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Literary Review
Place-packs
MORE for the tourists: anthologies on Mountains and on Kerala. Penguin had earlier published an anthology on Delhi, part of a series of such collections. Other areas to be so packaged in the future: Bombay, edited by Naresh Fernandes and Jerry Pinto; Chennai by C.S. Lakshmi; Rivers, by Amita Baviskar; and then come Forest, Sea and so on. Anthologies on nearby galaxies and planets have not yet been announced.
The anthologies on mountain writing and Kerala are interesting to browse through side by side, not only for the obvious difference in landscape. The editor of the first , Ravina Aggarwal, is an anthropologist by training. Nine of the contributors in this book are academics and their pieces are often the by-product of a Ph.D. thesis, or a learned work on pashmina shawls, tea plantation workers, carpet-weaving etc. It shows in the prose. The collection is more duty than pleasure, packed with information and the right ideas but little that is, in a literary sense, exciting.
The opposite is true of Anita Nair's collection of writings from Kerala, with its poets and storytellers, which evokes the Keralas within as well as beyond the ayurvedic massage. The pieces are intelligently chosen, quirky and satiric extracts sharing space with atmospheric and journalistic ones, encouraging the reader to reconsider stereotypes of Kerala. While the mountain book felt like a documentary this one is like a feature film. Both have their virtues, but if you like good writing, Nair, poet and writer herself, has packed in much more.
Into the High Ranges, Penguin, Rs. 250; Where the Rain is Born, Penguin, Rs. 395.
ANURADHA ROY
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