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‘Looking to the Future with New Eyes’ with Mineke Schipper

A brief review of Mineke Schipper’s Widows: A Global History (Speaking Tiger Books, 2024) and a conversation with the author

Mineke Schipper. Photo Courtesy: Christiaan Krouwel
To conquer fear is the beginning of wisdom.
—Bertrand Russell, Unpopular Essays (1950)

This is one of the dedications that precedes the narrative of Mineke Schipper’s non-fiction, Widows: A Global History. Her description of misapprehensions and the darkness around widowhood, as well as the actions that have been taken and suggestions on how more can be done to heal, weave a narrative for a more equitable society.

Starting with mythological treatment of widows, the book plunges into an in-depth discussion, not just with case studies but also with a social critique of the way these women are perceived and treated around the world, their need to heal from grief or a sense of devastation caused by their spouse’s death, concluding with stories that reflect the resilience of some of those who have overcome the odds of being repulsed. It is a book that inspires hope… hope for a world where despite all stories of misogyny covered in media, there are narratives that showcase both the human spirit and humanity where the ostracised are moving towards being integrated as a part of a functional social sphere.

Schipper, best known for her work on comparative literature mythologies and intercultural studies, navigates through multiple cultures over time and geographies to leave a lingering imprint on readers. She writes: “In Book V of his Histories, Herodotus (485-425/420 BCE) described life among the Thracians: Each man has many wives, and at his death there is both great rivalry among his wives and eager contention on their friends’ part to prove which wife was best loved by her husband. She to whom the honour is adjudged is praised by men and women alike and then slain over the tomb by her nearest of kin. After the slaying she is buried with the husband.” And yet she tells us of the dark past of Europe, “A Polish text asserts with great certainty that, after the burning of the body of her husband, ‘every wife allowed herself to be beheaded and went with him into death’.” She tells us stories of wife burning, killing and dark customs of yore across the world that seem like horror stories, including satis in India. The “motivation” is often greed of relatives or customs born of patriarchal insecurities. She contends, “wherever desperate poverty reigns, widows are at an increased risk.”

She argues: “The story is much the same everywhere; widows who are well educated know what rights they have or are able to find the right authorities to approach with their questions, while women with little or no education continue to suffer from malevolent practices.”

She has covered the stories that reflect the need for the welfare of widows, of how early marriages lead to widowhood even in today’s world ( “ Every year around twelve million girls under the age of eighteen get married, one in five of all marriages.”), of social customs like dowry, which can be usurped by a widow’s spouse’s family, of steps that are being taken and changes that need to be instituted for this group of women often regarded in the past and even in some places, in the present, as witches. In fact, she has written of such ‘witch villages’ in Africa, which have been developed to help widows who have been treated badly and turned away from their homes. Such stories, she tells us prevail all over the world, including India, where widows are sent or go to Varanasi.

She asserts that despite these efforts, “there is often still a significant gap between declarations of gender equality and their day-to-day enforcement and application.” She ends with case studies of four women: “Christine de Pisan, Tao Huabi, Laila Soueif and Marta Alicia Benavente examples of widows who dared to fully throw themselves into a new life following the death of their husbands.” And with infinite wisdom adds: “We cannot change history, but we can look to the past with new knowledge and to the future with new eyes.” She concludes with a profound observation: “Time does not heal sorrow, but out of the centuries-old ashes, grief, strict commandments and prohibitions, new prospects can also rise. The fact that every person’s life is finite makes every day unique and precious. The same goes for widows.”

In this interview Mineke Schipper (née Wilhelmina Janneke Josepha de Leeuw), an award-winning writer from Netherlands, tells us what started her on her journey to uncover the stories of this group of people.

What got you interested in widows as a group from around the world? Why would you pick this particular group only for a whole book?

Yes, whence this topic? The widow had been a tiny part of Never Marry a Woman with Big Feet. Women in Proverbs From Around the World (Yale UP 2004), an earlier book I wrote about proverbs referring to women’s lives, from girl babies to brides, wives and co-wives, mothers and mothers-in-law, grandmothers and old women. It was a long and breathtaking study about more than 15,000 proverbs, collected over many years, apparently widely appreciated and translated with two relatively recent editions published in India, in English and in Marathi. For those interested: the complete collected material is accessible and searchable at www.womeninproverbsworldwide.org, including proverbs about widows. That small but striking section about widows had made me curious, but other books, as it goes, pushed ahead, before I came back to them. In January 2020, I had to look up something in that book about proverbs, and the pages about widows looked so weird that I proposed the widow as my new topic to my Dutch publisher who responded enthusiastically.

You have written of so many cultures and in-depth. How long did it take you to collect material for this book and put it together?

All over I found obvious warnings and distrust viz a viz a woman whose husband dies. Interestingly, a widow was associated with death—and a widower was not. Take heed, suitor, when you replace the dead husband in the widow’s conjugal bed! Better not! Was it the fear that she had killed him? Or the creepy thought that the dead man’s hovering ghost was still hanging around? A widow was supposed to mourn intensely over her husband, preferably the rest of her life. In the meantime, proverbial messages openly expressed the widower’s happiness at the news of his wife’s death: ‘Grief for a dead wife lasts to the door’ (all over Europe) or ‘A wife’s death renews the marriage’ (Arabic). I came across well-known names—such as Confucius, Herodotus, Boniface, and Ibn Battuta—and lesser-known names of early travellers, historians, and philosophers with their commentaries on widows, compulsory or non-mandatory prolonged mourning, voluntary or prescribed chastity, and a surprisingly common choice of suicide as the best option for her. Amazingly many widows obediently followed their husbands to death. In all continents, monuments and documents witness how women joined dead men—buried or burnt alive, hanged, strangled or beheaded, drowned, stabbed or shot. A preference for strangling was inspired by the idea that the victim would enter the next world ‘intact’. So, from the narrow diving board of no more than a few dozen proverbs I plunged into the hidden history of widowhood for about three years.

How do women perpetrate the victimisation of widows? Would you say that widows as a group are more victimised against than other groups of women?

Conceptions about women as interchangeable objects were widespread. If a woman was ‘no longer of use’, a man would need to get a new one, much as you would do with a broken watch, rifle, knife or whip. A man cannot or will not do without a wife, but what about when the tables are turned? The need to present women without husbands as inept and dependent must have been great. A widow managing all by herself was rather met with obvious disapproval. Widowhood has traditionally been associated with emptiness. In Sanskrit, the word vidhua means ‘destitute’, and the Latin viduata (‘made destitute, emptied’) is the root of the word for widow in many European languages, including Witwe (German), veuve (French) and weduwe (Dutch).

Nonetheless there have always been plenty of widows who have lived wonderfully independent lives, but this is not the image seared into the public consciousness. The notion that a woman is unable to live her own life after the death of her husband is an amazingly deep-rooted one. The Japanese word for widow (mibōjin) literally means ‘she who has not yet died’, that is, a widow is simply sitting in Death’s waiting room for her own time to come. Interestingly, the status of widower on the other hand was usually so short-lived and temporary that some languages even lack a word for it all together!

What makes widows more vulnerable than others?

Every widow has her own story, but social systems play an important role. In traditions where goods, land and property are inherited through the mother’s family line with matrilocality, a groom comes to live with his bride’s family, although this often ended up working out slightly differently as men were not best pleased with this living arrangement, so in reality there would be negotiation. However, over the centuries patrilineal systems, lineage and inheritance significantly became the dominant system. According to the patrilocal rules, a man had to remain ‘at home’, a system which to this day obliges countless brides to move in with their parents-in-law, an environment foreign to them. They are forced to comply with the demands and expectations of their family-in-law, while the husbands remain comfortable in the familiar surroundings they grew up in, with major consequences for the lives of women who become widows. This patrilocal living situation has often resulted in greater inequality between marital partners and harsh rules for widows, often preventing a wife from any material heritage after her husband’s death. According to the work of evolutionary psychologists, married women who live with or in close contact with their matrilineal family run a significantly lower risk of violence in the form of (physical) abuse, rape and exploitation than those who move in with their husband’s family. This is all the more true for a widow with a distrustful family-in-law who accuse her of killing her husband, a danger that is greatest in areas where poverty reigns.

At a point you have said, “The Aryan period, which preceded later negative social developments, saw a differently structured society in which there was more space for women: to a certain extent women had religious autonomy, they were entitled to education at all levels (with some even becoming celebrated authors), they participated in public life and also held important positions… However, by the year 200 AD, their position had considerably worsened.” Do you have any idea why their condition worsened in India? What were the ‘negative social developments’ you mention?

In matters of religion the woman was increasingly dependent on the services of her husband or of priests, possibly also on her sons or male relatives, to carry out the rituals she required. Simultaneously she became largely excluded from all types of formalised education. This lasting effect can be seen even today in the global difference in the rate of female and male literacy. The negative stance towards women in India dates back to Brahmin commentaries of ancient Vedic texts, which referred to women as lesser humans; widows subsequently occupied an even lower rung on the social ladder and were forced to work hard towards their religious salvation through extreme asceticism. One example: ‘At her pleasure [after the death of her husband], let her emaciate her body by living only on pure flowers, roots of vegetables and fruits. She must not even mention the name of any other men after her husband has died.’ (Manusmriti Kamam 5/160) Patriarchal relations have developed gradually in different parts of the world and at different times, but not everywhere in the same rigorous forms.

