Bengal Feminist: My review in Cha

My review of Mohammad A. Quayum’s The Essential Rokeya: Selected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain has just been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal.

Here is an extract:

Born in 1880 in what is now Bangladesh, and having died in Calcutta in what was still undivided British India in 1932, Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain (whose name can be spelt in a variety of ways) has come to be known as one of Bengal’s first feminists. She is particularly known as one of its first Muslim feminists, especially for writing Sultana’s Dream, a “utopian” novella in which women rule and men are kept in purdah. With The Essential Rokeya: Selected Works of Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain, editor and translator Mohammad A. Quayyum adds to the body of scholarship on this interesting figure, with some previously-untranslated essays, articles, letters and extracts in translation from Bangla as well as some that were originally written in English. Quayyum describes the inclusions as some of Hossain’s best works.

Review of Vipul Rikhi’s 2012 Nights in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal

2012 Nights, by Vipul Rikhi. Delhi: Fingerprint, 2012. Provided with free review copy.

My review of Vipul Rikhi’s stories 2012 Nights has just been published in Cha: An Asian Literary Journal. Here’s an excerpt, and you can read the rest here.

“In 2012 Nights, Vipul Rikhi provides one possible answer to the question of what the classic One Thousand and One Nights would look like if it was told from a contemporary male perspective. In the original collection of tales, Scheherazade tells her husband, Schahriar, a story every night, but must leave each unfinished to prevent him from putting her to death, as he has done his previous wives after their first night of marriage. Rikhi employs many of the same structural and narrative techniques as the classic, such as the use of the framing story, embedded narratives, satire, parody and an unreliable narrator, but in other respects, his work does not resemble the folktale influences of its namesake.”