The Hindu on Books | Honour for Nandini Das, Perumal Murugan’s stories, relevance of Buddhism, and more

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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. Last week, Nandini Das was named the winner of the 2023 British Academy Book Prize for Global Understanding for her debut work of non-fiction, Courting India: England, Mughal India and the Origins of Empire. She tells the story of the origins of Empire though the arrival of the first English ambassador in India, Sir Thomas Roe, in the early 17th century to the court of Jahangir. Professor Charles Tripp, chair of the prize jury, said: “By using contemporary sources by Indian and British political figures, officials and merchants she has given the story an unparalleled immediacy that brings to life these early encounters and the misunderstandings that sometimes threatened to wreck the whole endeavour. At the same time, she grants us a privileged vantage point from which we can appreciate how a measure of mutual understanding did begin to emerge, even though it was vulnerable to the ups and downs of Mughal politics and to the restless ambitions of the British.” Read the review by historian Parvati Sharma here.

In other news, Kozhikode became one of the two latest entrants into the Unesco Creative Cities Network from India by getting the City of Literature tag on World Cities Day last week. Gwalior in Madhya Pradesh has got the City of Music label. The first to hold the title in the country, Kozhikode decided to work for the City of Literature tag in 2022 based on a proposal by the Kerala Institute of Local Administration. The Kozhikode Corporation sprang into action as soon as the idea was proposed, getting in touch with the University of Prague in the Czech Republic, seeking help with the preparations, as Prague was the first city to get the tag in 2014. The city has more than 500 libraries and over 70 publishers, and it is also the permanent venue for the annual Kerala Literature Festival.

In reviews, we read a comprehensive account of opposition politics post-Independence, two translations of Perumal Murugan’s books, and a roundup of Palestinian writers who have chronicled life under occupation. We also speak to journalist Lindsay Pereira about his new book and to Douglas Ober on the contemporary relevance of the Buddha.

Books of the week

Aditya Balasubramanian’s new book, Toward a Free Economy: Swatantra and Opposition Politics in Democratic India (Princeton University Press), explores the role of opposition politics in India’s early post-Independence times. He tells the story through personalities like the Swatantra Party’s C. Rajagopalachari from Madras, Minoo Masani from Bombay, N.C. Ranga from Andhra Pradesh and institutions like the Libertarian Social Institute of the Lotvalas, Forum of Free Enterprise by A.D. Shroff; academics like B.R. Shenoy and publications like ‘The Indian Libertarian’ and so forth. In his review, Kumar Anand writes that these fellow travellers with unique origin stories may have occasionally crossed paths and collaborated even with differing motivations, but each were part of the larger opposition politics that tried to present an alternative to Indian voters, readers and thinkers alike. “It is by painting this big picture without missing the smaller details that Balasubramanian’s work adds value to the available research.”

Perumal Murugan fans have a treat with two new translated works – one a novel (Fire Bird, translated by Janani Kannan/Penguin) and another a short story collection, Sandalwood Soap and Other Stories, translated by Kavitha Muralidharan/Juggernaut). Fire Bird has been shortlisted for the JCB Fiction Prize, the winner of which will be announced later this month. The reviewer, Ramya Kannan, says the works convey a Perumal Murugan voice, a quintessential western Tamil Nadu sensibility, both recognisable anywhere, without any introduction, but time and again, content transcends form, and the quotidian rises to be universal. “If sentience blesses his work with the regional connect, then his sharp consciousness gives it the larger, metaphysical frame. Ingrained in his work are the concepts of caste, discrimination, class, the gender question and the meaning of life.

Douglas Ober’s Dust on the Throne: The Search for Buddhism in Modern India (Navayana), which was shortlisted for the $75,000 Cundill History Prize 2023, offers a new perspective on the history and revival of Buddhism in India. In an interview to Sudhirendar Sharma, Ober says that the Buddha was a master teacher who catered his message for different audiences – “different strokes for different folks.” The suttas reveal, he says, that the Buddha was a critic of certain types of priestcraft and societal constraints. “But the prevalence of ritual practice and animist cults evidenced among even the earliest Buddhist communities suggests that reason and rationality coincided with the ethereal and mystical.” Ober says it’s remarkable that there are 8 million Buddhists in India today – and that India’s Buddhist heritage has played a critical role in its foreign diplomacy.

In his second book, The Memoirs of Valmiki Rao (Penguin), Lindsay Pereira revisits both the Ramayana and the riots that tore Mumbai apart in 1992-93 after the serial blasts, combining myth and reality to write fiction which raises questions of morality and hypocrisy, faith and hate. In an interview to Swati Daftuar, he says over the past decade or so, there is this hyper-religious sense of where India is going. “We are a god-fearing nation, but I wanted to ask myself, what if the gods and goddesses were to arrive in this so-called spiritual nation? How would we treat them? That’s where the novel began. I also wanted to write about the riots, because they were a very important part of my life when I was growing up in the city.” He says he began his novel with politics and tried to skirt around the issue but “I can’t deny the fact that everything about the novel is political.”

Spotlight

The West Bank and Gaza have seen repeated violence over the years over the question of state and a Palestinian identity. As Israel continues its assault on Gaza after the Hamas attack in early October, we bring you a collection of books by writers who have faced up to the long conflict by documenting experiences of dispossession, exile and restriction. After decades of failure in peace-making efforts, they also wonder what it will take for the strife to end. From Adania Shibli (Minor Detail) to Nathan Thrall (The Only Language They Understand: Forcing Compromise in Israel and Palestine) to Mourid Barghouti (I saw Ramallah), the writers try to make sense of the conflict and its aftermath.

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• M.J. Akbar argues that Gandhi’s freedom movement was fought on the back of three pivotal movements across two decades in Gandhi: A Life in Three Campaigns (Bloomsbury): the non-cooperation movement, the Dandi march and the 1942 Quit India call.
• Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine (Hachette) tells the story of the Luddites in rural England who rose up rather than starve at the hands of factory owners who were using automated machines to erase their livelihoods. In the time of AI and impending changes, Merchant asks how new tech will change the way we live.
•  In Sigrid Nunez’s The Vulnerables (Virago), a solitary female narrator meditates on what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history. Along the way, she encounters an adrift Gen Z member and a parrot named Eureka, punctuating the search for understanding.
• Mamang Dai’s selection of poems, The White Shirts of Summer (Speaking Tiger), talks of rivers, forests and mountains, with nature treated as both mysterious as well as dense with sacred memory. But underneath lurks a sinister undertone, of “guns and gulls” and the “footfall of soldiers.”