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If the International Booker Prize for 2022 put the spotlight on Hindi literature with Geetanjali Shree’s win for Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell from Ret Samadhi, this year the PEN/Nabokov award for achievement in international literature is being awarded to Hindi poet, novelist and writer Vinod Kumar Shukla. The $50,000 prize, founded in 2016, is “conferred annually to a living author whose body of work, either written in or translated into English, evokes what Nabokov called ‘the indescribable tingle of the spine’.” Shukla’s work lives up to this credo, being versatile and committed to literature “as a search for the deepest truth and highest pleasure”; and finding magic in ordinary things. He won the Sahitya Akademi award in 1999 for his delightful 1997 novel, Deewar Mein Ek Khidki Rahti Thi (translated into English, The Windows in Our House are Little Doors, by Satti Khanna); in 1999, Naukar ki Kameez came out to critical acclaim – it was translated into English (Servant’s Shirt) by Satti Khanna; a collection of his short stories, Blue is like Blue, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra and Sara Rai, appeared in 2019. The 86-year-old Shukla’s poems and stories are centred in two cities in India’s tribal heartland – Raipur, where he lives, and Rajnandgaon, where he was born. But, as Mehrotra and Rai, write in their introduction to his stories, “They are two cities on the map, but in his imagination, they are one. In his story, ‘Old Veranda’, he writes: ‘The old veranda of our house in Rajnandgaon is now in the house in Raipur’.” Shukla is a “frugal storyteller – he can make, and make do, with very little,” say Mehrotra and Rai. His first collection of poems, Lagbhag Jaihind, came out in 1971, heralding a new voice in poetry. Pointing out why it is important to read Shukla and his fleeting observations of moments, thoughts, and memories, Mehrotra and Rai write: “To read him is to read not a fictionalised version of what is already stencilled on the wall, but what is constantly being inscribed in and erased from the margins of our consciousness.”
This week, we interview two writers who have studied India and the origins of the republic closely: Taylor C. Sherman on the myths that surround Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Prime Minister, and Ashoka Mody on why India’s economy is broken and what needs to be done to fix it. We also read two anthologies, one by women writers, and another on climate change; an essay on climate fiction and more.
Books of the Week
In India Is Broken – and why it’s hard to fix (Juggernaut), economist Ashoka Mody tells the story of lived realities that still need comeuppance within the country’s much-vaunted economic liberalisation success story. He traverses through the history of socio-economic policies since independence and points at flawed decisions by successive governments that brought things to such a pass today. In an interview with Vikas Dhoot, Mody explains why he believes the country is now in a ‘bad equilibrium’ even as millions who have emerged from poverty remain precariously poised. Thanks to reforms, dire poverty did come down, he says. “But people moved from below $2 a day to between $2 and $3 a day. If you’re in that zone, one illness or layoff and you slip back – I call this the precarious zone. So we moved people from dire poverty to [a] precarious zone, and we declared victory that we have reduced poverty and so many 100 million people have come out of poverty.” What can India to fix it? “Every country that has succeeded,” Mr. Mody says, “has done two things: it has educated its children and brought more women into the workforce. Because when women come into the workforce, they treat their daughters well, they educate them, their daughters then educate their daughters, and that process begins a virtuous cycle of education and smaller families and higher productivity growth.”
Bring more women into the workforce: Ashoka Mody
In her book, Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton University Press), Taylor C. Sherman examines several central concepts associated with the first Prime Minister of India. Jawaharlal Nehru’s admirers and critics broadly use the same codes to make sense of his tenure - secularism, nonalignment, strong state, socialism etc. Placing Nehru on a pedestal was part of the nation-building narrative, particularly after his passing, says Sherman, who identifies herself as an admirer. With the Nehruvian order being berated by dominant Hindutva politics of the day, there is a tendency among secular historians to be defensive about Nehru. In an interview with Varghese K. George, Sherman, a professor in the London School of Economics and Political Science, explains that the realities of India were quite different from the common perceptions that Nehru’s admirers and critics propagate about the decades after Independence. More importantly, Nehru himself was deeply aware of these realities, she claims. Asked about Nehru’s policies and view on power, she says, “I think Nehru was actually aware of his limitations and that made him quite introspective about his power. And so rather than, amassing as much power to himself as possible, he was very aware of what he couldn’t do. At the inauguration of the Indian Institute of Public Administration, he said: I may be the head of administration, and you are the tail, but the head is so far removed from the tail that I have no idea what is happening or where it is, I can’t see it at all.”
