The world is in turmoil politically and socially, with wars being waged on two fronts. The year saw extreme weather events with hurricanes, cyclones, too much heat, too much rain, making climate change a cause for anxiety. Not surprisingly, many of the non-fiction published this year looked into the chaos. A notable book of the year is Anuradha Bhasin’s A Dismantled State, which chronicles what happened in the Kashmir Valley after August 2019 when Articles 370 and 35A were revoked, and the State became a Union Territory. Published in late December 2022, it was read long into 2023. Other books delved into history, politics, the economy, and environment. There were several memoirs, some going over the top with promotions (Prince Harry’s Spare), others letting word-of-mouth do the talking (Sara Rai’s Raw Umber); and biographies from a series of readings on the constitutionalist, Ambedkar, to Walter Isaacson on Elon Musk. Here are the top 20 of the year.
1. India is Broken and Why It’s Hard to Fixby Ashoka Mody (Juggernaut): The veteran economist critiques contemporary India’s glaring inequalities by tracing the history of socio-economic misadventures since independence. In an interview to The Hindu, he said, “When social norms and public accountability erodes, policy has no meaning.” Pointing out that though liberalisation helped India to reduce poverty, the nature of the growth has not been all-encompassing — there are not enough jobs, or clean air and water, and zero accountability when execution falters.
2. Joya Chatterji’sShadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Penguin Viking) tells the “turbulent, rich and compelling” history of the region and how it informs the present. In the Introduction, she writes that unlike many other histories of the subcontinent that concentrate solely on politics, people are at the heart of her book, “in all their voluble and often violent relationships with one another.” The historian points at the ties that bind India, Pakistan and Bangladesh, “connected by a shared legacy of structures of rule. And a lot else – let’s call it history.”
3. In Marginlands(Pan Macmillan), Arati Kumar-Rao travels to the Thar desert, the mangrove forests in the Sunderbans, eroding coastlines and beaches of Mumbai and Kerala, to study India’s most endangered landscapes. With climate change a reality, Kumar-Rao listens to the people — and explains why misguided decisions have taken many ecologically fragile places to the brink. She has documented a rich monologue about the fate of India’s landscapes, coming away with the belief that “the ancient practice of listening to the land and doing right by it can yet be reclaimed.”
4. Emperor of Rome (Profile Books/Hachette) by Mary Beard shines a light on the emperors who ruled the Roman empire, from Julius Caesar to Alexander Severus. Sifting fact from fiction, and the tall stories of excess, intrigue and outright terror associated withseveral Roman emperors, herstudy maps the period from 44 BCE to 235 CE and chronicles the “malevolent chaos” that emperors, instinctively or deliberately, thrived on. And yes, there’s a chilling resonance with the modern day chaos.
5. City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh (HarperCollins) by Zeyad Masroor Khan is a coming-of-age narrative about growing up in a ghetto where there were perpetual undercurrents of religious violence and an omnipresent fear that someone in the family may turn up dead. How did hate and “othering” become a part of everyday life? Is there a way out? Through his own experience, Khan, in his debut book, writes what it feels to be a Muslim in India today.
6. The figure of her grandfather, Premchand, naturally looms over Sara Rai’s Raw Umber: A Memoir (Westland Books), but her evocative autobiography is so much more and ‘The Ancestor in the Cupboard’ is just one part of it. Others in her family, grandmother, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, were all writers and in her mind she saw them insisting that they be written about too. In doing this and writing her story as well, she brings alive an eclectic and syncretic past, showing readers a world — and a time — lost forever.
7. Ashoka: Portrait of a Philosopher King by Patrick Olivelle is the first book in HarperCollins’ Indian Lives series, edited and curated by Ramachandra Guha. The portrait of King Ashoka, who ruled from 268-232 BCE, is aimed principally at the informed and curious public, says the biographer in his Preface. Calling him a unique and complex personality, Prof. Olivelle explores how a ruler in the third century before the Common Era wanted to practise a dharma that could bring — “or so he thought” — international conflicts to an end.
8. In Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right (1924-1977), published by Picador India, Abhishek Choudhary writes that the former Prime Minister remains “the most enigmatic Indian politician of recent times,” despite looming large on the political scene. For the Bharatiya Janata Party, Vajpayee was the “first authentic homegrown hero who was loved and respected by the masses.” Choudhary locates Vajpayee in the larger pantheon of Hindu nationalism; this part ends in 1977, and a second volume is in the works.
9. Vivekananda: The Philosopher of Freedom (Aleph) by Govind Krishnan V. argues that the best antidote to the Sangh Parivar’s appropriation of Vivekananda is for more people to read his work. Pointing out that Vivekananda was not a Hindu supremacist nor a “facile glorifier of Hinduism”, as the Sangh Parivar portrays him to be, the writer says Vivekananda’s thought stands in direct opposition to all the fundamentalist tenets of Hindutva. As a liberal and an individualist, Vivekananda pushed for universal religious tolerance.