In the Abron-Kulango culture in the northeast of his native Côte d’Ivoire, you have told us “[B]oth widows and widowers were required to accompany their spouse to the next world” but eventually due to societal realisations, such practices stopped. Do you think this can happen in other cultures too. Have you seen it happen in other cultures?

As far as I know, such practices do not exist anywhere anymore. The most problematic obstacle for the rights of widow’s in less-well off regions is the unfortunate combination of illiteracy, fear of witchcraft and covetous in-laws, particularly during periods of mourning and grief. The good news is that even in the most unexpected places initiatives are emerging to help inform women in rural areas of their equality before the law. Self-aware widows become inspiring role models; conscious of their rights, they share their knowledge with others so that more of their fellow widows can find the right legal aid when injustice rears its head.

Would you hold as culprit people who enforce the death of widows? Would you address these people too as criminals in today’s context? Please elaborate.

It wouldn’t help much to do this! Marriage is still frequently presented as the utmost peak that a woman can achieve during her life. From this supposed top spot married women often still look at single and widowed women in a new light—with pity, contempt, suspicion or even hostility: they are out to seduce your own husband! When death comes calling, not only men’s but also women’s negative feelings easily bubble up from the morass of fear at the dreaded prospect of becoming a widow. Over the centuries such reactions towards widows have become part of the constrictive hierarchy meant to keep so many women in their place.

Can sati be justified [1](even though they are deemed illegal as is suicide) by saying the widow immolated herself willingly? Please explain.

The social pressure on widows must have been immense, but we are living now and no longer in the past. It is true that in poorer regions far out of the reach of cities, countless numbers of widows still have to traverse a long road towards a humane and dignified existence. However, instead of justifying the willingness to immolate herself as her own choice, it is better to insist on the positive news that, after the loss of their partner, today not only men but also women have the right to stay alive and further explore their own talents and new possibilities.

You have told us dowry started as a European custom. Is it still a custom there as it is in parts of South Asia, even if deemed illegal? Was it brought into Asia by Aryans/colonials or a part of the culture earlier itself?

The dowry is the gift that the bride’s family would contribute to the couple’s new home. Even though colonisation may have reinforced this ancient custom, but in many communities, it was already a custom and still is in many parts of the world. In Europe it stayed on until the late nineteenth century. In cultures where the bride provided a dowry, the death of a wife would bring benefits to a widower, as a new wife with a new dowry would enrich his home with new assets such as silver tableware, jewellery, bed linen and other valuables. For centuries, among Christians, divorce was forbidden, and from the perspective of widowers the prospect of a second chance provoked a sense of euphoria, as expressed in quite some sayings where his sadness does not go beyond the front door. Across Europe such messages confirm a husband’s profit of his wife’s death: ‘Dead wives and live sheep make a man rich.’ (French; UK English). However, most widows were denied such liberating feelings or didn’t experience any profit from the change. Often, they did not even allow themselves to get over her loss and indulge in any new freedom. They usually were subject to the paralysing fear of other people’s gossip.

In many places a widow who remarried would even lose entitlement to her own dowry or other input she had contributed to her marriage. Many women who remarried felt unable to invoke any right they had on the property of their deceased husband. Little wonder, therefore, that widows were heavily discouraged from remarrying, for example in China. The use of far-reaching laws still re-enforced the highly recommended chaste and sexless existence of widows after the death of her husband. Of course, the considerable number of child marriages in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia easily robbed child widows from the legal rights wherever they had. According to the World Widows Report, the situation for widows with children is still exceptionally alarming in many parts of the world. Daughters, in particular, remain a huge problem in traditions where women have to contribute a dowry when daughters get married. For this reason alone, poorer parents have a preference for sons: they are more likely to inherit from their father’s family, while their widowed mother can expect little.

Has the condition of widows across the world improved over time? Please elaborate.

Over the centuries far too many widows have been convinced that their only future was conditioned by their dead husband. In my book there are examples from different areas of courageous widows who changed their own lives. Looking around in one’s own neighbourhood, there are always exemplary models of independent widows who do not let themselves be deterred by the doom of whatever prejudiced people think or say.

All emancipation starts with the opportunity to acquire knowledge, but if we are to believe what tradition tells us, women had little need for that, based on an assumption that knowledge did nothing to encourage and promote female obedience, and even less for virtue. ‘Knowledge goes before virtue for men, virtue before knowledge for women’ is an old saying in Europe, while a Chinese saying also agrees that a woman without knowledge is already doing very well. The fact that this message has had such a wide-ranging effect can be seen in the vast difference in levels of education and training among boys and girls in global education statistics.

What did a man look out for when it came to finding a wife? In order to facilitate control over women, various warnings have been passed down to men. One such proverb found the world over clearly expresses this sentiment: ‘Never marry a woman with big feet.’ It comes from the Sena language in Malawi and Mozambique. In China, India and other parts of the world, I came across literal iterations of this proverb. In spite of geographic or cultural distances and differences, this saying reflects a widespread consensus: hierarchy in male-female relations seemed to be essential, and someone had to be in charge. Should he become the main breadwinner for the duration of their married life, his wife will be even more dependent on him.

Significantly the big feet metaphor points to male fear of female talents and power. Hardly surprising therefore that becoming a widow was the worst possible catastrophe for women. Worldwide the solidarity between wives and widows is growing and literacy support within local communities as well, while the former unwavering prejudices against widows are shrinking, and more and more widows with big feet do manage. The old anti-widow stronghold of local prejudice is slowly but surely crumbling into ruins. We cannot change history, but widows can look to the past with new knowledge and into the future with new eyes and new hope.

Thank you Mineke for your time and book.

Click here to read an excerpt from Widows

[1] https://theprint.in/ground-reports/sati-economy-still-roars-in-rajasthan-youtube-as-jaipur-court-closes-roop-kanwar-case/2331357/

(This review/interview has been written/ conducted by Mitali Chakravarty.)

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Review

Short Stories by Nazrul

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: The Collected Short Stories of Kazi Nazrul Islam

Editors: Syed Manzoorul Islam and Kaustav Chakraborty

Publisher: Orient Blackswan

He dons many mantles. Kazi Nazrul Islam (1899 – 1976), the national poet of Bangladesh, was a prolific Bengali poet, revolutionary, essayist, journalist, editor, activist and composer of songs. The very mention of his name conjures up the figure of a fiery iconoclast who fought against the structures of oppression and orthodoxy in society to bring about progress and change. In fact, his self-styled image as the volatile bidrohi or ‘rebel poet’ overshadows his other literary achievements and that is how ordinary people still remember him.

This unique volume presents all twenty of Kazi Nazrul Islam’s short stories for the first time in English translation. Done by different hands, they feature rich imagery, evocative landscapes, references to music, classical poetry, folktales and more. The prominent characteristics of these stories are simplicity, vivacity and emotionality. They have been sourced from different anthologies. The first six stories are from the collection Harvest of Sorrow1.  The opening story of the collection titled “Harvest of Sorrow”, is a collage of tales narrated by the three characters: Dara, Bedoura and Saiful Mulk. Dara, located in Iran’s Golestan, narrates his tale of love, separation and devotion to his motherland through a series of reminiscences. After that, we hear the same set of events narrated from Bedoura’s perspective. Then follows the account narrated by Saiful Mulk, portrayed as a sinner who tempted Bedoura into losing her virginity. Overcome by guilt, he joins the freedom struggle where he encounters Dara. What follows is a tale of redemption loss and transcendence of physical love to a more spiritual kind of love. “Hena”, the second story of the collection, is narrated by Sohrab, and its theme is also love and war – both internal and external battle. “In the Relentless Rain” is basically a story of love between strangers. The author doesn’t provide us the names of the lovers – rather both are addressed as dark-skinned. The next story, “Half Asleep”, is divided into two parts: Azhar’s story and Pari’s story. Azhar’s story is mainly about his sacrifices and why he favours detachment from the sensuousness. His renunciation of carnal pleasures towards attaining greater contentment ends his relationship with Pari, whose marriage he arranges with one of his friends. He ensures that Pari remains confined within the household structure. By making Pari assert that she will not betray her role as a loving wife without pretending to erase the love that she has for her former lover, Nazrul offers a critique of the conventional notion of ‘loyalty’ of wives to serve their husbands. The first-person narrator of “Insatiate Desire” soliloquizes on a saga of disunited love where the narrator falls in love with his childhood friend, feigns disinterest in her when her marriage is arranged to another man, and characterises his own actions as stemming from the most noble impulses. The final piece of the volume, “Letter from a Political Prisoner”, is an epistolary story of a political prisoner who has also been diagnosed with fatal tuberculosis. The story is addressed to the lady of his dreams, Manashi, who does not seem to have reciprocated his love.

 The title story of the next section is from an anthology of the same name, The Agony of the Destitute2. The story centres around the glorification of war but in the process, it also raises questions related to war and gender. In sharp contrast to the narrator-protagonist of this narrative who detaches himself from domesticity to join the war, the protagonist of the very next story, “Autobiography of a Vagabond” suffers a tragic end to his domestic life and thereafter joins the army and eventually dies while fighting in Baghdad. “Meher Negar”, the third story of this section, is another tale of war and conflicts in love. Yusuf Khan, the protagonist, is a Pathan from the mountains of Waziristan who meets Meher Negar (whose actual name is Gulshan) after reaching a distant land to learn music. Later he joins the War of Independence for Afghanistan. Unable to forget her, he visits Meher Negar one last time only to discover that she is no more. As an allegorical piece of writing, “Evening Star” is about a man’s love for a distant beloved that is ultimately futile because of the probable demise of the beloved.

