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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
Last week, The Guardian reported that Hanif Kureishi is writing a memoir on his accident that left him paralysed last year. Shattered will be published by Hamish Hamilton, an imprint of Penguin Random House, next year and it expands on the tweet threads and blogposts (‘The Kureishi Chronicles’) he has been dictating to his family ever since his fall, and the material he has put out on Substack. Soon after spinal surgery following the fall, he took to social media to announce, via his son, that he may never be able to walk or use a pen again. Simon Prosser of Hamish Hamilton told The Bookseller: “…these compelling reflections on his situation, on writing and on life, composed with fearless honesty, insight and humour, have moved and fascinated readers around the world… I believe that the ultimate arc of this book will be one of recuperation.” Zadie Smith says she owes a lot, personally and professionally to Kureishi’s debut novel The Buddha of Suburbia, to his account of the strange relationship that can exist between first generation immigrants and their children. In an essay (British Library), Smith recalls the father of Karim, the protagonist, saying “We’re growing up together, we are,” and writes, “The child is trying to find his way through adolescence; the father is trying to find his way through a country. These two events are happening simultaneously. You’re growing up together. What a beautiful, painful way to put it.” Kureishi has penned several novels and screenplays including the Oscar-winning My Beautiful Laundrette which he co-wrote with Stephen Frears.
In other news, Ruskin Bond, one of India’s most loved writers, will be out with another new book, The Golden Years (HarperCollins). To be launched on his birthday, May 19, as he turns 89, Bond says his contentment with living the life he has chosen – keeping to himself, with his family and his books, in Landour – has only grown stronger. In simple, lyrical, witty prose, Bond tells readers how to enjoy the advancing years “some of us are blessed with, and how to make the most of the joys of life.”
In reviews, we read an extract from Manoj Mitta’s new book on the legislative and judicial fight against caste, a biography of Maulana Azad, Abhinav Chandrachud’s book on reservations and a special edition on Sachin Tendulkar as he turns 50. We also profile the Hindi novelist and poet, Vinod Kumar Shukla, who has been awarded the PEN/Nabokov prize for 2023.
Books of the Week
‘The catalyst for social change in Madras was the Self-Respect Movement led by Dravidian icon E.V. Ramasamy or Periyar.’ | Photo Credit: The Hindu Photo Archives
In Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India (Context), Manoj Mitta looks at caste through the legislative and judicial lens. In this extract, he looks at one such battle for self-respect that took place in Madras in the 1950s. It all began in the 1880s, when 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. “The catalyst for social change in Madras was the Self-Respect Movement led by Dravidian icon E.V. Ramasamy or Periyar,” writes Mitta. “The question of whether a Hindu wedding could be valid without a purohit (priest) and his Brahmanical rituals was addressed for the first time by the Madras High Court in 1953. In its judgment on suyamariyadai or self-respect form of marriage, the overall signal was that the Shudras were required to maintain the semblance of a Hindu wedding even if only as a poor imitation of the ways of their social superiors. As the judgment nullified all marriages that had been conducted in this fashion, it caused much consternation among the Self-Respectors in Madras state.” The government led by chief minister, C. Rajagopalachari, drafted a bill in response to the High Court verdict on marriage. But it would take till 1967 for the Annadurai government to incorporate ‘suyamariyadai’ in the Hindu law.
An extract from Manoj Mitta’s Caste Pride: Fight for self-respect
Facsimile of a 15 paise special postage stamp released on November 11, 1966, in honour of the memory of Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, who was Congress President and Union Education Minister. | Photo Credit: The Hindu Photo Archives
S. Irfan Habib’s Maulana Azad: A Life (Aleph) chronicles Azad’s sacrifices for the cause of a united India, and highlights the continued relevance of his iconoclastic views on religion and politics. Azad (1888-1958) was home-schooled, and began work on his Persian dictionary at the age of 9, completed his early education by 12, began writing columns and edited a monthly before he was 15 and became the youngest president of the Indian National Congress at 35. Azad’s birth anniversary (November 11) is celebrated as National Education Day, yet, a revised Class 11 political science textbook published by the National Council for Educational Research and Training has deleted mentions of Azad. The reviewer, A. Faizur Rahman, says Azad identified himself more with the liberalism of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan than with his father’s clerical puritanism which he found intolerable. In his view, “The perpetrators of oppression have always availed of the services of the ulema who are more than willing to serve the state.” To oppose Muhammad Ali Jinnah’s two-nation theory, Azad advocated the idea of composite nationalism (muttahida qaumiyat) arguing that Hindus and Muslims were part of the same nation, and therefore, dividing India on the basis of religion would be an act of sheer folly. “His brutal honesty tells us why the free-thinking Mohinuddin Ahmad renamed himself Abul Kalam Azad (the liberated father of discourse). It was to announce his liberation from the narrow perspectives of the religion and politics of that period, and speak his mind as the father of discourse without fear or favour.”
