Place: India

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 14, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Alton Melvar M Dapanas, MARGENTO, and Sayani Sarkar

The latest from Spain, Romania, India, and the Philippines!

This week, our editors bring news of publications with big reputations, celebrations of nature writing in the Himalayas, and a new city joining the prestigious line-up of UNESCO Cities of Literature. Read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Spain

From November 5 through 11, the Romanian Language and Culture Center at the University of Granada, Spain hosted a series of events featuring the major voices and rising stars of contemporary Spanish poetry, some of whom included writers with Spanish-Romanian identities, connections, or collaborations. Amongst them, the prolific and multiply awarded Romanian-Spanish poet and painter Mariana Feride Moisoiu was given top-billing, and people crowded in for her reading-performance.

Feride Moisoiu is the founder of the international festival Mujer, Manantial de Vida (Woman, Source of Life), in addition to coordinating the festival Grito de Mujer (Woman’s Scream) in Villa del Prado, Madrid, which focuses on women’s voices, empowerment, and gender equality. She serves as the executive director of the literary magazine Krytón (also published in Villa del Prado), while also being the honorary president of the Casa Nacional de Rumanía (Romanian House/Institute) in Getafe. The event in Granada presented an opportunity for Feride Moiosiu to launch the latest issue of Krytón, coedited with poet Cristian Mihail Deac, which pays tribute to the journal’s founder, Cornel Drinovan. During her reading, the poet moved the audience through a serene and relentless, indomitable cadence, one that placed lyric femininity at the heart of a multifaceted—political, sentimental, and cosmic—vision. READ MORE…

What’s New in Translation: November 2025

November 10, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Henry Gifford, Jason Gordy Walker, Liliana Torpey, and Nichole Gleisner

New work from India, Serbia, France, Colombia, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Iran, Spain, Lithuania, Palestine, and the Vietnamese diaspora!

This month, we’re bringing reviews of eleven different titles from eleven different regions, from a trilingual text of experimental fiction that veers between Vietnamese and English, a visceral and psychically frenetic portrait of a marriage gone wrong, a rich collection from a master Iranian poet that gestures towards his remarkable life, and the latest metafiction from a Spanish literary giant. 

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Dog Star by Nabarun Bhattacharya, translated from the Bengali by Subha Prasad Sanyal, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jason Gordy Walker

Something’s rotten in the city of Kolkata. A corrupt managerial class—within which mad scientists and war-mongers play a major role—has conspired with local authorities to capture, confine, and starve as many canines as possible. While the city’s “dead serf-servants and healthful, cellphone-carrying ever-connected mummies and balloons” stagger through their dystopia, the dogs have disappeared from the urban bustle, and no one cares. Animal rights groups have been eliminated, and in the way of Nazi death camps, the system targets even newborn pups. What’s a dog to do in these last dog days? “Bark! Bark!” replies the snappy refrain of Dog Star, the lyrical, subversive, and highly re-readable novella by Bengali writer and poet Nabarun Bhattacharya, delivered in a kinetic English by Subha Prasad Sanyal, who has doubtlessly advanced this innovative author’s reputation in world literature.

A self-proclaimed fable, Dog Star leads the reader through dark alleys where street dogs—“nerikuttas”—hide from “pincers,” form alliances, trade information about current dangers, and strategize escape plans, looking to the constellation “Lubdhok, aka Dogstar, aka Sirius aka Alpha Canis Majoris” for liberation. These survivors, along with their unlikely feline allies, are anthropomorphized in their emotions and dialogues, and their plight, although set in West Bengal, is familiar enough to seem representative of any place under political (dis)order. The Netanyahu regime’s genocide against Gaza comes to mind, for example, as do the active “detention centers” in the US: “They’ll yank and drag you by your neck with the pincers to the caged car. Then throw you in.” Bhattacharya does not avoid visceral descriptions of animal torture, but he balances its brutality with astute irony, giving the murderers absurd lines like: “We must pay heed that there aren’t ridiculous expenses.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

November 7, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Hongyu Jasmine Zhu and Zohra Salih

The latest literary news from China and India!

This week, our editors at large report from a panel bringing together French and Chinese writers working on similar themes and explore prize-winning reporting on climate change. From the ethics of life writing to an upcoming literary festival featuring everyone from beloved authors to Bollywood stars, read on to find out more!

Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, Editor-at-Large, reporting from China

On the evening of October 23, the “Tandem 无独有偶” literary dialogue series hosted by Beijing’s French Cultural Center welcomed Édouard Louis and Hu Anyan 胡安焉—one from an impoverished French family, the other a veteran of 19 grassroots jobs in China. In a conversation moderated by Sarah Briand 白夏荷 of the French embassy, they explored a fundamental question: why do some feel compelled to write so urgently about their own pain?

Édouard Louis began by tracing his writing to childhood violence. “As a gay boy of ten or eleven, I was beaten and bullied at school. The moment a fist struck my face, I vowed to one day put it all on paper.” To him, writing is not a pastime but “redemption,” even an “antidote”—a way to distill a vaccine from the virus of experience. His autobiographical novel En finir avec Eddy Bellegueule—with Michael Lucey’s English translation The End of Eddy reviewed by former Editor-at-Large Madeline Jones—exposed his family’s poverty and violence, becoming a French sensation that also provoked fury at home: his brother once arrived from Paris with a baseball bat, threatening to kill him. READ MORE…

Fall 2025: Highlights from the Team

November 3, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Find out what our very own team members have to say about our bountiful Fall issue!

I found that Nay Thit’s “The Language I Don’t Speak,” translated from the Burmese by Thiri Zune, was the perfect way to begin exploring the new edition. Like it, the rest of the poetry section is provocative and urgently alive—especially Olivia Elias’s verse about Gaza in Jérémy Victor Robert’s translation from the French. Moving from her work to that of Faruk Šehić, translated from the Bosnian by Ena Selimović, in “Who Came Back,” takes us from the action of war to the scars of postwar life. Then on to prison, with Başak Çandar and David Gramling’s translation from the Turkish of Kemal Varol’s “Dark Mist.” I found this piece unexpectedly amusing. Jen Calleja’s interview (conducted by Sarah Gear), is a delight, full of thought-provoking reflections on what we do as translators. There are so many other translations shining in this issue—I wish I could list them all.

—Ellen Elias-Bursac, Contributing Editor

Pablo Palacio’s “The Cannibal” (tr. José Darío Martínez from the Spanish) is my favorite piece from the new issue—fast-paced, vividly written, and replete with gruesome physical detail and haunting character psychology. As someone who likes to write about cannibalism, I found it both a wonderful point of reference and an object lesson in how obscene desire can be rendered in literature.

In “Vassal of the Sun” (tr. Tobias Ryan from the French), I was overjoyed by Patrick Autréaux’s descriptions of the natural world and his evident love for Melville.

Faruk Šehić’s “Who Came Back” (tr. Ena Selimović from the Bosnian) demonstrates how repetition, properly employed, can become a devastating poetic device. The scarcely varied refrain of “came back” hammers the losses of the Yugoslav Wars into the reader’s mind, while the sparse yet vivid language—“dandelions-cum-parachutes,” “white bark of birch saplings in living rooms”—emphasizes what war takes away, even from those who escape its bullets. It is essential reading for a world drunk on fantasies of righteous violence.

Palacio returns in “The Double and the Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor from the Spanish), a story that most cheap “twin horror” tales wish they were—though it’s not a horror story at all. Instead, it’s a superbly eerie study of difference and intimacy: how intricately a writer can render lives utterly unlike their own, and how such acts of imagination approach the question of what it means to write across unbridgeable experience. Using the extreme example of twins conjoined for their entire lives, Palacio transforms “monstrosity” into empathy. What a relief, in a world that so often wields that word against the oppressed, to encounter a story that refuses to dehumanize.

Finally, Johanna Drucker’s “Attention as Predation” remains, to my mind, the best framework for thinking about the phenomenon of Trump and other authoritarian figures turned cult icons. It is supremely bleak, but in an era when the democratic counteroffensive has so spectacularly failed, we need such correctives to naïve optimism. Reading Drucker’s essay, I felt a kind of cruel joy—the shock of recognition that comes when one is reminded of the essential brokenness of human beings, their eagerness to become both recipients and agents of predatory attention.

