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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
On May 28, a new Parliament building was inaugurated, coinciding with the 140th birthday of V.D. Savarkar. But in an essay, Vinayak Chaturvedi, who is the author of Hindutva and Violence: V.D. Savarkar and the Politics of History (Permanent Black/2022), points out that in the hullaballoo, another important anniversary was forgotten. May 2023 was the centenary of the publication of Savarkar’s Essentials of Hindutva, a foundational text in which he explains that Hindutva is not the equivalent of Hinduism. In fact, he condemns the term “Hinduism” as a Western construct in his book, arguing that it is a “dogma” incorrectly used by Orientalist scholars. “Savarkar adds that ‘Hinduism’ should also be ‘abandoned’ given its imprecise and unsatisfactory uses. By contrast, Hindu dharma is Savarkar’s favoured compound to discuss the religion and culture of Hindus. He says dharma was not ‘merely a religion,’ but that it constituted all the thoughts and actions of Hindus. In fact, Hindu dharma is closer to his interpretation of Hindutva than any other conceptualisation.”
In reviews, we read the findings from excavations in the Deccan and the unique features they have thrown up, Ann-Christine Duhaime’s suggestion to achieve climate change goals, a reappraisal of Churchill and his stance towards India, Siddhartha Deb’s new novel and Barbara Kingsolver’s Pulitzer Prize and Women’s Fiction Prize-winning book, Demon Copperhead. Next week, we will have the review of a much talked about book, Rebecca F. Kuang’s Yellowface, in which a little-known writer, June Hayward, steals the manuscript of her ‘friend’ and celebrity writer Athena Liu, and passes it of as her own. What happens next is scarring, and it is a sharp takedown of the publishing industry, social media, and all sorts of tokenism on race, gender and identity.
Books of the week
In Minding the Climate (Harvard University Press), Ann-Christine Duhaime, a professor of neurosurgery at the Harvard Medical School, explores why changing behaviour in response to the climate crises remains challenging. Having lived life for eons on resource scarcity, the human mind responds to better rewards for changing old behaviour. While the perception may have started changing due to the increasing frequency of extreme climatic events, we are physiologically not equipped with carbon dioxide sensors to reflect a strong personal threatening experience and thus change our behaviour. In his review, Sudhirendar Sharma writes that Duhaime presents a study of the human brain – from understanding its evolutionary origin to strategies for its pro-environmental shift. Taking a deep dive into the human decision-making apparatus, she finds that the brain is heavily influenced by its evolutionary design, but is also exquisitely flexible. “Minding the Climate is a ground-breaking work on how we might leverage our brains to fight climate change.”
Veteran diplomat Kishan S. Rana’s Churchill and India: Manipulation or Betrayal? (Routledge) argues that Churchill did nothing to prevent partition when he could have. As Prime Minister, it is revealing how Churchill used every pretext to deny self-rule to India and perpetuate British rule. He saw the perceived threat from Germany, the religious feud in India, Jinnah and the Muslim League as opportunities to divide and derail the Indian national movement, says Rana. In his review, Dammu Ravi writes that Rana’s scholarly book brings to the surface Churchill’s miscalculations in the British endgame, drawing conclusions from a swathe of archival documents, correspondence, letters, and conversations. “The book contributes to a better understanding of history; it also urges leaders to draw lessons from the past while moving forward.”
“First, I got myself born.” The first line of the multiple awards-winning Demon Copperhead (Faber) by Barbara Kingsolver sets up the story which draws from Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield. The protagonist, Damon Fields who is known as Demon Copperhead, is born to an 18-year-old addict in the Appalachian region of Virginia who lives in a trailer. Life is harsh and difficult and for Demon to be able to live and tell his tale too is a remarkable achievement. As Mini Kapoor writes in her review, life for him is a multihued arc with poverty, abuse, hunger, exploitation, addiction, loneliness, aloneness, serendipity and the occasional kindness. “Having been born to a teenage mother, Demon’s is a rollercoaster ride, and he narrates it with compassion. There is always a lingering understanding that given a better roll of the dice, he could have fared better.” Taking on the OxyContin crisis that is sweeping America, Kingsolver’s fictional tale is close to reality and heartbreaking.
