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IN Arts & Letters

Reading in Sin

If sexual explicitness caused the most outrage in the early phase of book bans in India, there was a point after which it became almost entirely about religion

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5 May 12 | BY Arpita Das
The Guru Ambedkar

BR Ambedkar chose a religion rather than a political ideology to empower  India’s Untouchables for a reason

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28 April 12 | BY Ananya Vajpeyi
The Gandhi Style Statements

Namrata Zakaria on the First Family’s enviable wardrobe, and why their sartorial sense matters so much

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7 April 12 | BY Namrata Zakaria
Finding Fact in Fiction

Real life intrudes on fiction all the time. Kalpish Ratna indulge in some literary detection as they search for clues to the true character of Arthur Conan Doyle in Sherlock Holmes’ life and movements

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24 March 12 | BY Kalpish Ratna
From Tagore to Thakur

Durga puja pandals have clay figurines of Tagore. As do Saraswati puja ceremonies. Parents buy their kids Tagore dolls. In a state where the Left dismissed him as too elitist, Sumana Roy observes the canonisation of the poet-educationist

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17 March 12 | BY Sumana Roy
Mimics and Models

Whatever Jane Austen might think, PD James’ Death Comes to Pemberley ranks among the finest examples of literary mimicry, a genre that has good reason to exist

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25 February 12 | BY Kalpish Ratna
The Big Lie of Sport

The notion that sport makes gentlemen out of men and promotes fair play is spin doctoring. A Victorian novelist called Thomas Hughes started it with Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

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4 February 12 | BY Mihir Bose
Has Pankaj Mishra Ever Been to South Dakota?

For a writer whose first book was a travelogue around small-town India, Pankaj Mishra seems strangely unwilling to engage with the complexities, or provincialities, of the United States.

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10 December 11 | BY Ethan Casey
Non-fiction is Dead: Long Live Belles-lettres

What’s so ‘non’ about literary work that is based on reportage and commentary? Let’s stop subordinating this genre with the term ‘non-fiction’

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3 December 11 | BY Arpita Das
One Night in Bollywood

What it means to be a foreign extra in an Indian movie

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5 November 11 | BY Marian Brehmer