Podcast with Mehr Afshan Farooqi, author of “Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep”
Mirza Ghalib is one of the most celebrated poets in the Urdu literary canon. Yet, at the time, Ghalib was prolific in both Urdu and Persian.
“Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India” by Suchitra Vijayan
Living along a border can be literally living on the edge, for borders are places of uncertainty where death, humiliation and misery can be all too common. As Suchitra Vijayan points out in her book Midnight’s Borders, this is where entire communities can become stigmatized as foreigners, illegals, smugglers and traitors.
Podcast with Amit Chaudhuri, author of “Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music”
Dismissal, in fact, is the default response to khayal (the preeminent genre of North Indian classical music), well before we get to know what khayal is, and vaguely term its strangeness “classical music”. Those who later become acquainted with its extraordinary melodiousness forget that on the initial encounter it had sounded unmelodious.
Podcast with Raza Mir, author of “Murder in the Mushaira”
May 1857. The Indian city of Shahjahanabad, today called Delhi, is tense. British officers are worried about rumors of insubordination and rebellion elsewhere in India, while the local residents both await and fear a coming storm of revolutionary fervor.
“Peace, Poverty and Betrayal: A New History of British India” by Roderick Matthews
In an essay in Open magazine in 2017, Roderick Matthews, a freelance writer who studied history at Balliol College, Oxford, criticized Shashi Tharoor’s book Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India for its one-sided, wholly negative view of British rule in India.
“Yasodhara and the Buddha” by Vanessa R Sasson
Vanessa R Sasson’s debut novel Yasodhara and the Buddha takes the life of Gautama Buddha, the stuff of scripture and legend, and lays out a story about love between him and his wife. And a fascinating story it is, too, about ego, love, and renunciation as love.
“Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music” by Amit Chaudhuri
Books, alas, don’t always come in the right order. Having recently reviewed Oliver Craske’s excellent biography of Ravi Shankar, I found myself wishing that I could have read Finding the Raga before undertaking that task. Amit Chaudhuri, well-known Indian novelist and essayist, is also a singer and a musician, but not just any musician. Thoroughly-versed…
“Ghalib: A Wilderness at My Doorstep” by Mehr Afshan Farooqi
The 19th-century Indian poet Mirza Ghalib always evoked strong opinions about his literary worth. An early 20th-century critic proclaimed, “India has just two scriptures or divine gospels, the holy Vedas and the poetry of Ghalib.” Meanwhile an anonymous Delhiwallah quipped: “I get the verse of Mir<fn>Mir Taqi Mir 1725-1810, Ghalib’s most illustrious predecessor</fn> but Mirza’s…
“Indians: A Brief History of A Civilization” by Namit Arora
Namit Arora’s Indians is, this non-Indian guesses, likely to be read somewhat differently depending on whether or not one is included in the title. For those who aren’t, this is a readable and personable if perhaps idiosyncratic history structured as a travelogue.
“The Woman Who Raised the Buddha: The Extraordinary Life of Mahaprajapati” by Wendy Garling
Behind or beside the great male spiritual leaders are great women, so we are told, although it is usually the case that their lives and deeds are often relegated to secondary importance by androcentric religious constructs put in place by those who come afterwards. For example, Jesus has two Marys (his mother and Magdalene), Muhammed…
“The Mission House” by Carys Davies
Hilary Byrd is a depressed and disgruntled English librarian from Petts Wood in southeast London. Frustrated with the changes in his library over the past twenty years—digitalization and moms’ groups that take the focus away from print books and exacerbate his depression—he plans a trip overseas to clear his mind and to show himself and…
“The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India” by Manan Ahmed Asif
History is commonly thought to be a subject about discovering the past in terms of exploring the origins and beginnings. Manan Ahmed Asif has previously written about resisting the need to look for beginnings and focusing on belonging.
Podcast with Priya Basil, author of “Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community, and the Meaning of Generosity”
The French philosopher Jacques Derrida once described his idea of absolute hospitality as follows: Absolute hospitality requires that I open up my home and that I give not only the foreigner, but to the absolute, unknown, anonymous other, and that I give place to them, that I let them come, that I let them…
Podcast with Debashree Mukherjee, author of “Bombay Hustle: Making Movies in a Colonial City”
In 1935, the writer Baburao Patel wrote the following about Bombay’s film industry: In India, with financing conditions still precarious, the professional film distributor thrives… He comes with a fortune made in share and cotton gambling, advances money to the producer at a killing rate of interest plus a big slice of royalty and…
“Murder in the Mushaira” by Raza Mir
Murder mysteries make natural period pieces, because passion, crime, investigation and come-uppance speak to material culture and social manners. Miss Marple evokes mid-20th century Britain, Inspector Montalbano—contemporary Sicily. Raza Mir’s Murder in the Mushaira brings to life mid-19th-century Shahjahan-abad (as Delhi was then known), its Ramazan celebrations, noble palaces, shrines, shops and slums. He lets…
