Book Title: Her Hajj Story:Travel Diaries of Women Pilgrims from Assam
Author: Teresa Rehman
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
There are some journeys which stay alive not in published word but in cupboards and old family trunks. Journeys whose stories travel through families, passed down as memories. Journeys, whose accounts may or may not enter literary sphere but leave account of a world seen through the eyes of women. Her Hajj Story: Travel Diaries of Women Pilgrims from Assamby Teresa Rehman attempts to bring some of those stories together. A compilation of account of memories of eleven women from Assam, this book recovers those stories and brings them to a larger view. As an award-winning journalist based in Northeast India, Rehman has brought the region’s diversity and distinct ethos to mainstream media through her work with India Today, The Telegraph, and Tehelka, before founding and editing Thumbprint Northeast Magazine. Her books include The Mothers of Manipur (Zubaan Books) and Bulletproof (Penguin Random House India).
The personal stories making up this book, written originally in Assamese and Bengali, are memories of eleven women living through different times. The translated voices belong to a botanist, an actor, a poet, a social worker, a widow and more, varied voices with equally varying experiences and reasons for undertaking the pilgrimage. One travels in grief, one in search of a spiritual course. While one struggles with finding a suitable male companion, the memories of another account for watching Red Sea on journey through ship. Then there are the practical difficulties of travelling as a woman. Alongside being a pilgrimage, the journey is also essentially of the female body through crowd and apprehension, sickness and fatigue, food and ablutions.
The book carries accounts of a mother and daughter, who travelled at different times. Syeda Sakina Ashraf journeyed in the year 1996 and her daughter Ayesha Ashraf Ahmed, a decade later. While the former account served as a practical reference for other women going on Hajj, the latter, documented scrupulously, brought forth the views of the pilgrimage experienced as a botanist. Beauty Rahman writes of her experience of journey by ship while Syeda Nazifa Ahmed’s writes about encounters with fellow travellers and her camaraderie with a woman from Nigeria. Zebunissa, a single woman, writes about her struggle in looking for a suitable mehram (a male companion) while Mallika Rahman, a social activist, writes about travelling at the age of sixty-four and about taboo topics like Hajj and menstruating women.
Eleven accounts making up this book read as reportage on eleven travel diaries, encompassing the varied voices not simply describing Mecca and Medina but bringing forth the distinctiveness of observing faith as a body. The ordinary questions of health and clothing, resting and exhaustion, while offering prayers or taking in the indescribable grandeur of Mecca, makes the account intimate and universal at the same time.
Through this book, Rehman succeeds in creating a geographical shift where Assam appears as a place with its own Muslim histories and traditions distinct from what is imagined or seen through pervasive cultures. Her labour in archiving the varied voices points to the difficulties of making editorial choices where the translated writings seem sometimes to be at variance with Rehman’s crisp, readable style, but perhaps that is the only way she could offer a comprehensive view of the distinct personalities of different women from different backgrounds. Collectively, these accounts convey the tradition of women writing the stories of their journey to Mecca as antecedents for subsequent travellers. They offer a unique glimpse into the courage and conviction that made their trials insignificant over their will to achieve what to them was a greater goal.
Rakhi Dalal is an educator by profession. When not working, she can usually be found reading books or writing about reading them. She writes at https://rakhidalal.blogspot.com/ .
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
When an author residing in India writes in Hindi and then gets translated into English by a foreigner who resides in the United States, the result is awesome. When Geetanjali Shree along with her translator Daisy Rockwell managed to secure the International Booker Prize in 2022 for the novel Tomb of Sand, the first thing that struck the readers is the exceptional stylistic experimentalism that made the book unique. Now with this new publication entitled Once Elephants Lived Here, comprising of eleven short stories that covers a wide variety of themes, the first thing that draws our attention is how the author dismisses conventional storytelling patterns and unfurls before us entirely new ways of conceiving and presenting storytelling to the readers. Interestingly, the stories included here were published in Hindi way back in 2012, proving the fact that experimentalism is the author’s forte where there are layers of subtext and one often must grasp the unwritten meanings floating around the words and phrases.
The titular story, ‘Once Elephants Lived Here’, is about the narrator and an old woman — about two generations –encompassing the destruction of an old city and it’s reconstruction. The topographical changes on both sides of the river remind one of the destructions after the Partition, and in the end the old woman is found literally and metaphorically dead on the bench. ‘These Days’ talks about the day before Holi, when there is a curfew and it is a period of community divide. A man sits quietly on the veranda of an old house belonging to his friend when he watches a shadow jump over the boundary wall and goes into the house to collect some things in a duffle bag. The twist of the tale comes in the end when he realises that it was his Muslim friend who had come as a shadow in order to break into his own house.
‘The End’ is a wonderful tale about an eighty-five-year-old unnamed patriarch of a house who after his retirement seems a misfit and annoys everyone with his behaviour and feels that giving orders is his birthright. The real twist in the tale comes after his death and the reaction of Ma, his wife. Another domineering grandfather is found in the story ‘And I Saw Myself Running’ where the grandson narrator, Raja, tells us about an out and out patriarch who worshipped Lord Shiva and played with snakes. The twist in the story comes when he suddenly passes on.
Middle-aged angst comes out clearly in ‘Out for a Spin’ where a woman spends all day compulsively walking in circles around her housing complex. She is a misfit of sorts, basically a loner who can’t communicate with anyone in the housing society. She gives us detailed observations about the different kinds of morning walkers but there is no introduction, no explanation, no denouement. In another story ‘So Much Sky’, a woman goes on a writer’s retreat, and in a pseudo-sci-fi turn of events, falls passionately in love with the sky. The other participants in the retreat are like robots. In ‘Butterflies’, a narrator staying in a cottage in Kerala is overwhelmed with the grief over past events but is surprised out of her self-indulgence by a mysterious group of young women who are either nurses or diabetes patients; she’s never sure which, but they come to the charity hospital to die. In most of the stories, plots break, sentences shatter midway, new words are formed, and new narrative structures are erected and felled.
The three final stories are set in Japan, which are spare and elegant and remind us of Japanese minimalist aesthetics. In ‘March, Ma and Sakura’, we have a mother who blooms with the cherry blossoms. In ‘Bulldozer’, a patient travelling on the Shinkansen train to Tokyo comes with her family for further treatment, narrates the sights and sounds she sees outside and is reminded how as a child she had complete faith that her Papa’s daily promise was true, and each day, she was convinced he would bring her a bulldozer. The last story in the collection is called ‘Fatigue’. It beautifully describes the ambience inside a Japanese graveyard built of gleaming grey stones and covered with offerings of bowls of water and vases full of flowers. The conversation between the nameless narrator and the visitor is interesting to read.
The book, therefore, presents a great challenge to the layman reader who cannot simply pick it up and start reading at leisure. One must read meticulously, ponder over the distortion of the usual short story genre, keep track of the convoluted or sometimes half-finished sentences and wonder where the narrator or the protagonist of the story is leading you – sometimes round and round and without reaching a denouement. All said and done, one must pick up this book to savour how post-modern storytelling can become an art in itself. The bond between the writer and the translator has worked out so nicely that one expects such collaborations in future as well.
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, India.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Title: Freebies or Rights:Rethinking India’s Social Policy
Author: Reetika Khera
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
The debate over welfare in India has increasingly been reduced to a convenient political binary. Governments announce food, pensions, employment guarantees, healthcare or other forms of support, and critics quickly label them “freebies”. Supporters, in turn, defend them as essential instruments of social justice. Reetika Khera’s Freebies or Rights:Rethinking India’s Social Policy brings into this debate a more fundamental question: Are these programmes merely acts of state generosity, or are they rights that enable citizens to live with dignity?
