RAG Demo

Tag: Award winner

  • Randamoozham

    Randamoozham, meaning the second turn, retells the Mahabharata through Bhima, the second of the Pandava brothers. In the epic he is the muscle of the family, the eater, the fighter who keeps his vows of vengeance. In this novel he is a thinking, feeling man forever placed behind Yudhishthira in rank and behind Arjuna in Draupadi's affection.

    M. T. strips away most of the supernatural. Gods become men whose origins are hinted at in earthly terms, miracles are rumours, and the great war is the outcome of human ambition, resentment and statecraft. Bhima's relationships with his mother Kunti, with Draupadi, with the forest woman Hidimbi and their son Ghatotkacha, and with his own brothers are explored with psychological depth.

    Published in 1984, the novel won the Vayalar Award in 1985 and is often ranked among the finest works of Malayalam fiction. Its spare, poetic prose and its sympathy for the second-placed have made it a touchstone for later modern retellings of the epics. Gita Krishnankutty's English translation appeared as Bhima: Lone Warrior.

    Book details

    AuthorM. T. Vasudevan Nair
    First published1984
    Original languageMalayalam
    Translated byGita Krishnankutty
    GenreMythology
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)300
    SettingHastinapura, the forests of exile and Kurukshetra, the age of the Mahabharata
    AwardsVayalar Award 1985

    Themes

    • Being second
    • Brotherhood and rivalry
    • Demythologised epic
    • Unrequited devotion
    • War and its cost

    Who should read it

    Readers who know the Mahabharata and want a humane, realist reading of it from a neglected hero's eyes.

  • Chemmeen

    Chemmeen, meaning prawn, is set among the Hindu fishing community of the Kerala coast. Karuthamma, daughter of the ambitious fisherman Chembankunju, has loved Pareekutty, a young Muslim fish trader, since childhood. Her community lives by a belief that the sea-goddess protects fishermen at sea only while their wives on shore remain chaste, and a marriage across faiths is unthinkable.

    Chembankunju's hunger to own a boat and net leads him to borrow from Pareekutty and then exploit him, while Karuthamma is married off to Palani, an orphaned fisherman from another village. Thakazhi shows the economics of the shore as clearly as the romance: the credit, the catches, the jealousy and gossip, the tightly policed customs that hold a vulnerable community together and also crush individuals within it.

    Published in 1956, the novel won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1957 and became one of the first modern Indian novels widely translated abroad, with a UNESCO-supported English version by V. K. Narayana Menon. Ramu Kariat's 1965 film was the first South Indian film to win the President's Gold Medal. The book reads as a folk legend grafted onto social realism.

    Book details

    AuthorThakazhi Sivasankara Pillai
    First published1956
    Original languageMalayalam
    Translated byV. K. Narayana Menon
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)230
    SettingFishing villages of the Alappuzha coast, Kerala, mid twentieth century
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1957

    Themes

    • Forbidden love
    • Fishing community
    • Myth and taboo
    • Greed
    • Fate

    Who should read it

    Readers who want a passionate love story rooted in the customs and economy of a real coastal community.

  • Gitanjali

    Gitanjali began as a Bengali collection of devotional songs published in 1910. Two years later Tagore produced an English selection, Song Offerings, drawing on that book and several others, and recasting the songs as short prose poems. Read aloud in London literary circles, the English version drew admiration from W. B. Yeats, who wrote its introduction, and it led directly to the 1913 Nobel Prize.

    The poems are addressed to a divine presence that is never named in doctrinal terms. That presence is met in ordinary things: a boat on the river, a lamp at dusk, a traveller on a dusty road, the labourer breaking stones. The speaker longs, waits, offers himself, feels unworthy and then finds the beloved already near. Death is approached without dread, as a guest or a homecoming.

    Much of the collection's appeal lies in its simplicity of image and its refusal of ritual or priestly mediation. Tagore draws on the Upanishads, Vaishnava devotional poetry and the Baul singers of Bengal, yet the result feels personal rather than scholarly. For many readers it remains the doorway into Indian spiritual poetry, and several of the original songs are still sung across Bengal today.

    Book details

    AuthorRabindranath Tagore
    First published1910
    Original languageBengali
    Translated byRabindranath Tagore
    GenrePoetry
    TypeNon-fiction
    Pages (approx.)100
    AwardsNobel Prize in Literature 1913 (awarded to the author)

    Themes

    • Devotion
    • Union with the divine
    • Nature
    • Death as homecoming
    • Humility

    Who should read it

    Anyone wanting a short, meditative introduction to Indian devotional poetry that can be read a page at a time.

