kriticulture

On Daljit Ami’s translation of Amandeep Sandhu’s novel Roll of Honour By Rajesh Sharma  There are books with souls and there are books without souls. Amandeep Sandhu’s Roll of Honour is a book with a soul. What impregnates a book with a soul is the writer’s capacity to undergo the baptism of truth. To bear witness. To submit to the knowing that truth entails. The novel bears out that those who side with truth take no sides. Sandhu tells a very Punjabi story without succumbing to the baneful provincialism of today’s decadent cultural production. Ami’s decision to translate the novel’s title as Gawah de Phanah Hon ton Pahilan ( Before the Witness Ceases to Be ) could only have been made because he was able to peer into the novel’s soul. And that happened because the ways of the two witnesses, Ami and Sandhu, crossed. Ami saw himself in the novel, saw his own life, saw his own experience of history. As a historian and documentarist reading and translating a nov...

(Written for The Teachers' Day, September 5, 2014) By Rajesh Sharma For days I have been rummaging my mind – its chests and cabinets, bureaus and bins, school bags, backpacks, pouches, knotted handkerchiefs, match-boxes, teeny b rass caskets, rubber-headed metal inkpots, slim little corked vials of touch-me-not glass, even flyers folded into flying machines grounded like dead butterflies among spiders’ remains and lizards’ egg shells – to pull out memories long since resting, deposited and forgotten like used postage stamps and untouched coins, to blow the dust off them. I do not really know why I am doing this. It might be for ritual gratification. Perhaps it is to propitiate guilt. Memories can be sticky, smelly things. Or they can turn into powder under the touch, like expiring bones awaiting final dissolution. But the dust that settles on memories is gold dust. Its shimmer lends them an illusory immortality. 1 He tied his beard, never tucked his s...

  Editor’s Note A lot of good South Asian writing is taking place outside the dominant circuits of recognition. It was our assumption when we started SAE . Five years down the road, it is a conclusion. Leafing through pages from the past, we see many installed stereotypes crumbling. Yet much survives that seems to identify us.             What is still awaited is a radical mobilization of the elements of the ensemble that is us and our experience, a mobilization that dislocates, disassembles and creates afresh beyond merely reproducing. This would require infusion of energies from outside the ensemble’s boundaries. But haven’t cultures always outsourced? Isn’t imagination the great outsourcing machine? Isn’t literature always in another place, always already elsewhere?             South Asia is a horizon that must be transcended. Only when it begins to...