A heartwarming and sensitive portrayal of a growing bond between Yusuf, a British Pakistani grandfather, and his mixed heritage teenage granddaughter, Rubi, Sairish Hussain’s second novel Hidden Fires highlights the importance of preserving the histories of South Asia’s most tragedy ridden generation. ‘This whole thing is far from over. It’s been dormant since 1947 and […]
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My first introduction to Anita Desai’s work was as a ten-year-old borrowing books from my school library over the summer holidays. ‘The Village by the Sea’ was an intriguing title and I, having lived near the Arabian Sea for all of my childhood, immediately gravitated towards the book. This was a time when English fiction
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Professor Eleanor Nesbitt’s book, Quaker Quicks — Open to New Light (published by Christian Alternative Books) provides an accessible and deeply informed account of Quakers engaged in interfaith activity over the last three and a half centuries. The following chapter (Chapter 4), which Professor Nesbitt has kindly allowed us to include at this site in
Quakers, Muslims, Muslim Quakers, and Quaker Muslims Read More »
Open to New Light: Quakers and Other Faiths Eleanor Nesbitt (Collective Ink, 2023) Researching this book brought me one surprise after another. I hadn’t previously known that George Fox, the founder of what is now the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), was reading the Qur’an (an English translation of a French translation) in the 1600s.
A reflection on my book, “Open to New Light” Read More »
Since the first translation of the Bhagavad Gita in 1789 by Charles Wilkins, there have been hundreds of translations into English. Some have translated the poetry of the Gita into prose, and some others have attempted metrical poetry. Whereas prose translations do not convey the delights of the original, good metrical translations have no choice
Michelle Mendonca Bambawale’s just-published book ‘Becoming Goan’ (Ebury-Penguin, 2023) is a story told at three levels. First, it is the story of a return to Goa by a daughter of the soil whose family has been out for generations. Secondly, it tells you about the rapid (sometimes destructive) changes Goa has been going through, as
Michelle’s Goa, a story told bluntly – a review by Frederick Noronha Read More »
Author(s): Michael Mitchell Publication date Pub: 22 December 2022 Journal: Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies Publisher: Pluto Journals Though much has been made of the fact that Silent Winds, Dry Seas is the first Anglophone novel from Mauritius to have achieved wide circulation, readers of Caribbean fiction will be struck by an impression of familiarity. The reason is not hard to
Vinod Busjeet, Silent Winds, Dry Seas (New York: Doubleday, 2021), 288 pp Read More »
There’s an old platitude that does the rounds every Independence Day: though we won freedom from the British back in 1947, it goes, we continue to remain unfree in many ways to this day Book: Caged Tiger: How Too Much Government Is Holding Indians Back Author: Subhashish Bhadra Published by: Bloomsbury There’s an old platitude
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Salt & Pepper. Selected Poems. Sukrita. Paperwall Publishing. April 2023. 196 pages. The latest anthology of Sukrita’s poems Salt and Pepper traverses the poet’s momentous journey of nearly four decades. The poems bring us to a world not altogether unfamiliar— but a world imbued with a sensibility that is fine, complex and aesthetically profound at
