Nazia Manzoor

In classic Bengali fiction, the kitchen is a central site for conflict and community bonding.

November 25, the International Day for the Elimination of Violence Against Women, marks the beginning of 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence which goes until December 10, Human Rights Day.

One does not need to remember Rabindranath on the occasion of the anniversary of his death—22 Srabon or August 7 to be precise.

Over the last two semesters, my course on South Asian writing at both the undergraduate and graduate level begins with Shahidul Zahir’s Jibon O Rajnoitik Bastobata (Life and Political Reality, translated by V Ramaswamy and Shahroza Nahreen).

One of the movements which helped accelerate the Liberation War of Bangladesh was the Mass Uprising of 1969.

When Gayatri Spivak ends her groundbreaking essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” (1988) with a definitive statement “the subaltern cannot speak”, a section of literary criticism took that dictum literally—accepting the “cannot” to represent mutism or an inability to speak.

As we close the curtains on the first month of the new year and step into the second, here at Star Books and Literature,  we are thinking back on the year we had.

No amount of activism is enough to bring an end to gender-based violence when women’s and girls’ lives are considered less than that of their male counterparts.

This week, then, we're thinking: music and books, music and literature. In print and online, we're dreaming in tunes, dancing with words, daring to merge the two.

Teachers are no longer the valued, moral arbiters of society that we once deemed them to be.

What codes of safety and protection can ensure women’s right to, well, exist?

In two of the more prominent fictional works that are part of the diasporic South Asian literary production, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake and Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, food is presented as a conceptual apparatus that makes palatable the tensions of ‘multiculturalism’ and offers a critique of class barriers—if not always at the level of economics, but at the level of consciousness.

Reading moves you. The movement is emotional—you feel moved as you read, you feel moved by what you read. To read is to be moved—by the sheer joy and ecstasy on the pages, by the pain and heartache in the letters,

One can find Rabindranath anywhere—he’s there in the words we whisper, in the tunes we hum, in the ethos we believe in, in the ideal of the human we wish we were. 

There is an element of the unexpected in the twinning of fiction and ecology. A sense of unease of sorts exists in the pairing together of fiction, a form of narrative that is untrue, with the imminent ecological disaster, an environmental inevitability that is true.

Few experiences in life can prepare us to be more sensitive, more inclusive, and generally kinder human beings than reading.