writing
-
Why Indian fiction learned to change society before it learned to question the self.
Every country carries a history, and in cumulative measure these histories are not so different from one another. Wars, famines, empires, revolutions — the costumes change, the wounds remain similar. What distinguishes one literature from another is not how much… Continue reading
-
Putin. Gandhi. Beckett. Noise. Symbol. Bone.
Gandhi, for Putin, is merely a protocol stop These days I watch certain Indian intellectuals—once loud, now faint shadows in the Modi era—waiting for any passing gesture to revive their old, muddy idealism. Vladimir Putin came, placed flowers on Gandhi’s… Continue reading
-
Grammar Tilts Against the Storm
Father’s Lesson— from my debut poetry book Lost Mother My first rolling was in nursery days. My teacher’s word was like a hammer to me when she told me to write eight. Sweat began to trail — in winter days.… Continue reading
-
SMOKE, THE NOSE, AND THE FUTILITY OF LABELS
Recently, the cover of Arundhati Roy’s new memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me stirred a different kind of smoke. She appears on it holding a beedi — calm, defiant, aware of the camera. A Public Interest Litigation in Kerala claimed… Continue reading
-
THE THREE NATIONS OF FICTION
Every art has its capitals. Painters look back to Florence and Paris, musicians to Vienna and Leipzig. But if you ask where fiction — the novel and the short story — found its continuous home, you will not wander across… Continue reading
-
A DIARY OF FRAGMENTS, WHERE THE PERSONAL AND LITERARY MEET IN SCATTERED RHYTHM
[This column gathers fragments I shared through August and September—notes from Kashi in progress, meditations on language, editing, memory, and literature. They came daily, like scattered pebbles; together they form a diary of two months’ writing and reflection.] A LANGUAGE… Continue reading
-
DEPTH OUTLASTS FASHION—FROM DICKENS TO KAFKA TO TODAY
What is better or worse for literature? The quiet tyranny of prizes or the constant demands of the market. Between both poles, the writer digs the hole like a mole. To be somewhere, or to be nowhere. Yes, the nowhere… Continue reading
-
A Literature That Missed the Inner Turn
Both scenes were not synchronous, nor did they get along. I’m talking about Indian literary writings and the rest of global literature during the incipient phase of the 20th century. That era’s clock faced two world wars, and amid them,… Continue reading
-
When Fiction Turns to Polemic: Llosa and the Price of Leaving the Temple
Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Laureate, remained a towering figure in the literary world and died this year after a long literary life. I often wonder what his literary career might have been if he had avoided the journalistic… Continue reading
-
WHEN WRTING IS BOTH VOCATION AND INVOCATION.
IN BETWEEN FLAME AND DISCIPLINE: A WRITER REFLECTS ON MURAKAMI’S CREED In Novelist as a vocation, Haruki Murakami lays out some important things about the writer’s attitude and routines. They are not similar but varied according to talents. If you… Continue reading
Pragya’s Pen 