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New Indian Express
21-05-2025
- Entertainment
- New Indian Express
Femme Fatale
Shinie Antony, known for her novella The Girl Who Couldn't Love (Speaking Tiger; ₹299), is a figure ubiquitous in Bengaluru's literary circuits. Through lyrical and deft prose, her work epitomises a struggle between bitterness and bereavement, primarily through first-person narratives. Recently, the author discussed three of her books: Can't (Speaking Tiger; ₹350), Eden Abandoned (Hachette India; ₹499), and Hell Hath No Fury (Hachette India; ₹599). A perfunctory glance at Antony's Google page would reveal that all three aforementioned books, along with ExObjects, an anthology Antony edited with AT Boyle, released in 2024. What might seem as a burst of prolific literary output, according to Antony, is incidental. She remarks, 'That is purely accidental. The two anthologies – Hell Hath No Fury and ExObjects – were compiled with themes of revenge and grief, respectively, and the writers were just terrific. The novella Can't had been written just before Covid, hence, in the queue longer; meanwhile, Eden Abandoned, a monologue by Adam's first wife, Lilith, happened.' In the jilted lover of Can't , the story of the forgotten Lilith, and the stories of Hell Hath no Fury (edited by Antony), the reader encounters women who are righteous in their ire. It is both implied and understood that it is crucial to not only write stories of women whose anger is justified, but also excavate such stories from the common mythos, like that of Lilith's. Antony concurs, adding, 'Gender is the real religion, with women being secondary citizens all over the world, right from the start. In mythology, it is important to exhume the women, as they were all originally written by men. 'Bad women' give everyone the heebie-jeebies; and the disrespect that society accords them – they zing it right back. The damned, in a way, are free to be themselves. They have nothing left to lose. There is nothing more liberating than the world thinking the worst of you.' 'This Little Heart of Mine', Antony's authorial contribution in the short-story anthology that is Hell Hath No Fury, centres around a student narrator, revealed at the outset as the victim of an ongoing rape. As in the entire corpus of her work, there is a deliberate insistence on imagery and simile, arguably acting as the primary narrative vehicle. Likening the narrator's thighs to falling 'wings' also hints at an inverted reference to WB Yeats' 'Leda and the Swan'. As Antony shares, 'I once read that metaphors and similes come from an unsound mind. Maybe that's true. The thighs in 'This Little Heart of Mine' fall like dead wings, because she cannot move, literally. Leda too, perhaps, had no say in the matter. A girl can't escape, not from Zeus.' Like the religious refashioning of Lilith casts her as demonic and monstrous, patriarchal contemporaneity stands to project the same accusation on the other 'bad women' that exist out of Antony's nib as well. As she shares, even (or especially) as children, it is important to read, to persist, and to document. 'What is lost in this whole good girl/bad girl debate is the human element. Who we are as opposed to who we are told to be. Modern-day Indian children's books already include this theme. Young desi heroines come fitted with fangs,' she asserts.
Hindustan Times
11-05-2025
- Politics
- Hindustan Times
New book explores collapse of empires and global struggle for new order
New Delhi, Hot on the heels of the 80th anniversary of World War II's end, best-selling author Phil Craig's new book offers a powerful and original retelling of how the war's closing chapters reshaped the future of Britain, its colonies, and dominions. Published by Hachette India, "1945: The Reckoning – War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World" delves into the collapse of the British, Dutch, and French empires as global power dynamics shifted. It focuses on India, where a generation on the cusp of independence faces a tough choice between loyalty to the British Raj and supporting Subhas Chandra Bose's Japanese-backed Indian National Army . Through the story of a family torn apart by these opposing paths, the book highlights the deep questions of loyalty, identity, and the future of a free India. "The book explores the lives of real people and two of the most important in this book are Subhash Chandra Bose and Kodandera Subayya Thimayya. Through tracking them closely, all of the book's many themes fall naturally into place - the war, the fate of the British Empire and the way decolonisation happens . "Both men believe passionately in independence, but they choose very different routes toward it. Their lives intersect in numerous fascinating ways, in fact Thimayya's brother joins Bose in the INA," Craig, who is also the co-author of "Finest Hour", told PTI. Thimayya, the first Indian officer to command a brigade in the Indian Army, fought against the INA as well as the Japanese. He eventually served as the third chief of Army staff from 1957 to 1961, playing a pivotal role in shaping India's military landscape during the post-independence era. May 8 is observed as the end of World War II as it marks the surrender of Nazi Germany to the Allied forces, officially ending the war in Europe. This event, celebrated as Victory in Europe Day , marked the culmination of years of fighting. The book, in its description, also sheds a spotlight on a little-known Australian special forces mission in Borneo, secretly directed from London. However, the campaign goes horribly wrong as questions are asked about whether its true purpose is military or imperial. "And in Indochina and the East Indies British Generals free and arm Japanese prisoners of war and use them in savage campaigns that aim to put colonial rulers back into their palaces," it added. According to the publishers, "1945: The Reckoning – War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World" confronts "uncomfortable truths" with honesty and depth, offering a nuanced and human portrait of a world in transition and challenging readers to reconsider what "victory" in World War II really meant. The book's foreword is written by renowned author, historian and broadcaster James Holland. "This is a book that crosses the globe from Britain to Germany and from India to is ambitious, deeply thought-provoking and, as with all the very best history, compellingly told," Holland writes in his praise for the book. The book, priced at ₹899, is available for purchase across online and offline stores.
