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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
To celebrate the birthdays of Saadat Hasan Manto (May 11) and Ruskin Bond (May 19), new collections of their short stories are being published. Manto’s stories, written in Urdu, are available in several English editions (Mottled Dawn: 50 Sketches and Stories of Partition, translated by Khalid Hasan/Penguin Modern Classics; Bitter Fruit: The Very Best of Saadat Hasan Manto, also edited and translated by Khalid Hasan/Penguin, Stars from Another Sky: The Bombay Film World of the 1940s); in The Pity of Partition (Princeton University Press), Ayesha Jalal draws on Manto’s stories, sketches, essays and letters to write a biography as also the history of partition and its devastating impact. To coincide with his birthday, The Collected Stories of Saadat Hasan Manto, Volume 1: Poona and Bombay (Aleph) is out, translated by Nasreen Rehman. The first of a three-volume series, it has all of Manto’s 255 known stories translated into English. Volume I collects 54 stories and two essays written by Manto about his time in Bombay and Poona in colonial India, and includes well-known stories like ‘Mummy’ and ‘Janki’. “Manto wrote several Bombay stories after 1948, across the border in Lahore, Pakistan, which read like dystopian love letters to the city he claimed to embody, describing himself as, ‘Bombay in motion’,” writes Rehman in her introduction. Volume Two has stories set in other parts of India before 1947, including some rather well-known stories of partition in Punjab, such as ‘Cold Flesh (Thanda Gosht)’; Volume Three has all the stories set in Pakistan, but it opens with ‘The Drawstring (Khol Do)’, which begins in India and ends in Pakistan. “His lexicon is everyday Urdu, and his style has the spontaneity of informal conversation, amplified by his regular appearance in his narratives,” she says. A new collection of short stories by Ruskin Bond (Song of the Forest: Stories from Here, There and Everywhere/Aleph) gathers the best of his recent fiction, written over the past 10 years or so. In his foreword, David Davidar calls it a “feast of fiction” from a literary master, in which “hilarious stories about crooks and conmen rub shoulders with horror stories, murder mysteries, and diaphanous literary marvels.”
In reviews, we read Pramod Kapoor’s book on the last war of independence, Kavery Nambisan’s memoir, Suresh Menon’s essays on reading and writing. We also talk to American journalist Vauhini Vara whose debut novel The Immortal King Rao is “a clear-eyed chronicle of a Dalit success story”, and more.
Books of the week
Talking about Pramod Kapoor’s 1946 Last War of Independence: Royal Indian Navy Mutiny (Roli Books), filmmaker Shyam Benegal says a footnote in the history of the freedom movement has been turned into an exciting and important account. Kapoor himself stumbled onto this forgotten story while researching for his book on Gandhi. When Kapoor began his research, he discovered hundreds of reports by British admirals, commanding officers of ships and shore establishments, cables and letters exchanged between London and Delhi, proceedings in the British parliament and debates in the Legislative Council in India. They were “honest,” but were told from the British point of view. To get to the truth, Kapoor waded through hundreds of newspaper reports and documents at libraries, met people with knowledge of the mutiny and toured HMIS Talwar, the signal school of the Navy at Colaba, where “inflammatory slogans” had been written on the walls and “seditious pamphlets” were circulated. In his review, K.R.A. Narasiah writes that the chapter, ‘Planning the Mutiny: The Secret Heroes’, reads like a thriller. “The initial planning took place in a flat belonging to Pran and Kusum Nair on Marine Drive. The Nairs were friends with two of the key planners, Rishi Dev Puri and Bolai Chandra Dutt, and Kapoor profiles the ‘heroes of the mutiny’ in great detail. He also adds an extensive Epilogue providing a glimpse of the life of the key protagonists post-mutiny as also notes on some of the ships and shore establishments. It is an exceptional book and a must-read for anyone interested in the freedom struggle.”
