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The Essential Ghalib

Book Review by Mohammad Asim Siddiqui

Title: The Essential Ghalib

Author and Translator from Urdu: Anisur Rahman

Publisher: HarperCollins

Mirza Asadullah Khan Ghalib (1797-1869), often considered a difficult poet by critics, offers both nuggets of philosophical wisdom and sparkling wit in his poetry. He wrote in both Persian and Urdu, but it is his Urdu poetry which has bestowed iconic status on the poet. Presenting a blend of classicism and modernism, a deceptive lucidity and a visible obscurity, playful naughtiness and transcendental raptures and above all an endearing humanism, Ghalib has a range which remains unsurpassed in Urdu poetry. His ghazals always open new possibilities of meaning and interpretation. An important poet in the court of Bahadur Shah Zafar and a mentor of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Ghalib has inspired and influenced almost all later Urdu poets.

 Anisur Rahman’s The Essential Ghalib is a welcome addition to many already existing translations and selections of Ghalib’s poetry. But such is the appeal of Ghalib’s verse that he continues to be read, loved and celebrated and there remains a scope for new books on his poetry, especially in English for a wider readership. In this regard Surinder Deol’s arduous task of translating Gopichand Narang’s book as Ghalib: Innovative Meanings and the Ingenious Mind, a study using insights of Indian aesthetics, and Maaz Bin Bilal’s excellent English translation of Ghalib’s famous masnavi Chiragh-e-Dair as Temple Lamp: Verses on Banaras, the best possible paean to the holy city,are admirable efforts. Other better- known academics like Khurshidul Islam and Ralph Russell, translators and editors, Frances W. Pritchett, to whom Rahman dedicates his book, Mehr Afshan Farooqi, who endorses Rahman’s book, have devoted a lifetime to present Ghalib before Anglophone readers.

Anisur Rahman knows that translating all of Ghalib’s ghazals can be daunting, a task which was attempted recently by Najib Jung.  However, as Rahman has not only made a selection of 200 shers[1] of Ghalib, but has also written an insightful commentary on each of them. Admitting that making a selection is always a subjective choice, Rahman has tried to represent Ghalib “in all his thematic and stylistic varieties” by developing his individual methodology, “a linguistic register and a pattern of rhyme and rhythm… that could represent Ghalib”. He also needed his “own diction with a certain echo, deciding on my number of syllables with certain weight and volume, determining the line breaks and their length to ensure their readability in translation, and finally approximating Ghalib’s tone and voice which differed from verse to verse”. Another criterion that he has followed is to select verses which were “translatable ones”, implying that a lot of Ghalib presents an insurmountable challenges for translators.

 A short Introduction presenting important facts of Ghalib’s life and times, which of course have been documented in a number of books, provides a context to appreciate fully the selection and elucidation of verses that follow. A brief timeline of Ghalib’s life and works presents information in a capsule form helping the reader further.

  A distinctive aspect of The Essential Ghalib is its neat and precise organization of verses and their interpretation. A two-line verse extract from a ghazal of Ghalib, which obviously can have an independent existence because of the very nature of the ghazal form, appears in Urdu and Devanagari script on the left side of the page. The page also carries a glossary of the difficult Urdu words and the English translation of the verse. On the right side of the book, the commentary of the verse explains its most obvious meaning as well as the philosophical and figurative layers hidden in the two lines. In other words, like a couplet of a ghazal, each page of the book also stands independently in the book. With his long experience as a university teacher of English poetry, Rahman has seen to it that his commentary of the couplet also does not go beyond a single page and yet it remains complete. A sequential reading of the book is not required, and the reader can open the book on any page, or savour it back and forth.

 Rahman’s selection and translation includes the variety of emotions, tones and themes that Ghalib’s poetry offers. Ghalib’s wit can be seen in the following verse:

Maine chaaha thaa ke andoh-e vafaa se chhuuTuu.
nvo sitamgarmire marne pe bhi raazii na huaa

I had wished to get rid of love’s grief and pain
But that tyrant didn’t even let me die in bane

Ghalib had the rare talent to turn an often-thought idea into a fine poem:

Bas-ke dushvaar hai har kaam kaa aasaa.n honaa
aadmi ko bhi mayassar nahii.n insaa.n honaa

It’s hard to make it easy; past man’s acumen
Just as it is for a man to be a human

Rahman’s short commentary on each couplet is undoubtedly the most important feature of the book. He brings out many layers of meaning of the couplet in a clear and precise prose. Rahman knows that one way of reading poems is to read them in relation to other poems treating the same idea. In his commentary, Rahman often cites a verse from another poet not only to stress Ghalib’s influence on other poets but also to suggest the intertextual nature of poetic imagination. In the following verse Ghalib talks about the oppressive nature of the beloved:

ki mire qatl ke b’aad us ne jafaa se tauba
haai us zuud-pashemaa.n kaa pashemaa.n honaa

She vowed not to be oppressive,
after ravaging me
Ah! Her repentance too soon!
Ah! Her idiosyncrasy!

While explaining this verse, Rahman quotes Shahryar’s verse:

Ham ne to koii baat nikaalii nahinn.n Gham kii/vo zuud pashemaan pashemaan sa kyu.n hai.

(I didn’t utter anything sad/ Why does she look repentant {my translation])

At other places in the book, Rahman quotes the relevant verses of Sheikh Ibrahin Zauq, Siraj Aurangabadi, Firaq Gorakhpuri, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Munir Niyazi and Parveen Shakir to show the resonance of Ghalib’s poetry.

Such is the beauty of Urdu poetry, of Ghalib’s in particular, that it never loses its relevance and can be cited to refer to many contemporary issues and controversies while Ghalib’s irreverence and “note of impudence” in referring to angels is beautifully captured by the following verse:

pakre jaate hai.n farishto.n ke likhe per naahaq
aadmi koii hamaaraa dam-e tahrir bhi thaa

I am unjustly caught for what the angels
Recorded of me
Was there someone for me to see
What they reported of me

Very proud of his poetry, Ghalib was never known for his modesty. Paradoxically, he can sound both vain and self-deprecating:

Ye masaail e tasavvuf ye tiara bayaan ghali
tujhe ham valii samajhte jo na baada khvaar hotaa

There mystical matters, these sparkles
 You bring me, Ghalib
If not a boozer, I would take you
For a saint, Saahib

Simple but not simplistic, scholarly but interesting, The Essential Ghalib is a good introduction to Ghalib’s poetry especially for a beginner.

[1] verses

Mohammad Asim Siddiqui, a professor of English at Aligarh Muslim University, is the author of Muslim Identity in Hindi Cinema: Poetics and Politics of Genre and Representation (Routledge 2025).   