  • Tomb of Sand

    After her husband's death, Ma, an elderly woman in a north Indian family, takes to her bed and turns her back on the household gathered around her. When she finally rises, it is as a changed person: playful, unpredictable and keen to do things her family never imagined, including moving in with her unconventional daughter, Beti, a writer who lives independently.

    Ma's new friendship with Rosie, a hijra, adds to the family's confusion, and her desire to cross the border into Pakistan leads her back to a past from the time of Partition that she has never spoken about. Beti, who has always been the free one, finds herself watching her mother outdo her in rebellion.

    Originally published in Hindi as Ret Samadhi, the novel is playful and digressive, with talking crows, puns and stories within stories. Daisy Rockwell's translation won the International Booker Prize in 2022, the first time the award went to a book translated from an Indian language.

    Book details

    AuthorGeetanjali Shree
    First published2018
    Original languageHindi
    Translated byDaisy Rockwell
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    SettingDelhi and northern India, and Pakistan, present day
    AwardsInternational Booker Prize 2022

    Themes

    • Old age and renewal
    • Mothers and daughters
    • Partition memory
    • Borders
    • Gender

    Who should read it

    Adventurous readers who enjoy playful, experimental prose and stories about women reclaiming their lives.

  • Em and the Big Hoom

    The unnamed narrator lives with his sister Susan and their parents in a cramped flat in Mahim, Bombay. His mother Imelda, called Em, smokes beedis, swears inventively and talks with startling candour, and she lives with bipolar disorder that sends her into periods of mania and despair, including attempts on her own life. His father Augustine, the Big Hoom, is calm, reliable and quietly devoted.

    Through Em's letters, diaries and long conversations with her son, the novel pieces together how Em and the Big Hoom met and married in the 1950s and how the family lives around her illness, with hospital visits, neighbours' gossip and endless cups of tea. Humour sits right beside sorrow on every page.

    Jerry Pinto drew on his own family history, and the book is admired for its honesty about mental illness and its love for its characters. It won The Hindu Literary Prize and the Crossword Book Award and has been translated into several languages. It is short and quickly read.

    Book details

    AuthorJerry Pinto
    First published2012
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)240
    SettingMahim, Bombay, 1950s to 1990s
    AwardsThe Hindu Literary Prize 2013

    Themes

    • Mental illness
    • Family love
    • Caregiving
    • Humour and grief
    • Marriage

    Who should read it

    Readers who appreciate warm, honest writing about families living with mental illness.

  • Cuckold

    The narrator is the Maharaj Kumar, heir to the throne of Mewar in Rajasthan in the early 1500s. His new wife, a young princess, declares that she is already married to the god Krishna and spends her days singing devotional songs. The prince is publicly mocked as a man cuckolded by a god, and he is privately consumed by jealousy, curiosity and an odd tenderness.

    Alongside the marriage, the prince deals with palace intrigue among his father Rana Sanga's many wives and sons, invents new military tactics and administrative reforms, and watches the rise of Babur in the north. His voice is modern in its scepticism and wit, making the historical setting feel startlingly immediate.

    Kiran Nagarkar's novel reimagines the life of the husband of the poet-saint Mirabai, a figure history barely records. Long and richly detailed, it won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2001 and is admired for turning legend into a psychological drama about faith, power and love.

    Book details

    AuthorKiran Nagarkar
    First published1997
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)610
    SettingChittor and the kingdom of Mewar, Rajasthan, early 16th century
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 2001

    Themes

    • Devotion and desire
    • Jealousy
    • Statecraft and war
    • Masculinity
    • Faith

    Who should read it

    Readers who like intelligent historical fiction told by a witty, troubled narrator.

  • Fire on the Mountain

    After a lifetime as the dutiful wife of a university vice-chancellor and mother of many children, Nanda Kaul has retreated to Carignano, an isolated house on a ridge in Kasauli. She wants nothing more than to be left alone with the pines and the view, and she resents any letter or visitor that might pull her back into obligation.

    Then her great-granddaughter Raka is sent to recover from typhoid and a troubled home. To Nanda's surprise, the child wants no attention at all and spends her days roaming ravines and burnt hillsides. Nanda finds herself trying to win the girl over with invented stories, while Ila Das, a childhood friend reduced to poverty, brings news of the dangers of the world below.

