This article forms a part of The Hindu on Books newsletter which brings you book reviews, reading recommendations, interviews with authors and more. Subscribe here
Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
To coincide with the platinum jubilee of Queen Elizabeth, The Reading Agency, along with the BBC, has compiled a list of 70 books – The Big Jubilee Read -- from across the Commonwealth, 10 each for every decade of her reign beginning 1952.
The first decade features three books by Indian writers, V.S. Naipaul’s poignant novel A House for Mr. Biswas, R. K. Narayan’s masterly book, The Guide, and Attia Hosain’s coming-of-age story set against Partition, Sunlight on a Broken Column. Over the next few decades, other Indian origin writers who find place are Anita Desai (Clear Light of Day), Salman Rushdie (and his ‘Booker of Bookers Prize’ winner Midnight’s Children) and Rohinton Mistry (A Fine Balance). Debut novels of Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (which also won the Booker Prize), and Raj Kamal Jha’s The Blue Bedspread are on the list too. Apart from Bapsi Sidhwa (The Crow Eaters), there are no other Pakistani writers; Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes is surely one of the big misses or Kamila Shamsie’s In the City by the Sea. Two Sri Lankan writers, Shehan Karunatilake (Chinaman) and Anuk Arudpragasam (A Passage North) make the cut. Other well-known authors include Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), Margaret Atwood (A Handmaid’s Tale), Kazuo Ishiguro (Remains of the Day), J.M. Coetzee (Disgrace), last year’s Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah (Paradise) and a host of others. Critics called out the surprise omissions of J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter books (the writer has faced accusations of transphobia) and J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.
In reviews, we read Manu Pillai’s portrait of princely India, a book on Bengal beyond the Bhadralok, a Jamia Millia Islamia student’s account of the police attack on university students, publisher of Seagull Naveen Kishore’s poems of grief and more.
Books of the week
Manu Pillai’s False Allies (Juggernaut) is a revelation about an India caught between the mandarins of the Raj, the rising scribal class of Indians and five princes as it follows the footsteps of Raja Ravi Varma. While Ravi Varma may be credited with creating the images of Hindu mythology, it is his commissioned work in royal households that Pillai uses to tell a tale that’s different from the one we are used to hearing and reading. In his review, Serish Nanisetti writes that Pillai, who also happens to be a Malayali, uses the artist’s life and work as a sutradhar (a connecting thread) between the kingdoms of the five princes. “He smashes the notion that the royalty of pre-independent India was only about exotic lifestyles, indulging in baubles of extravagance or wasting away in a haze of opioids. Instead, a complex nuanced world is revealed using the royal goings on in Travancore, Padukkottai, Baroda, Mysore, and Mewar. Pillai shows the readers how the princes, their queens and ministers deftly played the chess game set by the British Raj.”
False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma review: An alternative princely drama
The content of Nothing Will Be Forgotten (LeftWord) is as direct as its title. A Ph.D. scholar at Jamia University, Nehal Ahmed, was present on the campus during the days leading up to the police attack on Jamia students on December 15, 2019. What he witnessed on that “darkest day of his life”, he documents in detail. The 138 pages, says Soma Basu in her review, centre around the peaceful agitation turning into a warzone and the unique gathering of Muslim women in nearby Shaheen Bagh to lead the protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). “Ahmed writes a passionate first-hand account of a student shattered by the violence inside his university and how it led to a creative resistance and evolved into an inspiring movement spanning three months.”
