Ira Mathur

Sunday offering 🙏🏾 T&T Guardian

Please come tomorrow Saturday 29th November 10.00 am - 6.00pm at 6 Collins Road, Maraval at Galt and Maree Studio to the Secret Garden Market . There will be writers and readings, and mingling . There will be books and lovely people 📕. A lovely garden oasis for your mind before the 🎄 frenzy 📚 Looking forward to meeting you there 🌺

Sunday offering on Wednesday- Republic Day T&T Guardian Yale University 🌺🇹🇹♥️

To walk here with Anthony Vahni Capildeo, Trinidad-born poet and 2025 Windham–Campbell laureate, was to feel a double incongruity. Gargoyles watched from parapets built to echo Oxford and Cambridge, but that night they looked down on a voice shaped in Port of Spain’s dusk, steeped in Caribbean cadences, honed in Old Norse halls. Capildeo moved through the quadrangles gently but assuredly, as if testing each echo — a twin island voice resounding in one of the world’s grand literary arenas. …
For Anthony Vahni Capildeo, a
poet who had long written doggedly — often against the chill of English and Scottish winters, often in difficult personal circumstances, often quite alone, always swimming upstream — such recognition may have felt less like a coronation than a reprieve: a moment of being visibly loved for their work.

Capildeo’s path to this moment had been anything but direct. Born in Port of Spain in 1973, they studied English at Christ Church, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, before completing a doctorate in Old Norse literature …Capildeo’s poetry, like their spiritual life, is grounded in silence — not as absence, but as attentive fullness. “A formation in prayer (Roman Catholic and formerly Hindu), and in philology,” they told The Yale Review, shaped their habits of “attention, concentration, self-emptying, and openness.”

Sunday Offering T&T Guardian V. S. Naipaul

Sunday Offering T&T Guardian 🙏🏾
“At its core, the novel explores how identity, heritage, and empire intertwine. The sisters — one prized for her otherworldly beauty, the other gifted with foresight — navigate love, loss, and the slow erosion of ancestral traditions amid shifting political tides:
“Family will always kill you — some bit by bit, others all at once. It is the love that does it.”
“The idea that people who guarded you could also be the people that you needed guarding from was nothing anyone should have to learn.”

A Saturday offering 🙏🏾

Sunday offering 🙏🏾 T&T Guardian T&T Guardian India Today

Babytai Kamble was born in 1929 in Maharashtra to a Dalit family of the Mahar caste. To understand the force of her life and work, one must understand that Dalits—the so-called "broken people"—have historically been barred from temples, schools, wells, and even the shadow of upper-caste Hindus. They were condemned to "polluting" work: leather tanning, waste removal, co**se disposal. Even today, Dalits face systemic discrimination in education, employment, and justice.
Dalit women endure a double marginalisation. They are often victims of caste-based sexual violence, denied political voice, and excluded even from feminist discourse. The 2022 UN Women India report documented that Dalit women suffer higher rates of illiteracy, child marriage, and domestic abuse. Their lives remain largely unrecorded.

On June 14, I returned to Bishop’s High School in Tobago to moderate a landmark leadership forum with Dr Keith Rowley, Chief Secretary Farley Augustine, Chief Justice Ivor Archie, and Bishop Claude Berkley—four sons of the island who came back to their alma mater for the school’s centennial.

When I was ten, I landed on an island—with sea breeze, chenet trees, guava trees, and a people who folded my mother Zia, my father Mahendra, an engineer in the Indian army contracted to build the Claude Noel Highway—into their lives as if we had always belonged. My brother Varun, my sister Rashmi, and I became the children of Tobago.
My mother and I were walking up the hill to the fort where we lived next to the museum when a kind lady stopped and gave my mother, wearing a sari and carrying an umbrella, a glass of water. She was the mother of A.N.R. Robinson and became my second grandmother.
Mrs Wheeler, who lived in the museum next to us on the fort, became a second mother, teaching me how to cook macaroni, stewed chicken and plums; her son, now Dr Victor Wheeler, became my brother’s brother. The girls, Alana and Gillian, became our sisters.
I learned to use a cutlass, kill and clean crab, churn ice cream by hand. I played hockey on sunbaked fields. We go-carted down the fort on pieces of cardboard. We picked guavas behind the school, jumped into the sea from the jetty at Pigeon Point on moonlit nights, walked along cocoa estates and along the beach. The cannons became my way of seeing the wider world—which later always seemed unfinished without our sea, our bougainvillaea, our bright skies, and golden sunsets.
I became a Bishop’s girl—its classrooms, its fields, its rituals. Much of who I am began here.
Two years ago, when I wrote my memoir, Love The Dark Days I returned to say thanks to my teachers.

Last week, I returned again—not just as a writer and alumna—but as moderator of the Men in Leadership Forum, held at Mt Marie, Scarborough.

I was thinking of my late father, Mahendra Nath Mathur, who built the Claude Noel Highway in Tobago. An army man, he often said, peace is easy—if men shed their egos and put the people first. Remembering that, I asked Dr Rowley and Mr Augustine what they admired in each other despite their political rivalry. Like true Tobagonians, they rose to the occasion with generosity and grace.

