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Last week, scientist of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sounded a Code Red on global warming saying that there must be “rapid, deep and immediate” cuts in CO2 emissions to limit climate change and save the world from dangerous ramifications. It published a report, suggesting ways and means to keep the rise in temperatures down to 1.5 degrees Celsius. In this context, it will be interesting to read Vandana Shiva’s memoir, Terra Viva (Women Unlimited), in which she talks about her life working with farmers’ and people’s movements across the world against “seed imperialism”, economic polarisation and the “digital colonisation of our ecological and social diversity.” She looks ahead to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 crisis, the privatisation of biotechnology, and the “commodification of our biological and natural resources.”
In reviews, we read G.N. Devy’s re-appraisal of the Mahabharata and its enduring appeal, a biography of Captain Krishnan Nair, who founded the Leela chain of hotels when he was 65 years old, a veteran scribe’s journey as a sports writer, Stephen Alter’s new novel and more.
Books of the week
Literary Review | Photo Credit: GOOGLE
The Mahabharata inhabits a crowded field in epic literature but has a unique place in the Indian imagination. It shines bright despite the historical precedence of the Ramayana and its obvious lineages in the obscurity of the Vedas. Philosophically, there are other scriptures dense with meaning that have engaged scholarly attention far longer. What then accounts for India’s enduring fascination with the Mahabharata? Literary critic and archaeologist of language Ganesh N. Devy attempts to answer this in his book, Mahabharata, The Epic and the Nation (Aleph). In his review, Sukumar Muralidharan writes that the essence of the Mahabharata is perhaps its recounting of a story where the origins are “perennially open”, affording a unique civilisational foundation for India. Unlike other epics, it has no single protagonist who provides narrative continuity from beginning to end, aside from Ved Vyasa himself. “The Mahabharata is a way of perceiving a past of many beginnings, where time in all its dimensions –cosmic, mythical, historical and psychological -- fuse together. There are aspects of the Mahabharata that legitimise the worst of an ascriptive, hierarchical social order. But in the vastness of its sprawl, it provides a richness of narrative detail and moral ambiguities, to be a relatable tale for all.”
Captain Krishnan Nair was a bit of a “rolling stone” in his early days (Capture the Dream/Bachi Karkaria – Juggernaut). He joined the army, resigned, ventured into supervising ration distribution in Kerala, joined politics for a while and then went back to the army. The smart armyman impressed a local industrialist in Kannur who got his daughter Leela married to him. Every project of the captain was named after Leela, his “guiding force”. It was Leela who wanted captain to build a hotel. But first, says the reviewer Sushila Ravindranath, Captain Nair joined his father-in-law’s handloom business as a sales agent. Thus began his foray into handlooms and exports. Success came when he introduced the ‘Bleeding Madras’, a humble homespun fabric, to the U.S. His entrepreneurial brain was always ticking. When he was 65 years old, Captain Nair entered the competitive hotel industry. He wanted to prove to international visitors that India can build world class hotels and even outdo them. He was not fazed by the existing top class competition, Taj, Oberoi and the ITC groups. “At every stage of his life, he managed to achieve what he wanted to, turning disadvantages into advantages.”
Literary Review | Photo Credit: GOOGLE
Pradeep Magazine’s Not Just Cricket (HarperCollins) is a memoir that juxtaposes his roots of being a displaced Kashmiri Pandit with his eventual metamorphosis as a sports writer, who rose through the ranks, became sports editor and is now a columnist. Magazine isn’t merely offering snapshots or player-profiles, says the reviewer K.C. Vijaya Kumar. “He is also constantly placing them within the boundaries imposed by a nation in a state of flux. India’s post-independence pangs to its gradual evolution through the religion-cum-caste matrix before liberalisation and relatively better social and economic indices helped cricket gain heft, are all mentioned. He also admits that the country’s sensibilities may have changed but there was a time when its sporting moments weren’t essentially coated in the ‘kind of jingoism we abhor’.”
Birdwatching (Aleph) is set in the unruffled universe of New Delhi in early 1962, when a seemingly peaceful world is turned upside down after an ornithologist, Guy Fletcher, stumbles on a corpse. The man is white and he’s clearly been shot – this discovery triggers far-reaching reactions. With Indian and U.S. intelligence agencies involved in the cover-up, Fletcher is soon bundled off to the U.S. But once in the U.S., the CIA approaches him, telling him his fluent Hindi and his cover as an ornithologist are very useful assets. Fletcher accepts their offer to join the agency, not least because he can live in India, and thereby hangs a thrilling tale. In her review, Ranjana Sengupta writes that the novel has a certain deliberate, unhurried pace rather like, one imagines, the art of watching birds. Each chapter too begins with a bird description and the bird finds its way into the chapter, often just a flutter of wings, but a happy distraction from the combustible geopolitics of the moment, a sign that the natural world goes on even as men get ready to kill each other.
Spotlight
A portrait of sad poor mature mother talking to small daughter indoors at home, poverty concept. | Photo Credit: Halfpoint
In her column Women of Letters, K. Srilata writes about Tillie Olsen’s story, ‘I Stand Here Ironing’. Narrated in the first person, the story about a working class single mother has the “layered richness and intimacy of an interior monologue.” It begins with the narrator receiving a call from her daughter Emily’s school counsellor to come in and talk to her about her daughter. “Though the story is seemingly about Emily’s troubles, we see quickly enough what it really is about: the gut-wrench of parenting when you are poor and single, the guilt that corrodes your soul like acid, the shame of having failed a test that no one is meant to clear.” An American writer born to Russian Jewish emigrants, Olsen dropped out at the age of 15 to enter the workforce. She wrote when she found “snatches of time”. Olsen was 49 when her first book, a collection of four short stories, Tell me a Riddle, was published, of which ‘I Stand Here Ironing’ is the opening one.
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- The Dalit Truth (Penguin Random House), edited by K. Raju, has essays on a multitude of Dalit truths and their battles against the caste system. The eighth volume in the Rethinking India series, published in collaboration with the Samruddha Bharat Foundation, probes the path to be followed by Dalits as articulated by the Constitution.
- Richa Mishra’s Unfilled Barrels: India’s Oil Story (Bloomsbury) narrates the complex story of India’s hunt for fossil fuel, and what lies ahead. The Indian government has set aggressive targets to bring down the import bill on oil and gas. But why does India continue to be heavily import-dependent?
- Pulitzer Prize winner Louise Erdrich’s The Sentence (Little Brown Book Group) is a ghost story, a tale of passion, of a complex marriage and of a woman’s errors. It asks what we owe to the living, the dead, to the reader and to the book as it leads us through a year of grief, astonishment, isolation and furious reckoning in Minneapolis.
- Over the Edge (Rupa) by Vandana Kumari Jena is a collection of stories about love, longing, recriminations and regrets, added with murder and mayhem.
That is all for this week. We look forward to hearing from you, be it about this newsletter, our reading list, your literary queries or the book you are reading now. You can find us at www.thehindu.com/books and on Facebook and Twitter at @TheHinduBooks
