Book Reviews View More

While reading this book, I experience the anguish of a distinguished professor as she looks at the rise of the triumphant Hindutva, or the aggression implicit in the politics of majoritarianism and hyper-nationalism. Yes, Zoya Hasan’s new book reminds us...

Sujit Saraf’s ‘Island’ is a captivating exploration of isolation, ambition and the collision between modernity and indigenous life. Inspired by the tragic real-life encounter of American missionary John Chau with the Sentinelese in 2018, the novel reimagines this incident as...

How innocent we must seem when we don’t know our fate,” says Hanif Kureishi in ‘Shattered’. It is one of the truest lines I have read in a long time. A man is at his partner’s house in Italy, running...

Pain and suffering, the eternal woes of being mortal… How we all wish, at times, for the elixir of happiness, one that will grant us the supreme goal of contentment and free us from the cycle of desire. But what...

Madan Veera’s poetry, rooted deeply in the lived experiences of marginalised voices within Punjabi society, finds new life in English through ‘Narratives of the Excluded’, translated by TC Ghai. Spanning 85 selected poems from Veera’s five volumes published between 2001...

Past the middle of the 18th century, the East India Company had made a major stride at Plassey in its advent to the country when a king down the peninsula sought to check this imperialism. Thus, Mysore ruler Tipu Sultan...

The finest moment in Haroon Khalid’s new book is when Waris meets Bulleh Shah. Khalid’s imagination blazes, consuming and re-creating the fabled encounter. The writing is crystalline and dazzling, etching the encounter in a gem of an essay within the...

IN recent years, scholars have shown a growing interest in exploring the roots of Indian indigenous modernity, often termed “vernacular modernity”, and how it has shaped, and sometimes challenged, Indian secular democracy. In this context, ‘So Says Jan Gopal: The...

I write this from a metropolis, Delhi, caught in the thick of smog. Each year, as winter sets in, a toxic cocktail spreads through the north Indian airshed, leaving residents of the region equally vulnerable and frustrated. A cacophony of...

An excerpt from ‘Society Girl’ by Saba Imtiaz & Tooba Masood-Khan. Roli Books. Pages 331. Rs 595

Society Girl by Saba Imtiaz & Tooba Masood-Khan. Roli Books. Pages 331. Rs 595 It was October 1970. Poet and former civil servant Mustafa Zaidi had been found dead in his bedroom. In the next room, Shahnaz Gul, a married...

The ‘Pioneers of Modern India’ series by Niyogi Books has been bringing to readers monographs of legendary Indians. While in the past it has published books on personalities such as Charu Majumdar, Homi J Bhabha, Jamini Roy, RK Laxman and...

The Israeli Defence Forces’ ongoing heartless and meticulous detonation of every house in entire villages in Lebanon and Gaza and the flattening of multi-storeyed buildings with civilians still inside have been beamed worldwide, thanks to the social media. But this...