This new collection with an unbeatably eye-catching title opens with the eponymous novella. “Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers” takes more than a few (albeit short) chapters to get to the heart of the story: the red-light district in Kashi (also referred to as Varanasi or Banaras in the novella) is slated to be shut down to…
“Writers on writing” is a genre in itself, one to which readers flock. However, Indian authors, especially those writing in regional Indian languages, are rarely represented in this genre meant for the internationally-acknowledged the-Western-and-the-famous. Therefore, Hindi writer Geet Chaturvedi’s The Master of Unfinished Things, translated into English by Anita Gopalan, will come as a breath…
Novels set around the Jewish Bene Israel community in India are as rare as hen’s teeth, but Sheela Rohekar’s 2013 Hindi novel, Miss Samuel: A Jewish-Indian Saga, translated this year into English by Madhu Singh, must be one-of-a-kind. Rohekar is perhaps the only Jewish author in India who writes in Hindi. Her novel reads as…
When Mark Twain interviewed the leader of the Mormon Church, Brigham Young, in 1861, he found the religious patriarch mightily preoccupied with the problems of equal treatment for his 56 wives. Young told Twain of gifting a handkerchief or a fan to one woman; before long, all the other wives clamored for similar attentions. Polygamy’s…
In 1980, a year after Mridula Garg’s Hindi-language novel Chittacobra was published, two policemen appeared at her door at night to arrest her under sections 292, 293, and 294 of the Indian Penal Code, commonly referred to as the Act of Obscenity. The case was built around a scene of just two pages that described…
On a trip many years ago to New Delhi, I was struck by an official memorial to Subhas Chandra Bose, the wartime leader of the Indian National Army, the Japan-affiliated force of Indians who fought against the British during the Second World War. India, of course, has a more complex view of the fight against…
In these ten stories, selected by translator Kavita Bhanot, Anjali Kajal examines the lives of women across two generations of, mainly, mothers and daughters, set in current-era Northern India. No one who has lived in the region will be surprised at the unfortunate incidents portrayed in these stories: harassment of females by men on the…
We are often told that the trend toward globalization is unstoppable, but then some event occurs—whether it is the war in Ukraine or Brexit—that reminds us of the power of nationalism; the emotional attachment that citizens have to their land and people. That power, that emotional attachment, jumps off every page of The War Diary…
Satya Vyas’s 2015 bestselling campus novel Banaras Talkies—telling the stories of three undergraduate friends who have just started law school—has recently been translated into English by Himadri Agarwal and is full of humor, wit, and undergraduate antics.