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Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title:  Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons from the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond

Author: Ruskin Bond

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Recently Ruskin Bond turned ninety-two and from the various interviews he has been giving, one finds a single word that recurs in different forms in his interaction with his interviewers and that is ‘solitude.’ The recently published non-fiction book titled Scenes from the Magic Mountain: Five Seasons in the Mussoorie Hills and Beyond, captures this solitude and his deep, lifelong love for the Himalayas. It is a gentle, meditative reflection on the changing seasons, nature, and the quiet rhythms of daily life in Landour and Mussoorie, a place that he himself states to be his home for the last sixty-one years.  He had moved to Mussoorie in the early 1960s to write full time. In the ‘Introduction’ he tells us about how he moved into a cottage called Maplewood Lodge after renting a room from a lady called Ms. Bean and settled for good in these hills. The old and isolated cottage was tucked away in the shadow of a hill, but it brought him close to nature and helped him develop a rapport with it in all seasons. The open window of the small living room exposed him to the forest outside that seemed full of possibilities and the birdsong.

The book is not a novel or a continuous narrative; rather, it is a collection of vignettes, journal entries, and remembered moments.  It allows readers to experience the mountains exactly as Bond does, observing the nuances of the landscape over the course of five distinct seasons. Most of the entries are very brief, the lengthier ones are hardly more than a page in length, but through them Bond manages to give his readers his very close observations of the place as he experiences it through the five different seasons of the year. He divides the book into six parts, and the last part is called ‘The Eternal Season’. Each section begins with a suitable prologue borrowed from the Australian traveller John Lang’s mid-nineteenth century travelogue Wanderings in India (1869), a book which Bond had retrieved from oblivion and edited for the benefit of future readers.

Bond organises his observations into a seasonal framework, detailing the subtle shifts in his environment. In the first section ‘Spring’ we get detailed description of how the first tender leaves appear, bringing a sense of tentative warmth and new beginnings. Through his very perceptive and minute observations, we get visual images of the small birds that arrive to bathe and drink in the little pool beneath the walnut tree, water beetles and tiny fish that lurk in the shallows of the pool. The different varieties of birds that he has observed include two delicate little willow warblers, the whistling thrush, the wild ducks, eagles that fly high on the mountain, the cheeky mynah birds meeting under the eaves of the roof, and sparrows that flutter in and out of the room at will. Spring comes with its varieties of flowers with splashes of colour and Bond rightly describes how “the infection of spring spread simultaneously through the world of nature, and made them one”. The honeybees and butterflies also add to the beauty of the place and as he rightfully states, they do not recognise any “man-made border”.

The vignettes of summer have details of long, insect-filled, sun-drenched days that invite slow walks and quiet afternoons. Summer for Bond “was never entirely solitary”. As he sat in the window seat in his cottage and spent his mornings turning out stories, poems, essays, children’s tales and anything that came to his mind, he looked out upon a sociable gathering of trees that provided a recreation ground for different kinds of birds too. Very evocative descriptions of the mangoes, lichis as the fruits of summer and also the ice cream are drawn from his memories. He writes how as a boy he was engulfed in loneliness, and as a man in solitude. On some mornings when he carried his small table, chair and typewriter outside on to the knoll below one of the oaks, the different birds helped him with his punctuation. For his reflective and descriptive writing, he looked into the distance, at the purple hills merging with the azure sky; or examined a fallen leaf as it spiralled down from the tree and settled on the typewriter keys. The summer sun bathes everything with clear, warm light and the camera-eye of the narrator records everything to the minutest detail. He tells us about other prolific writers who were busy writing their books during this period while he produced not so much as a paragraph.

The monsoon is a defining feature of the hills, bringing mist, heavy downpours, and the lush abundance of the forest. “The first monsoon rain always felt like a beginning,” writes Bond and how this season is one of the most beautiful times of the year in the Himalayas. As the forest dripped and it rang with birdsong, Bond found it always worthwhile tramping through the forest above the stream to feast his eyes on the foliage that sprang up in tropical profusion. He tells us how the rains also heralded some seasonal visitors like leopards and several thousand leeches, and snakes as well as insects like grasshoppers, crickets and cicadas who produced different kinds of music.

When autumn arrives, burnished light, ripening fruit, and a golden hue take over the landscape and according to Bond it is the best time of the year in the hills. Now more than any other time of the year, the wildflowers come into their own and it is the best time for taking long walks. An atmosphere of peace and harmony descends on the hillside, and Bond watches the spectacular sunset as its faint glow spreads across the whitewashed walls of the ageing cottage, as though a part of that spectacular sunset has been left behind only for them. This season also occasionally brings in bears who come to the village to eat pumpkins, flying foxes sweeping across the roads and leopards circling the houses along with dogs. The cool, uplifting autumn breeze always stirred him to the marrow and Bond thought it to be the best aphrodisiac in the world.

Winter brings with it old silences, snow-laden trees, and the beauty of the serene Himalayan peaks against a clear blue sky. During Christmas when it was bitterly cold outside, the blazing wood fire in an old-fashioned fireplace made him enjoy the experience. Again, one day, after being cooped up in his room for several days, he set out for an enjoyable tramp outside in the snow-covered countryside with hardly anyone on the way. He also reminiscences about his school days when he took the train ride from his boarding school in Shimla to come to Dehradun and find occasional snowfall there. He also remembered the first time it snowed in Maplewood. From the windows he could see, up at the top of the hill, the deodars clothed in a mantle of white. “It was a fairyland: everything still and silent.”

The eight selected entries for the last section titled ‘The Eternal Season’ describe the quiet renewal that begins where all endings meet. Here Bond reflects on renewal and the passage of time across sixty years of living in the mountains, examining how the landscape remains wondrous despite changing times. All through his life he says he had been plodding along, singing his song, telling his tales in his own unhurried way and it didn’t matter if he hadn’t managed to get to the top of the mountain. He had lived his life at his own gentle pace and his long walk had brought its own sweet rewards; buttercups and butterflies along the way. He had been observing the natural world—along forest paths, during walks, storms, solitary afternoons, and shared silences.

Thoughtful, attentive and reflective, he offers the seasons not as events to be marked, but as a way of living in time.  In the penultimate entry he states: “In spite of all indications to the contrary, I have survived – as a writer, as an individual, as a breadwinner, as a lover of beauty. So many failure and setbacks along the way; but I suppose my inner stubbornness saw me through… And here I am, ninety-one, my own person, determined to live and love till my last breath.”