Khera, an economist known for her extensive work on social policy, approaches the subject through more than two decades of field research. Her concern is not simply with policy as it appears in government documents, but with how it works—or fails to work—in the everyday lives of ordinary Indians. The result is a book that combines empirical research with stories from villages, schools, anganwadis[1], government offices and field surveys.
The book’s scope is deliberately broad. It follows India’s welfare architecture from “cradle to grave”, examining anganwadis and school meals, the Public Distribution System, maternity benefits, pensions, public healthcare and the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). Together, these programmes represent some of the most important ways in which the Indian state intervenes in the lives of citizens, particularly those who have the least economic security.
The book refuses to treat welfare as an abstract contest between competing ideologies. Khera takes the discussion back to the ground. What does a pension mean to an elderly person with no regular income? What difference does a functioning school meal programme make to a child? How does access to subsidised food affect a poor household? What does MGNREGA mean when rural employment is uncertain? Such questions reveal the distance between political rhetoric and lived experience.
Interestingly, the word “freebie” itself comes under scrutiny. The term suggests something given away without obligation or social purpose. Khera challenges this framing by asking whether food, healthcare, education, and basic social security should instead be understood as components of citizenship. A democratic state, in this view, is not simply a provider of occasional relief but an institution with responsibilities towards its citizens.
Also, the book does not make a simplistic case for welfare. Its emphasis on implementation is important. A policy may look progressive on paper and still fail because of corruption, exclusion, inadequate infrastructure, bureaucratic delays or lack of awareness. Rights become meaningful only when citizens can actually access them. This distinction between legislation and delivery is central to understanding India’s welfare experience.
Khera’s field-based approach also helps puncture another familiar argument: that welfare programmes create dependency. The book asks whether social protection can instead expand freedom. An assured source of food, employment, healthcare or a modest pension can give people the security to make choices they otherwise could not afford. Welfare, therefore, may not diminish individual agency; under certain conditions, it can strengthen it.
The book’s larger contribution is to move the welfare debate away from slogans. It invites readers to consider inequality, citizenship and the responsibilities of the state in concrete terms. This makes Freebies or Rights particularly relevant at a time when social spending is frequently discussed through electoral calculations rather than through the experiences of those who depend on it.
Jean Drèze’s observation in the opening—that social policy is too important to be left to experts—captures the spirit of the book. Khera writes for citizens as much as for policymakers and academics. The book does not merely ask readers to accept a particular view of welfare; it equips them to ask better questions.
Freebies or Rights is a case for seeing social protection not as charity, but as part of the infrastructure of a democratic society. Its central message is both simple and consequential: dignity cannot be secured by economic growth alone. For millions of Indians, it also depends on whether the state can make basic rights real in everyday life.
[1] Government-run rural childcare centres in India
.
Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Rituparna Khan, an academic professional and artist, devotes her collection of short stories, Her Story: Beyond Dimension, “to the strong and beautiful being underneath the sky who runs and propels the globe in the truest direction… The Woman.” The singular destiny and universal history of women across time and space echo forbearance, creation, nurture, passion, perseverance, and more through every odd of society, recalling Virginia Woolf’s words, “As a woman I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the world.”
Her Story: Beyond Dimension is a collection of tributes to nine real-life historical revolutionary women whose contributions to society came at great sacrifice and were largely unsung in their time. Questioning the traditional realism, her stories offer multi-vocal, polysemous narratives with a story enclosed within a story and with exploratory, informative details about each influential historical woman character. In the genre of historical fantasy fiction, she highlights contributions as well as sacrifices of these remarkable women and synchronises historical and mythological facts with fantasy, offering us a compendium of breathtaking magical stories.
The short story ‘Myth to reality’ is a tribute to the last pharaoh of Egypt, Cleopatra VII Thea Philopater (70 BC – 31 BC). In the story, Orion Dasgupta was fascinated by the history and culture of Egypt and venerated the glorious queen to the point of obsession, so he readily agreed to the opportunity of his dream project of rehabilitation of dwellers in the vicinity of Aswan Dam over the Blue Nile. To his surprise, during his project, he encounters Cleopatra herself. An imaginative melding of magically connected experiences not only across time but also across identity is presented by the author when Cleopatra addresses him as her lover, Mark Antony. In the mythology, the enigmatic queen was estranged from her lover, Mark Anthony, at the Battle of Actium in 31 BC. This encounter of Orion Dasgupta with Cleopatra as the incarnation of Cleopatra’s lover Antony is a wish fulfilment having a cathartic effect on him and breaks the curse of unrequited longing of lovers.
The cycle of history resonates in her short story, ‘Reni and Gauri’. This story is a tribute to Gauri Devi (1925-1991), the leading woman figure who advocated the Chipko Movement to prevent deforestation in the Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, India. Inspired by the story of bravery and courage of environmental activist Gauri Devi, the author reincarnates her as Reni. The voice of Gaura Devi inspires across time, speaking through Reni. Her voice testifies to the lineage of ordinary women who changed the course of history with determination and consciousness and would continue to fight for environmental protection. The author nudges us to refrain from hero worship and continue to have faith in the spirit and courage of the common man.
The story ‘Last Flight’ is a tribute to and inspired by the life and sacrifices of Neerja Bhanot (1963-1986), an Indian head purser who died while saving passengers on Pan Am Flight 73. The flight had been hijacked by terrorists during a stopover in Karachi, Pakistan, on 5th September 1986. The story, ‘Cosmic Connection’, pays tribute to the Indian-born American astronaut Kalpana Chawla. Riya is a teen aspiring to become a space scientist. On her thirteenth birthday, she is gifted a magical sojourn to Columbia, the space shuttle, where she meets Kalpana Chawla and her crew. To her surprise, Kalpana addressed her as her mother, urging her ‘to live my dream, live your dream, and live the dreams of numerous children, especially the girls to fulfil their dreams’, thereby motivating and inspiring the young teen and emphasising the connected nature of our experiences and journey.
The story, ‘Rendezvous with Reflection’ is a tribute to the legendary Anne Frank (1929-1942), author of Diary of a Young Girl, which documents her hidden life during the Holocaust. During the COVID quarantine period, the protagonist feels in a slump, perusing through the pages of Anne Frank’s book ‘Diary of a Young Girl’ multiple times, only to find Anne Frank herself conjured up in the mirror as her reflection. Often reality proves not too congenial to our existence; this doesn’t always leave us in despair because the imaginative and creative power of humans’ triumphs through tough times. The spectacle of Anne Frank leaves an imprint upon the protagonist.
The short story, ‘First Lady’, is a tribute to Dr Kadambini Ganguly (1861-1923), the first practising lady doctor of British and South-East Asia. She narrates her life of hardship and courage, where even in her early years she puts her life at risk to treat her ailing cousin suffering from cholera in an abandoned cow shed. This is a tribute to all the female doctors who have worked hard for the cause of people but instead faced prejudice and distrust due to unquestioned patriarchal assumptions of society.
