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As India celebrates 75 years of Independence, a slew of books explores its political, economic and cultural journey, trace how far we have come from the dark era of colonialism and try to understand what lies ahead in the face of difficult headwinds from a flagging economy, illiberalism to global health scares. Prolific and loved writer Ruskin Bond set the celebrations going with his book early in the year, A Little Book of India: Celebrating 75 Years of Independence. Pointing out that he had spent 85 of his 88 years in India, Bond records some of his memories and impressions of “this unique land – of its rivers and forests, literature and culture, sights, sounds and colours – an amalgamation of the physical and spiritual.”
Sanjaya Baru, journalist, writer and media adviser to Dr Manmohan Singh, takes stock of the Indian economy in his new book, Re-emerge, Reinvest, Re-engage. He introduces the ideas and events that have shaped economic policy through the years after Independence, and how India transformed it from a feudal largely agrarian economy to a modern, industrial and services-based one.
In her latest book, Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age, Shruti Kapila looks back at the formation of the Indian Republic and why violence played such an integral role in the founding of the nation. She argues that Hindutva is using the strong state to advance itself, to be the sole custodian of sovereignty.
Looking back, historian Ramachandra Guha profiles a group of people who chose to fight for the freedom of a country not their own. In Rebels against the Raj: Western Fighters for India’s Freedom, he tells the story of British fighters for India’s freedom, seven rebels as it were, the likes of Annie Besant, B.G. Horniman and Madeline Slade, later Mira Behn.
Justice Gautam Patel writes a searing manifesto for the bleak times, Undermining the Idea of India, in which he argues that the Internet and the judiciary must serve as beacons in this age of precarity.
In reviews, we read Shruti Kapila’s explosive book on ideas that shaped the birth of the Indian republic, a debut Malayalam novel in translation, exploring repression and resistance in the Western Ghats, a tale around the 1984 Sikh riots, Anthony Sattin’s joyride with nomads and more. We interview Kapila too; and actor-politician Kamal Haasan and writer Jeyamohan, whose new book, Stories of the True, has been released, exchange ideas on the intersection of literature and cinema.
Books of the week
In Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age (Penguin), Shruti Kapila argues that violence was not merely incidental, but integral to the founding of the nation. The violence that pulverised the heartland left the foreign master untouched, but wantonly drew the blood of the kin. In fact, violence and fraternity coexist and perhaps, one can only exist alongside the other, as the title suggests. What appears as a passing mention in the textbook version of Indian history, ‘partition violence,’ was indeed civil war, the author tells us. In his review, Varghese K. George writes that a pre-eminent thinker of the age, B.G. Tilak, anticipating the conservative German theorist, Carl Schmitt, considered the ability to raise the sword against kin as the ultimate political act. “B.R. Ambedkar saw the Hindu-Muslim strife as an ongoing civil war, and he, like Vallabhai Patel thought separation would bring peace and tranquillity. Partition was meant to be the end of strife, but as it turns out, 75 years later, India is pursuing under Hindutva the ‘unfinished agenda’ of Partition. Burrowing through the lives and thoughts of Tilak, Gandhi, Har Dayal and his band of Ghadaris, V.D. Savarkar, Mohammad Iqbal, and Vallabhai Patel, Kapila builds her argument on how violence and fraternity, unity and separation, interact in the search and assertion of sovereignty.”
Violence and fraternity in Indian political thought | The Hindu On Books podcast
Valli (HarperCollins) by Sheela Tomy, translated by Jayashree Kalathil, unravels in the agrarian idyll of Kalluvayal, a village buried deep inside the Western Ghats. Tomy’s debut novel takes in the verdant sights and birdsong and builds a story around migrants who made it their home and the real inhabitants of the land, the adivasis. In her review, Navamy Sudhish says that the novel, inextricably linked to the earth, transforms into a “brilliant discourse on social and environmental justice.” The writer, she says, introduces a compelling array of characters but the chief protagonist is the forest, a storehouse of mysteries and myths. “An excellent piece of eco-fiction, Valli, which means vine, a system of wages and earth in Malayalam, is replete with fervent portrayals of nature.” Valli also means a young girl and in the novel there are many women who “carry the wild rhythm of the forest in their souls.”
