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Friday, June 14, 2019

Happy to be able to read and then write about this wonderful novel and an important piece of translation — Kannada author Shrinivas Vaidya’s Sahitya Akademi Award (2008) winning novel Halla Bantu Halla, translated into English as A Handful of Sesame by Maithreyi Karnoor.

In the context of the ever-present North-South divide, you can call A Handful of Sesame a beautiful bridge, where two brothers from Kanpur via Kashi land in a small town in the Dharwad district of Karnataka, and become ‘locals’.

This would, however, be selling the novel (which won the Sahitya Akademi Award in 2008) short. The beauty of this novel, within the ambitious narrative of a multi-generational saga of survival, is its over-reaching achievement in creating a microcosm of modern Indian history in the marking, where this small village in Dharwad, Navalgund, stands in for India, a country under the British Raj, struggling to find its identity.

In other words, A Handful of Sesame is the story of the coming-of-age of India as a country, from a collection of tiny, self-sustaining provinces with their particular customs and traditions, to a larger landmass with an over-arching political identity. So, naturally, as the novel progresses, we notice how the characters begin to travel outside Navalgund, to Sangli, Dharwad, and ultimately to Bombay.

Read the complete Review in https://bengalurureview.com/2019/06/12/shrinivas-vaidya-halla-bantu-halla/

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