Samidha

A fairy tale romance and a blueprint for anyone who wants to venture into social service, this autobiography of Sadhanatai Amte – a woman who chose to marry a frenzied man and a dreamer, Baba Amte – is also a tale of her willing surrender in love without the slightest loss of her identity.

It is a document of the dreams they dreamt for humankind and their struggle to put life into them. These memoirs present the portrait of a woman beside a man; a perfect consort who has the ability to tame the living storm, Baba Amte.

Written without a stance, the distinctive simplicity of this transparent narrative, as compared to other similar writings by women, it has the power to stir its readers with its salty sea-air tang, and the warmth of a fruitful mad pursuit of a goal—at once personal and impersonal.

A book like this – a saga of suffering, hopes, tensions and success, as well as the thrill of pleasure of work the two experienced while pursuing their goal – will serve as the beacon of light for posterity, and as a model in human relationships.

Shobha Pawar is a Student and Teacher of English literature, and currently a lecturer at S. P. College, Pune.

The Prisons We Broke

Writing on the lives of the Mahars of Maharashtra, Baby Kamble reclaims memory to locate the Mahar society before it was impacted by Babasaheb Ambedkar, and tells a consequent tale of redemption wrought by a fiery brand of social and self-awareness. The Prisons We Broke provides a graphic insight into the oppressive caste and patriarchal tenets of the Indian society, but nowhere does the writing descend to self-pity. With verve and colour the narrative brings to life, among other things, the festivals, rituals, marriages, snot-nosed children, hard lives and hardy women of the Mahar community.

The original Marathi work, Jina Amucha, re-defined autobiographical writing in Marathi in terms of form and narrative strategies adopted, and the selfhood and subjectivities that were articulated. It is the first autobiography by a Dalit woman in Marathi, probably even the first of its kind in any Indian language.

Government Brahmana

Government Brahmana is the English translation of the Kannada autobiography of Aravind Malagatti. The autobiographical narrative is in the form of a series of episodes from the author’s childhood and youth. These episodes function as what G.N. Devy calls “epiphanic moments” in a caste society. The author reflects on specific instances from his childhood and student days that illustrate the normative cruelty practiced by caste Hindu society on dalits.

We encounter all the tropes of (male) dalit life: is isolation in school where even drinking water is an ordeal; life in the village where dalits perform the filthiest tasks but are denied access to common wells, lakes, where they cannot step into shops and therefore have their purchases thrown at them, where they have to cut their own hair because no barber would touch it; consuming dead-animal meat and innards; doomed love affairs with `upper’ caste women.

A painful, disturbing, thought-provoking memoir, this text is conversely full of vitality, even tenderness. In its structure and purpose – as a series of notes towards a dalit autobiography – Government Brahmana appears to be anticipated by Ambedkar’s own autobiographical sketches. The book received the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award.

Aravind Malagatti has written and published prose, poetry and criticism. He is also a folklore scholar. He has founded Dalit organizations and has been an activist in the Dalit movement. He is now Professor of Kannada, Kuvempu Institute of Kannada Studies, Mysore University.

Dharani Devi Malagatti is a writer and critic. She received the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award for her poetry in the year 2004.

Janet Vucinich is a social scientist. She now works in a community college in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

N Subrahmanya translates from Kannada to English and from English to Kannada. He lives in Mysore.

Mirage

Set in the tea plantations of Sri Lanka, Mirage traces the lives of Valli and her family, migrants from a village in Tamil Nadu in search of a better livelihood. The novel depicts the lives of indentured labourers working in these plantations and explores the social structure and the norms of plantation life—an arena defined by economic and sexual exploitation.

Through Valli’s world, we gain insight into the complex social relationships – between husband and wife, parent and child, worker and supervisor, friend and neighbour – in these remote plantations.

Mirage, translated from the Tamil Thoorathu Pachai, records human dignity in the face of human brutality. The novel chronicles a hitherto ignored piece of human history.

Moon Mountain

Set in India and Africa in the early twentieth century, Moon Mountain is a classic of the Bengali ‘kumar-sahitya’ genre or young-adult literature that smoothly blends narrative elements of the thriller, the fantasy and the travelogue into an action-packed adventure story. The language of Pradeep Sinha’s translation is fast-paced and contemporary without compromising in the least either the charm of the old world it narrates or the flavour of the Bangla original.

Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (born 1894) was a renowned Bengali novelist and writer. His literary career began in 1921 with the publication of his first short story Upekshita in Probashi, a prominent Bengali literary magazine of the day. In 1928, the epic Pather Panchali was published and Bibhutibhushan instantly became a household name in the world of Bengali culture and letters. Pather Panchali and its sequel Aparajito were later immortalised in Satyajit Ray’s cinematic rendition of the ‘Apu’ trilogy. His other major works, including Aranyak, Icchamoti, Adarsha Hindu Hotel, Heera Manik Jwale, Maraner Danka Baje, Debjan, Jatrabadol and Dristi Pradeep, encompass an impressive range of genres and themes.

Pradeep Sinha was born on 28 August, 1942. He graduated with honours in Economics from St. Xavier’s College, Calcutta, and worked in several firms as a marketing executive before joining Orient Blackswan in 1987. Moon Mountain, his translation of Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay’s Chander Pahar, was his first literary project. He died on 2 February, 2001.

The Grip of Change

The Grip of Change is the English translation of Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum, the first full-length novel by P. Sivakami, an important Tamil writer. This translation also features Asiriyar Kurippu, the sequel in which Sivakami revisits her work.

The protagonist of Book 1, Kathamuthu, is a charismatic Parayar leader. He intervenes on behalf of a Parayar woman, Thangam, beaten up by the relatives of her upper caste lover. Kathamuthu works the state machinery and the village caste hierarchy to achieve some sort of justice for Thangam.

The first Tamil novel by a Dalit woman, Pazhaiyana Kazhithalum, went beyond condemning caste fanatics. Sivakami is critical of the Dalit movement and Dalit patriarchy, and yet does not become a ‘caste traitor’ because of her participation in the search for solutions. The novel became an expression of Dalit youth—eager and working for change.

In Book 2, Author’s Note, Kathamuthu’s daughter Gowri, the author of Book 1, traces the circumstances and events of her novel. The result is a fascinating exploration of the disjunctures between what happens in the author’s family and community, and her fictional interpretations of those happenings.

P. Sivakami is a member of the Indian Administrative Service. She has published four novels and four short-story collections, and is a regular contributor to the literary magazine Pudiya Kodangi.

Mole!

The fictional events narrated in Mole! – an English translation of Otran, a novel by Ashokamitran – take place within a period of seven months, nearly all of them in the American Midwest. The narrator, a culturally rooted writer from Chennai, is transplanted amidst a motley group of fellow-writers from distant parts of the world, all of them as dangerously dislocated as him. Deprived of the language that has brought them fulfillment and distinction, these writers struggle to retain their place of precarious honour in a strange, unfamiliar and sometimes hostile environment. And in the background looms the endearing, if exasperating, landscape of twentieth-century America.

Ashokamitran is one of the most distinguished of contemporary Tamil writers. His work has been extensively translated into many Indian and European languages. He has won many honours and awards, including the Sahitya Akademi award in 1996. The English translation of his major Tamil novel Padinettavadu Atchakodu has been published by Orient Blackswan as The Eighteenth Parallel.

Kalyan Raman’s English translation illumines the subtle, spare strength of Ashokamitran’s prose. N. Kalyan Raman is a senior telecom professional, whose translations of Tamil short fiction has been published in several collections of Indian language fiction in translation, including the KATHA Prize Stories. He has translated a collection of Ashokamitran’s short stories The Colours of Evil.

The First Promise

Set in the late and early nineteenth centuries, Ashapurna Debi’s widely acclaimed Pratham Pratisruti, translated as The First Promise, attempts to commemorate the struggles and efforts of women, of the mute domestic space, starkly neglected by history. This book, about one of the many unknown women from the ignored interiors of Bengal, also captures the larger social and cultural transformation of the colonial era.

Ashapurna Debi, Translated by Indira Chowdhury.

Kuttiedathi and Other Stories

Kuttiedathi and Other Stories is a careful collection of ten short stories. This collection brings together some of the most well known stories of M T Vasudevan Nair, fairly representative of his literary works. Written over a broad span of time from 1962 to 2000, the stories collected here reflect the built-in variety of his fictional concerns and the changing tones of his narration.

M T Vasudevan Nair is a renowned Malayalam author and winner of the Jnanpith award for literature (1995). He is also among Kerala's most popular scriptwriters and directors of mainstream cinema. Nair scripted, produced and directed his debut film Nirmalayam, which won the President's Gold Medal in 1973.