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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
Last Friday, Salman Rushdie was viciously attacked while he was preparing to give a speech at a New York literary event. Though the motive is unknown, Rushdie has been living under the threat of a death sentence since 1989 when Iran’s religious leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against his fourth novel The Satanic Verses (1988). The author was forced into hiding for nine years, but he continues to write and has published at least 10 more novels after the death decree, with his new novel, Victory City (Penguin Random House), slated to be released in February 2023. The publisher says it is a story set in 14th century south India. “After witnessing the death of her mother, the grief-stricken Pampa Kampana becomes a vessel for the goddess Parvati, who begins to speak out of the girl’s mouth. Granting her powers beyond Pampa Kampana’s comprehension, the goddess tells her that she will be instrumental in the rise of a great city called Bisnaga - literally ‘victory city’ - the wonder of the world.” As years pass and rulers come and go, the city’s ruin is brought about by the “hubris of those in power”. Rushdie shot to fame with his Booker Prize-winning Midnight’s Children, a “gigantic, all-or-nothing project” that reimagined the life of Saleem Sinai, born at the stroke of the midnight hour on August 15, 1947, and that of the newly independent India. As he writes in his memoir, Joseph Anton, “If he was going to have one last try at achieving his dream, he didn’t want it to be with a safe, conservative, middling little book.”
In reviews, we read Rajmohan Gandhi’s reflections on India after 1947, some epochal Partition literature, India’s sporting history in 75 years of independence and more. We also carry an essay on what independence means to a generation of people who witnessed the birth of the nation, and an extract from a book on arguably the greatest grassroots intervention in India that changed lives.
Books of the week
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In a slim volume, India After 1947: Reflections and Recollections (Aleph), published to mark the seventy-fifth year of India’s independence, Rajmohan Gandhi reflects on the journey travelled by the nation whose march to freedom was led by Mahatma Gandhi. The grandson of Mahatma Gandhi and C. Rajagopalachari, and the biographer of Sardar Patel, Rajmohan was born in 1935. His father Devdas was for many years the editor of the Hindustan Times. Rajmohan’s circumstances gave him a unique vantage point into the freedom movement and the early years of independent India, says Uma Mahadevan-Dasgupta in her review. “I was born into privilege, in comparison with many others, but also into a tradition of struggle,” he writes. “This brought him in close contact with the leading figures of Indian independence, and, in later decades, with social reformers and activists. Their commitment and fierce passion shine brightly through these recollections. A common element of all their projects is a quest for fraternity. Gandhi gave a call to freedom fighters to identify ‘with every one of the millions’ living in India.” Contemplating on the role of Gandhi in the twenty-first century, Rajmohan Gandhi points out that for the people whom he led to freedom, he was first a symbol of love.
Review of Rajmohan Gandhi’s India After 1947 —Reflections and Recollections: Quest for fraternity
Is Khushwant Singh’s searing novel, Train to Pakistan, the first great Partition book? Taking stock of epochal works of fiction that document an important chapter in India’s history, Aditya Mani Jha writes that the fact that Singh’s novel is still considered a classic nearly seven decades after its release speaks volumes about the raw power of his writing. “This is a novel that forced its readers to confront some unpalatable truths about the violence of 1947.” On his list are other great literary works including Bapsi Sidhwa’s Ice-Candy Man, which Deepa Mehta adapted for her film Earth; Anita Desai’s Clear Light of Day and Attia Hosain’s Sunlight on a Broken Column. Quoting a passage from Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, Jha says she uses compelling metaphors for the state of relations between India and Pakistan: “India and Pakistan play games. One says it’s cricket, let them come, the other says, it’s their singer, don’t let him sing. This one says our fishermen are sitting about catching fish over there, drown them; that one says he was in the army before, now he’s a spy, skin him. And amidst all this my turn no mine no mine, visas are granted or not granted. The diplomats are such deities, they can sometimes finish the game with no preparation at all, and sometimes they keep hitting sixes and losing anyway.”