Into a green darkness: review of Sheela Tomy’s ‘Valli’
It will soon be 40 years of 1984, but the crucial events that unravelled after the attack on the Golden Temple, the assassination of Mrs. Indira Gandhi, culminating in the Sikh riots, still haunt the nation’s psyche. The Anatomy of Loss (Bloomsbury) by Arjun Raj Gaind is a dramatic tale of a grandfather and his grandson during the 1984 pogrom and it is also about survivor’s guilt. Ritika Kochhar writes in the review that all those who survived 1984 “are still to make our peace with it.” Gaind studied at SOAS in London and was almost recruited by youngsters trying to revive the idea of Khalistan (“the book is heavily anti-Khalistan,” says Kochhar), and the trauma hangs over everyone “like a miasma that is never to be let go off.”
1984, the year that changed everything: review of ‘The Anatomy of Loss’ by Arjun Raj Gaind
Anthony Sattin’s Nomads: The Wanderers Who Shaped Our World (Hachette) begins on a lyrical note as he travels through the Zagros Mountains of Iran along with the Bakhtiari tribe. In his conversations with members of the tribe, he hears not just about the varied knowledge their journeys had given them but also of “the challenges of being a herder in the 21st century”. This is a problem most nomadic communities across the world face. With land being scarce and wanted for so many other needs, they are being pushed to the edges and often forced to settle. In her review, R. Krithika writes that Sattin goes on a world tour, Mesopotamia, Egypt, Turkey, Persia, India, China, trying to convince his readers that the nomads were at the heart of most achievements. Sometimes, his arguments are stretched a bit thin, but Krithika finds the writing evocative. “Sattin ends his story where he began it: in the Zagros Mountains with the Bakhtiari. ‘Perhaps,’ says his friend Feredyun, ‘thoughts and ideas should always wander like sheep and goats, this way and that, now together, now apart’. It’s a fitting end to the book.”
Spotlight
In a freewheeling conversation, Kamal Haasan and Jeyamohan swap notes on literary influences, democracy, filmmaking and the aesthetics of language, the context being the launch of Jeyamohan’s newly translated collection, Stories of the True (Juggernaut) from the Tamil Aram. Asked by Kamal Haasan why he chose to fictionalize it, Jeyamohan says: “Around the time I turned 50, I felt like I had lost faith in idealism. In an attempt to regain my faith, I started writing about the idealists I had met until then. I wrote the story, ‘A Hundred Armchairs’, as an essay at first, but it did not work. For me, fiction was truer to the original spirit. An essay can only express an idea. It cannot express the spirit. So, I chose fiction.” Kamal Haasan responded that he made the film Hey Ram as a testimonial to his hero Gandhi [after he too seemed to be trying to regain his faith in ethics and high morality]. “He [Gandhi] is a hero for the both of us, isn’t he? He is an enduring testimonial for upright living.”
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- Tuhin A. Sinha and Ambalica’s The Great Tribal Warriors of Bharat (Rupa) honour unsung heroes, people of tribal communities who took the fight to the British. The book begins with Tilka Manjhi, who unleashed guerrilla warfare to combat the British, and includes Jaipal Singh Munda, one of the most nuanced speakers of the Constituent Assembly. These freedom fighters came from all parts of India, including the Northeast and the South, and from all tribes.
- Bombay Imagined: An Illustrated History of the Unbuilt City by architect Robert Stephens compiles all the unrealised projects that could have shaped the city, from an underground railway, reclamation plans to monsoon-regulating canals. He has also brought to light some figures from its past who deserve a better place in the canons of historical personages that shaped Bombay/Mumbai.
- After being out of print for over a decade, Jeet Thayil’s collection of poems, These Errors are Correct (Penguin), is back in a new avatar. A meditation on grief, the illustrated work takes readers through verses of tenderness and rage where time blurs into a continuous present.
- Ghosts are everywhere in a collection of nine stories by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhay. Translated by Devalina Mookerjee, Taranath Tantrik and Other Talesfrom the Supernatural (Speaking Tiger), the nine short stories blur the border between reality and the supernatural world.