—Julia Maria, Digital Editor

READ MORE…

Our Fall 2025 Issue Is Here!

October 23, 2025  |  in News  |  by Lee Yew Leong

Featuring Nay Thit, Jen Calleja, Patrick Autréaux, and Johanna Drucker in our Special Feature on Attention

The world rewrites itself daily, unable to leave the past alone. As Trump’s relentless theatre once more monopolizes our gaze—proof, perhaps, of what Johanna Drucker, in her timely essay “Attention as Predation,” diagnoses as a civilization that is consumed even as it consumes—the question becomes what still endures beneath the smudged text of the present. Palimpsest, our Fall 2025 issue illustrated hauntingly by UK-based visual artist Jayoon Choi, turns to those deeper inscriptions: the faint, resistant traces that refuse to fade, the ghosts of meaning that survive the next rewrite.

In Amanda Michalopoulou’s “Desert,” Athens emerges as a manuscript of light and stone, its ruins glowing like marginalia of time. Carla Mühlhaus overlays the Black Dahlia murder and Andersen’s mermaid over Venice’s 2019 acqua alta, letting myth and crime shimmer beneath the rising waterline. Likewise, Barbara Köhler gives Homer’s Penelope her overdue monologue—both weaver and mermaid surfacing from the sediment of male authorship to reclaim their narratives. From Kazakhstan, Marat Uali laments the vanishing of minority tongues, an anxiety echoed in Tim Brookes’s interview on his Endangered Alphabets Project, where each carved script becomes an act of remembrance. In William Heath’s sparkling update, Herodas gives us drama composed on papyri—reminding us that even the most fragile art can defy oblivion.

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This issue’s wildcard Special Feature, “On Attention,” brings together thinkers and storytellers who resist the culture of erasure. Monika Vrečar asks whether poetry can still exist amid the static while Farah Ahamed, in an astute piece of film criticism on the Bollywood classic “Lagaan,” notes that the monsoon is also a season in the body. Elsewhere, Korean artists Koi and Hyungmee Shin—hailing from opposite sides of the 38th parallel—make masterful use of fabric to create radiant topographies of encounter, while Ecuadorian master Pablo Palacio’s “The Double and Singular Woman” (tr. Thomas Taylor) anatomizes the fractured identity of a pair of conjoined twins with a proto-modernist precision that feels radical in our own fragmented age. To read these works together is to experience literature’s own layered materiality.

If this issue has a thesis, it is that world literature does not replace; it accrues. Help us write the next layer: submit to the second installment of our “On Attention” Special Feature (as well as to our regular categories) and apply to join the team (deadline: November 1st)—we especially welcome applicants to the Assistant Editor (Fiction) role. A final note for the record: László Krasznahorkai, this year’s Nobel laureate in literature, appeared in our pages twice—long before Stockholm called. If this kind of early, global advocacy matters to you, please become a sustaining or masthead member today—the vital margin note that keeps this palimpsest legible, and gloriously alive.

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Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

September 26, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Ibrahim Fawzy, and Sayani Sarkar

The latest from Hong Kong, Egypt, and India!

This week, our Editors-at-Large bring us news from around the globe on the latest in world literature. From Hong Kong’s vibrant multicultural literary festival, to the release of Alaa Abd El-Fattah in Egypt and a collection of award-winning Indian authors, read on to learn more.

Charlie Ng, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Hong Kong

Hong Kong’s literary scene welcomed a vibrant celebration of European writing with the return of the European Literature Night (ELN) this September. Organized by Czech Centers and the European Union National Institutes for Culture, the event originated in Prague in 2006 with the aim of introducing contemporary European literature through public readings in non-traditional venues. Following a successful debut in Hong Kong last year, the 2025 edition featured a strengthened line-up of thirteen European countries. Over four and a half hours, well-known local guests read excerpts from European writers for approximately ten minutes each. Readings occurred simultaneously at fourteen different locations across Central and Sheung Wan at thirty-minute intervals, allowing audiences to plan their own personalized literature route.

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

August 22, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News  |  by MARGENTO and Sayani Sarkar

The latest literary news from Romania and India!

This week, our editors-at-large introduce us to transnational literary communities and newly-translated classic literature. From experimental poetry festivals to reading recommendations in contemplation of the 79th anniversary of India’s independence, read on to find out more!