Rituparna’s short story ‘A Self-Taught Artist’ is centred around Sunayani Devi (1875-1962), the first modern woman artist of the Bengal School of Arts. Hiya, a twelve-year-old daughter, has an fondness for painting. To the surprise of her mother, she etched perfectly a portrait of a woman gazing at the full moon from her terrace, the same picture that was found in the archive of Sunayani Devi in the wash technique, a technique in which she had no prior training. Possessed by the spirit of Sunayani Devi, she begins to narrate the story of the artist’s difficult and courageous life. Her voice is shared by the authorial voice that criticises the patriarchal culture with the inflamed rhetoric that is direct, empowering and persuasive.
In ‘A Mellifluous Evening’, Arun Chowdhury, a young man in his late twenties, trained in Hindustani classical music by his mother with no formal training or certifications, suffers from failures to make a musical career and struggles through paltry economic conditions. His icon is the famous Indian Thumri singer, Begum Akhtar (1914-1974), the queen of ghazal. Disheartened by the vagaries of life, a ray of hope illuminates his existence with the vision of Begum Akhtar’s spectre, and her mellifluous voice leaves him mesmerised. Only his love for music could sustain him in these trying times with an indomitable spirit.
Fantasy, in these stories, provides an outlet for the artiste within. It challenges the unified constrained self to go beyond limits in the realisation of their dreams.
In ‘A Liberated Soul’, while awaiting the second dose of vaccine during bitter COVID times, the protagonist meets a little girl seeking to sell a little bird to the only person who would readily set the bird free as a symbol of “a COVID-free world, a happy and free world of peace and liberty”. We hear the poignant, tragic story of Joan of Arc, who was burnt at stake in 1431 BCE, through the voice of the little girl who reveals the bird to be none other than Joan of Arc’s only friend, Balami.
Rituparna’s collection Her Stories: Beyond Dimension is a riveting and astounding read, gripping the readers to the edge of their seats with lore from mythology and history, with fantastical gymnastic poetic renditions of supernatural coincidences and timeless messages of consciousness and diligence for society. Each of her stories is also accompanied by the character sketch of the historical figures done by Juli Baruah, a renowned painter from Jorhat, Assam. History is not a dated, fixed historical time but returns to inspire, encourage and motivate.
.
Farah Imam is an avid reader, passionate creative writer, poet, and literary critic. Her works are recognised in various publications.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
A conversation with Kanupriya Dhingra with a brief introduction to her book, TheSunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, published by Speaking Tiger Books.
“Most Sundays, I found myself walking alongside hundreds of others for whom Daryaganj was, and continues to be, the primary site of book buying. It was democratic, messy, inclusive, sometimes illegal, often chaotic, but always alive.”
-- Kanupriya Dhingra, Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public
Perhaps, Kanupriya Dhingra’s Sunday Book Bazaar: Delhi’s Book Street and the Making of a Reading Public, could be seen as a democratisation of the process of reading. In an ethnographic study of a book bazaar that springs up every Sunday, Dhingra familiarises us with the historicity of the culture of a bazaar, of reading and even locates its roots in the Mughal Faiz Bazaar from the time of Shahjahan (1592-1666).
In an earlier article dated 2020, she had written about the bazaar: “Historian Sohail Hashmi says that Akbarabadi Begum, one of Shahjahan’s wives, built this market in its earliest form. Several historical maps of Delhi show the existence of ‘Faiz Bazaar’ in this area. The name, Daryaganj, itself means ‘a market across a river’, where ‘Darya’ refers to a river (here, the river Yamuna) and ‘Ganj’ refers to a site where trade is conducted. It was not always the same product that was traded here; Daryaganj only became synonymous with the sale of used, rare, pirated books in the 1960s. According to locals, Daryaganj started as a consumer goods market, set up adjacent to the walls between Subhash Park and Kasturba Gandhi Hospital. There were vinyl records and hand-mounted record players, radios, transistors, mechanical goods, medical goods and used clothes; books too found their place. After a few minor relocations not significantly far away from the lanes of Daryaganj, a few booksellers moved to the now absent ‘Lohe ka Pul‘ (Iron Bridge), near Golcha Cinema, from where the street market began to expand. Before its recent relocation to a nearby site by the name of Mahila Haat, the bazaar extended till Delite Cinema Hall. The structure of the market appeared like a long ‘L’, with books stacked on the sidewalks of Netaji Subhash Marg and Asaf Ali Road, and more than 250 vendors.”
Dhingra continued spellbound by the ‘magic’ of this bazaar when she visited it as a child and then, as a university student. Coming from a small town, where bookshops that stocked more than textbooks were a rarity, she supported the booksellers when they protested the ‘legalisation’ and the relocation of the bazaar to a newer site in 2019 and wrote of it in Himal Southasian in an article titled, ‘The death of a book bazaar’.
The book gives fascinating glimpses of booksellers and book buyers, of connoisseurs and of students striving for upward economic mobility in the job market. It houses parents, children, old people and young, book lovers, browsers, students, teachers and more. Dhingra asserts: “A republic, in its original sense, is a res publica—a public thing, a commons, something that belongs to everyone who participates in it. Not owned, not curated, not gatekept. The Patri Kitab Bazaar[1] is exactly this: a space where a rickshaw puller and an IAS officer, a first-generation student and a shauqeen[2] collector, a vendor from Uttar Pradesh and a buyer from Assam all have equal claim to the same pile of books.”
One of the most fascinating stories that emerges is of the Om Bookstore — that can be found in major malls across Delhi and many major cities of India — and Om Books International. Dhingra met the founder Om Mago and this is what she wrote: “Om Mago told me that when he first came to Daryaganj, there was no bazaar to speak of—just a few men who had found this way of living. Books that did not belong anywhere, that had potential afterlives, had been discovered as a sellable commodity. ‘There was need in Delhi, and there were books.’ From that simple equation, he learnt the trade, built connections across Delhi and Mumbai, and gradually transformed a pavement enterprise into what Om Books International is today.”
Dhingra has gathered details from booksellers and connoisseurs. Connoisseurs like Sohail Hashmi and Abdul Sattar gave her historic antecedents while bloggers like, Mayank Austen Soofi, who runs the highly coveted The Delhi Walla blog, and claims to idolise Arundhati Roy and have met her in the bazaar, shared more recent perspectives. Soofi “has been passing in and out of the same neighbourhoods for more than a decade, documenting the minutest social and cultural changes” as the New Yorker noted, giving almost a ‘Proustian quality’ to his posts on Delhi.
Dhingra has noticed that selling books is largely confined to men though women buyers are visible. She sees a difference in approach among the genders, which is an interesting observation, given the fact that Delhi is known for its discriminatory attitude towards women.
What I found most fascinating about the book was the capture of local colours, though the focus was more centred on discussions around North Indian languages. It has interesting snippets like a man who operates pirated books out of the dickey of his car, lodging his ware near an ATM. Dhingra tells us: “At the Patri Kitab Bazaar, pirated books are called D ki kitab—where D refers to duplicate and/or digital.” She mentions too, a publisher that brings out ‘Guru Chela’ ( Master- Disciple) booklets. “There were some 100 colourful booklets with miscellaneous titles of useful literature in Hindi, English, and Hinglish.” These were a mix of write- ups on ‘useful’ tips as well as popular jokes and light literature. Along with these, the vendor sold things like “pocketknives, razors, scissors, tiny notebooks, used fountain pens, old wristwatches and their band.” She also found stalls selling old film posters, lyrics and even ancient coins! A copy of the Lolita (1955, written by Vladimir Nabokov in English) translated to Hindi finds mention. “I found a copy of Lolita in the bazaar once—in Hindi. The title only mentioned Lolita in Hindi, and there was nothing else on the cover except a woman’s portrait. There were no copyright claims inside the paratextual pages—no author, no publisher. For a reader or buyer who is not familiar with Nabokov and his works, it is just another novel in Hindi.”