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Review

Signing in the Air by Malashri Lal

Book Review by Rituparna Khan

Tite: Signing in the Air

Author: Malashri Lal

Publisher: Hawakal Publishers

Signing in the Air, Malashri Lal’s second poetry collection, announces itself as a meditative, non-linear poetic journey from the very outset. A poet, academic and critic, Lal explains in her preface, there is “no linearity in such a theme,” and the poems move instead through cycles of time, memory, myth, and lived experience. The seventy-six poems converse with each other and portray her meticulous craftsmanship.

The collection draws deeply from the Indian concept ofritu — the six seasons — while simultaneously acknowledging the disruptions of climate change and modern dislocation. Nature in Lal’s poetry is neither sentimental nor static; it is capable of both “ravage and rejuvenation,” a duality that becomes central to the collection’s philosophical stance.

The poet’s voice resists fixity. The lyrical “I” is deliberately “timeless, generic author, reader, witness,” allowing the poems to transcend individual autobiography and become collective meditations on human and feminine destinies. This makes the book not merely confessional but contemplative, situating personal memory within wider cultural and ecological continuums.

The five sections of the book do not function as isolated compartments but intricately connected that speak to one another.

‘Whispers of the Earth’ foregrounds the elemental: trees, rain, seasons, and landscapes, yet avoids pastoral nostalgia. Lal speaks to nature rather than about it, creating an intimacy that acknowledges environmental fragility without moralising.

‘Installations’ shift attention to material culture and memory. Objects, such as, old books, domestic utensils, inherited artefacts become repositories of time. Lal’s reflection on ancestral possessions, such as the hamam or the dol [1] for washing clothes, raises radical questions: have women’s destinies changed as technology has advanced, or have only the tools evolved while labour and inequality persist?

‘Echo of Myths’ is one of the most resonant sections, reworking mythological figures like Lakshmi, Sita, and Radha not as static icons but as evolving subjects. Lal’s engagement with myth is neither reverential nor iconoclastic; it is dialogic. Myth becomes a living language through which contemporary women’s struggles, endurance, and resilience are articulated.

‘Meditative Missives’ carries a distinctly philosophical tone. Time dissolves into moments of stillness, and poetry itself becomes an act of contemplation. Lal explicitly frames the volume as possessing “a meditative streak weaving through it,” where mind and body interact to create “kaleidoscopic images” that search for form and vocabulary.

‘Women Who Wander’ brings the collection into the socio-political present. Drawing upon the idea of the flâneuse, Lal reimagines wandering as a gendered act—women moving through cities, histories, and emotional terrains. These poems reclaim mobility as agency and witness.

Lal’s language is marked by clarity rather than excess. Her metaphors are precise, often luminous, and grounded in lived experience. The imagery functions kaleidoscopically: fragments turning to reveal new patterns rather than fixed meanings. Light, shadow, seasons, and movement recur as motifs, reinforcing the book’s concern with impermanence and continuity.

A powerful example of Lal’s ethical and spiritual engagement appears in the opening poem, ‘Invocation: Devi Stuti – The Divine Feminine’. Here, the feminine divine is portrayed as both creator and destroyer, compassionate yet fearsome:

She, the feminine power creates as well as destroys…
Evil seems to flourish and goodness struggles
but She knows whom to vanquish
in the final reckoning.”

The poem moves beyond ritual praise to a contemporary plea, invoking divine protection against “violence, brutality, torture of the everyday woman”. This invocation sets the moral and emotional tone of the entire collection, anchoring the personal within the cosmic.

A recurring concern in Signing in the Air is hybridity of place, language, identity, and time. Lal reflects on her own transitions between Jaipur, Bengal, and Delhi, embracing what critics have described as her ability to be “at home in her multiple worlds, and an outsider looking in”. This tension enriches the poems, allowing them to speak across geographies and generations.

Memory functions not as nostalgia but as ethical inheritance. The poet’s recollection of her grandmother—an early graduate of the University of Calcutta—foregrounds women’s intellectual legacies often erased from public history.

The book cover is understated yet evocative. The image of a silhouetted tree against a luminous sky visually echoes the book’s thematic preoccupations: imprint and erasure, presence and absence, rootedness and transcendence. The title Signing in the Air is aptly suggestive, writing that leaves no permanent mark yet insists on meaning.

In terms of physical quality, the book is finely produced. The paper and layout are reader-friendly, lending dignity to the text without distraction. The careful structuring of sections and the inclusion of preface, acknowledgements, and critical blurbs enhance the book’s scholarly and aesthetic value.

Signing in the Air is a mature, reflective, and deeply humane collection. Malashri Lal writes with quiet authority, weaving together ecology, myth, memory, spirituality, and women’s lived realities. The poems resist closure, inviting readers into an ongoing conversation, one that unfolds across seasons, histories, and inner landscapes.

Ultimately, this is a book that does not shout but resonates. It affirms poetry as an act of witness, meditation, and ethical imagination: truly, as Lal suggests, a way of “scribbling in the empty air where intimations of spirituality and social truth coexist without definable boundaries.”

[1] Objects used for laundry

Rituparna Khan is a poet, an author and a faculty in the Department of Geography, Chandernagore College, Hugli, West Bengal, India. rrohnism@gmail.com

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Kailash Satyarthi on Compassion

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Karuna: The Power of Compassion

Author: Kailash Satyarthi

Publisher: Harper Collins India

Never before has the world been so wealthy, so networked and so saturated with information. And yet, as Kailash Satyarthi points out in Karuna: The Power of Compassion, humanity appears increasingly fractured—by inequality, conflict, ecological devastation and a growing culture of indifference. The paradox, he argues, is not a lack of resources or knowledge, but a moral failure. What the modern world suffers from is not technological deficit, but a deficit of compassion.

Satyarthi’s central intervention is to reclaim compassion from the realm of softness. In popular imagination, compassion is often treated as an individual emotion—gentle, personal, and largely apolitical. Karuna rejects this framing outright. Compassion, Satyarthi insists, is not passive kindness or distant sympathy. It is an active, disruptive force—one that challenges injustice, reshapes institutions and compels moral action.

For Satyarthi, compassion is born at a precise moment: when another person’s suffering is experienced not as an abstract concern but as one’s own. That recognition, he argues, cannot remain inert. True compassion demands a response. In this sense, compassion is not the opposite of power; it is a form of power—ethical power—that has historically driven social movements, expanded rights and forced political change. From struggles against child labour to campaigns for human dignity, Satyarthi positions compassion as the invisible engine behind lasting transformation.

One of the book’s most distinctive contributions is the idea of a “Compassion Quotient (CQ)”. Just as IQ measures cognitive ability and EQ assesses emotional intelligence, CQ is proposed as a way to understand how individuals, organisations and societies relate to suffering and responsibility. For Satyarthi, CQ is not an abstract moral scorecard. It is a practical framework—something that can be cultivated, strengthened and embedded into systems of governance, education and leadership.