“Rakshasi” is written in the language spoken by the Bagdi community of the Birbhum district in West Bengal in which the speaker Bindi is a woman who complains to her friend about how society has stigmatized her as a demoness because she has killed her husband to save him from abandoning her and getting remarried to a notorious girl.“Salek” is a short moral story where, through a series of events, a dervish (later revealed to be Hafiz) shows an arrogant Kazi the path to salvation; the former becomes the latter’s salek or the one who shows the way. In “The Widow”, Begum, the narrator, speaks of her sorrowful youth, her happy married life and the miseries of her widowhood to her friend Salima. The story challenge multiple stereotypes that are often associated with the women of South Asia. The concluding tale of this volume is titled “The Restless Traveller” which is an impressionistic story centered round the urge towards finding freedom by restless youth.

The four stories that comprise the third volume of Nazrul’s stories and the next section, called The Shiuli Mala3, speak about Nazrul’s ecological sensitivity. The opening story “The Lotus-Cobras” is about Zohra and her human and non-human intimacies. As the editors rightly point out, “In the portrayal of Zohra’s attachment with her serpent sons, Nazrul seems to be very close to the essence of posthumanism where radical posthuman subjectivity is understood on the basis of an intersectional ethics of plurality”. “The King of the Djinns” is a tragicomic story about how Alla-Rakha, the protagonist, resorts to a series of tricks to get married to Chan Bhanu, the woman he desires. “The Volcano” deals with the disaster that is caused by the sudden eruption of repressed anger and egotistic pride in Sabur, the humble, helpful and uncomplaining protagonist of the story. It is a study of the anxiety of manliness. “The Shiuli Mala”, the concluding story of this section, is a testimony to Nazrul’s love for the trope of separated lovers or unrequited love. Set in Shillong, it primarily deals with a platonic and disunited love between Azhar, a well-known chess player, and Shiuli, the daughter of another brilliant chess player, Professor Chowdhury. Structured as a flashback, Azhar narrates the story to his friends who are part of a regular chess adda.

Two unanthologised stories end the collection. “Letter from a Lost Boy” is an epistolary account of a boy who writes to his mother about some incidents in his life that have occurred since he had left her until the time of his return. The story is a critique of child marriage and the consequent early widowhood that brings never-ending misery in the life of a woman. “The Hawk-Cuckoo from the Woods” tells the story of a marital discord between Dushasan Mitra and his wife Romola. Their friction widens after Romola becomes too attached to an injured hawk-cuckoo and her husband feels agitated by her gradual disconnect from their conjugal life.  The story ends with Romola flaying her husband for throwing the bird away, finding and hugging the dying bird to her heart and plunging into the waters of the Padma.

All these twenty stories invite the reader to re-evaluate the ‘rebel poet’ as an empathetic humanitarian who also excelled in human relationships. Nazrul is essentially multilingual – he uses Hindi, Urdu, Arabic and Persian words along with Bangla. This book is the outcome of a project sponsored by the Nazrul Centre for Social and Cultural Studies, Kazi Nazrul University, Asansol, West Bengal. The volume is a transnational, collaborative labour of love bringing together the editors and translators from Bangladesh and India. Most of them are academics and have taken up the challenge to translate the stories, which in their infinite variety, is indeed a difficult task. The stories are accompanied by a timeline of Nazrul’s life and a detailed critical introduction that not only provides foundational context for the stories, but also highlights Nazrul’s attempt to counter majoritarianism and various hegemonies by dismantling hierarchies and celebrating intimate pluralities. In fact, at the end of their introduction, the editors Syed Manzoorul Islam and Kaustav Chakraborty ask two very pertinent questions. “In which category can we place Nazrul? Is there a need to formulate a different category altogether in order to position him?” The answers of course lie with the readers of the translated stories to decide. All said and done, this volume of short stories is strongly recommended for all classes of readers who are keen to discover the multi-faceted genius of Kazi Nazrul Islam and who could not earlier savour their uniqueness because they were only written in Bangla.

  1. Byathar Daan (Harvest of Sorrows) published in March 1922 ↩︎
  2. Rikter Bedon (Agony of the Destitute) published in January 1925 ↩︎
  3. Shiuli Mala (Garland of Jasmines) published in October 1931 ↩︎

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

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Review

Saga of Palestinian Identity

Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: My Palestine: An Impossible Exile 

Author: Mohammad Tarbush 

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

“The theme of this book is Palestine and its history, and the displacement and exile of its people. But it is, above all, a human story… My father’s story makes the basic point that, like all people, the Palestinians are made of flesh and blood and their children feel the agony of pain as strongly as they enjoy the warmth of happiness.”

—Nada Tarbush (Son of Mohammed Tarbush) in the ‘Foreword’.

Mohammad Tarbush was born in Beit Nattif, located in proximity to Jerusalem. In 1988, he assumed the role of managing director at Deutsche Bank, subsequently moving to UBS. He has authored multiple books, including Reflections of a Palestinian. His articles concerning Palestine have been published in various esteemed outlets, such as the International Herald Tribune, The Guardian, and the Financial Times among others.

 As a child, he and his family were compelled to leave their village along with the entire community following the Zionist victory that resulted in the formation of the State of Israel. This upheaval marked a profound turning point in their lives, as they were forced to abandon their homes, their memories, and the land that had been their ancestral heritage for generations. The trauma of displacement was palpable, as families were torn apart and communities fragmented, leaving behind a deep sense of loss and longing.

Subsequently, as displaced refugees in the West Bank, the family fell into a state of poverty. The harsh realities of refugee life were stark — they struggled to find adequate shelter, access to education, and basic necessities. The once vibrant community they had known was replaced by a life of uncertainty and hardship, where every day was a battle for survival. The children, including him, were often caught in the crossfire of political tensions, their dreams overshadowed by the weight of their circumstances. Yet, amidst the adversity, a resilient spirit emerged, fostering a sense of solidarity among the displaced families.

During his teenage years, Tarbush departed from home, ostensibly to visit relatives in Jordan; however, he embarked on a year-long hitchhiking adventure across Europe. This journey was not merely a quest for adventure but a profound exploration of identity and purpose.

As he traversed the diverse landscapes of Europe, he encountered a myriad of cultures, ideas, and perspectives that broadened his worldview. Each hitchhike brought new experiences, from the bustling streets of Paris to the serene countryside of Italy, and he absorbed the lessons of resilience and ambition that he witnessed in the lives of others.

Ultimately, he achieved great success as an international banker, navigating the complex world of finance with skill and acumen. His rise in the banking sector was marked by a blend of hard work, strategic thinking, and an innate ability to connect with people from various backgrounds.

Despite his professional accomplishments, he remained deeply aware of his roots and the struggles of his people. He became a significant, albeit discreet, advocate for the Palestinian cause, using his influence and resources to raise awareness and support for those who continued to suffer from the consequences of displacement and conflict.

Through his advocacy, Tarbush sought to bridge the gap between his successful life in the West and the harsh realities faced by his community back home. He understood that his journey was not just about personal achievement but also about giving voice to the voiceless and fighting for justice. His story became a testament to resilience.

In My Palestine, Mohammad Tarbush intertwines a moving personal narrative with sharp political and economic analysis, reflecting on the significant events that have influenced the history of Israel, Palestine, and the contemporary Middle East.

The sturdy book offers a profound exploration of the Palestinian experience, capturing the essence of resilience that defines a people who have faced immense challenges and adversities. Through a lens of deep empathy and insight, the narrative delves into the multifaceted struggles and triumphs of the Palestinian community, illustrating how they navigate the calamities that have profoundly impacted their lives.

 At its core, the narrative serves as a heartfelt and poignant testament to the ingenuity of the human spirit. It highlights not only the hardships endured but also the remarkable ways in which individuals and communities adapt, innovate, and find strength in the face of overwhelming odds. The stories woven throughout the narrative reflect a rich tapestry of cultural heritage, personal sacrifice, and unwavering hope, showcasing how the Palestinian people maintain their identity and dignity despite the challenges they encounter.

The book chronicles the everyday realities of those living in a region marked by conflict and uncertainty. It emphasises the importance of storytelling as a means of preserving history and fostering understanding, allowing the voices of the Palestinian people to resonate with authenticity and depth.

Through vivid imagery and compelling accounts, the narrative underscores the resilience that is not merely a response to adversity but a fundamental aspect of the Palestinian identity.

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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In the Footsteps of the Man Who Walked From England to India in 1613

Book Review by Rakhi Dalal

Book Title: The Long Strider in Jehangir’s Hindustan: In the Footsteps of the Englishman Who Walked From England to India in the Year 1613

Authors: Dom Moraes and Sarayu Srivatsa

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

During the years, in the early seventeenth century, when East India Company began a search for the possibilities of trade with India via sea route, Thomas Coryate of the village Odcombe in Somerset, England, made an ambitious plan to travel to the Indies, as he called it, on foot. This wasn’t his first undertaking. Having travelled across Europe on foot before, writing a travelogue Crudities on his experience which brought him some fame, he now wished to travel to a place no Englishmen had gone before. Motivated by the thought of gaining more fame with this venture so as to win the affection of Lady Ann Harcourt of Prince Henry’s Court, even the idea of traversing 5000 miles on foot as compared to 1975 miles that he did in Europe did not dissuade him.   

