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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
January saw a host of literary festivals in Kerala, Jaipur and Kolkata, and we bring a lowdown from JLF 2023 and the Kolkata Literary Meet; we had featured the Kerala festival last week. Reporting from the Jaipur Literary Fest, Radhika Santhanam writes that going beyond serious discussions about their books, writers found other ways to connect with bibliophiles at the 16 th edition of JLF this year. For instance, during her session on her novel The Book of Form and Emptiness, the American-Canadian writer Ruth Ozeki revealed a delightful anecdote behind her name – she had dated a Japanese man called Ozeki; they eventually broke up but she plucked his second name and attached it to her own. “It was liberating for her, she says, a person of mixed heritage who was struggling to belong somewhere, to have a Japanese-sounding name.” In Kolkata, the Literary Meet was held in the backdrop of the majestic Victoria Memorial and Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka couldn’t help wondering if some colonial ghosts were lurking around for the session on his book, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, about a dead war photographer trying to make sense of his afterlife in the backdrop of a civil war. Geetanjali Shree and Daisy Rockwell, the translator of Ret Samadhi ( Tomb of Sand), delighted the audience by reading out a portion from the crow assembly where the birds are free to express themselves in various dialects including Bhojpuri, Maithili, Avadhi and Braj. Amid these, there were sessions on rising majoritarianism in India and the threat to democracy. Laila Tyabji, founder-member and chairperson of Dastkar, said she felt “doubly Indian – because I was born Indian and my family chose to remain Indian [refusing to go to Pakistan after Independence].” She said to look at India in a majoritarian way is really a tragedy. The Colombian philosopher Oscar Guardiola Rivera said the message is very clear – the conversations must continue; “if we want to make ourselves strong against tyrants, we need to retake control of our history, our memory. We need to create shared spaces of togetherness.”
In books, we read about Jim Corbett, and talk to Katherine Rundell who has written a definitive biography of the poet John Donne and Rajeev Bhargava who has written essays on contemporary India.
Books of the week
In many of the essays in Between Hope and Despair (Bloomsbury), Rajeev Bhargava takes up a troubling contemporary event and by reflecting on it tries to clarify the meaning of ethical and moral concepts, what is good and bad, right and wrong. He also emphasises the significance of India’s constitutional values and the adverse consequences of undermining them. In an interview with Garimella Subramaniam, who took Prof. Bhargava’s class on political theory at Jawaharlal Nehru University, he explains why despite India’s collective ethical identity being under duress, there’s hope. “In each of these essays,” he says, “there is a clarification of the conceptual and normative structure of our key concepts of justice, freedom, equality and so forth, concepts that govern or ought to govern our collective life. And not just our public and political, but also our individual lives. There are about 20-25 out of 100 essays which are about interpersonal morality and ethics, not just about public and political morality.” For Bhargava, as a starting point, he wants to tell readers that they should examine and reflect on the Constitution and the basic structure of that ethic.
Pug marks of the tiger along a riverbed at the Corbett Tiger Reserve in Uttarakhand.
The Corbett Papers (Permanent Black), edited by Akshay Shah and Stephen Alter, collects the biographical, legal and contextual material of the life and career of Jim Corbett. It brings the man back to life and in doing so evokes the unique milieu that shaped him. Ever since the publication of Man-Eaters of Kumaon in 1944, its author, called ‘Carpet saab’ by locals, has passed from life to legend. In his review, Mahesh Rangarajan writes that Corbett’s death in Kenya a decade later did little to dim his appeal. Not only were his accounts of India gripping but ironically the person who pursued tigers and leopards that had lost fear of people and turned on them as prey stood out for his humility as much as his courage. “Nowhere is his deep affection for the land more evident than in the brief appeal on rural wildlife reprinted here. D.C. Kala did more than memorialise Corbett: he put him back into history as a local lad, later landlord, contractor, soldier and big game hunter, but till his departure for Kenya, very much a man of his place and day. This book reminds us how he is relevant to our time well.”
Spotlight
Katherine Rundell (right) in conversation with author Anna Keay at the Jaipur Literature Festival 2023.
Katherine Rundell switches between vastly different genres – she has written children’s books, books for adults, a biography of John Donne ( Super-Infinite: The Transformation of John Donne) which bagged the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction last year, and a book about endangered species ( The Golden Mole.) Asked how she wrote in a child’s voice for her children’s books and shifted to Donne who is known for his dark poems of death and despair, she said, “Donne had experiences no child should have and hopefully no child does. His knowledge of the dark was very great. He knew sorrow. But amidst that sorrow, he insisted on joy. And I think I took from him that joy and tried to put it in my children’s fiction.” Of the 22 species she has written about in The Golden Mole, her favourites are the pangolin because its beauty is breathtaking and because it’s one of the most trafficked and endangered animals in the world; the other is the golden mole; “it is remarkably evolved to live underground; it is the only iridescent mammal. But it can’t see. So, its beauty is invisible to itself.”
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- Nandini Vijayaraghavan explores India’s corporate history through the professional trajectories of four businessmen, Anil Ambani, Naresh Goyal, V.G. Siddhartha and Vijay Mallya, and finds takeaways for entrepreneurs, regulators, lenders and investors, in Unfinished Business (Penguin).
- Un/Common Schooling: Educational Experiments in Twentieth-Century India (Orient BlackSwan), edited by Janaki Nair, is a collection of writings by individuals who founded alternative schools in India, located mostly in remote villages, from the 1970s to the present that highlights the philosophies and rationale behind such schools.
- In The Hills are Burning (Fingerprint Publishing), Anirban Bhattacharya sets the coming-of-age novel against the backdrop of the Gorkhaland agitation of the 1980s in West Bengal. The story is told through three teenagers and throws light on the violence and human rights crimes that swept the State.
- The retelling of the life and times of a famed 500 BCE courtesan -- Ambapalli (Penguin) -- highlights how the young and talented dancer attempts to take control of her pre-determined destiny in the face of growing opposition.
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