Fiction

The Walls of Delhi by Uday Prakash, translated by Jason Grunebaum

Item: The Walls of Delhi
Author: Mridula Nath Chakraborty

by Mridula Nath Chakraborty •

September 2012, no. 344

UWA Publishing, $29.95 pb, 227 pp, 9781742583921

Fiction

The Walls of Delhi by Uday Prakash, translated by Jason Grunebaum

by Mridula Nath Chakraborty •

September 2012, no. 344

Continuously inhabited since at least the sixth century, Delhi is fabled to be the city that was built seven times and razed to the ground seven times. Some believe the word Delhi comes from dehali or threshold, and the city is seen as the gateway to the Great Indian Gangetic plains. In 1912 the British moved their colonial seat of power from Calcutta to New Delhi, which also became the capital of independent India and celebrates its hundredth anniversary this year. It seems apt, then, in 2012, to read about the older Delhi that lies and lurks behind the shining veneer of India’s National Capital Territory, a Delhi that the rising Asian power seems eager to forget and obliterate.

Mridula Nath Chakraborty

By this contributor

Mridula Chakrabortyis Deputy Director of the Monash Asia Institute at Monash University. She is the editor of Being Bengali: At home and in the world (2014) and co-editor of A Treasury of Bangla Stories (1999). She has facilitated literary-cultural exchanges between Australia and India through Literary Commons!: Writing Australia-India in the Asian century with Dalit, Indigenous and Multilingual Tongues (2014–2016), Autumn School in Literary Translation (2013), and ALIF: Australia India Literatures International Forum (2012). The outcome of these collaborations was a special issue on Dalit/Indigenous poetry from twenty-five languages translated into/from English in Cordite Poetry Review (2016).