Aparna Upadhyaya Sanyal’s 'Instruments of Torture' is a powerful literary collection that delves into the psychological and societal torments individuals endure, particularly focusing on themes of beauty standards and the representation of women. Each story in the collection is named after a medieval torture device, serving as a metaphor for the emotional and societal pressures faced by the characters.
Pre-occupation Palestine had, to use Anglo-American poet WH Auden's words, "marble well-governed cities" full of "vines and olive trees." But Israel and its allies have turned it into "an artificial wilderness"
Saikat Majumdar, a professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University, is a writer whose works delve deep into the intricacies of identity, desire, and the tensions between personal yearnings and institutional expectations.
In the psyche and schema of the average transnational Bangladeshi, rape is visible and legitimate only when it takes spectacular forms—violent, brutal, deadly.
In classic Bengali fiction, the kitchen is a central site for conflict and community bonding.
Pale, aristocratic, seductive forces lurking in the dark—when we think of vampires, we often perceive them through a western lens
The recent attack on “Amar Shonar Bangla” stems from this type of attempt to categorise the national anthem, leading to further allegations against it
There is something to be said about the innate process of otherising a person with disability, and pushing them out of the group of the ‘norm’ and into the group of the ‘exception’.
Even without a full-blown sympathetic backstory, a villain’s motivations can be complex.
I cannot, for the life of me, definitively describe what makes music. Growing up in a family where music of any form was not typically paid any reverence, my exposure to it was tunnelled into mainstream pop songs for the longest time.
I once again find myself drawn to "The Waste Land"—though this isn’t about just the one poem, not really—where so much of the old world exists in motifs in a tattered landscape.
Even if you are not a film enthusiast, chances are high that you have watched the 2022 Telegu blockbuster RRR. At the very least, you should have heard about it.
In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.
I was a little anxious. It was only the second day of my life at the University of Cambridge, and I was already bombarded with instructions on how to dine.
Listening is stretching beyond ourselves and another, and if we were to listen to printed words on paper as non-verbal cues of communication, it too emits lower frequencies that moves us, beyond the I, towards new modes of knowledge.
There is an element of the unexpected in the twinning of fiction and ecology. A sense of unease of sorts exists in the pairing together of fiction, a form of narrative that is untrue, with the imminent ecological disaster, an environmental inevitability that is true.
“How tragic it would be if you were wasted”, made me smile in a melancholic way. I know moments when “unnecessary things are our only necessities”. And I’ve not been hesitant to give “rebellion its fascination” and “disobedience its charm.”
Indigenous women are read even less. There are multiple root causes–lack of editorial support for indigenous authors writing in their mother tongues, the predominance of oral traditions, gender inequality and bias.
It concerns me that Tate’s apologists range from impressionable boys in my grade 9 classroom to 30-something-year-old single dads. My own mother calls me a ‘feminist’ with such chagrin in her tone, it begins to feel like a slur.
