Writer, novelist, filmmaker, director Aditya Kriplani talks of what moved him to write and to make films…
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Category Archive: writing
India before Partition
India 1947… Post-Partition
About seven decades ago, the colonials who swept through Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and earlier started their retreat. They had lost so much money fighting each other over their spoils during the World Wars that they could not afford the upkeep of their colonies.
One of the aftermath of the colonial rule in Asia was the formalisation of national boundaries. The Indian subcontinent was split into India and Pakistan( West and East, which later disengaged from the West and evolved as Bangladesh).The angst that started during the Partition of the Indian sub- continent generated violence that took more than 200,000 to 2 million lives. The figures remain disputed.
Translated by Mitali Chakravarty, excerpted and edited by Ratnottama Sengupta from Nabendu Ghosh’s autobiography, Eka Naukar Jatri/ Journey of a Lonesome Boat.
India Independence Day Special
Stamp commemorating Shaheed Smarak
Patna Secretariat 1940s
Young Nabendu Ghosh
Eka Naukar Jatri book cover
In April 1942, our independence movement took on a new vigour. That month, Mahatma Gandhi in his article in the magazine, Harijan, demanded the Imperial government grant India a ‘sovereign’ status and withdraw peacefully. On 7th August, when the All India Congress Committee convened in Bombay, they decided to launch the ‘Quit India’ movement, forcing the colonials to leave India without resorting to violence. When on 9th August all the leaders including Gandhi were arrested, Indians were inflamed with outrage and anger.
On 11th August, while I was sorting letters in the office of the AIG-Police, I could hear distant strains of “Van-de-ey Maa-ta-ram! I bow to thee O Mother”; “Bharat mata ki jai— Victory to Mother India” and “May the British rule perish”. When I went to the teak-floored verandah to check what the commotion was about, I saw a crowd of people raising these slogans as they marched off the main road towards the entrance gate of the Secretariat. Many carried the tri-coloured flag of the Congress and some held banners that read “British, Quit India”.
“Vande mataram… British leave India” — the chant drew nearer. Two constables ran forward to shut the gates, but the demonstrators pushed past them into the main compound of the Secretariat.
Amba, a novel from Indonesia, written by award winning writer Lakshmi Pamuntjak, was a modern take on the story of Amba and Bhisma from The Mahabharata, set against the backdrop of the violence of 1965 and the Buru penal colony set up during Suharto’s regime. Published in 2012, it became a national bestseller within Indonesia.
It was first translated to German in 2015 and sold 10,000 copies within three months of its launch. Later the English translation renamed it The Question of Red (2016). The novel did win some amount of international acclaim.
Korea is on the move to open up and assimilate its heritage.
It plans to open a museum for its literature by December 2023 in Seoul’s northwest district with a budget of 60 billion won($53.6 million).
“The need to build a proper museum for Korean literature has always been there, but it has not been realized for a long time,” said Yeom Mu-ung, a literary critic who was named head of the institution in a press conference. He added, “The National Museum of Korean Literature should reflect on the history of colonisation, division, war, industrialisation and democratisation.”
Do you have a poem ready?
Here is a contest where you can win £1000 for a single poem and find a place in an anthology of award winning writers.
First Prize: £1,000
2nd Prize: £500
3rd Prize: £250
The contest ends on July 31st.
This week we bring you contests from two ends of the ocean.
One short story contest located in Ireland promises an award of €2000 and a week- long residency at Anam Cara retreat for writers and artists in Ireland.
The last date of the contest is on 31 st July.
Do you like to weave a story, create a fantasy, a web of darkness or light or reach out to the world with your opinions in straightforward language?
Then here is a chance for you to jostle with a 15000 word or lesser entry in Narrative, an American magazine.
The contest ends on July 31 st, 2019.
Title: The Billionaire Raj
Author: James Crabtree
Publisher: Oneworld
Year of publication: 2018
Links: https://singapore.kinokuniya.com/bw/9781786075598
At the port, the facility’s amiable chief executive, Captain Unmesh Abhyankar, talked excitedly about the mechanics of the place: a world of berth occupancy, throughput rates and turnaround times. Mundra had an unusually deep harbour, allowing it to attract some of the world’s biggest cargo ships, he explained, giving it an edge over rivals elsewhere along India’s western coast. ‘We focus on the three Cs: coal, containers and crude,’ he said of the cargoes the ships brought in. Exports were more of a mish-mash, including everything from bauxite and cars to iron ore and wood. India’s dilapidated road network made it hard to move this in and out, so industrialist Gautam Adani built a 60-kilometre private freight line to the main rail network. Most Indian ports were state owned and inefficient, taking a couple of days or more to unload a ship. At Mundra, however, cargo was mostly whisked in and out over a morning. Abhyankar expected his facility to become the country’s largest port later that year, handling 100 million tonnes of goods, the first in India ever to do so.
Even at dusk the giant container cranes were easy to spot from the window, as our plane took off that evening and flew us back to Ahmedabad, ready to meet Adani the next day. The day’s last light glinted on the grey of the Gulf of Kutch in the distance. A few years earlier a team of oceanographers had found an ancient stone anchor lying 50 metres below the waves, of a type used by merchants more than a millennium before. For centuries, those same waters had been India’s trading artery, bringing wooden dhows and then steamships across from Africa and the Middle East. Through such trade and commerce, India had been an early pioneer of globalisation, at least until Nehru launched his new age of self-enclosure in the aftermath of Independence in 1947.
(From Lit Hub. Link to the complete article given below) It began because everything was breaking. Had broken. […]
