NEXT on SEA Conversations

The Bookmakers

Winter 2024-25


At SEA, the uncertain and unclear relationship between texts and space has been one of the core focuses of discussion and exploration. We have experimented with drawings and performances as bridges to create new possibilities for these connections. In this series, we invite people who work with texts - writers, translators, biographers, and even book collectors - to help us delve deeper into this relationship. In many ways, they capture the energies of their subjects, offering new meanings through their texts. The series will include book launches, readings by authors and translators, and an exhibition of a book collection.


speakers

Nov 15, 2024.
Sonal Mithal (co-authored with Arul Paul)
A Queer Reading of Nawabi Architecture and the Colonial Archive: Lucknow Queerscapes (Routledge, 2024)

Dec 10, 2024.
Nihal Perera
People’s Spaces: Coping, Familiarising, Creating (Routledge, 2016)

Dec 20, 2024.
Prasad Khanolkar
Passages of Play in Urban India: People, Media, Objects and Spaces in Mumbai’s Slum Localities, (Routledge, 2023)

Jan 17, 2025.
Mustansir Dalvi
Charles Correa: Citizen Charles (Niyogi Books, 2024)

Feb 21, 2025.
V Ramaswami
Translator of four volumes of short fiction of the anti-establishment and experimental Bangla writer, Subimal Misra: The Golden Gandhi Statue from America (2010), Wild Animals Prohibited (2015), Two Anti-Novels (2019), and The Earth Quakes (2024), all published by Harper Perennial.

Feb 28, 2025.
Rishi Aggarwal
Saving Aarey - The Undoing of an Environmental Campaign

Mar 07, 2025.
Shveta Sarda
Trickster City (Viking 2010) and translation of the book Mayyadas ki Mari/Mansion by Bhisham Sahani (Penguin, 2016)

Mar 21, 2025.
Priyesh Gothwal
BOOKSHOW on artists’ book (19-21 March)

March 28
Martina Maria Spies & Pritika Akhil Kumar
Cult Of Play: The Culture and Development of Children’s Play in Mumbai & Beyond

This lecture series is supported by the Urban Centre Mumbai. It is open to everyone across the world.
visit www.sea-city.in for event details

A SEA City initiative

session 5

Literature in the City and the City in Literature

by V Ramaswamy

on Friday, February 21, 2025,
at 6:00 PM IST

School of Environment & Architecture
CKP Colony, Eskar Road, Borivali West, Mumbai 400 091

This talk will look at the Bangla anti-establishment and experimental author, Subimal Misra (1943–2023), his formative influences, his gaze at the city of Calcutta / Kolkata, and the city’s geography in his writing.


about

V. Ramaswamy took up literary translation of voices from the margins after two decades of grassroots and public activism in support of the labouring poor in his city, Calcutta. He has translated Subimal Misra’s The Golden Gandhi Statue from America: Early Stories, Wild Animals Prohibited: Stories, Anti-Stories, This Could Have Become Ramayan Chamar’s Tale: Two Anti-Novels, and The Earth Quakes: Late Anti-Stories; Manoranjan Byapari’s novels, The Runaway Boy, The Nemesis and The Interloper. His translation of Adhir Biswas’s Memories of Arrival: A Voice from the Margins, was published in 2022, as were Shahidul Zahir’s Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas (co-translated with Shahroza Nahrin), and Why There Are No Noyontara Flowers in Agargaon Colony: Stories. His translation of the novel I See The Face, also by Zahir, was published in 2023, and that of the novel, Talashnama: The Quest, by Ismail Darbesh, in 2024. Ramaswamy has attended residencies at Sangam House, India, Writers Omi, USA, and Toji Cultural Foundation, Korea. He was selected for the Toji Fellowship in Wonju, Korea, in 2015, and the Literature Across Frontiers – Charles Wallace India Trust fellowship in creative writing & translation at Aberystwyth University, Wales, in 2016. Ramaswamy received the translation fellowship of the New India Foundation, and the PEN Presents translation grant in 2022. Life and Political Reality: Two Novellas was awarded the prize for best translated book for 2022 by the Bangla Translation Foundation (Dhaka).