The students of Delhi University holding a protest against the police for attacking students during an anti-Mandal Commission agitation, in New Delhi in 1992. | Photo Credit: Sandeep Saxena
In These Seats Are Reserved: Caste, Quotas and the Constitution of India (Penguin), Abhinav Chandrachud lays bare the philosophical, jurisprudential, and political foundations for reservations in India. Chandrachud, a lawyer, begins with the history behind quotas, which has its origins in British India, and takes readers through different constitutional developments, from amendments to judgments of the Supreme Court, to findings of commissions, in particular the Kalelkar Commission and Mandal Commission, and to the most recent development, the introduction of reservation for the economically weaker sections of society. In his review, Suhrith Parthasarathy says India’s jurisprudence on affirmative action and reservations can sometimes appear to be a veritable maze, and Chandrachud, through his admirable narration, reveals the nitty-gritties of the system and how it functions on the ground.
File photo of Sachin Tendulkar | Photo Credit: PTI
Sachin Tendulkar turned 50 on April 24, and remains an eternal favourite in the cricketing globe. For years he helmed India’s hopes, while the stands echoed with chants of ‘Sachin, Sachin’. In Sachin @50 (Simon&Schuster), Boria Majumdar showcases a clutch of articles from Tendulkar’s inner-circle to the larger world featuring team-mates, rivals and established writers like Gideon Haigh. In his review, K.C. Vijaya Kumar writes that fittingly it is bookended by features from his wife Anjali Tendulkar and elder brother Ajit Tendulkar. From Sunil Gavaskar to Amitabh Bachchan, Sourav Ganguly to Sania Mirza, leading lights from sport and the arts besides the common man as epitomised by the forever fan Sudhir Gautam, have all penned their thoughts. “It offers us different nuggets that defined Tendulkar’s personality. Everyone has seen him play but not all know him personally and this book tries to bridge that gap…The ‘lil fella’ who impressed Sir Donald Bradman is now 50 and while the mists of time race past, Tendulkar’s fandom has a certain permanence.”
Book review of Boria Majumdar’s ‘Sachin @50: celebrating a maestro’
Spotlight
From poetry to short story to novel, Vinod Kumar Shukla is one writer who navigates all genres with equal panache. | Photo Credit: Shashwat Gopal
This year’s PEN/Nabokov Award winner is the Hindi poet and writer, Vinod Kumar Shukla, who has created a rich literary universe, navigating across all genres with equal panache, and arriving with a voice fully formed. In his profile, writer and journalist Ashutosh Bhardwaj says that soon after Shukla’s earliest poems stunned the Hindi world with their novelty and precision, his debut novel, Naukar Ki Kameez (The Servant’s Shirt) awed the two great masters of modern Indian literature, Nirmal Verma and Krishna Baldev Vaid. Having published three novels, several poetry and short story collections, he has of late ventured into children’s literature. Bhardwaj writes that Shukla is often accused to not addressing contemporary topics in his works. “He may not have written newspaper op-eds or issued political statements, but his art firmly stands with the victim.” At one point, he told Bhardwaj, “The citizen has never felt so lonely since Independence.” Naukar Ki Kameez is a poignant and haunting account of the cruelties an ordinary human being is subjected to.
Vinod Kumar Shukla: quiet champion of the Hindi heartland
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- Ecological Entanglements (Orient BlackSwan), edited by Ambika Aiyadurai, Arka Chattopadhyay and Nishaant Choksi, calls for new ways to apprehend the ecological crisis by formulating a framework that integrates the social, material and cultural dimensions of ecology. The essays cover a wide range of disciplines and questions from human-nonhuman interactions, linguistics, caste, histories and ethics to literature.
- In Work 3.0 (Penguin), Avik Chanda and Siddhartha Bandyopadhyay look at the worker, workplace and work itself of the future. With research supplemented by industry reports, business case studies, interviews and anecdotes, the writers weigh in on how to prepare for work in future at a time of uncertainty in both global politics and economics, when predicting anything is difficult.
- In Bulgarian writer Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (Hachette), translated by Angela Rodel, and enigmatic flaneur named Gaustine opens a ‘clinic for the past’ that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. But as healthy patients too seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’ to escape from the horrors of the present, things take an unexpected turn. It has been shortlisted for the International Booker Prize for 2023.
- Purushottam Agrawal’s 2016 book, NaCoHuS: A Novel (Speaking Tiger) has been translated to English by Noor Zaheer and Ritambhara Agrawal. It is a cautionary tale of a splintering nation at the mercy of a dangerously powerful government. In alternatingly comical and evocative prose, it brings readers face to face with a dystopia that lies not in some distant future but may already be here.
