CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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The forensics of liberating the past
MARJORIE MAYO praises a narrative about the very different ways in which the past is being revisited and reinterpreted in India today
Madan Lal Dhingra’s statue in Amritsar, India
[Vengolis/Creative Commons]
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
Exhumation: The Life and Death of Madan Lal Dhingra
By Leena Dhingra
Small Axes £12.99
THIS is a story with very particular contemporary relevance, given the cultural wars that are being waged by the far right at the present time.
How to face up to Britain’s colonial past? How to make sense of competing ways of remembering? And how to take account of the implications for those involved in contemporary struggles against racism and religious intolerance?
Exhumation tells the story of Madan Lal Dhingra, a young Indian freedom fighter who was convicted of assassinating a British official and accordingly hanged in 1909 at Pentonville Prison.
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