Author – Nikita Sud Book – Liberalisation, Hindu Nationalism and the State: A Biography of Gujarat Publishers – Oxford University Press Price – Rs. 695 A shuttered window of the house where Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was once born frames the
Title: Dirty Love Author: Sampurna Chattarji Publisher: Penguin Books Price: Rs. 350 Sampurna Chattarji is branching out in all directions. She started as a poet, got a novel under her belt and is now rocking the short story scene.
Title: Untouchable God Author: Kancha Ilaiah Publishers: Samya Publishers Pages – 248 Price – Rs 350 Kancha Ilaiah is not an easy scholar to digest, with his brutal polemic against the Brahminical dominance of the Indian caste order. His
30th anniversary of Sarveshwar Dayal Saxena’s classic Khutiya par tange lok. Books are everywhere in January. Between bookfests of little or no significance to the idea of the book as a lived experience, between the recent memory of Sunando Sen being thrown
‘Burakumin Die!’ ‘Human Garbage!’ Endless discriminatory graffiti and phone calls. One person confronts another; tells them to die. Such terrible things… – Maeda Katsumasa (1989) For anyone from our part of the world, the familiar frisson of mortification is all too
Picture this scene: there is arson, looting, riots. Hordes of people are breaking into shops and running away with goods. The police are chasing them, sirens resound, several cars are ablaze and helicopters loom overhead. The national media is reporting
The copyright on quaint bookstores and their eccentric or idiosyncratic owners rests firmly with the Brits. There’s no end to the stories, of some reader wanting to know about a book which mentioned the only citing of a butterfly in
Lucky enough not to enter a classroom until I was eleven and having lived in a place where the nearest neighbour was a kilometre away, comics and books were an important part of my early years. I can recall books
Today, Dhubri grabs headlines for the wrong reasons. This town in Western Assam, within shouting distance of the Indo-Bangladesh border, is, as I write, curfew bound. Ethnic clashes which boil in the surrounding areas have spilled over to this town,
The first bookstore in my life – and the only one I can claim to feel really nostalgic about – had two wheels and a nasal voice that called out “Maga-zine! Maga-zine!” late in the evening. That was a thin