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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
A shortlist of six books for the International Booker Prize for 2023 was announced on Tuesday. Perumal Murugan’s Pyre misses out, and six books were picked from a longlist of 13: Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated from the Catalan by Julia Sanches; Whale by Cheon Myeong-kwon, translated from the Korean by Chi-Young Kim; The Gospel According to the New World by the’ Grande Dame of Caribbean literature’ Maryse Conde, translated from the French by her husband Richard Philcox; Standing Heavy by GauZ, an undocumented student turned security guard’s debut novel, translated from the French by Frank Wynne; Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov which documents the danger of nostalgia and selective memory, and translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel and Still Born by Guadalupe Nettel, translated from the Spanish by Rosalind Harvey, which chronicles the challenges of motherhood.
The chair of the jury, the French-Moroccan writer Leila Slimani, described the books as “sensual and subversive” stories from around the world. The winner will be announced on May 23.
Happy reading!
In reviews, we read Nandini Das’s book on the first ambassador from the English court to the Mughal king Jahangir’s court, Anjana Appachana’s much-awaited new novel, Sudeshna Guha’s history of India through 75 objects and more.
Books of the Week
In Courting India (Bloomsbury), Nandini Das puts Thomas Roe, the first English ambassador to the court of Jahangir, and the world he comes from centre-stage. The England of the early 17th century is not a happy place. Its new king, James I, is a spendthrift whose court is riddled with intrigue. Its people, having suffered “famine, plague, war and economic stagnation”, suffer an acute anxiety, both about lagging behind in European politics and global trade, and about the evils that such reckless engagement with the outside world could bring. India was a very different world indeed, writes the reviewer, Parvati Sharma, who has written biographies of Jahangir and Akbar. “Well-integrated into centuries-old systems of trade, Mughal India, along with Iran, Turkey and China, India controlled ‘the best part of the global economy’.” The Mughal state was also more politically stable than the west, where tensions between Catholic and Protestant nations meant that Europe was “a powder keg waiting to explode”. It may appear inevitable, now, says Sharma, that Roe’s embassy was the beginning of a colonial venture that would neatly overturn the equations of wealth and power that existed between Mughal India and Jacobean England, but Courting India overturns this expectation instead. “Through her rich and detailed investigation of the two worlds that Roe inhabited, and of his own two states of minds about them, Das evokes the dizzying uncertainty of a time that, as she writes, contained the ‘very real possibility of alternative futures’.”
Review of Nandini Das’ Courting India: Roe’s diplomatic woes
The power of stories has been at the heart of Anjana Appachana’s writing, and in her new novel, Fear and Lovely, too, she conveys the bracing power of storytelling. The story revolves around the life of Mallika who at 19 lost a few days of her memory, “and not long after I lost my mind.” It was 1976 and four years later she would leave New Delhi for America. Her account, says Mini Kapoor in her review, is fortified by recollections of years past by seven family members and friends, who are among the handful of significant people in her life. “The characters and plot lines of Fear and Lovely hark back to Appachana’s first and only other novel, Listening Now, published in 1998.” As Mallika jets off to the U.S., the writer poses a series of questions – the readers know what happened, but when will Mallika know what happened during the days she lost her memory? Will she ever know? Will that knowledge be good for her?
Review | Anjana Appachana’s growing-up tale, Fear and Lovely
In A History of India Through 75 Objects (Hachette), Sudeshna Guha chooses a range of objects from archaeological finds, artworks, literary works to modern items such as the Electronic Voting Machine and a solar pump to trace the country’s past through various artefacts. Guha begins with a note of caution. Her selection, she writes, though placed in chronological order, “move in time and space and, therefore, many histories. They implore us to see the bigger world they inhabit and caution us against conceptualising the past in a linear form and seeking only the aspects of their uniqueness. They create a regard of the infinite ways in which we are able to historicise.” In her review, R. Krithika writes that one chapter that drew her eye was ‘The Godrej Lock’. “It’s a relatively short essay but offers a quick overview of the history of lock-making and how Ardeshir Godrej was enthused by the success of the lock to develop the safe. All of which later led to the various products that ranged from steel cupboards, typewriters to refrigerators.”
Review of Sudeshna Guha’s A History of India Through 75 Objects: Everlasting things inside a book
Spotlight
At the recent ‘Literary Activism Series’ held in Delhi, the theme was ‘The Writer-Critic and Literary Studies’ and it was dedicated to the memory of Dubravka Ugrešić, who passed away in March. Addressed among others by Amit Chaudhuri, Jane Goldman, Sumana Roy Ashutosh Bhardwaj, Vidyan Ravinthiran and Martin Cowley, the meet raised several questions: Why does a literary work need citations to be considered authentic? Why should everything have to be publicised in a newspaper to be considered worthy? What do poet professors bring to academics and vice versa. In an interview with Ziya Us Salam, author-poet Sumana Roy said through her talk at the symposium she was trying to explain how a job in academia pays the scientist’s bills as much as it does the poet’s. “The work of both is necessary.” She cited the examples of Samar Chakraborty, Niranjan Mohanty and Robin Ngangom to show what the poet-professor brought to the classroom, and how the new curriculum and the new literature classroom has marginalised that idiosyncratic temperament and poetic intelligence.
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- Caged Tiger (Bloomsbury) by Subhashish Bhadra traces the story of India’s institutions, identifying reasons why they sometimes fail and what civilians may do about it. He argues that the Indian state often hinders rather than help the people it is meant to serve. “If India is to take its rightful place as a global powerhouse, we need all billion plus Indians free in every sense of the word,” he writes in the introduction.
- Vinod Thomas’ Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change (Palgrave Macmillan) presents insights on the interaction between risking risks and raising the bar for resilience to the climate crisis. Its timeliness lies in applying important findings on risk and resilience to runaway climate change. To give just one example, the first key message is that there has to be accounting for the root causes of climate calamities and not just their symptoms.
- The everyday ordinary takes an extraordinary turn in Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Book of Rahim & Other Poems (Westland). In it, he inhabits the voice and time of Ghalib; he revisits Abdul-Rahim-Khan-i-Khanan from the times of Akbar and Jahangir; and discovers anew his family home in Lahore.
- The story of The Return of Faraz Ali (Tranquebar) by Aamina Ahmed begins in pre-Partition India. A young boy is plucked from his home in Lahore at the directions of his powerful father. Years later, Faraz Ali is sent back to Shahi Molla’s labyrinthine alleys as an inspector tasked with covering up a violent death. Will he be able to follow orders? Writer Yaa Gyasi found it a rich and deeply moving novel about confronting both personal and political memories.