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After Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming and R.L. Stine, it’s the turn of Agatha Christie to be revised by sensitivity readers. British newspapers are reporting that several passages in new editions of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries are being removed or reworked.
The Telegraph said in Christie’s Death on the Nile, a black servant, originally described as grinning, is now said to be neither black nor grinning, but simply “nodding”.
In A Caribbean Mystery, the amateur detective’s reference to a West Indian hotel worker’s “lovely white teeth” has been removed. Poirot no longer calls a character, “a Jew, of course.”
The daily said Christie books have been revised earlier but the scale of the alterations now appears novel, carried out by sensitivity readers hired by publisher HarperCollins.
When the Dahl books were subjected to an overhaul, publisher Penguin relented after a backlash, saying it would allow the originals to be sold alongside the revised editions. Both Dahl and Christie had problematic views on race and colonialism, writing as they were in the time of Empire in the mid-20th century, but book critics are divided over whether their work should be updated for the modern era, for they are also cultural chroniclers of a time, and it’s important to know that history and context.
For World Storytelling Day, Radhika Santhanam asked four writers, Shehan Karunatilaka, Geetanjali Shree, Janice Pariat and Christopher Kloeble to talk about their craft, writing quirks, the books on their shelves at the moment, and their ideal literary dinner guests. Read the story here.
For Booker Prize winner Karunatilaka, his ideal literary dinner guests would be Robert Louis Stevenson, Dorothy Parker and Kurt Vonnegut; International Booker Prize winner Shree said her favoured literary dinner guests would be Nirmal Verma, Krishna Sobti and Abdulrazak Gurnah, who is a “fine, sensitive soul.”
German playwright and author of The Museum of the World, Kloeble, said he likes most genres, but doesn’t really enjoy crime – “that probably has to do with the fact that we have an enormous amount of that in Germany.” Pariat (Everything the Light Touches) said her ideal literary dinner guests would be Shirley Jackson, the Khasi poet Soso Tham and Easterine Kire.
In reviews, we read Caroline Elkin’s book on British atrocities committed in its colonies, Sara Rai’s memoir, and learn about Ameer Shahul’s book on mercury poisoning in Kodaikanal. We also pay tribute to poet Anna Sujatha Mathai who passed away recently.
Books of the week
Vintage engraving of British Colonial Troops, Mounted Infantry company of the 2nd Regiment. The New Regiments for service in Burmah. The London Illustrated News, 1891 | Photo Credit: duncan1890
Caroline Elkin’s book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire (Bodley Head) is a disturbing account of the numerous atrocities committed by Britain in territories under its control across the world. It includes the methods it deployed, from sadistic torture, sexual violence, brutal internment practices, deportations to executions on an industrial scale.
According to the reviewer, Uday Balakrishnan, Elkin’s book, a sequel to her 2006 Pulitzer Prize winner, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya, is unputdownable. “It graphically captures the numerous instances of imperial Britain’s brutalisation of its subjects in various parts of the world. She acquaints us with those who committed the atrocities in the name of the state as well as the political leadership — Prime Ministers Winston Churchill, Clement Attlee and Harold Macmillan included — which provided cover. She also brings out how the British establishment fought successfully in Parliament and in international forums like the UN not to hold it responsible for its many ‘crimes against humanity’.”
The most interesting portions of Elkin’s book are those where she tracks intelligence officers, administrative and security personnel as they move from one part of the empire to another, India, Ireland, Palestine, Cyprus, Kenya, Malaysia, to carry on with their task of smothering dissent and crushing revolts right up to the 1960s.
In the 1980s, Hindustan Lever, a subsidiary of the Anglo-Dutch company Unilever, took over Chesebrough-Pond’s thermometer factory in Kodaikanal. With allegedly inadequate safety protocols in place, scores of workers began to fall ill over the following years, and by some accounts, 28 people died, after they were exposed to the toxic heavy metal, mercury.
In March 2001, following an intrepid campaign by the local community and Greenpeace, the factory was shut down. Ameer Shahul, a former investigative reporter and Greenpeace campaigner, tracked the mercury poisoning case closely and he has stitched together the story in his new book Heavy Metal: How a Global Corporation Poisoned Kodaikanal (Pan Macmillan).
In an interview with Divya Gandhi, Shahul says that the Kodaikanal mercury poisoning shows that industrial units can be ticking bombs. “Erring corporations, especially the ones involved in industrial production such as Unilever, can be held truly accountable only with the help of science and data.”
