kahkashankhan

Agony has a universal language. We as humans are implicated in each other’s sufferings. ‘The Half Mother”, Shahnaz Bashir’s debut novel is one of the few novels written by a Kashmiri himself that has successfully taken up the cause of depicting the anguish and sheer pain experienced by most of the mothers of the splendid valley in its true form. One of the purposes of the trend in Kashmiri writers of writing the book in English is obviously to reach extended audience. Additionally, they can portray before the same bigger audience the kind of traumas, affliction and sufferings that majority of Kashmiris have been facing till now at the hands of grossly immoral and barbaric Indian forces. The novel circulates around the protagonist, Haleema, and her struggle to locate her only son Imran who was taken away by the relentless Indian Army. It may be mentioned here that the novel is a depiction of reality in Kashmir which is under illegal occupation of Indian forces since past several decades...

Anita and Me is a semi-autobiographical novel. It is written by a British-Indian author Meera Syal in 1996. It is an amusing yet poignant coming of age narrative of a precocious nine year old British Indian girl growing up in 1960’s Britain. Syal has also written other renowned works like Life isn’t hahahehe and The House of Hidden Mothers etc. The main themes in her novels are based upon up rootedness, cultural conflict, racism and generation gap. As Syal also grew up in a mining village in Essington in Wolver Hampton, she inevitably understands the pain and frustration of the bicultural progeny of the immigrants and has documented it brilliantly in this masterpiece. Anita and Me presents a, witty, heartbreaking, empathetic and intriguing picture of village life in the 1960’s British. It is the story of an Indian girl in a white community who was caught between two cultures and suffered racism at the hands of people whom she considered her friends. The migrant parents of Meena had no ...