She makes one feel it’s a must to visit the bazaar, perhaps, with a copy of her book in hand! Her style is smooth, evocative and flows well. Dhingra has a passion which translated to a whole book reflecting a community that is unique in the very fact of its existence, tied loosely by the love of books – not necessarily reading. We interviewed her to discuss her journey and here’s how she responded:
Kanupriya Dhingra
“As an ethnographer of the city streets, I am constantly reminded of the transformative power of walking. It allows us to uncover hidden stories, forge unexpected connections, and shape the world around us.” Can you please elaborate on this “transformative power” and how the bazaar forms and unforms every Sunday?
Until 2019, since the 1970s, Daryaganj Sunday Patri Kitab Bazaar was set up between two landmark cinema halls in Old Delhi — Golcha Cinema on Netaji Subhash Road and Delite Cinema on Asaf Ali Road. On any other day, this L-shaped part of the street carried the ordinary rhythms of a working city: government offices, shops and traders, food outlets, traffic on the road. On Sundays, those rhythms would change. Iron and cardboard boxes, tarpaulin sheets, and books spread across the footpath, using the closed shutters of offices as their display backdrop. The bazaar did not occupy the street so much as it temporarily rewrote it. What ethnography taught me to pay attention to is precisely this rewriting of the space that is overdetermined during the week, claimed by traffic and routine and competing uses, is briefly re-scripted by the arrival of booksellers and readers. And then, by evening, unscripted again. Books would go back in their boxes, the tarpaulins were folded, and the footpath was simply itself — flat and indifferent. The street would forget entirely what stood on it. But the people remembered.
Can you tell our readers what is ethnography? Why did you feel the need to do an ethnographic study on the Sunday book bazaar? What would be the target readership of your very well researched book?
Ethnography, at its simplest, is the method of sustained and repeated presence in a place and trying to understand a world on its own terms. What it is not is a survey, an archive search, or a one-time interview. It is slow and embodied. It is, also, deeply dependent on the trust of the people who agree to let you into their working lives.
Because the bazaar exists outside the formal structures that usually produce archives, there are no official records of this market. The only way to know it is to go there, repeatedly, over years, and listen. The book is built from those years of fieldnotes, interviews, and observations. While the formal fieldwork for my doctoral thesis happened in 2019, I had been a regular for a while. I continued spending Sundays at the bazaar across seasons, displacements, and a pandemic. With the support of the booksellers, I documented the 2019 protests in urgent media reports as well, to produce an immediate archive of what happened to the bazaar, instead of waiting to revisit my notes only while writing my thesis.
As for who the book is for — I resisted writing a book that only scholars could read. The Sunday Book Bazaar is for the student who recognises Usha with her handwritten list of textbooks — one that has scope for a few other ‘finds’ because her pocket money allows for it, here, at the bazaar. It is for the shauqeen who recognises their own Sunday morning in these pages. It is for the Delhi reader who has been going to the bazaar for years without quite knowing why. It is for the reader in Singapore, or Mumbai, or London, or Lahore who has their own version of this informal, unruly, necessary space and sees it reflected here. It is a book about books, the people who read them, and the people who make that possible. The research is rigorous, I hope. But the book is for everyone.
You have mentioned the absence of women among the sellers. The few that are there do not even see themselves as sellers but as temporary fixtures in lieu of their husbands. Can you tell us why in the twenty-first century women are still being segregated in the bazaar? Is it justified?
The question of women at the bazaar is more nuanced than it first appears. Women vendors are not absent. Quite a few have been running stalls at Daryaganj for years, some for decades, even if it means supporting their brother or husband or son. What is more important, and what my fieldwork revealed, is that many of them do not claim the identity of bookseller. When I asked directly, the answers were careful, deflective, or simply negative. One vendor, who had been managing her late husband’s stall with evident expertise for decades, told me that this work belongs to men because women cannot “lift heavy books”. Another, who had joined the bazaar more recently, had also lost her husband. She was selling the stock he had gathered over the years, keeping the stall going until her son was old enough to take over. But it was more than that, she said, “He passed away on a Sunday, after selling books at the bazaar. That has to mean something.”
Cities give women this kind of ironic independence. The bazaar is one of its more interesting examples. Anonymity in the crowd, the freedom to occupy public space on their own terms, the economic agency that comes from handling money and stock and customers without anyone particularly watching. And yet the identity, the word bookseller, with its history and its community and its authority, remains something many women at the bazaar do not claim for themselves. The crowd hides them, and that hiding is simultaneously a form of freedom and a form of erasure.
You have also noticed that women buyers are different from men. How and why? Please elaborate. Is this a reflection of the culture/ accepted norm of the city/ the sellers and visitors?
Women’s time in public spaces, especially in Delhi, is measured differently. They negotiate with surveillance and scrutiny. Their purposefulness is driven by necessity. They arrive with clearer lists and are less likely to linger without a specific destination in mind. A woman spending two hours browsing a pavement book market on a Sunday morning is doing something that requires more social permission than the equivalent activity does for a man.
And yet the bazaar’s openness, its visibility from the street, and the absence of walls and thresholds made it more accessible to women than many other public spaces in the city. Even Mahila Haat[3] tends to offer an interior that might feel safer, allowing a new scope for purposeless wandering. Moreover, on a public footpath or inside a gated haat, among other people, that openness is precisely what makes the bazaar feel usable for many women readers. What they do with that openness reflects the social conditions they navigate to get there, not their relationship to books, which is as varied and as shauqeen as anyone else’s.
One of the things that your book makes me wonder is — is book piracy justified? What do you think?
I want to be clear first: I do not support piracy, and it is illegal. That is not a complicated position for me. What is complicated is the context in which piracy at Daryaganj exists and the questions that context raises.
After the March 2026 raid by the Crime Branch in Rohini, in which over twenty thousand books were seized — titles by Arundhati Roy, Yuval Noah Harari, Haruki Murakami, James Clear, among others — Penguin India posted about it on social media. The comments were quite instructive. Readers responded not with sympathy for the publisher but with a straightforward observation: books are not affordable. The original editions of the seized titles cost several hundred rupees each. The pirated edition costs a fraction of that.
I am not using this to justify piracy. I am using it to point to the structural failure that makes piracy legible to so many people as a reasonable response. The formal publishing market has not solved the affordability problem. The bazaar, in its informal and sometimes illegal way, tends to fill that gap, albeit partially. The more interesting question is not whether piracy is right or wrong but what its persistence tells us about the gaps the formal book economy has created and, at the moment, cannot fulfil. A reading public that cannot afford books is not served by enforcement alone.
You have written of “a densely competitive educational ecosystem shaped by chronic state underfunding, unequal infrastructure, and the relentless neoliberal promise of upward mobility through credentialism. In this context, the bazaar does more than sell books: it acts as an unofficial welfare infrastructure, absorbing and responding to gaps produced by shrinking public support and rising private costs.” Please elaborate how the bazaar supports aspirants of upward mobility. Does it help close the gaping gaps we notice among different socio-economic, ethnic groups that exist within the given polity?
The phrase unofficial welfare infrastructure came out of a specific observation: that the buyers I met at Daryaganj were not, in the main, casual browsers. They were people for whom the price of a book at a formal bookshop was a genuine obstacle. Students preparing for competitive examinations. First-generation readers with no family library to draw on. Aspirants using books as tools for a different life.