This aesthetically produced hard-bound book is not to be read chronologically from beginning to end but can be opened by the reader at leisure from whichever page or season he feels like, and he can go back to it again and again. It is a collector’s delight and also one to be gifted and recommended for anyone who loves to read about Ruskin Bond’s deep and lifelong love for the Himalayas. Bond’s poetic prose can hardly be imitated and some of the spontaneous poems that abound in the collection speak immensely of his ability to cross over genres of prose and poetry with utmost ease. The black and white interior illustrations that abound in the book also add extra charm and help the less-perceptive reader gain better understanding of the particular image or scenery that Bond talks about. One is also fascinated by his exquisite sense of subtle humour, that includes the ability to even laugh at oneself.

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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a retired Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

Click here to read the book excerpt.

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Celebrating the Monsoon

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon

Author: Stephen Alter

Publisher: Aleph Book Company  

Stephen Alter has long established himself as one of India’s finest chroniclers of landscape, memory, and the natural world. In The Fragrance of Rain: A Brief History of the Monsoon, he turns his attention to the phenomenon that has shaped the subcontinent more profoundly than perhaps any other force of nature—the monsoon. The result is a richly textured work that combines travel writing, environmental history, natural science, and cultural reflection into a compelling narrative that celebrates India’s most anticipated season.

At its heart, the book is a journey. Alter traces the progress of the monsoon from the southern coast of Kerala through the Western Ghats, the forests of Goa, the plains of North India, and the mist-covered hills of Mussoorie. Yet this is not merely a geographical expedition. It is also an exploration of the countless ways in which rain has influenced the lives, livelihoods, imagination, and history of the people of the Indian subcontinent. The monsoon emerges not simply as a weather system but as a civilisational force that has determined agricultural cycles, guided maritime trade, nurtured ecosystems, inspired artistic expression, and shaped political destinies.

A key strength of the book is Alter’s ability to weave together diverse strands of knowledge without losing narrative momentum. He moves effortlessly from meteorology to mythology, from ecology to economics, from history to literature. Readers encounter perfumers in Kannauj who preserve the scent of rain in tiny bottles, fishermen who read the skies with remarkable precision, scientists tracking elusive amphibians and glowing fungi, and artists whose works reflect humanity’s enduring fascination with clouds and storms. These encounters lend the book a vibrant human dimension and prevent it from becoming a purely academic study.

The prose is among the finest aspects of the work. He writes with the sensitivity of a naturalist and the observational acuity of a seasoned traveller. His descriptions of rain-laden landscapes are evocative without becoming sentimental. Whether portraying the first monsoon clouds gathering over the Arabian Sea or the dense mist enveloping Himalayan ridges, he captures the sensory richness of the season with remarkable clarity. Readers can almost smell the damp earth, hear the distant thunder, and feel the coolness that follows a long spell of summer heat.

The title itself points to one of the book’s central concerns: the emotional and sensory experience of rain. Alter understands that the monsoon occupies a unique place in the Indian imagination. It is a season associated with longing and fulfilment, romance and renewal, abundance and uncertainty. Across centuries, poets, musicians, painters, and storytellers have celebrated its arrival. The author explores these cultural representations with insight, demonstrating how the monsoon has become a recurring metaphor for transformation, desire, and hope.

At the same time, The Fragrance of Rain does not romanticise its subject. Alter acknowledges the monsoon’s unpredictability and its capacity for destruction. Floods, landslides, crop failures, and storms are integral to the story. As climate change intensifies weather extremes, the monsoon has become increasingly erratic, raising urgent questions about environmental sustainability and human resilience. Without becoming alarmist, the author highlights these concerns and encourages readers to appreciate the delicate balance upon which ecosystems and communities depend.

The book also succeeds as a work of environmental writing because of its deep attention to biodiversity. Alter’s fascination with wildlife and natural habitats is evident throughout. His encounters with rare species and fragile ecosystems reveal a world that thrives because of seasonal rainfall yet remains vulnerable to ecological disruption. These passages add depth and reinforce the idea that the monsoon is not merely a climatic event but a life-giving process that sustains countless forms of existence.

The Fragrance of Rain is much more than a history of weather. It is a meditation on nature, culture, memory, and belonging. Stephen Alter has produced a work that is informative, beautifully written, and deeply engaging. By blending personal observation with historical and ecological insight, he reminds us that the monsoon remains one of India’s most powerful and defining experiences. Like the season it celebrates, the book is refreshing, nourishing, and lingering in its impact—a rewarding read for anyone interested in India, nature, or the intricate relationship between climate and civilisation.

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.

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Ordinary Wars of Ordinary People

Book Review by Rakhi Dalal

Title: The Cold War of Sadanand Borse

Author: Shyam Manohar

Translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

The Cold War of Sadanand Borse, translated from Marathi by Jerry Pinto, was originally published as Sheetyuddha Sadanand in the 1980s. Written by Shyam Manohar, the work is considered writer’s noteworthy contribution to modern Marathi literature. A deceptively slim novel, it packs much in its exploration of ordinary lives of ordinary people. Comic yet unsettling, the novel, set within the world of Maharashtrian middle-class, deals with the ‘cold war’ of everyday existence, their struggles, ambitions and anxieties. 

Most of Shyam Manohar’s writing deals with the theme of ordinary existence. He is an author two collections of short stories, eight plays, nine novels, and a collection of speeches and critical articles. He has received numerous national and state awards for his works, including the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2010.

The novel begins with a scooter colliding with a funeral procession of a child on a sweltering afternoon. The chance incident results in an absurdly comic encounter. It triggers a chain of events which not only bewilders but keeps the reader on tenterhooks with its acute observations on the tensions which ripple through the aspirations of middle-class. Sadanand collides with Govind and Shrirang, who are the friends of the bereaved father and part of the young son’s funeral procession. As they try to extract an apology from Sadanand, the subsequent events turn his world upside down.

Although the book centres around Sadanand Borse, whose recent one lakh lottery win has made him both suspicious and nervous, the author explores the anxieties of middle-class respectability through the reactions of his pregnant wife Urmila and his immediate neighbours in the aftermath of the incident. With Govind and Shrirang constantly at their door, an atmosphere of latent conflict (as suggested by the title) sets in, and Sadanand’s wife, his neighbours and acquaintances all become participants in a discreet struggle for recognition and influence. The subtle shifts in behaviour reflected in small acts of envy, admiration, cooperation, resentment and suspicion, which emerge when social hierarchies are disrupted, are captured effectively in the seemingly simple prose. The visual imagery of the prose takes the reader into a world echoing Sai Paranjype’s comedy movie ‘Katha’ (Story, 1982). The book revolves arounda similar satire on middle-class aspirations.