MARGENTO, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Romania

Indefatigable Florin Dan Prodan—just back from Egypt where he co-organized the performance poetry festival & interdisciplinary colloquium Interwoven Voices, and on his way to co-organizing a writing residency and poetry-and-music festival in Annapurna National Park (in Nepal’s Himalayas) and Pokhara City—threw a poetry festival in his home, northern Romania. Via Poetica, which ran from August 10th through the 14th, kicked off in the cultural hub and university city of Iasi and featured established names such as Radu Andriescu and Prodan himself alongside remarkable alternative voices such as past Asymptote contributor Simona Nastac, experimental novelist Paul Mihalache, and the lyrically contemplative Luminița Amarie. While the roster of performance poets slightly varied as the festival moved from Iasi to Prodan’s hometown of Suceava to the UNESCO-heritage medieval Voroneț monastery, a mainstay was the experimental avantgarde electronic music of Ranter’s Bay that has already resounded across Europe and beyond.

Special mention should be made of two genuinely experimental poets that were featured on every single night of the festival, whose inclusion contributed significantly to the festival’s international profile. Rhys Trimble, a Zambian-born Welsh poet, recently joined Prodan and the Zidul de Hartie (Paper Wall) collective’s initiatives, participating in both Interwoven Voices in Cairo, and now, Via Poetica in Romania. Trimble does bilingual work in Welsh and English and is strongly active as an improvisational performance and installation artist, musician, visual poet, and interdisciplinary-poetics academic. Another Welsh poet, David Greenslade, has split his time between Wales and Romania for a few years now, after traveling the world as an English teacher. He writes in both English and Welsh while experimenting (and performing) with “used and usable material objects” such as diagrams, tools, vegetables, and signs, and creatively engaging with visual and aural pareidolia (pattern-seeking misperceptions).   READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

July 25, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Hongyu Jasmine Zhu, and Zohra Salih

The latest in literary news from Bulgaria, China, and India!

This week, our Editors-at-Large take us around the world for updates on literary events, awards, and initiatives. From a celebration of the 101st edition of a cornerstone in Bulgaria’s literary scene, to a deep dive into innovative literary prizes in China, and an introduction to the winner of the 2025 Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation—read on to learn more.

Andriana Hamas, Editor-at-Large, Reporting from Bulgaria

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending a couple of literary events organized within the annual Пловдив чете (“Plovdiv Reads”) festival in my hometown. One of them was a discussion about the anniversary issue (the 101st, to be precise) of the Bulgarian magazine for literature and the humanities called Страница (“Page”).

The magazine, published every three months, was founded in 1997 in Plovdiv in collaboration with the local university St. Paisii Hilendarski. Throughout the years, it has provided a platform for a vast array of voices. In fact, almost all Bulgarian authors who have been active since and before Issue 1 have been present on its pages through their poetry, short stories, essays, criticism, memoirs, translations, interviews, and more. What truly separates it from other similar projects, however, is the dedicated literary criticism section and its yearly academic analysis of the development of Bulgarian literature over time, the directions it seems to have taken, and emerging trends in the Bulgarian literary scene.

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What’s New in Translation: July 2025

July 14, 2025  |  in New in Translation, Reviews  |  by Anna Mebel, Jason Gordy Walker, Jordan Silversmith, and Kaelie Giffel

Newly released titles from Morocco, India, Norway, Haiti, Spain, Austria, Argentina, Egypt, Brazil, Germany, and Chile!

This month, we’re delighted to present eleven titles from eleven countries, including a lyrical litany of dreams from a Nobel laureate, a psychologically thrilling fiction-study of domestic violence and complicity, a rollicking novel on poverty and police repression in a Brazilian favela, a sharp and surrealistic collection that deeply probes the connection between death and poetry, and much, much more. . .  

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Writings on Translation by Abdessalam Benabdelali, translated from the Arabic by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Seagull Books, 2025

Review by Jordan Silversmith

“What is at stake in translation,” Moroccan philosopher Abdessalam Benabdelali writes, “is the strangeness of the other.” In Writings on Translation, a slim but resonant volume translated with clarity and philosophical sensitivity by Marouane Zakhir and Christian Hawkey, Benabdelali argues not only that translation is foundational to the development of Arabic and European thought, but that it constitutes a mode of ethical relation—a hosting of the stranger.

