Mridula Nath Chakraborty reviews To Silence by Subhash Jaireth
To Silence
by Subhash Jaireth
Puncher and Wattmann
Reviewed by MRIDULA NATH CHAKRABORTY
The titular aptness of Subhash Jaireth’s latest offering cannot be overstated. If silence can indeed be voiced, here it is, speaking volumes. The slimness of the book belies its depth of thought and profundity of expression. In three short vignettes, Jaireth manages to bring to us whole universes: worlds as far-flung as fifteenth-century India, seventeenth-century Italy and nineteenth-century Russia. Using the genre of the monologue, Jaireth brings alive for us the milieus of Kabir, the weaver-poet of the Bhakti movement; Maria Chekova, Anton Chekov’s less-known self-effacing younger sister; and Tommaso Campanella, the Calabrian theologian whose heterodox views brought him into conflict with the Inquisition and who intervened in the first trail of Galileo Galilei.
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