Chandresh Narayanan’s book, 75 Years of Indian Sports: Game, Guts, Glory (Rupa), is a journalistic account of India’s sporting history since Independence. The value of the book, says the reviewer Suresh Menon, lies in its range of topics for historians of sport and Indian society to delve into. “It is timely, detailing the ‘what’ but falling short of the ‘why’ and ‘how’. How did a nation not renowned for its sports internationally (with some exceptions) raise its standards so dramatically? Why was it only cricket, cricket and more cricket for so many years, regardless of wins or losses? At what point did Indians decide to move beyond the Olympic ideal of mere participation and begin to focus on winning?” It would have been interesting, writes Menon, if the author had provided an inkling into the way decision-makers thought about sports after independence, and how the thinking changed over the years.
Spotlight
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For her new book, Independence Day (Juggernaut), Veena Venugopal spoke to people who witnessed the birth of the nation and traced the trajectory of the country through their individual lives. Fifteen of them made to the book, she writes in an essay, and include men and women, Hindus and Muslims, upper castes and Dalits. “While each of their stories is different, the one common thread is how their young lives were irretrievably intertwined with the imminent fate of their motherland.” When she asked them what they thought of the country today, they replied, without a trace of hopelessness: “What is 75 years for a culture that goes back 5,000 years?” They advised her to have patience. “Things take time. This is our home, if things aren’t going well, we should roll up our sleeves and get down to fixing it.” Giving up on the nation is not an option for them.
For the generation of people who witnessed the birth of the nation, giving up on it is not an option
In the 75 years since independence, grassroots interventions, driven by the state, market and civil society, have influenced the nature, shape and scope of social action. In Anchoring Change: Seventy-Five Years of Grassroots Intervention That Made a Difference (HarperCollins), the editors, Vikram Singh Mehta, Neelima Khetan and Jayapadma RV, present 24 stories of successful grassroots intervention since Independence which offer learnings for the creation of a development framework for the next 75 years. In his introduction, Mehta writes that the Midday Meal scheme in schools in Tamil Nadu, is arguably the best-known government intervention, and among the first to link food and nutrition to education and development. In an extract, we read Chandra Mohan B. and A.R. Meyyammai’s piece on the scheme that have changed the lives of thousands of people. “The noon meal programme of the Tamil Nadu government is still in force and is making a difference to lakhs of poor students who would otherwise have found it difficult to attend school. The noon-meal scheme not only eradicated hunger from classrooms but also substantially improved student enrolment, retention and education levels in Tamil Nadu, laying the foundations for the State to emerge as an economic powerhouse. The Puratchi Thalaivar MGR Nutritious Meal Programme, as it has come to be known, has emerged as a pioneering example for the rest of India. Today, it stands tall as Tamil Nadu’s contribution to the pantheon of developmental interventions that have transformed India.”
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- Building a Free India (Speaking Tiger Books), edited by Rakesh Batabyal, brings together landmark speeches delivered over roughly a century by leaders of the national movement, from Dadabhai Naoroji and Surendranath Banerjee to Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and B.R. Ambedkar. It also includes speeches of lesser-known but equally remarkable figures.
- M. Hamid Ansari’s Challenges to a Liberal Polity (Penguin/Viking) takes on some of the burning issues of Indian polity and society. The former vice president discusses Nehru’s vision for India, issues of citizenship, religion, democracy, Muslim identity, the role of women to build a compassionate society and the implication for dissent.
- Two friends from different backgrounds weather every storm of life together till one fateful night in Kamila Shamsie’s Best of Friends (Bloomsbury). Decades later, when the two have settled into their lives, the past catches up with them. This is a literary thriller about the complexities of friendship.
- In Guillaume Musso’s The Secret Life of Writers (Hachette), a celebrated author retires and moves to an island, away from the public eye. Twenty years later, a body washes ashore and a journalist shows up for an interview at the island. A gripping mystery unfolds where the lines dividing truth and fiction are blurred.