The ever-increasing amount of Indian fiction appearing in English translation has been one of the most striking publishing phenomena of the past two decades. But Lakshmi’s Secret Diary comes to us not via Bengali, Hindi or Tamil, but French. That author Ari Gautier hails from Pondicherry, the capital of the erstwhile French territory in India, is part of the story; Gautier however was born in Antananarivo, Madagascar, to a Franco-Tamil father and a Malagasy mother. In Pondicherry, Gautier was educated at the Lycée Français and subsequently emigrated to France.
South Asia
Enakshi Sengupta’s The Silk Route Spy is billed as a “true story” of her husband’s grandfather, Nandlal Kapur, who simultaneously spied for the British Raj and helped the Indian independence movement in the 1920s, 30s and 40s. It is a story passed down from Nandlal Kapur to his grandson Vijay Kapur, who in turn conveyed what he recalled to the author.
In our book Painter and Patron, about the Códice Casanatense, an album of annotated Luso-Indian watercolors produced in Goa ca 1540, my co-author Juan José Morales and I noted that the both the paintings and annotations indicated both considerable and rather granular knowledge of the people and places all over Asia, Persia, Arabia and East Africa, as well as familiarity with descriptions in Portuguese sources as yet not formally published at the time. How this happened, we could only guess; Jorge Flores’s Empire of Contingency: How Portugal Entered the Indo-Persian World, although it deals with a period from a few decades to a century and a half later, helps explain what was going on.
Witches make the world go round, and Gerda’s quest leads her to the most powerful one of all. When her village is hit with an unnatural snowspell, Gerda leaves in search of a missing boy. Every step of her journey culminates in a single choice: to save a boy, or save the world. But supernatural creatures want to make her their pawn. Will magic empower her, or will she lose to forces greater than herself?
Maya, the protagonist of Rohit Manchanda’s novel The Enclave, should be happy with her life. She’s newly single, her net worth steadily rising in the booming India of the 2000s. She has a cushy, if slightly unfulfilling, job in academia. But she struggles: She wants to write, but can’t summon the energy to do so. She juggles several relationships, each one slowly imploding as the novel continues. And she butts heads with an oblivious and pompous bureaucrat, nicknamed “The Pontiff”.
India’s western frontier with Pakistan may generate more headlines but India’s eastern border flanking both Myanmar and Bangladesh is arguably more complex. Both neighbors have long been unstable and have both at points in their history found their territory being used by rebels waging war against New Delhi. It is not just neighboring countries that pose a challenge: internal borders too are at play. The Indian government for decades has had a complex, often tumultuous relationship with its northeastern states. The inherent complexity of the region means a wider, more expansive approach to political analysis is needed. This is precisely what Avinash Paliwal’s new book seeks to do.
Anita Agnihotri’s newest novel, translated from Bengali by Arunava Sinha, traces the trajectory of salt from its use as a symbol of resistance against the British Empire in the 1930s to the exploitation of salt farmers in modern-day India. Spanning generations and juggling various points of view, A Touch of Salt is an ambitious novel that questions the fruits of Indian independence. Equally historical and politically relevant, the novel shines a much-deserved light on the Agarias, an often neglected community in western India.