Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
We have been reading a host of books by feisty women, and a little gem by Mahasweta Devi, Our Santiniketan (Seagull Books), translated by Radha Chakravarty. It was first published in Bengali in 2001 by Srishti Prakashan for the annual book fair in Kolkata, and has finally been translated into English. Mahasweta Devi spent her childhood days in Santiniketan in the 1930s at Tagore’s university, and the early experiences shaped her personality. By the time she passed away in 2016 at the age of 90, the writer and matchless activist left behind a rich oeuvre of novels, short stories and essays. “From Santiniketan I received the inspiration to work tirelessly and continuously…,” Mahasweta Devi would often say. Chakravarty writes in the introduction that through lively vignettes of Mahasweta Devi’s student life, “she offers us glimpses of Tagore’s innovative ideas on education” as they were put to practice. “They would plant in our minds the seeds of great philosophical ideals, like trees,” recalled Mahasweta Devi. The methods were unorthodox – “identifying trees, raiding fruit trees, and in the rains running towards the Kopai [river]…learning how to swim in those red, muddy waters…” The reminiscences, says Chakravarty, also reveal a shared interest in nature, environment and ecology that connects Tagore’s vision of co-existence between human, natural and animal worlds to Mahasweta Devi’s later environmental activism.
In reviews, we read about India’s grand strategy for the 1971 Bangladesh liberation war, the rise and rise of the Bharatiya Janata Party, Wajida Tabassum’s women and more. We also carry an excerpt from The Comrades and the Mullahs: China, Afghanistan and the New Asian Geopolitics (HarperCollins) by Ananth Krishnan and Stanly Johny.
Books of the week
Perhaps the most significant conceptual argument that Chandrashekhar Dasgupta makes in his book, India and the Bangladesh Liberation War (Juggernaut), is how Indian policymakers stitched together a multidimensional grand strategy to achieve the liberation of Bangladesh. In his review, Happymon Jacob writes that Dasgupta defines grand strategy as “a comprehensive and coordinated plan for employing all the resources available to a state – diplomatic, military and economic – to achieve a defined political objective”. The book also, somewhat indirectly, prompts one to raise several questions about India and its experiments with grand strategy. “There is little doubt that what we witnessed in 1971 was one of those rare moments when India articulated and implemented a grand strategy. The Kargil conflict was another example when India was able to press its military, political and diplomatic resources to successfully beat back Pakistani territorial aggression. These were of course crisis moments and India performed well. Yet what is it about us that we manage to get our act together only when there is a crisis? For sure, a crisis demands a grand strategic response, but the real test of a country’s ability to adopt grand strategic responses is whether it is able to do so consistently, thoughtfully, and in the long term, in less politically riveting situations.”
Nalin Mehta’s book, The New BJP : Modi and the Making of the World’s Largest Political Party (Westland), is an exhaustive look at the factors behind the rise of the BJP to a position of hegemony in Indian politics. How did India become a BJP-centric polity, from first being ruled mostly by the Congress, to a period of coalitions drawn from regional players and socialists and then a bipolar system? Mehta examines all these templates. In her review, Nistula Hebbar says the BJP’s electoral success cannot be explained without going into its history, the ideological challenges it faced, and the efforts the party made to transform its support base from being a largely upper caste to one based on solid support of Other Backward Classes (OBCs) in significant States in north India. “The book has interesting chapters on strategy and experiments it carried out on issues like digital engagement with the electorate, where the BJP had a first-mover advantage, and creating a “labarthi” or “beneficiary” vote bank out of those who receive welfare goods due to schemes and programmes run by BJP-led governments.”
In Sin: Stories by Wajida Tabassum (Hachette India), translated by Reema Abasi, Tabassum neither seeks to neither placate nor shock: she holds a mirror to society. Considered one of the foremost writers in Urdu, Tabassum (1935-2011) is often referred to as the ‘female Manto’. The conservation society she belonged to found her bold writing scandalous, bordering on the “dangerous”, yet she continued writing on how the privileged take advantage of the less privileged. In her review, Fehmida Zakeer points out that the women in Tabassum’s stories don’t take betrayal lightly and refuse to be puppets. With her powerful stories shining a “light in a dark place”, Tabassum, says Zakeer, demands to be read.
Spotlight
Why did the U.S. have to withdraw from Afghanistan? Are China’s ambitions for the region growing? How will these geopolitical events impact India? In their new book, The Comrades and the Mullahs: China, Afghanistan and the New Asian Geopolitics, two journalists of The Hindu, Ananth Krishnan and Stanly Johny, tell the story of the little understood China-Afghanistan relationship and what the American withdrawal means for China’s regional ambitions. On July 28, 2021, at the port city of Tianjin, China’s suave foreign minister Wang Yi met with Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, head of the Taliban’s political office in Doha and one of the group’s founders. “That meeting in Tianjin was by no means the first time China played host to the Taliban. But it was, without question, the most significant. The fate of Afghanistan hung in the balance. The U.S. was hurtling towards a hastily managed withdrawal: three weeks before that meeting, American forces had abandoned the Bagram airfield, the symbol of U.S. military power in Afghanistan, by ‘slipping away in the night’ and not notifying the Afghan commander that they were leaving. Talks on a political reconciliation had stalled. City after city in the provinces was falling to the Taliban,” write Krishnan and Johny. “Amid this perilous state of flux, here was China making a statement that would reverberate around the world. The message was simple: China saw the Taliban as a legitimate stakeholder in Afghanistan’s future, and when it came to power, Beijing would have its back.” For all the bonhomie, however, the Taliban’s rapid seizure of power barely two weeks later would spark a range of reactions in China. “While it was true that China was somewhat ahead of the curve in betting on the Taliban’s return, the embrace was, in many senses, wary and reluctant, despite the professed enthusiasm of state propaganda.”
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- In February 1946, sailors of the Royal India Navy mutinied. In less than 48 hours, 20,000 men took over 78 ships and 21 shore establishments, replacing British flags with entwined flags of the Congress, the Muslim League, and the communists. Pramod Kapoor records their forgotten story in 1946: Last War of Independence (Roli Books)
- Planning Democracy: How a Professor, an Institute and an Idea Shaped India (Viking/Penguin) by Nikhil Menon is a history of the Nehruvian state told through the prism of planning. Menon argues that a planning-induced explosion in the state’s capacities pried open a space for a statistician like P.C. Mahalanobis to dominate economic policy. He writes about the alluring idea of ‘democratic planning’.
- In 1917, a young Korean girl named Jade is sold by her family to Miss Silver’s courtesan school in Pyongyang. Then the Japanese invade and Jade flees to Seoul where she forms a deep friendship with an orphan boy called JungHo. But soon their lives will be upended, in Juhea Kim’s Beasts of a Little Land (Oneworld).
- In The Cat Who Saved Books (Picador) by Sosuke Natsukawa, translated by Louise Heal Kawai, Rintaro Natsuki spends many hours reading whatever he likes in his grandfather’s second-hand bookshop. After the death of his grandfather, Rintaro is left anxious about his future. Till he meets a talking cat called Tiger whose mission it is to save books.
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