Neighbours watch each other closely, interpreting every gesture and decision as confirmation of success, failure, arrogance, or insecurity. Their discussions often seem harmless, yet underlying their narratives is the continuous evaluation of social norms, niceties and hierarchies. Through these characters, the author illustrates how middle-class communities function under companionable scrutiny. The characters aren’t reduced to moral categories. There are no villains in the usual sense. Even the most petty and self serving characters are portrayed perceptively.

The spare yet evocative prose also takes the reader into routine spaces like streets, hospitals, and neighbourhood gatherings where broader questions of morality are enacted. Satire also hinges around the ethics of institutions like hospitals and police stations, where greed or power takes precedence over morality.

The Cold War of Sadanand Borse is a work of remarkable intelligence and restraint. Shyam Manohar brilliantly captures the quiet conflicts that shape ordinary lives. The Cold War thus becomes a condition of social existence itself—a state of constant, low-intensity conflict hidden under outward courtesy.

Jerry Pinto’s brilliant translation of this Marathi work by Shyam Manohar succeeds in capturing the quiet comic energy and perhaps even the tone and precision of the original work. This novel is a must read for its sheer energy, fun and its precise portrayal of the middle-class.

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/ .

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Setting Traps for Light

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Setting Traps for Light

Author: Giti Chandra

Publisher: Hachette India

Setting Traps for Light is a debut collection of poems by Giti Chandra which is illuminated and irradiated by her unique and multifaceted artistry. She is a writer, poet, painter and musician. She is also an academic– in all quite a tall order. As is to be expected given her remarkable gifts, her writing is both luminous and beautiful.

In literary interviews hosted by cultural platforms like Platform Magazine, Chandra shared that the title originated from her hobby of using her mobile phone camera to capture how light hitting ordinary everyday objects completely transforms them. The title — Setting Traps for Light — acts as a luminous metaphor for discovering and working towards courage, hope, and resilience in the middle of personal grief, political trauma, and climate anxieties.

Many of these anxieties, of migration and change — climate and otherwise — are refracted obliquely through her poetry. Events that have been relegated to the background of consciousness, surface suddenly, often unexpectedly. Chandra’s verses often act as a prism, refracting the everyday, the mundane to bursts of sudden illumination. For instance, in ‘Ode to the Ordinary’, she celebrates the “unwashed  beauty of the Ordinary day, the unnoticed, unapplauded/ Transcience of the repetitively mundane/The ubiquitously profane/Say it now in romantic rhyme/The ordinary is the Skylark of our time.”

Here is an instance of turning the everyday into the sublime, elevating the quotidian, the seemingly trivial into a polished gem. In a beautiful illustration of the individual talent constructing and honing a poetic tradition, she expresses her gratitude to her poetic predecessors, interlacing their phrases into the fabric, the warp and the weft of her own poetry:

A month of poems ends
With a day dedicated to labour.
A month that began
With a day dedicated to Fools.
Therein lies, perhaps, a metaphor
Requiring another set of tools.

References to Yeats, T.S.Eliot, Shakespeare are strewn across the poem. Similarly, she alludes to Ghalib and Faiz, Ludhianvi and Mira who “solder and weld the self and creation.” She continues:

But of all the names and works of hands
Those of you, all banded here
Are closest to the bone. You stand 
Together and walk the way
From All Fools to Labour Day.

Replete with scriptural echoes, the poem becomes a poetic manifesto of sorts attesting to the hard work, the perspiration that is welded in the smithy of the poet’s soul and is then acknowledged and recognised as genius. By bringing in references to Yeats’s hammer and Eliot’s chisel, poetry is apprehended as something material that brings together both inspiration and perspiration. Fleeting moments are honed to enduring monuments alchemising the transcient and the evanescent into something more lasting and profound, something rich and strange.

The fact that Chandra is an artist par excellence is evident in the strong visual imagery and metaphors that inform her poetry. The fact that she is a trained musician is also expressed  in the mellifluous cadences of her verse, in the rise and fall of words, in the rhythms and segues of free and blank verse. The fact that she is an brilliant scholar /student with a keen and perceptive eye, is attested to by the evocative title of her first poetry collection, which has been a while in the making.

Even though she understands the temptations and potential risk of resorting to Romantic conceit, Chandra soldiers on to write her experiences of climate change and crisis, the unimaginable misery of the long walk home that characterised the movement of migrant labour in India in 2020 when the Covid crisis unfolded. The poet here becomes a witness, a chronicler of critical events as she poignantly narrates the death of a twelve-year-old boy. Elsewhere, she writes of the paradox and the “irony that we /Fight for air.” There is a reference to George Floyd who had a “knee on neck, face down/Grit on cheek, no breath to speak,/No bed to sleep on, etherised/In our castles, safe in locked/Towns.”  The use of the word “etherised” had been immortalised by T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. Chandra has used it to suggest the numbness of contemporary civilisation in a state of crisis.

Chandra’s poetry opens up vast vistas and redefines the poet’s function-of playing witness, of chronicling change, treading oft-trod paths anew. Some poems also offer social commentary like ‘Simple Rhymes for Difficult Times’. In a series of apparently innocuous lines, the poet writes:

“Peace be in your streets/ Let no neighbour inspect/Your larder for its meats./Let no man  suspect/Your daughter of eyeing/Mates of other castes./Peace be in your markets/As people shop between fasts”. The reference leads inescapably to the current trends of food vigilantism. It evocatively explores loosening and binding, movement and migration, loss and desolation. A running theme is that of courage[1] , on which there are thematic and tonal variations.

In the poem ‘Love in the Time of Climate Change’, there are not only a Arnold’s poignant  lines from Dover Beach: “Ah love,let us be true /To one another,” but also echoes and resonances from Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’. Contemporary anxieties and concerns meld with eternal verities and create a delectable smorgasbord of emotions: ‘‘Our love shall be a raft, fuelled /By no heat, in a world bent on burning. /Deserts and dry continents are no grounds/ For deserting. We shall find our feet/To a love of no returning.” The brilliance of these lines lie not just in the skillful use of enjambment and caesura, but the deft summing of the   lyrical tradition.

The central metaphor of “setting traps for light” acts as an active, deliberate pursuit of hope, beauty, and clarity. Instead of waiting for illumination to arrive passively, the poet argues that one must construct “traps”—through memory, art, and close observation—to capture fleeting moments of joy and truth. With her transnational themes and multiple and extended locations, Chandra’s poetry truly seems to inhabit a borderless world. 

