Archives: Authors

Himadri Agarwal is a fourth-year student of Ashoka University, with an interdisciplinary major in English and Creative Writing. Her previous translation, Three Stories by Rashid Jahan, was published by Bee Books, Kolkata, in 2020.

Mohammad Hamid Ansari was the vice president of India and chairman of the Rajya Sabha for two consecutive terms from 2007 to 2017. A former diplomat, he served as ambassador to the United Arab Emirates, Afghanistan, Iran, and Saudi Arabia, as high commissioner to Australia and as permanent representative to the United Nations in New York. Ansari was a visiting professor in the Centre for West Asian and African Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University and in the Academy of Third World Studies, Jamia Millia Islamia. He was the vice chancellor of the Aligarh Muslim University, distinguished fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, member of the National Security Advisory Board and chairman of the National Commission for Minorities. He chaired one of the five Working Groups established by the Prime Minister’s 2nd Round Table Conference on J&K in April 2006. In 2005, he edited the proceedings of an international conference on Iran, Twenty Five Years after the Islamic Revolution. In 2008, he published a set of his own writing, Travelling through Conflict: Essays on the Politics of West Asia. Selections from his speeches have been published as Teasing Questions (2014), Citizen and Society (2016), Dare I Question? (2018) and Many A Happy Accident: Reflections of a Life (2021).

Mirza Ghalib (1797-1869) was one of the greatest Urdu poets who was most well-known for his ghazals. He lived during the reign of the last Mughal king, whose court was the centre of the golden age of Urdu poetry. Chiragh-e Dair is a masnavi he wrote on the city of Banaras en route to Calcutta.

Maaz Bin Bilal is a poet, translator, and academic. His first collection Ghazalnama: Poems from Delhi, Belfast, and Urdu (2019) was shortlisted for the Sahitya Akademi Yuva Puraskar. Maaz was the recipient of the Charles Wallace Trust Fellowship in writing and translation in Wales (2018-19) and has also just received the Akademie Schloss Solitude fellowship in writing (2022).

Virat Chirania is a young and dynamic trainer with over 5000 hours of training experience in India and abroad. Virat is a TEDx speaker and a certified Life Coach. Virat is also a senior Art of Living Teacher and has been teaching meditation workshops for over a decade now.

Virat has taught in some of the top educational institutes and also corporate houses and brings to the table a rich and diverse experience along with lightness and humour.

Abhirami Girija Sriram is an editor and translator. Currently, she is the chief sub-editor of Frontline magazine.

K.S. Bijukumar is the co-translator of this book, and he lives in Chennai.

Tridip Suhrud is a scholar, writer and translator who works on the intellectual and cultural history of modern Gujarat and the Gandhian intellectual tradition. As the director and chief editor of the Sabarmati Ashram Preservation and Memorial Trust (2012-17), Ahmedabad, he was responsible for creating a digital archive-the Gandhi Heritage Portal-of all of M.K. Gandhi’s works. Apart from a number of books on Gandhi’s life, Suhrud has co-edited the critical annotated edition of Hind Swaraj, edited the critial annotated edition of An Autobiography, or My Experiments with Truth, translated Narayan Desai’s four-volume biography of Gandhi, My Life Is My Message, and translated the four-volume epic Gujarati novel, Sarasvatichandra.

Suhrud is presently translating the diaries of Manu Gandhi, covering the period between 1942 and 1948, compiling a series ‘Letters to Gandhi’-of unpublished correspondence to Gandhi-and working on an eight-volume compendium of testimonies of the indigo cultivators of Champaran. Tridip Suhrud is provost at CEPT University, Ahmedabad, and director of Lalbhai Dalpatbhai Institute of Indology.

Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey has been a journalist for twenty-four years. She started her career with the Statesman and later joined the Times of India. Since 2007 she has been writing both fiction and non-fiction in English and Bengali. She also translates from both languages.

Garima Garg is a journalist and an author. Born and brought up in Delhi, she studied economics at Delhi University and attended Columbia University for her MS in Journalism. She writes about culture and her work has been published in various Indian and international publications over the years. In her spare time, she can be found travelling or experimenting as a photographer with her digital, film, and polaroid cameras. She lives with her family in Delhi.