Let’s ExploreLeaf, Water and Flow

  • Author: Avadhoot Dongare
  • Translator: Nadeem Khan
Leaf, Water and Flow
Leaf, Water and Flow

We live as social beings. But our being social includes power structures of various kinds – from the language that we speak and write in to the state or anti-state actors that claim to run some of these structures.

The novel attempts to grapple with these structures, the individuals who are part of these structures and also who are in conflict with these structures. There is Naxalite/Maoist politics, there is an egret who has seen a baby die in a village in central India, there is an author (perhaps the one who had written a novel titled The Story of Being Useless), there is a teak-leaf which is dying, there is a ‘professional revolutionary’ who has come out of incarceration, there is an adivasi woman who was once part of a Maoist dalam, there is a wife of a police sub-inspector, and there is a reader who reads this novel and ends it with his comments. There are some more such voices in the novel. Some of them tell their stories, some of them try to contribute to the stories of others, and a few of them are perhaps also thinking about how to end this binary and be a part of all the stories.

ABOUT THE AUTHORAvadhoot Dongare

Avadhoot Dongare started writing fiction in 2007. He has published four novels in Marathi: Svatahala Faltu Samjanyachi Goshta (The Story of Being Useless, 2012), Eka Lekhakache Teen Sandarbha (Three Contexts of a Writer, 2013), Paan, Pani Ni Pravah (Leaf, Water and Flow, 2015), and Bhintivarcha Chashma (Specs on the Wall, 2018). The first novel was awarded the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar in 2014. He has also published a critical essay Svatahacha Avakash Tapasatana (Probing One's Space, 2017) about one of the translations he had done as a professional and a book of short stories for children.

Avadhoot Dongare

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORNadeem Khan

Nadeem Khan has been a teacher of English since 1973. For more than seven years he worked as Director, Western Regional Centre, Amravati, of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, an autonomous institute of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India. He has translated into English the writings of well-known Marathi novelists Bhau Padhye and Vishwas Patil, Hindi short-story writer Doodnath Singh, as well as artists Ram Kumar and Jangadh Singh. He has also translated Sathya Saran's My Daughter - My Shakti from English to Hindi. He is a voracious reader and his lectures on a variety of subjects have been very popular in academic and corporate circles for over twenty years.

Nadeem Khan

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