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Within Her Home and Outside: Essays on Indian English Poetry
₹320.00We are glad that we can travel well-disguised through words between the abstract and tangible, between home and the world. We have grown with many pillars of Indian wisdom and faith. We can express anything and everything with style that defines our long roots, myths and engagements with words. We arrest ideas from an acre of love to politics of power. With some generations of English on the back, many are composing poetry from different soul spaces and mesmerizing the world with their magical abilities of experimentations with style and themes. Contemporary India is really shining with confident and aesthetically satisfying English poetry. In the busy traffic of poets these days some choose to return again and again. Some are extraordinarily calm, quiet and soothing like music. Some are powerfully tender, honest and contemplative. There are numerous platforms, online spaces, journals and magazines which only focus on poetry and reviews of poetry. Many Indian poets and professors are engaged with guest editing special issues for poetry and poetic ties in very prominent journals abroad. There was a time in early 1900 when we couldn’t write a good poem on the Indian Non Violence Movement or the Freedom struggle in English. We struggled. That anxiety was over in the 1950s. Over a period of seventy five years or so, we are a brand destination for English poetry. Henry Louis Vivian Derozio or Kashiprasad Ghoshto Arundhathi Subramaniam is a long walk to freedom! Let us repeat, “With its quiet glory, I brand my heart.” as Basudhara Roy writes in A Blur of a Woman. A review is all joy held in the aura; a truce with light and knowledge. Indian English Poetry is, currently, going through its healthiest and happiest phases. Each union in life is a poem. Eachbreaking is a season of silence, one note to another. The essays in this book attempt to address, in their own non linear way, the significant gap between what’s on the pages and reviews, creativity and criticism, and indomitable passion. This book explores how poetry writing is meditation, experimentations with truth. The stray images and thoughts that the meditator blows away are the rich suggestive stuff of poems. Every little bit of irrelevancy may turn out to be what the poem is really about. Poetry holds the aura of being ‘pure’ and ‘untouched’, song without a landscape. The sublime premise of contemporary Indian English poetry evokes from the post-independence Indian experiences. The plural and the singular seem to co-exist in contemporary English poetry written from different parts of India. Noted critic V. K. Gokak said, “It has to be Indian because it has to be truly universal and greet its compeers in the domain of world literature.” Going through the various literary (and cultural) movements that have shaped Indian English literature, one can experience as much by their variety yet integrity as their common sources and concerns.
In the cacophony of English poetry in India all poems do not speak to us equally. All poets do not write with equal strength and ease. My love affair with poets began when I was at seventeen/eighteen. My hunger drove me to Keats, Neruda, Jibananda, Seferis, Lorca, Quasimodo, Parra, and some others. English poetry in India has no particular quarter now; good poetry is written from small cities and villages all over the country. Many poetry groups are active in upholding poetry to its apex.
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Women in the Frontier Land: Mestiza Consciousness in the Novels of Tahmima Anam and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
₹390.00The book is divided into five chapters.
“Chapter One” entitled “Introduction,” provides a comprehensive introduction to the two mentioned novelists and their works, does an extensive literature review of the existing critical works on their writings and finally, establishes the stated point of departure.
The Second Chapter “War and Women Subjectivity in A Golden Age and Half of a Yellow Sun” studies the wartime agency of women in the 1971 Liberation War and the Biafran War respectively. It investigates into the genealogy of the emphatic emergence of women characters from their restrictive domestic spaces in times of national emergency and their eclectic and constructivist interventions in the said wars, from the background.
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Women on the Frontlines: Convergence of Fact and Fiction in Martha Gellhorn’s Works
₹425.00Martha Gellhorn’s extraordinary career as a reporter took her to the front lines of nearly every major international conflict, right from the Spanish Civil War to the conclusion of the Cold War; her combat reports are among the best of the century. Through her correspondence, we get to know the woman behind the frequently enigmatic journalist, Gellhorn, as she chronicles her turbulent marriage to Ernest Hemingway and her friendships with notable figures from the 20th century. Over four decades and numerous locales, including the highlands of East Africa, elegant dinner parties in London, and Depression-era America, Martha Gellhorn’s novellas exhibit the same traits that have made her one of the most renowned journalists of our time: a remarkable sense of place, incredibly fast and precise prose, and an unwavering focus on the motivations behind her characters and actions. Above all, Martha Gellhorn investigates how individuals, both male and female, live quietly-and frequently with passion-amidst the historical turbulence.
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Woven Reflections of Poems, Stories and Plays
₹250.00This is a book of poems, stories, and plays. The texts that comprise this volume are a product of moments of our life: times looking back, times to search for, and times of change. However, these do not stand alone; they speak to each other within a layered experience unfolding across various formats.
We chose to begin with poetry because it captures a moment: the raw emotion, the flash of a thought often in the most distilled way. It can be a whisper, a shout, or a quiet realization that beckons the reader to interpret it in their own way. But sometimes, a moment needs more than that – it needs more context, more depth, and space to breathe.
That’s where the short stories come into play, to be able to continue the themes developed in the poem and give a narrative slant to them. One will see the emergence of characters, and settings defined.
And then the plays. The way people talk, the spaces between, and the tension of what is never said have always interested us. Writing the stories into scripts seemed the natural step, allowing them to be articulated and performed and to live from the page. The transition from poetry to prose to stage was a way for me to experiment with perspective, structure, and voice.
For us, writing has always been about finding the right form to express an idea. Some thoughts are best left as poetry, others need to be lived through a story, and some are meant to be spoken out loud, felt in the rhythm of conversation. This book is a collection of those choices-a reflection of how words can shape and reshape meaning depending on how they are framed.
We hope you like reading this book as much as we did writing it.
– Ronok and Rhea
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Write To Me: Essays on Indian Poetry in English
₹400.00Write to Me is a slim collection of thirty-five essays on various poetry collections published by Indians between 2020 and 2023 from within the country and its rich diaspora. Alert, attentive, astute, and arduous, the book offers an interesting synchronic statement on Indian Poetry in English in the present. These four years, marked unalterably by the crisis of the Pandemic, witnessed new roles and responsibilities for poetry. The essays in this book, by inviting readers to the numerous pleasures of poetry as a genre, hopes to draw them towards both the criticism of poetry and the poetry of criticism.
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Yuddha Eka Abirata Prakriya
₹210.00Jachindra Kumar Rout has made a name for himself as an author, publishing twenty-three books: the collections of poetry, essays, criticisms, translated works, biographies both in Odia and English and contributing articles to the hundreds of international and national magazines and journals. Himself, being the short story writer of the storybook PALATAKA he has deeply gone through the Odia writings of Mr. Prusty and given proper justice to the originality of his thoughts and presentation style.
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Zen Buddhism and Advaita Vedanta: A Comparative Study of History, Philosophy, and Practice
₹500.00Zen Buddhism blossomed in China starting in the sixth century CE and spread to Japan and other Countries. Advaita Vedanta spread all over India starting in the eighth century CE because of the efforts of Shankaracharya. Both of these popular sects in the modern world, one from Mahayana Buddhism and the other from Hinduism, consider ‘non-duality’ as their main characteristic. This book makes a comprehensive comparative analysis of all aspects of Zen and Advaita Vedanta: history, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics and practice. One could harmoniously blend many aspects of their tenets in one’s practice regardless of Whether they are Buddhists or Hindus.
