Centered on the eastern half of Java and coming to control most of what would later become Indonesia, as well as Singapore, Malaysia and parts of Thailand during the 14th and 15th centuries, Majapahit may be the most significant empire that most people have never heard of. There are physical remains, but not as well-preserved…
Fiction set in the time of Indian freedom struggle draws attention to the lives of ordinary people against the background of great socio-political upheavals. That this period’s history can be juxtaposed with personal stories about being queer is the achievement of translator and scholar Ruth Vanita’s second novel A Slight Angle.
Gerda Philipsborn, Jewish and a part of the 1920s Berlin arts scene, developed a close friendship with a trio of Muslim Indian students. A decade later, she would move to India to join her friends at Jamia Millia Islamia, a university in Aligarh that was established in 1920 to boycott the colonial government’s educational institutions….
Like many stories, Amy’s begins long before she was born. Amy is an “all-American” young woman from Hawaii, but author Sherri L Smith and illustrator Christine Norrie start their graphic novel Pearl in 1886 in Japan, where Amy’s sosōbo (great-grandmother) is a pearl diver from Okinawa.
The influence of China on Japanese arts, culture and thought has been enormous. Yet, it varied widely across time. Periods of intense exposure and assimilation, as when the archipelago adopted Buddhism in the 6th century along with the logographic script that made its transmission possible, were often followed by decades, if not centuries, of distancing…
Pity the poor archaeologists who lie on their bellies in sand or mud and painstakingly dust off bits of fossilized wood or bone, ceramics or metal scraps. It is, however, from their patient work that scientific truth progresses. Our understanding of the natural history of the horse has galloped ahead in the 21st century. As…
The late British historian Paul Johnson devoted an entire chapter of his 1983 classic Modern Times to what he called the “Bandung Generation”—the leaders of former European colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and Asia who in April 1955 gathered in Bandung, Indonesia to form a non-aligned movement in the midst of the Cold War…
In Sheela Tomy’s new novel, the foreign observer of Israel and Palestine is not the archetypal Westerner, but a middle-aged Indian woman. Translated from Malayalam by Ministhy S, Do Not Ask The River Her Name weaves the past and future into a blood-filled present to tell an emotional and urgent tale.
Traude Gavin’s Borneo Ikat Textiles, Style Variations, Ethnicity, and Ancestry is a beautiful book replete with magnificent color plates documenting the author’s fieldwork. Gavin’s research included tracking down examples of a now defunct textile tradition, the warp ikat weaving once practiced by Ibanic-speaking ethnic groups in West Kalimantan.
Peter Hessler, arguably the most famous contemporary American writer on China after his first book River Town which detailed his years teaching in a small city along the Yangtze River in the late 90s, returned to the region more than two decades later to see how his students had done while teaching at a university,…
It seems that so little solid, verifiable information has reached the outside world from North Korea since the nation’s founding in 1948 that we might as well, in the manner of medieval cartographers, inscribe maps of the Korean Peninsula between the Yalu River and the Demilitarized Zone with illustrations of dragons and lions as an…
Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899-1976), aka “Dukhu Mia” and known as the “rebel poet” of the Bengalis, was born in Churulia, a village in the Bardhaman district of West Bengal. A litterateur, lyricist, revolutionary, communist and freedom fighter, he was declared the national poet of Bangladesh in 1987. These Collected Short Stories are a joint endeavour…
In an interview subsequent to the publication of the translation into English of Thuận’s novel, Chinatown, interviewer Phuong Anh observes that the author’s main characters are searching for an answer to a question that ultimately drives that novel.
Yoko Tawada’s Paul Celan and the Trans-Tibetan Angel, originally published in German in the fall of 2020, was an early—one might even say premature—response to the anxiety caused not only by COVID-19, but also government lockdown policies implemented worldwide. The novel is narrated in the third-person by Patrik, a literary researcher who most frequently refers…
Vikas Swarup is interested in narrative spectacle. His famous novel, Q & A, was adapted into the Oscar-winning film Slumdog Millionaire, which enthralled a primarily Western audience who had never seen the filth and grit of Mumbai slum life before. The film was a contested breakthrough; some Indians cynically gawked at the exoticised melodrama of…