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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
“What does China want?” That’s the question Rush Doshi tries to explain in his new book The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (OUP). To overturn the U.S.-led international order, China, argues Doshi, is pursuing a clear grand strategy, which has been in the works for decades. China’s ambition and agenda is based on the understanding that the “world order is at stake because of unprecedented geopolitical and technological shifts, and that this requires strategic adjustments.” In their book, The Comrades and the Mullahs (HarperCollins), Ananth Krishnan and Stanly Johny contend that China has shown a “willingness to insert itself as a power player and act more forcefully to secure its economic and security interests in the neighbourhood” as well. For instance, Beijing has come to conclude that the “best way to manage risks in Afghanistan…would be by betting on the Taliban.” There have been several books on India-China relations in the past few years which touch on all aspects of bilateral ties from the border dispute, Tibet, future strategies and so forth. Nirupama Rao’s The Fractured Himalaya: India Tibet China 1949-1962 (Penguin) highlights the flawed history of the initial years of the political relationship between India and China leading up to the 1962 war; A.S. Bhasin’s Nehru, Tibet and China (Penguin) points out that by not raising the border issue with China while discussing Tibet, India squandered an opportunity; In India and Asian Geopolitics: Past, Present (Penguin), Shivshankar Menon argues that China taking Tibet in 1950 is a pivotal moment in India-China relations. In his book, How India Sees the World (Juggernaut), among other foreign policy issues, Shyam Saran focuses on China, a country he has studied for decades. His new book, How China Sees India and the World (Juggernaut) is out end of the month, and analyses contemporary India-China ties, based on close readings of Chinese Communist Party leaders’ speeches and writings and his own experiences as diplomat and foreign secretary.
In reviews, we read about China in the world order, a journey with COVID-19 victims, a parable on our relationship with nature, stories of Indian migrants in the Gulf and more.
Books of the week
In his book, The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order, Rush Doshi places China in the midst of a continuing historical and cultural process. Xi Jinping’s aggressive foreign policy is not fundamentally different from Deng Xiaoping’s opening up or engagement. Rather, it’s part of a long game which China has been playing with a clear grand strategy. For a country that suffered ‘a century of humiliation’ at the hands of invading forces and a poor, backward looking agrarian society at the time of the communist revolution, China has come a long way. It is now the world’s second largest economy, a manufacturing and technological powerhouse and has the world’s largest navy. What does it want next? Will China be ready to play second fiddle to the United States in an American-controlled global order or will it try to displace the U.S. as the world’s leader and build a new China-centric order? Doshi emphatically argues that the contest between the U.S. and China is about who should lead the global order, says Stanly Johny in his review. “Doshi makes a forthright assessment of America’s decline, which he argues started in 2008. But his key argument is that there’s nothing fatalistic about the decline of American power. The U.S. has seen several ‘waves of declinism’ in the last century and has bounced back. America, he contends, should subvert the order China is trying to build employing asymmetric strategies and rebuild the American order with liberal values to ensure that it stays the global leader. The question that’s not answered is whether the U.S. has the economic and institutional capacity to play a long game against China like China has been doing for decades.”
The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order review: A contest for global leadership
The Living Mountain (Fourth Estate) by Amitav Ghosh is a no-nonsense tale, says the reviewer Neha Sinha. The slim book is a parable, ‘a fable of our times’, which suggests that “while there may not be one way of looking at Nature, there indeed is a way we should not look at Nature. We shouldn’t expect it to be a domestic familiar, destined to lie in chains of mining and megalomania.” Ghosh spins the story around Living Mountain, a mountain that feeds a tree which produces valuable honey, flowers – and fragrant nuts. This forms the bedrock of an indigenous economy. This way of life is interrupted with the coming of the Anthropoi – militarised men of machines with no time for oral traditions. “The Living Mountain should not be dismissed as pandemic fiction… Instead, it should be seen as the beginning of the real, normative question – what do we do, now that we know that the Anthropocene is here, espoused and glibly defended by us?”
Once upon a mahaparbat: Neha Sinha reviews Amitav Ghosh’s ‘The Living Mountain’
Travelling across 14 States, Barkha Dutt goes beyond statistics and policies to humanise the tragedy that COVID-19 inflicted on the people in Humans of COVID: To Hell and Back (Juggernaut). The reviewer Soma Basu finds the writing stark and lucid. While recording the despondency and despair all around, she also talks about the million acts of compassion. “Barkha tells us about the Hindu gravedigger at a Muslim burial ground; a Muslim volunteer performing the last rites for Hindus; women in a housing society in Surat who cooked extra meals to feed migrant workers; a Mumbai nurse who found it easier to battle terrorists than COVID; children who watched their mother die on the cold floor of a hospital when they were unable to get a bed for her; young resident doctors on long shifts and their mental meltdown; about gurdwaras that ran oxygen langars when hospitals closed their doors.”
Humans of COVID: To Hell and Back review: A million acts of compassion amid pain and despair
Rejimon Kuttappan’s Undocumented, Stories of Indian Migrants in the Arab Gulf (Penguin) is essential reading for those interested in the tales of struggle that prop up West Asia. It reveals the grime and hope that lurk beneath those oil reserves and highrises. In his review, K.C. Vijaya Kumar writes that Rejimon has a journalist’s inquisitiveness, an activist’s heart, the research-scholar’s rigour and the willingness to tell a story with all its warts. “Even if a majority of his case studies are linked to Keralites, specifically in Muscat and Oman, he also throws light on Indians from other States. Men and women, numb with poverty and yet excited about their prospects in West Asia, take diverse ways to reach their expected slice of heaven.”
Undocumented, Stories of Indian Migrants in the Arab Gulf review: Footprints in the sand
Spotlight
Are protein-packed insects the food of the future? In his column, Thought for Food, Rahul Verma reviews Extreme Cuisine: The Weird & Wonderful Foods That People Eat by Jerry Hopkins. The foreword, by the late chef Anthony Bourdain, says it is a “definitive collection” of unusual eats. “Vietnam? Gotta have that ho bit long (half-term foetal duck egg). Singapore? Don’t miss out on the scorpions! After a few years of this, when offered a spicy fry-up of crickets or worms, I’m likely to say, ‘Bugs? That is so last week!’” According to Hopkins, writes Verma, the insect mentioned most often as the protein source of the future is – get ready – the cockroach!
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- Irrationally Rational: Ten Nobel Laureates Script the Story of Behavioural Economics (Penguin/Viking) by V. Raghunathan takes readers through the journey of rational-irrational arguments, showing why economics shorn of psychology may be incomplete. Collating the works of 10 Nobel Laureates largely responsible for the rise of behavioural economics, it makes the subject more accessible.
- The Vortex: The True Story of History’s Deadliest Storm and the Liberation of Bangladesh (Harper) by Scott Carney and Jason Miklian chronicles the cyclone of November 1970, that killed over 500,000 people in then East Pakistan, and its aftermath. Scott and Jason piece together the story of how a cyclone spurred the liberation struggle.
- Nireeswaran (Vintage Books), a classic from the Kerala Sahitya Akademi-winning novelist V.J. James, uses satire to question blind faith. Translated by Ministhy S., it tells the story of three atheists who install and idol of Nireeswaran to establish that god is a superstition. When miracles start getting attributed to the deity, the trio ask if atheism is a religion in itself.
- Song of the Forest: Tales from Here, There, and Everywhere (Aleph) by Ruskin Bond brings together his very best tales written in the 21st century. The title story, ‘Song of the Forest’, has not been published before. There are other engaging stories like ‘A Man Called Brain’ and ‘Rhododendrons in the Mist’.
