Articles by: Basharat Shameem

 Khalid Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns: Giving Voice to the Voiceless

 Khalid Hosseini’s A Thousand Splendid Suns: Giving Voice to the Voiceless

The novel A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini poignantly writes the story of brave and courageous Afghan women who have lived under the debilitating shadows of patriarchal oppression, endless violence and war. As the extremist Taliban regime in Kabul enforces its full obscurantist and repressive rule on Afghan society, the brave Afghan women are again facing the brunt of[Read More…]

by 01/12/2022 Comments are Disabled Book Review
Documenting History in Exile: Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude

Documenting History in Exile: Siddhartha Gigoo’s The Garden of Solitude

The Garden of Solitude is Siddhartha Gigoo’s debut work. Gigoo was born in Downtown, Srinagar in 1974 in a Kashmiri Hindu family. Kashmiri Hindus are generally known as Pandits. For the first fifteen years of his life, Siddhartha Gigoo lived in Srinagar. Then, in 1990, he and his family, alongwith thousands of other families migrated from the valley as a[Read More…]

by 22/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Book Review
Photo by peterme

History vis-a-vis Fiction: A Fascinating Dialectic

The much contested debate pertaining to the relationship between Literature and History dates back to the classical times. Beginning with Aristotle, there have been constant efforts to identify the links and natures of these two domains of knowledge. In the traditional scholarship, History was often regarded as an art of particulars, while on the contrast, Literature was identified with universals.[Read More…]

by 17/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Life/Philosophy
Night of the Golden Butterfly: An Intense Political Elegy

Night of the Golden Butterfly: An Intense Political Elegy

The novel Night of the Golden Butterfly (2010) by eminent Marxist intellectual and author, Tariq Ali, is a narrative which paints a dystopian vision of what political authoritarianism looks like. The novel primarily explores the rise and nexus between religious fanaticism, dictatorship, majoritarianism and military-mullah-feudal nexus in Tariq Ali’s native country Pakistan, referred nostalgically to as “Fatherland” in the novel.[Read More…]

by 11/11/2022 Comments are Disabled Book Review
 Tariq Ali’s The Stone Woman: An Allegory of Ottomans with Strong Contemporary Parallels

 Tariq Ali’s The Stone Woman: An Allegory of Ottomans with Strong Contemporary Parallels

Tariq Ali’s novel The Stone Woman critically tells us the story of declining Ottoman in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and has plenty of lessons for the current day Turkey. As is well known, the Ottoman kingdom, based in Turkey, ruled a vast portion of the Middle East and Eastern Europe for over 600 years. Like any other[Read More…]

by 10/10/2022 Comments are Disabled Book Review
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