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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The 2022 Booker Prize judges, chaired by cultural historian and writer Neil MacGregor, have chosen their final six, “which stretch the boundaries of what fiction can do.” On the shortlist are Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka’s second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (Penguin), that draws on the “darkest days” of the Sri Lankan civil war, weaving the story around a photographer who bore witness; Irish writer Claire Keegan’s second book Small Things Like These (Penguin), which has won the George Orwell Fiction Prize too this year; and Zimbabwean author NoViolet Bulawayo’s second novel, Glory (Penguin), a satire on an uprising featuring a bevy of animals. The other three on the shortlist are American writer Percival Everett’s The Trees (Graywolf Press) that revisits the 1955 lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi and its aftermath; British writer Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker (HarperCollins), about an unlikely friendship between a young boy and a wanderer set in Cheshire; and American novelist Elizabeth Strout’s Oh! William (Penguin), in which she returns to her favourite heroine, Lucy Barton, and writes about love, loss and the “solitary” experience of grief. The winner will be announced on October 17.
This week, we also bid goodbye to one of the great contemporary Spanish writers, Javier Marias, 70, who passed away on Sunday. He has written 15 novels, two collections of short stories and several volumes of essays, and was often on the possible-Nobel Prize for Literature-winners list. His novels (Dark Back of Time, All Souls, A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think of Me, Your Face Tomorrow [a trilogy], The Infatuations), reflect on the transience, chance and fragility of life, and the myriad ways in which reality blurs into fiction, and often, absurdity. Growing up in the years of Franco’s dictatorship, his father, a well-known teacher and writer, was banned from doing both, and the family managed to escape to America where he taught for a few years till they moved back to Madrid. Javier’s formative years in America and later in Oxford left an indelible mark on him and he translated a wide array of English and American writers into Spanish, from Laurence Sterne, Thomas Hardy, W.H. Auden, Joseph Conrad, Robert Louis Stevenson to William Faulkner, Raymond Carver, John Updike et al. His delightful portraits of 26 writers in Written Lives throw an unexpected and “very human” light on authors “too often enshrined in the halo of artistic sainthood.” In a profile in The New Yorker, Wyatt Mason writes that Marias has been “mapping a country” of the mind from book to book, “full of tension between the desire to know and the fear of what knowledge costs.” Once asked what is the purpose of writing, Marias quipped: “Literature is not really supposed to ‘answer’ things, not even to make them clearer, but rather to explore – often blindly – the huge areas of darkness, and show them better.” In his writing, Marias asks unsettling questions about life, which is in a constant state of flux, and explores the “shadowland of human experience”.
In reviews, we read an exhaustive history of a Santal uprising against the British, the study of English in India, Anees Salim’s new novel, an essay by Phyllida Jay on her book of fashion inspired by India, and more.
Books of the week
Peter Stanley’s book, Hul! Hul!:The Suppression of the Santal Rebellion in Bengal, 1855 (Bloomsbury), is dedicated to “all the Hul’s unnamed victims: Santals, Bengalis and sepoys”, and among other things, charts the attitude of the British towards the rebellion. What started off as indifference turned into a full-fledged war that became Britain’s “only active conflict” after the end of the Crimean War. This book mentions the victories as well as the shortcomings, like, Superintendent Pontet’s failure to speak Santali “even after twenty years” in the region, writes the reviewer, Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar. He says, “There are too many British compared to Santals, the narration might appear a bit heavy-handed with all the military details and multitude of characters, and Stanley too rues that the ‘greatest single flaw in the sources used for this book…is that they are all in English’; yet, this book achieves what it had set out to do: present an exhaustive military history of the Hul.” For Santals, the Hul was difficult to sustain for it involved entire villages being vacated and being constantly on the move. In this a Hul leader’s words are pertinent. The Hul would not be necessary, said Kanhu, “if only Company officials had noticed, heeded or acted upon Santal concerns.” The Santals’ reason to join the Hul, and march to Calcutta to seek an audience with Lord Dalhousie, was, after all, to ask why he was allowing money-lenders to rob and harass the Santals.