Nothing Will Be Forgotten: From Jamia To Shaheen Bagh review: An account of fear and hope
Parimal Bhattacharya shines a light on people who live on mudflats left behind after floods, or others on the edge of cities, in Field Notes from a Waterborne Land (HarperCollins). If his memoir, No Path in Darjeeling is Straight (2017), gave readers a sense of the place and its people, in Field Notes, he shares insights from places he travelled to in the late 2000s, meeting those living in the shadows, in the Sundarbans, villages on the Bangladesh border or around Santiniketan, the Simlipal forests in Odisha. In a waterborne land, the story of loss begins with the drying up of swamps and tributaries, and frequent floods. With these occurrences, “a whole way of life” disappears. Flood refugees of Nabadwip are constantly thinking of ways to survive the next wave of water. A fisherman uprooted by the river a dozen times says settlers on the char cannot afford to be scared of floods, but due to erosion chunks of land vanish into the river in the blink of an eye. Bhattacharya explores the social, political, cultural history of a land where an invisible majority is trying to make ends meet, threatened by climate change and poverty.
Haiku-like and delicate as “butterfly wings”, the poems in Naveen Kishore’s collection Knotted Grief (Speaking Tiger) traverse the landscape of grief and loss. The first section, titled ‘Kashmiriyat’ about the trauma caused the violence in Kashmir, consists of 105 stanzas, each of which work like short, stand-alone poems, says K. Srilata in the review. “The deliberate absence of definitive narratives tied to particular people leaves us with a more unsettling sense of loss, of grief that is a maze through which we are destined to wander.” In another section, titled ‘Selected Griefs’, there is a poem about ‘knotted grief’, from the title, whose ‘braid-like’ structure mirrors the idea of a grief that is “braided” and “knotted”, hard to untangle and fundamental to the human condition. “In many ways, this poem is synecdochic of the entire collection.”
Grief is the thing on chinar leaves: K. Srilata reviews Naveen Kishore’s ‘Knotted Grief
Spotlight
SM | Photo Credit: SPECIAL ARRANGEMENT
A new book, Muzaffarnagar Diaries: A Post-Riot Resettlement Story, looks at the collaborative effort that went into the rehabilitation of some of those displaced by the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots in Uttar Pradesh. A not-for-profit organisation, the Hunnarshala Foundation, helped resettle about 250 families who could not return to their villages. In an interview with Vaishna Roy, the organisation’s executive vice-chairman Sandeep Virmani talked about the importance of empathetic resettlement in the context of the project. In the case of internally displaced persons due to conflict, Governments, directed by courts, often weigh the losses of these displaced people financially and get away with compensation. “But making amends for wrongs done, so that the scars of displacement and loss are healed, requires compassion and a human touch. It requires apology, handholding until they are physically settled, integrated into a new society, so that they and their children can let go of fear. The shock and betrayal, sometimes even unfounded guilt, never leaves one.”
A new book looks at the rehabilitation of Muzaffarnagar riot victims
Browser
- Over the centuries has the world been moving toward greater equality? Thomas Piketty guides readers through the great movements that have made the modern world for better and worse in his new book, A Brief History of Equality (Harvard/Harper): the growth of capitalism, revolutions, imperialism, slavery and the building of the welfare state.
- In the Language of Remembering (Harper) is the sequel to Anchal Malhotra’s Remnants of a Separation and consists of interviews recorded over years with Indians, Pakistanis and Bangladeshis. Malhotra finds out that the Partition of 1947 is not yet an event of the past and that its legacy is threaded into the lives of subsequent generations.
- In the three novellas in Blue Sky, White Cloud (Aleph) by Nirmal Ghosh, we walk through the rainforests with a tusker as he tries to understand the humans who have changed the jungles; watch Hira Singh, a forest guard, crossing paths with a leopard; and travel to Mongolia with Nadia, a wildlife biologist, where she tags two geese: Blue Sky and White Cloud.
- David Baldacci sets Dream Town (Macmillan) in Los Angeles circa 1952. It is New Year’s Eve and PI Aloysius Archer is dining with his friend and Hollywood actress Liberty Callahan when they are approached by Eleanor Lamb, a screenwriter who would like to hire him. She vanishes soon after and Archer must find out what’s happened.
That is all for this week. We look forward to hearing from you, be it about this newsletter, our reading list, your literary queries or the book you are reading now. You can find us at www.thehindu.com/books and on Facebook and Twitter at @TheHinduBooks
