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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
In a poll in the U.K. in 2007 to find the greatest love story, readers picked Emily Brontë’s devastating tale Wuthering Heights (1847) about the cursed affair between Cathy Earnshaw and the enigmatic antihero Heathcliff over Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813) and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (1597).
The other books to make the top ten list were Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind (1936), Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient (1992), Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier (1938), Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957), D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928) and Thomas Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd (1874).
The fact that all these stories — as also Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby or Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy — are still being read, adapted and referenced, point at the enduring power of classics on love and all its hues.
Arshia Sattar, renowned for translating The Ramayana into English, traces Rama’s predicament in her 2011 book Lost Loves: Exploring Rama’s Anguish. She approaches Rama as a literary character who is struggling to come to terms with the hand that life has dealt him. In this, she stays close to Valmiki’s subtly nuanced portrait of an exiled prince, Rama, who loses not only his birthright but his beloved, Sita, as well.
Treading on terra firma, Like Fine Wine (Roli Books/2023) brings to life nine “real, rare love stories”. Syeda Bilgrami Imam writes in the preface that what gave rise to the book was a request from a publisher friend for a monograph on Sir Ali, law member of the Viceroy’s Executive Council in British-ruled India as also Prime Minister of the State of Hyderabad, and Lady Imam and their “fateful discovery” of each other in 1918. Other stories followed to make up the collection – that of Sharmila Tagore and Tiger Pataudi; Yasho Karan Singh and Dr Karan Singh; Leila and David Lean; Meera and Muzaffar Ali and Aruna and Viswanathan Anand. “More and more, a symbiosis in pledged unions seems rare, elusive, too seldom real or lasting. Catching glimpses of a few unusually dovetailed ones, whether designed by accident or otherwise, may well spur more to occur,” she writes.
Happy Valentine’s Day reading to all!
In reviews this week, we read a history of Delhi in the time of change after the Great Revolt of 1857, a book tracing the rise of communalism, another which takes stock of India’s security preparedness and more. We also talk to Ruth Ozeki, who won the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2022 for The Book of Form and Emptiness.
Books of the week
Delhi, India, c1860. As seen from the palace gate. The Indian Rebellion of 1857 began in the town of Meerut and soon erupted into other mutinies and civilian rebellions across many regions of Company-ruled north-central India. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
The Broken Script (Speaking Tiger) is a luminous account of a tumultuous period in the history of Delhi – from 1803 to shortly after the Great Revolt of 1857 – when the city was under the sway of the East India Company.
Liddle catches two worlds that were fusing and merging; the old Mughal order had still not fully disintegrated and the new colonial enterprise was waiting to take shape in all its brutality and majesty.
Delhi, and by extension large swathes of Hindustan, were still ruled by the titular Mughal emperor who ruled from the imperial capital though both the power and prestige as also the territories and assets were slowly and steadily being nibbled away by the Company.
According to the reviewer Rakhshanda Jalil, Liddle, already very well known in Delhi for her many interventions on the city’s monuments and social history, has written an exhaustive account of this half-century of tumult and change.
Drawing upon diverse sources – literary, cultural, social, political – she writes of the emergence of a new power centre with the establishment of a Resident at the Mughal Court who moved from adviser to ‘de facto ruler of the city’. “The book devotes much attention to the destruction of a way of life, a deliberate and brutal effacement causing one to pause a while and draw comparisons with present times and the travails being visited upon this city in the guise of urban renewal.”
Read Rakhshanda Jalil’s review of Swapna Liddle’s The Broken Script here
An anthology of essays, In Hard Times: Security in a Time of Insecurity (Bloomsbury), runs through India’s defence preparedness with a to-do list.
Edited by Manoj Joshi, Praveen Swami and Nishtha Gautam, the essays underscore the need for India to develop a long-term national security strategy for hard times in the post-COVID era given that the global power equations have significantly altered.
The book deals with just a thin slice of the reality we are confronted with, writes Dammu Ravi in his review. “The experts have sought to craft solutions that require purposefulness and team work and, in certain cases, advocate biting the bullet. Their emphasis on smart and systematic planning and consistent effort over lofty goals is worth noting. At this critical juncture, when the West is busy fighting Russia and managing a belligerent China, India needs to prudently manage national security. The need of the hour is a ‘whole-of-the-nation’ approach that inculcates a sense of harmony, calm and modesty, which works towards putting the economy on a higher growth trajectory.”
Read Dammu Ravi’s review of In Hard Times — Security in a Time of Insecurity here
In Political Economy of Colonial and Post-Colonial India (Primus Books), Aditya Mukherjee, among other issues, discussed the growing challenge of religious communalism. “Communalism, as it is understood today (where religion is used to mobilise all sections and classes of a religious community basically for achieving political and economic goals), is a modern phenomenon, which took root halfway through the British colonial presence in India — in the second half of the 19th century,” he writes in the book. Mukherjee traces the rise of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), its interventions and impact on society.
In his review, Ziya Us Salam points out that there is much more to the book than communalism and its many manifestations. It is a solid attempt at enhancing the study of contemporary history, and its transitions through various periods, from the colonial to the post-colonial.
Spotlight
Ruth Ozeki
At the recent Jaipur Literary Festival, Radhika Santhanam caught up with the American-Canadian writer Ruth Ozeki who is also a Zen Buddhist priest. Talking about her Women’s Prize of Fiction-winning The Book of Form and Emptiness, she said it is a commentary on grief, mental illness and consumerism. Both 14-year-old Benny Oh and his mother are coping with grief – over the death of his father/her husband – in different ways. In it, the book itself is a character. When Benny Oh began having conversations with the book, “I realised it had to be a character in the book.”
Asked why mental health figures a lot in her books, she said: “I was a messed-up young person. I struggled with being different. I tell my students, there is nothing wrong with them if they are unhappy. In fact, that’s a sane response to the world we’re living in, to climate change, war, racial and social injustice… In America, there’s so much emphasis on happiness, which is exhausting. The first noble truth in Buddhism is, after all, suffering. But you need to know how to handle that suffering, how to survive it. You could then even use that as material to write about later.”
Read author Ruth Ozeki’s full interview with Radhika Santhanam here
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- In These Seats Are Reserved (Penguin), Abhinav Chandrachud traces the history and making of the reservation policy. How were groups defined for reservations? He delves into debates that took place on this matter in the Constituent Assembly, the Supreme Court and Parliament and examines several contentious issues.
- From smartphones and computers, game theory to evolutionary biology and nuclear weapons – all bear the fingerprints of John von Neumann. Ananyo Bhattacharya explores how a combination of genius and unique historical circumstance allowed Neumann to sweep through so many different fields of science in The Man from the Future: The Visionary Life of John von Neumann (Penguin).
- Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, as a vicious civil war subsumes Sri Lanka, her dream takes her on a different path in V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (Penguin Viking).
- Following a Prayer (Westland Books) by Sundar Sarukkai, a story about reclaiming voice, agency and faith, is set in rural Karnataka and traces the story of three young girls and a day that changes their lives forever.
