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Home / Author / Saikat Majumdar

Saikat Majumdar

Saikat Majumdar

Articles by Saikat Majumdar

The story of maimed nationalisms

“As I stood before Petőfi tomb this Spring, my mind went blank, gaping with questions about nationalism and war, and the missing body of the martyr. In the heart of the famous Fiumei Road Graveyard in Budapest, the Petőfi family grave holds the remains of his family members, even those of his son – but the man who gave the nation these unforgettable lines of patriotism could not get back on his feet to return to his homeland.” (Shutterstock)

Updated on May 15, 2025 23:50 IST

The critic as artist

Author Saikat Majumdar with poet Hoshang Merchant

Updated on Sep 17, 2024 15:06 IST

The rattle of skeletons

FILE PHOTO: An employee adjusts a poster of Canadian author Alice Munro in Munro's bookstore after she won the Nobel Prize for Literature in Victoria, British Columbia October 10, 2013. REUTERS/Andy Clark/File Photo

Updated on Jul 26, 2024 03:30 IST

The burden of togetherness

Love in Mumbai. (Shashi S Kashyap/HT PHOTO)

Updated on Feb 19, 2024 09:49 IST

Review: Out of God’s Oven & Another India

A riot in Shahdara, Delhi, on 20 August 1972. (Rane Prakash/HT Archive)

Updated on Feb 10, 2024 03:12 IST

Essay: Ayodhya and the end of the Hindu imagination

Devotees throng the Shri Ram Janmabhoomi Temple on the first day after the Pran Pratishtha ceremony, in Ayodhya on January 23, 2024. (ANI)

Updated on Feb 7, 2024 02:40 IST

HT reviewer Saikat Majumdar picks his favourite read of 2023

A remarkable collection on women in labour, in every sense of the term. (HarperCollins)

Updated on Dec 22, 2023 13:25 IST

Unsettling beauty

“Bats and owls/ransack the night/in search of remnants/of memory hidden/by human beings.” - From ‘Chakmak’ by Ramesh Karthik Nayak (Shutterstock)

Updated on Nov 14, 2023 09:45 IST

Review: The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays edited by Tenzin Dickie

Written in code: The Potala Palace in Lhasa, Tibet. (Shutterstock)

Updated on Oct 21, 2023 10:33 IST

Review: Tall Tales By A Small Dog by Omair Ahmad

A view of the Gorakhnath temple in Gorakhpur, Uttar Pradesh. (Ashok Dutta/Hindustan Times)

Updated on Sep 15, 2023 17:37 IST

Essay: The myth of French blackness

Cars burn after a march for Nahel on Thursday, June 29, 2023 in Nanterre, outside Paris. The killing of 17-year-old Nahel during a traffic check on Tuesday, captured on video, shocked the country and stirred up long-simmering tensions between young people and police in housing projects and other disadvantaged neighbourhoods in France. After more than 3,400 arrests and signs that the violence is now abating, France is once again facing a reckoning. (AP Photo/Michel Euler, File)

Updated on Aug 21, 2023 13:13 IST

Heft in lightness: Literary icon Milan Kundera dies at 94

HT Image

Updated on Jul 12, 2023 19:17 IST

Heft in lightness: Literary icon Milan Kundera dies at 94

(FILES) Portrait taken on October 14, 1973 shows Czech-born French writer Milan Kundera in Prague. Czech writer Milan Kundera, the author of "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", has died aged 94, said Anna Mrazova, spokeswoman for the Milan Kundera Library in his native city of Brno on July 12, 2023. (Photo by AFP) (AFP)

Updated on Jul 12, 2023 19:08 IST

Essay: The Cape of Silent Hope

A view of the idyllic town of Stellenbosch in South Africa. (Shutterstock)

Updated on Jun 16, 2023 11:06 IST

Review: Victory City by Salman Rushdie

The ruins of Vijayanagar, the Victory City of Salman Rushdie’s new novel. (Shutterstock)

Updated on Feb 14, 2023 02:35 IST

Essay: The writer without readers

The increasingly rare sight of an individual reading a book in public. (Kalpak Pathak / HT Archive)

Updated on Jan 12, 2023 14:42 IST

Essay: The reader between fiction and non-fiction

At a bookshop in Gaya. “The reading of fiction is the practice of a unique imaginative empathy that visual media cannot offer.” - Saikat Majumdar (Shutterstock)

Updated on Oct 12, 2022 16:05 IST

Essay: Hindu nationalism’s censorship of the gods

A 17th century illustration for the Mahabharata from the British Museum. (Print Collector/Getty Images)

Updated on Aug 3, 2022 08:56 IST

Essay: The novel and the love letter

Winning words (Shutterstock)

Updated on Jul 21, 2022 10:39 IST

Essay: The deception of creative writing

Is good writing like carpentry, dependent on the mastery of craft? (Shutterstock)

Updated on Apr 22, 2022 11:59 IST

100 years of Ulysses: A novel idea, a date celebrated around the world

Ulysses is still so beloved that fans mark June 16 as Bloomsday each year, with parades held in cities from St Petersburg (above) to New York. (Shutterstock)

Updated on Feb 19, 2022 10:29 IST

Essay: The gaze through time

Rabindranath Tagore (HT Photo)

Updated on Feb 11, 2022 12:25 IST

In conversation: On the new ‘Writer in Context’ book series

The Writer in Context series hopes to challenge insular approaches to the study of the nation. (Shutterstock)

Updated on Oct 2, 2021 06:36 IST

Essay: Remains of the body

The flower of happiness and of grief. (Shutterstock)

Updated on Jun 2, 2021 12:20 IST

Essay: On the influence of Bhasha literature on Indian English writing

Drawing deep: Indian English writing draws much from the texture of the vernacular literatures of India. (Shutterstock)

Updated on Apr 16, 2021 13:07 IST

Essay: How to read in a restless world

The pleasures of reading.

Updated on Jan 7, 2021 09:48 IST

Essay: Where does a writer go when the streets are stolen?

Trapped in the virtual?

Updated on Aug 21, 2020 10:38 IST

Essay: The art and law of love

LGBT activists celebrate at the Town Hall in Bengaluru on September 6, 2018, after the verdict by the Supreme Court of India which stuck down section 377 of the penal code that penalised people for their sexual orientation and ordered that gay sex among consenting adults is not an offence.

Updated on Jun 15, 2020 11:16 IST

Essay: On the future of reading and writing under the shadow of the pandemic by Saikat Majumdar

Oedipus and Antigone during the plague in Thebes, by Eugene-Ernest Hillemacher (1818-1887).

Updated on May 27, 2020 06:29 IST

Lockdown Diaries: The comfort of sickness by Saikat Majumdar

Definitely not love in the time of corona: A couple in the Botanical Gardens, Pondicherry, in an earlier era.

Updated on Apr 4, 2020 09:38 IST

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