Known as ‘the long strider’, in 1612, Coryate set for his journey to the Indies from London. And in year 1999, more than three hundred years later, his journey and subsequent struggles, somehow inspired Dom Moraes to traverse the same route to correlate Coryate’s experience in the now altered places and its people. Coryate travelled alone, Moraes took the journey with Sarayu Srivatsa, the co-author of this book.

Dom Moraes, poet, novelist and columnist, is seen as a foundational figure in Indian English Literature. He published nearly thirty books in his lifetime. In 1958, at the age of twenty, he won the prestigious Hawthornden Prize for poetry. He was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Award for English in 1994. The Long Strider in Jehangir’s Hindustan was first published in the year 2003. Moraes passed away in 2004.

Sarayu Srivatsa, trained as an architect and city planner at the Madras and Tokyo universities, was a professor of architecture at Bombay University. Her book, Where the Streets Lead, published in 1997 had won the JIIA Award. She also co-authored two books with Dom Moraes: The Long Strider, and Out of God’s Oven (shortlisted for the Kiriyama Prize). Her first novel, The Last Pretence, was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize, and upon its release in the UK (under the title If You Look For Me, I am Not Here), was also included on The Guardian’s Not the Booker Prize longlist.

Srivatsa, who travelled with Moraes to all the places Coryate passed through, writes diary chapters coextending the same routes subsequently. So, each fictive reconstruction of a period and place of Coryate’s travel by Moraes is followed by a diary chapter for the same place by Srivatsa. In that sense the book becomes part biographical fiction and part memoir. 

Coryate, son of a Vicar and dwarfish in stature, was seized by this desire to gain fame and respect. What desire seized the imagination of Moraes, eludes this reader. It, however, doesn’t escape the notice that both the writers shared somewhat similar plight towards the end.

Some of Coryate’s writing during the period did not survive as it was destroyed by Richard Steele, but the rest was sent to England and was posthumously published in an anthology in 1625. Basing his research on such sources, after extensive three years of investigation, Moraes managed to create an account of Coryate’s demeanour, his lived life in a new land with diverse people and customs at different places which he found both shocking and fascinating.  Coryate found the people of India loud and violent but he was also touched by their generosity and kindness. He witnessed the disagreements between Hindus and Muslims, the caste system where the upper caste oppressed the people from lower caste, sati, and the ways of Buddhist monks, Sikhs, pundits of Benaras and Aghoris[1], the lifestyle of Jehangir and the city of Agra before Taj Mahal. He was fortunate to have an audience with Jehangir, the main reason of his travel, but he failed in securing his patronage or enough money to continue to China which he had been his original intent.

In Moraes’ writing, the era comes alive. Vivid imagery and description makes the struggles and sufferings of Coryate palpable on one hand and on the other offer a view on the unfolding of history in a country where these many hundred years later, the echoes of a past similar to the present can be heard. In the preface, Moraes posits one of the reasons to take on the book — to compare the India then with the country during his times. As the reader proceeds with the story, the comparison becomes apparent in Moraes’ construction vis-a-vis Srivatsa’s entries.

Towards the end, an ailing Coryate succumbed to his illness and his body was buried somewhere near the dock at Surat. He could not make a journey home in 1615, but in 2003 a brick from his supposed tomb was sent back to the church in Odcombe by Srivatsa where a ninety six year old vicar waited patiently for the only famous man from Odcombe to return home. The epilogue by Srivatsa gives an account of Moraes’ own struggle with cancer and his demise in 2004, a year after the book was published. It is but right that the soil from his grave in Mumbai also found a resting place in Odcombe.    

[1] Devotees of Shiva

Rakhi Dalal writes from a small city in Haryana, India. Her work has appeared in Kitaab, Scroll, Borderless Journal, Nether Quarterly, Aainanagar, Hakara Journal, Bound, Parcham and Usawa Literary Review. 

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

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

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Categories
Review

Safdar Hashmi: Towards Theatre for a Democracy

Book Review by Meenakshi Malhotra

Title: Safdar Hashmi: Towards Theatre for a Democracy

Author: Anjum Katyal

Publisher: Orient Blackswan

How do you write a biography of a man who was yet to reach the full expression of his multifaceted talents? How do you document his contribution to social action? Do you say that the tragedy of such a premature death is not only that he died young, but that his  life was cut short while his talents were still quivering on the cusp of flowering, struggling for full self-expression? As witnesses to this shocking and traumatic event, we can call it a critical event; a moment in time which is still out of it. It is a moment of reckoning which forces us to revisit our assumptions about theatre as entertainment, a Brechtian moment which alienates us from our previous experience and which forces on us “a new and shocking revelation/revaluation of all we have been.”

In a kind of tragic irony, Safdar Hashmi’s[1]story became front page news when he was brutally attacked by some goons who were trying to stop the Jana Natya Manch actors from enacting a street play in Sahibad, one of Delhi’s industrial suburbs, on the 2nd of January, 1989. At that time, he was barely 35 years old.

Born into a close-knit family in 1954, the youngest of four siblings, Safdar Hashmi grew up in Delhi and Aligarh. His first few years of initial schooling were Aligarh and then he moved to Delhi, where he graduated from St Stephens. While the family had to struggle financially, they had plenty of opportunities to be involved in the vibrant cultural scene of Delhi in the late 1960s and early 1970s.  Safdar Hashmi: Towards Theatre for a Democracy by Anjum Katyal, a writer, editor and translator, with a forward by the eminent actor Naseeruddin Shah, details the journey of Hashmi, his total dedication to and involvement with theatre. In his forward, Shah writes that Hashmi was an actor who was unconcerened with personal fame or celebritydom. He was a theatre activist who saw theatre as a means of social action and an instrument of change; he was so dedicated to his work that he was “willing to die for it”.

The book houses his early years, his stint in Kashmir, where he proved to be a catalyst in college and university theatre and drew students into it. He worked for the newly instituted television industry in Kashmir, which helped him earn some much needed money to sustain his passionate love for his own work with street theatre .

 The slim volume is a veritable treasure trove of anecdotes about theatre from one of its scholars and connoisseurs and the narrative of Safdar’s journey is interspersed with rich dollops of theatre history. Katyal tell us stories of theatre giants like Badal Sircar, Utpal Dutt, Vinod Nagpal and M.K.Raina, thespians whose life stories and work were closely entwined with the history of theatre in India.

To quote the author, “[T]here is little reliable scholarship on the history of theater in India and on Safdar Hashmi’s contribution to Indian theatre.” Katyal’s book on Hashmi addresses both the issues, covering a substantial chunk of post-independence theatre and specifically the 1960s and seventies. Thus, we get to hear about the contributions of Utpal Dutt and Badal Sircar, doyennes and trail blazers of people’s theatre.  Katyal examines the larger socio-political environment against which  activist theatre evolved within the country. Drawing from different folk traditions , this adumbrated the vision that was truly democratic in its scope and reach and which moved out of proscenium theatre to reach trade unions and factory workers, the streets, factories and the marketplace.

Utpal Dutt, the intrepid screen and theatre actor recalled that they were  “infected by the real IPTA[2]’s concern for the people’s political struggle” and he professed, “the exhilaration of direct political action…changed me completely”.  These actors also offered valuable insights into the nature of the street theatre, including its capacity for consciousness raising and revolutionary action. Many of the street plays with their specific critiques “gathered the dispersed rage (of the people); it rallied angry men into an angry mass.”

Apart from socio-economic issues like price rise and labour exploitation, street theatre also focused on  political issues like the Emergency  and the Naxalite movement. In terms of experiments with form, in 1972 Badal Sircar and his group, Satabdi[3], introduced their Third Theatre; pieces evolved through intensive workshops. The physical and even  “graphic body  language, the ensemble approach in which all actors formed a close part of the whole with interchangeable ‘roles’,  the simple uniform-like costumes, and the strategic props were all taken straight from the news or the actors’ lives, in many cases. The narrative was often non-linear, like a collage of facts , ideas and images”.

Non-proscenium theatre, which could be performed in intimate spaces or outdoors for larger audiences, inspired groups in other parts of the country to evolve performances, which were experimental and non-formal,  combining disparate styles. The Third Theatre enabled practitioners the flexibility to practise their art even if they had no access to funds or sponsors. However, state-sponsored violence and the imposition of the Emergency in 1975 clamped down on street and activist theatre in India.

From IPTA to the plays of Utpal Dutt and Badal Sircar, the book gives a dialogic account of history of theatre, both for the specialist and non-specialist alike. Safdar Hashmi himself has written quite extensively on the history of street theatre, stating that “street theatre as it is known today can trace its direct lineage no further than the years immediately after the Russian Revolution of 1917.” It was a basically a militant, political theatre of protest. As Katyal traces the history of street theatre, she writes, “The history of street theatre in India is usually traced back to the 1940s and to the IPTA. However, the attempt to use theatre in public spaces to communicate a political message to the common people began as early as the 1930s, when the SFI[4] started using it to spread the message of class struggle among the masses.”

