Literary Trails
Intizar Husain captures the mysterious evocation of Nature’s ways viewed through the bewildered and wondrous innocence of a boy bursting with curiosity. Translated by M. Asaduddin …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
The jungle and its inhabitants the Gonds serve as the backdrop to this tale of post-partition unrest and tension across the border in Intizar Husain’s tale of looming apocalypse. Translated by Alok Bhalla & Vishwamitter Adil. …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
Geetanjali Shree, Hindi novelist and essayist, remembers Intizar Husain whose death anniversary falls on February 2nd as an affectionate friend with a disposition that helped him cross cultural boundaries in dialogic immersions. ..[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Intizar Husain (21 December 1925-2 February 2016) was a writer whose sensibilities were formed in the fires of the 1947 Partition but equally in the myths and memories of a ‘good’ life, Uprooted, he remained a rooted cosmopolitan feels Ashoak Upadhyay…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this beautifully sorrowful elegy to the peacock as bird of Paradise, Intizar Husain delves into the state of human consciousness bent on destruction of life and bemoans the impossibility of composing his Morenama, seeking clues (solace?) in Indic epic tales. Curated and translated by Alok Bhalla…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In this “hermetically sealed nightmare”, Intizar Husain has three anonymous, faceless men describe their barbaric acts of rape and endless killing to each other, realize they are horrors with nowhere to flee or even bury their own corpses. Curated and translated by Alok Bhalla. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Intizar Husain tackles the theme of Man’s fall from grace and the Flood through the creation myths of various faiths in a brilliant weave of our contemporary condition of human vanities and planetary destruction. Curated and translated by Alok Bhalla …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Drawing from the Jatakas, Intizar Husain tells us the story of a young Bhikshu with a begging bowl seeking grace through the Buddha’s teachings of renunciation, entranced by the temptation of earthly pleasure, aware sorrowfully of his failings. Curated and translated by Alok Bhalla. …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
In this imagined dialogue between Intizar Husain and artist Akhilesh , words and colours are like nomads transgressing boundaries with impunity. By Alok Bhalla. Paintings by Akhilesh. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A story that works at two levels: the surface one, where Intizar Husain records man’s priority for commerce and at the deeper level of an unspoken bond with Nature that is wordless; memory speaks/suffices. …[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Folklore is the artifice of enchantment; liminal, it includes the sites of both sorrow and joy; death and life but boundaries are fluid, forest-covered, unmapped. Alok Bhalla on folklore as gateway to life’s renewal.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
In the Adi Parva, Vyasa comments on the nature of the epic he has composed, its structure and its intention. Addressing Brahma, Vyasa says that he has ‘imagined’ a ‘poem’; a visionary ‘history…’ Allah Baksh’s Mahabharata neither begins by illustrating the long prelude about the visionary form and ahimsic intent of Vyasa nor by first visualising some act of heroism and sacred revelation.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A searing allegory of the way women are treated in a society governed by misogyny, lax moral codes and a political discourse that sanctifies both. Asghar Wajahat translated by Alok Bhalla.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
In dialogic encounters that recall a ‘looking glass world,’ Asghar Wajahat conjures up a grim reality where words and meanings are their own masters, painting the grotesqueries of our contemporary landscape. Alok Bhalla translates.…[Read More]…
Bookshelf
The miniature paintings of The Gita by Allah Baksh, from the late 17th century Mewar. commissioned by Udaipur’s Maharana Jai Singh. Allah Baksh’s luminous work on the Gita has no precedent in India’s art tradition. He has illustrated Krishna’s ecstatic song, verse by abstract verse. His images, meditative and unostentatious, are free from both heroic posturing and spiritual pride points out Alok Bhalla in this perceptive Introduction to the volume he edited with Chandra Prakash Deval…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Considered a “poet’s poet” for the standards he set in the genre of Hindi-Urdu modern progressive poetry, Shamsher Bahadur Singh, in this poem translated by Alok Bhalla from Hindi, draws sly distinctions between faith and religion.…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Alok Bhalla, Vinod Kumar Shukla and Asghar Wajahat articulate their visions, paying tribute to this Earth in the only way poets can, through slanted truths. Guest edited and translated by Alok Bhalla.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Krishna Sobti had a lot to say about the tangled interweave of religion, politics, Partition in the lives of the communities they affected and still do. Alok Bhalla offers a critical preview of her vison followed by extracts of his conversation with her that is remarkable for its relevance today.…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Alok Bhalla looks back at Partition as “borders of sorrow” created by violence bred by intolerant religious identities. Partition literature however comes across differently: not as dossiers of hatreds but as chronicles of yearning for that “good civilization” that once was and could be. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
History, myth, fact and fable merge in Ashgar Wajahat’s story. In Afzal Ahmed Syed’s short poem words can stem an apocalypse of the dagger, herald a promise. Both translated by Alok Bhalla
…[Read More]…
Literary Trails
This collection of emails between Asif Raza, poet, essayist and M. U. Memon, literary critic, essayist and editor is a dialogic feast of literary influences that shaped them and an ode to friendship. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Pash comes to life as the poet talking back to the demons of our imes in these fresh translations from his work by Alok Bhalla…[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Ink and Brush Portraits by Akbar Padamsee of the heads of prophets scarred by suffering, shying away from our compassion and yet some glow with tints of mercy …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Manto weaves a shocking tale of human grossness out of a chapter from our inglorious history that foretold the horrors of partition, in this translation by Alok Bhalla …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
In a deconstruction of Manto’s short fiction about 1919, Alok Bhalla offers an elegant yet forcefully insightful, studied but not ponderous alternative reading of South Asia’s ‘vile’ histories …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
Alok Bhalla, translator-poet’s brief and poignant salutation to life and its infinite possibilities to be sought and savoured. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
A little known tale by Saadat Hasan Manto on partitions that continue to rupture languages, identities and people. Translated by Alok Bhalla…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
Poet, translator and essayist Alok Bhalla does a variation on Surjit Patar’s Panjabi Poem. …[Read More]…
Between the Lines
Those who arrange languages into structures of hierarchy obscure the distinction between words and daggers, making us, rues Alok Bhalla, “hard-bristled, sharp-fanged, knife-clawed creatures with merciless fires in our eyes.” …[Read More]…
Personal Notes
How to explain the spiritual homelessness of the rooted, of one who has never left his home? Nirmal Verma on the consequent ‘loss of self’ and the place of literature in describing it. Translated by Alok Bhalla.…[Read More]…
That’s Life!!!
A short fiction that reads like a perennial reality for an oppressed minority this tale by Asghar Wajahat portrays the psychological damage that even talk of violence can have on the vulnerable. …[Read More]…
Literary Trails
With the release of Nandita Das’ biopic on Saadat Hasan Manto we felt it pertinent to offer Muhammed .Umar Memon’s meditations on Manto’s creative obsession “with women who practice the oldest profession.”…[Read More]…
Between The Lines
Our age is so deeply immersed in politics that we no longer have agency in the satisfaction of even our instincts and spiritual desires says Varis Alavi. In such an age what should the artist/writer do? …[Read More]…
Visual Spaces
Darius Cooper, poet and author of works on Satyajit Ray and Guru Dutt remembers the birth of his passion for cinema from what he calls the golden age of world cinema screening in seventies Bombay. …[Read More]…