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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
In what is turning out to be a great year for fiction, Penguin is set to publish Orhan Pamuk’s new novel, Nights of Plague next month. Written in Turkish under the pandemic cloud of 2021, it has been translated into English by Ekin Oklap. The story revolves around the happenings on the imaginary island of Mingheria, the 29th state of the Ottoman Empire, located in the eastern Mediterranean between Crete and Cyprus. Half the population is Muslim, the other half of Orthodox Greeks and there’s resentment brewing in the two communities. A royal ship, Azizye, arrives stealthily, carrying Princess Pakize, daughter of a deposed sultan, her doctor husband, and the Royal Chemist, Bonkowski Pasha. Each of them has a separate mission, and not all of them will survive the weeks ahead. Mingheria is on the “cusp of catastrophe. There are rumours of plague – rumours some in power will try to suppress.” But like in other Pamuk novels (My Name is Red, Snow, The White Castle, The Black Book) things are not what they seem, and plague is not the only killer. The island is forced to go into strict quarantine, and is cut off from the rest of the world, making a story over a hundred years old relevant to the present.
In reviews, we read the letters from Gandhi to his son Devadas, a story of two Iraqi brothers stuck in India as refugees, books on Madras, Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel and more. We also interview Tina Brown, author of The Palace Papers, a sequel to The Diana Chronicles, on the British royal family.
Books of the week
Scorching Love: Letters from Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi to his son Devadas (OUP) is a collection and translation of Gandhi’s letters to his youngest son, Devadas, with whom he had the most straightforwardly affectionate relationship of all his children. Tridip Suhrud and Gopalkrishna Gandhi, the youngest son of Devadas Gandhi, spent more than a decade building this volume. In her review, Ananya Vajpeyi says Scorching Love is the history of a family, a movement, a nation, but most of all it is a story about fathers and sons. “We note that some filial bonds are inherited like those of Gandhi and Devadas, but others are elective, like those of Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. The destinies of these individuals are tightly intertwined with one another, their ties of interpersonal love and loyalty strengthened by a common investment in the shared values of swaraj, swadeshi, satyagraha and ahimsa.” Vajpeyi writes that much like the country he helped usher into existence, Mohandas Gandhi was a complicated and contradictory individual. He gave his life to the freedom struggle, but he was constantly embroiled in family matters concerning his wife Kastur, their four sons and their extended kin and clan, with as much gusto and attention as he devoted to the larger public environment.
Is it Chennai, is it Madras? For a city that celebrated its 383rd birthday last week, this question has always been simmering under the surface, since the name change in 1996, writes Ramya Kannan in the column Bibliography for Text and Context. S. Muthiah was very clear, she says. For the late author and historian, this city was Madras. His 1981 book, Madras Discovered, subsequently retitled Madras Rediscovered ran into several editions. The book spans a wide berth in Muthiah’s usual style – industry, governance, politics, films, food, streets and gutters – because there was nothing that did not interest him. He said the book merely scratched the surface, and wrote several others, including Madras Miscellany, a collection of his columns that appeared in The Hindu Metro Plus. A.R. Venkatachalapathy’s compendium: Chennai not Madras: Perspectives on the City harnesses his bilingual prowess to place himself on the other side of the Madras-Chennai spectrum, sitting comfortable with the latter, over the ‘anglicisation’ of the former. The book is a wonderful compendium of articles by a range of people, discussing vignettes and issues dredged up from the Tamil past of the city – Vallalar, Ayothidas, Potti Sriramulu, the labour movement, Ashokamitran, Prabanjan. If it’s a warm, emotionally-connected, enchantingly-told point of view you are looking for, then, Nirmala Lakshman’s Degree Coffee by the Yard is essential reading. “A short biography of Madras, packaged so it could fit into a large pocket, the book contains sharp observations about the city by someone who has lived there many years, grew up in it and acknowledges the contradictions it holds. So, naturally, the author dips into Madras and reaches for Chennai, subtly melding one into the other, letting us know that they both come from one.”