Composed of essays selected from two earlier Arabic-language works, this collection positions translation not as the failed transfer of meaning between stable tongues, but as a generative rupture in the myth of linguistic purity. Echoing Derrida and drawing on classical Arabic poetics, Benabdelali deftly critiques the nationalist drive to see language as a closed identity. “The instrument of translation is a living language,” he writes, “and its mirror is condemned to be broken.” It is in this shattering that thought is permitted to migrate.

What emerges then is a meditation on translation as both inheritance and resistance. Benabdelali revisits the Abbasid-era Bayt al-Hikma, critiques 18th-century French Orientalism, and confronts the ambivalence of Arabic literary modernity, where some authors write in expectation of translation while others fear its erasure. His essays resist binary framings of colonizer and colonized, instead advocating for a polyglossic hospitality in which meaning is always provisional and always in motion. READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

June 27, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, Charlie Ng, and Sayani Sarkar

The latest from India, Bulgaria, and Hong Kong.

In bringing you the latest in literary news around the world, our editors speak on the mysterious disappearance of a renowned Indian literary prize, the death of an iconic Bulgarian writer and community leader, and ongoing discussions of queerness and translational crafts in Hong Kong.

Sayani Sarkar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from India

In a surprising turn of events, the JCB Prize for Literature, one of India’s leading book awards, has seemingly ended without any official announcement. The only information available is a legal notice on their website stating the “revocation of the licence” for the JCB Literature Foundation, established in 2018 by JCB India (a global manufacturer of construction equipment) with the aim of promoting and celebrating Indian writing and helping readers worldwide discover the finest contemporary Indian literature.

This development has sparked significant discussions within the literary community in India. Concerned writers and translators are left wondering whether the Prize will return in a different format, but there have been no announcements regarding the 2025 shortlist. Since 2018, a selected jury has been responsible for creating a longlist of ten, a shortlist of five, and selecting the winner. Each shortlisted author received Rs 1 lakh and their translators were awarded Rs 50,000; if a translated work is named the winner, the author received Rs 25 lakh and the translator was awarded Rs 10 lakh. This prize was previously the highest-paying literary award in India, and its sudden absence is troubling, especially given the recent surge of interest after Banu Mushtak’s Heart Lamp’s win at the International Booker Prizes this year. READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter V Space

June 5, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

Drawing the sun and the moon at the same time, drawing emptiness and fullness.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time. 

Fire. Water. Earth. Air. Space. Fall in.

 

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Everything written symbols can say has already passed by. They are like tracks left by animals. That is why the masters of meditation refuse to accept that writings are final. The aim is to reach true being by means of those tracks, those letters, those signs but reality itself is not a sign, and it leaves no tracks. It doesn’t come to us by way of letters or words. We can go toward it, by following those words and letters back to what they came from. But so long as we are preoccupied with symbols, theories and opinions, we will fail to reach the principle.

But when we give up symbols and opinions, aren’t we left in the utter nothingness of being?

Yes.

–Kimura Kyoho in Kenjutsu Fushigi Hen (On the Mysteries of Swordsmanship), 1768, epigraph found
in Robert Bringhurst’s The Elements of Typographic Style

 

Drukpa Kunley, the Master of Truth, himself said,
‘If you think I have revealed any secrets, I apologise;
If you think this a medley of nonsense, just enjoy it!’
Such sentiments, here, I fully endorse!

–The Divine Madman, The Sublime Life and Songs of Drukpa Kunley, compiled by Geshe Chaphu,
translated from the Tibetan by Keith Dowman and Sonam Paljor

READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 30, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Andriana Hamas, René Esaú Sánchez, and Sayani Sarkar

The latest literary news from India, Bulgaria, and Mexico!

This week, our editors-at-large interview an Indian translator to better understand the local impact of international prizes, report on the opening of an Umberto Eco-inspired bookstore in Bulgaria, and celebrate a major 20th-century writer in Mexico. Read on to find out more!

