Sunando Sen was an Indian immigrant living in America. In 2012, at 46, he fulfilled his dream of opening a print shop in Manhattan. Six months later, a woman pushed him off a subway platform and into the path of an oncoming train. In her own words, she “hated Hindus and Muslims” and had been … Read More
Sanjena Sathian’s novel Gold Diggers is concerned with conventional paths to success, and the possibilities that arise when we break from them. We meet the narrator, Neil Narayan, at a high school dance, where he sees dancing as a prescribed activity, a script. “I depended on scripts,” he thinks, “in those days before anyone asked … Read More
Iram Bilal’s new film, I’ll Meet You There, ends with a quote by Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” In a nuanced depiction of a Pakistani American, Muslim family in Chicago, Bilal offers a moving rumination of that field. The film follows Dua (Nikita Tewani), … Read More
Sharon Bala’s The Boat People tells a nuanced tale of migration. Inspired by real events , the novel follows Mahindan, a Tamil asylum-seeker who flees persecution amidst civil war Sri Lanka, only to find himself facing deportation by the Canadian government for suspected ties to the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE). A multi-narrative work, … Read More
Everyone has an opinion about Netflix’s reality dating-cum-wedding show Indian Matchmaking, which follows a handful of singles in India and America as they attempt to find their life partners through an Indian matchmaking service run by “master matchmaker” Sima Taparia. The end goal is a lavish Hindu wedding. The show has been rightly criticized for … Read More
Megha Majumdar’s A Burning, set in and around Kolkata, couldn’t be more topical. Moving with the inevitability of parable, it lacerates the Hindu right-wing by following violence until it reaches its logical endpoint. In A Burning, Jivan, a young Muslim woman, is thrown into jail for her alleged role in a terror attack. Lovely, a … Read More
Since the 1940s, the beginning of the Golden Age of Hindi cinema, the Sufi song form of qawwali has been a prominent feature in Bollywood film. Due to the rich sociocultural and religious history of qawwali in the subcontinent, it is easy, even for South Asians, to picture the qawwali as a solely Islamic sacred … Read More
As a book of poetry, Megan Fernandes’ Good Boys presents a prescriptive examination of the self. But as a body with life in it, it shatters what is known by intentionally moving through its own tempers. What does it mean to be good, and who assigns this meaning? In all its messiness, Good Boys lays … Read More
Released on Netflix last month, Naga filmmaker Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone (2019) is the first mainstream Hindi movie to address the racism that northeastern migrants face in the Indian capital of New Delhi. Despite its meticulous attention to varying shades of discrimination, the movie betrays itself through a dangerous attitude of “kuch nahin hota” , or … Read More
The title Bring Now the Angels is as much a God-like order as a human plea. Dilruba Ahmed’s new book-slash-summoning-slash-prayer reckons with expanse as painstakingly as it does limitation. Throughout, it takes on health, mortality, and immigration with disquieting force. The first section of Bring Now the Angels considers the circumstances surrounding the passing of … Read More
