Reinventing the veil

I’d have plucked Love in a Headscarf (LIH) off any shelf in the world had it not been for R robbing me of the pleasure by plain handing me the book and demanding a review. Why?

Love in a Headscarf 
Shelina Zahra Janmohamed
Amaryllis; Rs295; Pp 288

Cute pink cover, neon blue embossed type, my kind of unpretentious intellectual come-hither. And I’d have read it even if I weren’t reviewing it. Why? One riveting line in the blurb. “At the age of thirteen, I knew that I was destined to marry John Travolta.” That did it. It accosted me like a childhood friend in a street corner in Antigua or Jhunjhunu and dragged me into the book, hurtling me down 300-odd pages.

Old man Aristotle would have shot himself had he read LIH. After all he carps about plot, and here all the plot you get is a ‘man hunt’ in slow motion. But to call author Shelina Zahra Janmohamed’s debut novel just another don’t-want-to-be-single-desperately-want-to-mingle lit is to be decoyed by the cute pink.

Full report here Hindustan Times

‘Love in a Headscarf’ Wows India

Many media and publishing firms, such as Yahoo! and Penguin, operating in India in English are looking at how to tap into readers in Hindi and regional languages. Manjul, a publishing house that has specialized in doing that for about 11 years, is going the other way with a new English-language imprint called Amaryllis.

Amaryllis
The imprint’s been very lucky with its first book, the Indian edition of Love in a Headscarf: A Muslim Woman’s Search for the One, a memoir about her arranged marriage by North London-raised writer and blogger Shelina Zahra Janmohamed, which came out here in July. Ms. Janmohamed tweeted about the book’s success in India earlier this month.

India Real Time spoke to Amaryllis’s head of publishing, Sanjana Roy Choudhury, about the book via e-mail and phone. Read edited excerpts below:

IRT: What is Amaryllis?
Choudhury: Amaryllis is a fiction and non-fiction imprint that will bring to readers worthy homegrown titles and international authors who are yearning to be read in the Indian subcontinent. The list is small, select and titles are carefully picked that Indian readers will immediately connect to. Many of Manjul’s titles have sold upwards of one lakh (100,000) copies. The authors we sign also have the option of being read in many Indian languages other than just Hindi and Marathi.

Full interview here India Relative

Writing from behind the veil

Terrorist attacks, burqa bans and public flogging ironically mean good news for Muslim writers, and the publishers backing them. Fiona Fernandez asks why Islamic writing in English, especially by women, is piquing reader interest

It's official. The writer's voice behind the veil is no longer a subdued sigh. It's a loud chorus, with a confident message that the breed has arrived, internationally. "We plumbed for Shelina Zahra Janmohamed's Love in a Headscarf for our launch, to make people sit up and take notice. There were a few typical literary titles we could've launched with, but this was special. It's a light but sensitive portrayal of the modern British-Muslim woman," says Sanjana Roy Choudhury, Head of Publishing, Amaryllis. The novel was launched in India this week.

The Guardian has called it "irreverent and feminine", while The Daily Mail dubbed it "hilarious". But the woman at the centre of it, UK-based Janmohamed, says her debut, now in its third edition in the UK, grew from a desire to deviate from the prototype.

"After I started my blog four years ago, a mix of humour, honesty and East-West insight, I was often asked why I hadn't written a book about being a Muslim woman. I resisted for long, because I assumed what many people do - that I couldn't write unless I was a movie star or a politician! I walked into a local bookstore and spotted a special display of books that screamed 'sold', 'oppressed' or 'kidnapped'".

Full report here Mid-day