The argument is clear: without a high CQ, even the most intelligent or emotionally skilled societies risk becoming efficient but cruel. Economic growth without compassion deepens inequality. Technological progress without compassion accelerates exclusion. Political power without compassion normalises injustice. CQ, in Satyarthi’s formulation, becomes the missing ethical dimension in modern decision-making.

To prevent compassion from dissolving into sentimentality, Satyarthi defines it through four inseparable elements. The first is awareness—the refusal to look away from suffering. Indifference, he argues, is not neutrality; it’s complicity. The second is connectedness—the recognition that another’s pain is not “their problem” but part of a shared human condition. This sense of moral interdependence is central to karuna or compassion.

The third element is deep feeling—a genuine emotional identification with the other, distinct from detached sympathy or charity. And finally, action—concrete, mindful steps to reduce harm and restore dignity. Compassion, Satyarthi insists, collapses if it stops at feeling. Without action, awareness becomes voyeurism and empathy becomes self-indulgence.

When these four elements converge, compassion becomes transformative. It turns individuals—often without formal authority—into problem-solvers, moral leaders and catalysts for change. This is a recurring theme in the book: power does not always flow from institutions; it often emerges from ethical clarity and moral courage.

Satyarthi’s insistence on compassion as a public ethic is shaped by his own life’s work. Over five decades, he has fought for the rights of millions of marginalised children across borders, cultures and political systems. In Karuna, these experiences are not presented as personal triumphs but as evidence of what compassion-in-action can achieve when it is organised, sustained and fearless.

The urgency of the book lies in its diagnosis of the present moment. Satyarthi argues that globalisation has connected markets and technologies, but not consciences. What is needed, he writes, is a “globalisation of compassion”—a deliberate effort to act as if the world is one family. This is not sentimental universalism, but a pragmatic moral stance, especially when addressing issues such as child exploitation, forced labour, displacement, and environmental collapse.

In a political climate increasingly defined by hostility, exclusion and moral exhaustion, Karuna makes a quiet but radical demand: that compassion be treated not as a personal virtue but as a collective responsibility. It calls on citizens, leaders and institutions to rethink success—not merely in terms of growth or efficiency, but in terms of dignity protected and suffering reduced.

Karuna: The Power of Compassion is not a manual for charity, nor a retreat into moral idealism. It is a challenge—to individuals and societies alike—to recognise that the future will not be shaped by intelligence, technology, or power alone. Without compassion as a guiding force, Satyarthi warns, progress itself becomes hollow. With it, even the most entrenched injustices can be confronted.

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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.

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Along a River from Tibet to the Bay of Bengal

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: River Traveller: Journeys on the TSANPO-BRAHMAPUTRA from Tibet to the Bay of Bengal

Author: Sanjoy Hazarika

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Sanjoy Hazarika, a former reporter for the New York Times, dons many hats, combining roles as researcher, columnist, mentor and practitioner. Over decades this veteran journalist has travelled extensively across the Northeast and its neighbourhood. His interests include developments in Myanmar, Bhutan, Tibet (PRC), Bangladesh and Nepal and he has produced over a dozen documentaries including on the Brahmaputra, dolphins, governance, conflict, and rights.

River Traveller tells the story of a great river, as powerful as it is mysterious. The Brahmaputra rises in Tibet, travels through three countries and, after travelling over 2,900 kms, flows into the Bay of Bengal. But the most interesting part is that this river is known by many names: Yarlung Tsangpo and Po Tsangpo in Tibet, Siang in Arunachal Pradesh, Brahmaputra in Assam, the Jamuna in Bangladesh, merging with the Ganga at Arichar Ghat, to form the vast Padma on its unending flow to the Bay of Bengal and its quest for union with the sea.

This book has come together over decades of travels on this braided river (including on the boat clinics that he launched in 2005 in Assam) where Hazarika had seen its beauty and faced its wrath, been stuck on sandbanks and swept out to sea. He listened to those who plied the boats, the pilots, drivers, fishermen and their families, the sick and the ailing, women and children, Buddhist and Hindu monks, Sikh and Muslim priests, officials, politicians, students and scientists. He has listened to poets, singers, writers and artists, and to businessfolk and daily wage earners, boat builders, contractors, tea planters and workers. The writer amalgamated all their stories which were a mix of sadness, a determination to survive, an acceptance of fate and joy. Therefore, his traveller’s tales span not just his own journeys but the stories of those who had gone before him. Like the river, the region and its neighbourhood “never cease to delight, surprise, inspire, sadden and confound.”

Of course, the most ostentatious reason for Hazarika’s travels is the filming of documentaries on the river at different points of time.  His first travel was for the film A River’s Story, the Quest for the Brahmaputra that he scripted and produced with Jahnu Barua as the director, Sudheer Palsane as cinematographer, Sanjoy Roy and Jugal Debta as audiographers as well as many others. The thrust area was to study the stories of the river and its people, from its beginnings in the Tibetan Plateau to the end in the Bay of Bengal. It wasn’t about science and theory, or politics and the environment, or climate change, but about the river and its moods, and especially its people and their relationship with each other, through history and changing geography, culture, faith, peace and poverty.

In the second venture, Gautam Bora was director and cinematographer of Brahmaputra, a six-part series for Doordarshan, shot in Arunachal Pradesh and Assam. In his third venture, he was involved in the making of Children of the River, the Xihus of Assam, which was directed and filmed by Maulee Senapati and where he learned much about dolphins.

Divided into three parts, the book is as exhaustive a study on the river as can be imagined. The Brahmaputra is one of the world’s longest and widest rivers—sustaining entire civilizations and agrarian systems. It has fascinated cartographers, lured adventurers, attracted kings and dynasts, and has supported life and ways of living by its banks. Before beginning with the actual travel in Part One that includes his sojourns in Tibet and Arunachal Pradesh, Hazarika goes back to history of the thirteenth century when in about 1215 AD, the Tai-Ahom prince Siu-ka-pha left his native land now on the China-Myanmar border and undertook a long march before settling down in Charaideo, his capital, with its surrounding flat plains, rich red soil, streams and the vast Brahmaputra nearby. After that for centuries, traders, smugglers, fighters, fugitives, goods, cuisines, languages and ideas as well as religions and religious people have travelled in either direction on the Siu-ka-pha trail.

Hazarika begins his yatra in Tibet and narrates how the challenges relating to it were not new. He describes a Tibet that was trying to hold on to its cultural legacy in the face of Chinese rule and the land’s exploitation for its resources. He recounts stories of explorers, spymasters and mapmakers, especially a motley crowd of intrepid men in the service of the East India Company and the Survey of India, who discovered the route of the river especially when it’s source was hidden in the most inhospitable terrain on earth. They finally solved the puzzle of the vanishing river and established that the Brahmaputra and the Tsangpo were the same river.

