India’s stock markets are booming. One calculation from Bloomberg puts India as the world’s fourth-largest equity market, overtaking Hong Kong, as domestic and foreign investors pile into the Indian stock exchange.
Detective fiction in the West is often grouped with crime fiction and thrillers; but in detective fiction, the focus is on a puzzle and the process of solving it. It’s a game with the reader in which a mystery needs to be unraveled before the detective figures it out. In some places, the detective becomes…
The Solitude of a Shadow is about revenge, and the road to it. Its publication marks Devibharathi’s first novel after decades of novellas, essays, and plays—one of which won last year’s Sahitya Akademi Award. It has now been translated from Tamil by N Kalyan Raman for a wider audience. The story is straightforward: a young…
In April 1942, at least half a million people fled the city of Madras, now known as Chennai. The reason? The British, after weeks of growing unease about the possibility of a Japanese invasion, finally recommended that people leave the city. In the tense, uncertain atmosphere of 1942, many people took that advice to heart—and…
As India consolidates an aggressive model of economic development, indigenous tribal people—the Adivasis—continue to be overrepresented among the country’s poor. Adivasis make up more than eight hundred communities in India, with a total population of more than a hundred million people speaking more than three hundred different languages. Although their historical presence is acknowledged by…
Born of a Swiss mother and an Indian father and raised in England, Meira Chand’s novels have been set in Japan, Singapore, and India, and a couple have been adapted for the stage in London and Singapore. It wasn’t until she was an adult that she lived in India. Her recent book, The Pink, White…
How did the colonization of Goa in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries take place? How was it related to projects for the conversion of Goan colonial subjects to Catholicism? And how did these contribute to the making of Goan identity?
Although subtitled “Family Fortunes” and presented as being the story of the Jhaveri business family in Gujarat, Sudev Sheth’s recent history Bankrolling Empire is as much, if not more, about the wider arc of the decline of the Mughal Empire. Whether one is interested in the specific role of finance in the Mughal Empire or…
Somewhere in Tamil Nadu, there is a small village with “a golden four-lane highway near it but not a single tamarind tree.” Here, the novel’s unnamed narrator spends his days loitering around town and smoking cigarettes. This routine—and everything about life as he knows it—changes with the arrival of Kamala, a widowed mother, a schoolteacher,…
Set in the metropolis of Kolkata, A House of Rain and Snow describes the struggle of a section of middle-class Bengali society to cope with the effects of globalization during the early 1990s. It tells of their passion for art and culture, which too was affected by changing times. The author, Srijato, an eminent Bengali…
The historical and territorial space of Punjab has been politically and spatially unstable and changing, What Punjab means to different people also varies over time and context. Equally, what one holds dear about Punjab, the sense of “Punjabiyat/Punjabiness”, is both emotionally and culturally complex.
“Sometimes we have to retreat to return.” So says Iti, who is living in Gurgaon but is far from happy. A freelance editor, struggling to make it as an author, her life is a mess. Feeling lost and unsuccessful, particularly compared to her more successful classmates, who are rich and married while she lives alone…
It’s very easy to study the history of the British Empire from the perspective of, well, the British–and to extend the early 20th century version of the empire as a world-spanning entity backwards through history.
The Buddha of the Mahayana tradition anchored in such ancient Indian texts as the Jataka Tales or the epic Buddhacharita is a godly figure: he is born without causing any pain or suffering to his mother; he is born without sexual reproduction, moving from the heaven to the womb of his mother in the form…
Gandhi’s importance in the Western world, and his interaction with foreign visitors, have been well-documented. However, most of these accounts have focused on Britain and the United States. Today, as India’s diaspora grows in numbers and influence, the inspiration of Gandhi in other parts of the world needs to be understood. This is particularly true…