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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The literary festival season is on us: Tata Literature Live! was held in November in Mumbai and there are literary meets in Ranchi, Kolkata and Bhubaneswar. Bengaluru held the 11th edition of the community-funded Bangalore Literature Festival recently and it saw bigger crowds, more enthusiasm and greater energy, writes Suresh Menon. Both the Booker Prize winners from the subcontinent, Geetanjali Shree for Tomb of Sand (Ret Samadhi) translated by Daisy Rockwell, and Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka (The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida), were in attendance. “Shree was a star at the show, even if few knew how this brave anti-establishment writers has been shunned in her native Uttar Pradesh,” says Menon, while “for many, the presence of Booker winner Shehan was reason enough to rejoice. He didn’t disappoint; his wit and gentle manners augmenting his brilliant prose.” Pico Iyer spoke about “why we travel”, even as his new book, The Half Known Life: In Search of Paradise, is released. The BLF was a sign of normality for Menon, accompanied by the comforting thought that there is enough citizen support, from the financial to the physical, to sustain it. The Jaipur Literature Festival is slated to be held from January 19-23, where a slew of writers from Nobel Literature laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah to the Booker winners are scheduled to attend.
In reviews, we read about the growth of China after the Tiananmen Square uprising, a book on the sherpas and their forgotten struggle to help mountaineers, and more. We also interview director Saaed Mirza on his memoir of his friend Kundan Shah, and pay tribute to ‘City of Joy’ writer Dominique Lapierre.
Books of the week
China watcher Vijay Gokhale profiles the post-Tiananmen ‘golden decades’, and explores the backdrop to Xi Jinping’s phenomenal rise to the top in his new book, After Tiananmen: The Rise of China (HarperCollins). In his review, Ajit Ranade writes that the rise of Xi and his subsequent consolidation and centralisation of power should be understood in the context of the decades preceding Xi’s coronation, and that is exactly what Gokhale has focused on. “The 20-year period chronicled in the book lies between the Tiananmen incident and the Global Financial Crisis which dented belief in U.S. capitalism. This can be called the post-Deng Xiaoping and pre-Xi period, when the key actors were Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. This was a glorious period of modern China, as Gokhale proves conclusively. Apart from living standards, it saw a dramatic improvement in infrastructure, research and education.” But this was also a period of the rise of various Princelings and the Shanghai Faction, which exposed the dark side of the Communist Party, the rampant corruption which ultimately led to a purge and the rise of Xi, says Ranade. “The full story of Xi’s reign, only second to Mao, is still unfolding, and we await Gokhale’s next book to recount it. Meanwhile, this book is an excellent chronicle and analysis of the intervening golden decades serving as a bridge from Mao, Deng to Xi.”
A bridge from Mao, Deng to Xi: Review of Vijay Gokhale’s ‘After Tiananmen: The Rise of China’
Climbers make their way to the summit of Mt. Everest.
Amidst all the climbers that throng to Nepal to scale the world’s highest peaks including Mount Everest, there exists a small community of mountain people at the foothills of the Himalayas. Sherpa: Stories of Life and Death from the Forgotten Guardians of Everest (Hachette) tell their story. It’s the story of Endeavour and survival at the roof of the world. It dives into their culture and tells of their existence at the edge of life and death. Written by An kit Babe Adhikari, a writer, social science researcher and musician, and Pradeep Bashyal, a journalist with the BBC based in Nepal, Sherpa traces their story pre- and post-mountaineering revolution, their evolution as climbing crusaders with previously unpublished stories from the most notable and incredible sherpas of the last 50 years including Tenzing Norgay. In her review, R. Krithika says the authors trace the development of the trekking industry in the Himalayas and how the community has used it to create opportunities for itself. But alongside success rides devastating loss. “Reading about Furdiki Sherpa and Nima Dorma Sherpa is particularly difficult. Both women lost their husbands to the mountain and decided to do the ascent together.” As the authors put it, “They know the mountains can kill, yet they partake in someone else’s dreams of standing on the roof of the world, driven by hopes and prospects of pursuing a better life for their families.”
