A trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at Calcutta society. Set in Calcutta in the mid-1980s, Truth/Untruth is a fast-paced thriller built around the death of the pregnant Jamuna—a maid in a newly affluent residential apartment complex—and Arjun, the upwardly mobile businessman who seduced her. Packed with a cast of colorful characters, this novel is a trenchant, darkly humorous, and unsentimental look at the different segments of Calcutta society: from the middle-class culture vultures to the unscrupulous “promoter” class and the domestic helpers and slum goons who form an intrinsic part of the city’s life. All are implicated in a complex web of guilt and bizarre twists and turns. Sex, lies, death—the great modernist themes—run like a thread through this book, exposing societal greed, lust, corruption, and moral hypocrisy with a sardonic tone that spares none. An unusual novel by an author who is otherwise known for her hard-hitting activist-feminist stories, Truth/Untruth underlines the exploitative vicious cycle that defines urban relations between the haves and have-nots.

These essays explore the intricate connections between worship and performance, the sacred and the profane. In the process they challenge the common assumptions about worship as being simply about religious feeling, and open up the multifaceted possibilities of complex layering and overlapping that make any public act of worship simultaneously an act of socio-historical practice. Thus, the legendary Ramlila of Ramnagar in Varanasi, which engages the entire community both as performers and as audience, becomes an exploratory site to understand the connections between socio-economic factors and religious devotion. Or the commissioned street performances of the sacred tale of Mother Sitala, Goddess of the Pox, in Calcutta's by-lanes, are studied to see how professional performers don the mantle of the goddess in order to woo an audience. Or, in another register, the popular nineteenth-century Bengali mystic and sage Bamakshyapa, is seen to deploy performative tactics in the service of spirituality. The contributors include Richard Schechner, Sumanta Banerjee, Hanne de Bruin, Anuradha Kapur, and Anjum Katyal.