Tag
India
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The Allure of Postcolonial Pathos
“To what extent might the Booker—and venues like it in Europe and the US—be drawn for self-serving reasons to fiction like Kiran Desai’s?”
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Invoking the Translator: A Conversation with Raqs Media Collective
Since their international breakthrough in 2002, the Raqs Media Collective—Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta—have created and curated an extensive body of work spanning text, performance, video, sculpture, animation, sound, computer algorithms, and the photographic image. Raqs (pronounced rux), based in Delhi, have had recent major exhibitions in Madrid, London, Buenos Aires, Mexico City,…
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Building Up the Alphabet Again
I am reading an interview with Mahasweta Devi from 2002.1 At 75, having won renown for her fiction about the lives of peripheral peoples, she is full of delight at her continued discoveries: “I do what I want to, go wherever I want to, write down whatever I like.” She travels and pokes around, she collects…
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An Ancient Treatise and the Making of Modern India
In the intellectual history of modern India, 1909 was a turning point. That year Mohandas Gandhi, a middle-aged Gujarati lawyer based in South Africa, wrote his slim but Galilean freedom charter, Hind Swaraj, or Indian Home Rule, which made the case for ending British colonialism in India. Vinayak Savarkar, eventually to be recognized as the…
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Cosmopolitans in Indian Fiction
“What does it take to stop dreaming of alternative lives?” Two versions of this question from Anjum Hasan’s The Cosmopolitans speak to challenges now faced around the globe. First: what would it take—in India, in America, anywhere in 2016—to stop dreaming of alternative political systems and pathways for migration, of alternatives to poverty, scarcity, inequality,…
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Beyond the Bubble
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. In 2002, a year after Amartya Sen’s well-known essay on hunger, “Old Torments and New Blunders,” was first published, I travelled through parts of northwest Madhya Pradesh and adjacent areas of Rajasthan, which are home to Sahariya tribals, to report on hunger-related deaths in the community. I…
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Pakistan’s Place in World Literature
There are international novels you read and feel fairly certain will circulate among book clubs and appear on display tables at trendy bookstores in the US. Mirages of the Mind, published in 1990 in Urdu as Aab-e-gum and now ably translated into English, is not one of those. The novel is intelligent, sarcastic, at times…
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Origin of a Species: The First Indian to Publish a Book in English
This essay was originally published in The Caravan. It was 2002, four years before the Jaipur Literature Festival kicked off in Diggi Palace, when I was picked by the British Council to be a part of a small band of Indian reviewers and authors invited to see what the fuss was over the Edinburgh International…
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Indian Writers under Siege: A Roundtable
It is hard to remember a time when literature attracted so much front-page space, prime airtime, or mass attention in the Indian public sphere as it did in 2015. But not only was this importance accumulated through a particularly perverse chain of events, it was also a particularly toxic kind of importance. Writers, scholars, and…
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Jhumpa Lahiri’s Modernist Turn
Jhumpa Lahiri’s In altre parole announces the birth of a modernist. Written in hard-won Italian and reverberating with the energy of early 20th-century literary experiment, In altre parole describes the transformation of a writer exchanging the patient, polished realism of her first four books for a disquieting abstraction. It is a pleasure to witness sudden…
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To Be “A Glorious Thing Made Up of Star Dust”: A Suicide Note from the University of Hyderabad
In India, like elsewhere, the university is a place of upward mobility. It is also the tense meeting ground of social difference; of young people across caste, gender, religious, and sexual identities who encounter each other in the space of the classroom, where the divide between urban and rural, between English and the regional languages,…
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O My Swineherd!
The last century may have ushered in an epoch of wars that have no end, but Homer’s Odyssey continues to inspire. You do not have to be James Joyce or Derek Walcott to find the story of a man’s protracted struggle to return home from a fight he did not want appealing. With Odysseus Abroad,…
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Seeing Things
December 1, 2015 — One of the great myths of our time concerns the promise of a global vision, of seeing things with the power, distance, and clarity of an all-encompassing vantage point, what Donna Haraway once called “the god trick.”1 It is no surprise that the first photographs to give this kind of perspective on…
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Gems, Monsters, and Broodmares for Corpses
“No Hindu ever reads the Mahabharata for the first time,” A. K. Ramanujan, the celebrated poet, translator, and linguist, once wrote. The same cannot be said of the reader of contemporary literary English. Most have probably heard of the Bhagavad Gita, some might have an acquaintance with one of the poem’s modern Indian television avatars…
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Make Way for the “World-Class” City
Inaugurating a new generation of mechanical street sweepers, Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s chief minister, heralded the coming of a new era: “If we continue to receive the love and support of the public and the workers, then not in five years, we will make Delhi a world-class city in just four years.”1 By June 2020, more…
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A Playhouse Ready to Vanish: An Interview with Saikat Majumdar
She reminded Ori of the dark theatres that were breaking off in flakes of plaster and cement, crumbling into dust. That was the world that had made and nourished her. She was a playhouse with silver-streaked hair and skin beginning to wrinkle. A playhouse ready to vanish. —The Firebird Saikat Majumdar is the author of…
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The Spinning Wheels of Pluralism
Throughout his poetry, recently published as the collection Sufi Lyrics, Bullhe Shah describes religious life as a spinning wheel. We are impelled to spin properly, but that can only take us so far. Spinning, in Bullhe’s world, will eventually lead to entanglement, and to undo this confusion one must spin backwards. As he says: Make…
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Prajwal Parajuly and the Responsibilities of Fiction
“The Chaurasi is a curious event,” writes Prajwal Parajuly in the author’s note to his new novel, Land Where I Flee, “not many Nepali-speaking Hindus in India, especially people of my generation, know much about it.” In this teasing sentence, Parajuly, who has been hailed by the BBC as “The next big thing in South Asian…
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Empathetic Criticism
Over the past 50 years or so we have heard repeated calls to break down and restructure the canon, to integrate works from non-Western literary cultures into the general knowledge we expect an educated adult to possess. Often missing from this high-minded call to action are explorations of what this means and how it should…
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Can There Be a Feminist World?
The following is the lightly edited text of a lecture delivered on November 16, 2013, at the Columbia University Global Center in Amman, Jordan. I am pleased to be here at the Columbia Global Center in Amman. I lunched with the Vice President for Global Centers three days ago and told him, only half in…
