Hisham Matar Posts

Sam Dalrymple’s “Shattered Lands : Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia”

16 07 , 2025 No Comments

A history of modern South Asia told through five partitions that reshaped it.

As recently as 1928, a vast swathe of Asia–India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Burma, Nepal, Bhutan, Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait–were bound together under a single imperial banner, an entity known officially as the ‘Indian Empire’, or more simply as the Raj.

It was the British Empire’s crown jewel, a vast dominion stretching from the Red Sea to the jungles of Southeast Asia, home to a quarter of the world’s population and encompassing the largest Hindu, Muslim, Sikh and Zoroastrian communities on the planet. Its people used the Indian rupee, were issued passports stamped ‘Indian Empire’, and were guarded by armies garrisoned forts from the Bab el-Mandab to the Himalayas.

And then, in the space of just fifty years, the Indian Empire shattered. Five partitions tore it apart, carving out new nations, redrawing maps, and leaving behind a legacy of war, exile and division.

Shattered Lands, for the first time, presents the whole story of how the Indian Empire was unmade. How a single, sprawling dominion became twelve modern nations. How maps were redrawn in boardrooms and on battlefields, by politicians in London and revolutionaries in Delhi, by kings in remote palaces and soldiers in trenches.

Its legacies include civil wars in Burma and Sri Lanka, ongoing insurgencies in Kashmir, Baluchistan, Northeast India, and the Rohingya genocide. It is a history of ambition and betrayal, of forgotten wars and unlikely alliances, of borders carved with ink and fire. And, above all, it is the story of how the map of modern Asia was made.

Sam Dalrymple’s book is based on research that includes previously untranslated private memoirs, and interviews in English, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Punjabi, Konyak, Arabic and Burmese. From portraits of the key political players to accounts of those swept up in these wars and mass migrations, including common people, Shattered Lands is an attempt to revisit a pivotal moment in the Indian subcontinent’s history. Ideally it should be remembered as a moment of independence from the British colonial power but increasingly, particularly, post-1984*, it is remembered as “Partition”. Whichever way it is seen, the fact remains that this is a time that has had a massive impact on the nations it spawned. If modern generations remembered it as a moment of independence, then the hope, joy and being self-reliant would be a legacy. Constantly remembering it as a moment of partition ( a truth understandably), continues to stoke the mills of hatred, othering, and communalism, across generations, instilling prejudices that are inherited but are now manifesting themselves in a monstrously virulent form. The judicious choice of words, particularly when put on paper, and how we choose to remember has a long term impact and should be selected with care. Nevertheless, Shattered Lands : Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia is a must read. It is published by HarperCollins India.

Read an extract from the book that was published on Moneycontrol.

I interviewed him for TOI Bookmark**. There is always so much to learn from these conversations that we record for TOI Bookmark. Sam Dalrymple is a new voice that has burst upon the scene with his debut non-fiction Shattered Lands: : Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia. It is published by HarperCollins India. In less than a month of its release on 19 June 2025, it has created a stir globally.

This was the first audio podcast that Sam Dalrymple recorded for his book. We had a freewheeling conversation about his book, his research methodology and the early reception to his book.

Here is a snippet from the conversation:

So, the story I wanted to tell is the story of how 100 years ago today India encompassed not just India and Pakistan as we know today but also encompassed twelve nation states. You have got Yemen, Oman, the UAE, Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, and Myanmar. And the idea that this was just the whole of India for British administered purposes. You have very real consequences of all these people being given Indian passports and invited into the Indian Army etc. Such that in the 1920s, you have many Burmese politicians are Indian nationalists, as are Yemeni politicians. You have Yemenis considering themselves as Indians which is a thing that we have completely forgotten.

Here is the episode of TOI Bookmark on Spotify:

Sam Dalrymple is a Delhi-raised Scottish historian, film-maker and multimedia producer. He graduated from Oxford University as a Persian and Sanskrit scholar. In 2018, he co-founded Project Dastaan, a peace-building initiative that reconnects refugees displaced by the 1947 Partition of India. His debut film, Child of Empire, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022 and his animated series, Lost Migrations, sold out at the British Film Institute the same year. His work has been published in the New York Times, Spectator and featured in TIME, The New Yorker and The Economist. He is a columnist for Architectural Digest and, in 2025, Travel & Leisure named him ‘Champion of the Travel Narrative’. Shattered Lands is his first book.