The state has not solved the problem of access to books. School libraries are underfunded. Public libraries are underused and often inaccessible. The formal book market serves readers who can afford it. The bazaar, entirely without subsidy or policy support, has for six decades been doing what the state has not: putting books within reach of people who need them.
Does it close socio-economic gaps? Partially, and imperfectly. It reduces the cost of access. It creates a space where the student with fifty rupees and the collector with five hundred rupees stand at the same stall. But it does not solve the structural problems that create those gaps — underfunding, unequal infrastructure, the credentialism that makes books feel like necessities rather than pleasures. What it does is something more modest and more important: it refuses to accept that books should only be available to those who can afford them at full price.
What has been your most interesting experience in this bazaar? Please share it with us.
There is one moment I return to often. It was 28 July 2019, a Sunday, a few weeks into my formal fieldwork. I was walking from Delhi Gate Metro Station toward the bazaar, headphones on, no music, mentally preparing for the day’s interviews. My phone rang. It was Qamar Saeed, the vendor I had come to know as the ‘King of Daryaganj’, “Madamji, bazaar uth gaya hai. Aap jaldi aaiye.” Madamji, the bazaar has been lifted. Come quickly.
I walked faster. My mind had gone quiet. No fieldwork instincts, no questions forming. Just the turn onto Netaji Subhash Marg, and then the footpath. It looked the same. That was the first thing I noticed: how completely the same it looked. The shutters were where they always were. The traffic moved. A guard sat outside the closed bank, reading his phone. And then I looked at the footpath, and it was just a footpath. No iron boxes. No tarpaulin sheets. No one crouching. No one haggling. Just concrete, flat and indifferent, as though six decades of a particular kind of Sunday morning had been lifted along with the stalls and taken somewhere I could not see.
I understood something that morning that I had known intellectually but not yet felt, that how fragile and contingent this world was. How much it depended on permissions and invisibilities, on the stubbornness and resilience of people who showed up every Sunday and arranged their books and waited. That day shaped this book more than any other.
Do you think this bazaar will continue to thrive/survive given the online market of books? Please elaborate.
The bazaar has already survived things more threatening than the online market. It has survived displacement orders, pandemic lockdowns, municipal raids, and sixty years of operating without official sanction. The online market is a pressure, but it is not a new kind of pressure.
What the online market cannot replicate is serendipity. You cannot search for a book you do not know exists. You cannot stumble upon a 1978 Penguin edition with someone else’s marginalia on an algorithm. You cannot haggle, or sit on the vendor’s side of the stall and hear a story that changes how you read. The shauqeen will keep coming for precisely these reasons. The students will keep coming because the price point remains unbeatable. The families will keep coming because it is still, on a Sunday morning in Old Delhi, one of the most alive places in the city.
The question is not whether the bazaar will survive but what form it will take. It has always been good at taking new forms — from the footpaths of Jama Masjid to the stretch between Golcha and Delite to Mahila Haat. Each relocation changes something and preserves something. That capacity for reinvention, for showing up in a new place with the same iron boxes and the same stubbornness, is what I mean when I call this a story of resilience. The bazaar has never needed the formal economy’s permission to exist. It is unlikely to start now.
Thank you for your fabulous book and wonderful answers.
Title: Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Books
Author: Shanta Gokhale
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Shanta Gokhale’s Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Books is an unusual kind of literary memoir. It is neither a conventional autobiography nor a conventional work of criticism. Instead, it occupies an intimate space between the two, tracing a life’s intellectual and emotional history through books. For Gokhale, reading is not merely a habit or a professional necessity; it is a way of living, thinking, and making sense of the world. The result is a book that is at once personal, erudite, playful and deeply reflective.
Gokhale begins with a simple but revealing confession: reading has been the strongest and longest thread running through her eighty-five years. She began reading at seven, reading seriously at twelve, and over the decades discovered, as she puts it, “ancestors and friends”. The distinction is important.
Some books become intellectual ancestors, shaping how we think and see; others become friends, returning at different stages of life and revealing something new each time. The Covid lockdown, which provided her with the time and solitude to reread many of these works, becomes the immediate occasion for this literary journey.
Gokhale brings together criticism and memory. She writes about writers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jane Austen, Naguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, alongside major Indian writers such as Shri Na. Pendse, Kiran Nagarkar, U.R. Ananthamurthy and Alka Saraogi. Yet these are not detached academic exercises. Gokhale approaches literature as a living experience. She asks what these books mean to her now, what they meant when she first encountered them, and what they reveal about society, politics, human relationships and the changing world.
Her perspective as an Indian reader gives the discussions an additional dimension. Familiar works are viewed from a location that is neither wholly Western nor narrowly Indian. This enables her to make connections across cultures and literary traditions without reducing one to the other. Her reading is comparative, but never mechanical. The books are allowed to speak in their own voices while being placed within the larger questions of history and contemporary life.
Translation and the craft of writing form another important strand of the memoir. Gokhale’s reflections on the translator’s responsibility demonstrate her sensitivity to language, context, and cultural nuance. Translation, in her understanding, is not simply the transfer of words from one language to another. It involves interpretation, empathy and difficult choices about voice and meaning. Her experience as a writer, critic and translator gives these observations the authority of practice rather than theory.
What makes Of Ancestors and Friends particularly engaging is its refusal to behave like a conventional critical book. Gokhale deliberately calls it a “ramble”. She announces that she does not want to hear the “sound of those shackles” of deadlines, word counts and imposed structures that have accompanied her sixty years of writing. She wants to digress, follow anecdotes, abandon order when necessary and write simply for the pleasure of writing. That freedom becomes part of the book’s charm.
The anecdotes about her reading life are among its most delightful passages. The excitement of finding a long-sought book in a dusty second-hand bookstore, the mystery contained in inscriptions in old books, and the affectionate possessiveness of a true bibliophile are described with wit and warmth.
Her encounters with writers and playwrights from Maharashtra bring another personal dimension to the narrative. These episodes prevent the book from becoming overly cerebral and remind us that literature is ultimately connected with people, places, friendships and lived experience.
There is also an implicit philosophy of reading here. Gokhale demonstrates that rereading is not repetition. We change, and therefore the books change with us. A novel encountered in youth may acquire an entirely different significance in old age. Characters once admired may become troubling; passages once overlooked may suddenly appear profound. In this sense, it is as much about the changing reader as it is about the books being read.
The book’s intellectual richness never entirely overwhelms its humaneness. Gokhale writes with the confidence of a seasoned literary practitioner but also with the curiosity of someone who has never lost the pleasure of discovering a book. Her prose combines critical sharpness with humour, anecdote with analysis, and scholarship with accessibility.
The book, in a nutshell, is a celebration of the life of the mind—and of the enduring companionship that books can offer. It reminds us that reading is not an escape from life but one of the ways in which life becomes more intelligible. Gokhale’s literary ancestors have shaped her, her fictional friends have accompanied her, and rereading has allowed her to meet them again. In sharing those encounters, she invites readers to look back at their own bookshelves and remember the books that, in one way or another, made them who they are.
.
Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
In the literary cartography of the Global South, fiction has often been pressed into the service of nation-narration. From Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, canonised as the novelistic metonym for India’s tumultuous post-independence history, to Tahmima Anam’s celebrated Bengal trilogy, received as a fictional appraisal of Bangladesh’s birth pangs, critics have persistently sought foundational texts that can emblematise emergent nation-states. Bangladesh, a nation forged in the crucible of a 1971 war that violently severed the geographic and ideological construct of Pakistan, occupies a distinctive position within this literary ecology. Its fiction emerges from a fractured genealogy of linguistic and political resistance, one that inherently unsettles monolithic, linear narratives of statehood.
