Articles by Saikat Majumdar
The critic as artist
On how India’s first openly gay poet, Hoshang Merchant has created an entire tradition of interdisciplinary literary and cultural criticism
Published on Sep 17, 2024 08:36 PM IST
The rattle of skeletons
We need to examine the principles with which a writer is identified. And then ask, how do these principles bear upon the violations in their personal life?
Published on Jul 26, 2024 09:00 AM IST
The burden of togetherness
Uttarakhand’s move to get couples living together to register relationships calls into question the role of the state in relation to private bodies and lives
Published on Feb 19, 2024 03:19 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Review: Out of God’s Oven & Another India
A look a two collections of essays on India, one which shows the light-hearted ethnography of the columnist and another that contains determined reportage from the frontlines
Updated on Feb 10, 2024 08:42 AM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: Ayodhya and the end of the Hindu imagination
The most magical thing about the Ramayana is that it has the capacity to enter our personal lives, dreams and nightmares. But will that continue to be possible now that a single official version has been enshrined?
Updated on Feb 07, 2024 08:10 AM IST
Saikat Majumdar
HT reviewer Saikat Majumdar picks his favourite read of 2023
Anukrti Upadhyay's collection of short stories, The Blue Women, explores the lives of idiosyncratic women and the challenges they face. It is a remarkable and powerful portrayal of femininity and labor in modern society.
Updated on Dec 22, 2023 06:55 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Unsettling beauty
Poets like Jonaki Roy, Aishwarya Iyer, Ramesh Karthik Nayak, and Deepankar Khiwani challenge the representational limits set by the educated bourgeoisie
Updated on Nov 14, 2023 03:15 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Review: The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays edited by Tenzin Dickie
Exile, scepticism over national identity, and cosmopolitanism feature in this volume, which presents how utterances on language, learning and expression take on a certain poignancy in an embattled culture
Updated on Oct 21, 2023 04:03 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Review: Tall Tales By A Small Dog by Omair Ahmad
The author ventriloquizes a dog to tell eclectic stories, histories, anecdotes, and urban legends about the town of Gorakhpur
Published on Sep 15, 2023 11:07 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: The myth of French blackness
The relentless assimilationist model of French society has caused endless friction with immigrants, who, whether black or Arab, remain the Other
Updated on Aug 21, 2023 06:43 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Heft in lightness: Literary icon Milan Kundera dies at 94
The absurdity and cruelty in human relationships, and the absurd cruelty of ideologically driven state rule – Kundera threw the acid of his laughter on both in equal measure
Updated on Jul 13, 2023 12:47 AM IST
Saikat Majumdar, New Delhi
Heft in lightness: Literary icon Milan Kundera dies at 94
Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Hannah Arendt showed us the sheer banality of this evil – standing in the Jerusalem court, the Nazi bureaucrat mentioned in passing the role of doctors, in “killing and other medical matters”, with a normalcy that shook the judge
Updated on Jul 13, 2023 12:38 AM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: The Cape of Silent Hope
On literary residencies and the experience of writing a new book at one in a country with a fraught past and an uncomfortable present
Updated on Jun 16, 2023 04:36 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Review: Victory City by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie extends the colonial imagination to the arrival of the Portuguese in India in this novel whose heart is the story of the historical Vijayanagar, recast in the texture of a southern Mahabharata
Updated on Feb 14, 2023 08:05 AM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: The writer without readers
Saikat Majumdar wonders what the image of the reader, an increasingly rare sight in public life, signifies to the ordinary citizen not professionally connected to the worlds of reading and writing
Updated on Jan 12, 2023 08:12 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: The reader between fiction and non-fiction
While non fiction provides the reader with the utilitarian knowledge she believes is urgently necessary in a world in crisis, the interest in other lives is no longer satisfied by the novel
Updated on Oct 12, 2022 09:35 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: Hindu nationalism’s censorship of the gods
The limits of sensory representation of The Divine is an Abrahamic, particularly Islamic dictum, and bringing these strictures to the representation of Hindu gods is to misrepresent Hinduism itself
Updated on Aug 03, 2022 02:26 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: The novel and the love letter
Author Saikat Majumdar, who was a sought after writer of love letters at boarding school, reminisces about how the experience influenced his novels and his life
Updated on Jul 21, 2022 04:09 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: The deception of creative writing
The sudden clamour for the creative writing workshop is unsurprising in a country where coaching camps and manuals for engineering and medicine entrance exams have always been sure-fire best-sellers. But is great writing really all about the craft taught at these programmes?
Updated on Apr 22, 2022 05:29 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
100 years of Ulysses: A novel idea, a date celebrated around the world
A man’s throbbing anxiety about his wife’s adulterous affair; an author plagued by fantasies he poured into his work — Saikat Majumdar looks back on the genius and despair of James Joyce’s Ulysses, published a century ago this month.
Updated on Feb 19, 2022 03:59 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: The gaze through time
Novelist Saikat Majumdar wonders how to translate works from an earlier time, in this case a problematic story by Rabindranath Tagore, in an era of cancel culture
Updated on Feb 11, 2022 05:55 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
In conversation: On the new ‘Writer in Context’ book series
Author Saikat Majumdar speaks to Sukrita Paul Kumar, co-editor of the 12-book project from Routledge, on what it might signify for Indian literature. The series focuses on Indian writers in the bhasha tradition. The first volume on Krishna Sobti has just been released
Updated on Oct 02, 2021 12:06 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: Remains of the body
For the family and community of the person who dies, the body takes on a different life immediately after death. It becomes a soul craving last rites. An examination of grief in a season of great loss
Published on Jun 02, 2021 05:50 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: On the influence of Bhasha literature on Indian English writing
For the Indian English writer, growth as a reader and a writer is often a simultaneous quest for the shape and texture of the Indian vernacular
Published on Apr 16, 2021 06:37 PM IST
Saikat Majumdar
Essay: The art and law of love
In this essay to commemorate Pride month, Saikat Majumdar writes that Indian society will have truly ‘arrived’ only when same-sex romance is treated no differently from heteronormative romance
Updated on Jun 15, 2020 04:46 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Saikat Majumdar
Essay: On the future of reading and writing under the shadow of the pandemic by Saikat Majumdar
In a flash of dystopian lightning, the real has turned unreal, and the fictitious has morphed into reality.
Updated on May 27, 2020 11:59 AM IST
Hindustan Times | Saikat Majumdar
Lockdown Diaries: The comfort of sickness by Saikat Majumdar
Time has lost urgency, hours have become porous; they flow into each other throughout the day.
Updated on Apr 04, 2020 03:08 PM IST
Hindustan Times | Saikat Majumdar
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