Ek Nadir Roznamcha

Easy-to-understand entries capturing countless moments of inspiration and desperation make a diary, the most intimate form of writing. The tension between concealing and revealing produces a tantalizing narrative of the human predicament that this diary presents in a conversational and fresh style. The diary portrays the past from a personal perspective, and it usually tells what historians never tell. A young author, Saad Mustafa Hashmi gets hands on his fifth-generation grandfather, Maulvi Mazhar Ali's diary, "Ek Nadir Roznamcha", that exposes us to the widespread public culture of yore. He does well to get this astutely rendered text into English. It's not just a plainspoken saga of the immediate concerns of ordinary people, but it maps out the forgotten terrain of the cultural and intellectual growth of 19th-century India.