Rather, the reference is to humankind, which has inherited the Kaliyug, where men continue to oppress women, communities are killing off each other, and everyone is destroying the earth and all its natural reserves.ĭangerous Pursuits: By Suniti Namjoshi, Penguin Zubaan, 240 pages, ₹499. If you think you are going to read about the “bad people” from the Ramayan, you would be sorely mistaken. The opening tale, the best one, brings back Ravan, the king of Lanka, and his siblings Shupi (Surpanakha) and Kumbh (Kumbhkaran) into the 21st century. Namjoshi’s latest offering, Dangerous Pursuits, is a collection of three such extended stories in her signature style. Like a grown-up Alice, she is lost inside her wonderland, inhabited by hydra-headed monsters, comical dragons, talking cows, kings and queens from an ancient past, all of them vulnerable, with their all-too-human foibles. “Suniti”, or “S”, is often a character in these narratives, a woman much like the writer. Namjoshi’s fables, poems and prose experiments are heavily drawn from sources as varied as classical Greek and Sanskrit myths, Shakespeare’s plays, and a rich tapestry of folk and fairy tales that have been circulating around the world ever since people have been telling stories. Since then, more of her work-a memoir of her time with her late cat Suki, a revisiting of Aesop’s legacy in Foxy Aesop-has appeared in India, as have some of her writings for children. There’s no room for just outrage in her writing, though Namjoshi is nothing if not a profoundly political writer. In 2013, Zubaan published The Fabulous Feminist: A Suniti Namjoshi Reader, which gave readers a taste of her spiky genius, wicked sense of humour and refusal to play by the book. It’s a pity that they aren’t as widely read, enjoyed and celebrated as they deserve to be.Īlso read: How Dante’s Vita Nova inspired an art exhibition Over the last four decades, her books for adults and children have continuously pushed the boundaries of the real and the imagined. They inhabit a morally dubious, if exciting, universe, where conventional beliefs about life and art, gender and sexuality, right and wrong, turn topsy-turvy.īorn in 1941, UK-based Namjoshi embraces these contradictions in her writing with an elan that’s hard to rival. The best fabulists are masters of the art of fibbing. But it could equally mean a liar, a compulsive teller of tales. The word, deriving from the Latin fabula (“story”), refers to a storyteller. Few contemporary writers own the epithet of a “fabulist” with as much sass as 81-year-old Suniti Namjoshi.

Feminist Fables by Suniti Namjoshi