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Tag: Sahitya akademi award

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • The Shadow Lines

    The narrator grows up in Calcutta idolising his uncle Tridib, a scholar who teaches him to imagine distant places precisely. Through Tridib he becomes fascinated with the Price family in London, especially May, a musician Tridib loved. In memory he travels back and forth between a 1960s childhood and student years in London, assembling a family story in fragments.

    His grandmother, a stern schoolteacher born in Dhaka, longs to bring an elderly uncle out of what has become East Pakistan. That journey, in 1964, coincides with communal riots on both sides of the border, an episode the narrator only gradually understands and that he must reconstruct from newspapers and the silences of the adults around him.

    Ghosh's second novel questions the lines drawn on maps and asks why violence on one side so precisely mirrors violence on the other. Written partly in response to the 1984 Delhi riots, it won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 1989 and is widely studied in Indian universities.

    Book details

    AuthorAmitav Ghosh
    First published1988
    Original languageEnglish
    GenreLiterary fiction
    TypeFiction
    Pages (approx.)252
    SettingCalcutta, Dhaka and London, 1939 to early 1980s
    AwardsSahitya Akademi Award 1989

    Themes

    • Borders and nationalism
    • Memory
    • Communal violence
    • Imagination
    • Partition

    Who should read it

    Readers interested in Partition's long shadow and novels built from memory rather than chronology.