The Oxford Languages word of the year is vax; Merriam-Webster picked vaccine, noting that it has come to represent much more than just medicine. With the pandemic into its second year, it is perhaps not surprising that all the top lookups of 2021 had something to do with COVID-19. This was reflected in the themes that dominated non-fiction books — virus, vaccine, climate change, inequality, trade, globalisation, rising authoritarianism, surveillance technology and so forth.
Michael Lewis’ The Premonition: A Pandemic Story tells the story of a small group of “scientific misfits” who had obsessed all their lives with how viruses spread and replicated, and how governments accepted it theoretically but did not take it as an actual threat. Connecting the dots, Lewis explains America’s mismanagement of the pandemic, thereby holding a mirror for the rest of the world. A key local health official, who felt a “big event” was coming and that the healthcare system would be overwhelmed, said, “It’s a foreboding. A knowing that something is looming around the corner. Like how when the seasons change you can smell fall in the air right before the leaves change and the wind turns cold.” Several books dealt with other aspects of the pandemic by profiling vaccine makers ( Vaxxers: The Inside Story of the Oxford AstraZeneca Vaccine and the Race Against the Virus by Sarah Gilbert and Catherine Green) or the virus itself ( Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses by Pranay Lal).
The end of the year saw the publication of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by David Graeber and David Wengrow. An anthropologist and an archaeologist got together to try to “reconstruct” a sort of “grand dialogue about human history” with modern evidence. Graeber passed away last September, barely three weeks after they finished writing it. “We are projects of collective self-creation,” they say. “What if we approached human history that way? What if we treat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playful creatures who deserve to be understood as such?” Both go about telling the story of not how the species fell from an idyllic state but how it came to be trapped in such “tight conceptual shackles” that reinvention has become difficult.
The India story
Countries reacted differently to the pandemic and two decisions overwhelmed India — first, the sudden announcement of a national lockdown in March 2020 that put the informal sector in disarray and second, initial apathy on the vaccination front — not ordering enough vaccines early, exporting vaccines, then being forced to hold back because of domestic demand — meant that a virulent second wave revealed the cracks in health care.
After the lockdown, when people lost jobs in the cities and were desperate for food and shelter, many began to walk home to villages hundreds of kilometres away. Vinod Kapri catches one such journey – of a group of seven who rode their bicycles from Ghaziabad in U.P. to Saharsa in Bihar ( 1232 Km: The Long Journey Home ). On another front, farmers, upset with three controversial bills, protested for over a year at the Singhu border near Delhi, till the government withdrew the laws. With the agriculture sector in distress for decades, two writers highlighted the cause, Jaideep Hardikar in Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis and Kavitha Iyer in Landscapes of Loss: The Story of an Indian Drought.
Democracy in peril
In his 2018 book, How the World Swung to the Right , Francois Cusset points out that despite a few zones of active resistance, like the Chiapas uprisings or the movement against racialised police brutality in the U.S., the last half-century has been witness to an undeniable global shift to the right.
French political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, who has been writing on India since the 1990s, records the swift decline here from a “liberal secular polity” to a “majoritarian ethnic democracy”. Modi’s India: Hindu Nationalism and the Rise of Ethnic Democracy documents not only the unravelling of pluralism but also how the majoritarian takeover is happening with the systematic demolition of institutions.
New events
Two other writers, Debashish Roy Chowdhury and John Keane, argue that democracy stands at a crossroads in India ( To Kill a Democracy: India’s Passage to Despotism ). Keane, an acclaimed political theorist, and Roy Chowdhury, a journalist, collaborated for three years to understand the struggles of Indian democracy and why it was finding it difficult to live up to its ideals. In a talk about the book with the publisher, Keane said the book shows what is happening in India is something new, not just a repetition of the events of the 1930s and 1940s in Germany and Italy. The word both writers came up with is “despotism”.
In her book, The Violence in Our Bones: Mapping the Deadly Fault Lines Within Indian Society , Neera Chandhoke tries to understand why violence and democracy co-exist in India despite being antithetical to each other. Shruti Kapila throws new light on the political ideas and leaders that shaped modern India in Violent Fraternity: Indian Political Thought in the Global Age. Looking through the eyes of painter Ravi Varma, Manu Pillai takes readers through five erstwhile princely states (1860-1900) and shows how they tested the Raj in False Allies .
Cold truths
With climate change rapid, widespread, and intensifying, as per the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, writers are chronicling the changes and thinking of ways to stop the damage, like a drastic reduction of emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
Amitav Ghosh traces climate change to imperial policies and tells it through a spice in The Nutmeg’s Curse ; Shekhar Pathak profiles the people who led a unique environment movement in the 1970s in The Chipko Movement: A People’s History and the lessons it holds for the fragile Himalayas.
Former diplomats and foreign secretaries have been tracking India-China tensions too, particularly after the boundary row has seen a flare-up. Shivshankar Menon writes how India adapted to changes in Asia after independence and looks at Indian foreign policy with a “wide-angle lens” in India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present . In The Fractured Himalaya: India Tibet China 1949-1962 , Nirupama Rao untangles the knots and shows why India clearly invited trouble with China when it decided that the border issue would not figure in negotiations on Tibet. As ties between all three polities are being redrawn, Rao’s book reassesses the relationship and its inflection points leading up to the 1962 war.
If a professor of social and political theory, Amia Srinivasan, examines the politics of ethics and sex in a post-#MeToo world in her feminist essays, The Right to Sex , behavioural scientist Pragya Agarwal explores what drives how we think and talk about motherhood in (M)otherhood: On the Choices of Being a Woman .
Life and teachings
Nobel laureate Amartya Sen’s enriching memoir, Home in the World, explains how his early years in Santiniketan and later at Presidency College Calcutta shaped his ideas. Jairam Ramesh profiles Sir Edwin Arnold’s epic poem on the life and teachings of the Buddha in The Light of Asia: The Poem that Defined the Buddha . There were several books on technology, including The Art of Conjuring Alternate Realities by Shivam Shankar Singh and Anand Venkatanarayanan on cyber warfare and its chilling possibilities.
In sport, Michael Holding’s scathing attack on racism ( Why We Kneel, How We Rise ), Christopher Clarey’s biography of Roger Federer ( The Brilliant Career of Roger Federer ), and Simon Kuper’s The Barcelona Complex grabbed the headlines.
In a year filled with loss, there were at least two poignant memoirs – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief , a moving ode to her father, whom she suddenly lost in the middle of the pandemic, and Rodrigo Marquez’s A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes, a tearful and warm tribute to his famous writer father, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who battled dementia, and his resilient intrepid mother.
sudipta.datta@thehindu.co.in
