gfiles magazine

March 18, 2013

Wounds of an exodus


Book REVIEW
kashmir memoir
 
Wounds of an exodus
 
Talking about his book Palimpsest, the US literary great Gore Vidal made the interesting observation that ‘a memoir is how one remembers one’s own life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked’. Judged by this definition, Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon Has Blood Clots is both a memoir and an autobiography– for it is quite clearly how Pandita has remembered, and continues to remember, his own life even as the co-terminous historical bits that provide the overall tapestry appear to be well-researched.
 
Its sub-title ‘The Exodus of the Kashmiri Pandits’ is an apt caption for the overall concern that the book shares and which is narrated through the memory of a young boy cut suddenly from his moorings and cast adrift. This memory grows and evolves into a memory of adulthood with its attendant heartbreaks and heartaches, broken dreams and hopes, always in one exile after another, of overlapping lives and memories of many other people...Read More 

No comments:

Post a Comment