The collection ends with a reminder that poetry is a commitment and an act of faith. In the penultimate poem, ‘When You Run Out of Words’: “Poets/ have said that you should speak/Because your lips, your tongue/Are free and the truth lives still.” Further, she insists that “all/Shall not be well/Till you are well.”

The brave new world of Chandra’s poetry involves integrity and truth telling. While musings on death and mutability are profoundly present in her debut collection of poems, the tone is not necessarily despairing. Somber and meditative, lyrical and reflective, the poems make us think, even as they transport us into a delightful realm and an enchanted forest of words.

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.

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Review

Gooday Nagar: Of Cakes and Cities

Book Review by Rakhi Dalal

Book Title: Gooday Nagar

Author: Maithreyi Karnoor

Publisher: Tranquebar

Where is this city – Gooday Nagar? What does the city mean to the people living in it? Are they happy? Do they hope, love, endure? What do they do when their lives are upended — do they shatter or carry on?

Maithreyi Karnoor’s Gooday Nagar is a city that could be located anywhere in the world. It’s a city where ordinary people keep trying to live their ordinary lives, come hail or storm or love or pain or whatever else life throws their way. It’s a city where the ordinary stories hinge on a disquieting peculiarity governed by something unnamable or as one of the characters in the story refer ‘the greater sentience’. Imagined differently for each story, the city thus functions less as fixed geography and more a state of mind.

A bilingual author, Karnoor has to her credit an earlier novel in English, Sylvia, a Kannada one, Hettavara Neralu (Parental Shadow), and a poetry collection, Skinny Dipping in Tiger Country. Her English translations of Kannada novels A Handful of Sesame and Tejo Tungabhadra have won the Kuvempu Bhasha Bharati Prize for translation. A writer with an unusual perspective, she has imagined a fictitious city that takes on varied hues.

The stories in this collection resist neat categorisation. In the first story ‘Return of the Salesman’ we meet common aspiring people of Gooday Nagar fascinated by the appearance of a smart English-speaking salesman. Their curiosities pique, awakening desires for a better life. With his return though, the business resumes as usual. Here, the city is a self-contained world evoking nostalgic reminiscence of R.K. Narayan’s Malgudi Days.

‘Uncity’, composed of a poem and three striking vignettes — each starting with lines from C.P. Cavafy , is bound by a shared attentiveness to the absurdities and dislocations of contemporary life. The characters here are defined by their situations, by the peculiar worlds they inhabit. Existing in places they can’t leave, they navigate through life with serenades on the known and unknown.

‘You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.

The city will always pursue you.

You’ll walk the same streets, grow old in the same neighbourhoods,

Turn gray in these same houses’

                                                  — ‘The City’ by C.P. Cavafy (1863-1933)

These stories are about people who inhabit the city, yet whose lives remain unaffected by the places they dwell in. For no matter where they live, there is no escape from the city — it is a shifting construct — at once everywhere and nowhere.

In ‘Ringa Ringa Roses’, spinning around love and betrayal and ‘A Writing Competition’, where writing sustains the balance perturbed by COVID, the characters move through the fragile process of rebuilding meaning. The ordinary is attuned to the all-knowing but not all-loving ‘the greater sentience’ who can either metamorphose the incoherent to coherent or just let its unhurried hand write the destiny.   

The most memorable stories in this collection hinge on a single, disquieting conceit pursued with both rigour and restraint. In ‘Alone at Last’, a post-apocalyptic landscape where everything has turned into cake becomes the stage for a meditation on excess, decay, and survival. What begins as a darkly comic premise gradually acquires an unsettling weight, as the quest for survival also becomes a quest for companionship.

Karnoor handles the tonal and narrative shifts in the stories with a deliberate lightness, introducing the strange without spectacle. This restraint prevents the stories from tipping into excess; even the most fantastical elements are anchored by clarity of language that makes them feel oddly plausible. As the reader move from one story to the next, the sense of disorientation deepens, until the surreal begins to feel like the only adequate language for the world the book describes.

Rather than offering a unified vision of the city she invokes, Karnoor presents it as a shifting assemblage of experiences, each story illuminating a different facet of its strangeness. The result is a collection that lingers not because it resolves its questions, but because it refuses to, leaving the reader suspended in its unsettling, darkly luminous world.

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/ .

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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The Legacy of Wajid Ali Shah

Title: Wajid Ali Shah: A Cultural and Literary Legacy 

Author: Kaukub Talat Quder Sajjad Ali Meerza

Translated fromUrdu by Talat Fatima

Publisher: Hachette India

The late Dr Kaukub Quder Sajjad Ali Meerza’s study of Wajid Ali Shah is far more than a conventional biography. It is an act of historical recovery, a painstaking attempt to rescue one of nineteenth-century India’s most misunderstood figures from the distortions of colonial historiography. His book has been translated from Urdu by Talat Fatima, the great-great grand daughter of Wajid Ali Shah and Hazrat Begum and brought out as Wajid Ali Shah: A Cultural and Literary Legacy recently.

For generations, Wajid Ali Shah has survived in public memory largely as the indolent aesthete who lost his kingdom to the British while immersing himself in music, dance, and courtly pleasures. Dr Meerza’s deeply researched work dismantles this simplistic caricature and restores before the reader a ruler of extraordinary artistic imagination, intellectual depth, and cultural sophistication.

What makes this volume particularly compelling is the sheer breadth of its archival engagement. Drawing upon rare manuscripts, personal letters, poetic compositions, and forgotten historical documents, Dr Meerza reconstructs not merely the life of a king but the cultural ecology of nineteenth-century Lucknow.

The book vividly captures the refinement of Awadhi court culture at a moment when colonial expansion sought to undermine and delegitimise indigenous centres of power and creativity. Through meticulous scholarship, the author demonstrates that Wajid Ali Shah was not a passive dreamer detached from governance, but a prolific poet, dramatist, composer, patron, and innovator who consciously shaped the artistic identity of his kingdom.

The chapters dealing with Wajid Ali Shah’s literary contributions are among the most illuminating. His poetic works, especially Sabatul Quloob, emerge not as ornamental exercises in royal vanity but as deeply emotional meditations on exile, loss, devotion, and memory. Equally fascinating is the discussion of the ‘Shahi Rahas’, the nawab’s theatrical experiments that blended music, dance, costume, and storytelling into forms that anticipated modern performance traditions.

