Lihaaf (The Quilt).
Leila (2019).
To tackle the question of why the choice of language creates a make or break situation in these adaptations, we are forced to return to the heavily explored but still relevant debate about the assumed audience of English language novels from South Asian countries, all of which are literally teeming with regional language literature. African literature scholar Eileen Julien wrote of the pressures on African writers to produce the “extroverted novel” that has “been asked to satisfy contradictory demands: to be “universal” but to display its “difference”.
Elsewhere, Eleni Coundouriotis countered with an exploration of the “introverted novel” that divests from transnational and global concerns and focuses instead on producing a people’s history from below, thus offering critical perspectives on that particular nation or region.
Reading recommendations from a pandemic year
Poets and politicians, sportsmen and theatre personalities look back at 2020 through the books they read Updated: December 20, 2020 12:12:44 pm
Here are the books authors read this year. (Source: Getty Images)
Aruni Kashyap
writer
I think everyone in India should read Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits (2020, Simon and Schuster) it is an urgent and topical book set in an India of the future, a work of speculative fiction. I don’t read a lot in this genre, but I think speculative fiction has the ability to
caution us.
I have long admired Moroccan-American writer Laila Lalami’s fiction but Conditional Citizens: On Belonging in America (2020, Pantheon) is my first introduction to her nonfiction writing. Through a set of essays, Lalami talks about what it means to be a Muslim-American citizen, a naturalised American citizen; and how acceptance by the establishment comes with some conditions. Read
Abhishek Banerjee, who moved to Mumbai in 2008, got several blink-and-miss roles in movies
SOON after Abhishek Banerjee finished shooting for Paatal Lok in June 2019, he left for a month-long trip to Europe with his wife, Tina Noronha. The actor had found himself uncharacteristically angry, anxious and even possessive of his wife when he was shooting for the web-series as the serial killer, Hathoda Tyagi. Travelling was his way of leaving behind the intensity the character demanded.
Mumbai was under lockdown when Paatal Lok’s release was announced this April. “The announcement brought back memories of Hathoda Tyagi,” recalls Banerjee, whose portrayal of the negative character brought him wide recognition.