    Short and intense, the novel is a study of solitude, female lives and the pretences people build to survive them. It won the Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize and the Sahitya Akademi Award, and its quiet build-up gives way to a powerful, unsettling conclusion best discovered without warning.

    Book details

    AuthorAnita Desai
    First published1977
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)145
    SettingCarignano, a house in Kasauli, Himachal Pradesh, 1970s
    AwardsWinifred Holtby Memorial Prize 1978, Sahitya Akademi Award 1978

    Themes

    • Solitude
    • Women's lives
    • Old age and childhood
    • Illusion
    • Loneliness

    Who should read it

    Readers who enjoy short, psychologically intense novels about women and solitude.

  • The Room on the Roof

    Rusty is a sixteen-year-old Anglo-Indian boy living in the European enclave of Dehra under the strict guardianship of Mr John Harrison, who forbids him to mix with Indians. Curiosity draws him into the bazaar, where he meets Somi, Ranbir and Suri, and discovers chaat, Holi colours and the warmth of friendship.

    After a final quarrel with his guardian, Rusty leaves home and is offered a room on the roof of the Kapoor family's house in exchange for teaching English to their son Kishen. There he falls in love with Kishen's lonely young mother, Meena, and has to learn what independence truly costs.

    Ruskin Bond wrote the novel at seventeen, partly from his own adolescence, and it won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Its simple, evocative prose and its picture of 1950s Dehra Dun introduced the Rusty stories that Bond would return to for decades, and it was adapted for Doordarshan as Ek Tha Rusty.

    Book details

    AuthorRuskin Bond
    First published1956
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    SettingDehra (Dehradun), early 1950s
    AwardsJohn Llewellyn Rhys Prize 1957

    Themes

    • Coming of age
    • Belonging
    • Friendship
    • First love
    • Anglo-indian identity

    Who should read it

    Teenagers and adults who enjoy gentle coming-of-age stories set in the hills of India.

  • Train to Pakistan

    Mano Majra is a small village on the Sutlej, with a railway bridge and a station whose train timings organise the day. Sikh farmers and Muslim tenants have lived together for generations, largely untouched by the politics of Partition. Then, in the summer of 1947, a ghost train arrives from Pakistan carrying the bodies of murdered Sikhs and Hindus.

    Khushwant Singh moves between a handful of characters: Juggut Singh, a hulking local thug in love with a Muslim weaver's daughter; Iqbal, an English-educated activist sent to rouse the peasants; and Hukum Chand, the district magistrate, a weary, compromised man who tries to manipulate events from his rest house. As refugees and armed groups arrive, the village is pushed toward retaliation.

    Written with unsentimental directness and dark humour, the novel was one of the first major works of fiction about Partition violence. Its manuscript won the Grove Press India Fiction Prize, and it was filmed by Pamela Rooks in 1998. It is brief enough to read in a sitting but lingers long afterwards.

    Book details

    AuthorKhushwant Singh
    First published1956
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreHistorical fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)181
    SettingMano Majra, a village on the India-Pakistan border in Punjab, summer 1947
    AwardsGrove Press India Fiction Prize 1954

    Themes

    • Partition
    • Communal violence
    • Love across religion
    • Moral responsibility
    • Village life

    Who should read it

    Anyone wanting a short, unflinching novel about how Partition reached ordinary villages.

  • The Guide

    Raju, recently released from prison, takes shelter in a ruined temple by a river near a village called Mangala. When a villager mistakes him for a sage, Raju finds it easier to accept the role than to explain himself, and soon people bring him food, problems and reverence. The novel alternates between this present and Raju's account of how he got here.

    Years earlier Raju ran a shop at Malgudi railway station and became a popular guide for tourists. One of his clients was Marco, a cold archaeologist, and his wife Rosie, a gifted dancer whose husband despises her art. Raju's involvement with Rosie, and his management of her career as a star performer named Nalini, led him into vanity, debt and eventually crime.

    Narayan writes with typical lightness, but the book poses serious questions about sincerity, performance and whether a role played long enough becomes real. It won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1960, the first for an English-language novel, and inspired the 1965 Dev Anand film Guide.

    Book details

    AuthorR. K. Narayan
    First published1958
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreClassic
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)220
    SettingMalgudi and the village of Mangala, South India, mid-20th century
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1960

    Themes

    • Identity and performance
    • Redemption
    • Art and marriage
    • Faith
    • Self-deception

    Who should read it

    Readers who like gently ironic stories about reinvention and the line between faith and fraud.