issue 21: monsoon 2020

Editorial

The rudra veena master Ustad Bahauddin Dagar once said that while playing a certain raga one could sometimes touch the edges of another one, go out of the parameter while keeping one foot inside it. In the same vein, this new issue of Almost Island has two essays that are not directly literary.

One is Mantra Mukim’s unusual take on the legendary singer Kesarbai Kerkar’s Jaat Kahan Ho, a bandish that once heard, cannot be forgotten. The words in a bandish are fundamental to its emotion and rendition. So language, entwined with the musical voice, becomes a different force.

Ashis Nandy’s essay on the genocide of 1947 in India sees the Partition as the last, great unwritten epic of the Indian civilization. Here, he discusses how research yields incomplete and half-forgotten narratives.

We have an excerpt from the inimitable Allan Sealy’s new work of fiction, Asoca, built from the life of the powerful emperor.

Anne Waldman gives us a formidable new poem, Heft, protean in its form and exploration.

New poems from Adil Jussawalla that engage with the natural world that still survives amongst the concrete of our cities.

An intriguing collection of brief paragraphs from the Serbian writer David Albahari in which he turns a microscopic gaze at words and the act of writing.

Medha Singh, Jennifer Robertson and Monica Mody bring their sight and formal explorations to bear on paintings, films, and what they see around them.