Vinu P is a “corpse collector”; that is, he retrieves the bodies of those who die “unnatural” deaths—victims of accidents, suicides, and abandonment, and so on—and assists the police in the enquiries that follow. This being India, where Vinu lives and works in Kerala, what might elsewhere be considered the duties of a first responder…
Mantras of the Moon is a luminous collection of poems born from the desire to explore the self, memory, and Indian heritage. These poems weave together psychology, mythology, desire, and divine destinations from Murshidabad’s museums to the quiet radiance of Saraswati Pujo. Inspired by the encouragement of editors and strengthened by love, this book is…
Much of the contemporary Indian literary landscape features writing in English and Indian languages, but Sheela Mahadevan points to the less-studied Francophone writing in India in Writing Between Languages: Translation and Multilingualism in Indian Francophone Writing. An academic at the University Liverpool and the English language translator of Ari Gautier’s Indian-Francophone novel Carnet secret de…
English language children’s picture books that center around Asian folktales and themes are no longer as uncommon as they once were. Yet it’s still rare to find collections of folktales that originate from Asian countries themselves. Now David Conger, Liana Romulo, Joan Suyenaga and Marian Davies Toth have come together in Asian Folktales for Children…
There is, despite the title, very little that is Asian in Raffaele Danna’s new The Craft of Indo-Arabic Numerals. The subtitle—How Practical Arithmetic Shaped Commerce and Mathematics in Western Europe, 1200-1600—tells it all. However, the numerals themselves—concepts of great intellectual depth and practical value—came to the West from the Arabs, and originated in India (hence…
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….
The author, a former president of Army Women’s Welfare Association in India, explores the layered nature of grief in military families, especially for children, through The Memory Tree, a three-book series for ages 5–13. Designed to support children who have lost a parent in the uniformed services, the series employs twelve short stories and related…
The lives of those impacted by the British Empire were complex, deeply intertwined, and, as Julia Stephens describes, transcend boundaries. The lives of the generations that follow the initial immigrants are varied and pluralistic, so they can no longer fit the identities their forefathers held. Worldly Afterlives traces the journeys that some groups of the…
Few institutions in India have shaped the imagination of the nation as profoundly as the railways. Rahul Bhattacharya’s Railsong places this vast network of tracks, workshops, stations and employees at the centre of a sweeping narrative that follows one woman’s life alongside the evolving story of modern India. Moving from the decades after Independence to the…
On 6 September 2018, India’s Supreme Court ruled that Section 377, a law that criminalized consensual homosexual activity, was unconstitutional, reversing an earlier decision from 2013. Both news headlines and LGBT activists hailed the decision as a major step forward for same-sex rights in India.
It seems that the Nobel Prize-winning Octavio Paz was “obsessed with the idea of the Other as not an external entity but a tree within”. Borrowing the phrase for the title of his new book, Indranil Chakravarti generously explores and develops this point, presenting his readers with different trees in different spaces, including Paz’s own…
1869 was a time of Russian expansion into Central Asia and British anxiety about India’s northern borders. Because Tibet was closed to Europeans during this “Great Game”, the British trained Indians in surveying and sent them across the mountains as covert mapmakers.
My Home is Dissent is a luminous poetry collection by Pooja Ugrani that constructs verse as one might build a home—brick by tender brick, with the mortar of memory, desire, and defiance. This collection moves fluidly between the everyday and the elemental, where the domestic becomes a site of quiet resistance and reimagining.
Jiban Narah’s The Yellow Metaphor is an unassuming collection of poetry, written from 1990 to 2023, that draws from the Mising and Assamese traditions of north-east India. Occasionally embedded in the English translation are the original Mising words, a translator’s decision to retain the otherworldliness of the poems. Assamese geography, fauna, and history feature prominently…
Set in the tea gardens of colonial Assam, Moonlight Saga follows the communities who built and maintain these delicate ecosystems on the frontiers of India, and the tensions and pressures of plantation life. Originally published in Assamese in 2022 and recently translated into English, this family saga set on the Atharighat Tea Estate in Assam, just…