Vikramjit Ram’s novella Mansur re-imagines life amongst artists working in the imperial atelier of Mughal India. The emperor Jahangir had a deep interest in flora and fauna and dispatched agents far and wide to acquire exotic creatures that may delight him. It was the imperial painter, Mansur who was credited with capturing the sensitivity of…
Long unavailable, Rohit Manchanda’s newly reissued A Speck of Coal Dust won the Betty Trask Award when it was first published (under a different titles) a generation ago. It takes place in the kingdom of childhood, not however to be confused with that of innocence. In this world, everything can be—and is meant to be—explored…
“Historians are stuck with the evidence, novelists can describe what actually happened,” says the French writer, Jean-Félix de la Ville Beaugé. In Firestorm in Paradise, historian Rana Safvi switches roles from the constraints of the former to the imagination of the latter. In her history of Mughal Delhi, Shahjahanabad, published in 2019, she meticulously retraces…
Almost a hundred years ago, Agatha Christie published an Hercule Poirot mystery, Death in the Air, which takes place on a flight from Paris to London. It may not be her most famous, but debut author Ram Murali has recycled the title for his whodunnit set mainly in the foothills of the Himalayas near Rishikesh—where…
John Reeves was the British consul in neutral Macau throughout the Second World War. Officially, he reported to Chungking, but in fact he was on his own representing Britain in a very hostile environment. He was utterly unprepared.
Some 140,000 men were recruited from China during the Great War by the Allied Forces. Their mission was not to fight but to labour on the front lines. In exchange, they would (in theory) receive a salary and decent rations. The unsung heroes of the Chinese Labour Corps, whose contribution to the First World War…
Some things about Filipino author Marga Ortigas are clear after reading her recent novel God’s Ashes. She can write. She has a fertile imagination. She knows a great deal about a wide variety of things from politics to culture and technology. She knows how to craft a complicated, detailed, intricate plot.
The term “Shanghailander”, coined over a hundred years ago, referred to foreigners who lived in Shanghai’s French Concession or International Settlement. In her debut novel, Shanghailanders, Juli Min has reclaimed this term for contemporary use to include a wider spectrum of expatriates and to indicate, somewhat contrary to current narratives, that Shanghai remains—and will remain…
Tatsuhiko Shibusawa’s 1987 novel Takaoka’s Travels opens like a straightforward volume of history: “On the twenty-seventh day of the first month in the sixth year of the Xiantong era, Prince Takaoka set sail from Guangzhou on a ship bound for Hindustan.” Takaoka was a real historical figure, son of the Japanese Emperor Heizei (ruled 806-809…
After much of the western world let go of its colonies in the years following World War II, the United States did the opposite in Guam: it not only re-occupied the island, but established a (massive) military base there. The culture in Guam is a melange of the legacy of Spanish colonialism (particularly seen in…
Over the course of thirty-seven fragments, an elderly man coming to an understanding of his world tells the “story” of his village: chronicles of a village serves as an indictment of History for what it leaves out. The narrator often offers a curiously romantic view of a pastoral world that is being overtaken by the…
One winter day, Reiko asks her friend Rika to pick up some butter on her way over for dinner. But due to a product shortage, this simple favor turns into a trip to several grocery stores and results only in the purchase of a tub of margarine, setting the stage for a story where just…
Ranjan Adiga’s debut collection Leech and other stories comprises 10 short stories based around the experiences of Nepalis adapting to new worlds, lands and experiences. The majority relate to migration, both internal, with migrants from rural Nepal traveling to try make it in the capital, or abroad, in search of their dream life in America….
Detective fiction in the West is often grouped with crime fiction and thrillers; but in detective fiction, the focus is on a puzzle and the process of solving it. It’s a game with the reader in which a mystery needs to be unraveled before the detective figures it out. In some places, the detective becomes…
In 2015, author Sanya Rushdi was hospitalized after her third psychotic episode and was subsequently diagnosed with schizophrenia. Hospital, first published in 2019 in Bengali and then in an excellent recent English translation by Arunava Sinha, is an attempt to make sense of what had happened to her and the things around her during that…