JANAM or the Jana (People’s) Natya (Dramatics ) Manch (Stage)was founded by Safdar Hashmi in 1973. He poured himself into developing plays like Machine, From the Village to the City and Killers, which demonstrated the group’s commitment to workers’ rights and issues. The group also took up women’s causes to raise consciousness in a society which had normalised violence against women. Their play, Aurat (Woman), met with unprecedented success and had 2500 shows. Their theatre also dealt with sectarian or communal violence.

In her book, Katyal ultimately  locates the significance of Safdar Hashmi’s and the Jana Natya Manch’s work in its strengthening of democracy and democratic processes. Tragically and ironically, he paid a high price for it.

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[1] Safdar Hashmi (1954-1989) was one of the most major proponents of street theatre in India.

[2] Indian People’s Theatre Association founded in 1943.

[3] Translates to mean century

[4] Student Federation of India

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Dr Meenakshi Malhotra is Associate 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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PLEASE NOTE: ARTICLES CAN ONLY BE REPRODUCED IN OTHER SITES WITH DUE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT TO BORDERLESS JOURNAL

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

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Categories
Interview Review

Mandalas, Malashri Lal & the Pilkhan Tree…

In Conversation with Malashri Lal, about her debut poetry collection, Mandalas of Time, Hawakal Publishers

Professor Malashree Lal 
Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.

-- TS Eliot, Burnt Norton, Four Quartets(1941)

‘Mandalas’ means circle in Sanskrit, the root, or at last the influencer, of most of the Indian languages in the subcontinent. Sanskrit belongs to the Indo-Germanic family, which homes Latin and Greek among other languages. Malashri Lal, a former professor in Delhi University, has called her poetry collection Mandalas of Time. 

Her poetry reiterates the cyclical nature of the title, loaning from the past to blend the ideas with the present and stretching to assimilate the varied colours of cultures around the world.

Embracing an array of subjects from her heritage to her family — with beautiful touching poems for her grandchild — to migrants and subtle ones on climate change too, the words journey through a plethora of ideas. Nature plays an important role in concretising and conveying her thoughts. In one of the poems there is a fleeting reference to wars — entwined with the Pilkhan (fig) tree:

The Pilkhan tree thinks of its many years
Of shedding leaves, bearing inedible fruit, of losing limbs
But smiles at his troubles being far less 
Than of unfortunate humans
Who kill each other in word and deed
But gather around the tree each Christmas 
With fulsome gifts and vacant smiles 
To bring in another New Year.

--Another New Year

Amaltas (Indian Laburnum) or Bougainvillea bind her love for nature to real world issues:

Only the Amaltas roots, meshed underground 
Thrust their tendrils into the earth’s sinews below.
Sucking moisture from the granular sand, desperately.
The golden flowers pendent in the sun, mock the traveller 
Plump, succulent, beacon-like, they tease with 
The promise of water 
Where there is none.

--Amaltas in Summer

And…

The Bougainvillea is a migrant tree, blossom and thorn
That took root in our land 
And spread its deception
Of beauty.

--Bougainvillea

Her most impactful poems are women centric.

Words crushed into silence
Lips sealed against utterance
Eyes hooded guardedly
Body cringing into wrinkled tightness 
Is this what elders called 
‘Maidenly virtue?’

--Crushed

There is one about a homeless woman giving birth at Ratlam station during the pandemic chaos, based on a real-life incident:

Leave the slum or pay the rent 
Who cares if she is pregnant, 
Get out — go anywhere.
… 
Ratlam station; steady hands lead her to the platform.
Screened by women surrounding her
A kind lady doctor takes control.
Pooja sees a puckered face squinting into the first light.
"This is home," she mutters wanly,
"Among strangers who cut the cord and feed my newborn,” 

-- Ladies Special

In another, she writes of Shakuntala — a real-world migrant who gave birth during the covid exodus. She birthed a child and within the hour was on her way to her home again — walking. It reminds one of Pearl S Buck’s description of the peasant woman in Good Earth (1931) who pauses to give birth and then continues to labour in the field.

Most interesting is her use of mythology — especially Radha and Sita — two iconic characters out of Indian lore. In one poem, she finds a parallel to “Sita’s exile” in Italy, at Belisama’s shrine. In another, she finds the divine beloved Radha, who was older to Krishna and married to another, pining after the divinity when he leaves to pursue his life as an adult. And yet, she questions modern stances through poems on more historical women who self-immolated themselves when their husbands lost in battle!

Malashri Lal has turned her faculties post-retirement to literary pursuits. One of her co- authored books around the life of the poet Michael Madhusudan Dutt, received the Kalinga award for fiction. She currently serves on the English advisory board of Sahitya Akademi. In this conversation, Lal discusses her poetry, her journey and unique perceptions of two iconic mythological women who figure in her poetry.

When did you start writing poetry? 

Possibly my earliest poetry was written when I was about twelve, struggling with the confusing emotions of an adolescent. I would send off my writing to The Illustrated Weekly which used to have pages for young people, and occasionally I got published. After that, I didn’t write poetry till I was almost in my middle age when the personal crisis of losing my parents together in a road accident brought me to the outpourings and healing that poetry allows.

What gets your muse going? 

Emotional turmoil, either my own or what I observe within the paradigms of social change. With my interest in women’s issues, my attention is arrested immediately when I hear or read about injustice, violence, exploitation or negligence of women or girl children. It doesn’t have to be a dramatic or extreme event but even the simple occurrences of decision making by a husband without consulting his wife has me concerned about the dignity and agency of a woman. Some poems like “Escape”, hint at such inequality that society takes for granted. On the other hand, my poems about migrant women giving birth on the long march to a hypothetical  village “home”  during the pandemic, are vivid transferences from newspaper stories. “Ladies Special” is about Pooja Devi giving birth at Ratlam station; “The Woman Migrant Worker” is based on a  report about  Shakuntala who stopped by the roadside to give birth to a baby and a few hours later, joined the walking crowd again. 

Why did you name your poetry book Mandalas of Time? 

To me ‘Mandalas’ denote centres of energy. Each node, though distinct in itself, coheres with the others that are contiguous, thus resulting in a corporeal body of interrelatedness. My poems are short bursts of such energy, concentrated on a subject. They are indicative of a situation but not prescriptive in offering solutions. Hence the spiritual energy of ‘Mandalas’, a term used in many traditions, seemed best suited to my offering of poems written during periods  of heightened consciousness and introspection. The poems are also multilayered, hence in constant flux, to be interpreted through the reader’s response. Many of them end in questions, as I do not have answers.  The reader is implicitly invited to peruse  the subject some more . It’s not about closure but openness. See for instance: “Crushed”, or “Shyamoli”. 

Today, I rebel and tug at a
Divided loyalty —
The feudal heritage of my childhood
Fights off the reformist Bengali lineage, 
My troubled feminism struggling 
Between Poshak  and Purdah 
White Thaan  and patriotism 
Can one push these ghosts aside?

--Shyamoli
*Poshak: Rajasthani dress
*Thaan: White saree worn by the Bengali widow

You have written briefly of your mixed heritage, also reflected in your poem dedicated to Tagore, in whose verses it seems you find resolution. Can you tell us of this internal clash of cultures? What exactly evolved out of it? 

My bloodline is purely Bengali but my parents nor I ever lived in Bengal. My father was in the IAS in the Rajasthan cadre and my mother, raised in Dehradun, did a lot of social work. In the 1950s and 1960s, Rajasthan was economically and socially confined to a feudal heritage and a strictly hierarchical structure. Rama Mehta’s novel Inside the Haveli (1979), describes this social construction with great sensitivity. Elite homes had separate areas for men and women, and, within that, a layout of rooms and courtyards that were defined for specific use by specified individuals according to their seniority or significance. Such hierarchies existed in Bengal too — the ‘antarmahal[1]’ references bear this out —  but the multiple layers in Rajasthan seemed more restrictive.   

In my “mixed heritage” of being born of Bengali parents but raised in Rajasthan, I started noting the contrasts as well as  the similarities. I recall that when my father went on tours by jeep into the interior villages along rutted roads, I would simply clamber on. At one time I lived in a tent, with my parents, during the entire camel fair at Pushkar. I would listen to the Bhopa singers of the Phad painting tradition late into the evening.  So my understanding and experience of Rajasthan is deep into its roots.

Phad painting
Bhopa singers
From Public Domain

Bengal– that is only Calcutta and Santiniketan–I know through my visits to grandparents, aunts and uncles. My cousins and I continue to be very close.  I saw a fairly elite side of Calcutta—the Clubs, the Race Course, the restaurants on Park Street, the shopping at New Market, and sarees displays at Rashbehari Avenue. Santiniketan though was different.  I was drawn to the stories of the Santhal communities, visited their villages, attended the Poush Mela[2] regularly and knew several people in the university. After Delhi, the wide-open spaces, the ranga maati (red soil), the Mayurakhi River, and the tribal stories were fascinating. I am fluent in Bengali and because of my relatives in Calcutta as well as Santiniketan, I never felt an outsider. My father’s side of the family has  been at Viswa Bharati since the time of  Rabindranath Tagore. So, I felt comfortable in that environment. And through an NGO called Women’s Interlink Foundation, established by Mrs Aloka Mitra, I had easy access to Santhal villages such as Bonerpukur Danga.