10. Courting India by Nandini Das (Bloomsbury) won the British Academy Book Prize for Global Cultural Understanding for 2023. Her book retrieves Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the court of Jahangir, from the margins and puts him at the centre of the narrative. Roe arrived in India in 1616 at a time when a new king, James 1, was on the throne, and England had suffered “famine, plague, war and economic stagnation.” In contrast, the court Roe encountered in India was wealthy and cultured, and Das explores how the imperial seeds were sown, giving readers an understanding of Britain and early empire.
11. The Day I Became a Runner (HarperCollins) by Sohini Chattopadhyay is dedicated to athlete Santhi Soundarajan “who never stopped thinking of the track as her home.” She chronicles stories of women athletes, particularly runners, spanning the history of independent India. There’s Mary D’ Souza, Kamaljit Sandhu, P.T. Usha, Soundarajan and others who took up a sport which posed a more direct challenge to patriarchy.
12. It was while researching for the Ibis Trilogy (A Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke and Flood of Fire) that Amitav Ghosh began to take a deep interest in the history of relations between India and China and the colonial links. His Smoke and Ashes (HarperCollins) traces the impact of the opium trade on the region and the world, and how it influenced the past and the present. In the context of the tensions in Manipur, and asked if poppy is still relevant, he told The Hindu: “If anyone thinks that the importance of poppy is declining, they really need to be disillusioned. If anything, the power of poppy has been growing stronger and stronger... a lot of the Myanmar poppy planting has shifted very close to the Indian border.”
13. All the material in H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (HarperCollins) is based on interviews, says Kunal Purohit. During his travels, he found the genre thriving, with songs targeting everyone from Muslims to Pakistanis, from rival politicians to critics of Prime Minister Narendra Modi and the Bharatiya Janata Party. “While investigating it, an entire ecosystem unfolded before my eyes,” he writes in the Introduction. Songwriters, singers, musicians, studios and production houses were all involved “in the process of producing songs to further the ideals of Hindutva.”
14. Historian Charles Allen’s last book, Aryans: The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth (Hachette India), reassesses the contested histories and conflict that follow the Aryans. The book, released posthumously, was edited and completed by writer David Loyn, who says Allen drew on evidence from linguistics, archaeology, and genetics, to profile the Aryans, and is a cautionary tale against the use of history for divisive political ends.
15. In A Part Apart — The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar (Navayana), Ashok Gopal “aims to chart the evolution of Ambedkar’s thought, its core vision, and its relation to his life and work.” He argues that Ambedkar’s oeuvre was shaped by certain concerns and principles which need to be understood before one analyses and evaluates any one aspect of his thought, such as his views on democracy, minority rights, religion or Buddhism.
16. In the 1880s, a radical form of wedding took place in the Bombay Presidency, which did away with any kind of Brahmin priest. The moving force behind this reform was the Satyashodhak Samaj or the Truth Seeking Society established by social reformer Jotirao Phule in Poona in 1873 “to free the Shudra people from slavery to Brahmans...” There were back and forth legislations and post-independence too India was still grappling with the validity of a wedding without a Brahmin officiating at it. Manoj Mitta’s Caste Pride (Westland Books) traces the many legal and judicial battles on caste, a defining feature of India’s public life in many States including Tamil Nadu.
17. In her autobiography, Manjunath to B. Manjamma Jogathi — The Inspiring Life of a Transgender Folk Artist, (HarperCollins)co-written by journalist Harsha Bhat, traces her journey after she came out at 15 and was labelled a curse, beaten up and treated like a criminal. She sought solace in art, and learnt and performed Jogathi nritya, a folk art form of north Karnataka, performed by female devotees of goddess Yellamma. It gave her a new identity, and brought her recognition and respect.
18. In the 1980s, Hindustan Lever, a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch company Unilever, took over Chesebrough-Pond’s thermometer factory in Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu. With allegedly inadequate safety protocols in place, scores of workers began to fall ill over the following years, leading to deaths, after they were exposed to the toxic heavy metal, mercury. In March 2001, following an intrepid campaign by the local community. A former journalist and Greenpeace campaigner, Ameer Shahul, chronicles the fight against the corporate in his book, Heavy Metal: How a Global Corporation Poisoned Kodaikanal. (Pan Macmillan)
19. Neerja Chowdhury’s How Prime Ministers Decide (Aleph) explores the leadership of six Prime Ministers of India — Indira Gandhi, Rajiv Gandhi, Vishwanath Pratap Singh, P.V. Narasimha Rao, A.B. Vajpayee and Manmohan Singh — and the key decisions they took. The political journalist comes away with two broad takeaways. The first is that prime ministerial decision-making was often “ad hoc, in-the-moment”, with an eye on the immediate: firefighting, responding to a crisis, political exigencies. The second realisation, she writes, is that India is essentially a coalition – and should be ruled like a coalition, by consensus.
20. Fire on the Ganges by Radhika Iyengar (HarperCollins) documents the life of the Doms on the ghats of Banaras. “Their profession involves cremating the dead,” she writes, “and they are considered ‘untouchable’ by a majority of dominant-caste Hindus.” The Doms, therefore, are isolated and “unseen”, and she goes looking for them to find out about their everyday reality, their dreams and aspirations.
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
