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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
Wish you all a happy new year. In his new ambitious book, The World: A Family History (Orion/Hachette India), British historian Simon Sebag Montefiore traces convergences and divergences in world history through individuals and families.
In an interview with historian Manu S. Pillai for The Hindu Magazine, Sebag Montefiore explained why it is his most daunting and yet most satisfying project yet. He said he was clear about diversity as he decided to take on the span of world history. Avoiding the trap of Eurocentrism, Sebag Montefiore said he wanted to approach dynasties, such as the Mughals or the Gandhi-Nehru family in India, “exactly as I would approach the Ming or Tang of China.” Asked about his view of history through the lens of human agency, Sebag Montefiore said, “This book is a celebration of humanity, as well as an indictment. So, there’s a lot of dark spots out there: massacres and wars. But also there’s poetry, song, music, architecture and so forth.”
In reviews, we read an oral history of the Narmada struggle, a fictional narrative of a real-life 19th century expedition across India and the Himalayas, a crime thriller where a Dalit is a prime mover, and more. We also interview Captain G.R. Gopinath about his new book on the idea of India.
Books of the week
Farmers, environmentalists and social activists partially immerse themselves in the Narmada as they protest against dams being built in the river.
“While leaving our village we cried a lot; when we shifted our houses, we cried; we looked at the river and we cried,” recollects Kevalsingh, an adivasi oustee of the Sardar Sarovar Project. After Nimgavhan village met a watery grave, its inhabitants were relocated to Vadchhil-Shobanagar resettlement site. The fate awaiting them there was similar to what millions of India’s displaced adivasis generally share -- “[Our] old and new villages are as different as the earth and the sky.” But before the gigantic Sardar Sarovar Dam tamed the River Narmada and permanently inundated hundreds of villages across Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Gujarat, concerned people from all walks of life came together to resist a flawed, yet dominant, development paradigm by launching one of the most powerful mass movements in the history of post-colonial India – the Narmada Bachao Andolan (NBA). The Struggle for Narmada by chronicler-archivist Nandini Oza unravels its untold history. In his review, Ajay Saini says while much ink has already been spilled on the Narmada Bachao Andolan and the exceptional contributions of its popular faces, Medha Patkar and Baba Amte, the experiences and struggles of adivasi and local activists remained barely documented. “Oza, who had joined the NBA as a full-time activist in 1990, realised this lacuna. In the early 2000s, she tasked herself with an extraordinary responsibility of documenting the Andolan’s oral history in the voices of the local activists who could not pen their experiences.”
Review of Nandini Oza’s The Struggle for Narmada: The children of Narmada
Christopher Kloeble’s engrossing novel, The Museum of the World (HarperCollins), translated by Rekha Kamath Rajan, is a fictional tale woven around the real-life journey undertaken by three Bavarian brothers, Hermann, Adolf and Robert Schlagintweit, across India and the Himalayas in the 19th century. Their scientific expedition was supported by the East India Company and endorsed by the respected scientist Alexander von Humboldt. The novel opens with the brothers’ arrival in Bombay in 1854 and their fateful decision to hire Bartholomew, “an almost 12-year-old orphan” to travel with them who speaks many languages. In her review, Vineetha Mokkil writes that the expedition and thrilling encounters are viewed through Barthomolew’s eyes. “Barthomolew’s take on everything he sees and experiences along the way is as much a commentary on a momentous journey as it is on the colonial project, history and India’s place in the world.”
In Manjhi’s Mayhem, Tanuj Solanki brings freshness to the noir thriller genre through a politically charged sensibility that is all his own.
Tanuj Solanki’s Manjhi’s Mayhem (Penguin) is a noir thriller which steers clear of the tried-and-test formula for fiction in India and tries something new. Sewaram Manjhi is a Dalit migrant worker who has fled to Mumbai from his village in Uttar Pradesh. He lands a job as a security guard at an upscale cafeteria. Across the street is a restaurant where Santosh, also a migrant from UP but a Brahmin, works as a hostess. She presents Manjhi with a strange request, setting off a chain of events involving murder, seduction, lies, broken noses, and a MacGuffin in the form of an elusive bag of money. In his review, G. Sampath writes that having the story unfold as a first-person narrative allows Solanki to explore the injustices and hypocrisies of a society divided along caste and class from the vantage point of the marginalised – especially in a setting where, it is often claimed, caste is not really a factor: the metropolis.
Creating mayhem in Mumbai | Review of Tanuj Solanki’s noir thriller ‘Manjhi’s Mayhem’
Spotlight
Captain G.R. Gopinath has worn many hats, as an Indian Army officer, politician, entrepreneur, aviation pioneer, and also farmer. In his recent book, Our India: Reflections on a Nation Betwixt and Between (Harper), he gives a perspective as a concerned citizen on a variety of subjects. In an interview to Murali N. Krishnaswamy, he says he covered a diverse range of topics as he has been in the Army, plunged deep into farming, ran many small businesses, from motorcycle dealerships to a Udupi hotel, founded aviation companies and contested two elections, State and Centre. “Almost all my articles are laced with anecdotes from what I saw and experienced. No claims to scholarship here. This is just a layman’s attempt to present both a ‘worm view’ and ‘helicopter picture’ as I saw it. It’s a palette of colours rather than a painting.”
We must lose ourselves in action and not in despair: Captain G.R. Gopinath
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- A Life in the Shadows: A Memoir (Harper) by A.S. Dulat traces his Partition-bloodied childhood in Lahore and New Delhi to his early years as a young intelligence officer and observations on Kashmir, China, and his work. The candid memoir by the former head of the Research and Analysis Wing is the first by an Indian spymaster.
- In India, despite the pervasiveness of public policies, the public doesn’t know it all, argue Pranay Kotasthane and Raghu S. Jaitley in their new book, Missing in Action: Why You Should Care About Public Policy (Penguin), as they try to acquaint readers with fundamental concepts. They explain the logic of the Indian state’s actions, shortcomings, constraints, and workings.
- Set in the decades around World War II, The Circus Train (Sphere), by Amita Parikh, champions its protagonist, the wheelchair-bound Lena Papadopoulos, daughter of a star circus artist, as she tries to find her way in the world after being separated from her domineering father.
- The stories in The Blue Scarf and Other Stories (Harper) by Anu Singh Choudhary, translated by Kamayani Sharma, unfold in messy hotel rooms, work cubicles and the confines of the home, as young women try to find purpose and fulfillment.
