India

Introduction

In 2021, poets and novelists responded creatively to topical issues, including the Covid-19 pandemic; well-known poets like Ranjit Hoskote, Sudeep Sen, Hoshang Merchant, Murali Sivaramakrishnan, Adil Jussawalla and Tishani Doshi brought out new collections; Jnanpith award-winning novelist Amitav Ghosh published a book of poetry, Jungle Nama and poet Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih published his first novel, Funeral Nights. New work was published by several established novelists, including Namita Gokhale, Irwin Allan Sealy, Jhumpa Lahiri, Anuradha Roy, Jeet Thayil, C. P. Surendran, Anuja Chauhan, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, Siddharth Chowdhury, Sunjeev Sahota and Amitava Kumar. Some books published in 2020 have been included in the current bibliography — because of Covid restrictions last year, we could not access them in time. Some impressive new voices have made their mark. Priya Balasubramanian’s novel The Alchemy of Secrets (2020) and Bharati Jagannathan’s short stories in A Spoonful of Curds (2020) blend the personal with the political. Novelist Kavery Nambisan’s A Luxury Called Health is an autobiography as well as a critique of public health in India. Yamini Dand Shah’s debut collection Abstract Oralisms is an experiment in dialect. The North-East, especially Arunachal Pradesh, is beautifully mapped in Madhu Raghavendra’s Being Non-Essential. In drama, Danish Sheikh’s Love and Reparation responds to I.P.C. Section 377 (discussed below).

Amitav Ghosh has brought out his first book of verse, Jungle Nama, an adaptation of the popular legend of Bon Bibi in the Sundarbans. There are two print versions of the epic poem, composed in Bengali in the 19^th century. Jungle Nama is a “free adaptation”, different from both the versions. Ghosh foregrounds the courage and valour of Bon Bibi, the mistress of the forest, and her brother Shah Jongoli, who defeat the tyrannical Dokkhin Rai — “to finish him wasn’t their mission,/ they had come there with a different intention./ What they wanted to end was his tyranny,/ this they did by confining him to a boundary”. This is followed by the story of Dhona’s greed and the simplicity of Dukhey as they enter the Sunderbans.

Adil Jussawalla’s The Tattooed Teetotaller is a book of 27 poems, nonsense verse rooted in “contemporary absurdities”. Rats are compared to dictators — “Rats are strict in their regulations,/ Like dictators they regulate/ meals and nations/ along lines of bite.”

Artist and poet Murali Sivaramakrishnan’s seventh collection Notebook of a Naturalist (2020) is a birder’s delight. Written in simple and direct lines, the poems showcase the different birds that have caught the poet’s attention — the crow pheasant is a “brown and black, dumpy bird” with “beady eyes”, the tailor bird “is at the edge/ Of day and night/ Carefully/ Carefully/ Stitching/ Everything together”. The book is embellished with drawings by the poet.

Author of 25 poetry books, Hoshang Merchant’s latest collection is Paradise Isn’t Artificial. Inspired by Dante and Ezra Pound, Merchant has written a long poem in the canto form with epic concerns that include “Life, Time, Society, War, Education, Art, . . .”. Empathizing is Amarendra Kumar’s ninth volume of verse. It includes poems from earlier collections as well as new poems. Many of the new poems mourn the loss of his wife of five decades.

Unbound by Sanjukta Dasgupta has poems from six different collections along with 15 new poems presenting a wide range of ideas. The brutal impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on human life is found in plain lines: “Crowded crematoriums/ Electric ovens smell like/ Those at Auschwitz”.

Ranjit Hoskote’s latest poetry collection Hunchprose is a universe in itself where the extinct and endangered find space along with the living. Written in an erudite tone, the poems are steeped in history, mythology, linguistic diversity and cultural heterogeneity. Like the “Sovereign”, the arctic fox who travelled across glaciers in 76 days, “leaving her pawprints on frozen currents”, Hunchprose traverses a boundless historical expanse. The eponymous poem is also a sardonic rejoinder to critics, “Call me Hunchpraise. I bend over my inkdrift words./ And when I spring back up I sing”.

Established poet Sudeep Sen’s Anthropocene has a planetary sweep and is a kind of 21st-century epic. Epigraphed with the work of many poets, Sen creates a poetic continuum of writers with serious concern about world crises and climate change. The epilogue is a prayer reminiscent of T. S. Eliot’s Wasteland.

Hindustani music vocalist and poet Smita Agarwal’s Speak, Woman! is the poet’s third collection with 38 poems. They bring the magic of bhakti into the modern world and its problems. Hindi words are often used in her poems to create the effect of the local — “Buaji from Kothaar, widow,/ childless, wearing unstitched cloth/ while cooking; impure woman,/ pure as Gangajal at 6 am,/ preparing bhog for her Krishna”. The body of the woman is central to this collection.

Bibhu Padhi’s Principles of Sleeping has poems reflective in tone. Sleep, dreams, nostalgia, the unconscious have all a place in this book.

Tishani Doshi’s fourth volume of poetry A God at the Door spans the cosmological and the earthly. Doshi has experimented with stanzaic forms and used visual poetry in some of the poems. Of special focus is the female body and the way in which it becomes a pawn on the political chessboard — as was the case of the 21 million Indian women whose name did not figure on the voting list. At the same time women are seen as active entities capable of reacting, asserting and reclaiming space — “Our vaginas/ have learned to shoot. They laugh and talk back (rapacious/ beasts)”.

G. J. V. Prasad has brought out his second poetry collection, This World of Mine, 25 years after his first, In Delhi without a Visa. Written with perspicuity, the book’s 50 selected poems carry the poet’s views on the shaping of India from the 1970s to the present. Punctuated with experience, endowed with a dramatic element, the poems question people’s imperviousness to the inequalities around. A three-part poem on Roop Kanwar, a Rajput woman who was burnt on her husband’s pyre in a village in Rajasthan, mocks the shortness of public memory: her story “Is buried in the inside pages/ Along with dowry deaths and minor murders/ And the rapes of lower-class girls” as people soon get busy in invitations, sarees and jewellery.

Mustansir Dalvi’s Walk is a collection of his English poems and their translations into Hindi by the poet, into Marathi by Hemant Divate and into Gujarati by Udayan Thakker. The migrant labour, yearning to return home during the pandemic are sensitively etched in Dalvi’s poetry.

Kashmiri poet Ayaz Rasool Nazki’s Tree without a Nest, the poet’s second collection, has a profoundly elegiac tone. The pain of Kashmir flows through every line of Nazki’s poetry. The vocabulary of death is central to the poems: “For years now/ I have been/ carrying my coffin/ to the cemetery/ getting there”.

Santosh Bakaya’s Runcible Spoons and Peagreen Boats, a “curatorial walkthrough”, makes a generous dip into the memory archive to create poetic pen portraits of both people and instances from her childhood days in Kashmir.

Jerry Pinto holds conversations with his self/selves through poetry in I Want A Poem and Other Poems. Concrete objects from everyday life often signpost the explorations and questioninings of his poetry: the bathroom wall, the window, the metal stairs or the right-angled sketch of a home. In an earlier collection, Asylum (2017), republished in 2021, specifically in poems such as “Exiled Home from Burma”, Pinto shared his mother’s experience of having to flee from Burma in the wake of the Second World War.

Basudhara Roy’s second poetry collection Stitching a Home courses through a languorous view of cities, home and life visualized as a sprawling organism, feeling and experiencing things to the fullest. Banaras is presented through nostalgic recollections as a live emblem of history: “Through capitals, calendars, and unyielding distances,/ the city keeps faith, has remained a friend”.

The poems in Swati Pal’s debut collection, In Absentia, come from a deep sense of loss as Pal lost her son in 2019. She recollects moments spent with him through memorabilia: “The soccer shoes/ With a bit of mud/ Still stuck to them…”. Poetry for Pal is the articulation of mourning, of reconstructing and preserving in memory. The last poem in this collection, “AE (Drastic Alter Ego)”, is by her son, Divakar Sinha.

Sanjeev Sethi has published two new poetry collections, Bleb and Hesitancies. In his fifth poetry collection, Hesitancies, moments from personal history, perceptions and experience connect with mythology. Words from French, Hindi, Yiddish and other languages make the journey in this collection a rich experience. Sethi’s poetic peregrinations bring us finally to the moment of loss during the Covid-19 pandemic: “Smoke billows/ from the crematorium/ inscribing the last lines/ on the sky’s surface/ of another loved one/ who lies curdled as a cadaver”.

Madhu Raghavendra’s third poetry collection, Being Non-Essential, carries the poem “Artist” written as a response to a survey published by the Sunday Times on jobs people considered essential and non-essential in Singapore. The poem resonated with the voices of other artists and thinkers and went viral: “Art is non-essential/ until it is not”. The poems provide a cornucopia of the lush green locales of Arunachal Pradesh and the rituals of the Galo tribe.

