Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. At two recent literary festivals, The Hindu Lit Fest 2024 (January 26-27) and the Kolkata Literary Meet (January 23-27), Gopalkrishna Gandhi, former Governor of West Bengal, spoke about his grandfather, sharing insights from a book he edited, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi: I am an Ordinary Man (Aleph/2023). It is a sequel to Restless as Mercury: My Life as a Young Man which contained the story of Gandhi, in his words, from his childhood up to 1914. The second part takes Gandhi’s life forward right up to the last day of his life (January 30, 1948), and considers an intense phase with several movements in the run-up to Independence and Partition, including the Dandi March in 1930 and the Quit India call in 1942. In Chennai, Gopalkrishna Gandhi said his grandfather was scared of the dark as a child, and a housekeeper, Rambha, had told him that if he said the name of Rama, he would not be afraid anymore. This, Mr. Gandhi said, resonated throughout Gandhi’s life. “Eventually, there were two things he came not to fear — defeat and death — all through his experiences in South Africa where he was beaten almost to death, and through his experiences during the years before and after Independence, when he faced physical threats,” writes Zubeda Hamid in her report.
Gandhi said the real heroes and heroines of the freedom struggle were ordinary men and women, many of whom had died, and not him or his wife. He called these people “the salt of the earth” on whom the future of India would be built. At a time when supremacy and self-glorification claim our attention, Gopalkrishna Gandhi said, it may be remembered that the Mahatma recognised the extraordinary in ordinary people. Here is an excerpt from the book.
Read about the sessions at The Hindu Lit Fest here
In books this week, we interview Mary Beard, Professor Emerita of the Classics at Cambridge, and an expert on the Roman world, who will be addressing two sessions at the upcoming Jaipur Literary Festival from February 1-5, and Booker winner Damon Galgut, who will be at JLF too; we also talk to Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty about her book on the Assamese community. We read Usha Priyamvada’s Hindi novel in translation, and the last High Commissioner to Pakistan Ajay Bisaria’s memoir, Anger Management.
Books of the Week
Mary Beard
Professor Mary Beard has been interested in the Romans all her life and teaching career. In her latest book, Emperor of Rome, she busts several myths about the Roman world, like she did in SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome as well. Asked what the stories tell us about the imperial court, she said: “It’s a dystopian world in which the emperor overturns the very nature of what it is to be true and what it is to be false.” As emperors continued to rule for hundreds of years with the attendant excesses of power, many Roman writers felt an anxiety about the nature of one-man rule. “But what’s interesting is that there is so little opposition in Rome to the system. A vast majority of them were collaborators or co-operators. For most of them it was the only system they knew. They kept their heads down, and it was business as usual and that is where I see the big lesson for us. There are places in the world where aspects of democracy are now very much under threat and the lesson of Rome is you have to stand up and object, because if you don’t, you will be like the Romans. You will let it happen.”
Ahead of the 17th edition of the Jaipur Literary Festival, where Booker Prize winner Damon Galgut will be a speaker, he talked to Swati Daftuar over email. Talking about The Promise, in which, simply put, a White family grapples with South Africa’s racist history, Galgut says a sense of responsibility weighs South African writers down – “this is the curse of the South African writer.” History makes itself felt, he says. “I don’t go around trying to speak for the voiceless, but it’s impossible to create a South African character without thinking about their race and class. And of course many people don’t have a voice precisely because of those factors. You can’t turn away from them.”
In her new book, The Assamese (Aleph), Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty unpacks the composite culture of the people of the State. In an interview to Abdus Salam, she said, “For a few years, I have seen the identity of the Assamese community swerving towards a particular religion, but that has never been historically the case. The cultural greats, including Bhupen Hazarika, highlighted that the Assamese community is the product of multiple bouts of migration over the centuries. And that is what makes us.”
First published in 1967 in Hindi as Rukogi Nahi Radhika, Usha Priyamvada’s feminist novel will now find new readers with Daisy Rockwell’s translation into English. In her review, Latha Anantharaman says the book begins with an introduction about ennui, and Rockwell gives the subject the same light touch in the translation, “framing it within the broader tradition of bourgeois languor as well as all the ennui-adjacent varieties of female melancholy that exist in literature and in life.” The story revolves around a young woman who returns to India after some years of studying and living with a man in the U.S. Can she reconnect with her roots? Priyamvada tells that story in all its many-layered complexities.
Spotlight
Ajay Bisaria
Ajay Bisaria was posted to Islamabad as High Commissioner in 2017, and expelled after the Narendra Modi government’s Article 370 move in August 2019 angered the Imran Khan government in Pakistan. In his prologue to his study-cum-memoir of India-Pakistan relations, Anger Management (Aleph), he writes that the attempt was to tell the story of India–Pakistan diplomacy “from the point of view of its practitioners, those who exited early and those who stayed long in the trenches”. In the Bibliography column, Suhasini Haidar says Mr. Bisaria divides the history of the relationship into decades rather than events, with Section 1 focusing on the decade from 1947-1957 and so on until Section 8, focusing more closely on his own tenure and what has followed, from 2017-2023. “Mr. Bisaria documents how ties gradually plummeted.... He likens Mr. Modi’s plight to that of Atal Bihari Vajpayee and Dr Manmohan Singh, when despite several outreaches and even a visit to Lahore, terror attacks from Pakistan put paid to all plans for ‘peace’.”
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- The childhood stories his mother told him sparked his interest in The Great Flap of 1942, the eponymous title of Mukund Padmanabhan’s debut book. The title refers to an expression used by British bureaucrats in India to describe what happened between December 1941 and mid-1942 when all of India was caught in a state of panic fearing a Japanese invasion. It led to an exodus from many cities, and Padmanabhan explores the story and also the impact it had on the freedom struggle.
- Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay has updated his earlier book, The Demolition and the Verdict, exploring the question whether the opening of the am Mandir will be a new chapter in the Ayodhya saga. Will those who wield political power be mindful of the sensitivities of minorities, he asks, in The Demolition, the Verdict and the Temple (Speaking Tiger).
- Iranian-American poet and scholar Kaveh Akbar’s (Calling a Wolf a Wolf, Pilgrim Bell) new novel, Martyr! (Pan Macmillan), revolves around the life of a newly sober, orphaned son of Iranian immigrants who is seeking meaning in life through faith, art, relationships. His search leads him to a terminally ill painter living out her final days in the Brooklyn Museum.
- Maya Nagari - Bombay-Mumbai: A City in Stories (Speaking Tiger), edited by Shanta Gokhale and Jerry Pinto, has 21 stories from seven languages, spanning over 70 years. The anthology has short stories from both old and new voices writing on the city, ranging from Saadat Hasan Manto, Ismat Chughtai, Baburao Bagul, and Pu La Deshpande to Ambai and Tejaswini Apte-Rahm.
