Smitha Balachandran

The novel’s relevance remains undimmed. It speaks to a world still governed by appearances, ambition and self-deception, while quietly insisting on the redemptive possibilities of forgiveness, self-knowledge and love in its truest form. ‘The Painted Veil,’ a novel written by W. Somerset Maugham - the celebrated twentieth century British novelist, playwright, critic, short story writer and British secret agent during World War One - is one of the author’s most poignant and haunting...

When the British dismantled what they called the Indian empire, they shattered it repeatedly, unevenly and often inadvertently. ‘Partition’ is usually remembered as a single cataclysm in 1947 - the vivisection of British India into India and Pakistan. Yet, as Sam Dalrymple reminds readers in his ambitious and meticulously crafted ‘Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia’, that rupture was only one act in a longer imperial unravelling. Between 1937 and 1971, the empire splintered five...

In a literary era crowded with climate fiction, Amitav Ghosh’s ‘Gun Island’ stands apart not for its science, but for its faith in myth, in migration and in the enduring power of the tale itself. In Gun Island, Amitav Ghosh performs a literary sleight of hand that merges the mythic and the modern, the ecological and the existential into an ambrosial cocktail of narrative craft. First published in 2019, the novel is at once a fable and a forecast, a story that straddles continents and...