"Indian fiction, collection of short stories and poems."

This Volumes Of Civil Lines Carriesthe Best And Most Diverse Collection Of New Short Fiction From Indian Writers That You Are Likely To Read: A Total Of Seven Stories By Amit Choudhuri, Amitava Kumar, Avtar Singh. Mina Kumar And Suketu Mehta. Civil Lines 5 Also Features Exceptional Non-Fiction. Sonia Jabbar Gives Us An Account Of Life And Death In Kashmir, And Urvashi Butalia Literally Revisits Partition: Brilliant Hybrid Narratives, Part Essay, Part Travelogue, That Make Places And Histories Come Alivewith Vividly Realized People And Their Tragedies. And Anita Roy Reminds Us, Funnily And Poignantly, That All Writers Begin As Obsessive Readers.

In the early 1990s, Rupa Sharma founds a magazine and pens her first – and last – editorial: The future has never looked brighter. The fires of communal tension appear to have been vanquished. More women are entering the workforce than ever before, and everywhere I look, I see new possibilities. I see dialogue, I see tolerance, and I see openness. I see hope for myself and my colleagues, and for the two daughters I am bringing up to be fearless inheritors of this earth. Decades later, her daughter Siya travels to Delhi in the wake of her reclusive mother’s death, leaving behind a failing relationship and an unravelling life. Waiting at home are her estranged sister Maya and a crumbling Lutyens behemoth that is proving too cumbersome to maintain. The two sisters rattle around the house until a cryptic note falls out from their mother’s papers: I saw last night as a meeting between old friends. That you considered my conduct overfamiliar fills me with endless regret. As Siya and Maya try to decipher the words and piece together what happened, they find themselves uncovering both dreams and long-buried secrets, finding new resolve as they look to breathe fresh life into their mother’s shattered vision. Shocking, poignant, and life-affirming, Civil Lines is a family saga that explores belonging and is also an ode to every girl in every generation who dreams that a brighter future lies within her grasp.

A new kind of Indian writing in English was in the air in the early 1990s. Vikram Seth, Amitav Ghosh, I. Allan Sealy and Upamanyu Chatterjee had written their early books. The new current was promising, and Dharma Kumar, historian and editor of the famous Indian Economic and Social History Review, decided to publish a journal, along the lines of Granta and The New Yorker, dedicated to ferreting out the best literary talent. The journal, Civil Lines: New Writing from India, first appeared in 1994 and quickly attracted attention by publishing literary pieces that were a cut above, developing a cult following among readers of Indian writing in English. Till 2001, five issues had been published—totaling sixty-one individual contributions by thirty-eight contributors. Some of the contributors were then far from well known, and Civil Lines could be said to have given them a leg-up towards subsequent fame. Sheila Dhar, Susan Visvanathan, Raj Kamal Jha, Ruchir Joshi, Siddhartha Deb, Suketu Mehta, Amitava Kumar and Manjula Padmanabhan went on to become established writers after Civil Lines had published their smaller pieces. Ramachandra Guha’s first brilliant essay—a five-finger exercise in literary anthropology which seems with hindsight to presage his later work on Verrier Elwin—appeared in the inaugural issue. A little-known aspect of Amitav Ghosh is his interest in the short story. Ghosh contributed two pieces to the journal—a reflective essay on the Indian practice of the short story and a wonderfully fluent translation of one of Tagore’s most famous tales, ‘Kshudhita Pâshân’ (The Hunger of Stones). The present anthology comprises a selection of the finest essays, stories and poems that were published in the first five issues of Civil Lines. The original issues of the journal are difficult to come by. This anthology is a must for all those interested in the best practitioners of desi English.

The main objective of this book is to analyze prominent literary images of Delhi in post-independence India. The author has probed into a number of eminent writings in Hindi, English and other languages. The author's methodology, a humanistic and phenomenological approach, allows exploration of experiential dimension of writers’ and their characters in various genres of literature. An inquiry into perceptions and imagination in literature enriches the understanding of place, space, time, and seasons, the concerns central to geography. The Perceptions of the metropolis of Delhi interestingly vary between authors and their characters. The images of Delhi in plethora of literary works show a wide spectrum of colors. The images evoke feelings of reverence, love, adoration, dislike, indifference or neutrality. Experiences vary from places of beauty and grandeur to utterly ugly environments. Natives express different views and attitudes toward the city of Delhi from those of expatriate writers.

British India generated the largest imperial archive in the world. From the stacks of administrative reports, minutes, instruction manuals, memoirs, letters, reports, cook-books and travelogues the British left behind,