(This article forms a part of The Hindu on Books newsletter which brings you book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. Subscribe here.)
Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The countdown to the announcement of the International Booker Prize on May 23 has begun and we have been closely reading the shortlist. This week we review Georgi Gospodinov’s Time Shelter (Hachette India), translated from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel. His book, as Andrew Whitehead writes in his review, is an exploration of the lasting imprint of communist totalitarianism. Gospodinov hails from Bulgaria, Moscow’s most loyal communist ally, and now lives in Berlin, which was at the centre of Europe’s Cold War and the city itself was once-partitioned. “How are the events of the time remembered and how does memory, the ‘bomb shelter of the past’, become both comfort and trap?” The narrative follows the account of a psychiatrist (probable alter ego of the protagonist) who sets up a clinic in Zurich for those with dementia and memory loss. One each floor, a different decade is recreated with an eye on detail like furnishings, music, food and magazines. What follows is that the past invades the present and Gospodinov takes readers on a winding, but stimulating and entertaining journey through Europe’s painful past which is an eerie reflection of contemporary times. Also on the shortlist are Guadalupe Nettel’s Still Born, about the challenges of motherhood, translated by Rosalind Harvey; GauZ’s Standing Heavy, translated from the French by Frank Wynne, in which a security guard looks back on his time at the mall, making it an astute observation on colonial legacies and capitalist consumerism; Cheon Myeong-kwan’s Whale, translated by Chi-Young Kim looks at Korea’s rapid transition from pre-modern to post-modern society; Eva Baltasar’s Boulder translated by Julia Sanches is the story of Samsa and ‘Boulder’ and their journey in a world against queers; and Maryse Conde’s The Gospel According to the New World translated by her husband Richard Philcox.
In reviews, we read a ‘new’ history of India, Parini Shroff’s debut novel, Sukumar Muralidharan’s tales of bondage and belonging and what it means to be a citizen of India and more. We also talk to Namita Gokhale about her new book on the mystics and sceptics who have trekked the Himalayas.
Books of the week
In A New History of India: From its Origins to the 21st Century (Aleph), Rudrangshu Mukherjee, Shobita Punja and Toby Sinclair embark on an ambitious journey to bring readers a singular history of India’s past. It is indeed brave (or risky perhaps), says the reviewer Janaki Nair, to announce a ‘new’ history of India from its ‘origins’ to the 21st century. “Composed in equal part of lavish, high-quality images with excellent explanatory captions, the book is no doubt a visual treat,” she writes. “But the narrative, given the political constraints within which history can at all be discussed in our times, settles for a dated and excessively cautious account of the Indian past.” Beginning with the safe reaches of geology and continental formation, the book’s 24 chapters traverse a landscape of well-known landmarks: Harappa, Vedic Society, Ashoka, the Guptas, the Delhi Sultanate, the Mughals, and ends with 11 chapters devoted to the last 300 years. “Some gestures are meanwhile made to regional histories. Given the kinds of books that vie for public attention today (and the monstrous proliferation of messaging that implants bizarre new historical ideas in a post-book society), this potted history serves only a limited purpose. While presenting an accessible overview, aided by the richly contextualised images and maps, the New History attempts what is acknowledged, by historians at least, as an impossibility. A singular history, even when coming from the secular stable, can no longer be the weapon in battling the aggressive surge towards a unified, glorious, majoritarian – and patently untrue – past.”
Review of A New History of India — From its Origins to the 21st Century: Heroes and villains
When six women of Kohra, a dismal village in Gujarat, seek retribution after they find that the government’s micro-financing schemes meant for them are only encouraging their husbands into drink and debauchery, all hell breaks loose. They won’t give up without a fight – one of the characters in Parini Shroff’s debut novel, The Bandit Queens (HarperCollins), has a portrait of Phoolan Devi on the wall of her one-room home. The reviewer, Geeta Doctor, says Shroff could have become the next Naipaul with her sharp vignettes of contemporary Indian life on the margins. “She, however, writes in an execrable patois of Americanese that when mouthed by the ‘Desperate Housewives of Kohra’ makes them just as vicious as the men they so efficiently despatch into the next world.”
Review of Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens: Desperate housewives of Kohra
The Nation and its Citizens: Tales of Bondage and Belonging (Rupa) by Sukumar Muralidharan places India’s present in a larger historical and geographical context, with competing dynamics of identity, equality and nationalism. From Voltaire to Habermas, Arendt to Ambedkar, Savarkar, Gandhi and Tagore, the author dips into a wide range of intellectual strands; and from the French Revolution to the Industrial Revolution to the Trump Revolution, he traverses many historical landscapes to make sense of two words - belonging and bondage. In his review, Varghese K. George writes that by locating the current turbulence in a broader historical and analytical frame, the author questions the assumption of a pristine past. “The disturbing strength of this volume is the depth and sweep it employs to convey that our present has been in the making for a while. All nationalisms are imperialism for some, the ‘euthanasia of many cultures’ is a critical strategy of nation-building. Muralidharan’s writing is a wonderful combination of reportage, political theory and historical trends.”
Review of The Nation and its Citizens: Tales of Bondage and Belonging: A lived experience
Spotlight
Namita Gokhale
The essays in Mystics and Sceptics: In Search of Himalayan Masters (Harper), edited by Namita Gokhale, look at both the tyranny and beauty of life. It brings alive the spiritual resonance of the Himalayas. A non-believer may read it with a pinch of salt; but the book helps to fathom why people take a leap of faith. A diverse set of writers, including diplomats, journalists, authors and seekers, give an insight into experiences of wanderers and spiritual gurus. In an interview with Soma Basu, Namita Gokhale explains what led her to the Himalayas and the reasons why she thought of a book of essays on the mountains. “My childhood was spent in the Kumaon hills and a love of the Himalayas is, therefore, a part of much that I write. However, I have written 21 books (including anthologies) with the 22nd in the pipeline and not all of them are about the mountains. Laughter, irony and humour are equally a part of my repertoire; urban spaces interest and intrigue me. My debut novel, Paro - Dreams of Passion, was set between Mumbai and Delhi; it was published almost 40 years ago and remains wickedly funny.” Asked what prompted her to curate the anthology on the Himalayas, she says, “Curating this anthology was important to me because I wanted to discover and add to my own learnings in the process of compiling it. It was in that sense a journey and a quest. I wanted to steer clear of the romanticised and hyperbolic spirituality that is sometimes encountered in this genre. A healthy dose of scepticism is the surest foundation for mystical enquiry.”
Into the heart of the Himalayas
Browser
- Indian Ideas of Freedom (Harper) by Dennis Dalton is a study of the lens through which freedom was perceived by thinkers such as Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghose, Mahatma Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, B.R. Ambedkar, M.N. Roy and Jayaprakash Narayan. It examines, for instance, how, for this ‘group of seven’, the pursuit of freedom was both individual and political.
- While technological development cannot be stopped, can its course be directed to do good? Yes, says Orly Lobel, arguing that the world’s thorniest problems from climate to poverty can be solved by harnessing technology in the right way in The Equality Machine (Hachette).
- A follow-up to the bestseller, Please Look After Mom, Kyung-sook Shin’s I Went to See My Father (Hachette), translated by Anton Hur, is a heartfelt portrait of an aging father by his daughter, which explores the past of not just one family, but an entire generation, and Korea as a whole.
- Described as Crazy Rich Asians meets The Help, Balli Kaur Jaiswal’s Now You See Us (Harper) tells the story of three Filipina maids working in Singapore. When news of a murder breaks, the maids come together to solve it, and also expose secrets of Singapore’s elites.