16 July 2025

*1984 is a significant year in modern Indian history as on 31 Oct 1984, the then prime minister, Indira Gandhi was shot dead by her security guards. It resulted in the worst communal riots that many parts of the country, especially the capital Delhi had witnessed. Many Sikhs were killed. The violence was unimaginable. The flag marches. The silence. The pieces of burnt paper fluttering down quietly on to roof tops and terraces while one could hear mobs on the rampage in the distance. Everywhere that one looked, there was only smoke spiralling upwards to be seen. It was a mere thirty-seven years after Indian independence achieved on 15 August 1947. So, there were still many living who remembered the events of 1947. Coincidentally, at this time, the state television, Doordarshan, broadcast the TV adapatation of Bhisham Sahni’s classic Tamas. The concatenation of events was ghastly. At the time, in the camps set up for the victims fleeing the mobs or whose homes and families had been destroyed in the violence, suddenly memories of the trauma of partition came out. These were recorded by many, many organisations and individuals. It was very new. It was being documented for the first time. It made sense to do so. Probably no one realised the long term consequences of entrapping history to a word and the way it should be viewed in one sense at the cost of another instead of as a balanced perspective. Now, 1947 is mostly remembered as “Partition” and not “Independence”. Sad, but true.

** TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. Till date, I have recorded more than 138+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction and Non-fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.

TOI Bookmark: Murzban Shroff

07 07 , 2025 No Comments

Murzban Shroff is a Mumbai-based writer. He has published his fiction with over 75 literary journals in the U.S. and UK. His stories have appeared in innumerable literary journals such as The Gettysburg Review, The Minnesota Review, The Saturday Evening Post, Chicago Tribune, LitMag, Manoa, and World Literature Today. He is the recipient of the John Gilgun Fiction Award and the Bacopa Review Fiction Award. He holds seven Pushcart Prize nominations, among the most honoured short story prizes in the U.S.

His story collection, Breathless in Bombay, was shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize in the best debut category from Europe and South Asia, and rated by the Guardian as among the ten best Mumbai books. His novel, Waiting for Jonathan Koshy, was a finalist for the Horatio Nelson Fiction Prize and has been published in India, China, and the U.S. His India collection, Third Eye Rising, featured on the Esquire list of Best Books of 2021.

Shroff’s latest book, Muses Over Mumbai, a collection of 17 full-length stories, has received glowing endorsements from male writers such as Salman Rushdie, Jonathan Franzen, Robert Olen Butler, Ben Fountain, Amit Chaudhuri, and Jeet Thayil. It is published by Bloomsbury India.

I interviewed him on TOI Bookmark. Here is a snippet from the conversation:

I reserve the short story form for my issue-based fiction because I feel that when I am covering a territory like Mumbai, it is very difficult to have an overarching theme and weave it into a single piece of work. I feel Mumbai works best as a polyphony of class and cultures. There are multiple issues working at multiple levels; how do you best represent the diversity. Let me expand a bit on that, Jaya. If you look at Muses of Mumbai it has seventeen stories, out of which two are almost novellas, which means that they are about 15-17,000 words. Now each story is completely different from the other, not only in terms of subject matter and characters but also socio-economics and in terms of writing styles. Some I have used elements like memoir writing, used elements like essay, like whimsy. So the styles themselves represent the diversity and that is why I think the short story form works marvellously because short story is a marvellously promiscuous form of writing.

Listen to it on Spotify:

TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. Till date, I have recorded more than 138+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction and Non-fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.

7 July 2025

TOI Bookmark: Profs. Anjali Nerlekar and Ulka Anjaria

07 07 , 2025 No Comments

Anjali Nerlekar is Associate Professor at Rutgers University, and coeditor of Modernism/ Modernity. Most recently, she co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures in 2024. She is the author of Bombay Modern: Arun Kolatkar and Bilingual Literary Culture (NUP, 2016; Speaking Tiger, 2017), and has also coedited a special double issue of Journal of Postcolonial Writing on “The Worlds of Bombay Poetry” and a special issue of South Asia: A Journal of South Asian Studies on “Postcolonial Archives.” She also continues the work of building “The Bombay Poets’ Archive” at the Rare Manuscripts Collection at Cornell University. Her research interests include Her research interests include multilingual Indian modernisms; modern Marathi literature; Indian English literature; Indo-Caribbean literature; translation studies; Caribbean and postcolonial studies; and Indian print culture.

