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Sharmistha Jha

@reading_between_the_lines_

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writer✒️ Editor 🌻
Words in Current Affairs, Hindustan Times, The Hindu, Scroll.In, The New Indian Express
📚 Building @marginalia.bookclub2025 📚

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Reading Arundhati Roy's memoir, Mother Mary Comes to Me, took me back to her Booker-winning debut, The God of Small Things. I wrote about Roy's writerly life and her activism for @currentaffairsmag , with inputs from the magazine's incredibly helpful editorial staff. It was published alongside @sarahanna.singh 's breathtaking portrait of Arundhati Roy.

Read the full article in @currentaffairsmag latest issue.
Link in comments.

#indianliterature
#arundhatiroy
#mothermarycomestome #thegodofsmallthings #literature by @reading_between_the_lines_

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3 months ago

On the rare day when Delhi's air is breathable and the wind has a slight chill in it, we decided to spend the day at Lodhi. Visit to the @thebookshopinc and Carnatic was mandatory ♥️ taken in Lodhi Garden-Lodhi Road by @reading_between_the_lines_

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23 days ago

Set in the early 2010s, Good Arguments follows Delphi as she begins to forge her own identity while attempting to decode the theatre scene in Bangalore, a space in which both her class and her gender make her an outsider.

Arwind’s writing is tender and funny – it has an admirable range. Switching from sentimental and heartwarming stories, Arwind changes the atmosphere in the last chapters as she plunges the reader into the dark days following the Nirbhaya gangrape case of 2012, when protests erupted across the country. Even after all those years, I try to read this part quickly, breathing uncomfortably. I was in the tenth grade, studying in Dwarka, New Delhi, not too far from the crime scene. As an adult now, I imagined Delphi reading about it for the first time in the newspaper. My intense discomfort was mirrored by the altered rhythms of life of Asha (Delphi's mother) and Delphi, who now slept with a cricket bat inside their own homes. The women became fearful outsiders in their own private spaces.

Arwind captures the aftermath of the rape and examines how people exploit women’s public fears and anxiety for private vantage, riding the wave of female rage.

Who is entitled to tell a story? Who decides whose story is told? These questions lie at the centre of Arwind’s novel. She also captures how terror comes to reside in women’s bodies.

I review Deepika Arwind's (@pikadee7 ) 'Good Arguments' for @scroll_in
@simonandschusterin

For the full review, visit link in bio. 📚

#indianliterature #literature #booksbooksbooks #readingwomen #writing by @reading_between_the_lines_

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23 days ago

Across her novels, political essays, and now her memoir, Arundhati Roy has never stopped challenging the status quo and dreaming of a more humane world.

🦩 Read more at currentaffairs.org
🎨 Illustration by @sarahanna.singh by @reading_between_the_lines_

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2 months ago

I review Amitava Kumar's The Social Life of Indian Trains for @scroll_in

On Indian trains, people tend to be vulnerable and are often treated kindly in return by co-passengers. We make adjustments to accommodate each other. However, trains also serve as sites of crime and corruption – human trafficking, exploitation, and signs of systemic collapse in India. Amitava Kumar’s slim book, The Social Life of Indian Trains (published by @alephbookco ), captures these varied, often difficult encounters that together constitute the social and political texture of Indian trains.

@amitavawriter boards the Himsagar Express from the Himalayan Foothills in Kashmir, travelling to the southernmost tip of India, Kanyakumari – a journey of three days. Notes and observations from this recent journey, along with those from other journeys taken over the last few decades, form the basis of his book.

Kumar a significant aspect of the Indian trains – that of loss, displacement, and constant migration. While on the Himsagar Express, the author meets Ganesh Rajwar, a labourer from Jharkhand who is headed to Vijayawada in Andhra Pradesh to work a construction job that will pay Rs 400 for eight hours of work, to support his children and his mother back home. When Rajwar shows Kumar his flip phone, which he is going to use to stay connected to his family back in the village, Kumar notes that the village has come nearer to the city. But at what cost? Thousands of workers are pushed out of their village and into the abyss of the Indian metropolis in search of paid work. Here, they are paid a pittance for salary, often working in hazardous conditions. This traps them in an endless cycle of modern-day slavery.

Much like his earlier works, The Social Life of Indian Trains connects readers to something larger than themselves – in this case, the Indian Railways. Once again, observation emerges as the seed of literary endeavour. Through trains, Kumar captures a vivid cross-section of India’s politics, social history, and class realities.

Read the full review at @scroll_in . Link in Bio.
🍂🍂

#indianliterature
#literature
#bookflatlay
#booksbooksbooks📚 #booksofinstagram by @reading_between_the_lines_

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5 months ago

'Karnoor crafts an absurd plotline that is both amusing and eerie. Yet, rather than inspiring dread, this altered world offers a strange, almost soothing relief from the anxieties of modern life.'

Read @reading_between_the_lines_'s review of Maithreyi Karnoor's Gooday Nagar for @the_hindu. by @reading_between_the_lines_

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6 months ago

I interviewed Anil Yadav about his book 'Courtesans Don’t Read Newspapers' (which comprises the eponymous novella and five short stories), translated from the Hindi by @urf_lehza 🖊🖊

Anil Yadav reflected on how religious elites manipulate language to legitimise the sexual subjugation of women. He observed that ours is a culture that worships women, only to assert dominance over them, allowing traditionally powerful and corrupt groups to use sexual violence as a tool to deny women bodily autonomy. In a conversation with Scroll, Yadav explored the links between prostitution and capitalism.

