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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. In the introduction to his new book, How China Sees India and the World (Juggernaut), Shyam Saran, former foreign secretary, writes that learning Mandarin in Hong Kong in 1971 soon after he joined the Indian Foreign Service opened “a whole new and fascinating world”. He came “face to face with a civilisation with a long and varied history, a philosophical and cultural heritage of enormous richness, and a view of the world quite distinct and indeed different from others. Saran spent six years in China in two stints and witnessed its “rapid and far-reaching transformation”. China is the world’s second largest economy after the U.S., and is already a leader in new-age technologies like artificial intelligence, quantum computing and space exploration. Saran explains why though both India and China were roughly at the same economic level once, India is now a “retreating image in China’s rear-view mirror.” In an excerpt, Saran says that in the aftermath of the global financial and economic crisis of 2008, the Chinese assessment is that the U.S. is a declining power, that its credibility is eroded and, importantly, that its will to exercise power has also diminished. “It is a power in retreat and, therefore, allies and partners of the U.S., the Chinese assert, cannot count on U.S. power to deter China. A narrative is being built on the inevitability of Chinese regional, and eventually global, dominance, which it would be futile to resist.”
In reviews, we read about the contribution of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis in moulding development and planning in the years after Independence through statistics, a collection of B.N. Goswamy’s art criticism, Nitin Sekar’s astute reflections on wildlife and the original dwellers of the forest, Rahman Abbas’s reading of Mumbai as a ‘protean beast’ and more.
Books of the week
In Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute and An Idea Shaped India (Viking/Penguin), Nikhil Menon profiles the early years of India’s planning and growth, which was inexorably tied to the legacy of Prasanta Chandra Mahalanobis and the Indian Statistical Institute (ISI), established and nourished by Mahalanobis. In his review, Atanu Biswas writes that the book depicts the epic journey of a charismatic professor of physics at Calcutta’s Presidency College who pioneered the study and practice of the discipline of statistics in India. The first three chapters portrays the story of a young Mahalanobis’ accidental meeting with ‘statistics’ due to a delayed ship journey to India from England, his lifelong courtship with the subject, how he slowly but steadily became a statistician and established the ISI, his tireless and bold leadership to develop and promote statistics and a survey culture in India, and nourishing a generation of excellent academics. The Professor, as he was called, instilled the idea of data-driven planning in a new nation, deeply assisted by the ISI.
In 2018, Rahman Abbas won the Sahitya Akademi award for his novel, Rohzin. It has now been translated into English by Sabika Abbas Naqvi and published by Vintage Books. In Abbas’s Mumbai, the city is a watery canvas floating the boat of first love and also a cesspool of emotional traumas. The story begins in Mabadmorpho, a coastal village where Asras has just finished high school. He decides to go to Mumbai to learn a trade. Living in ‘Jamat ki kholi’ along with other boys from the village, the teenager is introduced to the glitz, the stink and the contestations of identity that have defined Mumbai in recent decades. In her review, Annie Zaidi says that what makes the novel worthwhile is the interlacing of closely observed lives in contemporary Mumbai and the fantastical elements of the Urdu imaginary. “It recalls the trauma of the 1992-93 riots and subsequent bomb blasts, the custodial death of Khwaja Yunus in 2003, and even the terror attack of 2008…despite the novel’s occupation with sex and love, it never strays from the city’s socio-political wounds.”
‘Rohzin’ by Rahman Abbas, translated by Sabika Abbas Naqvi, reviewed by Annie Zaidi: Mumbai, a mood
In Conversations (Allen Lane), a collection of B.N. Goswamy’s columns, one senses the see-saw of a critic, that recursive balancing between loving and knowing. As the reviewer Prathyush Parasuraman says, “To love is to pay attention. To know is to expand attention. To be a critic is to uneasily slot yourself between the two.” The essays “are not academic, nor are they dense with information and insight… there is a casual quality to them, as if these were written in the peripheral vision of Goswamy’s primary occupations — teaching, writing monographs, researching with museums, planning exhibitions, preparing for lectures.” Like any conversation there are threads left loose, unfulfilled promises of circling back to a theme, and generous and inexact platitudes. “Then, there are mooney paragraphs, describing paintings — some of whom are printed in colour in the insert, sadly, in a pitiable blur — with forceful love, one that shows both his affection for art but also betrays a suspicion that few like him exist, and fewer still as we chug into a less discerning future of art and art criticism.”
Nitin Sekar’s What’s Left of the Jungle (Bloomsbury), is set in Buxa, which is a tiger reserve in West Bengal with barely any tigers. In her review, Neha Sinha says that beautiful passages recount coming upon scores of butterflies—but not tigers. People who live in the forest face the brunt of elephants who damage their crops, and occasionally face death because of human-elephant conflict. Should people leave the forest, or should they make further sacrifices for wild animals? “The answer, the book suggests, can only begin to be reached by involving local people, and by creating sensible links between the gram sabha and the forest department.”
Nitin Sekar’s What’s Left of the Jungle review: Rich reflections on wildlife
Spotlight
An Israeli Border Policeman checks a young Palestinian woman’s documents as she enters the city from the West Bank. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
In Reprise, a column on the classics, we turn to Suad Amiry’s Golda Slept Here (Women Unlimited), which traces the history of both Palestine and the émigré Palestinian community forced to live in other countries of West Asia and the world. Amiry, a well-known architect, uses poetry and prose as she maps the Palestinian landscape, recalling stories about individual members of Palestinian families, how some of them had to flee their homes in minutes as bullets flew past, the acute sense of loss and the never-ending struggle to come to terms with the present. In Remembering and Forgetting, she looks back to May 1948 when the British left Palestine and “all hell broke loose”. The poem called ‘May 4 of 1948’ records the moment: “They left behind two fighting peoples/One strengthened, the other weakened/ The new and mighty jubilated and went for more/’What is mine is mine and what is yours is also mine’.” When the fighting between Jews and Arabs intensified, the Amiry family had to escape to Ramallah and later to Amman. With a past irrevocably lost, Amiry and her cousins often walked to Jerusalem neighbourhoods for a glance of their old homes sometimes running into inhabitants who “screamed” at them to get out and threatened to or often called the police. One day they stumbled onto a villa where former Prime Minister of Israel Golda Meir lived, an Arab home called Villa Harun al-Rashid.
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- The Internet is not What you Think it is (Princeton University Press) by Justin E.H. Smith gives a picture of what the internet is, where it came from, and where it may be taking the world. Smith reveals how the internet’s organic structure roots it in the natural world and challenges efforts to draw an easy line between technology and nature.
- In February 2019, Harmony Siganporia walked from Dandi to Ahmedabad, retracing the route of Gandhi’s salt march in reverse. With the march as a setting, she explores the story of modern Gujarat, and investigates if anything remains of the salt march in its memory in Walking from Dandi: In Search of Vikas (OUP).
- In Kyung-Sook Shin’s Violets (W&N), translated by Anton Hur, rural South Korea and urban Seoul come together in the story of San as she negotiates thwarted desire, misogyny and erasure. It is a story about a woman’s search for autonomy and attachment in a patriarchal society.
- A monkey searches for the meaning of Brahma in Pebblemonkey (Jadavpur University Press), written by Manindra Gupta (Nuri Bandor) and translated by Arunava Sinha. Animals talk to each other and to humans as the monkey embarks on his existential journey.
