Ashokamitran: 5 books

For nearly thirty years from 1940, the Gemini Studios of Madras (Chennai) was the most influential film-producing organisation of India and its founder, the brilliant multi-faceted entrepreneur S.S.Vasan lent substance and quality to the rather fragile and unpredictable movie business.The Gemini emblem...

The early 1960s, also known as the golden age of Indian cinema. Satyan Kumar, reigning screen god, moves from Mumbai to the Madras film industry. There he meets Gopalan, a middling studio writer. An inexplicable connection forms between the two men across the chasms of class and language. But just...

The fictional events narrated in Mole! an English translation of Otran, a novel by Ashokamitran take place within a period of seven months, nearly all of them in the American Midwest. The narrator, a culturally rooted writer from Chennai, is transplanted amidst a motley group of fellow-writers from distant...

Chandrasekhar, adolescent, vulnerable, confused, is growing up in the momentous period before and after 1947, when Hyderabad is the State of Nizam. This political setting drumbeats through the novel, closely and ironically interwoven with Chandrus life at home, in the city and at college. The Eighteenth...