Vernacular English: Reading the Anglophone in Postcolonial India (Princeton University Press) by Akshya Saxena sheds new light on the study of English in India through five key categories: law, Dalit Anglophone writings, Indian Anglophone literature, voices in Northeast India and cinematic English. The Preface sets the tone by placing English spoken by Narendra Modi and Rohit Vemula at opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. According to her, ‘in spite of Modi’s agenda to equate Hindu nationalism with Hindi, he cannot resist the allure of English, and he regularly appeals to its symbolic power.’ At Hyderabad Central University, ‘Vemula’s suicide note, an autobiographical narrative in the English language, has been excerpted on posters, woven into poems, adapted into plays and read at protests.’ The point Saxena drives home, says the reviewer N.S. Gundur is that ‘these two figures stand in testimony to how different English looks in India.’ It’s a fascinating study of the social life of English in India, points out Gundur, but that it speaks more to scholars in comparative and postcolonial literary studies than to the common reader.
In Anees Salim’s new novel, The Bellboy (Hamish Hamilton), the writer grants readers an entry into a world that is simple but flawed, where melancholy hovers in the air. The story is told through the point of view of 17-year-old Latif as he embarks on the journey of life. The reviewer, Navamy Sudhish, writes that The Bellboy is the sights, sounds and memories filtered through the psyche of its protagonist. “The prose draws its narrative energy from pathos, but the author balances heaviness and levity in a masterful manner. There is subtle humour and social commentary as in Latif’s reaction to the saffron thread on the manager’s wrist: ‘It somehow suggested that no matter how doggedly he worked, he would be constantly frowned upon.”
Dread has an address: review of Anees Salim’s ‘The Bellboy’
Spotlight
In Inspired by India: How India Transformed Global Design (Roli Books), Phyllida Jay explores the complex history of over six centuries of cultural exchange between India and the world. The investigation leads her to raise specific questions she elucidates in an essay: how can India’s rich cultural heritage inform designers in ways that overcome reductive stereotypes, such as the paisley motif, or the world of maharaja chic, for example, and reward and recognise the communities and artisans upon which fashion and luxury so often depend? How can we transcend bounded and proprietary ideas of culture that often lurk in debates around cultural appropriation? What can history, which spans the spectrum of appropriation, exploitation, colonial domination, and transculturation, tell us about the present, and more importantly, the future? Appreciation is about rigorous research and respectful engagement, she writes, and it is also about crediting, compensating and supporting the communities and artisans upon whose shoulders so much of India’s intangible cultural heritage rests.
‘Inspired by India’ | The book explores the country’s imprint on global fashion
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- The Pashtuns: A Contested History (HarperCollins) by Tilak Devasher profiles one of the largest ethnic groups in the world without a country of their own. They inhabit a continuous stretch from the Hindu Kush to the Indus, across Pakistan and Afghanistan. Devasher writes on the predicament of Pashtuns who live across restive borders.
- Vineet Gill studies the scattered elements of Hindi stalwart Nirmal Verma’s life as ingredients that went into the making of the writer, the places he lived in, people he knew, and the books he read in his biography, Here and Hereafter: Nirmal Verma’s Life in Literature (Vintage/PRH).
- Jerry Pinto’s The Education of Yuri (Speaking Tiger), a coming-of-age novel, is set in 1980s Bombay. Yuri is an awkward and sometimes lonely 15-year-old figuring out life, as he makes friends, falls in love, gets hurt, loses friends and even courts Naxalism for a while.
- On an exchange programme to America, Hira, a Pakistani student, navigates two worlds in Dur e Aziz Amna’s American Fever (Arcade). The immigrant tale follows Hira as she tries to break away from stereotypes while clinging to her identity.
