The New Look

"Literature deserves to be elevated to a revered and indispensable position in the grand gallery of human knowledge," so said the Telugu literary colossus, Seshendra Sarma. We have constantly striven to improve the standard of Muse India, both in content and style, so that we can serve Indian literature better and elevate it to those revered realms. We have made major changes to the look and feel of Muse India beginning this Issue. It is there for you to see and experience. We have a new and elegant masthead and logo. The layout and design is sleeker and more in tune with international standards. Navigation through the journal is smoother. There are newer features and facilities too. We hope all of you will like the changes. What may not be so apparent to a reader are the major restructuring of databases and fine-tuning of several technical aspects, as in the archive of past Issues, done to improve the overall efficacy of the website. We will be happy to have your constructive criticism and suggestions. We place on record our appreciation for the commendable work done in introducing the elegant look and making the website more efficient by PSK Viswanath and his team at access center (p) ltd., our web-designer and technical partner right from our inception. They work as hard as we do in making Muse India a pleasurable experience.

With the successful completion of 31 Issues, we are throwing ourselves into our endevours with more vigour and vitality.  I would like to reiterate in every Issue that we are indebted to our Contributing Editors and writers who make the wide recognition and plaudit Muse India enjoys possible. We had sought your support to our work and are very thankful to those who responded and contributed. We appreciate this gesture to stand by us in our efforts to ‘elevate and revere literature.’ It is said that we are all one-winged birds and can soar high only when we hold one another and fly together. Let us be together in this delightful flight!

Focus

Though the violence of the land makes Northeastern parts of the country a sad human story, the vibrant literature transforms it into a haven of hope and progressive outlook. This is reflected in the works collected and presented in our Focus section by Robin Ngangom, a noted poet himself. As Prof GJV Prasad of JNU, New Delhi, says, perhaps the best English poetry in the country is being written in the Northeast today. There is a surfeit of poetic talent across the ‘seven sisters of the N-E.’ We thank Robin for his endeavours to present works of some of the best poets of the region. There are several other talented writers who write in the vernacular languages of the region. Muse India will bring focus on them in a future Issue.

Feature

Locke, a great philosopher, proclaimed, "the works of Nature everywhere sufficiently evidence a deity." He couldn’t have been more right. Paying tribute to that deity, we offer a Feature on the splendour and supremacy of ‘Prakriti’ (nature) with Prof. Sivaramakrishnan at the helm as the guest editor. At once exclusive and exhaustive, his ‘prefatory remarks’ offers a fine read, and the works presented in the section portray nature-literature as a precious domain of literature. Prof. Sivaramakrishnan insightfully points out what actually nature poetry is, how the act of poetry, the poetic utterance and the sense of ‘natural’ should be examined et al. He very pertinently emphasizes that Nature was never perceived as the other, an adversary to be conquered, dominated and subjugated. It was an organic worldview that the Vedic poets held. Muse India is indebted to the editor for his painstaking work and the support he extended.

Regular Sections

We engaged the renowned Gujarati poet and scholar-physician, Dileep Jhaveri, in a long and interesting discussion on the status of literature and poetry today, influence of mythology on his work, and his recent travels in the USA.

A remarkable recent publication is the English translation of 16^th century Telugu classic, Amuktamalyada, composed by the renowned Vijayanagara emperor, Krishnadeva Raya. Srinivas Sistla’s English rendering of the highly difficult text fulfills a long felt need. In this Issue, Prema Nandakumar, a scholar and herself an authority on the emperor’s classic, reviews the book. We also engage Sistla in a discussion to assess the challenges he faced in his stupendous effort.

We also present Ganesh Saili, the noted travelogue writer and a national award winner, in an interesting discussion with Swapan Banerjee, our regular contributor.

Dr Charanjeet Kaur pays glowing tribute to the noted Marathi writer Vinda Karandikar who passed away some time ago. In another impressive essay, Gargi Bhattacharya takes a sweeping and critical look at Indian Writing in English. .

The stories carried in the Fiction section are diverse in nature, each one different from the other in content and treatment. Hope our readers enjoy their narrative experience. Muse India thanks Atreya Sarma for his meticulous editorial work in the section.

‘In this world in which all people lose their heads and are all lost in things of the moment, the poet at least should stand as the guardian of the truth of experience,’ said Gopalakrishna Adiga, a poet of great renown – we can see that effort to stand as the guardians of truth of experience by the poets whose work we have carried in this Issue.

Gallery of Art

Complementing poetry of the Northeast presented in Focus section, we feature several works of art of the region as well. Asu Dev’s paintings are presented in the ‘Gallery.’ He is one of the pioneers among artists of the Northeast and has a distinctive style in his renderings. The 12 paintings presented cover a wide range of his themes and style. The entire section on the poetry of Northeast is richly illustrated with beautiful paintings of a large number of modern artists of Assam, all members of Gauhati Artists' Guild. We thank Anutosh Dev, son of Asu Dev and himself a painter and photographer of merit, for helping us with the works presented. We also thank all the artists whose works are featured.

To celebrate the theme of ‘prakriti’ (nature) we bring some exceptional images of nature in the section on nature poetry as well as the general section on poetry. These are taken from various websites, all of which are acknowledged. We express our gratefulness to these sites.

Wishing that our members enjoy the richness of literary cornucopia presented in this Issue, I present a verse here which pays encomiums to the most copious and eternal deity called Nature.     

"O glorious Nature ! Supremely fair

And  sovereignly  good ! All loving and lovely

All divine…!

Whose every single work affords an

Ample scene and is a nobler spectacle

Than all which ever art presented !

Oh mighty Nature, wise substitute of Providence."  (Shaftsbury)