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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize for 2023. Last year, Geetanjali Shree won for Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell from the Hindi Ret Samadhi. Murugan’s novel, set in rural Tamil Nadu of the 1980s, is a love story of Saroja and Kumaresan who hail from different castes, and thereby hangs a sordid tale of discrimination, prejudice and violence. Will love be able to provide a safe harbour? In 2015, after copies of his book Madhorubhagan were burnt, and he faced protests from caste-based groups, Murugan declared himself ‘dead’. At the court case around the book a year later, the judge ruled: Let the author be resurrected to what he is best at: Write. Murugan took this as a “command and a benediction” to get back to writing. The panel of judges chaired by the French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani said Murugan is a “great anatomist of power and, in particular, of the deep, deforming rot of caste hatred and violence. With flashes of fable, his novel tells a story specific and universal: how flammable are fear and the distrust of others.”
The other 12 books on the longlist include Andrey Kurkov’s Jimi Hendrix Live in Lviv, translated by Rueben Woolley, Zou Jingzhi’s Ninth Building, translated by Jeremy Tiang, Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, translated by Rosalind Harvey, and Maryse Conde’s The Gospel According to the New World, translated by Richard Philcox. The shortlist of six will be announced on April 18, and the winner on May 23.
The Nobel Prize-winning Japanese writer Kenzaburo Oe – or Oe Kenzaburo as he is called in his country – has passed away. His publisher said the 88-year-old author, who chronicled the life of the Hiroshima victims as also the challenges faced by the disabled and other human beings, died on March 3 due to old age. His 1965 novel, Hiroshima Notes, not only brought him worldwide acclaim, it also helped him tide over a family crisis. As he interacted with the valiant doctors looking after the victims of the American bombing in 1963, he decided to agree to an operation for his son, who was born with a brain hernia, and give him a chance to live. The surgery left Hikari, which means light, with learning difficulties, but he overcame his challenges to become a celebrated composer. Oe wrote about his struggles to accept the birth of a brain-damaged child in the thinly veiled autobiographical novel A Personal Matter. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1994 with the Swedish Academy lauding his “darkly poetic” novels and their “disconcerting picture of the human predicament.” For Hiroshima Notes, he picked an epigraph by French preacher Sebastien Castellion: “Who, in later times, will be able to understand/that we had to fall again into darkness/after we had once known the light”. The overriding theme of all his work is his attempt to “find decent and humanistic ways to contribute to the healing and reconciliation of all peoples,” and that makes it important to read Oe in the divisive world of today. In an interview with The Paris Review, Oe said he considered himself an “anarchist who loves democracy.” He was born in the island of Shikoku but studied French literature and other greats, and loved to read books where a text was written — Dostoyevsky in Saint Petersburg or Beckett and Joyce in Dublin. Asked to talk about his writing, he once said, “My writing is focused on a single concern… I am writing about the dignity of human beings.”
In reviews, we read an extract from Varun Gandhi’s new book on the Indian metropolis, another on India’s G20 journey that led to the presidency, a new translation of Mirza Ghalib and more. We also talk to British journalist and writer Bee Rowlatt.
Books of the week
In his new book, The Indian Metropolis: Deconstructing India’s Urban Spaces (Rupa), Varun Gandhi rues the apathy displayed towards urban infrastructure in India. He traces India’s journey towards urbanisation going beyond the metros, discusses multiple issues threadbare, from water, healthcare, transportation, housing, employment opportunities to crime, particularly crimes against women, and offers solutions to problems. In this excerpt, he says that “India’s women continue to remain victims of their circumstances. Of the metropolitan cities covered, in 2019, 45,485 crimes recorded were against women, with cities like Delhi (12,902), Mumbai (6,519) and Hyderabad (2,755) being at the top. With millions of rape victims in India, our criminal justice (police and judiciary) and healthcare institutions need to continue to be restructured to reach out and support victims. We need to promote school-level and premarital counselling on healthy and sustainable relationships. A ‘broken windows’ approach, as adopted in New York, cracking down on offences euphemised as ‘eve teasing’ shall reduce [an] offender’s courage for sexual crimes.”
