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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. In her latest book, The Incarcerations: Bhima Koregaon and the Search for Democracy in India (HarperCollins), Alpa Shah tells the life stories of the BK-16, lawyers, professors, journalists, artists and activists, who were raided and arrested, “without credible evidence and without trial as Maoist terrorists.” During her investigation, Shah found that emails and mobile phones of the BK-16 were hacked, and electronic evidence implanted to put them behind bars. While the octogenarian activist Stan Swamy died in prison, some like lawyer Sudha Bharadwaj was in jail from 2018 to 2023 before getting bail, and the National Investigation Agency (NIA) has just told the Supreme Court that teacher and Dalit activist Shoma Sen, who has been in prison since 2018, is not required in custody anymore. Shah writes in the introduction: “Delving into the lives of BK-16, and deep into the history of the causes they represent, I aim to show how in very different ways and in different places, they have persistently defended the social and economic rights of a broad spectrum of vulnerable communities across the wide geographical breadth of the subcontinent.”
In reviews, we read Ruby Lal’s biography of Princess Gulbadan, the Mughal empire’s only woman historian, Keigo Higashino’s last book in the Detective Kaga series, a Partition memoir and more. We also talk to Tathagata Bhattacharya about his witty debut novel that mirrors the times.
Books of the week
Ruby Lal profiles Gulbadan Banu Begum, the only woman historian of the Mughals, in Vagabond Princess: The Great Adventures of Gulbadan(Juggernaut). Prompted by Emperor Akbar, her nephew, Gulbadan began writing about the Mughal era when she was 63 years old. In her review, Sushila Ravindranath writes that most people tend to have cliched ideas about the role of women in the Mughal empire. The royal women were not cloistered away in zenanas. They lived separately, but were much respected; they were educated and had a voice of their own. The emperors often turned to them for guidance and advice. Gulbadan, literally ‘Rosebody’, was Babur’s daughter and an exceptional but under-appreciated figure. Her memoir, ‘Ahval-i Humayun Badshah’ or the ‘Humayun Nama’, provides an insight on life under her father Babur, brother Humayun and nephew Akbar. “Akbar asked his aunt to write the book as she had known and interacted with three Mughal emperors. Her book is not political unlike the other accounts of the time. It provides details of every day life in the royal palace and is also an account of the empire as it was taking shape.”
In Lest We Forget: How Three Sisters Braved the Partition (Westland Publications), Indira Varma writes a first-person account of Partition and how three sisters lost their home and everything else in the autumn of 1947 in Peshawar, and slowly built their lives in “another country”, in cities like Kanpur, Aligarh, Dehradun and Delhi. The family did odd jobs like pasting stickers on bottles and making candles. Slowly, the three sisters started building a life for themselves. In her review, Nandini Bhatia says: “The eldest, Uma, who had started earning at 13, later finds a stable job at Delhi’s Cottage Industries Emporium. The youngest, Roopy, becomes a stewardess and settles in London. Indira, who once wanted to be a doctor, marries into a stable, large family, to a husband with cultural tastes like hers. After the birth of her three children, she begins a career-driven life, from working at Citibank, to travelling for Thomas Cook, to being the Honorary Director of Travel for Festival of India, to being an entrepreneur, and finally a writer. The sisters travel the world and when life allows, they visit the place of their lost childhood in Pakistan, to find that only the clocktower built by their great-grandfather stands as a remnant.”
Keigo Higashino is Japan’s pre-eminent writer of detective fiction. He has written over 60 books over three decades of writing, and only about a dozen have been translated into English, says Aditya Mani Jha as he reviews the last novel in the Detective Kyoichiro Kaga series, The Final Curtain (Hachette India). The story begins with Kaga’s cousin and colleague Shuhei Matsumiya seeking his help on a pair of murders that have strange links to Kaga’s mother Yuriko Tajima’s passing years ago. Jha writes that the impressive thing about the novel is that while the action is propulsive, the actual ‘whodunnit’ part isn’t always the main event. “Higashino uses his psychological acuity to delve deep into every single character’s motivation in life. It is this brand of frothy, Freud-on-a-holiday psychological realism that’s now considered the Japanese veteran’s signature touch.”
Spotlight
Tathagata Bhattacharya began writing his debut novel, General Firebrand and the Red Atlas (Seagull), in the time of grief. His parents (his father is the writer and maverick Nabarun Bhattacharya, mother Pranati Bhattacharya) and grandmother (Mahasweta Devi) passed on in quick succession, in three years, and it was at that point that he started writing his book, and finished it in less than two months like a possessed being, he tells Saurabh Sharma. It’s a dystopian tale in the time of totalitarianism and General Firebrand, an unsocial and recovered alcoholic, rises up against the country’s fascist regime. Beasts and birds of the jungle join the struggle; spirits of historical figures from past wars and fictional characters with supernatural abilities support the cause too. Bhattacharya says the book became a kind of redemption song, “...as I felt everything was coming down crashing on me, it became a kind of an umbrella, a shelter.” Asked why he has invoked figures from the past, Bhattacharya said: “You study history to not repeat the mistakes you made in the past. Unfortunately, such mistakes are being made.”
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- The Rumbling Earth: The Story of Indian Earthquakes (Penguin) by C.P. Rajendran and Kusala Rajendran is an exploration of earthquakes, blending scientific insights with historical narratives and personal experiences. It presents various earthquake cases investigated like a detective story, while emphasising earthquakes’ role in shaping the earth’s landscapes.
- An Italian automotive industry veteran, Luca Del Monte, has profiled the Ferrari founder and the world of cars and racing. Enzo Ferrari, The Definitive Biography of an Icon (Hachette) draws upon years of original research, conducted in Italy and abroad, and unveils hidden aspects of Ferrari’s career -- from his early days as a racer, to how he founded the Ferrari company, and even his dealings with the Italian Fascist government and Communist leaders.
- Bengal’s literature has a fair sprinkling of ghosts and most of the greats have written a haunting tale or two. Add to that The Devil’s Teacup and other Ghost Stories (Fingerprint!) by Bibhutibhushan Bandopadhyay (Pather Panchali), translated into English by Prasun Roy. The collection comprises stories of malevolent ghosts lurking in the shadows, and paranormal activity.
- In Katy Brent’s The Murder After the Night Before (HQ Digital), the protagonist wakes up to horrible news: her best friend is dead and the police think it’s a tragic incident. She is sure her friend was murdered, but there’s a small problem: she can’t remember anything from the night before.
