In 1958, a Kashmiri poet who earned his living cutting timber sat down in front of a radio microphone and stumbled over a verse from a printed edition of his own work. His name was Samad Mir, and he was one of the best-loved mystic poets of his day. His interviewers were JL Kaul, a…
The word yakuza has its own history, and it is not what most readers assume. Kabuki theatre and popular fiction gave the word its start, with a stock character called a yakuza-mono: an outlaw or drifter who lived off the gambling tables. The literal meaning is close to “a useless one” or “a bad one”,…
At the center of Kersi Khambatta’s Bombay Tabloid is Cyrus Kerman, the son of an Iran-born bakery owner, and his lifelong entanglement with Devika Wright, a beautiful Anglo-Indian dancer and model who later becomes a lawyer. Cyrus falls in love with her twice. Their story unfolds between two traumatic periods in the city’s history. The…
First published in Japan in 2009, then followed by a second volume in 2023 written in the shadow of a terminal diagnosis, these two books appear here together in English for the first time, translated by Sam Bett. When Ryuichi Sakamoto was asked as a child what he wanted to be when he grew up,…
Daniel Ehrlich spent four decades as a laboratory head at MIT, leading national programs in semiconductors and optics. Beginning in 1987 and continuing for the next 32 years, he travelled to Myanmar almost every December, crossing twelve time zones, arriving alone in the dark, and checking into a modest Mandalay hotel called the Nylon Hotel…
There is an irresistible temptation to read filmmaker Adachi Masao’s life as if it were itself a movie. A Japanese New Wave filmmaker disappears into Lebanon, becomes associated with the Japanese Red Army, spends decades in exile, is imprisoned, and eventually returns home as one of the most controversial figures in postwar Japanese culture. It…
Once a major Hollywood star, George Abercrombie’s career has quietly cratered after a string of box-office flops. He has moved to Mumbai to be near his wife, Sweety Sahota, India’s biggest actress. George is accustomed to having things under control. Mumbai in Abir Mukherjee’s new novel, The Pinnacle, has other plans for him. During his…
Approaching the Buddha: Transmission and Transformation, is based on the Xuzhou Collection, a dazzling array of ceremonial objects assembled by an anonymous collector and housed at the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. For students of the dharma, these images are alive, living transmissions rather than decorative relics. That collector, whose identity is withheld throughout,…
Julia Kristeva is one of the most formidable minds in contemporary literary and cultural theory, the Bulgarian-born, Paris-based intellectual who gave us Powers of Horror, a 1980 study of abjection that remains a landmark of psychoanalytic criticism, who coined the term “intertextuality”, who spent decades making psychoanalysis and semiotics speak to each other in increasingly…
Eka Kurniawan’s The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks follows the coming of age of Sato Reang, a mischievous boy growing up in a small Indonesian town, whose life moves between childhood pranks, religious pressure, friendship with the deeply pious Jamal, and the consequences of choosing rebellion over obedience. From the very beginning, Sato Reang announces his…
Karan Mahajan’s ambitious third novel, The Complex spans roughly fifteen years of Indian family life, from 1980 to the mid-1990s. It charts the Chopra clan of Modern Colony, North Delhi, through the assassination of Indira Gandhi, the anti-Sikh pogroms of 1984, the rise of the BJP and the Mandal Commission agitation against caste-based affirmative action….
There is a moment in Mohammed Hanif’s new novel where Baghi, founder of a cut-rate English tuition centre in Rawalpindi watches a Himalayan quack hawk libido supplements to a crowd of labourers on the morning after erstwhile PM Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s hanging. Grief hangs in the air like smoke. The country is in shock. And…
A book that attempts to tell the story of one of the world’s largest and most complex islands across vast spans of time—from deep geological history to the urgent pressures of the present—Olivier Hein’s Borneo: The History of an Enigma announces its ambition from the first pages. Such scale is risky: many books with grand…
When Bitcoin first became a buzzword among early adopters around 2011, it was spoken of by devotees as a revolutionary force, promising to upend finance much like Jimi Hendrix redefined rock music with his electric guitar riffs. But for ‘normies’ or everyday people, the idea was baffling. How could something intangible, not backed by governments…
I was born in Bombay and lived there, not far from the Gateway of India, for the first sixteen years of my life. I left the city by the bay soon after turning sixteen. When I returned decades later, I barely recognised it. The city and I had both gone through dramatic changes in the…