Known Turf

Shakeela Akhtar was one of the earliest women writers of Urdu fiction in the twentieth century. Born and buried in Bihar, she was obviously ...

Terrible news. Desraj Kali is gone. Other people have written detailed obits , and  friends like Shekhar have written personal accounts that...

Bantering with Bandits and Other True Tales (Aleph 2023) is just out. This is a new edition of Known Turf (2010), with a fresh Introduction...

Here is a transcription of one of my grandfather's ghazals, for those who are interested in poetry but can't read the script. I thou...

I reviewed a new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which is still as much fun as it was four hundred years ago. It speaks to the ...

What is a Dalit perspective in literature? How does it differ from the phrase 'Dalit literature'? These were some of the questions I...

Eight years ago, I had my first essay accepted in the Griffith Review. ' Embodying Venus ' was a meditation on women's bodies an...

If a government is driven by the need to secure majority mandates, what incentives does it have to secure minority rights? In fact, if all i...

I had intended to do this around the new year but better late than never. I have been thinking about unpaid labours of love, art and so on. ...

Recently, I translated a poem of the contemporary Hindi poet Amitabh Bachchan (not the film actor). It was entirely spontaneous for I saw hi...

This is a difficult book to review in that it does not adhere to any literary format. It includes poetry, but it is not an anthology. It inc...

I have two poems out in a special edition of the Portside Review , focused on what is 'Endangered'. Editor Sampurna Chattarji picked...

Many of you do not know but over the past year, I've gone back to studies. I'm in the second year of a PhD (English Studies/Creative...

What a thing it is to discover a good book decades after it has been written! I wonder why nobody told me to read Sara Suleri's Meatless...

Spanning the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the story introduces the reader to women who rejected factory and homestead and immersed th...

I've written a long, critical review of the 'C: A Novel'. A short extract and a link to the full review below: She moves to the ...

A few weeks ago, I was invited to contribute to the Hope Project by the University of York. This is a series of conversations with writers a...

It has taken thirteen years but, finally, my play 'Name, Place, Animal, Thing' got staged. The Bay Area Drama Company produced it an...

A new review of City of Incident :  "Against the impossible dimensions of this city, the 12 small lives flicker bravely under the razor...

"We are reminded that the author’s voice, shining through the telling, illuminating the prose, is what keeps the novel vital and alive....