Books and Authors

"The book is about my story as somebody of mixed heritage. In many ways it's just the story of somebody trying to figure out who they are in a world that likes to separate and divide. the story of the book is about how, through discovering the origins of ideas, through discovering history, I discover a new way of thinking. So then it became easy for me to reconcile my mixed identit

"If you look at late 19th century photographs or sketches of Delhi, it is empty and treeless. It's a historical fact that the city's greenery has come with the development of urban settlements... My favourite Delhi garden is Sundar Nursery because there are always new trees to discover there" – Swapna Liddle and Madhulika Liddle, co-authors of Gardens of Delhi talk to Manjula Nar

"Social comedy usually has a very short span because it gets dated. For people to laugh at the same silly jokes, for social comedy to survive means that it's hit some enduring spot. I was trying to write a literary novel. It was a take on the Gothic novel and was about the relationship between Paro and Priya. In a way, Paro was Rebecca (in the eponymous novel by Daphe du Maurier),

"As a writer and art critic Rudolf von Leyden was able to mentor artists in a certain capacity but for artists to live, to sustain a life as an artist, they need to sell their work. They need patrons. Because of his corporate job, Rudi was able to support the work of the artists he liked – Ara, Husain, Hebber, Souza, Raza of the Progressive Artists Group" - Reema Desai Gehi, auth

"You can't leave caste behind but you can change religion so why won't you get attracted to another religion for whatever reasons? We are now paying too much attention to religious conversions. There are so many histories which run parallel within this one big history of the country and that's what makes the nation" - Nusrat F Jafri, author, 'This Land We Call Home' weaves the hist

"In 2010, I totally got wedded to Indian aesthetics. I decided to view art through the lens of the rasa theory. I went back to the Natya Shastra because that is where it all starts. When I look at art, I find a sense of immediacy, through emotion, through rasa. When you look at the work of Manjit Bawa or Swaminathan or Raza, our great modernists, why are they all still so relevant?

"The mytho-epic imagination is an integral part of the structure of our culture. The religious character of the mytho-epic imagination in the Indian subcontinent provides a shared collective unconscious," Manoj Kumar Jena, editor, 'Ways of Being Indian; Essays on Religion, Gender and Culture' talks to Manjula Narayan about the country's cultural diversity, death rituals, ways of mo

"The history of tourism is intricately connected to colonialism. Travel writing is a direct descendent of colonial exploratory writing and even today, modern tourism has that DNA. Modern tourism, in its internal logic, has a colonial gaze. This idea of "discovering" other places is built into the idea of why we travel" - Shahnaz Habib, author, 'Airplane Mode; A Passive Aggressive H

"Stories leave a deep impact on how our thinking is shaped. These stories are challenging some very traditional ideas that still exist heavily in society. There is a power in terrible representations. Somehow, we have representations where the disabled woman is a burden to family, to society, and to her partner. As a teenager you think, "Oh, somebody will have to sacrifice a lot to

"Villages are complicated entities. There's always a power game. Now, money values have come in and villages are also changing. The lives between the village and the city are starting to merge. I don't know what that means for the country. Villages and cities are both equally important for us. Some kind of continuity is what the village offers. People who live in villages and don't