Birder and poet Nitoo Das’s Crowbite (2020) combines sensuous thought with the beauty of the North-East. There are poems on different places in the North-East. Birds remain the protagonist of this collection, the forktail is “a chess game speckled/ with dots. A zebra bird/ with strategic full stops”.

After her novel in verse, The Girl and the Goddess, Nikita Gill’s Where Hope Comes From is a song in troubled times. It sends across a message of solidarity and hope.

Teji Sethi’s Moss Laden Walls is a collection of haiku and senryu. Something More than Broken Love by Naren Weiss has poems on love, heartbreak and moving on in life. Written simply, the poems gently mock at the claims made while in love.

Jhilam Chattaraj’s Noise Cancellation draws attention to the many sounds and aromas we have forgotten in the noise of modern life. “Ross Island” presents the island’s chequered history, its English and Japanese colonisations, and draws attention to the thoughts of the tribal Andamanese rendered a spectacle by the tourists.

2021 saw the publication of several impressive debut collections. The poems in Teething by Megha Rao retrieve moments from life’s difficulties, the experience of violence and childhood trauma, all uncovered through a deep and nuanced sense of perception. The difficulties of teething are an apt metaphor for the pain experienced in living and accepting life.

Yamini Dand Shah has published an interesting debut collection, Abstract Oralisms. Imbued with rhythmic cadences, the poems provide a rich journey into the linguistic enmeshing of the Kachchhi dialect, spoken in Gujarat, with English. Words and inflexions from the two languages fuse to create a new aesthetic: “dreaming of being in the shade of his bhungo;/ sapno nerde circular house ji chhaya mein”.

Sabitha Satchi’s Hereafter weaves together personal bonds, social perceptions and a profound understanding of her world in poetry. The hieroglyphs and pyramids of Egypt, the Egyptian queen Hatshepsut who became the fifth Pharaoh, the trauma of people in Kashmir and Gaza, all find a voice in her poems. A series of eight poems have been written for her father, the Malayalam poet K. Satchidanandan, who has also published a new volume of poems in English.

Nagaland poet Achingliu Kamei’s debut poetry collection Songs of Raengdailu is divided into two parts: in the first are poems on the geographic beauty and cultural richness of Nagaland; they reflect an organic connection between women and the natural ecosystem. The second part has poems that protest against the patriarchal domination of women.

Artist from Gujarat, Shweta Rao Garg’s debut poetry collection Of Goddesses and Women brings together the woman from mythology with the modern woman. In “Kali, Come for Tea”, the speaker addresses the goddess: “I am sure you need to be elsewhere/ And stop the world from destruction/ I too need to go too, to buy vegetables for dinner”. She has also presented the lives of urban women in her paintings under the title, Of Goddesses and Women.

Loss, grief and bereavement during the Covid-19 pandemic find creative expression in Shikhandin’s After Grief.

Devika J. is a class X student; her poems in Lantanas in a Cold Misty Morning provide a surprising depth of thought. Granny’s wrinkles are, “Peach skin wrinkled,/ Like the soil of earth has cracked,/ In the scorching summer heat./ Her locks are hoary and silvery”.

Sonali Pattnaik’s when the flowers begin to speak presents a brutal experience of marriage: “in this marriage the walls are tall and thick/ they all pretend to have not heard…if I show him my bruises, / he calls me mad”.

Poems in Alka Singh’s Colours of Blood hold dialogue with the woman’s body; the red of the menstrual blood is used to define women. Shahana Khatoon’s collection Chaotic, in bits and pieces carries images of the body and the way it resonates with conflicts of thought and experience: “This body is a sight of disorder/ waiting to be sewed again”. Deepa Kailasam Iyer’s, Zodiac, Richik Banerjee’s Two Commas and that Voice, Tapas Bandopadhyay’s From the Wrong Room, Debarun Sarkar’s <blank> and The Blue Rabbit by Joyce Job are also worth mention.

Some poetry collections published in 2020 came to hand too late for inclusion last year. Nileen Putatunda’s Bangles comprises poems written in the pre-pandemic phase from 2017–2018. These short poems of pithy lines cover a wide range of topics. Some of the many subjects of A Book Lover to His Darling and Other Poems, Nita B. George’s third collection, are thoughts, shadows, roots, twilight, sparrows, a piece of cake and motherhood.