Dr Meerza carefully situates these innovations within the broader evolution of Urdu literary and theatrical culture, making a persuasive case for Wajid Ali Shah’s centrality in the development of North Indian artistic traditions.

One of the biggest strengths of the book is its refusal to separate culture from politics. The British annexation of Awadh in 1856 is shown not merely as a political event but as an ideological campaign that required the systematic defamation of its ruler. Colonial narratives portrayed Wajid Ali Shah’s love for the arts as evidence of decadence and incompetence, thereby legitimising imperial intervention. Dr Meerza exposes the deeply political nature of these accusations and presents a more nuanced portrait of a ruler who attempted administrative reforms, maintained military discipline, and remained deeply connected to the cultural aspirations of his people.

The English translations by Dr Fatima deserves special appreciation. The prose retains scholarly precision while remaining accessible and elegant, allowing contemporary readers to engage with an important body of Urdu scholarship that may otherwise have remained confined to academic circles. Her translation also carries emotional resonance, extending a family legacy of preserving the memory of a much-maligned ancestor through intellectual rigour rather than sentimentality.

At nearly six hundred pages, the work is expansive and occasionally dense, yet its richness never feels excessive. Every chapter contributes to the larger project of historical correction. More importantly, the book invites readers to reconsider how colonial narratives continue to shape modern perceptions of Indian rulers and cultural figures.

Eventually, this is not simply a book about a dethroned nawab. It is a meditation on memory, power, art, and historical injustice. Dr Meerza succeeds brilliantly in restoring Wajid Ali Shah to his rightful place not merely as the tragic last ruler of Awadh, but as one of the great cultural visionaries of nineteenth-century India.

For anyone interested in Urdu literature, the history of Awadh, colonial politics, or the cultural life of India, this volume stands as an indispensable and deeply rewarding work of scholarship.

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

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

Click here to access the Borderless anthology, Monalisa No Longer Smiles

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Review

My Shackled Life by Sushila Takbhaure: A Story of Reslience

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: My Shackled Life

Author: Sushila Takbhaure

Translators: Deeba Zafir and Preeti Dewan

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Ever since Dalit writing has caught the fancy of academics, researchers and social scientists in a big way, we are coming across several new titles almost every other day and are getting to read them in translation, often published by established and reputed publishing houses. The present volume under review falls exactly into this category.  First published in Hindi in 2011 as Shikanje ka Dard, this is an autobiography of a Dalit woman called Sushila Takbhaure who belongs to a poor Dalit Valmiki family in Seoni in Madhya Pradesh. Divided into three sections, it tells us the story of how the author rose through determination and her mother’s support to pursue higher education, teach in school and college, build a wide-ranging literary career and become part of the Babasaheb Ambedkar movement to bring social awareness and changes in the lives of the Dalits and the downtrodden in society.

Writing from childhood, she went on to publish poems, stories, novels, plays, criticism and her books are now even taught in university courses. In the pan-Indian surge of feminist consciousness and assertion of Dalit women in the 1990, Sushila Takbhaure is a name to reckon with.

Coming to this autobiography we find how the narrative chronicles the extremely protracted and tortuous process by which a timid and vulnerable Dalit girl fashions herself into an assertive and empowered woman by exercising her agency and single-minded pursuit of education. But the path was definitely not easy. The first section of the narrative entitled ‘Early Years’ gives us details of a society that is dominated by the savarnas or upper caste Hindus, and lays bare the truthful accounts of the disgraceful practices of this casteist order. Like many other Dalit families of the time, Sushila’s story is no different. Discrimination based on caste was widespread, and untouchability was deeply entrenched everywhere. The thatched mud huts of the untouchable Bhangi-Harijans stood outside the village, far from the landowner’s houses.

Raised like the child of any poor untouchable family with a life full of deprivation, Sushila was nurtured by her Ma (mother) and Nani (grandmother) and grew up eating, crying and playing. In spite of working as a scavenger and midwife, Nani protected her daughter from hardship and Ma too sheltered and nurtured her children by giving them an education. With society placing many restrictions on girls, however hard they worked, they enjoyed neither equal rights nor independence. Women lacked awareness and confidence, and the lack of education, knowledge, and foresight crushed the potential of many who had the ability to rise as all unethical behaviour was seen as natural and commonplace.

Sushila fought all odds and continued her studies till she managed to appear for her BA final exams. In a patriarchal society, women are always considered inferior to men though there were some women who through their talent, initiative, intelligence and courage managed to surpass men in every field. But society had conditioned them in such a manner that they could not come out of the shackles imposed by rigid casteist norms. The first section of the narrative ends with Sushila’s Ma continuing to look for a good match for her and she too often dreamt of a loving, caring husband meant just for her.

The second section of the autobiography ‘Marriage and After’ is the most distressing part of the entire narrative. Married to a man much older than her, Sushila finds that things are worse in all respects in her in-law’s place. As it is the atmosphere in the city of Nagpur was different from her village life, but her husband, who is always reverentially mentioned as ‘Takbhaureji’, acts as the typical patriarchal figure, often physically abusing her. The practice didn’t stop even after several children were born to her. He made his wife work at home and like all male chauvinists took away all the salary she earned as a teacher. One often wonders why Sushila went on enduring all the humiliation and never retaliated.  

Maybe if she had received love, care, and companionship instead of constant torment, she might have developed the strength to assert herself in public life, but that never happened. The atmosphere at home only deepened her sense of powerlessness and since she lived in constant fear, wrongs were committed against her without hesitation. It is amazing to learn that despite conflict and physical abuse becoming a regular part of her life and filling her with humiliation and pain, she managed to complete her PhD and start teaching in a college. Her married life, as she states, went with all its ups and downs.

The final section ‘Writer Activist’ narrates her rise to become the voice of resistance for her people. Her fury started finding its voice in poetry. She wanted to write about being a Dalit and that became the central theme of her writing. Enduring social humiliation and fighting against the deprivations and oppression born of caste prejudice, she moved forward, slowly but steadily.

Once the various Dalit organizations in Maharashtra involved in the movement to address the problems faced by Dalit women in their homes and society came to know her, they began inviting her to travel with them to distance places to participate in their programmes. Even then her husband went on taking sadistic pleasure in hurting her. His real motive was clear: to prevent her from pursuing writing and publishing, and to keep her confined to the simple life of a working woman who managed both her job and household. But after living in Nagpur, Maharashtra gradually became an empowering experience for her. As a Dalit activist fighting for the ideals of Babasaheb Ambedkar across the country, she began travelling alone to far-off places within India and places abroad like Sri Lanka, Britain, and Dubai.