Poush Mela, started by the Tagore Family in 1894
Santhali Performance at Poush Mela

However, in summary, though I lived with both the strains of Bengal and Rajasthan, the daily interaction in Jaipur where I received all my education till PhD, was more deeply my world. The fragmented identity that some poems convey is a genuine expression of figuring out a cultural belonging. Poems such as “To Rabindranath Tagore” helped me to understand that one can have multiple exposures and affiliations and be enriched by it.

Do you feel — as I felt in your poetry — that there is a difference in the cultural heritage of Bengal and Rajasthan that leads you to be more perceptive of the treatment of women in the latter state? Please elaborate. 

Indeed, you are right. Bengal has a reformist history, and my family are Brahmo Samaj followers. Education for women, choice in marriage partner, ability to take up a career were thought to be possible. My paternal grandmother, Jyotirmoyi Mukerji, was one of the early graduates from Calcutta University; she worked as an Inspectress of Schools, often travelling by bullock carts, and she married a school teacher who was a little younger than her. They together chose to live in Rangoon in undivided India, heading a school there. These were radical steps for women in the late 19th century.  My father grew up in Rangoon and came to Rajasthan as a refugee during the Second World War. My grandmother, who lived with us, was a tremendous influence denoting women’s empowerment. But what we saw around us in Jaipur was the feudal system and purdah for women in Rajasthan.

Fortunately, Maharani Gayatri Devi had set up a school in 1943 in Jaipur to bring modern thinking in the women, and I was fortunate to study there till I went to university. Let’s recall that Maharani Gayatri Devi was from Coochbehar (Bengal) and had studied at Santiniketan. She brought Bengal’s progressive ideas to the privileged classes of Rajasthan. My classmates were mostly princesses. I visited their homes and families and delved deeply into their history of feudalism. Without being judgmental, I must say that Rajasthan’s heritage is very complex and one must understand the reasons behind many practices and not condemn them.

You have brought in very popular mythological characters in your poems — Sita and Radha — both seen from a perspective that is unusual. Can you explain the similarity between Sita’s exile and Belisama’s shrine (in Italy)? Also why did you choose to deal with Radha in a post-Krishna world? 

Namita Gokhale and I have completed what is popularly known as the “Goddess Trilogy”. After In Search of Sita and Finding Radha,  the latest book, Treasures of Lakshmi: The Goddess Who Gives, was launched in February 2024 at the Jaipur Literature Festival, and the Delhi launch was on 8th October 2024 to invoke the festive season. 

Version 1.0.0

In answering your question let me say that myth is storytelling, an indirect way of contending with issues that are beyond ordinary logic or understanding. Sita and Belisama coming together is an illustration of what I mean. The backstory is that Namita Gokhale and I had a joint residency at Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio (Italy) and we were revising the final manuscript of our book In Search of Sita. The thrust of that book is to recall the strength of Sita in decision making, in being supportive of other women, in emerging as an independent minded person. Our research had unearthed a lot of new material including oral history and folklore. In Bellagio, we started enquiring about local mythical stories and chanced upon Belisama,[3] a Celtic goddess known for her radiant fire and light, and in the village we chanced upon an old grotto like structure.  Unlike in India, where we have a living mythology of commonly told and retold tales, in Italy the ancient legends were not remembered. The poem “Bellagio, Italy” took shape in  my imagination bringing Sita and Belisama, two extraordinary women, together.

As to my poems on Radha, I cannot think of a “post-Krishna” world since Vrindavan and Mathura keep alive the practices that are ancient and continuous. Radha is the symbol of a seeker  and Krishna is the elusive but ever watchful divine. They are body and soul, inseparable. The stories about “Radha’s Flute” or “Radha’s Dilemma” in poems by those names have an oral quality about them. The craft of writing is important, and for me, the theme decides the form.   

Interesting, as both the poems you mention made me think of Radha after Krishna left her for Rukmini, for his role in an adult world. You have a poem on Padmini. Again, your stance is unusual. Can you explain what exactly you mean — can self-immolation be justified in any way? 

This is a poem embedded in the larger query about comparative cultural studies. Rani Padmini’s story was written by Jayasi[4] in 1540, and it described  a ‘heroic’ decision by Padmini that she and her handmaidens should commit Jauhar (mass self-immolation)  rather than be taken prisoners and face humiliation and violent abuse by the men captors. You will note that my poem ends on a question mark: “I ask you if you can rewrite /values the past held strong?” Self-immolation has to be seen in the context of social practices at the time of Padmini (13-14th queen in Mewar, Rajasthan).  The jauhar performed by Rani Padmini of Chittor is narrated  even now through ballads and tales extolling the act if one goes into oral culture. But there is counter thinking too,  as was evident  in the controversy over Sanjay Leela Bhansali’s film Padmavat (2018) which stirred discussions on historicity, customary practice and oral traditions. Sati and Jauhar are now punishable offences under Indian law, but in recording oral history can one change the storyline?  It’s not just self-immolation that comes under such a category of questioning the past — polygamy, polyandry, child marriage, prohibitions on widows and many other practices are to be critiqued  in modern discourse,  but one cannot rewrite what has already been inscribed in an old  literary text. 

This is a question that draws from what I felt your poems led to, especially, the one on Padmini. Do you think by changing text in books, history can be changed? 

“History” is a matter of perspective combined with the factual record of events and episodes. Who writes the “history” and in what circumstances is necessary to ask. The narration or interpretation of history can be changed, and sometimes ought to be. To take an obvious case why is the “Sepoy Mutiny” of 1857 now referred to as the “First War of Independence”? In current discussions on Rana Pratap[5] in Rajasthan’s history, there are documents in local languages that reinterpret the Haldighati battle of 1576 not as the Rana’s defeat but his retreat into the forests and setting up his new kingdom in Chavand where he died in 1597. The colonial writers of history—at least in Rajasthan– were dependent on local informers and had little understanding of  the vast oral repertoire of the state. Even Col. James Tod’s Annals and Antiquities of Rajasthan (1829) about  the history, culture, and geography of some areas in Rajasthan, is often reproducing what he has heard from the bards and balladeers which are colourful and hyperbolic renderings as was the custom then. In Bengal, the impact of Tod is seen in Abanindranath Tagore’s[6] Rajkahini (1946), which is storytelling rather than verified facts. I feel history cannot be objective, it is author dependent.    

Nature, especially certain trees and plants seem to evoke poetry in you. It was interesting to see you pick a fig tree for commenting on conflicts. Why a Pilkhan tree? 

The Pilkhan is an enormous, bearded old fig tree that lives in our garden and is a witness to our periodic poetic gatherings. Mandalas of Time is dedicated to “The Poets under the Pilkhan Tree” because my book emerged from the camaraderie and the encouragement of this group. I see the tree as an observer and thinker about social change—it notes intergenerational conflict in “Another New Year”, it offers consolation against the terrors of the pandemic in the poem “Krishna’s Flute”.  It’s my green oasis in an urban, concrete-dominated Delhi. In the evening the birds chirp so loudly that we cannot hear ourselves speak. Squirrels have built nests into the Pilkhan’s  wide girth. It’s not a glamorous tree but ordinary and ample—just as life is. By now, my poet friends recognise the joy of sharing their work sitting in the shadow of this ancient giant. There are no hierarchies of age or reputation here. We are the chirping birds—equal and loquacious! 

You have successfully dabbled in both poetry and fiction, what genre do you prefer and why? 

Mandalas of Time is my first book of poems and it comprises of material written unselfconsciously over decades. During the pandemic years, I decided to put the manuscript together, urged by friends. Meanwhile my poems started appearing in several journals.

As to fiction, I’ve published a few short stories and I tend to write ghostly tales set in the mountains of Shimla. Its possibly the old and the new that collides there that holds my attention. I’ve been urged to write a few more and publish a book—but that may take a while.

Should we be expecting something new from your pen? 

Mandalas of Time has met with an amazing response in terms of reviews, interviews, speaking assignments, and online presentations.  The translation in Hindi by 13 well known poets is going into print very soon. Permission has been sought for a Punjabi translation. I’m overwhelmed by this wide empathy and it is making me consider putting together another book of poems.

Thank you for giving us your time.

Malashri Lal’s poetry can be accessed by Clicking at this link.

[1] Inner rooms for women mainly

[2] A fair held in December, where local vendors mingle with others to exhibit their wares and culture. It was started by the Tagore family in 1894. 

[3] Belisama was identified with the Roman virgin goddess of wisdom, justice and learning, Minerva, by interpretatio romana.

[4] An Indian Sufi poet who lived from 1477-1542

[5] Known as Maharana Pratap (1540-1597) too, he ruled over Mewar, which can be located in current day Rajasthan. 

[6] Abanindranath( 1871-1951) was the nephew of Rabindranath Tagore, known for his art and the impact he had on it.

(The online interview has been conducted through emails by Mitali Chakravarty.)