Debashish Lahiri’s fourth poetry collection, Poppies in the Post and Other Poems is based on the poet’s travels to different European countries and Indian cities. Vignettes from Orissa are to be seen in Bhardwaj Mishra’s Farewell to Kalpana Saikia. Amit Radha Krishna Nigam’s sixty years from now combines the quotidian with emotional opulence: “But some nights, the city rains,/ sometimes it snows too/ and the streets are cleaned off./ But like a ring of a teacup,/ the stains are set in our mind forever./ They refuse to go”.

Some interesting debut collections appeared in 2020: My Epitaph by Jagdeep Singh, Corona Diary, Before and Beyond by Harshita Srivastava, Lost City Symphony by Indrajit Bose, Everything in Between by Gauri Gharpure and The Untied Shoe Laces by Elvira Lobo. Kamayani’s The Witch Must Die and Other Poems is a set of feminist poems that reject submission, transforming women into active agents of assertion as in the eponymic poem. Centred on Kashmir is Moumita Alam’s debut collection, The Musings of the Dark. Assamese poet Misna Chanu’s perceptions on life are seen in A Little Piece of Melancholic Sky.

A large number of anthologies appeared. Shimmer Spring (2020) presents poetry by 39 writers from India and other parts of the world. It also has prose pieces by four authors. The Inheritance of Words brings together “essays, short fiction, poetry and art” by the women of Arunachal Pradesh. There is a photo essay on the custom of bride price. It also has an interview of Tina Mena, the first woman from the North-East to climb Mount Everest.

Yearbook of Indian Poetry in English (2020–2021) has poems contributed by more than 100 poets. As the editors point out, the idea was to explore Indian English in its “interface with Punjabi, Marathi, Tamil, Bengali or for that matter any other Indian language”. Collegiality and Other Ballads has poems by poets from India and abroad. It looks at feminism from the point of view of men and non-binary allies and their critique of “toxic masculinity”. Lockdown Literature from Mizoram (2020) has poetry and a few prose contributions by 21 writers from the north-eastern state.

Fragility, Thy Name Is Not Woman (2020) turns around the line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet to bring poems by women on the legendary women of India who have left an indelible mark in diverse fields from the ancient to the modern period. The Kali Project curates poetry by 190 Indian women from different parts of the world. It derives its inspiration from the Goddess Kali, a metaphor for the “great dissenter” and “the perfect feminist icon”. The youngest poet in this collection is a nine-year-old. Feminist Voices brings together verses on the brutal experience of rape and sexual abuse. The poets are from 47 different countries, including India.

In All the Spaces (2020) presents poetry by poets from India and other countries on diverse issues. According to the editors, instead of “celebrity poets”, the contributors are poets “who are not always in the limelight”. Antargata (2020) brings together poetry by the young poets of the Bangalore Poetry Circle. The frightening experience of the pandemic has been presented in its various forms by more than 50 poets in Monster 2020.

The Shape of a Poem has contemporary erotic poetry with contributions from all over the world: Bangladesh, Canada, India, Israel, Italy, Mexico, Portugal, Scotland, the UK and the USA. The anthology is certainly an intervention in discourse on sexual practices and assumptions.

Indian English drama continues to be a trickle. Two interesting collections appeared in 2021: Danish Sheikh’s Love and Reparation and Naren Weiss’s A Marginally Better Place.

Love and Reparation, a collection of two plays, “Contempt” and “Pride”, dramatise the litigation around Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code which criminalized homosexuality. The plays cover a struggle of almost two decades. “Contempt” is a response to the disappointment and anger generated by the 2013 verdict that reinforced Section 377 and “Pride” to the restoration of rights to the queer community in 2018. “Contempt” is structured along four courtroom scenes, “forged” from transcripts of courtroom hearings. These scenes are “interleaved” with stories called “affidavits”; they document the real time experience of the queer community. At the level of performance, the stage setting is planned in a way that the audience is a performer. In “Contempt” the judges are seated with the audience suggesting how the community at large sits in judgement of people. In “Pride” the audience is split into two sections, facing each other; in the midst is the stage space. The tone of both plays is even and dispassionate.

A Marginally Better Place by Naren Weiss is a collection of performance manuscripts. The book carries two short plays, “Sherlock Holmes” and “There Is a Field”; a one-act play; two monologues; a prologue for a film and an epilogue. It also has two short stories “Metro Blooming” and “Aurum”, with a strong dramatic element. A fresh voice, these experimental plays explore the idea of what lies beyond existence. In most performances, the ending leaves the audience at a point where they will have to formulate their own journey thereon.

