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Boats on Land is a unique way of looking at India’s northeast and its people against a larger historical canvas—the early days of the British Raj, the World Wars, conversions to Christianity, and the missionaries. This is a world in which the everyday is infused with folklore and a deep belief in the supernatural. Here, a girl dreams of being a firebird. An artist watches souls turn into trees. A man shape-shifts into a tiger. Another is bewitched by water fairies. Political struggles and social unrest interweave with fireside tales and age-old superstitions. Boats on Land quietly captures our fragile and awkward place in the world.
'You, though, are as beautiful as light splitting through glass.'Nine characters recall their relationship with a young woman - the same woman - whom they have loved, or who has loved them.We piece her together, much as we do with others in our lives, in incomplete but illuminating slivers.Set in familiar, nameless cities, moving between east and west, The Nine-Chambered Heart is a compendium of shifting perspectives that follows one woman's life, making her dazzlingly real in one moment, and obscuring her in the very next.Janice Pariat's exquisitely written new novel is about the fragile, fragmented nature of identity - how others see us only in bits and pieces, and how sometimes we tend to become what others perceive us to be.
Nem is a student of English literature at Delhi University. He drifts between classes, weed-hazy parties, and the amorous complexities of campus life, until a chance encounter with an art historian steers him into a world of pleasure and artistic discovery. Nem’s life is irrevocably transformed. One day, without warning, his mentor disappears. In the years that follow, Nem cocoons himself in South Delhi, writing for a chic cultural journal. When he is awarded a fellowship to London, a cryptic note plunges him into a search for the art historian—a search which turns into a reckoning with his past. Retelling the myth of Poseidon and his youthful male devotee Pelops, Seahorse transforms a simple coming-of-age story into an epic drama of loss, love, and healing.
‘A novel like none other’ AMITAV GHOSH ‘A masterpiece’ AVNI DOSHI ‘Wise, funny, touching’ ROBERT MACFARLANE
From the winner of the Sahitya Akademi Young Writer Award and the Crossword Book Award for FictionShortlisted for The Hindu Prize for Literature 2015 ‘Explores with sharp beauty the mystery at the centre of loving anyone’ Sophie Mackintosh, author of The Water Cure
This book is an offering—of prose, poetry, musical lyrics, and visual art—by the women of Meghalaya in Northeast India. One of the smallest states in the country, but also, one of the most beautiful, Meghalaya is blessed with landscapes that mesmerize and inspire song and story. In the not-so-distant past, though, it has also seen political turbulence and civil unrest, and many of the works here capture that quiet unease—in homes and kitchens, in market-places and public taxis. Yet this anthology is also a celebration. Of wisdom and joy, of queerness and sisterhood, of mothers and feminine bodies, of home and hearths. Of voices new and established. Brought together in one volume by Janice Pariat, a novelist and poet from these hills. Here, we sit together around a fire, and sing, and weep, and dance, and tell stories. We dream of where we came from, the hills, the mist, and dream of what else we are still yet to discover.
This book provides an in-depth analysis and critical examination of the representation of ethnic, sexual, cultural, and individual identities in selected literary works by contemporary writers from Northeast India. The book explores the complex dynamics of identity construction, sexuality, marginalisation, ethnicity, and belonging in the context of Meghalaya and Northeast India as a whole. The author analyses poetry and prose by Janice Pariat, Anjum Hasan, Kynpham Singh Nongkynrih, and other Khasi writers. These works candidly portray the turmoil afflicting contemporary Meghalaya – from insurgency and ethnic tensions to ecological threats and loss of roots as well as reconciliation, integration, and mutual understanding. Using postmodern and postcolonial literary strategies, the book depicts fluid, heterogeneous, and multifaceted notions of identity in Northeast India. An exploration of ethnicity, belonging, and unbelonging in the Northeastern context, this book presents marginalised voices and liminal spaces. It will be of interest to academics focusing on Indian English literature, postcolonial literature, and South Asian Studies.
Travel guidebooks may be common today (especially thanks to the Internet), but a book that looks beyond the landmarks and the dos and don’ts for tourists/travelers (there is a difference between the two) is fairly rare, and all the more so when written from the author’s personal perspective. The city of Shillong has always fascinated newcomers and seasoned travelers alike and has received its fair share of exposure, owing to the onslaught of print and electronic media, especially the Internet. What else is there to know, right? Yet, here is a book that reveals how inhabitants of a city routinely live, from their conversations, to their food habits, to their idiosyncrasies, right down to how they treat their dead. Tidbits that may or may not be found in other information sources, but surely attention catching in the unique style used by the author, sprinkled with humour and even poetry. In the melee of information sources on Shillong jostling for the readers’ attention, this book offers content that will serve not only the tourists/travelers – it is a cozy read that will warm the cockles of even the non-travelers’ hearts.
A FREE-FLOWING NARRATIVE IN VERSE AND PROSE THAT MARKED THE DEBUT OF AN ASTONISHING NEW VOICE IN LITERATURE. ‘Reading Sharmistha Mohanty’s Book One, you keep turning the pages, not to follow the story—though there is a story being told in every page, and in every page she tells a different story which is yet part of the fabric of the same telling—but to follow her sentences. They are unflinching, tender, unexpected, aphoristic, violently observant and violently restrained: “to feel pain but never to come to tears”. You read because you want to know where they will take you next. She gives no hint. Whether it is to the unnamed riverine land of her ancestors or, in an unnamed city,...
THE GALLERY pursues the question of what it takes for a woman to stand up for herself, through the intertwined lives of Minal and Ellora Sahni, wife and daughter of a successful New Delhi lawyer, and Maitrye and Tashi, wife and daughter of the office peon at the Sahni law practice. In her new novel, Manju Kapur brings together themes of independence, identity and womanhood by focusing on a set of principal characters who are connected through work and physical proximity, yet separated by class and power. As the women navigate their own desires, they are forced to re-examine marriage, as well as to consider the role of art as property, value and self-expression. The titular gallery that Minal opens becomes a powerful symbol of both autonomy and constraint. Set in Delhi and Nepal, The Gallery surveys the lives of two families over three decades, becoming, in the process, an exploration of sexual freedom and the world of art.