This book on Indian literature offers a critique of the aesthetics and politics of modernity as embodied in Indian bhasha literature of the past two centuries. It discusses the complex ways in which the bhasha imagination, even as it reshaped the history of colonial modernity, simultaneously allowed itself to be shaped by it in turn.

Winner: DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2019No Presents Please: Mumbai Stories is not about what Mumbai is, but what it enables. Here is a city where two young people decide to elope and then start nursing dreams of different futures, where film posters start talking to each other, where epiphanies are found in keychains and thermos-flasks. From Irani cafes to chawls, old cinema houses to reform homes, Jayant Kaikini seeks out and illuminates moments of existential anxiety and of tenderness. In these sixteen stories, gaps in the curtains of the ordinary open up to possibilities that might not have existed, but for this city where the surreal meets the everyday.

An engrossing narrative of a colonial subject’s life contemplating his Imperial masters at the height of colonialism in India; based upon the first eight years of his life-long diary

Comprises poems, short stories, and a play; translated from Newari.