In Arunachal Pradesh, Hazarika views the river from a helicopter and to him it resembled a great, brown meandering serpent, moving in huge loops, with many channels; at times, a stream or two which joined the flow backed down on themselves, creating elegant oxbow lakes. At Gelling, the first village on the Indian side, the turbulent Tsangpo churns its way through a narrow valley after a cascading drop from Tibet. Here for the first time the Tsangpo changes its name and is known as the Siang or Dibang for the next 200 kilometers before it enters Assam. At a place called Kobo, the Lohit meets the Dibang, Noa Dihing, Tengapani and Siang and develops the immense power that is mirrored in the Brahmaputra in full flow.

Part Two comprising of nine chapters focuses on Assam. After the earthquake of 1950, water ‘blockades’ happened not just on the Siang but also on several other rivers flowing into the Assam Valley and as a result the river changed its course, lifted the riverbed, flattened the banks and land, and braided it in many places far more than ever before. As a result, many towns like Rohmoria, Sadiya simply vanished after being embraced by flood waters, and places like Barpeta, Goalpara and Dhubri underwent demographic changes.

In separate chapters we learn about the tea gardens of Assam, the influence of Srimanta Sankaradeva and his satras[1], about the great river island Majuli, the singer Bhupen Hazarika, the presence of dolphins in the Brahmaputra, the thousands of islands known as the chars and saporis, which are permanent in their impermanence, where the Muslim residents are known as Miyas, the large number of migrants that inhabit the place, the sand bars and sandbanks that dot the riverscape from Upper Assam and how the collection of sand and its sale and distribution has changed the lives of many along the river to the point where it enters Bangladesh. He also gives us details about the ferry system, the boat clinics on the river that represent both a dream and a reality, as annually, nearly three lakh people are treated in these mobile structures.

The third part of the narrative obviously ends with four chapters on Bangladesh. We are told how to move from a slow riverine economy to a bustling one is quite challenging. This section includes fear of being hunted by pirates on an open sea, the faith in the navigators, ‘drivers’, pilots and other crew members who can read the mind of the river, the trip to the confluence of the Ganga and the Brahmaputra along with a Bangladeshi singer called Maqsoodul Haque or Mac. Both these rivers have different names in Bangladesh. The Ganga is the Padma while the Brahmaputra is the Jamuna. We are told about the story of the island known to Indians as New Moore Island and to the Bangladeshis as Sandwip island that appeared and disappeared, causing a diplomatic furore. The Brahmaputra’s role in shaping the destiny of low-lying Bangladesh is well-established and we are told of the connectedness of the people to the river, on either side of the human-made border. There are many places where the turbulent river refuses to accept human markers and controls and the border just remains an imaginary line snaking across shifting sands.

After reading about the multifarious experiences of Hazarika, it is needless to state that this book of non-fiction mesmerizes the readers to such a great extent that one hankers for more information. It is best to conclude the review by quoting from the poetic way Hazarika himself speaks at the end of the book about the interconnectedness that lies even in a grain of sand:

“I have traversed the river, shared my secrets with it and laid my fears and troubles to rest there. It too has spoken to me and has been kind and generous, in the midst of its vastness and power, to someone who could not swim.

“River Traveller is deeply personal and piloted by my life and learnings on the river, failings, shortcomings, understanding. It’s about shared stories, loves gained and lost, inspiration and sadness. Autobiographical in parts, it navigates history and crosses borders.

“Many travels beckon, for the river still calls.“

 From extremism to environmental responsibility, politics to ethnography, River Traveller touches on a multitude of subjects, and is an enduring study of human life and natural history. It is a rich and memorable portrait of one of the mightiest rivers on our planet. The colour photographs that are included in the middle of the narrative add extra charm to the narration. A volume worth possessing and reading and rereading repeatedly.

[1] Specialised Vaishnavi monasteries in Assam serving as socio-religious, cultural and educational centres since the fifteenth century.

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

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How ‘Every Room Has a View’ Explores Migrant Narratives

Book Review by Rakhi Dalal

Title: Every Room Has a View — A Novel

Author: Sujit Saraf

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Every Room Has a View — A Novel by Sujit Saraf is a narrative of exceptional dignity and subtle audacity. A dark comedy, a rumination on loss, and an evocative picture of a diasporic life – this book manages to turn what could have been a simple account of bereavement and rites into something much richer – into a luminous examination of identity, remembrance, and ever shifting territory between tradition and revivification.

The author is an engineer by training. His novel, The Peacock Throne, has been was shortlisted for the Encore Prize in London. His third novel, The Confession of Sultana Daku, is being made into a motion picture. He also runs Naatak, an Indian theatre company in America for which he writes and directs plays and films.

In this novel, Naveen Gupta, an Indian engineer who made a life in Silicon Valley over three decades, is dead. His Bay Area home boasts of panoramic vistas of the Golden Gate Bridge, portraying the American dream he managed to make into a reality for himself and his family. Naveen’s final wish is, however, strikingly paradoxical. He wishes to be cremated on seashore in San Francisco with the same rites that his father was cremated in India with. This odd wish becomes the pivot around which the story revolves—divulging not only operational absurdities but innate questions about what it means to belong, or to crave for belonging, in a place that would hardly understand those traditions.

Narrated through the voice of Usha, Naveen’s widow, the novel gives a glimpse into the quiet perplexities of those living between cultures. We witness at once the chaos and comedy that ensues when a circle of well-meaning friends and relatives make attempts to honour Naveen’s wishes in a land where neither permits nor precedent exist for such rites. The absurd painted through images — a pandit in jeans and a backpack, a rented cow brought up through an apartment elevator, and confusions with local authorities who mistake a funeral pyre for a beach campfire — play like a comedy. These images are, however, never frivolous. They reveal how sometimes diaspora may cling to rituals in unsettling times.

The story’s procession brings in focus characters whose dilemmas and idiosyncrasies deepen the central themes. Maaji, Naveen’s mother, at first unsure about how to navigate life in a foreign land, eventually finds solace and community among other seniors in Sausalito. Her ache of displacement replaced by a sense of belongingness in a society. Ajay, the teenage son, is silent and observant. Standing on the edge of two cultures, he carries his father’s legacy in his reticent response to loss and his passionate retreat into music. Through these figures, the author explores different ways in which immigrants may carry and reconcile their heritage while forging new selves on unfamiliar ground.

The most compelling journey, though, is Usha’s own. What begins as confusion over her husband’s last wish slowly progresses into a thoughtful inner quest for meaning and autonomy. She moves through grief not as a passive mourner but as a pilgrim of her own consciousness.

Saraf’s narrative invites us to laugh at the ludicrousness of circumstance, to pause in instants of quiet contemplation, and to wonder at the fault lines between what is reminisced and what is lived. He shows that the immigrant experience is not uniform but a constellation of small, vivid moments — a recollection of a far-off village or city street, a misplaced ritual, a cautious chat in a new language or a yearning for ancestral soil that may never be touched again.

