Books

The Writer Who Doesn’t Mind the Northeastern Label

Jyotirmoy Talukdar

Jahnavi Barua on geographic labelling as a pragmatic exercise, giving up her medical practice, and making it to prestigious literary prize shortlists

Cartoons by the Colonised

Shruti Ravindran

The pre-Independence Parsee Punch offers political comment and gently subversive humour

Maa Maati Manush, and Motor Cars

Sumana Roy

Mamata Banerjee’s career has been bound to the automobile in strange ways. No wonder, then, the reader of her memoirs soon starts to play a game of car-spotting in the narrative

Firang Historian

Jyotirmoy Talukdar

Academic Jonathan Gil Harris is writing the history of the poor Europeans, as distinct from White Mughals, who settled here and became Indian

Whose Hostages?

Rahul Pandita

A brilliant account of the 1995 kidnappings of six foreign nationals in Kashmir reveals shocking details of the involvement of the Indian State

Reading the Reader

Sumana Roy

On Tagore is as much about reading Rabindranath as it is about Amit Chaudhuri reading himself as a reader

The Long and Short of a Story

Sohini Chattopadhyay

A novel is like building a house and a short story like furnishing a room, declares Anjum Hasan, who now has both under her belt

Mama Em’s Cope Book

Kalpish Ratna

In literature focused on insanity, the gaze seems to have shifted from the insane. The patient is no longer the victim; that status now belongs to the caregiver