Deborah Baker’s The Convert, tells a strange tale of a woman who exchanged her Jewish-American identity for an Islamic life of exile.

By Anjana Basu

This is a story which strengthens the belief that truth is stranger than fiction. Browsing the New York library archives ‘on the prowl’ for a subject to write about, biographer Deborah Baker stumbled upon a file containing the papers of Maryam Jameelah. The sight of a lone Muslim name in those conservative American stacks piqued her interest. She rummaged through the papers and came upon the intriguing story of Margaret Marcus, an intellectual misfit born to Jewish parents in New York State.

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The Early Indian Women Writers series reviews a few remarkable books by Indian women from the 1900 – 1950 period.

An Unfinished Song by Swarnakumari Debi Ghosal revolves around a young Bengali girl in the process of discovering herself amidst a gradually changing India.

Review by Sunayana Roy

Although the average reader usually places Swarnakumari Debi as a member of the illustrious Jorasanko Tagore family (Rabindranath was a brother), this author/editor was well-known in her own time for her literary prowess as well as her progressive politics and philanthropy. She edited the Bengali literary magazine Bharati for nearly thirty years, helmed the Ladies’ Theosophical Society in Calcutta for two and was one of the earliest members from Bengal to attend the Indian National Congress.

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In the ‘Author’s Corner’ series we shine the spotlight on promising first-time female authors. Hope you enjoy reading some fun facts about them!

Meet Nina Godiwalla, author of Suits, which tells the story of an ambitious young woman starting out on a challenging corporate career – with several odds stacked against her.

If you had not become a writer, what would you have been?

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Swedish author Jesper Bengtsson’s Aung San Suu Kyi: A Biography is a very readable account of the Iron Butterfly – and her country, Myanmar. 

Review by Aparna V. Singh

With the recent elections in Myanmar attracting worldwide attention, the time is ripe for a biography of Aung San Suu Kyi, on whose shoulders rest so many expectations and hopes, both within and outside her country.

But, how does a biography look when its subject has been under house arrest for 15 of the last 21 years? When she has spoken very little of herself and that too in rare interviews permitted by the military junta?

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Namita Gokhale’s The Habit Of Love transcends time and explores the different facets of women – and the intricacies of their loves.

Review by Rashi Goel

To term Namita Gokhale’s The Habit of Love a collection of short stories would be unfair, almost belittling to this author of remarkable excellence and profundity. It is in truth a mirror reflecting the lives of thirteen women or maybe thirteen mirrors reflecting the life of a woman.

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In the ‘Author’s Corner’ series we shine the spotlight on promising first-time female authors. Hope you enjoy reading some fun facts about them!

This week we talk to Urvashi Gulia, the author of My Way Is The Highway, a book about a young woman who sets off on a road trip – and ends up meeting people she has never known and doing things that she has never done!

If you had not become a writer, what would you have been?

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Pulitzer prize-winning journalist Katherine Boo offers an incisive look into the underbelly of Mumbai in Behind The Beautiful Forevers.

By Unmana Datta

The cover of Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers has this quote from Ramachandra Guha: “The best book about contemporary India, the best work of non-fiction I have read in the past twenty-five years.”

The force of that statement depends, of course, on what else Guha has read in the last twenty-five years; nevertheless, that statement both impressed me and made me wary.

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With striking images, Our Pictures, Our Words presents a visual history of the women’s movement in India while highlighting its importance today.

Review by Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta

In late 2011, Vijayalakshmi, the wife of Kannada film star Darshan, filed a police complaint accusing him of domestic violence. The immediate response of the Kannada Film Producers’ Association (KFPA) was to issue an embargo preventing an actress, Nikita Thukral, from working in the Kannada film industry, alleging that she had caused ‘marital disharmony’ in Darshan’s family.
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In the ‘Author’s Corner’ series we shine the spotlight on promising first-time female authors. Hope you enjoy reading some fun facts about them!

A name which Women’s Web readers would be quite familiar with – Kiran Manral, author of The Reluctant Detective, a murder mystery with a bored housewife as the protagonist.

If you had not become a writer, what would you have been?

A painter.

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Sagarika Chakraborty’s A Calendar Too Crowded has its ups and downs; nevertheless it stands by womanhood and speaks out unflinchingly.

Review by Anne John

A Calendar Too Crowded has an interesting and unique theme. It is a collection of short stories and poems around notable days of the calendar that are dedicated to women or women’s issues. Thus we have a poem on gender selection for the Anti-Selective-Abortion Day which falls on October 25th, a story about oppression against widows for the International Widows Day on February 2^nd and so on.

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