Octogenarian and contributor to Sindhi language and culture, Hira Kartar Dalwani has published a play, Suffer Little Children, on the issue of children in domestic labour. The play draws on real life incidents she experienced or ones reported in newspapers. Antony Fernandez has been contributing consistently to the field of Indian English drama. His recent publication, June 14 and Other Plays, is a collection of five short plays locating acts of kindness and humanity in different walks of life.

Namita Gokhale’s 12th novel, The Blind Matriarch, presents the complex dynamics of a joint family in Delhi during the Covid-19 pandemic. 80-year-old Matangi-Ma lives on the top floor of a four-storeyed house, with her sons and daughter occupying the other floors. She is blind, but her other senses are so sharp that she knows when anyone enters her room. All the characters look to her for guidance, but there is also a sense of resentment. The novelist notes all the details of the period: migrant labourers, the hassle of “work-from-home”, the shortage of oxygen, the mass funerals. Her delineation is so perfect, every Indian can identify with the characters in their despair and resilience in the face of the pandemic.

Novelists have chosen different periods of Indian history as a backdrop. In Asoca: A Sutra, Irwin Allan Sealy attempts to present the “real man” behind the third-century King Ashoka the Great. He uses the spelling “Asoca” to highlight the way simple villagers pronounce the name, for his mother was not of royal birth. The 77 chapters of this long and extremely slow-paced novel show Ashoka’s childhood, his rivalry with his brother for the throne and his efforts to propagate Buddhism. His life after the Kalinga war is devoted to soul-searching, even as he faces court intrigues and attempts to kill him.

The Tale of a Beleaguered Soldier: A Novel by Tej N. Dhar is an encapsulation of the history of Kashmir from the second century to the end of the 20th century. The protagonist Manav lives through multiple previous births over the centuries and recollects the triumphs and difficulties of his Kashmiri Brahmin ancestors. The contribution of Kashmiri Brahmins to literature, poetics and philosophy is highlighted through Manav’s meeting with personages like Anandavardhana, Abhinavagupta, Bhamaha and Kshemendra. The novel is based on years of research into the history and culture of Kashmir. Events of the 20th century are based on the testimony of his father and his own personal experience: Tej N. Dhar was Professor of English at the University of Kashmir, when militants forced him to flee Srinagar in 1990. Two novels present life after 1990 in Kashmir: Life in the Clock Tower Valley by Shakoor Rather and The Plague upon Us by Shabir Ahmed Mir, a first novel. Deepa Agarwal’s stories in Kashmir! Kashmir! can be read with profit by adults, though brought out by a children’s publisher.

Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Last Queen has Maharaja Ranjit Singh’s youngest wife Jindan Kaur as protagonist and explores in detail the different periods of her life — as the daughter of the royal kennel keeper, as a bride (1835–1839) and as a queen (1840–1849). The reader cannot help admiring her as she works hard to resist British attempts to take over Punjab, but their machinations succeed in depriving her of everything, including her son, six-year-old Duleep. The Last Queen is a “prequel” to Navdeep Sarna’s The Exile: A Novel Based on the Life of Maharaja Duleep Singh (2008).

Nandini Sengupta’s The Ocean’s Own, the third book in her Gupta Empire Trilogy, celebrates the achievements of Samudragupta (c. 335–375 CE). Nalanda by Shivani Singh is a murder mystery set in the early 13^th century, in the renowned university it is named after. Madhulika Liddle’s new novel takes its title from an intricate stone frieze that the carver, Madhav, has named “The Garden of Heaven”. She traces the rise and fall of dynasties in Delhi in the period 1192–1398. Historical figures like Razia Sultan and Amir Khusrau also make an appearance in The Garden of Heaven. Savita Singh’s The Indian Connection has incidents that occurred in 1857. She uses an effective (though not very original) strategy: a young Englishwoman has visions of the battles between the Rani of Jhansi and the British forces when she starts reading the journal of her great-grand-aunt. Lahore by Manreet Sodhi Someshwar is the first part of her proposed Partition Trilogy. News of the impending partition of Punjab has already started to divide the common people. As Mehmood, a coolie at the Lahore Railway Station says of the old men gossiping and smoking hukkahs, “You know they were looking askance at me because nowadays, when they see me, they see a Muslim — not your childhood friend”.

