(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.
The literary world is mourning the loss of noted historian and biographer Patrick French who passed away after a long battle with cancer at the age of 56. His biographies of V.S. Naipaul (The World is What It Is/2008) and Francis Younghusband (The Last Great Imperial Adventurer/1994) are luminous portraits of complex, many-personalities-in-one characters.
His book on a lost land, Tibet, Tibet (2003), is part history, part travelogue, part memoir and is a search for a non-mythical Tibet. He lived with nomads, met victims and perpetrators of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution, and talked to nuns who were secretly fighting against Communist rule. He also travelled the length and breadth of India to understand its diversities, contradictions, what works, what doesn’t, and wrote about it in India: A Portrait (2011), a sequel of sorts to his marvellous 1997 book Liberty or Death, an account of Indian independence and partition. He wanted to look at India “in a new way, for what it was becoming rather than for what others wanted it to be.” In the introduction, he wrote: “Some sort of unleashing was taking place, the effects of which were not yet clear, and the country appeared to be passing through epic and long-awaited changes.” With the help of three sections – Rashtra (nation), Lakshmi (wealth), and Samaj (society) – French sought to answer one question: why is India like it is today? Even during intense therapy for cancer for the last four years, he was finishing a biography of Doris Lessing. He will be missed for the many books he would have written, opening up new ways of understanding the past and the present, and particularly for holding a mirror to the subcontinent, its promise and challenges.
Hindi last year, Tamil this year? The books world is celebrating the nomination of Tamil writer Perumal Murugan’s Pyre, translated from the Tamil Pookuzhi by Aniruddhan Vasudevan, to the International Booker Prize longlist. Looking back at Pyre, Ramya Kannan writes that a community’s pathological compulsion with caste leaves us shaking and speechless with the violence of intent and action of humans. “Riveting in its chronicling, Pyre drags the reader through the rollercoaster of emotions that Kumaresan and Saroja go through after the couple, from different castes, elope and marry. It is easy to see how the forcefulness of the slender novel impelled the International Booker Prize panel of judges to put the book on its famed longlist.” Last year, Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated from the Hindi Ret Samadhi by Daisy Rockwell, won the International Booker Prize, a first time honour for a Hindi novel.
In reviews, we learn about Ruth Harris’ biography of Vivekananda, Lewis H. Ziska’s work on how carbon dioxide impacts yield, nutrition and growth of all plants, Sonora Jha’s novel of lust and retribution in the corridors of American academia and more.
Books of the week
In Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda (Harvard University Press), Ruth Harris shows how Vivekananda’s thought spawned a global anticolonial movement and became a touchstone of Hindu nationalist politics a century after his death. At the 1893 World Parliament of Religions in Chicago, Vivekananda fascinated audiences with eclectic teachings even as he advocated a more inclusive conception of religion. In an interview with Keshava Guha, Harris says she wanted to find out how Vivekananda put together multiple legacies for himself and for the world. Though the book has been marketed as a biography of Vivekananda, she says it was intentionally constructed around three individuals so that it would not be a conventional account of a ‘great man’. “I concentrated on Vivekananda’s transformative relationships – the first with his guru Ramakrishna, the last with Margaret Noble, the disciple who did more than anyone to nationalise and internationalise aspects of his thought. Ramakrishna took him away from the Brahmo samaj to a more accepting and wide-ranging understanding of Hindu and world religious traditions; Margaret Noble shaped the ‘legacy’ that is integral to the book’s subtitle. I hoped that Vivekananda would then be regarded as standing between these two figures.”