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Weaving Strands of the Past to Create an Imagined Place

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: A Person Is a Prayer

Author: Ammar Kalia

Publisher: Penguin Books

“This novel became a way to collect the strands of the past, to pull these disparate lives together and to give me an imagined place to stand upon.”  Ammar Kalia

Debut novels have a unique quality – the author takes extra care to deliver his best, whether in the form of storyline, or setting or stylistic devices. And though either subconsciously or deliberately borrowing from family history, he always tries to justify that the novel is not autobiographical, but a piece of fiction. A similar thing takes place with Ammar Kalia, the author of this novel under review, who is a writer, musician and journalist living in London. Beginning and ending his narration in March 1955, he tells us the story of the Bedis, a Punjabi family who went through multiple migrations from India to Kenya and then to England. Like all diasporic Indians in search of their roots and still longing for somewhere they can call home, and find ‘something to belong to’, Kalia got the idea to develop this novel when he came to India in 2019, especially to Haridwar, to spread his grandmother’s ashes in the Ganges. As he stood in the dust near the river, several questions popped up in his mind – where did my grandparents grow up? How did they meet? Why did they move multiple continents in a lifetime (from Asia to Africa to Europe)? What were their dreams? Why did I never ask them anything important?

With all these questions lurking in his mind, Kalia opens Part I of the novel in March 1955 with a detailed description of how his grandfather Bedi’s marriage was arranged with a girl called Sushma through a middleman. Coming from far off Nairobi where he was the son of an engine driver and had seven other siblings, he came all the way to India, but Bedi was a tourist and not a prodigal son. We are given the details of the bride-viewing, the discussions of both parties on what they want and what to expect, and finally give the green signal to marry.

Part II of the book jumps straight ahead to February 1994, and it is located in London and Bournemouth where Bedi was spending his time trying to erase the past and not to be engaged in his three grown kids’ lives anymore, wanting to be left alone, to be respected from a distance, to ultimately be ignored. The story of his life in England is like all immigrants who had to make that a new home and go on living with the hope that maybe one day they would be able to go back. After mentioning the generation gap and how the children would not be stuck between continents, there is a sudden catastrophe in the family when Sushma goes out for a last-minute shopping trip for the family get-together and dies after meeting with a street accident. Everything goes haywire in their lives.

The story then moves ahead to September 2019 with three long sections comprising Part III of the novel and is narrated by the three siblings – Selena, Rohan and Tara – who come to India along with their family members on a ‘dreaded pilgrimage’ to scatter their father’s ashes in the Ganges at Haridwar. The heat knocked them out of their daze, and they could feel the looks of the surrounding men bearing down on them. They realsed they didn’t belong here but needed to be here as this was the only place they were meant to say goodbye. It was also a chance to reconnect with their ‘roots.’ By far the most powerful section in the entire novel, we are told how pilgrimage sites in India were dens of corrupt individuals, who tried to fleece the tourist or visitor at every step. After suffering from the heat and dust and a futile attempt to trace their father’s genealogical chart from the family records maintained by different pandits in the long family scrolls, they ultimately decide to scatter the ashes at the end of the day with the help of a new pandit and complete the ceremony for which they had travelled all the way from England.

Tara narrates:“We began to sprinkle him into the bubbling water and after each round we would watch as he dissolved like dropped candy floss in a puddle. … And now all of Dad is in the water and Sel and Rohan bow their heads for a moment of silence amid the strange harmonies of splashing, calling and praying. And I see myself, as if in a painting, unhook from their chain and step into the water, as if in my dreams, and I can feel its cold needles between my toes.”

Divided into several sub-sections and narrated in the first person, we get the detailed background and fill-up of the personal lives and family relationships of each of the three narrators. Kalia does a remarkable job here. We are told how each sibling follows a different profession, gets embroiled in different relationships, and how they ultimately behave with their own children. Incidentally, one is reminded of William Faulkner’s novel As I Lay Dying (1930), which narrates the story of the death of a matriarch in a family and keeping to her last wish, the family members carry her coffin for forty miles to the town of Jefferson to bury her next to her own kith and kin. While they are travelling, Faulkner devotes each chapter to a different family member who narrates the same incident in the first person and from a different point of view. Thus, it gives us his or her background along with the reason for travelling to Jefferson.

In the ‘Author’s Note’ at the end of the novel, Kalia categorically states: “I like to call it an act of remembrance, but it’s all fiction. It’s bringing people back to life – with those we can no longer reach. This is a story of a family like mine, but that isn’t mine; it is a novel about people hoping for a better future, longing for an idealized past and striving to survive in the present. It is about so many families.”

This personalisation and universalisation of the narration at the same time is what makes this novel a unique reading experience. Kalia’s narrative style is appreciable, and one can go through these 284 pages without feeling bored or mired into unnecessary details for long. The observant eye of a foreigner blends subjectivity and objectivity in balanced proportion and so the book is recommended for all classes of readers – serious and casual alike.

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

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To her Great Grandfather from a Great Granddaughter

Book review by Bhaskar Parichha

Title: Selected Works of Vyasa Kavi Fakir Mohan Senapati

Editor: Monica Das

Publisher: Sahitya Akademi

Fakir Mohan Senapati (1843-1918) is a prominent figure in Indian literature and a key advocate for Odia nationalism. Born in Mallikashapur, Odisha, he faced significant hardships, losing both parents by age two and being raised by his grandmother with limited education.

Senapati is celebrated for his pioneering works, including the first modern Odia short story, “Rebati,” and novels like Chha Mana Atha Guntha (Six Acres and a Third) , Mamu (Uncle), and Prayaschita (Atomement), which address social issues and the lives of ordinary people, emphasizing social justice and peasant struggles.

His impact transcends the realm of literature; he was instrumental in promoting the unique identity of the Odia language during times of external challenges. His literary contributions facilitated the de-Sanskritisation of Odia, thereby rendering literature more accessible to the general public. He continues to embody the pride and cultural identity of the Odia people.

Selected Works of Vyasa Kavi Fakir Mohan Senapati by Monica Das is characterised by its relevance and authenticity. The compilation and editing, originating from Sahitya Akademi, reflect a high level of quality, with the editor having meticulously attended to every detail.

Monica Das is an Associate Professor of Economics at Gargi College, University of Delhi, and a fellow at the Developing Countries Research Centre. Her research focuses on feminist economics, and she is involved with the International Association for Feminist Economics (IAFFE). Her own works include Tales of the Girl Child in India and The Other Woman, which examine the socio-economic impacts of underage marriage and polygamy on gender development. She also produced the film Anwesan, highlighting the life of her great-grandfather, Fakir Mohan Senapati. She oversees the Fakir Mohan Foundation, which promotes Odisha’s cultural heritage and addresses social challenges, particularly those affecting women.

Putting together a collection can be quite a challenge. It has to open up different viewpoints and styles for readers, deepening their grasp of literature and culture. Curators have to also add introductions that give context to the works, making it easier for readers to see the importance of each piece in the larger literary scene. Monica Das has successfully met these expectations. This Selection highlights Senapati’s creations that established a framework in which the ordinary individual became the focal point.

Says Monica in the introduction: “Fakir Mohan Senapati is a giant in the field of Indian literature, who belonged to Odisha. He brought about a revolution in novel writing by departing from romance and writing on social realism. His portrayal of the common man and his concerns predated those of Premchand and Rabindranath Tagore, the other giants of Indian literature.

“His writing had elements which, apart from promoting secular attitudes, helped bring about social changes, to which he also contributed directly as the Dewan of some of the princely states of Odisha in British India. Odisha is the first state in India to have been established on the basis of language, for which he laid the foundation.”

Fakir Mohan distinguishes himself from his predecessors in the field of Odia prose through his unique use of language: “His liberal use of terse proverbs and the folksy style of his writings is what catches the reader’s immediate attention. Besides this, it adds to the rustic wisdom of his characters. In his stories, one cannot miss the underlying concern with social reform. He always took care to depict an honest view of life. Though he takes a didactic stance in his writings, he took care to see that this did not militate against realism and the smooth flow of the narrative. Fakir Mohan’s characters were drawn from ordinary life from among peasants, weavers, barbers, milkmen, revenue clerks and teachers. Very few belong to the higher ranks of the society. He set the tone of the common man. For the first time, ordinary readers were touched by the fact that stories were written about them, about their concerns, their agonies, exploitations and bitter-sweet experiences. Fakir Mohan was indeed a consummate artist with a keen eye for minute details.”

The Selected Works of Vyasa Kavi Fakir Mohan Senapati spans approximately four hundred pages and presents the intriguing perspective of a remarkable individual. He was more than merely a writer; he was a social reformer, a patriot, and a cunning strategist, serving as the dewan of the princely states of Odisha during the period of colonial rule.

Concludes Monica in the book: “It’s a strife-torn world that we live in today. Fakir Mohan’s works, considered unparalleled internationally, hold even greater significance now because of the centrality of humane modes that form the essence of his writings. The compilation in the Selection presents all this and more.”

The volume serves as a comprehensive and curated resource on Fakir Mohan’s literary works, significantly enhancing the current body of literature dedicated to the father of Odia literature.

