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“I can take any empty space and call it a stage,” wrote Peter Brook, the theatre director who passed away at 97 last week, in his 1968 book The Empty Space. Known for his innovative productions of William Shakespeare plays and the Mahabharata, often using factory space or other open areas to stage the shows, Brook detested the “lazy habit to generalise” (Tip of the Tongue). He lived by the credo -- ‘Don’t take anything for granted. Go see for yourself.’ This little “nagging murmur”, he said, led him to so many journeys and explorations, “from the sublime to the ridiculous.” It led him, for instance, to stage an ambitious production of the Hindu epic with several Indian actors that got the Mahabharata a wider audience but also some flak. Critics like Rustom Bharucha (Theatre and the World) argued that Brook had “trivialised” Indian culture, but if anything, the play and subsequently the film, did open up many discussions on the classic. We are still reappraising the epic, as G.N. Devy wrote in his 2020 book, Mahabharata: The Epic and the Nation. In his review, Sukumar Muralidharan said: “In a time dominated by Manichean conceptions of good and evil, Devy speaks up courageously for sanity and an appreciation of ambiguous origins... There are aspects of the Mahabharata that legitimise the worst of an ascriptive, hierarchical social order. But in the vastness of its sprawl, it provides a richness of narrative detail and moral ambiguities, to be a relatable tale for all.”
This week, we take a look at emerging trends in the Indian publishing industry, read Navtej Sarna’s historical fiction centred on the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, follow Harmony Siganporia’s march from Dandi to Ahmedabad to explore the story of modern Gujarat and more. We also have an interview with the noted lawyer, Abhishek Singhvi, who recounts eight legally significant cases that marked his career in his book From the Trenches; and we speak to the filmmaker Onir about his movies, sexuality and his new book, I am Onir & I am Gay.
Books of the week
In Crimson Spring ( Aleph Book Company) Navtej Sarna brings together themes he has long pursued in his writing, albeit in fiction: the Jallianwala Bagh massacre, early twentieth century Punjab, the Indian soldiers who fought in the Great War (World War I), and the revolutionaries who died for India’s freedom”. In her review, Mini Kapoor writes that Sarna prefaces the novel with a timeline, preparing his reader for the sweep in which he seeks to place the agitation against the Rowlatt Act, passed on March 18, 1919 and the horror a month later, on Baisakhi Day, April 13, at Amritsar’s Jallianwala Bagh, on the instructions of General R.E.H. Dyer. The first date on his calendar is July 15, 1913, when the Ghadar Party was formed. The last one is March 13, 1940, when Udham Singh assassinated Michael O’Dwyer, Lieutenant Governor of Punjab at the time of the massacre, in London, Dyer having passed away in 1927. “The last tracts of the novel belong to Udham Singh, one of 20th century India’s most enigmatic figures. He has never been out of sight, moving in and out of the timeline as well as the lives of some of the other characters. We know how it will end, the assassination, quick trial and death penalty. Sarna admits to taking ‘fictional liberties… to flesh out the scant details available of his early life and dramatize the other scenes where he appears’. And in doing so he reinforces our overall understanding of the men and women who people this novel: how Jallianwala Bagh altered the political and social fabric of their lives as well as those who were touched by the massacre as a remove.”
In February 2019, Harmony Siganporia walked from Dandi to Ahmedabad with two friends, retracing the route of Gandhi’s Salt March in reverse to tell the story of modern Gujarat. The Dandi March in 1930 marked one of the high points of Gandhi’s political career. Siganporia and her compatriots walked the route of just under 400 km in 25 days. As Gujarat has come to be described as the “laboratory of Hindutva”, Siganporia wanted to find out if there remained any “memories of the region’s prior avatar as the base that served as the setting against which Gandhi put into practice his ‘experiments’ with truth, non-violent civil disobedience, satyagraha and more.” Walking from Dandi (OUP) has speeches Gandhi gave on his way to Dandi, relevant now as we reappraise who we are and where we are headed as a polity. “For Gandhi, swaraj could only come ‘from an engagement with the inequalities we perpetuated, for if we were not prepared to squarely face the caste, class, gender, religious and other divides in our society, no amount of political freedom would ameliorate our lot’.” To stem the tide against a ‘forgetting’ of Gandhi and his legacy, there’s an antidote – and that is to go back to his words, as Siganporia does throughout her remarkable book.
Spotlight
From the rise of non-fiction, the arrival of the literary agent to the reinvention of bookshops, India’s publishing industry, thought to be a slow-moving sector, is showing signs of change. In an essay, Radhika Santhanam traces the changes taking place, mirroring what’s happening in the political, social, cultural and economic space in the rest of the country. Perhaps the most noticeable figure in the Indian publishing industry today is the literary agent, she writes, “who discovers and brings new talent to an appreciative audience, guides new voices, brokers deals and mediates between writers and publishers.” In other trends, readers are lapping up non-fiction books, and translations from the regional languages, mostly fiction. For a literary agent who represents Geetanjali Shree (she just won the International Booker Prize for Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell from Ret Samadhi), “the huge interest in translations is not just thanks to Geetanjali.” Vivek Shanbag’s Ghachar Ghochar (translated by Srinath Perur) became a bestseller by word of mouth in 2015 and was “a watershed moment in Indian translation.” But there are challenges too. If the number of readers doesn’t grow exponentially, for instance, there’s trouble ahead for all – writers, publishers and booksellers.
From the Trenches (Juggernaut) discusses threadbare the eight ‘most important’ cases in the career of Abhishek Singhvi, well-known lawyer and parliamentarian. “The challenge, a difficult one, was to write for the layman and yet make it interesting for those versed in the law,” he says. The cases, a diverse mix, include Sabarimala, the Tata Group boardroom battle, animal abuse and the misuse of Article 365. In an interview with Mukund Padmanabhan, Singhvi says that in the Sabarimala case, for example, he believes that notions of rationality cannot be invoked in matters of religion. Does Singhvi then think that the wall that separates and provides autonomy to religion from the state (which is also integral to secularism) has been excessively breached in India? “Yes,” Singhvi tells Padmanabhan. “The religious rights intended by the clutch of Articles 25 to 30 have been excessively breached, in terms of both number and degree. Objective and external tests are being applied to judge (what are) essentially subjective religious rights. While I accept that the specific language and structure of the Indian Constitution cannot be assessed by either the words in the U.S. Constitution or by the western idea about the separation of Church and State, I think the Constituent Assembly debates show clear intent to strictly ring fence the bundle of religious rights. It is important that they are not breached in a casual manner.”
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- From the ‘politics of friendship’ between Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah, Nehru’s defence of secularism, to what propelled him to curb free speech in the First Amendment, Manash Firaq Bhattacharjee draws from political history to illuminate debates in India today, ranging from Kashmir, the citizenship amendment law to hate speech in Nehru and the Spirit of India (Viking/Penguin).
- The prime objective of people who were caught on the ‘wrong’ side of the border in 1947 was to stay alive. In Scars of 1947 (Penguin), Rajeev Shukla writes the stories of various people – from former Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to Liaquat Ali Khan and Fatima Jinnah – affected by Partition.
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