Ulka Anjaria is Professor of English and Barbara Mandel Professor of Humanities at Brandeis University. She is also Director of the Mandel Center for the Humanities at Brandeis. Her research interests include South Asian literature and film, realism, and the global novel. She is the author of Realism in the Twentieth-Century Indian Novel: Colonial Difference and Literary Form (2012), Reading India Now: Contemporary Formations in Literature and Popular Culture (2019), and Understanding Bollywood: The Grammar of Hindi Cinema (2021), along with essays and chapters in several journals and volumes. She is the editor of A History of the Indian Novel in English (2015) and co-editor (with Anjali Nerlekar) of The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (2024). She is currently working on a monograph tentatively titled Bad Mothers, on gender, caste, and modernism in 20th-century Indian literature.

Recently, they co-edited The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures (Oxford Handbooks), published in India by Oxford University Press.

The Oxford Handbook of Modern Indian Literatures refutes the Anglocentrism of much literary criticism of the global South by examining “Indian Literature” as a multilingual, dialogic, and plural space constituted by both continuities and divergences. In forty-three chapters and with a team of scholars who exemplify the method of historically situated and theoretically rigorous literary criticism, this volume shows how the idea of Indian literature is a relational and comparative concept. Through readings of a vast diversity of multilingual literature in a range of genres, the chapters highlight contact zones and interchanges across seemingly sedimented boundaries. The Handbook provides an overview of the current state of modern Indian writing and features a range of texts and approaches from across India’s many languages and literary traditions, examining and amplifying recent critical attention to the multilingualism that is at the base of any curation of what could be termed, with qualification, “Indian Literatures.” The book ranges from the 19th century to the 21st, with especial focus on the centrality of gender and caste to Indian modernism and new generic formations such as graphic novels, autofiction, and videogames.

It was a pleasure speaking with the two professors on TOI Bookmark. Here is a snippet from the conversation:

One of the conversations we had when we went to India and talked to students about this book in September [2024], one of the questions students had was how can you subsume, and this was an example, how can you subsume Tamil Modernism under India? So we tried to explain as if we already know the term what India is? But in the actual chapters and in the actual work follows, its gets queried, dismantled, reformulated. For example, Tamil Modernism or the question of Tamil is featured here but then we also talk about Tamil in Sri Lanka and Tamil in Singapore. A chapter goes across India and Singapore. The border, contact zones of the borders is another concept that we always kept in mind. This idea of relationality and contact zones from which we started looking at the idea of what it is that is Indian or what that it is modern for example?

Listen to it on Spotify:

TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 138+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.

7 July 2025

TOI Bookmark podcast with Andaleeb Wajid

02 07 , 2025 No Comments

Andaleeb Wajid is a hybrid author, having published nearly 50 novels in the past 15 years. Andaleeb enjoys writing in a number of different genres such as young adult, romance, and horror. Andaleeb’s YA novel “Asmara’s Summer” was adapted for screen to become “Dil, Dosti, Dilemma” on Amazon Prime and other works are in the process of being optioned or adapted. Her YA novel, “The Henna Start-up” is the winner of the Neev Literature Festival Award 2024, Crossword Book Award 2024, and TOI Auther Award 2025, along with receiving honourable mention at the BK Awards, 2024.

She recently published her moving memoir “Learning to Make Tea for One: Reflections on Love, Loss and Healing”, published by Speaking Tiger Books.

I have known Andaleeb for years. It is absolutely marvellous to witness her growth as an author year on year. Hence, recording an episode of TOI Bookmark was extra special.

Here is a snippet from the conversation:

I really enjoy writing fiction. So, nonfiction as a rule I don’t like to approach. But this was different because I have also put so much of myself into the book. Which was why it was so difficult to write. When I write fiction I do tend to put parts of myself into the book but those are very miniscule parts. And this book took huge chunks of me. And I think it was supposed to be healing but at that time it did not feel that way. Now maybe in a couple of months I will be able to look at it.

TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 138+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.

2 July 2025

“A Man of Two Faces” by Viet Thanh Nguyen

16 06 , 2025 No Comments

Award-winning writer and academic Viet Thanh Nguyen is a name that many in the literary world are familiar with. As a Vietnamese-American, he is acutely aware of his two identities and the histories he carries within himself. This is one of the recurring themes of his memoir, A Man of Two Faces. He has written plenty of books, most notably his Pulitzer Prize for Fiction 2016 The Sympathiser. It was recently turned into a TV series with Park Chan-wook and Robert Downey Jr. His books are published in India by Hachette India.