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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of 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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This Our Paradise

Book Review by Somdatta Mandal

Title: This Our Paradise: A Novel

Author: Karan Mujoo

Publisher: Ebury Press (an imprint of Penguin Random House)

“A debilitating symptom of exile is unfamiliarity with your homeland” – Karan Mujoo

For ages, Kashmir had been defined as a paradise on earth. However, with the advent of insurgency, political unrest, strife, bloodshed, terrorism and insecurity for the past several decades, this picture of the ideal and beautiful place has been largely shattered. This debut novel by a person of Kashmiri origin, now settled near Delhi, is a moving tale of the ground realities that have been taking place in this region for a long time. Adding the suffix of “A Novel” to the title, the author obviously wants to steer clear of all the controversies that might arise because as he himself states in the “Author’s Note” at the end, “the names and places in this book are a mix of the real and the imaginary… Certain incidents in the novel are based on real events. But their details have been imagined. Hence the names of victims and perpetrators have been changed or tweaked.”

The author was acutely aware of the fact that Kashmir is too large a canvas to be contained in a single book or movie, and so he tells the story of two Kashmiri families, one Hindu and the other Muslim. The stories of both families intertwine tragically in the end. In both cases, the boys are at the mercy of forces much larger than them. Both lose their Kashmir, in different ways. The first story is of a Kashmiri Pandit family who, when the narrative begins, is moving half-heartedly from their house in Bagh-i-Mehtab in Srinagar to their new home in Talab Tillo in Jammu, which was just a dilapidated 12×12 foot hovel with a tin roof and crumbling walls. The patriarch Papaji is a clerk in a food cooperative and his wife Byenji is a homemaker. He is very optimistic that all this is a temporary affair. He still believed in the inherent goodness of people, in ties built over generations and that things would soon turn for the better. The narrator is their eight-year-old grandson who is one of the thousands of children of exile who had nothing to do, nowhere to go. He spent his days playing cricket and climbing the tangkul [1]in the garden. Everything is rosy till 1989. But then, propelled by ISI and the Jamaat, a secessionist movement rises and changes everything. There was gun culture everywhere. For the media, too, Kashmiri Pandits became disposable footnotes in a far greater struggle. Slowly they joined the ranks of the forgotten and became a tragedy that could not be prioritised. At the end of the novel, we find that the idea of exile which harboured within it the hope of return, did not apply to them anymore. They were truly displaced.

Mujoo juxtaposes the earlier story with the story of a Muslim family, set in Zogam, a small village in Lolab Valley. There, after years of prayers, a boy named Shahid is born to Zun and her husband in 1968. Quarantined from everyone else in the village, Sahid’s days passed listening to tales and making them up. As a result, he slowly developed into a shy, quiet boy who found it difficult to mingle with others and liked being with nature. Compared to the slick city dwellers, the people of Zogam seemed like wretched beings with no dreams and ambitions. They were content with their lot because they were not exposed to the luxuries and opportunities life held. Sahid gradually grew up in a society where corruption and unemployment were rife. He made friends with Rashid, who believed that the system had to be dismantled. The trajectory of his life changes when he meets Syed Sahab ― an Islamic theologian and rabble-rouser, who wants to overthrow the Indian state. He brainwashes the young boys into believing that the day they made Sharia their lives, their lives would become Jannat[2]. He preached that Jihad[3] was coming to the Valley soon, and everyone should be ready for it.


The next section takes us back once again to the Pandit protagonists and their life story. The year is 1968 and our young narrator gradually turns worldly-wise when he is taken to different places by his young uncle, Vicky, including the Dal Lake and the Sheikh Colony – a settlement of sweepers, scavengers and tanners who were reviled by all Kashmiris. Believing that education would relieve them of all penury and social ostracisation, Vicky becomes their temporary teacher. Without the knowledge of his parents, he gradually gets enmeshed within other radical ideas and different military groups that had emerged in the city. On the other hand, Shahid realised he could either be a clerk and part-time Jamaat[4]sympathiser or a full-time Jamaat worker. In the end, he opts for the latter and believes that he was no longer a poor farmer’s son from Zogam whose life and death were insignificant.

An interesting section of the narrative told in minute details is how the young jihadis[5] are escorted over the difficult mountain terrain by a Gujjar guide and clandestinely taken across the border to makeshift and rudimentary Pakistani camps in Muzaffarabad. The aim was to indoctrinate the boys in orthodox Islamic ideology and impart basic military training. They were brainwashed into believing that the most important thing was to attack all symbols of India: blow up government banks and offices, kill army and police personnel, murder judges, bureaucrats, teachers, politicians, cripple the state, silence all the voices who oppose the Tehreek[6] and instill the fear of Allah in the hearts of all unbelievers. After they are once again brought back to the Indian side, the boys turn into hardcore terrorists and Sahid is no exception. No matter how hard his parents tried, he had simply become one of the thousands of boys who were ready to fight for the cause.

Without giving out further details of the parallel storylines, we can conclude by stating that through this book Karan Mujoo has tried to ask some fundamental questions. How does a boy become a terrorist? How does society crumble?  What forces a family to go into exile? To serve this need, to create a picture of these chaotic years, he has attempted a certain sort of distillation. He only hopes that the illusion has been marginally successful. Through the vividly drawn characters whose lives intersect with one another, each navigating their own paths through love and life, the author successfully captures the essence of human experience and the eternal yet illusive search for paradise.

We have been reading fictional and non-fictional accounts of the problems in Kashmir for a long time, but the painstaking way in which this debut novelist has tried to give us the entire scenario in a nutshell is praiseworthy. The book is strongly recommended for all readers who would find the universal quest for happiness really moving, and how the author has blended fact and fiction with remarkable ease.

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[1] A pear tree

[2] Paradise

[3] Holy war

[4] Party, community or assembly

[5] Warriors of Jihad

[6] Cause

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

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A Bouquet of Dead Flowers

Book Review by Rakhi Dalal

Book Title: A Bouquet of Dead Flowers

Author: Swadesh Deepak

Translators: Jerry Pinto, Pratik Kanjilal, Nirupama Dutt, Sukant Deepak

Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books

“Hindi literature, Swadesh Deepak maintained, had to be forced out of its comfort zone. The reader here is treated no less savagely,” writes Jerry Pinto in his introduction to this collection of ten stories by Swadesh Deepak, an author and playwright who was born in Rawalpindi on 6th  August, 1942. After his masters in English Literature, he taught for a long time at the Gandhi Memorial National College, Ambala Cantonment. Following a period of illness from 1991 to 1997, when he had little contact with anyone other than his family and close friends, he made a momentous return to the world of letters with an autobiographical account of his illness, Maine Mandu Nahin Dekha[1], and the play Sabse Udaas Kavita[2]. He received the Sangeet Natak Akademi Award in 2004. He has a total of 15 published books to his name including short-story collections such as Tamasha, Baal Bhagwan[3]and Kisi Ek Pedh Ka Naam Lo[4]and hugely successful plays such as Court Martial and Kaal Kothri[5]. In 2006 he left home for a walk and never returned. He has been missing ever since.

These stories, deeply unsettling, challenge readers by taking them into a world where unknown forces work mysteriously, upending and affecting the lives of its characters, leaving them vulnerable at the mercy of chance happenings which rarely bring them relief. Much akin to what Thomas Hardy called as the Immanent Will — a blind and indifferent force determining the fates (and generally blighting the lives) of the privileged and the common people alike.

Whether it is the hunger for food, a ravenous longing of the starved and the deprived as portrayed in the stories ‘Hunger’ and ‘The Child God’, the mystery around the fate of a loved one in ‘For the Wind Cannot Read’, the struggle with depression in ‘Pears from Rawalpindi’ or ‘Horsemen’[, the unrequited yearning for a life of togetherness in ‘Dread and Dead End’, the author’s masterful play of the elements comes to the fore with an intensity that shakes and stuns the reader. Pinto refers to the author as the master of neo gothic,

The sunlight, the wind, the trees, the figure of a broken man, appears again and again. It seems as if it is just not the fate but also the forces of natural elements that keep rattling the course of the lives of the characters.     The trees stand as guards, or sway in delight or offer a refuge, the sunlight “makes a hesitant arrival” sitting quietly or climbing the hills or sometimes streaking in the rooms, the wind is at times playful and at others vindictive. Then there are the flowers, the dead flowers of memories, whose bouquets one keeps holding, clinging to and clasping. And then there is the poetic play of words – “a pale yellow georgette afternoon in November” – bringing to life the patchy sunlight of autumn.

In the figure of broken man which appears again and again in stories, the author seems to be questioning the role that society has forced upon a man – that of a provider of the family, a role sometimes begrudgingly assumed in the stories because “no one respects a man without work, no matter how talented he is.” 

In each story, the author weaves a tale that becomes a commentary — on society and its inherent evils, on relationships within a family stifled by arrogance, ignorance or circumstances and quietly working on the minds of those inhabiting it, on human greed engendered by depravity, hunger or lust, on the mysteriousness of fate whose force makes the mighty cower.  

The translation, well executed, offers a closer reading experience and leaves a bilingual reader with the wish to approach the author’s works in original as well. I must make a special note on the introduction by the acclaimed writer and translator Jerry Pinto who offers a peek into the mind of Swadesh Deepak through a couple of excerpts of the author’s conversations with his psychiatrist and also with a convict brought to the hospital for evaluation. Perhaps these ideas had haunted him in the mental ward of the hospital and later seeped into his stories. Pinto in the introduction not only seeks to make sense of Deepak’s writing but also makes for a compelling reason to read his works – to read on without looking over one’s shoulders.

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[1] I have not seen Mandu

[2] The Saddest Poem ever Written

[3] The Child God

[4] Name a Tree, any Tree

[5] Dark Chamber

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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