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.
India has inspired William Dalrymple for well-on thirty years, resulting in a number of eminently readable books, including White Mughals—an analysis of east-west inter-cultural conflicts), Return of a King (a portrait of military disaster); and The Anarchy, an exposé of colonial exploitation. In his latest book, The Golden Road, Dalrymple for the first time tackles a big, civilizational theme: what world history owes to the subcontinent.
Glenn Diaz’s second novel is set in the busting-at-the-seams capital of Manila, in a district named only as T—, characterized by “the density, the closely packed, in-your-face life that sometimes felt like drowning.” Diaz’s complex female protagonist is ex-academic Yñiga Calinauan, now reduced to ghost-writing theses for foreign students. She also believes in astrology which “made better sense than religion, just a nice, healthy balance between faith and free will. And at night when you look up you see proof of it every time.” She survives on coffee, diet Coke and cigarettes and dotes on her rescue cat Jestoni, yielding “first waking thoughts, punctual and constant: caffeine and cat.”
A “fairy-tale” family/children’s version of George Bizet’s opéra-comique Dr Miracle premiered at the Guangzhou Opera House on 30 September 2024 with six schedule performances.
After viewing American painter Agnes Martin’s “Untitled IX, 1982”, a work of irregular, horizontal pencil lines that are nuanced and experimental, with a subtle hue of pink underneath, poet Victoria Chang was moved to contemplate the struggle to embrace or appreciate her racial identity: “To be an Asian woman is to be seen as night… Some people assume Asian women are made of flowers, but some of us are made of lines.”
From Pashas to Pokemon (Vishwakarma Publications, 2024), Maaria Sayed’s first novel, is a coming-of-age story. Aisha grows up in the Muhammad Ali Road neighborhood of Mumbai in the ’90s—a time when India was starting to grapple with liberalization, globalization, and polarization. In Mumbai and London, Aisha tries to learn what it means to grow up, as an Indian, a daughter, a woman, and a Muslim.
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.
Washington officials have long found Pyongyang a bedeviling problem. Much of their frustration has come from a lack of information on a country that Donald Gregg—a Korea expert who served in Seoul as US ambassador and before then as chief of the CIA station there—called Washington’s “longest-running intelligence failure”. Without information, as Gregg argued in his 2014 autobiography Pot Shards, “we fill our gaps of ignorance with prejudice, and the result is hostility fueled by demagoguery, and damage done to all concerned.”
With their intricate interplay, of the diverse identities that shape Pakistani society, art and literature serve as crucial tools in challenging the narrow definitions of Pakistan, particularly those imposed by the West.
Hô Chí Minh was also a poet. From 1890-1969, Hô Chí Minh lived many lives in his seventy-nine years, a broad range of diverse roles and contributions that have attained a continued worldwide influence, from anti-imperialist Marxist-Leninst revolutionary, Vietnamese nationalist, political leader, philosophical thinker, newspaper founder, and columnist. His complete published writings available in English runs to fifteen volumes.
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