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White woman’s burden
Wicked Women of the Raj (HarperCollins,
Rs 295) by Coralie Younger gives a romantic and
richly described account of European women who “broke society’s
rules and married Indian princes”.Complete with photographs,
it captures the high-spirited, reckless ambience of the
raj, in which Indian princes scattered their wealth
and pursued beautiful white women to take home as their
wives. But the women themselves are as fascinating and determined
as the rajas. Not always from the highest levels
of European society, their consciousness of their power,
both as beauties and as members of the “master” race, makes
them the real heroines of these tales.
Mr Naipaul’s Round Trip and
other essays (Penguin, Rs 295) by T.G. Vaidyanathan
is a collection of writings by the striking personality
known as TGV to his peers in Bangalore. He taught literature
and film criticism, played first division cricket and wrote
about everything from psychoanalysis to umbrellas in a characteristically
provoking style. Although he writes with depth and compassion
about literature — the essay on Naipaul determines the title,
on cricket — his involvement with it forms the basis of
his friendship with Ramachandra Guha, who writes the foreword,
— and on film, as on Shatranj Ke Khilari, he is at
his most entertaining and wittily profound when his subjects
are chosen from everyday moments, like secondhand bookshops
and stainless steel culture.
Ants, ghosts and whispering
trees: An anthology of oriya short stories (HarperCollins,
Rs 295) edited by Paul St-Pierre, Leelawati Mohapatra
and K.K. Mohapatra brings together twenty-two of the
most remarkable Oriya short stories written over the last
one hundred years. At the head of the collection stands
the father of modern Oriya prose, Fakir Mohan Senapati,
whose autobiography is a classic of Indian literature. The
short stories in the collection, which have been translated
by the editors themselves, focus largely on life in the
countryside. The portrayal of village life changes, as Orissa
changes — or persists — through the years. The book is important
because it not only opens up the world of Oriya literature
for the non-Oriya reader, but because it also provides further
evidence of the extraordinarily rich tradition of short
stories in Indian regional literature to the world.
Blood against the snows: the
tragic story of Nepal’s royal dynasty (Fourth Estate,
£8.99) by Jonathan Gregson reads like a fast-paced
thriller. Yet it is the true story of the world’s only Hindu
kingdom. Gregson packs in much of the history of Nepal’s
bloodstained royal inheritance and its troubled politics
together with the drama of the last tragic and hideous episode
of murder in the palace. The author’s gift lies in arranging
his amassed facts with clarity and logic, so that the analysis
naturally follows the lines of the narrative.
 Faith: filling the god-sized
hole (Penguin, Rs 250) by Renuka Narayanan
is the kind of mixed bag of milk-of-human-kindness reflections
that makes the perfect DIY faith book. It is important to
appreciate the author’s use of contemporary issues, because
what does come through the inevitable woolly-headedness
of such entries as “The coin of education” and “Husbandly
ethics” is the insistence on pluralism. To achieve a “confluence”
of the faiths, she cites stories and sayings from a huge
range of religions. This gives to the book a slightly piquant
flavour, since the usual reflections on spirituality and
faith are thus given differing contexts and an appearance
of a practical code to live by.
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