Tabla Legend Zakir Hussain Dies: Grammy Winner, Global Music Pioneer Was 73
His fingers flew, fluttered and floated in quicksilver changes of raga and rhythm, drumming up music and magic. Zakir Hussain was the maestro of tabla, percussionist, composer and even an actor—a legend who was India’s very own and yet belonged to the world. Hussain died from ‘idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis’, a
Does Rasam Hold the Secret to Transforming A Glum Day Into A Flavourful Experience?
As the sun slouches westward, are you having a day like mine? Snail-slow, all grimace and growl, stagnant, the very air in aspic—in a word, glum? Breakfast is a memory from deep time, lunch is a receding mirage—did I just see you reach for chai? Toxic masala or green detox?
INTERVIEW We Now Have Means to Actively Build a Community and Train and Help Emerging Translators: Daisy Rockwell
The creative partnership of Daisy Rockwell and Geetanjali Shree is embodied in Daisy’s moniker, Shree-Daisy. But before her International Booker–winning partnership with Geetanjali Shree, Rockwell had already translated and curated a panorama of epoch-defining Hindi-Urdu novels probing the heart-wounds of the subcontinent. Over the past two decades, Rockwell has brought
Geetanjali Shree Interview: Language as Protest in ‘Our City That Year
Geetanjali Shree’s 1998 novel, Hamara Shahar Us Baras, rendered into English by Daisy Rockwell as Our City That Year (Penguin, 2024), is the story of a communalising city as experienced by a vulnerable narrator grappling with the task of lending language to the self-estrangement of her secular friends. The narrator, who is not
Avtar Singh’s Into the Forest: An Exploration of Isolation, Loneliness, and Human Fragility During the COVID-19 Pandemic
A homeless person sleeps on a storefront during the second wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, in Lyon, France, in 2020. | Photo Credit: Getty Images/ iStock There is a moment (around the 40-page mark) in Avtar Singh’s new novel, Into the Forest, that does not directly engage with the COVID-19 pandemic but
Freedom at Midnight Review: Book vs Web Series-Partition Through Two Lenses
Inside 10 Downing Street, the rhythms of a relentless clock fill the air. “May I have time to think?” Lord Mountbatten pleads, facing the burden of a crumbling empire. “You may,” Prime Minister Clement Attlee responds, “but be warned, Mountbatten—time is the one thing we’re running short of.” The ticking
Review: Payal Kapadia’s ‘All We Imagine as Light’ Challenges Traditional Film Criticism
Sometime in late November, you can feel Mumbai entering winter. Many can point to the exact day, the exact moment. It could be midnight at home when the skin suddenly prickles in the cool wind. It might be the night-time desire to actually cover yourself with a sheet. It might
Book Review| Weena Pun’s ‘Kancchi’: A Captivating Tale of a Mother’s Search for her Missing Daughter in Nepal
One dark November morning in 1995, Maiju surreptitiously escorts her 16-year-old daughter down the slippery, rain-drenched slopes of Torikhola in Nepal to help her catch a bus to her aunt’s house in Pokhara. Maiju never hears from her daughter again. Kanchhi never reaches her aunt’s place. What happened to Kanchhi?
Kumar Shahani’s Cinema: How the Avant-garde Filmmaker Crafted Meaning Through Movement, Silence and Form
I am no film critic. I have had the privilege of being Kumar Shahani’s friend for over 20 years and have seen almost all his well-known films. I also had the privilege of talking to him about his films. He was deeply interested in the nuances of language, its sounds
William Radice, Renowned Tagore Translator and Bengali Scholar, Dies at 73
William Radice, the English poet, Tagore translator, and scholar of Bengali language and literature passed away on November 10. He was 73. I was his oldest Bengali friend, but I never worked out what led him to make Bengali the focus of his life’s work. I honestly can claim no