issue 22: winter 2020

Editorial

Alternatives are not controlled by tradition. The idea of tradition only facilitates a journey into the interiors of the self — to search for resources that may allow one to transcend the limits set by our times.
— Ashis Nandy

One model presents modernity as involving a thorough rejection of the ancient ... A second model locates modernity not in a rejection of the past but in a profound reorientation with respect to it.
— Jonardan Ganeri

In India we are privileged to still be able to access a remote past, things from a thousand years ago still practiced or considered or performed, available to anyone who wishes to approach it.

This issue of Almost Island is an attempt to examine our engagement with the far pasts here in India, pasts of course that are varied yet standing together. This is a tentative effort and it gathers here some of those poets and novelists who have spent many years in an attempt to dialogue with these pasts in their own ways. They have translated or interpreted, recreated from a different standpoint, looked beneath its layers and mysteries, or found something there that, though ambiguous, gives us another way of looking.

D. Venkat Rao’s essay on the lithic and the alithic traditions of Indian civilization is of seminal importance. That our engagement with the past means concerning ourselves largely with the oral, the chanted, the sung, the performative, the myth in its many tellings, our ruins, our stones.

Karthika Naïr writes on what impelled her to turn to a retelling of the Mahabharata; Mani Rao shows how the Ishavasya can be translated in various ways; Irwin Allan Sealy speaks of what draws him to Akbar and Asoca and even further back; Jeffrey Yang’s poems bring in the ancient past from another part of Asia; Rahul Soni talks of translating Shrikant Verma’s Magadh, set in ancient empires; Sharmistha Mohanty reads a painting from the Ramayana.

In poetry we have the Argentine poet Luisa Futoransky: “dust and chicha fermented my words”.

Nabina Das’ Anima poems move between folklore and the now, rearranging realities as they move.

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s poems look at the crucial ordinary from where the extraordinary begins to emerge.

And Khalida Hussain’s story lays bare the asymmetrical in the everyday, in a translation from the Urdu by Haider Shahbaz.

— The Editors