She could do all this because she had finally begun to feel confident of herself. At times, she received support from people within her community, while at other times, she faced opposition. Her goal was to carry Ambedkar’s ideology and knowledge of Dalit literature to others, and she succeeded in doing so. Although her travels abroad brought her immense joy, they unfortunately did not change her social condition. She remained what she had always been – an untouchable outcast.

This searing autobiography of Sushila Takbhaure, a Dalit woman whose life story reveals not only the brutal machinery of caste but also the intimate cruelty of patriarchy, is a must read for everyone irrespective of class and gender. Though the narrative drags a bit towards the end, one sees its importance too. Having embraced Phule-Ambedkarite ideology and taken part in the movement for social change, Sushila Takbhaure’s writing has gained a clear direction and is vital not only for herself but for her community too. As she states towards the end of her narrative, writing had given her the strength, and it was both a source of joy and a way to give back to society what it had meted out to her. After reading the autobiography, one must sincerely offer kudos to a deprived woman who succeeded in life in spite of all unsurmountable odds.

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Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a retired Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

Click here to access Wild Winds: The Borderless Anthology of Poems

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Interview Review

How Marzia Pasini Explores the ‘journey  back to the heart’

An introduction to Leonie’s Leap (published by Atmosphere Press) by Marzia Pasini and a conversation with the author

Maria Pasini

 Leonie’s Leap by Marzia Pasini is a novella that explores the inner recesses of a teenager’s mind till he finds clarity, perhaps a kind of bildungsroman, if realisations can happen in thirteen days! Leonie technically leaps to self-realisation as he tries to run away from an exploitative orphanage somewhere in Hungary.

It’s an unusual story, with a commentary by an inner voice which addresses the fifteen-year-old Leonie as “dearheart” and leads the teenager towards self-realisation. With a background in Philosophy and a Master’s in Comparative Politics from the London School of Economics, Pasini began her career in international development and has moved on to become writer and life coach. This is her second book which she has dedicated to her two children, William and Maria.

The narrative travels through Leonie’s subconsciousness to his coming to realisation about his life’s choices. Colours are woven into the tapestry of his subconscious experiences with a Buddhist monk called Hridaya, Leonie’s own mysterious Indian mother who might have an interesting backdrop, colourful circus characters — Isabelle who plays violin to  her elephant named Grace, Astrid, the chief of the circus’s daughter who wants to be a ballerina, clowns, a lady that wrestles with a tiger, a Russian oligarch and more. Young Leonie meanders through an adventure of his own making, a bit like Pinocchio’s experiences in the circus except the teenager soul searches where the puppet was just mischievous.

The plot is simple you realise at the end of the book, but as you meander onwards, you pause to wonder if it’s child labour, underage marriage or unsafe working conditions you’re grappling with. The conclusion is clear cut. You realise you have been led along a maze. All the action was in Leonie’s subconscious.

For all those, who like to discuss spiritual development and growth, this book could well be like Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince (1943), though in that the author reached out to not just within an individual but to pertinent social issues. Leonie’s Leap is more about personal growth — about the teen taking a leap towards adulthood — perhaps because Pasini has opted for a career as a Life Coach who has travelled many countries to make a home in India. Let’s ask her to tell us more:

What led you to write this book?

For many years, I felt called to explore the journey back to the heart—not as an idea, but as something lived. The kind of return that happens when roles fall away and you are left with your body, your breath, and a reality you can no longer sidestep.

The book took shape after a life-altering health crisis that brought me close to death. Writing was no longer optional. It became a responsibility to the life still moving through me and to the vow I made: if I am still here, I will not delay what is mine to live.

You started out as a master’s from London School of Economics in comparative politics, worked for the royal family of Jordan, and then became a life coach. Tell us a bit about why you made these choices and what stirred your muse towards becoming a writer.

I’ve always wanted to be of service. Studying comparative politics at LSE came from a desire to understand how power moves and decisions shape lives. Working for the Jordanian royal family and the UN was a natural extension of that impulse.

In my late twenties, my health redirected that trajectory. It pulled me into myself with no escape. Though I had always been drawn inward, I could no longer outrun what I was being asked to face. 

Over time, it became clear that all real possibility begins within. The shifts I later supported in others were first ones I had to move through myself. Writing became the place where I let the truth hold me. 

What made you leave Italy? Why did you opt to live in India? What has your journey through six countries done for you and your writing?

I’ve always been adventurous. I left Italy at fifteen to attend boarding school in the UK, driven by a curiosity to discover something larger than the life I knew. Looking back, I see I was chasing aliveness, perhaps even a kind of magic I believed lived somewhere else. 

Life later carried me across six more countries. My husband’s work with the United Nations placed us in the Middle East, South America, and eventually India. Each relocation reshaped me, dismantling the illusion that identity is fixed.

India, in particular, asked for radical honesty. There was little room to hide. In that rawness, I began to see where I wasn’t fully inhabiting myself.

That changed my writing. The listening deepened. Stories became less about what happens and more about what is revealed beneath the surface. Today, I carry many worlds inside me. Home is no longer a place.

Has your own life impacted the diverse colours of humanity in this book? Please Elaborate.

I write about the human journey—the longing to belong, the fear of stepping into the unknown, the courage it takes to choose oneself. These are not experiences confined to one story.

My life shaped the book because I have known those edges, too. Uncertainty. Illness. Loss. Love. Each deepened my understanding of what it means to be human, and that depth gives my characters their colour.

The story could have taken place anywhere in the world. Why did you choose Hungary as the locale for your story over all other places?

Hungary sits at a crossroads between East and West, carrying beauty alongside a sober melancholy. When I walked around Budapest, I sensed an emotional gravity that resonated with Leonie’s sense of in-betweenness. 

There is also a long tradition of Hungarian acrobatics. The circus in the novel isn’t just spectacle; it represents the inner balancing required to hold contradiction, leap without certainty, and trust oneself first.

Is this book impacted by your choice of career — being a life coach? Please explain.

My work as a life coach has given me a deep respect for the inner process. Leonie’s Leap invites readers into wonder, inquiry, and direct seeing. It isn’t a self-help book in the traditional sense, but it engages questions that draw the reader back to their own heart. 

The “dearheart” letters woven into the narrative are not instructions. They are a voice that sits beside you and says, stay. It is tender here. You are not alone.

Did you imagine all the characters in Leonie’s journey towards self-hood or were they based on some experiences? Please elaborate.

