Maria Helena Barrera-Agarwal is an Ecuadorian writer, essayist, researcher and translator based in New York. In this interview she talks about different aspects of her experience as a translator, her ongoing projects and future plans.

These lines require little to no mental effort in identifying the “us versus them” in a South Asian context. In fact, what happens when a political leader of a Hindu right-wing party endorses such stereotypes and that too in broad day light? The communal tension further aggravates.

Taut with tension of a thriller, Gun Island is a treasure trove of historical events that whet one’s appetite for history and anthropology. One may take a liking to archeology while decoding the symbols of terracotta friezes with the protagonist-cum-narrator.

Selina Hossain explores in her novel many ideas that were way ahead of the time the novel was published. She writes about gay romance as early as the 2000s, when the talk of LGBTQ rights was not a de rigueur as it is today.

When Shibram Chakraborty became well-known for his mastery over puns, Mujtaba Ali became a household name for shaping up an entire genre called Ramya Rachana. Strangely enough, the two contemporaries have a lot in common to draw parallels between their lives.

More or less all literature enthusiasts are familiar with Freud’s “Oedipus Complex”. What Girish Karnad’s Yayati did was popularize the “Yayati Complex”—a “reverse Oedipus Complex” to the Indian audience.

What can be more compelling than a story that takes a leap back in time to recount a case of molestation that occurred on a busy street in Assam, and that too by exploring the psyche of the molester, the molested and a society that has become desensitized to sexual violence given the frequency of the occurrences? Missing, set in 2012, is a relevant novel at a crucial time—a novel that stresses nothing significant has changed in six years since the incident took place.

From translating a plethora of western science fiction to creating iconic fictional characters like Professor Nut-boltu and detective Indranath Rudra, Adrish Bardhan mainstreamed the imaginative world of speculative fiction in Bengal. He was in fact credited for having coined the term kalpabigyan, the Bangla word for science fiction.

An early poster by Pears Soap pictures a black boy sitting on a bathtub, gawking at the water, transfixed, as though taking a bath is foreign to him. A white boy, clad in a white apron, offers him a soap—a fetish that can wash off the blackness from his skin.

In her book The Doctor and the Saint, Arundhati Roy discusses at some length how Gandhi’s impressions of the Africans during his two-decade-long stay as an expatriate attorney in South Africa were full of superstitions. Naturally, such an attitude was the least expected from a victim of racial discrimination in colonial India. But it speaks volumes about how colonial prejudice had been internalized in the subcontinent and how it did not spare even the best among us.