The Hindu
22-04-2025
- Entertainment
- The Hindu
Author Keshava Guha on his new novel, The Tiger's Share
Keshava Guha's debut novel Accidental Magic (2019) created a fictional world of Harry Potter fans from different parts of the world and varied cultural backgrounds. His second and recent novel, The Tiger's Share (Hachette India) revolves around the lives of two families in Delhi, the inheritance wrangle between successful sisters and entitled brothers, environment degradation and social realism. A writer of fiction and literary and political journalism, Delhi-based Guha says reading fiction is his single, favourite activity. 'I have no illusions about fiction changing the world, it's a private path, a private artistic pursuit that is like fulfilling a deep impulse,' says the author who was raised in Bengaluru and studied history and politics at Harvard. Excerpts from an interview: Q: What inspired you to write this story? A: The book started with the ending in terms of the idea. I just had this idea of an individual taking a drastic step because he was so appalled by what humans had done to the environment. Then I tried playing around with that and everything else took shape around that idea. It is a bit of a mystery where ideas come from for fiction. I don't sit down and plot it in a thorough way or anything like that. Q: There's a Victorian feel to this novel — the storyline, the connection to some characters. A: Absolutely, in a few ways. In Victorian England, the novel was kind of at the heart of at least middle-class culture and one of the roles which the novel played was helping people understand social change as it was happening. A big influence on this book in particular is Elizabeth Gaskell's novel, North and South (1855), a really graphic account of workplace industrial pollution and the effect it was having on the world. Also, a lot of these Victorian novels do have prominent heroines whether they are written by men or women. But those heroines are living lives that are much more circumscribed. So, you are kind of using the form of the Victorian novel in many ways, although it's much shorter in a very different context. I do think that it is a very adaptable form, the novel. Q: In a statement about the book, you said that you've tried to do something 'old-fashioned but of enduring value'. Please elaborate? A: To me, this is what is unique about novels as a form. If you think about other forms like painting or classical music or even poetry, the form becomes outmoded very quickly. So, if you listen to Mozart, Schubert or even Beethoven who was very modern for his time, you couldn't try to compose like that today. On the other hand, Victorian fiction, or say, writers such as Flaubert or Tolstoy — it is in the nature of the form that it can constantly be renewed with new material because it is so suited to understanding whatever is happening right now. In the age of the Internet, people thought ebooks would replace printed books; they never did. So, it really does have that enduring appeal and that ability and capacity to absorb new material and things. Q: Fiction is the great lie that tells the truth. So much in this novel seems real. A: The people in it, the families in it are entirely made up. I also wanted to write about issues and problems and situations that exist. To come back to what you said about the great lie that tells the truth, the lie angle is also important in that you can do things in a novel which you can't do in a documentary or journalism. One of those is to write about people who are really not typical, to show how things could be different. If you think about things like the patriarchal aspect of the inheritance disputes, that is very much provoked, not by my own family but by families that I saw in Delhi over and over again. My view of Delhi is that it is completely driven by material ambition, the values are entirely material and they are to do with having fancier cars and more expensive apartments. Delhi is a city that is all about exclusion. It is kind of explicit in the book. I was also struck by the contrast between those values and the kind of non-material idealism of the pre-Independence generation. Q: What are you working on currently? A: India has had this crazy sort of brain drain over the last 10 years or so; it's been a little different from earlier waves of migration and now you have so many Indians who are influential, in so many positions of power around the world. I've become interested in this new phenomenon: to be global, the idea of a global Indian elite. It'll be more of a global book. Q: Has your writing been influenced by any authors? A: In terms of conscious influence — all the Victorian novelists, in particular George Eliot. Among more recent writers, Australian Shirley Hazzard has been a big influence at the level of prose; the other is Penelope Fitzgerald, Booker Prize winner, who wrote incredibly short books and who had an amazing amount of daring, writing about anything. The interviewer is a Bengaluru-based independent journalist.