Living in Chennai, celebrating Madras
In Forgotten Refugees: Two Iraqi Brothers in India (Speaking Tiger), Nandita Haksar profiles two Iraqi brothers she met outside the UNHCR office in Delhi. A human rights lawyer herself, Haksar invited the men home and decided to be their voice. In her review, R. Krithika says the story of Babil and Akkad (the names they chose for themselves after the Babylonian and Akkadian empires) is poignant and heart-breaking, and highlights the price people have to pay in times of war. Chaos and impoverishment followed the American-led invasion of 2003, the subsequent civil war and sectarian strife. The last straw is the disappearance of their father. Babil and Akkad fled to India to seek the protection of the UNHCR. This doesn’t solve their problems. Constant fear of deportation and the fear of being Muslims in a communally-charged nation dog their footsteps, while the pandemic-led lockdown only added to their difficulty. “We faced hostility, prejudice and utter indifference,” says Babil. Haksar traces the history of refugee protection in India and calls for better processes to be put in place. These words by the brothers linger: “We long to have a home, our own families, and a place where we can live with peace and security.”
Review of Nandita Haksar’s Forgotten Refugees — Two Iraqi Brothers in India: Not just a number
In Amit Chaudhuri’s new novel, Sojourn (Penguin), an unnamed Indian writer arrives in Berlin as a visiting professor at an unnamed university. The few months’ sojourn are filled with lectures at the university, a quiet life in a flat in an uneventful part of the city, and some quirky social interactions and relationships – most significantly, that with a poet and asylum-seeker from Bangladesh, Faqrul Haq, and a German woman named Birgit with whom the narrator develops a friendship. In his review, Saikat Majumdar writes that the novel remains deliciously suspended in the present, avoiding the fate of recounting; “our true reward is that we have a real-time immersion with every moment of reading. And after reaching the last sentence, we can go back to the beginning and start all over again, because no event, in Chaudhuri’s fiction, is ever really over.”
Amit Chaudhuri’s Sojourn book review: Suspended in the present
Spotlight
Tina Brown (The Palace Papers) describes the British royal family as the world’s only global monarchy, a never-ending soap opera. On the eve of the 25th anniversary of Lady Diana’s death, Gayatri Rangachari Shah spoke to Brown who says the beleaguered Princess would have evolved into a very popular humanitarian if she were alive today. Asked what would Lady Diana have made of the monarchy, Brown said, “I think she would still be attached to the monarchy, because unlike Harry and Meghan, she understood its potency. Diana didn’t want to be a breakaway, she wanted to stay. She would have turned her humanitarian global power into something even bigger. By now she would have been as big as the Gates Foundation.” So, has the royal family changed since Diana’s time? “Yes,” said Brown, “I think they are more understanding but it is still really tough to be in it. It’s a firm and they all sort of compete with each other. It’s stuffy.”
The British monarchy is a soap opera, says Tina Brown, the author of The Palace Papers
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- Krishna Bose’s Netaji (Picador India), edited and translated by Sumantra Bose, reveals the life, politics and struggle of Subhas Chandra Bose. Scholar and Bose family member, Krishna Bose, travelled the subcontinent and the world to discover aspects of Netaji’s life – the military campaigns he undertook, how the Indian National Army took shape, the leaders he met including Tojo and Hitler, his favourite cities (Vienna and Prague) and so forth.
- State Capitalism: Why SOEs Matter and the Challenges They Face (OUP) by Lalita Som studies eight countries to understand how can state-owned enterprises, which play a role during emergency situations, can be managed more efficiently. Generalising from the results of multi-country studies is difficult, because all countries are different, but the two most important conclusions that can be drawn from the country studies are that competition and regulation, rather than ownership, is key to efficiency.
- Set against the Assam insurgency, Debapriya Datta’s Then Came the River (Bloomsbury) traces the friendship of Roop, the daughter of a tea planter, with her teacher, who comes from a wealthy family. They are happy till personal and political problems mar their lives. The book reads like a thriller which explores the meaning of relationships.
- In After Sappho (Pan Macmillan), Selby Wynn Schwartz re-imagines the lives of women trailblazers from Sarah Bernhardt to Virginia Woolf. The women fight for rights which their male counterparts have had since birth in this Booker Prize-longlisted historical fiction.