That moment was captured in national press coverage, including these Newsday articles:

https://newsday.co.tt/2025/06/17/rowley-anger-in-society-being-fuelled-by-entitlement/

https://newsday.co.tt/2025/06/15/chief-sec-rowley-reveal-childhood-trauma-suspension-at-bishops-forum/

📹 Watch the full forum here:

https://www.youtube.com/live/DsUOaHq7Ej0?si=nfG99tqoL31bYcr4

Tobago has changed. So have we all. But this place—this school, this island—remains a kind of anchor in the drift of things.

IRA MATHUR
On 20 May 2025, at London's Tate Modern, Banu Mushtaq made history as the first Kannada author and Indian Muslim woman to win the International Booker Prize. Her short story collection, Heart Lamp, translated by Deepa Bhasthi and published by And Other Stories, features twelve stories written over thirty years portraying the lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. She is the second Indian author to win the International Booker Prize, after Geetanjali Shree, in 2022.
This is the first book translated from Kannada—a language spoken by around 65 million people—to be nominated for the prize. Deepa Bhasthi is the first Indian translator to win. The award also marks a first for Sheffield-based independent publisher And Other Stories.
Born in 1948 in Hassan, Karnataka, Mushtaq attended a Kannada-medium school in Shivamogga as a child, where she mastered the language.
Mushtaq's literary career began in the 1970s within the Bandaya Sahitya (Rebel Literature) movement, which challenged caste, class, and patriarchal norms. Her writings, rooted in activism, focus on the lived experiences of Muslim and Dalit women in southern India. Dalit women belong to communities once labelled "untouchable" under the Hindu caste system—socially excluded, economically exploited, and politically silenced. They face the compounded oppression of caste and gender, often working in low-paid or unpaid labour, with little protection from caste-based violence.
In 2000, Mushtaq was targeted by a fatwa issued by clerics in Karnataka after she criticised the treatment of women within the Muslim community. Her name was denounced from pulpits. Threats followed. Libraries were told to pull her books. The intention was ominous: to shut her down. She kept writing and publishing where she could while working as a lawyer and teacher in Shivamogga.

This win felt personal to me. I studied Kannada in school in Bangalore. It was the compulsory state language, taught alongside Hindi, English and Sanskrit. In a country of 28 states, each with its own official language, Banu Mushtaq's win breaks the dominance of English and Hindi, reaffirming Kannada's place in a linguistic landscape now threatened by centralised, Hindi-first nationalism.
Mushtaq, a lawyer and a known voice in progressive Kannada writing came through her work as a lawyer—many of the women who came to her for legal help became the basis for her characters.
Bangalore (changed to Bengaluru after a Hindu ruler, Veera Ballala II) is my hometown in India. I went to school there. With this win, I had to unpack the wave that came over me, as I am sure it has over every woman in India whose survival depends on a plural India.
Banu Mushtaq's win restored something in me. Of Bangalore before it was turned into Bengaluru, a convent, girls in uniform, a sunlit tree, patterned shadows on a white field, in a classroom
bent heads, oiled plaits, tracing the script of Kannada.
We were taught by South Indian nuns that Kannada, with its rounded, almost ornamental shapes, evolved from Brahmi through Kadamba, designed for palm-leaf manuscripts that favoured curves over straight lines. Kannada is among the oldest of the Dravidian languages, with a literary history from the fifth century and an older spoken history.
Its cadence is soft, its structure syllabic, its stress even, with words ending in vowels.
I had learned to keep my South Indian past to myself. We weren't native to Bangalore—my mother was a Muslim Khan with roots in Afghanistan, my father a Hindu from North India—but it was where I was socialised to love the languages spoken there: Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, and Telugu.
That Banu Mushtaq, a Muslim woman writing in Kannada, has won the 2025 International Booker Prize is as political as it is literary. She writes in a language spoken by around 65 million people (By the 1980s, Kannada had been overtaken by English in urban life but remained in bureaucracy, state schools, and local media) in a country of 1.3 billion and at a time when Muslims—about 200 million—face growing marginalisation (Pew Research Center, 2021).
Since 2014, the Modi government has passed laws and policies that have stripped Muslims of protections: the revocation of Article 370 in Kashmir and the Citizenship Amendment Act.
Muslim women in India remain at the bottom of the social ladder, with poorer access to education, healthcare, and legal support than any other group (Sachar Committee Report, 2006; All India Muslim Personal Law Board, 2023).
A campaign to erase or rename India's diverse linguistic and cultural histories has gathered speed. Mughal-era road names have been replaced. Allahabad became Prayagraj. Aurangabad became Chhatrapati Sambhaji Nagar. In Karnataka, there have been calls to rewrite textbooks to reflect a more "Indian"—that is, Hindu—view of history. The symbolic message is that to be Muslim or to speak a regional language is to be pushed outside the frame. T&T Guardian