Civil Lines New Writing from India (No. 1) [Paperback]

Rukun Advani (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 170 pages
• Publisher: South Asia Books (June 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0863115845
• ISBN-13: 978-0863115844
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 6.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,446,405 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars Profiled New Writing from India in the 1990s, November 1, 2008

By 

Reader in Tokyo - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Civil Lines New Writing from India (No. 1) (Paperback)

This was the first issue of the journal Civil Lines, founded in New Delhi in 1994 to publish promising new writing from India. It was modeled on Granta and targeted at literate urban Indians. There were four subsequent installments, in 1995, 1997, 2001 and 2002.

This first issue contained seven works of previously unpublished nonfiction by as many writers, six of whom were Indian. The Indian writers had either spent some years living outside India or were currently based abroad. All the works were written originally in English.

There were excerpts from the autobiography of Khushwant Singh (1915-), a short autobiographical piece by A. K. Mehrotra (1947-) centered around his youth in Allahabad, a work by Radha Kumar written after a brief period of detention in Bhopal, a piece of impressionistic writing by Allan Sealy (1951-) on travel in the American West and Mexico, and a diffuse essay by Bill Aitken (1934-), a Scottish expatriate, touching slightly on the importance of ecology. An essay by Amitav Ghosh (1956-) surveyed the development of the modern novel and short story in India, though it was too short to do so in any depth. An essay by Ramachandra Guha (1958-) discussed the varieties of Marxists encountered in Bengal in the 1980s. It was based on the witty conceit that Marxists were a soon-to-be extinct tribe with their own icons, sacred texts, and heresies and that Guha had been an anthropologist doing fieldwork.

Most enjoyed were the reminiscences by Mehrotra, for their recreation of his early self, with memorable details and sensitivity to sensations and memories, though the description of emotion was avoided. And the writing by Singh, which covered the desert town where he was born and, too briefly, portions of his life in Europe. The pieces by Ghosh and Guha also. The others I found to be much more impressionistic and unfocused. I would've enjoyed this publication even more had there been a greater number of selections, with the addition of some short stories and newer writers.