Saima Begum’s The First Jasmines provides not as a supplement to a pre-existing history, but as an epistemological correction. It radicalises the project of narrating the nation by relocating the locus of meaning from the birth of a state to the structural, gendered violence its delivery both requires and represses. In doing so, the novel demands that we rethink the very relationship between fiction and national history, turning away from the monumental icon of the “tree” toward the unseen, divergent “branches” of women’s testimony.
The novel situates its inquiry not in the heroic theatre of the Mukti Bahini’s guerrilla campaigns, but in the circumscribed, carceral space of a military camp where women are held as spoils of a genocidal war. The protagonist, Lucky, is introduced as a figure of radical ordinariness, a mother and daughter-in-law whose husband works in London, whose life is violently unmoored during a journey to visit her ailing mother. Abducted alongside her sister Jamila, she is thrust into a temporal and spatial parenthesis where historical time collapses into the cyclical horror of daily violation.
Begum’s masterful narrative choice is to dwell in this atemporal zone, resisting the teleological pull of rescue and nationhood. The novel insists that the truth of national formation is to be found not in the climax of independence, but in this interstitial, nine-month duration of captivity—a dark, inverted gestation of the state. The narrative voice meticulously records a reality where agency is atomized into the smallest of sensory perceptions: “A lone window was squished between several patched-up panels, nothing visible from the outside but the thick black threads of hair of the women inside, shimmering liquid under moonlight.” The prose transforms the scene into a spectral image of beauty and abjection, a visual field where the women are reduced to a single organic mass, their subjectivity merging with the material textures of their prison.
Begum’s aesthetic project hinges on her refusal of graphic spectacle. The violence is rendered not through an unveiling of the wounded body, but through an immersive phenomenology of trauma and a choreography of survival. A dialogic exchange between the two sisters becomes a profound meditation on the ontology of endurance. Jamila’s counsel, “Close your eyes… The longer they stay open, the more you’ll remember when you leave…” and Lucky’s retort, “What I see with my eyes closed is worse than what I see with them open…” stage a dialectic of memory and presence, of protective dissociation and sensory assault. When Jamila counters Lucky’s terror with the sacred identity of “A praying mother,” Begum constructs what can be termed a fragile counterforce; an affective and spiritual armature that stands against the physical machinery of the camp.
These whispered philosophies, born from the collective precarity of womanhood, elevate conversation into a mode of existential resistance. The female prisoners emerge not as silent victims but as vernacular philosophers whose dialogue constitutes a parallel archive of wisdom, a repository of insight into the patriarchal logics that subtend the spectacular violence of war.
The novel’s metaphorical architecture is anchored by the recurring, titular motif of jasmine, “a flower that blooms at night, alluding to the possibility of survival and beauty in darkness.” This is not a simple consolatory figure. The jasmine operates as an olfactory and mnemonic counter-symbol to the visual regimes of state power and historiographic documentation. It is a scent that persists where light, the Enlightenment metaphor for knowledge and liberation, fails. In the novel’s most formally striking passage, the dehumanising violence is refracted through a complex simile of capture: the soldier grabs Zoleyka’s braid “like fishermen pulling a net full of bounty back from the sea.” The comparison is devastating in its precision, momentarily stripping the character of human subjecthood to figure her as catch, as non-human resource within a predatory political economy of bodies.
Yet, the meticulous catalogue of her braids, “Plait braid, single braid, lace braid, ladder braid, fishtail braid”, preceding this act of violation is a testament to a life of self-care and cultural practice. The text thus inscribes violence not as an isolated event but as a systemic logic that weaponises what women have tended with love. Begum’s narrative eye, however, is unremittingly dialectical, and in a chillingly audacious shift, she turns the omniscient gaze onto the hyper-sensory paranoia of the soldiers: “Tasted sugar when they bit into the flesh of bloodied girls.” This perspectival haunting refuses a Manichean simplicity, exposing the perpetrators’ psyche as a landscape corroded by superstition and a barbarity that recoils upon the self. It suggests a war that consumes both the captured and the captor, albeit along radically asymmetrical axes of consequence.
This bifocal vision culminates in the novel’s central epistemic maxim: “God must’ve given us different eyeballs, men and women, they only seem to see the tree and never the direction of its branches.” The folk aphorism articulates a gendered scopic regime. The masculinist, state-centric gaze sees the singular, monumental “tree”—the nation, the war, the linear narrative of liberation—while women’s perception traces the divergent, lateral, and unseen “branches”: the capillaries of care, the trajectories of trauma, the lived experiences that the grand narrative cannot integrate.
The novel’s own form embodies this branched perception. It intersperses harrowing depictions of suffering with moments of startling levity born from collective wit: “Never marry a man who needs to make a mistake to learn.” “Look at your mother-in-law’s hair.” This rhythmic oscillation between the visceral and the light is not a tonal inconsistency but a profound formal mimesis of the survival strategies of the captive women. Humour and gossip become technologies of selfhood, momentarily reassembling a world of intimate sociality within the zone of annihilation, proving that the unsayable can only be approached through a dance between testimony and the sustaining grace of the mundane.
The final act of the novel delivers a liberation that is no liberation at all, structurally executing a terminal critique of the nation-form. The Mukti Bahini liberates the camp; the state, in a gesture of political commemoration, confers the title of ‘birangona’ (war heroine) upon the violated women. Yet, as Begum’s paratextual note devastatingly clarifies, societal excommunication transmutes the honorific into its homophonic, pejorative other: ‘barangona’ (prostitute).
The state’s promised apparatus of care—rehabilitation, vocational training, social reintegration—evaporates, revealing a patriarchal compact that allows the nation to valorise the violated female body as a symbol of its own violated territory while violently disavowing that body’s living, breathing claim to dignity. This post-war abandonment constitutes a second, more insidious violence, a form of slow death by social prescription that exposes the nation-state’s liberation as a gendered event, incomplete by design. The women are granted a symbolic place in the national epic while being denied a livable place in the nation’s society, a schism that The First Jasmines identifies as the founding lie of the postcolonial settlement.
Published at a critical historical conjuncture, as Bangladesh navigates a new landscape of political turmoil following the 2024 mass uprising and the fall of Sheikh Hasina’s government, The First Jasmines performs an urgent act of archival retrieval. It excavates the foundational, suppressed memory of gendered violence as the unspoken condition of the nation’s emergence, an inheritance that successive governments have refused to fully acknowledge or redress.
Begum’s profound innovation is to turn the narrative back not just to these women’s trauma but to their “humanity, resilience and heart,” depicting them as “architects of family and community.” To return to the novel’s governing metaphor, Begum abandons the vertical, central stem of the “tree”, the official history of the nation-state, to follow the rhizomatic directions of the “branches.” In doing so, she reframes the project of national literature not as the celebration of a fait accompli, but as a witness to its hidden costs. The novel ultimately insists that the nation cannot be received as an uncomplicated patrimony. True liberation, like the late-blooming jasmine, is a fragrance that unfolds only in the darkness, a promise whose truth is recognised only when we find the courage to sit with its scent long after the fanfares of dawn have faded.