Sayani Sarkar, Editor-at-Large, reporting from Kolkata

The literary community in India has been celebrating this week because Heart Lamp, written by Banu Mushtaq and translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, has won the 2025 International Booker Prize. This marks the second time that a book translated from an Indian language has received this prestigious award. The first was Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell, which won in 2022. Anton Hur, one of the judges this year, described Heart Lamp as “daring, textured, and vital.” I wanted to find out how the book has been received in the translation community in India, so I briefly spoke with Sayari Debnath, a culture journalist at Scroll and a translator from Bengali and Hindi to English.

I asked her how the translation of Heart Lamp stands out to her compared to other recently translated books in various Asian languages. Sayari mentioned that she was quite surprised by the translation when she first read the book. “There are plenty of phrases that were translated literally and Deepa Bhasthi chose to retain some of the Kannada words too,” she said. “It took some time to get used to but as I read on, I realised what it was doing to my own tongue – there was a “chataak” in the language, or what one could also call spice/sourness/pungency. My mouth was imbued with a flavour I couldn’t really place. I thought that was quite an interesting feeling. However, I did tell Deepa that at first, I wasn’t sure about what she was trying to do. She told me she ‘translated with an accent’ — that’s new, I think.” READ MORE…

Weekly Dispatches From the Frontlines of World Literature

May 16, 2025  |  in Dispatches, News, Weekly Roundup  |  by Charlie Ng, Eva Wissting, and Zohra Salih

The latest from India, Hong Kong, and Sweden!

This week, our editors are introducing a generous new anthology that illuminates India’s capital, the winners of prestigious Swedish literary awards, and a feature of Hong Kong poets. Read on to find out more.

Zohra Salih, Editor at Large, reporting from India

It has been a harrowing week in this part of the world. We are still, very cautiously, coming to terms with the ceasefire that was finally declared to de-escalate tensions between India and Pakistan, the consequences of which have been disproportionately and brutally borne by the residents of occupied Kashmir (one of the most militarized zones in the world). Things are now supposedly returning to ‘normal’, yet the fact that war was blatantly invoked, justified, and celebrated by fellow citizens has created an atmosphere of unease around writing about India in its aftermath, to say the least.

If he were alive today, one person would have found the words to make something meaningful and urgent amidst this fog of madness: Saadat Hasan Manto. Born in India and forced to make a second life in the newly formed Pakistan, the fiery writer and chronicler of Bombay was considered prophetic for his stories that anticipated with stark-eyed clarity the savagery awaiting the two nations post-Partition, a decision he vehemently opposed. May 11 is the 113th anniversary of his birth, and there is no better time to return to his short story, ‘Toba Tek Singh’, or his collection Mottled Dawn: Fifty Sketches and Stories of Partition, than now. Those in Mumbai have also been able to experience his stories—many of them excluded from the usual anthologies—as part of an audio theatre piece performed by Katha Khana at the iconic Prithvi theatre on May 13.

I would also be remiss to not mention The World With Its Mouth Open by another journalist turned author, Zahid Rafiq, which came out in December last year. Rafiq’s debut short story collection vividly and humanely renders the lives of the people of Kashmir as they go on with what has come to be called ordinary life, marked by precarity. There is a quietness to the writing that allows Rafiq to enter your mind and transport it to the valley, blocking out all the noise that obscures its image in the mainstream imagination. Needless to say, it is essential reading for the times we are living in today. READ MORE…

Elementalia: Chapter IV Air

May 1, 2025  |  in Essays  |  by Kanya Kanchana

There was more to the word than Indra thought. There was more in the air.

Humans throughout history have been fascinated by the elements. Unfathomable forces of nature, they entered our myths and minds aeons ago. There’s no time when we’re not in their thrall. Drawing from the vast store of our collective imagination across mythology, philosophy, religion, literature, science, and art, I present Elementalia, a series of five element-bending lyric essays that explores their enchanting stories and their relationship with the word—making, translating, and transforming meaning and message. This is not an exhaustive (nor exhausting) effort that covers every instance of and interaction with each element, but rather an idiosyncratic, intertextual, meditative work—a patchwork quilt of conversations with other writers, works, and texts across space and time.

Inspire, from the Latin inspirare, in- + spirare, to breathe.

 

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