In Every Room Has a View, the titular phrase itself becomes a brilliant metaphor. The rooms in Naveen’s house may offer views of an iconic bridge and sweeping bay—a testament to success and achievement—but the novel invites us to look beyond the literal. Every room in Usha’s life, every memory and every ritual, holds its own view: of history, of loss, of transformation. It prompts the reader to ask: What do our “views” reveal? What do they conceal? And what remains when all the windows have been opened, and all the rituals performed – especially towards the end when Usha comes to know of the reason of Naveen’s reluctance to make a journey back home.

This novel is not a simple commentary on cultural collision nor a mere satire on complications of creed and law. It is a humane narrative of the perennial human quest for meaning. In seeking to honour his father’s rites, Naveen’s family—and through them, the reader—discovers that identity is not something anchored in a fixed geography or grammar of practice, but something that must be negotiated with love, imagination, and an openness to the unpredictable vistas of the heart.

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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Taslima Nasrin’s Poetry: Between Silence and Defiance

Book Review by Anindita Basak

Title: Burning Roses in My Garden

Author: Taslima Nasrin

Translated from Bengali by Jesse Waters

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

Imagine a woman bound by shackles – not of iron, but of her own people, her country, her religion, and above all, by men. This is not just a metaphor; it is the reality that moulded Taslima Nasrin’s life and journey as a writer. Her first English poetry collection, Burning Roses in My Garden (translated and edited by Jesse Waters), gathers 103 poems that bear the scars of exile and the defiance of survival.

Nasrin, hounded by fatwas and banned for her unflinching criticism of patriarchy and religious dogma in Bangladesh, writes from the margins yet refuses to be silenced. The anthology commences with early meditations on passion and desire, seen in poems like ‘A Bouquet of Scarlet Envy’ and ‘On Love’, toward darker elegies like ‘The Cycle of Loneliness’, ‘Walking through This Life and into Death’, and ‘Am I Not to Have a Country of My Own?’ that grapple with loneliness, mortality, and the burden of political banishment. These poems become the very tools with which she breaks the restraints, not to escape them, but to forge them into weapons of truth.

The collection opens with poems like ‘On Love’, which delve into romantic love and intimacy as the poet tenderly explores physical connection through sensory detail. In the piece ‘The Last Kiss’, the poet reminisces about a lover’s touch that transcends geographical boundaries. “That kiss that brought an entire world within her grasp, /…a rush of youth, /His kiss was becoming more than him,” compares her memories to permanent imprints. These early poems in the collection reveal a different register – more vulnerable, more willing to dwell in private emotions rather than public testimony. It creates a counterpoint to the later poems of exile and loss, suggesting what was left behind when she was forced to choose between fragile love and unwavering candour.

Through images of loss and displacement, which work both as wound and testimony, the poet confronts her banishment with stark honesty: “To me, my country is now a crematorium. /A lonely dog stands and whines all night, a few/Pyre-makers lie here and there, drunk to the bone.” In her traversal of exile, she transforms personal anguish into universal questions of belonging and continues to write from a place of loss. Her voice carries the weight of those who cannot speak, turning poetry into both elegy and resistance.

Feminist consciousness also flows through Nasrin’s verses with unflinching directness. In ‘Another Life’, she exposes the grinding reality of women’s domestic servitude through devastating metaphor: “Women spend half of their lives picking stones from rice. /Stones pile up in their hearts.” The image suggests not only physical drudgery but emotional calcification – the heart itself becoming a repository of unspoken grievances. Her feminist vision extends beyond individual suffering to collective oppression, revealing how patriarchal structures trap women in cycles of invisible labour.

The poet’s political views turn philosophical, confronting mortality while examining the cost of speaking truth to power through the lens of displacement and exile. This progression from the collection’s early love poems to these darker meditations reflect not only her growing maturing but also usher in a socio-political awakening – the recognition that private desire cannot exist separately from public consequence.

Nasrin doesn’t shy away from contemporary political realities; instead, she shows how religious fundamentalism and state censorship became suffocating forces that compress individual expression. She highlights the way authoritarian systems silence dissent through both legal mechanisms and social ostracism. In ‘Am I Not to Have a Country of My Own?’, she directly questions the price of dissent and the meaning of citizenship when one’s own nation rejects its truth-tellers. In contrast, particular tender pieces like ‘Miserable Ma’ highlight the endurance of personal relationships despite geographical separation within the collection’s otherwise relentless critique.

This collection’s strength lies in its refusal to separate the personal from the global. An American poet and professor, Waters preserves Nasrin’s directness in her translation while maintaining the emotional intensity that makes her work so compelling. These poems serve as both autobiography and historical document, charting one woman’s journey from intimate expression to public testimony. Her masterful use of juxtaposition, placing tender domestic moments against brutal political realities, creates a poetic tension that amplifies both spheres of experience.

Ultimately, Burning Roses in My Garden becomes a new mythology of endurance, not the tidy myth that comforts, but a foul-weather myth that survives storms. In the current climate, Nasrin’s poetry resonates with startling immediacy – mass rallies, hardline backlashes, midnight vigils, and student protests – the streets themselves find their voice through her verses. As if to remind us what her poetry truly stands for, the last poem of the collection bears the words: “I don’t write poetry, I write life on paper. /I don’t write poems; the wind that hits my body/When I stand on the top of a hill? I pen it down.” In closing lines like “when all game ends… I’ll sit down to write about love,” Nasrin promises that love’s survival against cruelty becomes an article of faith. The world of the poet and that of the reader blur here, and in that blurring, a strange comfort arrives, a lesson that even in a country’s crematorium, the rose of hope can burn and perfume the air.

Anindita Basak, a student at the University of Calcutta, is an avid enthusiast of literature and philosophy. Her published works include poetry, prose, and reviews in reputed magazines.

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Vignettes from Pre-partition Bengal

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The Struggle: A Novel

Author: Showkat Ali

Translators: V. Ramaswamy & Mohiuddin Jahangir

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

Showkat Ali (1936 – 2018) was a renowned Bangladeshi novelist, short story writer and journalist whose work explored history, class and identity in Bengali society.  In 1989, he published a novel called Narai (translated from Bengali as The Struggle) which is set in a remote village in the Dinajpur region of undivided Bengal during the mid-1940s.

The novel is broadly divided into three sections. In the first section entitled ‘A Ploughing Household,’ the author gives us detailed description of an agrarian society where poor Muslim farmers as well as some other lower classes of untouchable Hindus eked out their living primarily through farming as well as other low-paying jobs. The feudal setup of the society is complete with threatening and wily landlords (often Hindus) who are always on the lookout for cheating the sharecroppers of their legitimate dues.

