Category: Books

Translation of the Bengali poem Ruti Dao by Birendra Chattopadhyay…

Ulysses, definitive edition, 1961…

The Novel Reader by Vincent Van Gogh So little is known about Shakespeare that there are perhaps as many biographies of him as there are biographers. Scholars often read back into his life from either his plays or other extant reports of 16th century London life. One such was Columbia English professor James Shapiro’s powerful study: The Year of the Lear: Shakespeare in 1606, which has resurfaced recently. Why? Because 1606 was also the year of the plague. Shapiro writes:…

It is time we understand that for a figure like Subhas Bose, there is no greater honour than to die in the battlefield in the war for freedom, insists Harvard’s Professor Sugata Bose, in an expansive interview with Sayandeb Chowdhury The setting of the large, airy, six-windowed second-floor room at Netaji Bhavan is doubtlessly the most fitting location for an interview of this nature. This room is directly above the room where he, the talismanic subject of our discussion, for…

Facsimile of the published article Amitav Ghosh is great hope for fiction in the 21st century and now, at the height of his powers, his influence is all set to grow bigger, writes Sayandeb Chowdhury Amitav Ghosh’s novels are an Olympian event; a peripatetic storm in the largely sterile cultural topography of this ‘city of lost causes’ as he calls Calcutta succinctly and appropriately. On his arrival, the city’s literati suddenly wake up to the possibilities of fiction, a possibility…

The name Manishankar Mukherjee was thought to be difficult to pronounce. So he changed it to Sankar. And the name stuck like a second skin all his life — as a lowly clerk, as the author of national and now international repute and a high profile corporate job as the CPRO of one of world oldest electric supply companies. But who was he who changed his name? “Noel Frederick Barwell”, came the reply from the other side of the large…

If the phrase ‘been there, done that’ is said aloud, without making concessions to the force of its clarity or its bon-vivant abandon, then that best describes Pritish Nandy. But his being there and doing that is not fraught with the usual clumsiness of the itinerant busybody. A poet, painter, journalist, columnist, filmmaker and even an MP on a Shiv Sena ticket, he has treaded the world, sometimes softly, sometimes in disagreement with it, that lie between the disquiet of…

The sunlight inside the spacious atrium at Taj Bengal seemed to have been looking for him. The itinerant light, when it found Ramchandra Guha posing on a chair for a restive photographer, seemed to stand still on him for some time. The sun, obviously partial to leading lights on a clear December morning in Calcutta, set its sight on the award-winning author of India After Gandhi because he was the most sun-worthy man in a city that day, which once had many…

Mani Shankar Mukherjee alias Shankar talks to Sayandeb Chowdhury about the jump he has made from being a Bengali bestselling writer to an Indian one The fear of becoming obscure after his first novel, Koto Ajanare (The Many Unknowns) haunted Mani Shankar Mukherjee alias Shankar. So what if it became an instant bestseller? “I was about 19 or 20 and had already fallen out with the mandarins of Bengal’s premier literary magazine where the novel was serialised. They spread the rumour that…

MG Vassanji is best known for his novels The Gunny Sack and The Book of Secrets. His last work, The In-between World Of Vikram Lall, gave academia a catchphrase — ‘in-between’ — to underline shifting identities in an increasingly global world. Born and brought up in East Africa, Vassanji went to the US to study and then moved to Canada. He has won the Giller Prize twice. In India to promote his new novel, Vassanji talks about The Assassin’s Song, set in Gujarat and culminating in…