Can we write women’s authorial roles into the history of industrial cinema in South Asia? How can we understand women’s creative authority and access to the film business infrastructure in this postcolonial region? Esha Niyogi De draws on rare archival and oral sources to explore these questions from a uniquely comparative perspective, delving into examples of women holding influential positions as stars, directors, and producers across the film industries in India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
Yniga, the main character of Glenn Diaz’s novel of the same name, returns to her unnamed fishing town after her urban neighborhood burns down in a fire—what many suspect is retaliation for the capture of a wanted army general near her house. What follows is a story about activist politics, state retaliation and returning home.
The word miniature in fact comes from the Larin miniare or “to paint red”; early European miniatures—palm sized pieces that are parts of manuscripts and books facing a verse or an intense moment in a story or placed behind one—were initially delineated in that pigment. There was an Asian tradition of such painting as well, with Indian examples including illustrations in such texts such as the 12th-century Gita Govinda and 15th-century Rasa Manjari (15th century), as well as a great many Mughal examples.
Seen through the lens of a career, Yukio Mishima is a difficult author to classify. In the introduction to this new collection of the author’s stories, Voices of the Fallen Heroes, Mishima biographer John Nathan notes that, by his death at the age of forty-five, Mishima had written dozens of novels, forty plays and 170 short stories. Such an impressive tally necessitates variety. However, the last decade of the author’s life—from which editor Stephen Dodd selects all of the stories here—was unified by a virulent patriotism that found its real-life consummation in Mishima’s theatrical suicide, committing seppuku after delivering an impassioned but ill-received speech intended to incite military insurrection. While the stories in Voices feel at first eclectic in nature, it is possible to see Mishima’s burgeoning nationalist sentiment, specifically tied up with a personal fear of ageing, a resentment of those who waste their youth, and the impact of such profligacy on the spiritual purity of the Japanese nation.
It is a tribute to the literary diversity of India that this anthology of ten excerpted classics includes eight or nine different languages. They also represent four different religious traditions. Yet the texts are unmistakably Indian, sharing a love for words, sounds and images and exhibiting an exuberance rarely found in other cultural traditions.
Originally written in Bengali, Shabnam presents a passionate love story set in 1920s Afghanistan. What is love? asks author Syed Mujtaba Ali: a dream or a dreamy reality? Maybe, it is like an overnight train journey through a long tunnel, in which the traveler stays awake to catch a glimpse of the sun’s first rays, but falls asleep just before dawn. When he wakes up frustrated, he comforts himself by thinking that the soft light had touched his skin and its warmth had seeped into his veins through the pores. The elusiveness of love is a potent theme in this classic novel now available in an English translation from Nazes Afroz.
Pirates and piracy seem to be about as universal as death and taxes, and Chinese and Western piracy bear much in common, from violence and hardship, to oppression from the authorities as both cause and consequence, as well as a certain amount of popular romanticism. In Outlaws of the Sea, Robert J Antony provides an overview of the Chinese version of the phenomenon, situated “along the southern coast of China and in the South China Sea between the 1630s and 1940s,” which he places firmly in the broader sweep of Chinese history.
