Author and activist Sarah Joseph was born and raised in present-day Kerala, known for both Jewish and Christian populations dating back well into the first millennium CE. A Christian herself, she writes both poetry and prose in Malayalam, often centering around religion and feminism. A decade ago she won accolades for a novel based on…
It’s not every day one comes across a new novel about Jesus as a social activist, least of all one in translation from Malayalam. So Ministhy S’s recent translation of renowned Indian writer Benyamin’s 2007 novel, The Second Book of Prophets, is unexpected, to say the least. One need not know much about biblical stories…
The Malayalam edition of the Mini Krishnan-helmed collections of newly translated classic short stories offers readers a glimpse into the changing social landscape of Kerala. Covering stories written and published across forty decades, the writers of The Second Marriage of Kunju Namboodiri and Other Classic Malayalam Stories navigate the various promises of the early 20th…
In Maria, Just Maria, a woman born in the dense humidity of Kerala, with talking pets and petty saints as her friends, finds herself in a psychiatric hospital. The novel steps backwards, beginning with Maria as a recently divorced woman searching her memories for clues that might explain why she ended up in a hospital….
Indians take their gods and goddesses seriously, holding them extraordinarily close by means of innumerable festivals round the year, and striving to find every possible opportunity to pray to the divine, wish-granting beings in as many ways as humanly possible. As a result, everything from personal problems to social evils becomes a matter of divine…
South Asia is a literary universe unto itself. It is home to hundreds of languages intersecting in multiple ways with history, ritual, and traditions of the classical Sanskrit as well as vernacular orality. In Sensitive Reading: The Pleasures of South Asian Literature in Translation, editors Yigal Bronner and Charles Hallisey put together a set of…