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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The 2022 International Booker Prize longlist has been announced, and for the first time in its history, a book of fiction in Hindi (Ret Samadhi/Tomb of Sand), by Geetanjali Shree and translated by Daisy Rockwell, finds place in it. Among the 12 other novels in the ‘Booker’s Dozen’ are old winners Olga Tokarczuk, David Grossman, Jennifer Croft and Jessica Cohen. The shortlist of six will be announced on April 7, and the winners of the Prize on May 26. In Tomb of Sand, the story revolves around an 80-year-old woman who suffers from depression after the death of her husband, but then recovers to embark on a journey to the past. She insists on travelling to Pakistan to confront unresolved conflicts of Partition. Her daughter, who considers herself to be a ‘modern’ woman, is taken by surprise at her mother’s determination and courage. Geetanjali Shree has written four other novels, including Mai (Mai: Silently Mother, translated by Nita Kumar, and Khali Jagah (That Empty Space, translated by Nivedita Menon) and two collections of short stories. She has also written a critique of Premchand, Between Two Worlds: An Intellectual Biography. Tomb of Sand like Mai explores the role of motherhood in a gender-driven and patriarchal society where women/mothers/daughters are expected to “behave” in a certain manner, and how despite the strictures women push boundaries. With translations opening up new worlds, it’s only a matter of time before India’s rich literature, in Tamil, Malayalam, Odiya, Assamese, Bengali, Marathi and other languages, are translated too and find a wider audience. After all, readers of the non-Latin American world discovered Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s works too in translation.
In reviews, we read about women and their lives, with Shah Rukh Khan’s films and the 1991 reforms as starting points, a new biography of Jayaprakash Narayan, Pankaj Mishra’s new novel and more.
Books of the week
In Shrayana Bhattacharya’s Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh (Harper) the watershed moment of the 1991 reforms serves as an anchor, as the author traces the rise of the Indian economy and the simultaneous arrival of Shah Rukh Khan as a superstar. The author wears her economist hat lightly, but combines hard economic data, such as falling female labour force participation rate, hidden taxes women pay and a whole host of metrics, with surveys and interviews to paint a picture of the state of women. What makes this work special is her ability to use heart-warming, everyday stories to provide a relatable view of complex economic phenomena, writes Suman Joshi in her review. “The book draws on her work of following the trajectories of a group of women across caste, religion and class groups over several years. It has a generous smattering of songs and dialogues from SRK’s movies, deploying his work as a literary tool to string together stories of women whose paths would otherwise never cross. The magical SRK touch adds to the readability and fun quotient of the book.”
‘The Dream of Revolution: A Biography of Jayaprakash Narayan’
Historian and diplomat, Bimal Prasad was a professor of South Asian Studies at JNU, Delhi. A close associate, Bimal Prasad tracked Jayaprakash Narayan’s life and career, especially the years that preceded his arrest and imprisonment during the Emergency. He passed away in 2015 after attempting a biography of JP. But Bimal Prasad’s daughter Sujata was able to finish the mission and the result is a beautiful, thoroughly researched volume on the movement that was Jayaprakash Narayan. The Dream of Revolution (Penguin) profiles a man who at one juncture in history was as popular as Mahatma Gandhi. In his review, Jinoy Jose P. says JP was a revolutionary, though his revolution didn’t take off as intended. “He still remains one of the most important corrective forces Indian politics has witnessed in recent history. The slogans JP raised, against nepotism, elitism, exclusionary politics, authoritarianism, and those in favour of people’s democracy, socialism, participatory rule, social audit of politics, continue to reverberate in Indian polity, even though their colour and character have changed in unrecognisable ways. Simply put, take any politician today, in any party, he will have a slice of JP in him.”
Pankaj Mishra’s new novel in two decades, Run and Hide (Juggernaut), is a memoir written by Arun, an IIT graduate who gave up corporate life to translate Hindi novels, and is addressed to Alia, an urban Muslim woman from a family of inherited wealth and liberal attitudes with whom he has recently had a relationship. In his review, Tabish Khair writes that the novel is not a pot-boiler full of corporate intrigue. The cut-throat competition, economic manipulation, political leverage and moral turpitude that envelope his fellow IIT alumni in the U.S., U.K., and India seem a world apart from the ruminative space of Arun’s narration. “Mishra,” says Khair, “is not interested in the institutional structures of power and privilege in aspiring neo-liberal societies, but in the distorting shadows they cast on personal spaces: between mother and son, between friends, between siblings, between lovers. This is a more troubling diagnosis than one that would have called for, say, a revolution.”
Spotlight
Author and poet R. Vatsala. | Photo Credit: Raghunathan S. R.
In the first of a new monthly column on women and writing, Woman of Letters, K. Srilata, a writer and independent scholar, talks about her mother, the almost 80-year-old Tamil writer Vatsala. She has written 200 poems in the last two years, “enough for a new collection”, writes Srilata as she reappraises her mother’s work. Vatsala had come late into writing, when she was in her late-40s, and after she had walked out of an abusive marriage with two-year-old Srilata. Her first poem, ‘Alamaram (Banyan)’ was composed on the heels of an All India Women’s Conference that she attended. Her first short story, ‘Veruppai Thandha Vinaadi’ hinges on a question that a woman in an abusive marriage asks: Just when did I start to hate my husband? The poet and novelist now leads a life of quiet reflection, “to the arrangement of words on a page, to the magic of making meaning.” She has also made peace with the fact that she faded from public view. But, says Srilata, “I can’t help being somewhat resentful on her behalf. How much of this invisibility, I wonder, is due to her gender?”
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- Not One Inch: America, Russia and the Making of Post-Cold War Stalemate by M.E. Sarotte (Yale University Press) is based on over a hundred interviews and on secret records of White House–Kremlin contacts. The book shows how the U.S. overcame Russian resistance in the 1990s to expand NATO. But it also reveals how Washington’s tactics undermined what could have become a lasting partnership.
- In Urban Housing, Livelihoods and Environmental Challenges in Emerging Economies (Orient BlackSwan), Rajesh Bhattacharya and Annapurna Shaw show how the rural–urban migration in developing countries has resulted in a growing informal sector. They highlight the impact of unchecked urbanisation through studies carried out in Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa and Thailand.
- The anthology, The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told (Aleph), selected and translated by Dasu Krishnamoorty and Tamrapami Dasu, includes a century of work by some of the finest writers of short fiction in Telugu. The storytellers range from masters such as Chalam, Kanuparthi Varalakshmamma to contemporary writers like Mohammed Khadeer Babu and Jajula Gowri.
- In S. Hussain Zaidi’s Zero Day (HarperCollins), the book begins with all traffic signals of Mumbai not working on a particular day. Shahwaz Ali Mirza, head of the Anti-Terrorism Squad, receives an email claiming it to be a Distributed Denial of Service attack. He and Vikrant Singh, IG Cybercrime, trawls the web for the hacker but then there’s a deadlier attack on the railways.
That is all for this week. We look forward to hearing from you, be it about this newsletter, our reading list, your literary queries or the book you are reading now. You can find us at www.thehindu.com/books and on Facebook and Twitter at @TheHinduBooks
