Known Turf

Very pleased to hear that 'Two Way Street,' a short film I wrote has been named by Platform magazine as one of the shorts to look o...

Three new poems in Usawa Literary Review's  tenth edition (Jan 2024) . One of them, below.  There was a country we could have been   ...

My review of Tabish Khair's latest collection, Namaste Trump and Other Stories :  The book’s structure is imaginative, if also unusual. ...

In Western fairy tales, a witch is a scary woman who might ‘eat’ you, cooked or uncooked. In South Asian fairy tales and folklore, she might...

Once upon a time, I was judgmental about selfies. From film stars to your third cousin, everyone was pouting, clicking, and uploading selfie...

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...