The Meat Market

The Inner World,a

The Inner World

Mashiul Alam, trs Shabnam Nadiya

Eka

₹499

The leading Bangladeshi writer’s stories hold up a mirror to his country and its society. The horrors of everyday reality e ortlessly veer into the realm of the surreal, allowing the reader to cope and even escape.

The Inner World,

Shamans, Mystics and Doctors (an exploration of a variety of Indian healers and healing traditions concerned with “the restoration of what is broadly termed ‘mental health’ in the West”), and Tales of Love, Sex and Danger, co-written with John M. Ross, which examined sex and love through some of the world’s most enduring love stories. To my mind, a writer of his stature would gild my Ÿedgling publishing list. However, there was no guarantee that this would happen. Although he had agreed to see me, at the time Sudhir was published in India by the brilliant Ravi Dayal at Oxford University Press and around the world by a host of other equally legendary publishers — including Sonny Mehta at Knopf. Given this reality, I couldn’t see why he would choose to place any of his books with an untried publisher, but I needed to try.

Lucid and accessible work

A secondary concern I had was that the books he had published until then were all rather scholarly, and I wanted him to write for the general reader. In any event, our meeting went well, and marked the beginning of a productive publishing relationship and friendship. He brought his great gifts of analysis, scholarship, and expression to bear on a variety of important subjects and published lucid, accessible books on sex and sexuality (Intimate Relations), an astonishingly original work on sectarian violence (The Colours of Violence), and, unexpectedly, a superb novel (his rst — at the age of 60) entitled The Ascetic of Desire,

(GETTY IMAGES) ◣ Sudhir Kakar wrote several foundational books that will influence generations of scholars and readers.