The story begins with a poor farmer called Ahedali who, unable to procure a second bullock to till his field, bore one side of the yoke himself, and soon fell ill and succumbed to death leaving his young wife Phulmoti and a ten-year-old son Abedali behind. The real problem for this widow begins when she is left alone to fend for herself along with a few ducks, chickens and goats. Her fragile world is shattered. People in the village start advising her to get married once again and she gradually finds it very difficult to survive from the ogling eyes and salacious offers from different men in the community. Her son can offer little defense against the men now circling her—neighbours, relatives, even the local cleric—drawn by desire and the lure of her small property. Malek, a kindly bookseller at the local market, too, proves not to be what he seems. It is Malek’s hired hand, Qutubali, who finds himself drawn into her struggles, standing by her in ways that others do not.

The second section of the novel ‘Home and Family’ describes in detail how Qutubali, the simple-minded outsider whose unexpected kindness and fierce loyalty turns into Phulmoti’s unlikely ally. Apparently, he was a senseless and stupid man who provided her benefaction again and again. Much younger to her, he was totally ignorant of standard man-woman relationships and though he often stayed back at Phulmoti’s house, he didn’t express any sort of physical desire for the young widow. He tended to the animals, helped in sowing seeds and worked relentlessly to bring some comfort and peace in the household.

This entire section gives us details of how they come close to each other. Finding no other alternative to live a decent and harmonious life, they go to a mosque where a saint called Darbesh Chacha, who had brought up the orphan Qutubali earlier, gets them married in order that both can live their lives peacefully hereafter. Since then, things gradually changed. If a young widow found a husband, or brought home a ‘ghor jamai’[1], that was definitely news, especially if the man in question was from another village. But people gradually accepted it. Of course, the widow’s suitors fumed with resentment, though even that fire cooled eventually.  Qutubali also gradually started learning the tricks of the trade – he had their own land and along with the yield of the sharecropped land, he knew he could become a full-fledged farmer soon. He was sure the days of his misfortune were over. At the end of this section, when Phulmoti announces to the simple-minded Qutubali that she was pregnant, the reader feels that the rest of the story would follow suit in domestic harmony and bliss. The family had a happy air about them. But that was not to be.

The third section of the novel aptly titled ‘We Must Fight!’ begins amid the upheavals of a precarious feudal order and the stirrings of a nation on the verge of independence. Qutubali did not have the time to stay at home. He was never clear about where he went and what he did. When asked, he replied in monosyllables. He started attending sermons. The headmaster of the village school started indoctrinating him and the village folk with the idea of swadeshi.

The politics of the Congress and the Muslim League started to hover on the margins of village life, far removed from their daily battles. But when the tebhaga[2] struggle broke out in Bengal—with sharecroppers demanding two-thirds of the harvest from landlords as their rightful due—Phulmoti and Qutubali stand to lose what little of their lives they had pieced back together.

By that time, she no longer saw Qutubali as a callow youth. He had become a regular, responsible, labouring man but his gradual involvement in the politics could not be avoided. He got involved in the activities of the peasants’ union. The novel remains open-ended with Phulmoti keeping on waiting for her husband to come back from wherever he was even after a decade is over.

Before concluding, a note must be added about the excellent quality of translation. Both V. Ramaswamy and Mohiuddin Jahangir have done a wonderful job in translating this social realist novel from one of the most celebrated novelists of Bangladesh for the benefit of a wider audience to remember a very detailed study of rural Bengal from both social and political angles from the 1940s — a very significant time when amidst the prevailing feudal order of the agrarian society in rural Bengal, the stirrings of a nation on the verge of independence as well as outside forces were gradually creeping in.

[1] In the usual Bengali tradition, a wife moves on to live in her husband’s house after marriage. The situation is reverse when the married man comes to live in his wife’s or in-law’s house and is then called a ‘ghor jamai.’

[2] The Tebhaga movement was significant peasant agitation, initiated in Bengal in the late 1940s by the All India Kisan Sabha of peasant front of the Communist Party of India. It aimed to reduce the share of crops that tenants had to give to landlords.

Click here to read an excerpt from The Struggle

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

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The Lost Pendant

Book Review by Udita Banerjee

Title: The Lost Pendant

Editor: Angshuman Kar

Publisher: Hawakal Publishers

The Lost Pendant brings together poems translated from Bengali by translators such as Himalaya Jana, Mandakranta Sen, Rajorshi Patronobish, Sanjukta Dasgupta, Angshuman Kar, and Souva Chattopadhyay. Through these compelling translations, the volume makes a significant intervention in Partition literature, arriving at a moment when revisiting the lingering spectres of the event has become especially urgent. The Partition of India in 1947, which divided the subcontinent into India and Pakistan, resulted in one of the largest mass migrations in history and left enduring scars of displacement, violence, and fractured identities. As the editor, writer and academic, Angshuman Kar, notes in the book’s introduction how Partition remains a 78-year-old wound that continues to bleed.

The anthology showcases poetry from the eastern parts of the subcontinent, chiefly Bengal, Assam, and Bangladesh, featuring works by 41 poets from India and Bangladesh. Kar does not simply compile these poems but thoughtfully curates them to reveal several critical nuances. He invokes the concept of “buoyant memory,” introduced in his earlier work, Divided: Partition Memoirs from Two Bengals, to depict how “forgetting the past is impossible for the direct victims of Partition.” He also draws attention to the disproportionate representation of upper-caste Hindu Bengali poets, in contrast to the relative invisibility of Muslims and those from marginalised communities. This imbalance extends to gender as well, with a noticeable disparity between male and female poets in the collection.

The book is structured in two parts, respectively featuring poets from India and Bangladesh. The Indian section is notably larger and presents a wide range of emotions, reflecting both the immediate trauma of Partition and its long-lasting reverberations over the years. Many of the poems in this section express a deep nostalgia for a lost homeland. For instance, Alokeranjan Dasgupta’s ‘Exile’ evokes memories of abandoned spaces. Similarly, Ananda Sankar Rai’s ‘The Far Side’ laments the estrangement from what was once familiar. He writes, “Once it was a province, now an alien land / where you must enter passport in hand.” Basudeb Deb’s ‘Picture of My Father’ constructs a powerful portrait of the nation through the figure of the father: “Swadeshi movement war sirens famine flood / Riot and partition written in the wrinkles on his forehead.” After the father’s death, only a walking stick remains. The poem draws a powerful parallel between the futility of the father’s dismissive words, “This country is not a pumpkin that you can cut it in one blow”, and the uselessness of the walking stick after his passing. This object comes to embody the spirit of the deceased father, “just another old toy”, offering a stark commentary on how individuals became pawns in the hands of the state.

