Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The countdown to The Hindu Lit Fest 2024, to be held in Chennai on January 26-27, has begun. The festival, writes Swati Daftuar in a preview, promises to provide a platform that encourages and nurtures the exchange of ideas, allowing participants and audience to engage consciously with the important questions of the day. “The Hindu Lit Fest ensures that it actively makes room for an experience that both fosters and champions, above all, ‘free speech, the highest ideals of democracy, and a pluralism of expression in the arts and literature’. As The Hindu Group Chairperson Nirmala Lakshman puts it, these are the ‘underlying core values that reflect the newspaper’s ethic’. They reflect the principles on which the festival, Dr. Lakshman’s brainchild, was founded in 2011.” From sessions on the global shift to hypernationalism to a discussion on countering viral falsehoods; from a conversation on Sangam poetry to the journey of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO); and from a panel on understanding the history of idol worship to another on the Indian economy, there’s food for thought on a wide range of subjects including politics and the economy, food, fashion and stand-up comedy. Panellists include Ramachandra Guha, Tarun Tahiliani, T.M. Krishna, Perumal Murugan, Manu Chandra, Cyrus Broacha, Kanan Gill, Sreenivasan Jain, Shashi Tharoor, Devdutt Pattanaik, Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Neerja Chowdhury, Anuja Chauhan and others.
In books of the week, we talk to historian A.R. Venkatachalapathy about his new book on V.O. Chidambaram Pillai and author Abdullah Khan (A Man from Motihari) on the role of politics and identity in his writing – both will be at The Hindu Lit Fest, 2024. We also read Raj Kamal Jha’s new novel, Aditya Sinha’s second book with ACP Mona Ramteke in attendance, Pranab Mukherjee’s daughter, Sharmistha Mukherjee’s memoir on her father, and more.
Books of the week
At The Hindu Lit Fest, historian A.R. Venkatachalapathy will be talking about his new book, Swadeshi Steam (Penguin), on the life and times of V.O. Chidambaram Pillai (or VOC as he was called), freedom fighter from Tamil Nadu, who took on the mercantile might of the British in the early 20th century by staring a shipping company. In an interview to Sushila Ravindranath, Venkatachalapathy says VOC was an audacious patriot who dreamed big, and yet he was not a man who blew his trumpet. “In whatever little he spoke or wrote about the great Swadeshi Steam Navigation Company that he launched in 1906, he underplays his role.” VOC, he says, was his childhood hero, and the absence of a good biography led him to start the research on him in 1981. “It has taken me over 40 years to research his life. It has shaped my vocation as a historian, my life as a social being and my conscience as an individual.”
Another speaker at the Hindu Lit Fest 2024, Abdullah Khan, spoke to Swati Daftuar about identity, desire and aspiration in his writing. His debut novel, Patna Blues (2018) and his latest, A Man from Motihari, tells stories of everyday characters in Indian society who are grappling with a host of issues. As it turns out, he shares his place of birth, Motihari in Bihar, with George Orwell, and since that discovery, the written word has remained Khan’s constant companion. Asked how much of what he writes is influenced by his own story, Khan says: “As a boy, I didn’t fully grasp the complexities of identity.... In my village, I was Pathan; in school, a Muslim. Beyond Bihar, a Bihari. These identities intrigued me. As I ventured into fiction writing, my reflections on identity seamlessly became woven into my stories.”
Raj Kamal Jha’s new novel, The Patient in Bed Number 12 (Hamish Hamilton), begins in the ICU ward of a corporate hospital. The unnamed narrator, who is sick, used to be a professor of Sanskrit, and is estranged from his only daughter, as she has married a Muslim man. In a few swift strokes, Jha makes clear his intent – this is a pandemic novel with a sharp gaze on society, and all its attendant realities: the condition in hospitals, the shortages, the excesses, the plight of migrants, the life of minorities. The head nurse, Sister Shiny, wants him to have his moment of reconciliation with his daughter, and she says the only way is to go on living and to do that the old man must look for a story every day. “...maybe some will get to see an old man from the hospital flying above, looking for a story.” Through his imagination, the immobile narrator peers into the lives of others through a series of interconnected chapters. In his review, Jaideep Unudurti writes: “Jha stuffs the proceedings with all the horrors of this age: there are references to the Akhlaq case, to love jihad, mob lynchings, fake news...” But, he writes, that the sprawling attempt to capture “Modi’s India” in fiction, “while well-intentioned, starves the narrative of oxygen.”