Spotlight
Director Saeed Mirza has written a quizzically titled book, I Know the Psychology of Rats (Tulika Books), a memoir of his friend and well-known film and TV director Kundan Shah. He calls the book “a tribute to our friendship, to the most astonishingly wonderful guy that Kundan was.” In an interview with Ziya Us Salam, Mirza says the book contains the relationship between Kundan and him, “a beautiful relationship.” For Mirza, Kundan Shah, who made Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro and Wagle ki Duniya, had intensity about him like no other filmmaker. “I want this book to be accessible to everybody, to let everyone know the kind of genius Kundan was. Towards the end of his life, when he made films like P Se PM Tak, there were smirks that he had lost it. It was not quite true because he was dealing with a world that was turning more and more grotesque.” Mirza says the absurdity of Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro was rooted in reality. “Kundan felt it was not good enough but he struggled to find a form that could encompass what he felt innately.” Asked whether we have lost the art of satire, Mirza says, “We have lost the ability to laugh at ourselves. We take ourselves too seriously. We think we are a superior people and the world owes us a lot. It is a strange kind of arrogance.”
Director Saeed Mirza on his memoir of his friend Kundan Shah, and why a Nukkad may not work today
Dominique Lapierre before taking a boat to the Sundarbans on his visit to India in the late 80s. The author was involved in several philanthropic activities in the country.
Dominique Lapierre, whose books Freedom at Midnight, Is Paris Burning?, O Jerusalem, written with Larry Collins, and The City of Joy were all bestsellers, passed away on December 4. Paying tribute to the writer who kept returning to India, Geeta Doctor writes that Lapierre’s engagement with India started on his honeymoon travelling across the subcontinent with his young wife Aliette Spitzer in 1952. In 1985, he wrote The City of Joy, which is perhaps the more intensely personal and memorable book for Indians. Later, he married Dominique Conchon, who was his wife of 56 years, and they lived at Ramatuelle on the French Riviera. “She has the last word on the life of the man who advised all those he met to live an extra moment every day. ‘At 91, he died of old age,’ she told a French newspaper. ‘At peace and serene since Dominique is no longer suffering’.”
City of Joy author Dominique Lapierre’s tryst with India began on his honeymoon travelling across the subcontinent in 1952
Browser
- How did the dilution of Jammu and Kashmir’s status on August 5, 2019, impact the 1.4 crore people on the ground? In A Dismantled State: The Untold Story of Kashmir after Article 370 (HarperCollins), journalist Anuradha Bhasin chronicles the state of the Valley after the alteration, and how the revoking of Articles 370 and 35A have reshaped the region’s social, economic and political dynamic.
- Rajeev Bhargava’s new book, Between Hope and Despair (Bloomsbury), is a collection of essays that probes deeper into the meaning of India’s constitutional democracy and analyses whether various components of democratic machinery viz-a-viz the judiciary, executive and legislature are functioning within the ethical framework of India’s founding narrative.
- Bounded by dense Kodagu forests on the south and west, and rivers on the north and east, Perumbadi, at the border between Kerala and Karnataka, has hidden itself from the world. Its very isolation has attracted varied settlers from south Kerala over the years, as Vinoy Thomas writes in his Sahitya Akademi winning novel Puttu. Now, the English translation, Anthill (Vintage), by Nandakumar K. is out – it’s a story that questions moral codes that bind society.
- The Greatest Marathi Stories Ever Told (Aleph), selected and edited by Ashutosh Potdar, features established literary masters such as Gangadhar Gadgil, G. A. Kulkarni, Baburao Bagul, Kamal Desai, Vilas Sarang, Anna Bhau Sathe, Urmila Pawar, Jayant Narlikar, Hamid Dalwai, and others. The stories are melancholic, sarcastic, humorous, elegant, and experimental—together, they showcase the range, variety, and vibrancy of the Marathi short story and the famed Marathi literary tradition.