Several poets in the anthology focus intensely on the experiences of refugees, capturing both their suffering and the complexities of their identities. In ‘The Refugee Mystery’, Binoy Majumdar laments the loss of linguistic roots, noting how “the Bangals now speak the dialect of Kolkata all the time, having forgotten the dialects of Barishal and Faridpur / The Moslems of Dhaka are heard singing and speaking in the radio with the lilt of Uluberia.” His reflections emphasise the deep connection between language and social identity. This theme finds a resonance in Sunil Gangopadhyay’s poem ‘That Day’, where he writes, “On one side they named the waters Pani / on the other side–Jol.” Through this simple yet evocative contrast, Gangopadhyay underscores how a shared concept can be articulated through divergent linguistic expressions in India and Bangladesh, which become subtle yet potent markers of socio-linguistic divisions. Such poems provoke profound questions: Can the adoption of a new dialect truly redefine one’s identity? How does one navigate the tension between past and present linguistic selves, and is reconciliation even possible?

Viewed through the intertwined lenses of faith and suffering, poetry often functions as a repository of collective memory and a means of resilience. In this regard, Devdas Acharya’s three poems present a poignant exploration of the lived experiences of refugees in post-Partition India. A recurring and haunting image emerges in his work: a grieving father, who has recently lost a child to hunger, standing before a deity symbolically embodied by a swadeshi leader. This image encapsulates both the profound deprivation endured by displaced communities and their simultaneous reliance on unshaken faith. Despite the magnitude of loss, what sustained many refugees was a deeply rooted belief system that imbued their suffering with meaning.

By foregrounding the gendered dimensions of violence, Partition poetry exposes how women’s bodies became contested sites of power and trauma. In “She, on the Platform of a Station”, Krishna Dhar powerfully captures the plight of women during Partition. She writes, “Chased from the other side of the border, escaping fire and the fangs and tongues of wolves, one day she arrived,” evoking the image of a refugee woman doubly marginalised– “devastated by Partition” and simultaneously “dodging the eyes of the hyenas.” Here, the metaphorical wolves and hyenas represent predatory men who treated women’s bodies as extensions of territorial conquest. Kar points out in the introduction that very few women wrote poetry about their Partition experiences, largely because they were already engaged in the broader struggle for gender equality. While women’s memoirs on Partition exist, poetry by women addressing these themes, particularly from the 1970s, is strikingly limited. This absence is significant, as women’s experiences are crucial to understanding how deeply gendered the space of the subcontinent was during and after Partition.

Following independence, conflicts often emerged within the nation, revolving around issues of region, language, religion, and ethnicity. In ‘The Diary of a Refugee’, Shaktipada Brahmachari reflects on his sense of belonging across borders, juxtaposing his memories of a past home in Bengal with his present life in Assam. He writes, “The world is my home now, in Bangla my love I spell–Prafulla and Vrigu are the cousins of my heart,” referencing two leaders of the Asom Gana Parishad. While refugees in Assam experienced a more complex form of marginalisation due to ethno-linguistic differences, Brahmachari portrays a gradual process of acceptance, where both the homeland he left and the land he adopted come to hold emotional significance.

Across the border in Bangladesh, the theme of displacement persists. In “Leaving Home”, Jasimuddin asserts, “this land is for Hindus and Muslims,” calling on educators to return and “build the broken schools once more…we will find out our beloved brother, whom I lost,” a poignant appeal for reconciliation and return of Hindu families displaced by Partition. The motifs of memory and loss recur throughout most of these poems, a trope common between both the nations. This sense of finality is further echoed in Binod Bera’s lament: “Our nation is now three, all three are independent, and love lives an alien existence.” The emotional chasm created by Partition, and the subsequent loss of mutual affection, renders any notion of return futile.

The collection deserves commendation for its ambitious effort to recover voices from Bengali literature and render them accessible to a global readership beyond linguistic boundaries, through gripping translations. It is the first-ever translated collection of Bengali Partition poetry that captures the angst of the original poems with perfect nuance. The very title, The Lost Pendant, merits particular attention, for it resonates with themes of liminality and the fractured sense of identity experienced by the refugee poet Nirmalyo Bhushan Bhattacharya, better known by his pseudonym, Majnu Mostafa. Born in Khulna, Bangladesh, yet spending much of his life in Krishnanagar, India, Bhattacharya embodies the dislocation and dual belonging of Partition’s afterlives. As Kar insightfully observes, the choice of pseudonym can be read as a deliberate act of defiance, “a strategy to cross the boundaries set up by religious politics and fundamentalism–a move much needed in the subcontinent of our times.” In this sense, The Lost Pendant is not merely an anthology but a work of cultural recuperation as it attempts to resurrect poets whose voices risked erasure, while simultaneously protecting their oeuvres from the twin threats of historical amnesia and linguistic inaccessibility.

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Udita Banerjee is an Assistant Professor of English at VIT-AP University. Her work has previously been published in platforms such as Outlook Weekender, Borderless Journal, Indian Review, and Poems India.

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Colonisation in the Global Frame

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India: A Saga of Monstrous British Barbarianism around the Globe

Author: Rakesh Dwivedi

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Rakesh Dwivedi’s Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India is an unflinching indictment of British imperialism and a forceful challenge to the long-standing narrative of colonialism as a “civilizing mission”. Written with the precision of a seasoned constitutional lawyer and the moral urgency of a historian disturbed by selective memory, the book seeks to dismantle the myths surrounding the British Empire while situating India’s freedom struggle within a wider global context of colonial violence.

At its core, the book argues that British rule in India was not an aberration of excesses but a carefully structured system of exploitation sustained by economic plunder, engineered famines, racial hierarchies, and institutionalised violence. Dwivedi rejects euphemisms such as “benevolent administration” or “rule of law,” insisting instead on naming colonialism for what it was: a barbaric enterprise masked by moral rhetoric. In doing so, he aligns himself with a growing body of postcolonial scholarship that seeks to recover suppressed histories of suffering and resistance.

One of the book’s notable strengths is its global frame. Dwivedi does not treat India in isolation but links the subcontinent’s experience to British imperial conduct in America, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia. By drawing parallels between policies of extraction, demographic manipulation, and divide-and-rule strategies across continents, he underscores the systemic nature of empire. This comparative approach lends weight to his claim that colonial brutality was not incidental but intrinsic to imperial governance.

The chapters dealing with famines, wartime exploitation, and economic drain are particularly compelling. Using archival material, parliamentary debates, and secret British records, Dwivedi exposes how starvation and deprivation were often outcomes of deliberate policy choices rather than natural calamities. His discussion of India’s role during the World Wars—both as a resource base and as expendable manpower—adds a crucial geopolitical dimension to the freedom struggle, reminding readers that independence was shaped as much by global power shifts as by internal resistance.

Dwivedi’s legal background is evident in his methodical narrative. He builds his case like a prosecution brief—marshalling evidence, anticipating counter-arguments, and dismantling colonial apologetics with forensic rigor. This gives the book a distinctive voice, though at times the prosecutorial tone may feel relentless. Readers looking for narrative subtlety or emotional restraint may find the language uncompromising, even polemical. Yet this stylistic choice appears deliberate: the book is less concerned with balance than with moral clarity.