The impact of the Second World War on north-east India is receiving attention in fiction. In April 1944 the Japanese army crossed the Indo-Burmese border to attack Nagaland; Digonta Bordoloi’s Second World War Sandwich traces the interaction of four persons thrown together in defending the small British garrison: Captain Timothy Hastings (a tea-estate manager), Raan (a cook), Chetri (a Gorkha) and Mongseng (a Naga warrior). Mamang Dai’s Escaping the Land combines myth with historical records to trace the formation of Arunachal Pradesh. Dai’s protagonist is Mayang, a native who has come back to her land to write its history. She is conscious of Kojum-Koja, a sacred place outside time, but is also aware of the forest mafia and of corrupt politicians who have links with militants. Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s first novel, Funeral Nights, is about another north-eastern state, Meghalaya. Ka Phor Sorat is a six-day funeral ceremony of the Lyngngams, a Khasi sub-tribe. In 12 chapters spread over 1000 pages, Nongkynrih writes about being Khasi and his attachment to his hometown, Sohra (anglicized to Cherrapunji). Daribha Lyndem’s debut novel Name Place Animal Thing charts the coming of age of a girl in Shillong (the capital of Meghalaya) through interconnected stories. The novel, which was shortlisted for the JCB Prize, delineates the emotions of the child with great sensitivity. The Last Light of Glory Days: Stories from Nagaland by Avinuo Kire gives an insider’s view of the situation. People there were hoping to be independent when the British left in 1947, but the central government declared it a state within India, leading to an ongoing conflict. Easterine Kire’s The Rain-Maiden and the Bear-Man and Other Stories is based on folktales from Nagaland; the spiritual and the natural mingle to illumine human predicaments.

Established writers as well as new ones have turned to thrillers and mysteries. Bestselling novelist Chetan Bhagat’s 400 Days is his third novel with Keshav Rajpurohit as protagonist. When he gets involved in investigating the disappearance of a 12-year-old girl, he falls in love with her mother. The book presents an authentic picture of contemporary Delhi. Anuja Chauhan’s Club You to Death presents the life of privilege enjoyed by the very rich in Delhi. ACP Bhavani Singh is the soft-spoken police officer who handles the case; the solution comes as a surprise, even though Chauhan has given out clues throughout the novel. Sutapa Basu, author of historical novels like The Legend of Genghis Khan (2018) and The Curse of Nader Shah (2019) has authored The Cursed Inheritance, set in contemporary Calcutta, in which supernatural elements help the protagonist to solve a mystery. Krishnan Srinivasan I. F. S, a retired diplomat, has published The Ambassador and the Private Eye, his sixth novel featuring old Somali ambassador Michael Marco. Koel Deb, a private detective, enlists his help. In these classic detective stories, she does all the investigative work and delivers her findings to Marco (and the reader) who then works out the solutions without stirring out of his room.

Several novelists have made their debut with crime fiction. Rijula Das won the Tata Literature Live First Book Award 2021 for A Death in Shonagachhi; it is more than a detective story, as it portrays the inner life of people in the red-light area of Calcutta. Smriti Zubin Irani, a popular TV star who is now a minister in Narendra Modi’s cabinet, has published her first novel, Lal Salaam, set in the Naxalite area of Chhattisgarh. The protagonist, a police officer, unmasks the people behind the murder of his close friend, a police officer who was working hard for the education of the villagers. Nobody Likes an Outsider by Fawaz Jaleel has a police team investigating the murder of a charismatic young leader in Bihar. The plot hinges on a less known reality: caste discrimination in Indian Muslim communities. Raza Mir’s Ghalib: A Thousand Desires (2019), was a scholarly study of the great Urdu poet’s life and work. Murder at the Mushaira, set in 1857, is a well-constructed historical novel dominated by Ghalib as detective. Every chapter is prefaced by a verse of poetry. Children’s books have also turned to detective fiction: Ravi Subramanian’s The Mystery of the Missing Cat is the second book of a series featuring three ten-year-olds as detectives. Children’s detective fiction has won awards: Shabnam Minwalla won the Best Children’s Book award at the Atta Galatta Bangalore Literature Festival for Saira Zariwala Is Afraid, and the Auther award for Murder at Daisy Apartments.