In 2023-24, Viet Thanh Nguyen delivered the prestigious Norton Lectures. In the lectures as well as in the discussions that follow, he addresses many of the aspects of being an immigrant in the USA that are at the heart of his moving memoir A Man of Two Faces.

We have recorded more than 134 episodes of TOI Bookmark. Each one is special and memorable. Every conversation is unique. It was an honour and a privilege to record this episode with Viet Thanh Nguyen. He is exceptionally busy with a demanding schedule. Yet, once we had figured out a mutually convenient time to record, across time zones, days and dates, he was immensely courteous and gave us his focussed attention. It did not seem as if he had been in back-to-back meetings/interviews during the day. It was Memorial Weekend in the USA, but he was working.

It was a fascinating conversation about reading and writing memoirs while discussing his book A Man of Two Faces. Also, how he had to think through himself, think through the history of his family that he was dealing with, and think through the language he was going to use.

Read an extract from the book published on Moneycontrol.

Incidentally, 30 April 2025 marked fifty years since the conclusion of the Vietnam War.

Listen to the podcast on Spotify:

TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 134+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA, Walter Scott Prize for Historical Fiction etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaq, Deepa Bhashti, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, Viet Thanh Nguyen, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.  

16 June 2025

“My Friends” by Hisham Matar

28 05 , 2025 No Comments

Recording every episode of TOI Bookmark is an honour and a privilege. I get to speak with incredible writers and publishing professionals around the world. This interview with Hisham Matar was truly special. I have read every single book that he has written so far. My Friends was exceptionally good and I devoured it in one sitting.

Here is a snippet from the conversation:

Going through… if you have ever lived through a moment of great political upheaval and rupture in your country and therefor you have experienced it beside and alongside people whom you know very well, whom you have grown up with, and known for a very long time. I am sure many of your listeners can find many examples in their mind of this. What’s fascinating is that some of those people will agree with you totally about you know what is a hopeful future and how might it look like but then you notice over the years that each one of you ends up in a different place. I think part of the question isn’t ethics or ideology or political persuasion but it is actually questions of temperament. And within political conversations it is impossible to talk about this because nobody knows what you are talking about, but we all know what is temperament. For example, some of our friends are excited by argument and they get really heated up, and I have other friends who grow poetic saying arguments will convince no one. They think that in order to get to the truth, you have to have a different kind of conversation. And they tend to be quieter perhaps and more reluctant. So those are questions of temperament. And I think, I have always thought of the novel really, the novel really is the place for human temperament. Here, I am focussing more on questions of politics, but of course these questions touch and they do deal with these characters, questions of belonging, what love is, friendship is, intimacy is. They affect all of these.  

Listen to it on Spotify:

TOI Bookmark is a weekly podcast on literature and publishing. TOI is an acronym for the Times of India (TOI) which is the world’s largest newspaper and India’s No. 1 digital news platform with over 3 billion page views per month. The TOI website is one of the most visited news sites in the world with 200 million unique monthly visitors and about 1.6 billion monthly page views. TOI is the world’s largest English newspaper with a daily circulation of more than 4 million copies, across many editions, and is read daily by approximately 13.5 million readers. The podcasts are promoted across all TOI platforms. I have recorded more than 130+ sessions with Jnanpith, Padma Bhushan, and Padma Shree awardees, International Booker Prize winners, Booker Prize winners, Women’s Prize for Fiction, Nobel Laureates, Pulitzer Prize, Stella Prize, AutHer Awards, Erasmus Prize, BAFTA etc. Sometimes the podcast interviews are carried across all editions of the print paper with a QR code embedded in it.

Some of the authors who have been interviewed are: Banu Mushtaw, Deepa Bhasthi, Samantha Harvey, Jenny Erpenbeck, Michael Hoffman, Paul Murray, V. V. Ganeshananthan, Hisham Matar, Anita Desai, David Nicholls, Amitava Kumar, Hari Kunzro, Venki Ramakishnan, Siddhartha Deb, Elaine Feeney, Manjula Padmanabhan, NYRB Classics editor and founder Edwin Frank, Jonathan Escoffery, Joya Chatterji, Arati Kumar-Rao, Paul Lynch, Dr Kathryn Mannix, Cat Bohannon, Sebastian Barry, Shabnam Minwalla, Paul Harding, Ayobami Adebayo, Pradeep Sebastian, G N Devy, Angela Saini, Manav Kaul, Amitav Ghosh, Damodar Mauzo, David Walliams, Boria Majumdar, Geetanjali Mishra, William Dalrymple, Abdulrazzak Gurnah, and Annie Ernaux.  

