‘In these days when Kashmir is ever more inaccessible to most of us, it is both a personal pleasure and a cultural treasure to have this authentic Kashmiri voice speaking to us from the living realm of Kashmiri memory and imagination.
First published in 1961, Usha Priyamvada’s debut novel Pachpan Khambe, Laal Deewaarein is located within the boundaries of an all-women’s college in Delhi.
Here is a unique moment in a region's cultural and spiritual history in which a sex-worker and a domestic servant, a brahmin and a dalit woman, collectively staked their claim to the sacred sometimes hesitantly, sometimes imperiously, but always feverishly and passionately.
‘[A] delightful, intelligent and effortlessly well-researched book… [Pinto] captures in nuanced but unpretentious prose the sheer transcendence of Helen’s personality.
In this collection of stories, set in the fecund, mineral-rich hinterland and the ever-expanding, squalid towns of Jharkhand, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar breathes life into a set of characters who are as robustly flesh and blood as the soil from which they spring, where they live, and into which they must sometimes bleed.
Born in England to an Irish mother and an Indian father, Aubrey Menen—a brilliant yet underrated writer far ahead of his time—navigates the contradictions of identity, nationality and belonging with his trademark irony and insight in his two classic autobiographical books.
‘Sumana Chandrashekar’s memoir-travelogue is fascinating.
‘Jim Kasom’s stories pull me into a world familiar and fascinating…[They] display the nuanced meaning of freedom for diverse individuals…and reveal the sacrifices people make to preserve peace.
In a time of democratic backsliding and institutional erosion, Manoj Kumar Jha’s collection of essays offers a stirring and necessary voice of conscience.