Read more: 1946 Last War of Independence Royal Indian Navy Mutiny review: The 1946 naval uprising
Kavery Nambisan’s A Luxury Called Health (Speaking Tiger) is an engaging sort of Bharat Swastha – Ek Khoj, a discovery of the Indian health care system. In her review, Ramya Kannan says that Kavery takes readers on a well-documented journey with medicine, from the classroom to the hospital, and the life lessons she derived. “Sometimes it is about the right bedside manner, even about the right skillsets for surgery; it exposes avarice, other times lethargy, sheer stupidity, and is often about the increasing dominance of the private health sector, and harps on inequities in health care.” Most of all, having working in poor resource settings in remote Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, she shakes her fists at the powers that be, with concerns about serving everyone with the same level of care and a burning desire to enforce an ethical and scientific medical practice.
Read more: A Luxury Called Health review: A discovery of India’s fragile health care system
Spotlight
The Immortal King Rao (HarperCollins) is Canada-born American journalist Vauhini Vara’s much-awaited debut novel. Thirteen years in the making, it draws heavily from Vauhini’s career as a tech reporter for The Wall Street Journal and business editor at The New Yorker. It also borrows from her real life, for like her protagonist, her father is Dalit. Asked how she navigated the rapid real-time developments in science and technology, she told Anindita Ghose, “I thought I was writing about this distant dystopian future, but then the things I was making up (a Trump-like figure becoming president of the U.S., a technology that lets people connect to the Internet with their minds) started coming true in real life. So then I’d have to revise to make the world of my novel stranger still.” In her book, Dalits are not oppressed victims, but ambitious entrepreneurs and innovators. Her Dalit protagonist goes on to become a global tech mogul. For Vauhini, that King Rao becomes a global tech mogul is a matter of more than mere representation. “I was interested in seeing what would happen when this particular character from an oppressed group gains economic, social and political power. What does he do with that power? What kind of world does he seek to create?”
‘King Rao is more than a mere representation’: Vauhini Vara
In her column, Women of Letters, K. Srilata profiles the late Zimbabwean writer Yvonne Vera (1964-2005). Yvonne, says Srilata, does not write about easy things. Hers is visceral writing, which has the texture of bold organicity and makes the leap into that strange place in which subjective truth resides. Born and raised in the 1970s in a Rhodesia rife with guerrilla warfare, Yvonne was acutely aware of the heavy price that her fellow country women paid for freedom, the unspeakable brutalities they were left to process. Yvonne chose to look the unspeakable in the eye and to write about it in prose that bleeds but is also filled with light and lyricism. “As I read her novella, Without a Name, I had to remind myself to breathe. For Yvonne writes trauma, the emotional, imaginative truth of it, in much the same way she wrote on her body as a child – near the bone.”
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- Oded Galor offers a revelatory explanation of how humanity became the unique species to have escaped a life of subsistence poverty, enjoying previously unthinkable wealth and longevity in The Journey of Humanity: The Origins of Wealth and Inequality (Penguin). He reveals why this process has been so unequal around the world, resulting in great disparities between nations.
- Featuring essays originally written in Italian and published in English for the first time, as well as essays written in English, Translating Myself and Others (Princeton University Press) brings together Jhumpa Lahiri’s meditations on the translator’s art as an act of both linguistic and personal metamorphosis.
- It is 1947. Life is almost idyllic in the village of Chakri near Rawalpindi, where Muslims, Hindus and Sikhs get together to prepare for Lohri. Then comes the news of Partition, followed by frenzied communal violence. The villagers’ lives are changed irreversibly as they leave everything behind in Hymns in Blood (Harper), by Nanak Singh and translated by Navdeep Suri.
- Young devi Sati is drawn to the softer things in life in The Vow of Parvati (Bloomsbury) by Aditi Banerjee. Till she meets Rudra, the ash-smeared yogi, who brings out her fiercer, darker side. Then a tragedy rips apart the abode of gods and Sati rises again as Parvati from the ashes. Given a second chance, Parvati makes a vow to win Rudra. Can she succeed?