28 May 2025

Hisham Matar’s ” A Month in Siena”

08 02 , 2020 No Comments

A picture changes as you look at it and changes in ways that are unexpected. I have discovered that a painting requires time. Now it takes me several months and more often than not a year before I can move on. During that period the picture becomes a mental as well as a physical location in my life. …This unveiling of new territory must be one of the most remarkable achievements that an artist can attain. By challenging the imagination they nudge our perception a little and, for an instant at least, the world is remade. …To look closely at their work is to eavesdrop on one of the most captivating conversations in the history of art, one concerned with what a painting might be, what it might be for, and what it could do and accomplish within the intimate drama of a private engagement with a stranger. You can detect them aksing how much a picture might rely on a viewer’s emotional life; how a shared human experience might change the contract between artist and viewer, and between artist and subject; and what creative possibilities this new collaboration might offer.

Pulitzer winner Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena is an intensely personal memoir. It is about spending a month in Siena, observing the Sienese School of paintings that he first was fascinated by as a nineteen year old. Now these paintings which covered the thirteenth, fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and belonged to a “cloistered world of Christian codes and pleasure” somehow against his best intentions made him return over and over again to reflect upon them. A Month in Siena was written after he had spent more than three years researching into his father’s disappearance. Unfortunately it transpired that his father would not be returning home. The grief experienced would be inexplicable. As he says in this interview with Radio National that when his father first went missing, no one in the family could share or speak about their grief, worried that it may mar the prospect of their father returning home. But once the realisation dawns upon the family that there was to be no closure, Hisham Matar’s grief is acute. He needs time to recover. At first he spends most of his lunch hour visiting one paiting at a time at the National Gallery in London. He then decides to spend a month in Italy. It is therapeutic. And with him the reader too is transported, transfixed, transformed and transfigured as should be with any work of art. ” …rediscover our own powers of remembrance, and to finally find the consolation that lies between intention and expression, between the concealed sentiment and its outward shape.”

8 February 2020

Book Post 52: 25 Nov – 17 Dec 2019

17 12 , 2019 No Comments

Book Post 52 includes some of the titles received in the past few weeks.

17 Dec 2019

Hisham Matar “The Return”

04 07 , 2016 No Comments

( My review of The Return has been published in the Scroll on 10 July 2016. The url is: http://scroll.in/article/811475/as-polls-near-number-of-cases-filed-against-opposition-leaders-in-goa-go-up ) 

I had never been anywhere so burdened with memories yet also so charged with possibilities for the future, positive and negative, and each just as potent and probable as the other.

Hisham Matar’s third book The Return is a memoir, unlike his previously award-winning novels. He is of Libyan origin, born in New York but now a British citizen living in London. His childhood has been spent in Nigeria, Egypt and the UK. He is the son of a prominent Libyan, Jaballa Matar, who was abducted by the Egyptian secret police and delivered to Muammar Gaddafi. Jaballa Matar vanished.

“He was taken to Abu Salim prison, in Tripoli, which was known as ‘The Last Stop’ – the place where the regime sent those it wanted to forget.” There were rare letters smuggled out of prison, which the family treasured. After a while even those stopped coming. Twenty-two years later, after the Arab Spring of 2011, Hisham Matar returned to Libya. He was accompanied by his mother Fawzia Tarbah and his wife Diana Matar.

The Return is about Matar’s homecoming, so to speak. It is also about his public campaign to put pressure on the Libyan government to provide information about his father’s whereabouts. As Matar says, he is “a very private man”, but he is “writing something way beyond my person”.

Jaballa Matar was a young Army officer under King Idris’s rule. He returned from London to Egypt full of hope when a young soldier named Gaddafi led a coup in Libya. Gaddafi’s dictatorial rule soon manifested itself. All those considered to be close to the previous government were sent out of the country on minor diplomatic missions. Jaballa Matar was sent to the United Nations, where he spent a few years before resigning and returning to Libya.

My father was one of the opposition’s most prominent figures. The organisation he belonged to had a training camp in Chad, south of the Libyan border, and several underground cells inside the country. Father’s career in the army, his short tenure as a diplomat, and the private means he had managed to procure in the mid 1970s, when he became a successful businessman – importing products as diverse as Mitsubishi vehicles and Converse sport shoes to the Middle East – made him a dangerous enemy.

Despite making his home outside Libya, Matara considers himself an exile.

