Knit India Through Literature, Volume II: The East

Knit India Through Literature is a project that well-known Tamil writer Sivasankari has been totally absorbed with these past seven years. And it will be few years more before her other two volumes in this series see the light of day.

Through Knit India Through Literature she intends to introduce Indians through their respective cultures and literature. Her mega-venture is to knit Indians through a knowledge of each others literary heritage. To this end, she has traveled through many parts of the country, studied several artistic and cultural forms, intensely researched the literature of the respective Indian languages, interviewed several leading men and women of letters in each language made a representative selection from each literature and sought the best translations of these works.

Her travelogues, her interviews, the overviews of each literature she has sought all reveal one important unity: the concern our writers and poets express in their work for the problems that beset our country today: poverty; ignorance; caste, class and gender discrimination; the challenges of modernity; the resurgence of religious fundamentalism, bigotry, superstition and intolerance; disrespect for law; proneness to violence; and an erosion of Gandhian values. Through her Knit India project she feels writers can make an invaluable contribution with their writing to change the thinking of the people and help eliminate these problems.