About the Book
When a Pushcart Prize nominee for poetry with six or seven books to his credit and a writer whose translations of an Urdu poet have been nominated for a Nobel who also has six or seven books to her credit get together and bring out a compilation of their essays on India in a post-modern, minimalist, aporia-ridden effort what will the result be? A delectable potpourri, a Cortazarian hopscotch, a collage, a montage, a bricolage, an assemblage of fragments 'shored against ruins' that is poetic in pieces, literary at times, critical, theoretical and surface-centred at others and sketchy too at places, definitely.
Will this book be banned, burned, be controversial(ized) or silenced and marginalized for questioning concepts like nation, caste and religions, while also questioning Gandhiji, criticizing Indian governance, politics, politicians and polity, exposing fault lines and espousing indirectly a non-Marxist revolution without stating if it should be violent or not, looking again at the past and past and present leaders of India and other places, lands and times and Pak-Indian relations etc.; in a totally original way, mixing high and low culture?
One thing is certain, this book is dynamic and challenges the reader to let go of his or her safe assumptions and begin thinking for himself or herself and enter areas of thought that he or she may find highly disturbing so that he or she may even turn against the book but be forced to acknowledge its ability to work as a pulley and lever to bring movement and activism towards the process of nation building. Hate it or love it, curse it or praise it, criticize it for its glaring flaws, inconsistencies, inaccuracies, weaknesses and mistakes or laud it and give it awards and accolades for its equally amazing strengths, pluralities, multifacetedness and introduction to new significant issues like the agenda of the millenium goals and e-waste- this book will still make waves.
Get hold of a copy now, read it, discuss it angrily, loudly and vehemently and then go out and do something, anything, about the issues it raises in a very brief and tantalizing manner.
About the Author
Dr. Bina Biswas, a Professor of English, based in Hyderabad, is a translator, critic, poet, fiction writer and multilinguist par excellence, besides being a Tagore expert. Her first book, a collection of short stories titled “The Tale of the Missing Shoe and Other Stories” and the second, “Breeze in the Old Building and Other Stories” have been published in 2012. Her book “Tagore’s Heroines: Portraits of Gender Orientation” and her poetry book “Forest Flowers” have been released in May 2013.
Her translation of Mahesh Dattani’s play “Final Solutions” into Bengali, Naseer Ahmad Nasir’s poems into English from Urdu and the well-known Bangladeshi playwright Masum Reza Khan’s play Araz Charitramala into English from Bengali (co-translator) will be published soon.
She is also the co-author of the English translation of Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s celebrated epic, Meghnad Vadh Kavya, in a mammoth work titled “An Epic on the Slaying of Meghnaad”, to be published soon. She is presently working on a docufiction on the strife-torn Middle East vis-à-vis religions of the world.
Dr. A.V.Koshy, has six books to his credit, is a literary critic, poet, fiction writer, dramatist to be, social innovator, teacher, lover of life, and married, with 3 children. He is also an essayist, theoretician, researcher, freelance journalist, artist and editor (of Inklinks), who has published a book (Wrighteings: In Media Res with A.V.Verghese), articles, poems, research papers etc..He has won awards as a teacher and has a certificate from the world Bank for having done a course on social innovation. He and his wife Anna Gabriel run an NGO for autism.