The treatment of Partition is another significant aspect. Dwivedi views it not merely as a tragic inevitability but as a consequence of imperial betrayal and strategic manipulation. His critique of British exit policies challenges sanitized accounts of decolonisation and raises uncomfortable questions about responsibility, culpability, and historical accountability.

That said, the book’s sweeping scope occasionally works against it. The ambition to cover centuries of imperial history across multiple regions can lead to dense passages that demand close attention. Some readers may also wish for greater engagement with alternative historiographical perspectives. However, these limitations do not diminish the book’s central achievement: forcing a re-examination of colonial history stripped of nostalgia and imperial self-congratulation.

Colonization Crusade and Freedom of India is not a neutral history—it is a corrective one. It speaks directly to contemporary debates about historical memory, reparations, and the politics of remembrance. In an age when empire is often romanticised in popular culture and public discourse, Dwivedi’s work serves as a necessary provocation.

This book will resonate most with readers interested in colonial studies, Indian history, geopolitics, and the ethics of empire. Whether one agrees with all of Dwivedi’s conclusions or not, his argument compels engagement. It stands as a powerful reminder that freedom was not gifted to India—it was wrested from an empire whose legacy must be confronted, not softened.

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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.

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Geetika Mehendiratta Comes of Age!

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta

Author: Anuradha Marwah

Publisher: Rupa Publications

Anuradha Marwah’s debut novel, The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta, republished by more than thirty years after its original publication, is a delightful read. It is a trailblazer and a pioneer in more ways than one-an Indian campus novel before the campus novel became identified as a genre; and a frank exploration of female sexuality without the usual  humbug  and euphemisms associated with the treatment of sex in many 20th century novels.

It scores in other respects as well-its recreation of small-town ennui before the internet took over our lives, in the middle of a hot summer is a feeling  we recognise well. Time moved slowly, people still read books and families still conversed with each other, albeit in the most cliched terms. However, the novel’s tone is not nostalgic, and does not “invite readers into a sepia-tinted past.” (Authors Note)

When the novel opens, we see Geetika whose outlook and  family context is quite at variance with the majority of people around her. We cannot imagine her settling into middle-class bourgeois domesticity with her ‘boyfriend’  or otherwise. The slow pace of life and limited options available in Desertwadi make it a claustrophobic trap for someone like Geetika, who is ready to embark on her adventures, both intellectual and sexual. Her experiments in both directions is a sort of liminal phase before she embarks upon the next stage of her life.

The author has hit the right mixture of irony, tongue-in-cheek humour and social satire. Her social satire pierces particularly deep, albeit at the risk of occasionally falling back on stereotypes. This is strongest in the case of the typical small-town aunty, Andy’s mother. Andy, her son, who is attempting to court Geetika, can barely get anything said (or done!) without  his mother butting into the conversation or walking into his room. Dalpat Singh is another such character, a corrupt small town sports official who has considerable clout and fully exploits his position in whatever way possible. Geetika realises that “Dalpatji was a reality I could not accept. He did not care if the Indian team won or lost; he only cared about the requisite number of scotch bottles that had to be presented to a journalist in order to get good coverage in the papers.”

Drawing on an undertow of real events like the mega sports hosted by India, ASIAD in 1982, the novel stays moored to recognisable places and times. Sometimes, it almost seems like a ‘roman a clef,’ a novel where real events and people appear with fictitious and invented names. The author has explored the nooks and crannies of the two cities, Delhi (Lutyenabad) and Ajmer (Desertwadi) in intimate detail, the claustrophobia of small town existence and the fraught ‘freedoms’ of the big city which breeds its own threats and insecurities. Double standards of morality and the double binds of gender are both in evidence in the novel. Geeti’s friend, Vinita, gets married to a NRI who while being sexually experienced himself, wants  a ‘pure’ Indian wife. Vinita is comfortable with her new husband’s sexual exploits before marriage: she did not mind as it was “all before marriage and men will be men-if girls were game, one couldn’t expect them to be saints.” The double bind of gender is evident in Geetika’s careworn mother. A working woman who is also engaged in social work, Geetika also observes how she has to do the heavy lifting when the domestic help is on leave.  

Many aspects this coming of age story seems particularly prescient for a novel that  was first published in 1993. Its primary concerns —  the stifling and limited choices of life particularly for girls in small-town India, its frank and unabashed exploration of sexuality, narrated in a sassy and unapologetic way make it seem like a fitting story of twenty-first century India.   The book accurately captures the inner conflicts of a young woman caught between a society where even progressive parents are limited by the paucity of available options and the narrowness of societal expectations.   Geetika inhabits a society that veers between conservatism and a kind  of  progressive  hypocrisy. On a quest to expand the contours of her world, she learns that there are no easy choices and the seemingly viable options of settling into bourgeois domesticity, albeit self-chosen, would clip her wings and disable her from self-realisation. This realisation hits her when she is already into the relationship. Some of the fault lines in the relationship between Geetika and her boyfriend, Ratish, are evident from the beginning. From his conservative perspective, feminism is a problematic term. On being asked about his mother, he declares that she is not a hysterical feminist. For him, a woman’s primary duty is to make herself available and agreeable and  be a good mother and wife, and any other aspiration is dismissed as a feminist excess.  

 Geetika realises that her curiosity and quest for freedom have led her up a slippery slope and this book is about the incremental costs of chasing one’s dreams.  The book ends on a somewhat sombre notes with Geetika giving up on dreams of middle class marriage  which would severely limit  her choices. The unconventional and difficult choices she makes also demonstrate the influence of feminist staff rooms where many  women– colleagues and associates — have made difficult and  unconventional choices.  In their company, Geetika realises that she has let herself drift into a relationship which would negate any exercise of agency on her part. It is in part, her recovery of her intellectual freedom to think and write authentically that constitutes her higher education.

The novel also offers us a social satire of ‘higher education’ in the premier institutions of Lutyenabad, replete with references to Capital University and Jana University. This is an insider joke with barely veiled references to actual universities in Delhi. Further, the academic pretensions of many academics who unleash fancy theories, which they have barely grasp themselves, on their hapless research students,  are called out. Literary references pepper the text where Roland Barthes’s   essay “Striptease”, a masterpiece of structuralist criticism, actually refers to a stripping of Geetika’s professor of her pretensions of having been at Sorbonne .   

The Higher Education of Geetika Mehendiratta is a sharp, accurate, searing and witty coming of age story, a bildungsroman, which is unabashed in its honesty about an ambitious  young woman’s journey to self-realisation. To quote from the Author’s Note, “Geetika, my outspoken protagonist, questioned and challenged, and the issues she grappled with are by no means resolved till date.” She continues, “Young people continue to face similar dilemmas: career or family, feminism or femininity, love or rebellion.” Geetika’s story is still relevant and contemporaneous,  ”adding the heft of history to present-day conversations on marriage and partnership.” It’s a coming of age story that resonates far and wide into the twenty-first century.  

Click here to read an excerpt of the novel.

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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