Academic Manju Jaidka’s Gumshoe Mania employs elements of a detective story, a quest narrative and a travelogue to explore a mother-child relationship without solemnity or sentimentality. Reema, a single mother from a well-to-do family in Chandigarh, is deeply attached to her son. As the author observed in a panel discussion, “mothering at some point becomes smothering”; Reema’s son travels to the U.S. and takes care not to reveal his whereabouts when he phones her. The distraught Reema decides to become a cyber-sleuth, inspired by the gumshoes she is fond of reading about, and tracks him down with the help of an old college friend, a burly Sikh nicknamed “Tiny”, who fled to America to escape homophobic Indian society. Her travel to Hawaii, and later to the hill shrine of Vaishno Devi, is vividly recreated. Not only the protagonist, but also the minor characters are etched in depth.

Many debut novels are centred around the mother-daughter relationship. Priya Balasubramanian, a gastroenterologist and transplant hepatologist in Sacramento, California, made her fictional debut with The Alchemy of Secrets (2020). Mira grows up hearing rumours that her mother died in an accident when she was running away with her lover. This well-crafted novel, with multiple narrators (Mira is the primary narrator) shows how casteism, bigotry and rumour-mongering destroy family life. Mira’s mother dies when Mira is just a few weeks old, and she is brought up by her grandmother, who is ready to believe the worst about her daughter-in-law because she is a Christian orphan. The novelist recreates life in Bangalore in a Brahmin household in the early 1980s while revealing the effects of the misuse of power by petty politicians during the National Emergency declared by Indira Gandhi in 1976.

Naheed Phiroze Patel’s A Mirror Made of Rain, a first novel, is also about familial bonds. It presents a dark picture of Noomi’s love-hate relationship with her mother, who is an alcoholic because of childhood ill-treatment. Girl in White Cotton (2019) by Avni Doshi (published with the title Burnt Sugar in Britain), shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2020, also centres on a fraught mother-daughter bond: the protagonist struggles to look after her mother who is suffering from memory loss, a mother who never cared for her.

In Jhumpa Lahiri’s third novel Whereabouts, the protagonist’s complex bond with her mother shapes her psyche. As she lays flowers on her father’s grave, she says, “I am still struggling, even after your death, to eliminate the distance between you and my mother”. The book, originally written in Italian, was translated into English by Lahiri herself. The 46 chapters, two or three pages each, take us through the everyday routine of the nameless woman narrator: “on the street”, “in the bookstore”, “in the hotel” or “at the cash register”. A dozen chapters could be deleted at random, without affecting the “novel”.

More novelists are turning to Hindu mythology for their themes, exploring the Mahabharata, the Ramayana and the Puranas from new perspectives (the bibliography that follows this Introduction does not list all of them). Sarasvati, the goddess of knowledge, music and art, is always worshipped single, unlike the other two goddesses in the triumvirate, who are often worshipped as a couple (Lakshmi-Narayana, Parvati-Shiva). Kavita Kane’s Sarasvati’s Gift explores her relationship with her consort Brahma, the creator. Anand Neelakantan takes a fresh look at the women in the Ramayana. Trisha Das’s The Misters Kuru imagines the comic consequences of the Pandavas appearing in contemporary India. Dibyasree Nandy’s The Labyrinth of Silent Voices: Epistles from the Mahabharata perceives the emotions of 12 characters of the epic through the letters they write.

Jeet Thayil, a Syrian Christian from Kerala, turns to myths and legends from the Bible in his fourth novel Names of the Women. He recreates the final days of Jesus Christ through the experiences of 15 women. The novel is episodic in structure, with each of the chapters dealing with women and ending with a mention of a woman (“Her name is Lydia, sister of Assia and of Jesus”) being interspersed with short chapters of Jesus talking to Mary Magdalene. The words Thayil puts into his mouth are a radical departure from accepted teachings; for example, Jesus tells Mary “I say to you that forgiveness is the recourse of the weak and we are not weak and we must not forgive” (101).

Achala Moulik’s Rogues among the Ruins uses her experience as an Indian Administrative Service officer who served as the Director-General of the Archaeological Survey of India to present an unbiased picture of bureaucracy. The first part of the novel shows a dedicated archaeologist at work, while the second part shows his son succumbing to the temptation to further his career at the cost of his values.

Some impressive new voices have emerged. First books of note include Gods and Ends by Lindsay Pereira, The Illuminated by Anindita Ghose, Gold Diggers by Sanjena Sathian, Equations by Shivani Sibal and The House Next to the Factory by Sonal Kohli. Bharati Jagannathan’s A Spoonful of Curds (2020), a first book, has 13 short stories which perfectly capture the ambience of Tamil Brahmin homes. Serious issues, such as the old living alone because their children have migrated to America, or young people defying their parents and rejecting arranged marriages, are explored with a touch of humour. Jagannathan, who teaches history at Delhi University, is quite conscious of the linguistic diversity of India; the glossary she has provided, with a guide to pronunciation, could be a model for other writers.