I don’t believe we ever write from a neutral place. Even when characters are fictional, we create through our perception—our wounds, our longings, our questions. The characters in Leonie’s Leap are imagined, yet carry the landscapes I have traversed. They hold the mess of being human and the possibility of grace.

Leonie’s mother would have had a back story—a lonely Indian woman. Is she an illegal immigrant? Where’s his father then? What would be her story? Is Leonie an immigrant?

I left her backstory intentionally open because some spaces don’t need to be filled. Leonie’s mother is a woman who lived a complicated life, marked by abandonment, illness, and loss. What matters most is the imprint she leaves on Leonie—a gentleness and fierceness that fuel his longing for freedom.

Your book has a discussion on fear in chapter one. Your first book, Satya and the Sun, also dealt with fear. Does overcoming fear become a theme in both your books? Is the first one also a psychological adventure? Why is overcoming fear so important to you?

Fear has been central to my life. I have been in more surgeries and hospital beds than I can count. In those moments, fear became breath. Today, I no longer see it as an obstacle to overcome, but as a catalyst for deeper embodiment.

Satya and the Sun is also a psychological adventure, though written for children. It follows a girl afraid of the dark who sets out to find a place where the sun never sets. Inspired by my own fear of going blind, it explores what happens when we turn toward what terrifies us and discover that light exists even there. 

Are you on the way to writing more books? What are your plans going forward? 

I recently completed a poetry collection centred on devotion and heartbreak—an exploration of love when it strips you to your essence. I have also begun a new novel set in the Amazon—a story of initiation, surrender, and what survives when identity falls apart. 

 (This review and online interview by email is by Mitali Chakravarty)

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Click here to read an excerpt from Leonie’s Leap

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Review

The First Novel about the Gig Workers of Kolkata

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: No. 1 Akashganga Lane: The First Novel about the Gig Workers of Kolkata

Author: Ashoke Mukhopadhyay

Translation from Bengali by Zenith Roy

Publisher: Niyogi Books

No. 1 Akashganga Lane: The First Novel about the Gig Workers of Kolkata by Ashoke Mukhopadhyay, translated with sensitivity and nuance by Zenith Roy, is a strikingly contemporary novel that brings into sharp focus the precarious lives of urban gig workers. Set against the pulsating yet indifferent backdrop of Kolkata, the novel explores a world that is at once hyper-connected and profoundly isolating.

At the heart of the narrative is Sriman, a food delivery worker whose life is defined by anonymity and transience. He delivers meals to strangers, navigating the city’s labyrinthine streets, yet remains invisible within the very system he sustains. Mukhopadhyay captures this paradox with quiet precision: Sriman’s labour is essential, but his existence is expendable. The gig economy, as portrayed in the novel, demands efficiency, obedience, and silence—qualities that gradually erode individuality and agency.

Equally compelling is the character of Mrittika Sen, a bike taxi driver whose experiences foreground the gendered dimensions of gig work. Through her, the novel examines the additional vulnerabilities faced by women in an already unstable ecosystem. The constant threat of being “logged out”—a chillingly impersonal metaphor for economic erasure—hangs over her life. Mukhopadhyay does not sensationalise her struggles; instead, he presents them with restraint, allowing their quiet intensity to resonate.

What elevates No. 1 Akashganga Lane beyond a social-realist narrative is its imaginative and philosophical layer. The titular word, Akashganga, is a century-old house and serves as a refuge, both literal and symbolic. Within its walls resides Bishan Basu, a figure who introduces Sriman, Mrittika, and others to the stars. This shift from the immediacy of urban struggle to the vastness of the cosmos is one of the novel’s most poignant devices. It offers a counterpoint to the claustrophobia of gig work, suggesting that even in the most constrained lives, there exists a yearning for transcendence.

The recurring motif of the stars and the speculative question—whether these workers might one day need another planet to call home—imbues the narrative with a subtle dystopian edge. It reflects not only ecological anxieties but also a deeper sense of displacement. The idea that gig workers might carry their labour into another world is both darkly humorous and profoundly unsettling, underscoring the inescapability of systemic exploitation.

Mukhopadhyay’s Bengali prose, as rendered in English by Roy, is measured and evocative. The translation deserves particular commendation for retaining the cultural texture of the original while ensuring readability for a wider audience. Kolkata itself emerges as a character—its rhythms, inequalities, and fleeting solidarities shaping the lives of those who inhabit it. The author’s background in documenting the city’s social history is evident in the authenticity of detail and atmosphere.

The novel also succeeds in capturing the fragile solidarities that emerge among gig workers. Friendships, though often transient, provide moments of warmth and resistance. The shared experiences of precarity create a sense of community, however fleeting. Akashganga becomes a space where these fragmented lives intersect, offering not solutions but solace.

No. 1 Akashganga Lane is a timely and thought-provoking novel that captures the human cost of the gig economy with empathy and insight. Through its blend of social realism and philosophical reflection, it offers a nuanced portrait of contemporary urban life.

Ashoke Mukhopadhyay has crafted a narrative that is both rooted in the specifics of Kolkata and resonant with global relevance, while Zenith Roy ensures that its voice travels beyond linguistic boundaries. The result is a work that lingers, prompting readers to look more closely at the invisible lives that sustain modern cities.

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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

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Review

The Tree Within: Octavio Paz in India

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The Tree Within: The Mexican Nobel Laureate Octavio Paz’s Years in India

Author: Indranil Chakravarty

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

‘For me, India was an accident.’ – Octavio Paz

The Mexican Nobel laureate poet and essayist Octavio Paz (1914-1998) was a writer of lightening insights and electric intelligence. His impassioned poetry is meditative, with a precision of language that is imbued with a strangely sensuous quality. In fact, language and poetry per se were some of his key thematic concerns. The announcement on the cover of this book states that The Tree Within is the enchanting story of Octavio Paz’s passionate love-affair with India where he served as Mexico’s ambassador in the 1960s but reading through this very detailed 518 pages well-researched biography of the Nobel Laureate poet one realises that it is a lot more.

Immersing himself in India’s rich cultural life and contemplative traditions, Paz travelled widely, forged deep friendships with some of India’s finest minds, and produced several of his most inspired poetry and essays. It was here that he met the love of his life and until the day he died, he continued to refer to India as the place where he experienced what he called his ‘second birth’. It is difficult to find similar cases in our history when a major creative figure from abroad drew inspiration from India’s culture for one’s own works over such an extended period. His writings became a bridge between continents, blending Eastern and Western sensibilities in ways that enriched the literary landscapes of both. In India, where the erotic and the sacred blend in ecstatic union – unlike in the West, where the two are scrupulously kept apart – he saw the possibility of a new synthesis through the dissolution of dualities. Interestingly, Mexico belongs to the western hemisphere but is generally considered non-West, like India. Blending biography, cultural history, and literary criticism, The Tree Within is a luminous testament to the enduring alchemy between India and the world through one of the greatest writers of the 20th century.

