The Hindu on Books | Celebrating Pride Month, Gita Ramaswamy’s political memoir and more Premium

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. 

In August 2020, Mark Gevisser released his book,  The Pink Line (HarperCollins), which follows protagonists from nine countries in the world, including India, to tell the story of how LGBT rights has become one of the world’s new human rights frontiers. His first trip was to India, in 2012, when though Article 377 was still on the books, he discovered that the campaign to get homosexuality decriminalised had changed society in many ways. He recalls interacting with “LGBT affinity groups”, going to Pride marches and encountering gay characters in the Indian entertainment industry, all “a marker of modernity, of being part of the global village.” Gevisser returned to India several times and tracked the way the debate has shifted to transgender rights. He begins the book in India, and ends it there too: “by telling the story of an amazing group of third-gender  Kothis in a Tamil Nadu fishing village – struggling to be true to themselves while also staying within their families and communities.” But as Gevisser and other chroniclers of gender rights have written, while same-sex marriage and gender transition are now celebrated in some parts of the world, laws to criminalise homosexuality and gender non-conformity have been strengthened in others. This makes it a great opportunity to read diverse books, both fiction and non-fiction, on issues of sexuality and gender identity all through Pride Month, and right round the year too. Look out for anything by Vietnamese-American poet and writer Ocean Vuong ( On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous) or Mary Renault ( The Persian Boy); the Booker Prize winner Douglas Stuart’s poignant autobiographical fiction ( Shuggie Bain and  Young Mungo) to name just a handful. Penguin released the memoirs of filmmaker Onir this month,  I am Onir and I am Gay, whose directorial debut  My Brother Nikhil broke new ground in LGBT representation in films. Aniruddha Mahale’s  Get Out: The Gay Man’s Guide to Coming Out and Going Out (Harper) is also releasing this week – it charts the long journey for gay men in India. 

In reviews, we read Gita Ramaswamy’s political memoir, a pair of graphic tales which provide a sharp commentary on the times, two Tamil classics made accessible to a wider readership thanks to superb translations and more.

Books of the week

Gita Ramaswamy’s  Land Guns Caste Woman (Navayana) is the story of a Tamil Brahmin woman who tries hard to shed the privileges of her caste and rebels against its oppressiveness throughout her life. It is the story of an educated middle-class intellectual who is absorbed into the Naxalite movement during the Emergency, only to eventually discover that the “possibility of democratic functioning in a party so deeply hierarchical was bleak.” In her review, Meena Kandasamy says it is the story of an empowered woman deeply uncomfortable with 1980s feminist groups’ blinkered, Anglo-centric approaches. “But at the core of the book is the most important story of them all: her decade-long association with the historic and successful wage struggle led by the landless Dalits of Ibrahimpatnam.” Kandasamy writes that the memoir “shies away from any trace of docility; it is a fierce critique of what is wrong with the Indian Left, what ails the judiciary and why the poor cannot get justice. It is a celebration of how grassroots organisation and struggle can shift the status quo. Engaging with her work, reflecting upon these histories shall also provide the necessary course correction for resistance politics today.”   

Gita Ramaswamy’s  Land Guns Caste Woman review: The voice of a revolutionary

Two recently released volumes –  Longform 2022: A Collection of Graphic Stories, edited by Pinaki De, Debkumar Mitra, Sarbajit Sen and Sekhar Mukherjee (Penguin) and  Panchali: The Game of Dice, by Sibaji Bandyopadhyay, illustrated by Sankha Banerjee (Penguin) – deliver a sharp comment on the times though the stories they tell are vastly different. In his review, Jaideep Unudurti says  Panchali, an adaptation of the  Mahabharata, abounds with visual inventiveness, like a jewel encrusted foot descending down the length of a page or rhinos fleeing a burning forest. The graphic stories in  Longform 2022 take into consideration the pandemic trauma of the last two years, but the editors point out in the introduction that these are also “times when artists bring out their best.” Contemporary upheavals inspire a “rich tapestry” of graphic narratives by artists and writers from India and abroad in  Longform 2022.  

Review of  Panchali: The Game of Dice &  Longform 2022: Picturing the apocalypse

Kalki’s  Parthiban Kanavu, published in the 1940s and considered to be one of the earliest historical novels in Tamil, has been translated into English by Nandini Vijayaraghavan ( Parthiban’s Dream, Ratna Books).  Meeran’s Stories (Ratna Books), by Thoppil Mohammed Meeran, translated by Prabha Sridevan, is a contemporary classic. Both are now accessible to a wider audience thanks to superb translations, says the reviewer Hema Ramanathan. While  Parthiban’s Dream is a swashbuckling story of a young prince keeping alive his father’s dream of establishing a glorious kingdom, the 18 short stories in  Meeran’s Stories have been selected from across three anthologies and showcase the Sahitya Akademi award winner’s range and sensitivity. These two books, says the reviewer, are must-reads. 

Review of  Parthiban’s Dream &  Meeran’s Stories: The prince and the paupers

Spotlight

Moshe Bar | Photo Credit: R Rajesh

In his latest book,  Mindwandering: How it Can Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity, Moshe Bar, an award-winning neuroscientist, writes about the unfocused mind.  In an interview with Divya Gandhi, he says that not everything that is familiar should be put aside and that the noisy brain can be harnessed to improve creative thinking. “Some things, like the stories your daughter brings from kindergarten, or a beautiful flower, deserve our full attention afresh in every encounter.” Asked if there are evolutionary benefits to mindwandering, he says, “Yes. Simply put, there is good mindwandering and there is bad mindwandering. I strongly recommend stretches of free mindwandering, without the guilt that modern society has associated with it so often. Mindwandering can be a total waste of time, or it can be a fountain of creativity and exploration, and it all depends on our state of mind.” 

Neuroscientist Moshe Bar’s new book discusses how we can harness our noisy and unfocused brain

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• Rajiv Dogra, a former ambassador, takes readers on a journey across the world’s future battlefields and makes a geopolitical case about the major powers and their choices. He examines issues like whether a nuclear war is imminent or if there will be many small battles before a big war in  Wartime: The World in Danger  (Rupa). 
• At a time when trust and truth are hard to come by and public figures blatantly deceive us by abusing what sounds like evidence, Frederick Shauer, a legal theorist, proposes correctives, drawing on centuries of inquiry into the nature of evidence in  The Proof: Uses of Evidence in Law, Politics and Everything Else (Harvard University Press/Harper). 
• In over 15 fascinating stories,  The King who Turned into a Serpent and Other Thrilling Tales from Indian Mythology (Hachette) by Sudha Madhavan takes young readers to kingdoms, courts, palaces and battlefields of the glorious royals who shaped our epics and legends. 
• Gurdev is part of a group of refugees who travel east from Pakistan after Partition in Priya Hajela’s  Ladies’ Tailor (Harper). Like everyone around him, he struggles to survive in a world where so much has changed. Will Gurdev be successful in his new business of making garments for women?