The anthology Covid’s Metamorphosis: Stories of Our Corona Times “is concerned with the metamorphosis in human life and character which has resulted from the Corona Crisis of our days”. The 27 pieces, fiction as well as personal essays, have been commissioned specifically for this volume. Ether Ore: Chronicles of the Limitless has 29 stories, four of them translated from Malayalam. Most of the authors hail from Kerala, which is the locale of many of the stories. With a wide variety of themes and narrative techniques, several stories have a supernatural element. Suraj Sriwastav’s Survivors and Other Stories is an accomplished first collection; some of the 12 stories are science fiction. The Memorable Bus Journey by Meera Das has simple stories about childhood in a village, based on her own life; one is reminded of R.K. Narayan’s Swami and Friends. The 15 stories in Kiran Doshi’s The English Teacher and Other Stories are women-centred.

Nayantara Sahgal’s Encounter with Kiran presents her interaction with novelist Kiran Nagarkar (1942–2019), whom she met for the first time in 2002. Their email correspondence reveals their commitment to India as a secular democracy. The second part, “Bonds of Dissent: Two Writers in Protest” is of archival importance, it compiles the public speeches and the letters the two novelists wrote to authorities, protesting against the violation of human rights. Shashi Deshpande’s Subversions: Essays on Life and Literature is a record of her active participation in the public discourse of India. Acclaimed novelist Kavery Nambisan’s A Luxury Called Health: A Doctor’s Journey through the Art, the Science and the Trickery of Medicine is her first non-fiction book. She shares her own experiences as a doctor working in the rural areas of India. The paucity of health services for the poor is only increasing, “a creaking government health system and a greedy private sector spell doom”. The chapter on her husband poet Vijay Nambisan’s death due to cancer is very touching.

Historians are paying more attention to pre-Independence India. Shrabani Basu’s The Mystery of the Parsee Lawyer, based on letters and other records, reads like a detective story. The book is an account of Arthur Conan Doyle’s successful efforts to exonerate George Edalji, a Parsi convert framed by the racist British police. Bhagat Singh’s jail diary has been published by his grandnephew; the young revolutionary’s fluent English and wide reading is quite impressive. Books about cities (Udbhav Agarwal’s A for Prayagraj: A Short Biography of Allahabad, Shabnam Minwalla’s Colaba: The Diamond at the Tip of Mumbai, Chennai: A Biography by V. Sriram) take cognizance of local history. Madras Inked by Manohar Devadoss and Sujatha Shankar, with 60 beautiful line drawings, presents two perspectives of the city: Sujatha Shankar, an architect, comments on the historical background and architectural features of the buildings, while Devadoss provides emotional commentary.

People from all walks of life are the subjects of life writing: film stars (Kabir Bedi, Neena Gupta, Priyanka Chopra Jonas, Sonu Sood, Guru Dutt), political leaders (Presidents Pranab Mukherji and A.P.J. Abdul Kalam, Vice-President M. Hamid Ansari, Chief Minister, actor and writer M. Karunanidhi, socialist leader Jaya Prakash Narayan, former Prime Ministers Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Vishwanath Pratap Singh, Hindutva idealogue Savarkar) and sportspersons (Para Swimmer Madhavi Latha, cricketer Ravi Shastri). In his memoir Mahe & Mano, artist and novelist Manohar Devadoss recounts his wife Mahema’s life as a quadriplegic and his own struggle with fading eyesight. The Parsi communities of India and their enormous contribution to Indian commerce have received a lot of attention; there are five books about Ratan Tata and the Tata conglomerate. Novelist Farrukh Dhondy, a Parsi, calls his autobiography Fragments against My Ruin: A Life. Adil Jussawalla’s third collection of prose, The Magic Hand of Chance: Selected Prose, 1979–2009 has a wide range of subjects, including poetry.

We mourn the death of bilingual novelist, short story writer and poet Manoj Das (1934–2021); literary critic, poet and translator Ravi Nandan Sinha (1952–2021), founder- editor of The Quest (Ranchi); journalist and author Anil Dharker (1947–2021), founder-director of the Mumbai International Literary Festival and “Literature Live!” and Goan writer Maria Aurora Couto (1937–2022).