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.
Author: Soni Wadhwa
The Indian epic Mahabharata continues to inspire novelists to retell the story of the war between the Kauravas and the Pandavas, the cousins who fight over the kingdom of Hastinapur, especially from the points of view of the women characters who have been wronged. Many of these retellings—including Ira Mukhoty’s Song of Draupadi reviewed in the Asian Review of Books—narrate the battle and the politics from the points of view of the wronged women: the epic is full of awful stories about women being abducted so that they can be married to the prince of Hastinapur, or tricked into marrying the blind king Dhritarashtra or gambled away by her husband(s).
Literary history of vernaculars in the West has a well-established narrative. For instance, Geoffrey Chaucer is considered the “father” of English literature, followed by the other greats of the Renaissance—Spenser, Sidney and Shakespeare—and the canon continues. The literary histories of Indian languages, in contrast, do not have such a straightforward lineage.
The Partition of India has inspired cinema, some of which has reached audiences outside South Asia, especially when produced or directed by the Indian diaspora: for instance, Deepa Mehta’s Midnight’s Children (based on the Booker winner by Salman Rushdie) and Gurinder Chadha’s Viceroy’s House. However, there are more films that draw from partition as setting, theme, entertainment and history in art as well as commercial traditions of film-making in India, and to an extent, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Most of the individual films in this substantial body of work have been brought together by John W Hood in Tear-Drenched Earth: Cinema and the Partition of India. By Hood’s own admission, the book is not an exercise in film criticism but a way of exploring the use of Partition, “a gold mine of stories for filmmakers”, as an idea and as a theme.
Among the epic and stories of great battle, the Mahabharata has certain sections where smaller stories and myths exist to illustrate the larger point about origins of something or explain why things are the way they are. Some characters might seem familiar from other myths or the fables bring to mind other fable texts such as the Panchatantra or the Jataka Tales. Outside of the specialists who read and research the epic, no one has probably heard of them. In her latest book The Dharma of Unfaithful Wives and Faithful Jackals: Some Moral Tales from the Mahabharata, Wendy Doniger brings together stories from the relatively unexplored sections in which the dying Bhishma responds to questions from Yudhishthira, the eldest of the Pandavas. The stories Bhishma narrates relate to esoteric things such as tigers, jackals, dogs, sages (and their wives and disciples).
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.
Sikhs in India and the Sikh diaspora in North America are occasionally in the news around controversies regarding the demand for a separate state. For those interested in the deeper history of power and politics of the idea of the Sikh republic, Sarbpreet Singh’s Cauldron, Sword and Victory: The Rise of the Sikhs (which is volume two of The Story of the Sikhs series) will be of immense use. While the first volume engaged with the formulation of the tenets of the faith by the ten Gurus from Guru Nanak to Guru Gobind Singh, this second one deals with the 18th-century translation of the religious identity into a political one.