Mudassar Javed Baryaris a scholar atthe University of Faisalabad, Pakistan.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
The title of Romila Thapar’s memoirs is deceptive and deceptively simple. It is not ‘just being’ but that being Romila Thapar is also a story of becoming, of mapping out borders and boundaries of what a woman from a liberal, progressive and well to do family could achieve in newly independent India. Her achievements are many and varied and her persona redoubtable. There is tremendous breadth of scholarship and Thapar’s is undoubtedly a remarkable journey which details the trajectory of her growing up years-family, background, physical and social location.
As a historian, Thapar is acutely aware and interested in the way memory works and it is this abiding interest which is perhaps reflected in her use of the following lines: “Times present and time past/Are both perhaps present in time future/And time future contained in time past”, lines from “Four Quartets” by TS Eliot.
This encapsulation of time reminds us of a common feature of autobiography — memoirs and autobiographies measure the gap between two temporal loci — the time of a past event and the time of its narration. In this case, the beginning of the story goes back nine decades. Prof Thapar regales us with stories of growing up in pre-Independence India. Born in Lucknow, she grew up in the North Western Frontier Provinces, moving from place to place as her father was a doctor in the Army.
In a way, the seeds of autonomy and independent thinking were sown very early in her life in myriad ways. She was influenced by her maternal grandmother and her mother. The latter was a graduate in the India of the 1920s, creditable for a woman since it was at a time when women’s education received mixed responses. She was competent in reading and writing three languages — Hindi, Urdu and English. Thapar narrates that “my maternal grandmother had insisted on two conditions before the marriage: that my mother never be asked to observe purdah– take the veil — when there were men around: and that she never be asked to cook meals for the family. These conditions were met.”
One finds it surprising even from the vantage point of the present time where entrenched patriarchal attitudes completely normalise the double burden carried by women and mythify cooking not only as part of women’s household duties and responsibilities, but as an act of maternal care and a labour of love. Many such instances stand out which provide a glimpse of a progressive, educated and liberal family, among whom are to be found many intellectuals who played their role in public life.
Underlying this memoir is a certain imagination of India. Thapar stands in the vanguard of those invoking, protecting and saving the idea of an India which is secular, multilingual, diverse and heterogenous. Thapar’s narrative warns us time and again of the dangers of a single narrative , a single story. Thus, she calls out the crises of democracy both during the Emergency[1] and in the present time. Is the failure of democracy attributable to the pervasive atmosphere of fear where citizens were/are cowed into silence? Or is it the failure of the education system within capitalism which has oriented individuals to fulfilling privatised desires rather than their duties as citizens? Or is it a comment on our civilisational failure that we have been reduced to acting as echo chambers for ruling elites?
In Just Being, historian par excellence Romila Thapar reflects on a rich, variegated, path-breaking life ― along with the people, relationships, ideas and journeys that made her who she is. In this compelling memoir, she invites us into her illustrious world ― a rich, testimony from a scholar who has profoundly shaped and moulded our understanding of India’s past and present. From her childhood growing up in British India, through her years of education in London, her extensive travels to archaeological sites across Asia and beyond, and her trailblazing role in shaping the Centre for Historical Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, Thapar reflects on a life lived in the service of education and research. Written over the past few years, Just Being is ample proof of Thapar’s ability to view herself within the larger flow of history, and to give a splendid account of it with a scholar’s depth, a storyteller’s sensitivity and an artist’s luminosity. It reveals not only an extraordinary, boundary-defying life but courage, integrity and a profound conviction that understanding our past in the light of undeniable evidence is essential to understanding the present and shaping a more thoughtful future.
She completed her doctorate in 1958 and was offered a temporary job at School of Oriental and African Studies to teach a course in ancient history in London. Thapar’s father had set aside funds – it could be used for either marriage or education. She chose the latter and proceeded to educate herself in myriad ways. From attending the lectures of Eric Hobsbawm on European political thought, reading Ismat Chughtai, Simone de Beauvoir, enrolling herself in evening courses on Chinese art (she did Chinese landscape painting) and archaeology, learning italic calligraphy, playing table tennis with monks, holding the stepladder for friends in libraries while the other reached for books in upper shelves, her discovery of Africa, to making posters and going for marches at Trafalgar Square and Hyde Park, hers is a rich and variegated life.
One is enthralled by her narratives of the people she met, the places she visited, illumined by the rays of her razor-sharp wit and comprehensive intelligence. What also dazzles is her knowledge of jazz, her cosmopolitanism and her capacity to engage with politics and culture, art and music. She narrates about her experiences in both white and coloured jazz bars, among musicians across the racial divide, in the immediate aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination in January 1968. She writes about her meeting with the writer Nelson Algren, who had previously shared an intense relationship with Simone Beauvoir and featured in her work, both fictional and non-fictional. Undoubtedly and confidently cosmopolitan, she is able to make a place for herself and earn respect in widely varying contexts, including many international fora and platforms.
Professor Thapar’s feistiness is evident throughout this absorbing memoir. So is her impeccable scholarship. In the chapters on “History Rocks” and “Textbooks in the Fray,” she calls out the ideologically motivated peddlers of popular histories prevalent on Whatsapp groups and contrasts them with professional historians and historiographers. She is a stickler for honing the historian’s craft through the discipline of method and process and sharply critiques the ideologically motivated peddling of history at the cost of professionalism. Two points are made very clearly by her: first that history is and should be based on scientific evidence and there should be no mixing up or conflation of mythology and history. “Mythology is the other kind of literature that is often quoted in public discussion and confused with history.’’ Another distinction is made with equal precision: following a Weberian or Marxist methodology is not necessarily a sign of ideological persuasion as much as a methodological preference for a certain rational process of historical analysis.
Thapar is one of the world’s foremost authorities on ancient Indian history, celebrated for transforming how ancient Indian history is studied. Rather than treating history as a sequence of kings and battles, her structural, sociological, and text-critical approach shifts focus on social formations, economic shifts, and the evolution of cultural identities. Her definitive research has fundamentally challenged both nineteenth-century colonial stereotypes and reductive nationalist narratives.
Her contribution to Indian history is immeasurable.She meticulously dismantled the Eurocentric colonial claim that ancient Indians lacked a “sense of history”. In works like The Past Before Us, she showed how early Indian society embedded its historical memory through distinct traditions — such as the Itihasa-Purana literature, Buddhist/Jain monastic chronicles, and royal biographies (charitas).
Her chapter “Textbooks in the Fray” traces the ideological warfare being waged over school textbooks, some of which she had written along with other well-known historians. Her interrogation and contestation of monolithic and singular identities pave the way for a layered reading of history.
Thapar argues that modern conceptions of a singular, monolithic “Hindu” or “Muslim” community are modern constructs. Her study of the historical narratives surrounding the Somnath Temple in Dwarka illustrated how a single historical event was interpreted in profoundly different, multifaceted ways by varying social groups over centuries. Similarly, her study of Sakuntala’s contrasting depictions in the famous Indian epic Mahabharata (around 4th century BC) and Kalidas’s play “Abhijnanashakuntalam” (4th-5th century AD) point out different conceptualisations and representation of women from a chronological perspective.
Prof Romila Thapar’s skills as a memoirist are perhaps comparable to her skill as a historian. Her endeavours have both decolonised history as well as given the discipline the status of a social science. The book gives an insight into her life, her beliefs and reflects on our times with an unbiased perspective of an adroit historian. It is a prized and rare read.
[1] 1975-77: Period of curtailment of civil liberties in India due to internal unrest.
