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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
From a new biography of Vajpayee to an uplifting memoir by a transgender folk artist, from a reimagining of Charles Dickens’ 1850 novel David Copperfield to political fiction mirroring the times, The Hindu has picked the best reads across genres for the summer. Take a peek here.
In other news, Tamil writer Udaya Shankar has won the Sahitya Akademi’s Bal Sahitya Puraskar, 2023, for his novel Adhanin Bommai, based on the archaeological excavation in Keezhadi; Ram Thangam has won the Yuva Puraskar for his short story collection, Thirukarthiyal which chronicles life in Nanjil Nadu in Kanniyakumari district. Shankar is among the 22 recipients of the Bal Sahitya Puraskar, while Thangam is among the 20 winners of the Yuva Puraskar. The list also includes Anirudh Kanisetti who has won the Yuva Puraskar for Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from Chalukyas to Cholas.
In reviews, we read Sudha Pai and Sajjan Kumar’s book on Dalit politics in Uttar Pradesh, Aasheesh Pittie’s book on the philosophy for birdwatching, an excerpt from a new biography of Vivekananda and more.
Books of the week
Sudha Pai and Sajjan Kumar’s Maya, Modi, Azad: Dalit Politics in the Time of Hindutva (HarperCollins) explain a new phenomenon unfolding in Uttar Pradesh, where Dalits appear to be moving towards Hindutva in increasing numbers. Pai, who has followed the Bahujan Samaj Party’s politics, and Kumar, a researcher, offer insights into the churn in Dalit political behaviour through extensive field work in U.P., the State which has been instrumental in delivering two successive Lok Sabha majorities to the Bharatiya Janata Party. Explaining the split in Dalit votes, the writers argues that the BSP succeeded in instilling a sense of dignity among Dalits, but then stepped off the political radar, a vacuum exploited by the BJP and also because the self-confident Dalit had also become aspirational now. In his review, Vikas Pathak writes that this is one of the finest insights of the book. “One sign of self-confidence is always fragmentation. The electoral debacle of the BSP also reflects the success of the BSP in providing ‘aatma-samman’ (self-respect) to Dalits who grew up seeing Kanshi Ram and Mayawati as their natural leaders.” But this does not mean that Dalits are not protesting on the ground when there’s discrimination. “The rise of Dalit electoral support for the BJP co-exists with vociferous protests in the context of atrocities. Dalits will vote for the party they think has a better chance of fulfilling their aspirations and protest when they sense discrimination.” Read the review and listen to the podcast.
The Living Air by Aasheesh Pittie (Indian Pitta/Juggernaut) features short chapters on birds or places he visits and re-visits. As a wildlife rich country blessed with over 1300 bird species, there are many rare storks, woodpeckers, hornbills and bustards that are on the must-see lists of birders around the world. Yet, as the reviewer Neha Sinha says, Pittie suggests that birdwatching is about quietly observing what is around you, taking notes, and in celebrating even common avians. “Pittie makes a fine point by focusing on what is close by, common and crisscrossing his life. He makes no distinctions between the rare bird and the one you may see every other day. The idea is to value everything nature has to offer, even that which appears mundane. In a chapter on Dabchicks (Little grebes) near the Golconda fort, he notices the birds and their ‘clockwork’ movements in the water, and wonders how long it will be before land sharks gobble up the wetlands the Dabchicks daub their bodies in.” The book covers sparrows, nightjars, ioras and owls, and are accompanied by beautiful illustrations by Sangeetha Kadur. “The book’s sharpness lies in how still and centred it is; for a nature-deprived world, this work should be Vitamin N.”
Review of Aasheesh Pittie’s The Living Air: A philosophy for birdwatching
Spotlight
In Vivekananda, The Philosopher of Freedom (Aleph), Govind Krishnan V. argues that the best antidote to the Sangh Parivar’s appropriation of Vivekananda is for more people to read his work. Pointing out that Vivekananda was not a Hindu supremacist nor a “facile glorifier of Hinduism”, as the Sangh portrays him to be, the writer argues that Vivekananda’s thought stands in direct opposition to all the fundamentalist tenets of Hindutva. As a liberal and an individualist, Vivekananda pushed for universal religious tolerance. Vivekananda was neither an iconoclast, nor an anarchist. He valued what spiritual tradition, scriptures, and the accumulated wisdom of humanity had to offer the individual. He considered the Upanishads (the philosophical part of the Vedas) to contain the grandest truths of existence ever discovered by man and the Buddha to have preached the highest morality ever conceived. But all these were valuable only if man received them freely and accepted these truths after examining them with her own discriminative faculty. No one should be coerced to accept them or live according to anything other than the dictates of her own conscience. Read an excerpt.
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- Simon Schama’s Foreign Bodies (Simon & Schuster) traces the history of humanity caught between the terror of contagion and the ingenuity of science. Post-COVID-19, he goes back in time to shine a light on Waldemar Haffkine, a Jewish student in Odessa who became a microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute and was instrumental for finding vaccines for cholera and bubonic plague, and other “saviours” down the ages.
- Manish Gaekwad’s The Last Courtesan: Writing my Mother’s Memoir (Harper) is an incredible story of survival narrated by his mother. Originally from the Kanjarbhat tribe, Rekhabai was sold and trained as a tawaif while she was still a child. In the 1980s when society disapproved of a tawaif’s art, Rekhabai made a name for herself in Calcutta and Bombay as a singing-dancing star, managed to provide for her large family and sent her son to an English-medium boarding school.
- Entering the Maze: Queer Fiction of Krishnagopal Mallick (Niyogi Books) has been translated from the Bengali by Niladri R. Chatterjee. Krishnagopal Mallick (1936-2003) wrote short stories, novels, poetry, published magazines and lived and worked in North Calcutta, chronicling the pace of life in the lanes and bylanes. But as Chatterjee writes in the introduction, what makes him stand out among all other Bengali writers is “the unabashed expression of his homosexuality,” as is evident from the stories in this collection.
- In this debut novel, Sharvay (Speaking Tiger), the writer Mansi sets the story in the eighth century in South India during the rule of the Rashtrakutas. The eponymous heroine is born with great disadvantages: she is an orphan, the daughter of a dasi. But determined to make a life for herself, despite the circumstances, she wants to devote her time to learning to become a philosopher. Will she succeed in her quest? The writer had chanced upon a sculpture of an ancient female philosopher during her research and it inspired her to imagine this historical fiction.