The book is divided into ten stand-alone chapters, and one can move to the topic of one’s choice. The first two chapters entitled ‘Family and Nation’ (1914-36) and ‘Paz Before India’ (1936-1951) serve as the background of Paz’s lineage, his growing up, and his passionate engagement with India can be understood in terms of the seeds planted early in his life through his family as well as the national cultural ambience where the idea of India was inscribed. All of them played a role in reinforcing his attraction towards the country. Unlike T.S.Eliot, Paz became politically active from an early age, with an initial inclination towards anarchism and Marxism and a subsequent rejection of Communism. He witnessed the Spanish Civil War firsthand, and he also had a close relationship with the surrealists in France.

It is only in the third chapter, ‘The First Sojourn’ (1951-52), that India is physically present when in 1951 Paz, then 37-years old, was assigned the task of opening a new embassy in New Delhi. It recounts his long sea-journey to India and his experiences and poetic output during that brief period of six months. To some extent, he externalised his inner unhappiness on India during his first trip. India of that time had little to offer him by way of intellectual excitement or fulfilling companionship. Things were in disarray when under Nehru as the new nation-state had just been born a few years ago. In New Delhi, Paz stayed at the Imperial Hotel, which became his residence during his entire stay. He also carried a lot of baggage in terms of Western cultural prejudices towards India. India not only smothered his senses; the grinding poverty and rigid mores of life left him disgusted.

In Chapter Four, ‘Paz and Satish Gujral: In Light of Mexico’ describes the personal friendship between Paz and Satish Gujral, one of India’s leading painters and how Paz shaped his development as an artist by inserting Gujral among the maestros of the Mexican mural movement. In fact, the influence of the Mexican mural movement on modern Indian art through Gujral would not have been possible without Octavio Paz’s decision to send him to Mexico. The meeting with Nehru and Indira Gandhi through Satish’s brother I.K. Gujral also offers interesting information. The following chapter, ‘Coming Home, Going Away’ (1953 -62) traces Paz’s life and creative evolution from the time he left India to the time he was sent to India as Mexico’s ambassador in 1962. This ten-year period between his first sojourn in India in 1952 and his return as the Mexican ambassador in 1962 involved many defining moments in his personal and professional life which shaped his creative evolution as a writer. The extent to which he had already immersed himself in Indian philosophy is evident from the ways he assimilated his experiences and insights of his first stay in the writings of the next decade even when their themes had little to do with India.

‘Making Poetry, Making Love’ (1962 -68) is an account of Paz’s travels through the Indian subcontinent (he was given additional charge of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal and Ceylon), his relationship with Bona Tibertelli with whom he spent an idyllic vacation across the Indian subcontinent, his unhappy marriage with Elena Garro, his meeting and eventual marriage with his second wife, Marie-Jose Tramini, and the poetry that grew out of that amorous experience – all find ample space in this chapter. The way in which their love affair unfolded is wrapped in secrecy. It is also said that he developed some unsavoury practices for a man of his position. Nevertheless, it was the most bountiful period of an unimaginably productive life.

Chapter Seven named, ‘The Poet as Diplomat (962-68), recounts his role as a diplomat and his pioneering bridge-building efforts. His life stands as a shining example of how the advantages of diplomatic life can be used for maximizing literary output. The title of the next chapter ‘Paz’s Indian Friends: Surrounded by Infinity’ is self-explanatory. It recounts Paz’s close personal friendships with major Indian painters, musicians, writers and thinkers. We are given details of the close relationship with Indira Gandhi, and Paz throws interesting light on Indira by contrasting her with Nehru: “Indira was concrete and sober. She never forgot the old maxim that politics was the art of the possible…”  

Among the literary figures, mention is made of Santha Rama Rau, Nirad C. Chaudhuri, Mulk Raj Anand, Raja Rao, Satchidananda H. Vatsyayan, and many others. The story of Paz’s dramatic resignation in October 1968 over his own government’s massacre of students at the Plaza de Tlateloco is explained by the author through studying archival documents. The next chapter ‘Under Western Eyes: Visiting Writers and Artists’ tells the story of famous international writers, musicians and painters who met Paz  in India and forged lifelong bonds and collaborations based on their common love for India.

The final chapter ‘Paz After India’ (1968 -98), traces the continued presence of India-related themes in Paz’s body of work, particularly his prose, ever since his departure from the country. Leaving India was not easy for Paz and Marie-Jose. Over the next three years, he would drift around the world, accepting fellowships, residencies and lecture assignments. Though Indian themes gradually faded out of his poetry, in prose it continued to engage him till his last days, thirty years after leaving India.  Even in old age, Paz continued to maintain epistolary contact with his Indian friends and welcomed distinguished Indian visitors to Mexico with his characteristic Latin American warmth. ‘Cantata’ tells the knotty story of Paz’s legacy in Mexico and how India has periodically remembered him, one as late as February 2023, at a large international conference held in IIC[1], New Delhi, on the cultural links between India and Latin America. There was unanimity in the acknowledgement that the Mexican poet had created a permanent, direct bridge between India and Latin America that no state-led enterprise could have done.

Before concluding, a few words need to be said about the author of this book. An academic and a filmmaker by profession, Indranil Chakravarty’s interest in Hispanic literature and culture comes out clearly through the translations he made of Paz’s poems. His enormous labour to bring out this volume comes out in the manner he reconstructs the inner journey of the poet by delving into multilingual archives, declassified diplomatic files, personal letters, and intimate interviews. The labour that has gone into selecting the innumerable photographs that don almost every page of the book, many borrowed from the website zonaoctaviopaz.com (an ongoing repository of photographic and news material on Paz put together by a group of Mexican scholars) clearly exemplifies the author’s emphasis on visual imagery too. In Acknowledgements, he clearly mentions that he has merely tried to fill up the missing information on the poet’s India-years. He entirely agrees with Ramchandra Guha’s contention that an autobiography or memoir must be understood as a pre-emptive strike against a future biographer. The poet’s memoir of India elides most of the aspects that are interesting to us today.

[1] India International Centre

Somdatta Mandal, critic and translator, is a former Professor of English at Visva-Bharati, Santiniketan, India.

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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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