Guru to the World: The Life and Legacy of Vivekananda
Lewis H. Ziska, associate professor at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, had to quit the U.S. Department of Agriculture after 25 years of service in 2019 to protest interference by the Trump administration in his research on the negative effects of rising carbon dioxide on nutritional composition of rice. Published in Science Advances, a top-notch scientific journal, the research found that increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere reduced Vitamin B and E in rice plant which could impact 50% of daily calorie intake by more than 6 million rice eaters in the world. In his book Greenhouse Planet (Columbia University Press), he captures all that went behind the research while stressing the urgent need for investigating the climate-denying mantra that carbon dioxide feeds plants and greens the planet. In an e-mail interview with Sudhirendar Sharma, Ziska responded to questions on the wider implications of his research on plant biology as seen from the climate change lens. “It’s important to consider,” he says, “that in the plant kingdom, as with the animal kingdom, competition is important. If you farm you recognise that the biggest physical effort is to reduce weeds, as weeds are the primary limitation on crop yield. As CO2, the source of carbon for plant growth increases, it isn’t just crops that are affected. In a majority of studies to date, it is the weeds, not the crops, that are the ‘winners’ and crop yields are negatively affected. So, while individual plants can respond, in a field situation, the weeds, with their greater ability to adapt to change, may pose an even greater threat to food security.”
CO2 rise won’t just affect crops: Prof. Lewis H. Ziska
In Sonora Jha’s The Laughter (Penguin), the hijab hovers over the text like a disembodied fragment of fabric, defining the narrative of happenings in American academia with unsettling consequences. “It is both a flag and a banner of selfhood that seduces and repels in equal measure,” says the reviewer Geeta Doctor. It sends unsettling ripples in the hitherto calm environs of Seattle that is being assailed by changing demographic patterns. Doctor writes that it creates an almost unbearable tension in the mind of the charmingly literate but lonely middle-aged professor named Oliver Harding. As he is drawn to Ruhaba and her lace-fringed hijabs, readers are drawn to the semantics of entitlement. Jha’s “insider readings of the wars of attrition between the mostly white tenured staff and the students of mixed race backgrounds are totally riveting.”
The hijab and the embattled white American male: review of The Laughter by Sonora Jha
Spotlight
Norwegian public library Deichman Bjørvika in Oslo | Photo Credit: Getty Images
It was David Reich who dramatically revised assumptions of the past with a book about the ancient DNA revolution. In Who We Are And How We Got Here (2018), he wrote an account of the genome revolution, highlighting some of the themes that have been emerging, “specially the finding that mixture between highly differentiated populations is a recurrent process in the human past.” Three new books by historians – Culture, A New World History by Martin Puchner, The Earth Transformed: An Untold Story by Peter Frankopanand Simon Sebag Montefiore’s magnum opus, The World A History – attempt to fill major gaps in coverage of history. Books like these provide a broader perspective and introduce fresh themes, ask more questions that can help push the boundaries of research in the future. As Puchner says, the main lesson from cultural history is that we need engagement with the past, and with one another, “for cultures to reach their full potential, despite the errors, incomprehension, and destruction that often accompany such engagement.” The scope of Frankopan’s study is the way human beings have interacted with the natural world; Sebag Montefiore’s focus is on family ties that connect the world across eras and all continents.
From culture to climate change, new books on history map the world’s crossing points
Browser
- Unframed: Discovering Image Practices in South Asia (Harper Design), edited by Rahaab Allana, traces the evolution of photography in the subcontinent from the 19th century to the present. It scrutinises complex dimensions of lens-based practices in South Asia, today a divided entity.
- Bipin: The Man Behind the Uniform(Penguin) by Rachna Bisht Rawat is the biography of General Rawat, killed in a helicopter crash in 2021, along with his wife and other personnel. It throws light on his mission in life and how he became the country’s foremost military officer.
- Fear and Lovely (Penguin) is Anjana Appachana’s first novel in 20 years which critics have been hailing as a “melt-your-heart” piece of work. The story revolves around Malika, a shy woman growing up in a close-knit Delhi colony. Though she is surrounded by love, her life is complicated by secrets that she, her mother and her aunt work hard to keep, and what happens when they unravel.
- Sharon Dodua Otoo’s Ada’s Realm (Hachette) is a kaleidoscopic novel spanning generations and continents. Ada is not one woman, but many – she is all women, revolving in orbits, looping from one century and from one place to the next.
