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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The Women’s Fiction Prize for 2023 has gone to Barbara Kingsolver for her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Demon Copperhead, an adaptation of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. Set in a rural town of the Appalachian mountains, amid the burgeoning opioid crisis, the protagonist, Demon Copperhead, is born poor and is faced with challenges beyond his control. But he fights on, against all odds and unbelievable loss and tragedies, and it’s a testament to human endurance and the power of storytelling. “Literature is how we make our hearts grow bigger, and that’s how we change the world,” Kingsolver said, as she accepted the prize. This is the second time she has won the Women’s Fiction Prize, the first was for The Lacuna in 2010. In other news, the Elizabeth Longford Prize for Historical Biography, 2023 has been awarded to Ramachandra Guha for his book, Rebels Against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom (Penguin). It’s the story of seven white “renegades”, from Britain, America and Ireland, who adopted India’s struggle for independence and stayed true to higher, universal ideals. Of the seven, Annie Besant promoted the emancipation of women in a deeply patriarchal society and B.G. Horniman campaigned tirelessly for the freedom of the press. Read an excerpt here.
The literary world is mourning the loss of three American greats: writer Cormac McCarthy, editor Robert Gottlieb, and analyst Daniel Ellsberg who leaked a government study of the real situation on the ground during the Vietnam War, which came to be known as the Pentagon Papers, and changed the course of history. He wrote two books, Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers and The Doomsday Machine, which highlighted how close the U.S. and the U.S.S.R had come to a nuclear confrontation. As the U.S. and other NATO powers are drawn into the Ukraine invasion of Russia, his books are relevant for the times. As for McCarthy, 89, he wrote about misfits in society and people on the margins who are constantly having to fight to survive in his 12 genre-bending novels including Blood Meridian, Suttree, All the Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men and The Road. Gottlieb, who worked with Simon & Schuster and Alfred Knopf, edited hundreds of writers including Salman Rushdie, Ray Bradbury, Toni Morrison and others. His memoir, Avid Reader, provides a glimpse of his staggering bookshelf as also his work ethic. In an interview to The Paris Review, he had said, “Editing is simply the application of the common sense of any good reader. That’s why, to be an editor, you have to be a reader. It’s the number one qualification.”
This week, we talk to historian Romila Thapar about her book, The Future in the Past, and to Arati Kumar-Rao about Marginlands, in which she narrates stories of people who inhabit the most hostile corners of the subcontinent. We also review Guy Gunaratne’s new novel, Tsering Yangzom Lama’s tome on the Tibetan experience, a collection of texts banned by the British and more.
Books of the week
Romila Tapur | Photo Credit: The Hindu
Romila Thapar’s The Future in the Past: Essays & Reflections (Aleph) is a collection of essays on issues and ideas that have preoccupied her as a historian. In a conversation with Ziya Us Salam, Thapar explains how Hindutva politics seeks legitimacy from a supposedly Hindu past to the exclusion of others. Asked how she looks at the Hindutva approach to history, she said: “An approach to history usually involves a theory of explanation. This means gathering reliable evidence on the subject to be researched, which is then analysed, and a logical explanation sought for past events. None of this is required for the Hindutva approach to history which is largely the description of a past so constructed that it provides legitimacy for an ideology of present times. The purpose of Hindutva history is to maintain that the proposed Hindu Rashtra is the predictable outcome of the past of India. The focus is on the history of Hindus thought to be the most relevant compared to others. Contributions to the past came from varying sources, but for Hindutva only the past of Hindu communities is of any real consequence. For Hindutva, current politics should be conducive to bring about a Hindu Rashtra.”
Selected and introduced by Devika Sethi, Banned and Censored: What the British Raj Did Not Want Us to Read (Roli Books) revisits historical works which dominate present-day discourse on issues like sedition. Sethi notes that the collection of texts is “united by their patriotic sentiments, their sense of mission and by the fact of their all being banned”. Texts of ideological opposites like Gandhi, V.D. Savarkar, Jawaharlal Nehru, Subhas Chandra Bose among others are placed side by side. The book, divided into five parts, covers the period between 1900 and 1947 and deals with all hues of nationalist leaders. The reviewer, Sandeep Phukan, calls it an important and timely contribution to examining history with a fresh perspective.
Mister, Mister (Tinder Press) by Guy Gunaratne is a fast and furious ride through recent history, particularly the time before and after the 9/11 attacks. For the reviewer, Geeta Doctor, the novel is “part confessional, part interrogation as Yahya Bas, the orphaned Iraqi born in London to a dysfunctional family, plucks at the sleeve of his interlocutor, the Mister of the title, and cajoles and pleads with him as he unravels his life in what appears to be separate compartments.” The reader, she says, is both seduced by Yahya’s power and appalled at being led into a trap – “at times, it seems to advocate jihad as a career option.” Yet Gunaratne’s triumph, says Doctor, is in being an entertainer, in the Dickensian sense of the word, keeping things in ambiguity.
Review of Guy Gunaratne’s Mister, Mister
Tsering Yangzom Lama centres her novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies (Bloomsbury), around the Tibetan refugee experience, in which a Tibetan family in exile moves from place to place in search of permanence, but their hearts constantly ache for home. The title, says the reviewer Radhika Santhanam, is clearly inspired by the meaning that land holds for a people. She writes that the novel is equally about the appropriation of the Tibetan cause by the West and the ethics of the antiquities trade. “It is in these parts that the book shines.”
Review of Tsering Yangzom Lama’s We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies
Spotlight
In her travels across some of the most hostile environments of the subcontinent for her book Marginlands (Pan Macmillan), author, artist and photographer Arati Kumar-Rao exhausted her savings, but as she tells Divya Gandhi she likes to go back multiple times to the places she has visited so that she can “follow the lives of people I’ve come to know, who are intimately tied to those landscapes,” be it in Assam or Bengal or Rajasthan or Ladakh. “What becomes clear is that we seem to be systematically pushing large swathes of our society to the edge: a fallout of how we treat the land. In this age of the Anthropocene, with climate change upon us, the worst thing we can do is undermine the innate resilience of the land. Unfortunately, that is exactly what we end up doing.”
Interview with Arati Kumar-Rao, artist and author of Marginlands
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- From the changing character of nationalism to food habits, historian Joya Chatterji takes readers through the complex past of the subcontinent, weaving in her experiences and years of research in Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Viking/Penguin). She tells the story of India, Pakistan and Bangladesh and their historical signposts – British Raj, Independence, Partition, formation of a modern state – by picking overriding themes that have shaped each.
- Janet Malcolm’s Still Pictures: On Photography and Memory (Granta Books) turns her sharp eye on her own life, examining 12 family photographs to construct a memoir from camera-caught moments, each of which poses questions of its own. Malcolm, who wrote despatches for the New Yorker for decades turned to a narrative of herself in her final months. She passed away in June 2021.
- After the abolishing of the matrilineal system among the Nairs of Kerala, Gomathi tries to navigate her way through life as she and other women are left in a state of flux and uncertainty in Drop of the Last Cloud (Ukiyoto) by Sangeetha G.
- Belles-Lettres: Writings of Hijab Imtiaz Ali (Oxford University Press) edited by Sascha A. Akhtar is a collection of modernist Urdu writer, Hijab Ali’s set pieces. The book is written in a non-linear, fragmentary form, and offers contemplation on life, death and the nature of existence.
