Caste: The Origins of Our Discontent by Isabel Wilkerson
A pandemic is as good a moment of reckoning as any other. For those of us that have experienced caste privilege or prejudice in India and/or in other parts of the world, so much of this book holds up a mirror as it traces the parallels of racism and casteism in the United States, India, and Nazi Germany. I felt both shame and inspiration, but was also moved by the description of a moment in which Dalit activists and visiting African American scholars sing ‘We Shall Overcome’ together in a village in India. Tracing the history of caste is such a profound task to take on, yet Wilkerson doesn’t lose my attention for a minute as she moves between current struggles like Black Lives Matter and threads back to ancient texts such as the Manu Smriti .
Hope in The Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities by Rebecca Solnit
Philosopher Rebecca Solnit wrote this in the wake of the Bush Administration’s invasion of Iraq. A third edition came out in 2016. Things were about to get worse and we were about to ache more than ever for “wild possibilities”. In this, perhaps the darkest moment of our collective lifetimes, it is such a comfort to read of the kind of hope Solnit wants us to keep in focus – populist, grassroots, ones that demand action through the uncertainty. “In these moments of rupture,” Solnit writes, “people find themselves members of a ‘we’ that did not until then exist…” Reach for this slender book when you need a reminder that “grief and hope can coexist”.
A Burning by Megha Majumdar
An escape into fiction is always welcome, isn’t it? Ah, but Majumdar won’t let us roam too far from reality, with her all-too-real characters tossed about in the peril of all-too-recognisable moments of extremism in India. The escape comes because there’s much pleasure to be gained here in her beautiful prose. Take this deceptively simple yet searing line in the head of one of her many riveting characters, for instance — “Nothing good comes from contacting the police. Everybody knows that. If you catch a thief, you are better off beating the man and, having struck fear in his heart, letting him go.”
A Room of One’s Own , by Virginia Woolf
This one is especially for women who either are in blissful solitude at this moment or are aching for it. Virginia Woolf’s 1928 essay was written as a lecture on Women and Fiction at Cambridge University. She writes about the nature of interruptions on a woman’s thought, the politics of intrusion, the exclusionary history of universities, and whether a woman can take up space. Come for Woolf’s philosophy, stay for her humour with sentences as delectable as this one - “Women have served all these centuries as looking glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size.”