The impact of mercury in Kodaikanal’s environs has been catastrophic. “Today, Kodaikanal remains one of Asia’s mercury hotspots, as recent research shows. A study published in 2020 by IIT Hyderabad found that mercury is likely to reside in Kodaikanal forest soil for decades to centuries and that forest soil will continue to act as a source of mercury downstream,” he adds.
Writer, translator and editor Sara Rai goes back to her homes, the cities she lived in, Allahabad, Banaras, Delhi, and to her family of writers for her lyrical memoir, Raw Umber (Westland Books). Her admission that she felt as if she had always been writing it doesn’t come as a surprise, for she had many stories to tell beside her own.
While the figure of her grandfather, Premchand, ‘The Ancestor in the Cupboard’, loomed over her childhood, others in her family, grandmother, parents, aunts, uncles, cousins, were all writers and in her mind she saw them insisting that they be written about too. In doing this, she brings alive an eclectic and syncretic past, showing readers a world — and a time — lost forever.
Premchand, she writes, was the “unbelievable” figure in the family cupboard: “The air of our house was permeated with my grandfather’s presence – his life of commitment to the underdog, his willingness for personal sacrifice for the larger good and his ideals.”
Her grandmother, Shivrani Devi, whom Premchand referred to as yoddhastree or warrior woman, and who outlived her husband by 40 years, narrated incidents from his life.
One of them was about a mail-runner, Kazaki, whose life inspired Premchand to write a story about him. A photograph of her grandfather, with a hole in his left shoe, adorned the walls — satirist Harishankar Parsai had written about it in his essay, ‘Premchand ke Phate Joote’ (Premchand’s Torn Shoes).
Growing up in an extraordinary family of letters, Sara Rai could have chosen to write this memoir in Hindi (as her novels and short stories). She picked English because it came naturally to her, as most of her reading was in that language, and had helped create her literary sensibility.
Sudipta Datta reviews Sara Rai’s Raw Umber — A Memoir: Remembrance of a lost world
Spotlight
Anna Sujatha Mathai who passed away recently at 89 was part of the first wave of poets, along with Ranjit Hoskote, Tabish Khair, Sudeep Sen and others, to be published in the ‘New Poetry’ series, selected by Nissim Ezekiel and published by Rupa in 1991.
In a tribute to Mathai, Sudeep Sen says her verses had a down-to-earth and familial touch. Mathai’s first poems were published as part of P. Lal’s Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry in 1969.
“Words are fish/swimming in the ocean/ Unless there are waves/the fish won’t come up/unless there is excitement/the words won’t swim up/that’s how a poem starts/with waves of excitement.” Sen writes that these lines from her eponymous poem, ‘Words’, sum up Mathai’s “excitement” and point to the wellspring of her poetry. Born in Kerala to Syrian Christian parents, Mathai’s early years were spent in Delhi as her father was then head of the English department at St. Stephen’s College.
Sudeep Sen’s tribute to poet Anna Sujatha Mathai
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- Delving into the history of sedition and censorship in colonial India, Banned & Censored: What the British Raj Didn’t Want Us to Read (Roli Books) examines 75 texts that the colonial state banned, censored or deemed seditious. Selected and edited by Devika Sethi, it includes books, articles, poems, pamphlets and portions from Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj and Hindustan Ghadr Party’s circular Yugantar.
- Where the Madness Lies: Citizen Accounts of Identity and Nationalism (Orient BlackSwan) by Kishalay Bhattacharjee draws on years of reportage, interviews and fieldwork to foreground perspectives of ordinary, often marginalised Indians, in Assam and elsewhere, and their negotiations to carve out a place in their own country. Bhattacharjee tries to understand what it means to be an ‘other’ in one’s own country.
- The Odia writer Gopinath Mohanty’s short stories have been translated into English by Sudeshna Mohanty and Sudhansu Mohanty. Oblivion and Other Stories (Penguin) were written across half a century (1935-1988) and recreate the social life of mid-20th century India, its harsh realities, the rich-poor, rural-urban divide. The thread running through the anthology is marginalisation of a class of people, and its aftermath.
- The characters in Moms in the Wild (Harper) by Nidhi Raichand live in the competitive world of social media and journalism and ride a rollercoaster on jobs, friendships and motherhood. The story revolves around Sneha Talwar, an idealistic young reporter, and what happens when the person she is about to interview ends up dead.