Will Bibi, the vulnerable protagonist of Siddhartha Deb’s new novel, The Light at the End of the World (Context), be able to breathe eventually or will she be too weighed down by everything that is happening in the world around her – and to her? This is the question Saikat Majumdar asks in his review, pointing out that the author brings the past alive with a masterful touch but he falters in the allegorisation of the present. In his handling of Bibi’s life, Deb embeds everything we know today from news headlines and social media storms. “Should fictional lives end up confirming media reports and their stereotypes, or should they tease them and create something recognisable yet alien?” poses Majumdar. For him, the hostility Bibi faces is savage and brutal – she is outed as a Pakistani agent, as a prostitute, as a sex-crazed woman, as a lesbian, as the holder of fake university degrees, as a Naxal… -- but given the surreal times in which we live, such fiction fails to enrich or complicate our digitally enhanced reality in any way.
Spotlight
Bhimbetka Rock Painting. The Bhimbetka rock shelters exhibit the earliest traces of human life in India, Madhya Pradesh on March 12, 2017 in India. (Photo by Frédéric Soltan/Corbis via Getty Images) | Photo Credit: Frédéric Soltan
The third volume of Beyond Stones and More Stones (The Mythic Society), edited by well-known archaeologist Prof. Ravi Korisettar, has 11 chapters and the focus of this volume is on “site-specific studies in Indian archaeology,” while the earlier ones had focused on prehistory and then, domestication of plants and animals. If there is a broad theme underlying the structure of the book, says Tony Joseph in his review, it would be transitions: from the Acheulian to the Palaeolithic; from hunting and gathering to farming; from the Neolithic to the Iron Age; and from the ancient to the medieval, and it will be of enormous help to students and practitioners of archaeology in India. To give just one example, the paper titled ‘Unfolding the Landscape of Southern Neolithic: Recent Explorations at Tekkalakota’ by Namita Sanjay Sugandhi and V. Shobha, puts across how prehistoric and protohistoric communities in the southern Deccan are a marked contrast to contemporaneous societies in other parts of the subcontinent, a distinction that the authors say, lasted well into the early medieval period. Some of these unique factors would include forms of monumentality (from ashmounds to megaliths), processes of domestication (millets, for example), early metallurgical production and symbolic expression. “Many chapters, such as those on the rock art of Maski in northern Karnataka and also on that of the Aravallis; a third one on the megalithic landscape of south India; and a fourth on the Neolithic ashmounds of southern India, pay much attention to the new techniques that are being used to survey, document and analyse these important sites before they are lost altogether.”
Browser
- In India Rising: Memoir of a Scientist (Ebury Press), R. Chidambaram (with Suresh Gangotra) looks back at his life and his contribution to the world of science and technology. Always fascinated by physics, he joined the Bhabha Atomic Research Centre, spending a long time with the institute before becoming the principal scientific adviser to the Government of India in 2001. “The India of my dreams,” he writes, “has always been one which is economically developed, scientifically advanced and militarily strong.”
- The Peacemakers (Aleph), edited by Ghazala Wahab, chronicles the lives of some extraordinary individuals who acted when it counted. Among the writers are Rajmohan Gandhi who writes about the closing years of Mahatma Gandhi’s life as he worked to stop the post-partition violence. Others include Nandita Haksar, who writes about the challenges in fostering peace in a conflict zone like Nagaland, and Rahul Bedi who recalls both the killers and saviours in the riots that followed Indira Gandhi’s assassination in 1984. A host of activists, journalists and citizens, including Teesta Setalvad, Jyoti Punwani, Uttam Sengupta, offer stories which provide hope amid the hatred.
- In The Grande Matriarch of Malabar (Readomania) by Sajita Nair, Dakshayani Amma is determined to hold on to the tharavad, her family’s ancestral house, passed down matrilineally. But this this jeopardised by Rohini’s arrival from the U.S. Will the two women be able to rise above differences?
- Varavarao Rao: A Life in Poetry (Vintage), edited by N. Venugopal and Meena Kandasamy, is an English translation of the Telugu poet’s selected poems, a collection which is the first of its kind. It is a blend of tender responses and thoughtful reactions to social realities, and champions the underdog.
