Category: Reviews

Books, Reviews

Review: A Spoke in the Wheel

Courtesy: Luis Dias, Navhind Times.

Of all the genres of novel-writing, I have the greatest respect for writers of historical fiction. It is a genre best left untouched before a vast amount of reading and research on the subject and the historical period has been accomplished. In addition, one also has to possess a good imagination to recreate an often-distant past, in some ways very different from ours, but also in terms of the human experience, not that different. (more…)

Reviews

Review: Avyahat

Courtesy: Vikram Phukan, The Theater Times.

The third generation of an almost 70-year-old Goa-based theatre company, the Hauns Sangeet Natya Mandal, has taken over the reins in recent years. In what is a cultural resurgence for the group, their new production, Avyahat, won top honors at the 58th Maharashtra State Amateur Marathi Theatre Competition in March. It will now be staged at the historically significant Mumbai Marathi Sahitya Sangh, as part of the Damu Kenkre Smriti Natyotsav, the five-day experimental theatre festival named for the noted Marathi stage director, who passed away in 2008. Avyahat is adapted from Amita Kanekar’s 2014 novel, A Spoke in The Wheel, by Kaustubh Naik and directed by his brother, Rohan Naik. The writer-director duo’s grandfather, the redoubtable Vishwanath Naik, founded the company in 1950. It continues to operate from the culturally rich city of Ponda in central Goa. (more…)

Books, Reviews

Review: A Spoke in the Wheel

Courtesy: Dale Luis Menezes, Gomantak Times.

  • If change could be brought by a king,

why did the Buddha become a beggar? (p. 382)

  • The Buddha preached his Way, they went theirs (p. 334)

Before Hinduism, in Ancient South Asia, Buddhism was a major religion. What the common man as well as the student of history knows about Buddhism has come, generally, from the old Jataka story of how the Buddha who was a prince was isolated from all the ills of the world and a chance encounter with old-age, sickness and death transforms his whole life, eventually leading to his enlightenment. Sadly for all of us this legend has been – verbatim – passed off as history. The Buddha is viewed as godhead, when charting the history of Buddhism with the actual historical processes that the Buddha as a person had experienced, given scant attention. (more…)

Books, Reviews

Review: A Spoke in the Wheel

Courtesy: D. N. Jha, Outlook India.

For historians, historical fiction is bunk. History’s gripping enough, so I can’t understand why writers would want to fictionalise it. I rarely read fiction myself, and historical fiction, never. But having read Amita Kanekar’s novel about Emperor Ashoka and Buddhist monk Upali, I must admit it successfully captures the stress and strains of monastic life, and brings alive the centuries following the death of the Buddha, a period when his teachings were taking the form of a canonical corpus. While many historical fictions make only tenuous references to real history, the present one doesn’t. That’s precisely my problem with it: the facts. It’s true Ashoka had an important role in systematising and interpreting the Canon, but his commissioning a monk to put down his life and teachings is not borne out by historical evidence.

Nor was Upali, who systematised Buddhist ideas on monastic rules and discipline, a Kalingan contemporary of Ashoka, as Kanekar makes him out to be. He was born three centuries earlier, one of the chief disciples of the Enlightened One. In other aspects, however, the story is reasonably close to historical fact and is an interesting mix of erudition and historical imagination, even if at times imagination does obstruct the flow of the narrative.