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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
Last week, Salman Rushdie announced that he had written a memoir about the attack that left him blind in his right eye and damaged his left hand. Knife: Meditations After an Attempted Murder will be published on April 16, 2024. In a statement on October 11, released by Penguin Random House, Rushdie said, “This was a necessary book for me to write: a way to take charge of what happened, and to answer violence with art.” Rushdie was stabbed repeatedly on stage last August as he was about to give a lecture at a literary meet. The 76-year-old writer who was issued a fatwa in 1989 by Iran’s religious leader for his novel The Satanic Verses has been living in the U.S. after living in hiding in the U.K. for years. He had told David Remnick of The New Yorker that after the knife attack, he had worked hard to avoid “recrimination and bitterness,” determined to “look forward, not backwards.”
Louise Glück, a celebrated American poet who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2020 “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal”, has passed away at the age of 80. In her poetry, she wove “classical allusions, philosophical reveries, bittersweet memories, and humorous asides” to write indelible portraits of a fallen and heartrending world, AP said in an obituary. “The advantage of poetry over life is that poetry, if it is sharp enough, may last,” she once said. Her work has been often compared with poets like Emily Dickinson and Sylvia Plath. She had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for her poetry collection, The Wild Iris, and was appointed Poet Laureate in 2003. Her poems are spare. In ‘Persephone the Wanderer’ (Averno), she examines the mother-daughter relationship — “In the first version, Persephone/is taken from her mother/and the goddess of the earth/punishes the earth — this is consistent with what we know of human behaviour,/that human beings take profound satisfaction/in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm:/we may call this/negative creation.” Read a profile we did when she won the Nobel Prize.
In reviews, we read about Sanjay Kaul’s ideas for an alternative development agenda for India, columnist-author Aakar Patel’s first novel, a biography of a forgotten footballer. We also interview Sudha Bharadwaj about her new book and write about books on cricket as the World Cup progresses to the business end of the tournament.
Books of the week
The development challenge in a vast, populous, diverse, and democratic policy like India is a formidable challenge. In his book, An Alternative Development Agenda for India (Routledge India), Sanjay Kaul points out the deeply disturbing signs of widening inequality, jobless growth, widespread malnutrition, and other problems of the poor. In his review, G. Gurucharan writes that the former civil servant brings to bear his experience of development practice as he seeks to set out an alternative development agenda, to improve human development outcomes in India. “With its focus centred on what the author describes as a ‘people first’ approach, the book brings together the problems and possible solutions in universalising health care, overcoming malnutrition, improving learning outcomes, creating jobs, and promoting planned urbanization.”
Aakar Patel’s first novel, After Messiah (Penguin), is a meditation on power in India today and the future of that power. The narrative opens with the sudden demise of the ‘messiah’ of the title, referred to as the ‘Big Man’ in the book. A scramble for his successor throws up several names, including the daughter of a deceased party founder. But when she is anointed, it stuns quite a few people, including the second in command and a regional strongman. The book, says the reviewer Sumana Mukherjee, may not qualify as great literature but it is an important book of ideas, using fiction to force engagement with facts almost to brutal to contemplate upfront.
There are few books on football in India. A sports journalist based in Kolkata has paid tribute to one of football’s forgotten heroes in a new biography. Tulsidas Balaram: The Boy, The Hero, The Tormented Footballer (Hawakal Publishers) by Sudipta Biswas captures the world of football when India boasted of some classy players. Balaram, a distinguished forward, was part of the legendary troika comprising P.K. Banerjee and Chuni Goswami, and yet he is little known outside his legion of fans. In his review, Vijay Lokapally says that the chapter on India’s 1962 triumph at the Asian Games stands out as Biswas reconstructs the occasion with Balaram’s help – how India lost to South Korea in the initial stages, before winning 2-1 in the final against the same opponents. “The book is replete with rare anecdotes and Biswas narrates them with flourish. It is a must-read for lovers of football and footballers.”
Spotlight
Activist-lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj, an IITian, turned her back on American citizenship and chose to work instead with the faceless multitudes of Dalli Rajhara and Bhilai. A well-known trade unionist, she has concentrated her energies on the uplift of the poor in Chhattisgarh, and taken brave positions against the concentration of wealth in the hands of a few. In 2018, Bharadwaj was arrested for allegedly inciting violence in Bhima-Koregaon. She was imprisoned for a year and three months at Pune’s Yerawada jail, and for another year at Mumbai’s Byculla jail. She was released in 2021. In jail, she lived amid women and decided to write about the life of fellow prisoners in her book, From Phansi Yard (Juggernaut). In an interview with Ziya Us Salam, she says she learned a lot about how prisoners cope in overcrowded prisons, how class and caste operate in prison, and the struggles to bring up their children or maintain contact with them after they leave jail. “I saw some brutality and a lot of misery, and indeed that can kill the human being inside anyone. But I also saw the most remarkable friendships and solidarity,” she said.
With the ICC Men’s Cricket World Cup 2023 going on, it’s perhaps the perfect time to read up on the book. In an essay, Suresh Menon picks a list of personal favourites for the fan. On his list are books like A Corner of Foreign Field by Ramachandra Guha, in which the historian tells the story through the life and times of Palwankar Baloo, whose cricket aided social mobility. Guha sees the game from the angles of race, religion, and nation as well as caste, and the cricket field as “both a theatre of imperial power and of Indian resistance.” He also lists Peter Roebuck’s It Never Rains (the diary of a county season); Mike Marqusee’s War Minus the Shooting (on the 1996 World Cup hosted by the subcontinent); Osman Samiuddin’s The Unquiet Ones (the story of Pakistan cricket); Nicholas Brookes’ An Island’s XI (on Sri Lanka’s cricketing journey) and Michael Coward’s Cricket Beyond the Bazaar (which demystifies India and the subcontinent and gives readers a fine account of the tied Test in Chennai in 1986.
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- The Day I Became a Runner (Harper) by Sohini Chattopadhyay is a history of women athletes in India, specifically runners, from the 1940s to contemporary India. As she writes in her introduction, “running is also a lens for me to examine what it is like to be a woman in India.”
- Has India’s innovative digital public infrastructure helped it to leapfrog decades in development? How has this impacted governance? Technology lawyer and privacy expert Rahul Matthan provides a perspective in The Third Way (Juggernaut).
- The Indian Cat: Stories, Paintings, Poetry, and Proverbs (Aleph) by art historian and critic B.N. Goswamy includes artwork and stories, poetry, and sayings about the Indian cat. It’s a look at the place of the domestic cat in Indian art, literature, and speech.
- James McBride’s The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store (Hachette) tells the story of people who live on the margins of white, Christian America and their struggles. Residents of Chicken Hill in Pottstown, Pennsylvania have been nursing a secret of a death, and McBride’s tale reveals the part the town’s white establishment played in it. And yet, he also shows how communities are sustained by love, even in dark times.