Aditya Sinha’s Death in the Deccan (HarperCollins) is set in Hyderabad, and ACP Mona Ramteke (her second appearance in a Sinha book after The CEO Who Lost His Head) is thrown into solving a whodunnit following the death of four people of a heart attack in the same place on the same day. In her review, R. Krithika writes that like Kalpana Swaminath’s Inspector Lalli and Harini Nagendra’s Kaveri Murthy, Mona Ramteke is another welcome addition to the female detectives club.
Spotlight
Man-made water storage devices were once a traditional part of Tamil Nadu’s hydro-cultural history, says Yuvan Aves, as he talks to Preeti Zachariah about his new book, Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary (Bloomsbury). “It was a way of living which was deeply in tune with the ecology,” he says, adding that amnesia about how water behaves is a key contributor to floods and water logging which are witnessed every time Chennai gets an extreme rain event. “When something as big as urban planning forgets this, it is a problem.” His book, says Zachariah, crisscrosses multiple urban landscapes—Urur Olcott Kuppam, the Kaliveli Estuary, Kovalam, Ennore, Pulicat, even the balcony in his Velachery home—over two years and three monsoons, taking the reader straight into the microcosms these landscapes hold and offering a sense of the writer’s own inner and outer world. “The word ‘intertidal’ refers to the zone which is uncovered at low tide and covered at high tide. The title is deeply metaphoric, evokes non-binariness,” he says of this innovative book, a medley of memoir, meditation, journal, commentary, information, observation and lived experience.
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- Vijay Gokhale’s Crosswinds: Nehru, Zhou and the Anglo-American Competition over China (Penguin) analyses how India formalised its China policy in the first decade after Independence amid competing American and British interests in the region. He looks at policy making in India during the time through four key events that shaped the Indo-Pacific order after the Second World War: the recognition to the newly established People’s Republic of China, the Geneva Conference in 1954 that was intended to end the Indo-China conflict, and the first two Taiwan strait crises in 1955 and 1958.
- Food Journeys (Zubaan), edited by Dolly Kikon and Joel Rodrigues, gathers poets, artists, writers and researchers who explore the diverse food and eating habits of the Northeast, and its impact on lives and society. In her Introduction, Kikon writes that the book celebrates food – think fermented bamboo shoots and delectable pork curries and much more -- from the Northeast and showcases how “deeply entangled fellowships of communities informs food cultures in significant ways.”
- A perfect New Year’s gift, Allie Esiri has edited A Poem for Every Day of the Year (Pan Macmillan), a collection of 366 poems, as 2024 is a leap year. There are familiar voices from T.S. Eliot and William Shakespeare, to Seamus Heaney and Carol Ann Duffy and many others. There’s an introductory note about the poet – and poem. January 9’s is George Herbert’s The Pulley, which narrates the story of god creating humans. God gives all of his gifts to man – strength, beauty, wisdom, honour, pleasure – except one: rest. “Let him be rich and weary, that at least,/If goodness lead him not, yet weariness/May toss him to my breast.”
- Maria Just Maria (Harper Perennial) by Sandhya Mary, translated into English from the Malayalam by Jayasree Kalathil, tells the story of Maria who has stopped speaking by choice after her grandfather’s death. She is put into a mental hospital, where she begins to reconnect with reality, and in the process shares her life story: her birth in a Syrian Christian family and the influence of her grandfather on her life and why the loss seems impossible to bear.
