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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The longlist for the JCB Prize for Literature 2023 has been announced with debutants, translations on it. It’s a diverse and ambitious longlist, with stories set in Bombay, Calcutta, Shillong, Rome, Virginia, and across centuries, from the 1600s right up to the present. Manoranjan Byapari’s Nemesis (Westland Books), translated from the Bengali by V. Ramaswamy, Geet Chaturvedi’s Simsim (Penguin), translated from the Hindi by Anita Gopalan, Perumal Murugan’s Fire Bird (Penguin), translated from the Tamil by Janani Kannan, and Manoj Rupda’s I Named my Sister Silence (Westland Books), translated from the Hindi by Hansda Sowvendra Shekhar, are on the list together with Tejaswini Apte-Rahm’s debut novel The Secret of More: A Novel (Aleph), Bikram Sharma’s The Colony of Shadows (Hachette), Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches (Harper), Tanuj Solanki’s Manjhi’s Mayhem (Penguin), Vikramajit Ram’s Mansur (Pan Macmillan) and Brinda Charry’s The East Indian (HarperCollins). The shortlist of five titles will be announced on October 20; and the winner on November 18. Last year, Khalid Jawed won the ₹25 lakh Prize for The Paradise of Food, translated from Urdu into English by Baran Farooqi.
In reviews, we read Gautam Bhatia’s book on the judiciary between 2014 and 2023, Ulbe Bosma’s history of sugar, Ranjit Hoskote’s new collection of poems, Amrit Mathur’s tales from the Indian cricket dressing room and more. We also pay tribute to Jayanta Mahapatra (1928-2023) who took Indian English poetry to the world.
Books of the week
In his preface to Unsealed Covers: A Decade of the Constitution, the Courts and the State (HarperCollins), Gautam Bhatia writes that the central focus of his book is to highlight the ways in which “the Constitution is a contested terrain – and which have everything to do with power and powerlessness, who wields power and who is subjected to it, and the actions of those whose task it is to mitigate the impunity of power.” The book is a collection of essays published in his blog, Indian Constitutional Law and Philosophy blog, between 2013 and 2022 and which discusses Indian constitutionalism and the Indian judiciary during this tumultuous period. In Bhatia’s words, in these years, the Supreme Court’s judgments on privacy, same-sex relations, the national biometric identification system, the hijab ban and reservations, among others, have made headlines in India and abroad. Its refusal to hear high-stakes cases on time, the powers of the Chief Justice of India and the court’s deferral to the executive in crucial civil rights cases have all raised critical questions around judicial independence, and the relationship between the judiciary and an assertive – at times aggressive – executive. In his review, Sriram Panchu writes that Bhatia, an outspoken academic-turned-lawyer has skillfully delineated how the Court has moved from being an anti-majoritarian institution to being the executive’s court.
Since the 17th century sugar has dominated the world of western commerce. Once only affordable by the rich, it is now one of the most ubiquitous products, present in most things the world consumes. For long, sugar production was dependent on the punishing labour of millions transported from Africa and enslaved to toil in brutal conditions in sugarcane plantations in the Caribbean and the Americas. Published shortly before Dutch King Willem Alexander apologised for his kingdom’s role in the slave trade, Ulbe Bosma’s book, The World of Sugar: How the Sweet Stuff Transformed Our Politics, Health, And Environment Over 2000 Years (Harvard University Press), is a global history of sugar from its early origins in India and highlights Asia’s crucial role in shaping the world of sugar. In an interview with Uday Balakrishnan, he says the point he wants to make is that sugar was pivotal in the rise of the global capitalist economy. “But also, that global capitalism has been crucial in shaping our current consumption patterns including our overconsumption of sugar. Moreover, only through a constant violation of human rights could sugar become a cheap mass commodity. The relentless exploitation of labour did not end with the abolition of slavery but continues until this very day.”
Talking about Icelight (Hamish Hamilton), Ranjit Hoskote’s new collection of poems – his eighth – Amitav Ghosh says they offer “tantalising glimpses of a disintegrating world.” In his review, Siddharth Dasgupta writes that in the collection, there is an imaginary point somewhere on this earth where contrasting fortunes are being played out on a precarious knife’s-edge – transience and immortality; belief and betrayal; faith and fragility. “At stake is conceivably everything we think of as our own. Humans, habitats, the filigree of memory, perhaps the impending narrative of the world itself.” A sense of the earth’s ephemerality is never too far, says Dasgupta. “What if the earth slowed down, pulled off its gloves/and raised its knuckles to the late spring?” Hoskote ponders in ‘Postscript’; in ‘Planet’, he warns: “About time/this blunted earth opened up/ and swallowed/its shiftless sons/its reckless daughters/its steeply tilted lighthouses.” Divided into six passages, Icelight “does not shy away from peeling the surface layer of things.”
In Pitchside: My Life in Indian Cricket (Westland Sport), sports administrator Amrit Mathur takes readers behind the scenes of Indian cricket. He looks at India’s maiden tour of South Africa during the 1992-93 season, the 1996 World Cup in the Indian subcontinent, the 2004 tour of Pakistan and other signposts with the perspective of an insider. In his review, K.C. Vijaya Kumar says that Mathur reveals the wheels that grease cricket. “The tone is both factual and warm while the logistical headaches associated with big championships or an important tour are described well. Equally, he keeps readers engaged with his snapshots of players. Privy to dressing rooms, Mathur is aware about the vulnerabilities of cricketers. There is respect for their skills and an understanding about what makes them tick or crack.”
Spotlight
In her tribute to Jayanta Mahapatra, Anupama Raju begins by quoting lines from his ‘The Poet’s Death,’ “When the sun went down,/the elegant white peacock/crossed the land it had once known,/as though restoring words to their purity.” These lines, she writes, perhaps best describe Mahapatra, both as poet and human being. “He was, after all, a soul as gentle and rare as a white peacock, whose imagination restored words to their purity.” The literary world will always remember Mahapatra as a highly accomplished bilingual poet who took Indian English poetry to the world stage. He was the first Indian poet to win the Sahitya Akademi Award for English poetry, and during his lifetime published over 40 volumes of poetry.
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- Identity and Marginality in Northeast India (Orient BlackSwan), edited by Hoineilhing Sitlhou, raises some critical questions -- Is Northeast India a marginal region? What social phenomenon in Northeast India qualifies for a discussion on or justifies the relevance of the concept of marginality or marginalisation? – and a host of writers attempt to explain themes relevant to the region.
- In Fire on the Ganges (Harper), Radhika Iyengar chronicles the everyday realities of the Doms in Banaras’ burning ghats. It tells the story of a community struggling to find a place beyond that accorded to it down the ages.
- The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton) by Paul Murray has been longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023. The Irish writer tells the story of the Barnes family which is in trouble. “The present is in meltdown but the causes lie deep in the past.” How far back would that be? Murray digs deep, and writes with humour despite the sadness lurking beneath.
- Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s All the Little Bird-Hearts (Tinder Press) provides a glimpse into the world of Sunday Forrester who lives with her 16-year-old daughter Dolly. Being neurodiverse (like the writer herself), Sunday does things more carefully than most people. For instance, on quiet days, she must eat only white foods. What happens when a couple enters her ordered life and breaks every rule in Sunday’s book?