Meenakshi Malhotra is Professor of English Literature at Hansraj College, University of Delhi, and has been involved in teaching and curriculum development in several universities. She has edited two books on Women and Lifewriting, Representing the Self and Claiming the I, in addition to numerous published articles on gender, literature and feminist theory. Her most recent publication is The Gendered Body: Negotiation, Resistance, Struggle.
.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
From the title of this novella, Homecoming, one can guess that a particular place becomes the focal point in the unravelling of the story, and that place is none other than Lucknow, seeping in past history, a promise of grace that the city was famed for, and a unique brand of Nawabi culture. The novel opens with a ‘Prologue’ where we are told that Hassan’s wife Samina has decided to leave Lucknow after she discovered that a small monument with a grave had been destroyed and the calligraphy over it had been vandalised. From that vantage point, Omair Ahmad, an eminent novelist, tactfully gives us the entire history through rendition given by three characters – Hassan, Ahmed Sahib and Sam or Samina narrate the story in four independent segments.
Hassan originally belonged to a Reddy family in Hyderabad and was of mixed parentage with a father steeped in communist ideology. His father married a Muslim lady from Patna. After several years, when they quarreled and fell apart, Hassan, a dentist by profession, left for Lucknow in search of a stable job. That became his home for almost twenty-five years. After years of trying to belong to Lucknow, once a city of poetry and grace where he had hoped to find something of the father he had lost, Hassan meets a kindred spirit—Ahmed sahib, an elderly man of quiet warmth and dignity, although diminished in circumstance. Unable to pay his professional fees, Ahmed sahib accepts Hassan’s proposal to show him around the city of Lucknow with the hope that it would become his home and gives him the gift of unspoken friendship. He believed that the city was too close to him. Sometimes, he thought, everything had changed, and sometimes he thought nothing had. In the company of this man, the city opened itself to him, parting ever so slightly, slowly making him its own in a way he had not felt in all the years he had lived there.
Ahmed sahib himself was an abandoned son, had no siblings, no wife or child, but was still connected to a wider family. It was through his connections with an extended family that the novelist depicts the lifestyle and stories of old Lucknow with its begums, kothas, tawaifs, courtesans, old havelis[1], music being practiced by so many great artists, intricacies of inheritance etc.
The third and the most significant protagonist is Sam or Samina, who was born in Lucknow, though she didn’t know that, and as an orphan went to live and grow up in London with her aunt and uncle. In college she fell in love with Urdu calligraphy and the Lucknawi style, and she managed to receive a fellowship from the Royal Historical Society to go to Lucknow to study calligraphy on the tombs of the noblewomen there.
Her aunt used to receive a letter once every six months from Badinani in Lucknow, from a great aunt called Begum Waheed, who briefed regularly about the myriad people she still thought of as her family, even if she hadn’t met most of them. At first Sam was afraid because she felt she was entering a world where everybody was an aunt or uncle, or a great-aunt or great-uncle. But gradually she becomes slightly more stable.
Hassan and Samina meet and gradually fall in love with the machinations of Ahmed sahib. When Ahmed sahib dies, the two of them felt orphaned once more. Hassan concludes his narrative by telling us that he was no longer the man he had been before he met Ahmed sahib, before he learned of all he was to so many people. It had taken a year after his death for him and Samina to discover each other, and when she offered him her name, he knew he could never let her go. The concluding lines of the novella are striking:
“I will let Samina rescue me from Lucknow, as her parents were once rescued by exile, and go haunt another land. I think Ahmed sahib would forgive me, I think he would even approve.”
Spare, nostalgic and moving, Omair Ahmad’s new novella is a meditation on love, lost and gained, dwelling on ideas of family, home and belonging. A wonderful read and the novelist should be congratulated for it.
[1]Kothas– brothels; Tawaifs– courtesans; Havelis– old palatial houses
Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
Krishna Dutta and Andrew Robinson’s Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man is among the most authoritative and nuanced biographies of the Nobel laureate, offering a deeply researched portrait of one of the twentieth century’s greatest intellectuals. The result of a decade of collaborative work by a Bengali scholar and a British writer, the book transcends the conventions of literary biography to present Tagore as a global thinker whose influence extended far beyond poetry.
The biography’s highest strength lies in its refusal to reduce Tagore to a single identity. While Gitanjali and the Nobel Prize naturally occupy an important place, the authors devote equal attention to his work as an educator, philosopher, playwright, composer, painter, and social reformer. His founding of Visva-Bharati University, experiments in rural reconstruction, and engagement with questions of nationalism, internationalism, and cultural identity receive careful and balanced treatment. Readers come away with a renewed appreciation of Tagore as a visionary who sought to reconcile India’s civilisational heritage with the demands of modernity.
The authors contend in the Introduction: “This is an ambivalent book. It has to be, whichever way one views Rabindranath Tagore, well over half a century after his death. Seen from the West, Tagore appears to have come out of nowhere in 1912 and collected a Nobel prize without the least effort; to have travelled the world and enjoyed a worldwide homage for over two decades not granted to any other writer in the twentieth century; and then to have evanesced until he is barely more than a name. But seen from Bengal he looks very different. Before 1912, Rabindranath was rejected by many, perhaps the majority, of Bengalis as being a product of western influence; for the rest of his life he experienced a unique blend of vilification and homage; and only after he died in 1941 was he canonized as Bengal’s greatest creative artist and raised to the Olympian pedestal he now occupies. No writer, living or dead, is today more actively worshipped in Bengal than Rabindranath Tagore. “From his own point of view, Tagore’s predicament was even more contradictory. As an idealist – which he remained to the last – he reserved his highest admiration for the humane spirit of the West he had first encountered in the liberalism of nineteenth-century English literature and politics. ‘Whatever may be the outward aspect of Europe’s power, I have no doubt that at its core is the power of the spirit’, he said before leaving Bengal in 1912.’ Like some other highly educated Bengalis of his time, until about 1920 Tagore believed British rule in India to be providential, necessary for the reform of a moribund, degenerate society. But as a patriot, particularly after 1900, he needed to believe in the persistence of ancient India’s spiritual values in contemporary India. In 1912, through his poems Gitanjali (Song Offerings), translated by himself, and through his personal presence in England – where people were even reminded of Christ – these two beliefs became harmonized in his mind.”
Dutta and Robinson are particularly successful in capturing the contradictions that defined Tagore’s personality. They portray him neither as an untouchable icon nor as a flawless sage, but as a deeply human figure marked by personal grief, spiritual searching, intellectual restlessness, and emotional complexity. His relationships with contemporaries such as Mahatma Gandhi, W. B. Yeats, Ezra Pound, and Albert Einstein illuminate the extraordinary intellectual networks that shaped the modern world. The narrative also examines the fluctuating fortunes of Tagore’s international reputation, explaining why his global fame diminished in the decades following his death despite his enduring significance.
The prose, running into five hundred pages, is elegant and accessible without sacrificing scholarly rigour. Richly illustrated and supported by extensive archival research, the biography succeeds in weaving together historical events, literary criticism, and intimate personal details into a compelling narrative. Rather than overwhelming readers with chronology, the authors emphasise the ideas and experiences that shaped Tagore’s creative genius.
Rabindranath Tagore: The Myriad-Minded Man stands as a definitive modern biography of India’s first Nobel laureate. It is indispensable reading for anyone interested in literature, intellectual history, cultural modernity, or the life of a man whose vision of humanity continues to speak powerfully to an increasingly interconnected world.
Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL
