Partial Recall : Essays on Literature and Literary History

by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra

India’s poets have been among the finest writers of English prose—earlier, Henry Derozio and Toru Dutt; more recently, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Dom Moraes, and Adil Jussawalla. Writers of this kind, representing the ‘common reader’ tradition of unpretentious and jargon-free writing about literature and life, are something of a rarity in India. Arvind Krishna Mehrotra—renowned poet, critic, translator, editor, and anthologist—enriches an uncommon stream with this brilliant collection.

The essays gathered here, rich in literary detail and accessible insight, were written over the past thirty years. Among them are Mehrotra’s homage to his friend and fellow poet Arun Kolatkar; a perceptive appreciation of A.K. Ramanujan; a scathing scrutiny of R. Parthasarathy; a radical redefinition of the modern Indian poem; a literary-historical view of Kabir; and a wide-ranging introduction to the entire corpus of Indian writing in English from 1800 to the present.

Mehrotra, who has lived much of his life in Allahabad, writes also about the provincialization of India’s middle-sized cities, the decimation of cultural heritage across urban north India, and the joys and pains of growing up in a small town where everyone knew everyone. 

Forthright in manner and cosmopolitan in their references, Mehrotra’s writings are an exceptional mix of the autobiographical and the literary, an antidote to the everyday annihilation of English prose by journalists at one end and literary critics at the other. 

This is a book to be enjoyed, savoured, dipped into, and read—again and again

299 pages, Kindle Edition

About the author

Arvind Krishna Mehrotra was born in Lahore in 1947. He has published six collections of poetry in English and two of translation — a volume of Prakrit love poems, The Absent Traveller, recently reissued in Penguin Classics, and Songs of Kabir (NYRB Classics). His Oxford India Anthology of Twelve Modern Indian Poets (1992) has been very influential. He has edited several books, including History of Indian Literature in English (Columbia University Press, 2003) and Collected Poems in English by Arun Kolatkar (Bloodaxe Books, 2010). His collection of essays Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History was published by Permanent Black in 2012. A second book of essays, Translating the Indian Past (Permanent Black), appeared in 2019.

Mehrotra was nominated for the post of Professor of Poetry at the University of Oxford in 2009. He came second behind Ruth Padel, who later resigned over allegations of a smear campaign against Trinidadian poet Derek Walcott (who had himself earlier withdrawn from the election process).

Mehrotra has translated more than 200 literary works from ancient Prakrit language, and from Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati.