Tag: book review

In Mahmud and Ayaz, R Raj Rao’s titular characters paint a bleak picture of present-day India, one where the poor get poorer and minorities are silenced. Despite the heavy subject material, it’s a provocative, sexy, and playful read that treats characters as caricatures and acts as a larger experiment ...

Delhi, with its long, continuous history and various cultures, continues to hold the interest of historians, writers, and poets. In an interesting chapter on Delhi in the Routledge Handbook of Asian Cities (2023, edited by Richard Hu), Pilar Maria Guerrieri, builds on the work of HC Fanshawe(1902, Delhi Past ...

As might well be apposite for stories of the Partition, let us begin at the end. Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s Hyderabad, the second book in her Partition Trilogy, closes with a ghazal by Hyderabad’s last Asaf Jahi Nizam, Nawab Sir Mir Osman Ali Khan Siddiqi, lamenting the end of his ...

Kamia Shamsie’s last fictional outing Home Fire was a politically prescient novel which deservingly won the 2019 Women’s Prize. It was a modern reimagining of Sophocles’s play Antigone, in the context of the lives of British Muslims.Like most of her books, her latest novel, Best Friends, features Shamsie’s favourite ...

Mention the word “chinar” and one thinks romance or a quiet introspective walk with golden hued leaves rustling beneath one’s feet. It goes without saying that a book with the title The Whispering Chinar almost certainly invokes a certain romantic aura and mystique. But this collection of interlinked stories ...

By Maj Gen Jagatbir Singh, VSM (Retd) In 1967, India and China had a stand -off in the heights of Cho La and Nathu La at the Sikkim border. This time, unlike in 1962, overcoming the odds, India stood its ground and triumphed. Probal DasGupta in his wonderful account ...

Afghanistan and the shambolic US withdrawal from that war-ravaged country dominated the global news cycle and collective consciousness in August 2021, even as yet another beleaguered superpower wearily acknowledged that the rugged Afghan nation was indeed a ‘graveyard of empire’. However, Afghanistan has receded from public memory and the ...

How do you begin to talk about Tomb of Sand? You might say, in some (misguided) attempt to explain it, that it’s about an octogenarian woman, hiding away after her husband’s death, eventually gaining “a new lease on life” in which she “flies in the face of convention,” whether ...

Arguably, the first Kashmiri short story to be written – with a proper record to prove its authorship – was by Dinanath Nadim, in 1948. Prior to this, Kashmiri short stories existed in the oral tradition, as dastans, much like Lal Ded’s vaakhs, Habba Khatoon’s vatsun and rich folk ...

The Lenox globe, a medieval map, is inscribed with the Latin phrase HC SVNT DRACONES, “here be dragons”, to show unexplored territories. What was unknown was to be feared.But maps aren’t static representations of our world. Explorers return with new knowledge. Victors extend borders after wars. Seas rise. Coasts ...