In a year when the United Nations will do a “global stocktake” of the climate, including the goal of keeping global warming to well below 2 degrees Celsius, an anthology of stories has been written by science fiction writers, Tomorrow’s Parties: Life in the Anthropocene (MIT Press), edited by Jonathan Strahan. The editor puts man-made climate change front and centre, calling it the “defining problem of our time”. The ten writers in the book offer original stories offering a “glimpse of what life might be like… however bleak, as we live with climate change.” In his review, Jaideep Unudurti writes that rather like the blind men perceiving the elephant in the parable, “we see glimpses” of the future amid climate change. For instance, its smell is that of burning forests where “the air rasps her throat, and the campfire smell fills her nose.” A character in one of the stories says that he “never cared for people much” as he was “born in the first pandemic and missed most of high school because of the second.” However, the anthology somewhat underserves India and other countries on the frontline of climate change. Unudurti writes that contemporary Indian SF writers have plenty of material to write about but their reflex would be to draw on the past from the epics as it were, which are replete with imagery of extreme weather events – from pralaya or heavy rains to droughts that scorch the earth.
A new anthology of short stories, A Different Sound: Stories by Mid-Century Women Writers, touches on two questions: has the space afforded to the form shrunk in recent decades, and what exactly is a short story? Selected and introduced by the London-based critic and book publisher, Lucy Scholes, the 11 women writers represented in the volume were published in Britain and lived through “the golden age for short stories”, with an array of magazines and periodicals regularly and committedly publishing short fiction during World War II and the decade that followed. Of the journals that published these writers, only The New Yorker is still in existence. In her column, Word Count, Mini Kapoor says the stories remind the reader of anxieties and social change, at the domestic and national levels, sweeping Western (and, in the case of a story by Attia Hosain, Indian) societies in the War and post-War years.
Spotlight
The rise of ‘climate fiction’ in the West almost designates climate stories to be a new genre, as if environmental degradation were a recent phenomenon. | Photo Credit: Getty Images
In an essay on climate fiction, Saumya Kalia argues that Indian fiction and cinema, new and old, has peered through the climate lens, far more organically than the West has. Works like Janice Pariat’s Everything the Light Touches, Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain, and Kartiki Gonsalves’s film The Elephant Whisperers (an Oscar 2023 contender for Best Documentary) are constructing climate realities where the environment exists as a backdrop, a protagonist, but also as a vehicle for imagining a world beyond devastation. “There is magic beyond us,” Kalia writes, “and climate stories are as much about embracing that seductive odour of life rather than focusing solely on humanity.” In Pariat’s novel, for instance, four unconnected protagonists travel through time and geographies, engaging with their natural environment as something dynamic, alive and forever changing.
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- By exploring Chinese readings of Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, and other ancient philosophers, Shadi Bartsch shows how Chinese thinkers have dramatically recast the Greek classics to support China’s political agenda in Plato Goes to China: The Greek Classics and Chinese Nationalism (Princeton University Press).
- In Like Barbarians in India (Niyogi Books), Jean-Claude Perrier comments on India of the past and present, through the interactions of Pierre Loti, Henri Michaux, André Malraux and André Gide with an ‘ancient civilisation’.
- When two paintings worth crores are stolen from the Indian government, two officials join hands to recover the art works and thwart a terror attack in Tarun Mehrishi’s The Portrait of a Secret (Penguin).
- In The Pledge: Adventures to Sada (Speaking Tiger), Madhulika Liddle and Kannan Iyer go on a fantasy adventure that spans time and space, placing three friends on a mission to guard a powerful secret that holds the key to their civilization and ensuring that it does not fall into enemy hands, that of an evil landlord.
