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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The Sri Lankan writer, Shehan Karunatilaka, has won the Booker Prize for 2022 with his second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Penguin). The story, set in Colombo of the 1990s during a bloody civil war, revolves around the death – and life – of war photographer Maali Almeida. Maali wakes up dead one Tuesday; he is wearing one shoe, three chains and still has his trusty Nikon 3ST around his neck but the lens is smashed and its casing is cracked. How did he get here? And what happens next? He has just seven moons to find out two things: 1) who killed him? 2) how to guide the loves of his life, a man and a woman, to a hidden box of photographs which will expose the dangerous games at play in the time of war. In his acceptance speech last night in London, Karunatilaka said, “My hope for Seven Moons is this: that in the not too distant future, ten years or as long as it takes, it is read in a Sri Lanka that has understood that ideas of corruption and race-baiting and cronyism have not worked and will never work. [I hope] it is read in a Sri Lanka that learns from its stories and that Seven Moons will be in the fantasy section, next to the dragons and unicorns, and not to be mistaken for realism or political satire.” In an interview to The Hindu in September, after the Booker nomination, he said the novel has been in his head for a decade, and that he thought a ghost story would be an interesting way of making sense of the trauma that Sri Lanka was in the 1990s, with civil war, a Marxist revolt, an Indian army, state counter terror squads. “It was a time of disappearances and unidentified corpses.” Read our review of Chats with the Dead, which was published in January 2020, and later updated to Seven Moons for a global audience unfamiliar with Sri Lankan politics of the late 1980s. Karunatilaka’s debut novel, Chinaman, too gathered a clutch of accolades, and he is out with a new collection of short stories, The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises (Hachette).
In reviews, we read a new biography of Shivaji, a book on the state of the Congress Party, Orhan Pamuk’s novel and more. We also talk to Dinesh Singh Thakur and Prashant Reddy Thikkavarapu about their new book on the state of drug regulation in India; and to Barry O’ Brien who has written a biography of the Anglo-Indian community.
Books of the week
In Shivaji: India’s Great Warrior King (Juggernaut), Vaibhav Purandare divides the political and strategic legacy of Shivaji in three stages. Shivaji had a short life of just 50 years (1630-1680). The first stage is up to 1656. During this time, he was emerging as a militant rebel with a superb understanding of the terrain — and tyranny — of Mughal rule. Describing the second phase as a “dramatic decade”, that lasts from 1656-1666, Purandare writes a fascinating account, says Kumar Ketkar in his review, which includes Shivaji’s arrest and sensational escape from Aurangzeb’s jail. By then, the 36-year-old Shivaji had realised that he would have to create an autonomous regime, and the ideas of guerilla warfare and a people-centric (Rayat) government were forming in his head. The third and final stage, says Purandare, from 1666 to 1680, was of consolidation and expansion. It is not as if he had to confront only the rule of Aurangzeb and his henchmen in the north and south. Shivaji had to face a number of Maratha (Hindu) schemers and small-time chieftains. In fact, even when he was betrayed by some of his so-called trusted colleagues, he was helped by small but loyal Muslim power-holders in the region. Though there are minor quibbles about the book, Ketkar contends that it is an important contribution to the literature on Shivaji and the rise of the Maratha empire.
With his latest novel, Nights of Plague (Faber), set primarily in the first decade of the 20th century in an imaginary land, Orhan Pamuk continues to pose questions for his country, and beyond. Pamuk also places a pandemic at the heart of the novel. It is 1901. The Ottoman Empire’s Chief Inspector of Public Health and Sanitation, Bonkowski Pasha, is on his way to one of its states, the island of Mingheria, “pearl of the Eastern Mediterranean Sea”. The microbe that has caused devastation in different parts of Asia has hit Mingheria, and as he tells a select few of his fellow travellers on the ship headed eventually for China, “The situation is much graver than what is being written.” He underlines the secrecy of his mission by adding that the authorities in Istanbul and in Mingheria see the claims about a plague outbreak as “a political trap”. In her review, Mini Kapoor writes, “how is this story of Mingheria — of repression and revolution, of tradition and modernity, of disease and human nature, of nationalism and myth-making, of censorship and the liberating art of the novel — to be told?” Pamuk’s narrator, who introduces herself as the historian Mina Mingher, is an inventive story-teller, and at the outset, in a preface, she says, “This is both a historical novel and a history written in the form of a novel.” The novel, filled with characters, intrigue and mystery, is “demanding on the curious reader’s attentiveness.”
Zoya Hasan’s Ideology and Organization in Indian Politics: Polarization and the Growing Crisis of the Congress Party (OUP) takes a dispassionate look at the party, which led the freedom struggle, set up core institutions of democracy and power, and later with liberalisation kickstarted a floundering economy, but today faces an identity crisis. The book, according to the reviewer Ziya Us Salam, is for those who look up to the Congress with hope in these bleak times, as also for those who realise that the party has contributed in no insignificant manner to the current morass. Quoting Hasan, he says, the Congress’s compromises with regard to religious politics need to be noted, but with all its inconsistencies and compromises, there is recognition on its part that secularism is essential for democracy. “This stands out as the most crucial distinction between the Congress and the BJP’s political discourse, and it was this platform of secularism that kept communal polarisation at bay for several decades.”
Spotlight
The Truth Pill (Simon&Schuster), by Dinesh Singh Thakur and Prashant Reddy Thikkavarapu, investigates the challenges of drug regulation in India. It looks at why enforcement by authorities is lax; and how this sows the seeds for incidents such as the deaths of over 60 children in The Gambia, likely the victims of a spurious cough syrup made by the Haryana-based Maiden Pharmaceuticals. Asked what has the incident in The Gambia done to the reputation of the Indian pharmaceutical industry, Thakur and Reddy tell Jacob Koshy that there have been complaints about Indian drug quality from several countries including Sri Lanka, Ghana and Vietnam, but that this is the first time deaths have been reported. In India, 11 children died in Jammu in 2020 but nothing happened, and there was barely any coverage in the media. “However, The Gambia incident is an international incident and we don’t think Africa or the World Health Organization will take it lying down.”
In his social, cultural, political and historical biography of Anglo-Indians, a “small community with a large heart,” Barry O’ Brien takes in the roller-coaster ride it has faced over five centuries in its chosen homeland, India. Talking about his new book, The Anglo-Indians – A Portrait of a Community (Aleph), O’ Brien says, “We may be a David in size but we have made a Goliath contribution, particularly in the field of education.” He feels that the withdrawal of the provision for nomination of Anglo-Indian representatives to the Lok Sabha and the State assemblies is an act of “betrayal”, for a community which still needs assistance, care, and opportunity.
Browser
- Kris Gopalakrishnan and 50 other stalwarts, who built and shaped the Indian info-tech industry, recount the last six decades, a story of persistence and triumph, and look at the road ahead in Against All Odds: The IT Story of India (Penguin).
- Losing Home, Finding Home (B&W) by Saaz Aggarwal, and illustrated by Subhodeep Mukherjee, is an illustrated story of the Sindhi people who lost their homes to partition. It is narrated by the writer’s mother, Situ Savur, who recalls how the community picked up the pieces in India.
- Vivek Narayanan’s After (Harper) is a collection of poems inspired by the Ramayana. On each successive page, Narayanan brings the resources of contemporary English poetry to bear on the Sanskrit epic, thus initiating a transformative conversation across time.
- Filled with the emotion with which she illuminated the Shakespearean canvas of Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell turns her eyes to Renaissance Italy to tell the story of a resilient young woman’s battle for survival in The Marriage Portrait (Tinder Press/Hachette).
