Description

This book brings together, for the first time, the journalistic writings on India by the Nobel Prize-awarded Guatemalan-Spanish writer, Miguel Ángel Asturias (1899-1974). Crónica or the chronicle is a typically Latin American genre of witness, memoir and history. Asturias's chronicles record the philosophical moment of his encounter with an alien reality, alien not because it was an exotic world, but because it came from a hard-won national independence which was yet to fully establish itself. They reflect on themes of the resurgence of Asia, the linguistic proliferation of languages and new national literatures in India, while focusing on the crippling effects of poverty on the national economy, the obscenity of caste practices, and the contradictions between national independence and revival of religion. This bilingual collection bears witness to lines of contact between Latin America and India that have existed and continue to exist today beyond the proliferation routes of global capital.