Feroze Varun Gandhi’s The Indian Metropolis — Deconstructing India’s Urban Spaces: The female force
Author V. Srinivas, a secretary in the Union government, has had extensive experience as an international civil servant specialising in financial subjects. Fascinated by G20’s journey since 2002 when, as private secretary, he assisted the Indian finance minister to chair G20 meetings, he has studied its trajectory continuously. As knowledge about it remains limited, G20 @ 2023: The Roadmap to Indian Presidency (Pentagon Press) is a welcome endeavour to bridge the information gap, writes Rajiv Bhatia in his review. “Reader-friendly and packed with facts, it offers a scholarly analysis of G20’s evolution, achievements and challenges.” Until mid-2022, interest in the Group of 20 (G20) was confined to experts in international economy and diplomacy. Now, thanks to its presidency coming to India and New Delhi’s resolve to leave an indelible imprint on this influential multilateral grouping, G20 has almost become a household word, says Bhatia. “Composed of 11 short and crisp chapters, the volume offers a panoramic view of G20’s journey that led to the Indian presidency.”
Review of V. Srinivas’s G20 @ 2023: The Roadmap to Indian Presidency: A panoramic view
A new translation of Mirza Ghalib — Temple Lamp: Verses on Banaras (Penguin) — by Maaz Bin Bilal should turn the English-speaking world towards Ghalb’s considerable and valuable legacy to poetry and literature. In the review, Ather Farouqui considers Temple Lamp the best translation of Chiragh-i-Dair. It is documented that while proceeding from Delhi to Calcutta, the then capital of British India, Ghalib arrived in Banaras in the spring of 1827 and was greatly captivated by the city. “That Ghalib chose to describe Banaras, believed to be the holiest centre of Hindu culture, as the ‘Kaaba of Hindostan’ reveals the extent of his love for the city.” Ghalib’s fascination for Banaras is evident in the masnavi. For instance, Verse 81 reads: So great is the majesty of Banaras/that the reach of thought cannot mount its summit.
Ghalib, lost in Banaras: review of Temple Lamp, translated by Maaz Bin Bilal
Spotlight
Bee Rowlatt Roberto Ricciuti | Photo Credit: Getty Images
Several years ago, while working on an article, the British journalist and writer Bee Rowlatt contacted May Witwit, an Iraqi academic. Soon they began to exchange letters and hatched a plan to get Witwit out of war-torn Iraq and to London. The letters were published as a book, Talking about Jane Austen in Baghdad (2010). On the sidelines of the Jaipur Literature Festival, Rowlatt spoke to Radhika Santhanam about her decision to publish private letters and why she thinks female friendships are exceptional. “The only reason the letters became a book was sheer desperation – to get May out of Iraq. As she pointed out, ‘Your country smashed my country, get me out of here’.” As for female friendships, Rowlatt said, “I hate to be gender stereotyping but women nurture their friendships more.” She is also worried about the petty squabbles within feminism now. “Those are damaging the movement against right-wing fascism. We don’t have the luxury of it being exclusionary. We just got to hang together, and keep going.”
Bee Rowlatt on exceptional female friendships and helping her Iraqi friend flee the country
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- In A Constitution to Keep (Harper), Rohan J. Alva writes an account of the law on sedition in India. Drawing on archival material, Constituent Assembly debates, and Indian and global jurisprudence, he makes a case for granting heightened constitutional protection to political speech.
- K.C. Singh, who was deputy secretary to President Giani Zail Singh, argues that the Zail Singh years are crucial to understanding both the limits and possibilities of the country’s highest office in his book, The Indian President (Harper).
- In her first short story collection in a decade, Old Babes in the Wood (Penguin), and her first after losing her partner, Margaret Atwood brings her humour and humanity to 15 tales that include an imagined conversation between Atwood and Orwell, and seven stories that feature a married couple.
- Is it possible for anyone to move through life without doing harm? This is the question at the heart of V.V. Ganeshananthan’s Brotherless Night (Viking) set in war-torn Sri Lanka. A young girl dreaming of becoming a doctor is forced to come to terms with her harsh reality and find a way to survive.
