An Evening in Calcutta

Khwaja Ahmad Abbas (1914-87) was a prolific political commentator, short-story writer, novelist, scriptwriter and a film-maker who preferred to call himself a communicator. He published seventy-three books in English, Urdu and Hindi, including an engaging autobiography, I Am Not an Island, and two semiautobiographical novels, Inquilab and The World Is My Village, detailing contemporary Indian history. His works have been translated into several Indian and foreign languages including Russian, German, Arabic, Italian and French. Abbas received several state and national honours, including the Padma Shri in 1969, and was involved in the making of sixty Hindi films. Suresh Kohli (born in 1947) is a poet, writer, translator, editor, literary critic and fi lm historian with more than thirty-five published works including five volumes of poetry and a novel. He is also a short and documentary film-maker, with over a hundred films to his credit that have been screened, apart from India, in Australia, France, Germany, Spain, the United Kingdom and Nepal. He lives in Delhi and is currently working on a long abandoned novel and a collection of short stories.