Anil Yadav: In our culture, women have always been seen as property, and a lot of emphasis has been put on controlling their behaviour. Prostitutes are women who, since the dawn of civilisation, have defied this control and used their bodies as they desired. They expose the falsehoods of institutions like family, marriage, and other forms of morality, and are hence hated by the same society. Our society doesn’t want to accept its failures and resorts to avoiding prostitutes altogether.

Read the full interview in @scroll_in . Visit link in bio.
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#literature #translatedliterature #indianliterature #bookclubsofinstagram #booksbooksbooks📚 by @reading_between_the_lines_

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8 months ago

I interviewed @amitav_ghosh1 about his latest book, Ghost- Eye, for @newindianexpress
@harpercollinsin
📚

Talking about caste and ecological catastrophe, Ghosh said, 'there can be no doubt that in India, the caste system creates a hierarchy based on proximity to and distance from the environment, with the latter being elevated above the former. Those who work most closely with the elements, fisherfolk, farmers, or those who handle “waste”—in other words, the people who were described by Madhav Gadgil as ‘ecosystem people’—are usually placed at the bottom of the social order. But in fact, ‘ecosystem people’ possess a profound, embodied knowledge of the natural world. Varsha’s past life as a fisherwoman and cook places her in an intimate relationship with the river that a landlord or a bureaucrat would never have. There is a profound irony in this because the planetary crisis will probably overturn this entire hierarchy.'
🍂

The novel opens in 1960s Calcutta, where three-year-old Varsha Gupta, born into a rigidly vegetarian Marwari family, shocks her household by demanding fish and rice. Psychiatrist Shoma Bose diagnoses her as a “case of the reincarnation type”. Varsha, it emerges, had lived as a fisherwoman in the Sunderbans.

Visit link in bio to read the full interview.

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#literature #amitavghosh #booksofinstagram #climate #indianliterature by @reading_between_the_lines_

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8 months ago

Dispatches from Mysore ✨️🌻

Wherever you go becomes a part of you. Here's to exploring more underrated haunts. 🌿☕️ by @reading_between_the_lines_

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8 months ago

From the illusion of Bollywood glamour to the darkness of slums, The Only City captures the many dimensions of Bombay. Some may view Bombay through rose-tinted glasses as a place that promises possibilities for social mobility. However, reality is more merciless. One thing is for certain. Bombay is fertile ground for stories – dazzling and dystopian.

I review The Only City: Bombay in Eighteen Stories ( edited by @aninditaghose 📚 Published by @harpercollinsin ) for @scroll_in

In “Snakeskin”, @swarupshubhangi captures the forever-morphing Bombay that imposes metamorphosis on its inhabitants.

Lindsay Pereira’s Bombay collects those who wash up against its shores, lost and unwanted children, and minors trafficked into lifelong employment at local businesses until they gather the courage to run away towards something worse.

"In the city, as you lost money, people squeezed inaround you, not in support, but in an orgy of indifferent touch”, Nitila muses in Raghu Karnad’s “Speedboat”. A day spent at the pier in Alibaug, waiting for a speedboat, exposes class inequalities.

@raghukarnad

In Yogesh Maitreya’s “The Sound of Silence”, a young Dalit student arrives in Bombay from a small town to become a writer, only to have his dreams shattered by premium educational institutions governed by caste hierarchies.
@yogeshmaitreya

Read full review on @scroll_in ✒️ Link in Bio

#indianliterature
#bombay
#shortstory #booksofinstagram #booksbooksbooks📚 by @reading_between_the_lines_

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8 months ago

2026 so far 🌻 Also, bringing you self-help from Flannery O'Connor✨️📚

📚“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to never was there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place. Nothing outside you can give you any place. You needn't look at the sky because it's not going to open up and show no place behind it. You needn't to search for any hole in the ground to look through into somewhere else. You can't go neither forwards nor backwards into your daddy's time nor your children's if you have them. In yourself right now is all the place you've got. If there was any Fall, look there, if there was any Redemption, look there, and if you expect any Judgment, look there, because they all three will have to be in your time and your body and where in your time and your body can they be?”

― Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood 🌿
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#booksofinstagram #bangalore #coffee #bookish #literature taken in Bangalore, India by @reading_between_the_lines_

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8 months ago

We are reading James Baldwin's Go Tell it on the Mountain for the month of February. 📖

Originally published in 1953, Baldwin said of his first novel, “Mountain is the book I had to write if I was ever going to write anything else.” 🖋️

Gaining power from its nuanced portrait of Black life and spirituality, James Baldwin’s deeply perceptive debut novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, is a compelling story of a young boy’s coming of age that established Baldwin as one of the most celebrated writers of the twentieth century.

On the morning of his fourteenth birthday, John Grimes realizes two things: he has sinned and he does not want to grow up to be a Pentecostal minister like his father. With these two realizations, Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain chronicles John’s struggle to assert his own identity while in the throes of moral, religious, and sexual turmoil that threatens to overcome him.
📚

Meet details will be out mid-Feb 💌
Join our Whatsapp group for updates (Link in @marginalia.bookclub2025 Bio) 🌻
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[James Baldwin, Literature, Books, Book Club, Reading Classics, Reading, Modern Classics, Black History]

#literature #bookstagram #bookclubofinstagram #jamesbaldwin #booksbooksbooks by @reading_between_the_lines_

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8 months ago