I am often unnerved by exiles I meet who, like me, have found themselves living in London but who unlike me, have surrendered to the place and therefore exude the sort of resigned stability I lack. Naked adoption of native mannerisms or the local dialect — this has always seemed to me a kind of humiliation.

There is a calm pace to the text, almost matching the cadences of Hisham Matar’s serene voice. ( http://www.newyorker.com/podcast/out-loud/hisham-matar-and-david-remnick-on-returning-to-libya ) But the almost lyrical prose cannot mask the horror of the human right violations committed under Gaddafi, which Matar documents. These range from the barbaric torture of the prisoners and the massacre of more than 1200 inmates in Abu Salim prison to snippets of information about Matar’s father.

Matar’s uncle Hmad Khanfore, an aspiring playwright, was incarcerated in prison for 21 years. Upon his release he met his nephew to thank him for the campaign that assured his release. He also recounted the horrors of the massacre.

It began with a group of disobedient prisoners who started a scuffle and tried escaping by jumping the guards. There was firing and some prisoners and guards were killed. But the standoff continued, with water supply to the prisoners being cut off too. By sunset the guards were willing to negotiate with the representatives of the convicts. When they returned they were accompanied by the three senior most figures in the regime:

Abdullah Senussi, who was the intelligence chief and brother-in-law to Gaddafi; Abdullah Mansour, also in intelligence; and Khairi Khaled, the head of prisons and brother of Gaddafi’s first wife…Throughout these exchanges, Senussi was in regular contact with Gaddafi. His phone would ring and he would stand as straight as a reed and start whispering. His phone rang again now, and once more we watched him take a couple of steps away before answering, “Yes, Your Excellency. The situation is completely under control, Your Excellency. Absolutely, we will do exactly that. Rest assured.”

At dawn, before daybreak, the prisoners were matched into the big open courtyard where rows and rows of soldiers were standing, dressed for battle, with several of them poised in firing positions. The dead prisoners were dumped into rubbish bins and rest of the prisoners handcuffed – Israeli cuffs, their latest design. “A thin plastic wire that drew tighter with the slightest resistance. You felt the pain not so much around the wrists but inside the head.” Later, six courtyards were filled with the prisoners and the shooting began. Surprisingly, Matar’s uncle Hmad, his brother Ahmed, Uncle Mahmoud, Cousin Ali and a couple of others from the Ajdabiya Group, the opposition and from the 1990 case were spared. They “witnessed” the execution from their cells by hearing the sounds.

Of course, memory plays a role.

I am not sure if my recollections… are accurate or if they have been affected by my state at the time. Either way, this is how I remember it.

At this point in the text he is referring pointedly to his meeting with Gaddafi’s son and entourage in London to enquire about his father but it is an observation that holds true for the entire narrative. Despite lobbying with the British government to help extricate information from the Libyan government about his father Matar was unsuccessful in finding out whether his father was alive or dead. He had become so desperate that at the height of the campaign he wrote a letter to Gaddafi’s son, Seif el-Islam, detailing the known facts of his father’s case and asking them to clarify his fate.

I was a desperate man, willing to talk to the devil in order to find out if my father was alive or dead. That was how I was then; I am no longer like that now.

The Return is about the loss of a father. A masculine text in that sense. Perhaps has to be, since it is wholly preoccupied with Matar’s search for his father. This is echoed throughout the book, as he invokes other renowned literary texts that focus on the father-son relationship, such as the one between Odysseus and Telemachus.

But it is also evident in, for instance, the way Matar refers to his mother, who is a big pillar of support to him and his brother, as “Mother”. She is introduced by her name only two-thirds into the book, when it is mentioned by a grateful Libyan whose family had been provided shelter by the Matars.

And yet Matar does recognise and acknowledge the invaluable contribution women make to surviving in a conflict zone, especially with their insistence on information from the authorities about missing relatives. This is a common feature of gendered participation in conflict and post-conflict zones. And it happened in Libya too.

…from 2001 onwards, mothers and wives began to camp outside Abu Salim prison, holding framed photographs of their sons and husbands. Their grief was never acknowledged. They kept growing in number, until the moment when a young human rights lawyer decided to defy the wishes of the dictatorship and take up the case of the families. When in 2001 he was detained, they all marched to the Benghazi courthouse to demonstrate against his arrest.

The Return is a heartrendingly painful but dignified memoir. It is disconcertingly beautiful.

Hisham Matar The Return Penguin Random House UK, London, 2016. Pb. pp. 280. Rs 599

4 July 2016 

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