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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The New India Foundation has announced the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize shortlist for 2023. The five books selected from a longlist of 10 “illuminate our understanding of how the nation and its citizens have come to be,” the jury, led by political scientist Niraja Gopal Jayal, said. The shortlist: Achyut Chetan for Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic (Cambridge University Press); Rotem Geva’s Delhi Reborn: Partition and Nation Building in India’s Capital (Stanford University Press); Akshaya Mukul for his biography of Hindi poet Agyeya: Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya (Penguin); Gita Ramaswamy for Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: Memoirs of a Lapsed Revolutionary (Navayana); and Taylor C. Sherman for Nehru’s India: A History in Seven Myths (Princeton University Press). Perumal Murugan has won the JCB Prize for Fiction for 2023 for his novel Fire Bird (Penguin), translated by Janani Kannan. Read a review here.
In reviews, we read an excerpt from Ziya Us Salam’s Being Muslim in Hindu India, Ramanujan’s Soma poems, an anthology celebrating trailblazers of the LGBTQIA+ movement in India, a guide through events and people who have shaped Indian cricket, and more. We talk to author Tashan Mehta on her latest novel about two sisters.
Books of the week
What is it like to be a Muslim in Hindu India? In his new book, Being Muslim in Hindu India (HarperCollins), Ziya Us Salam writes about the Hindutva agenda, everyday communalism and history. In an excerpt, he talks about the persuasive attempts being made to link Akbar and Aurangzeb, the two Mughal emperors who should be seen at the opposite ends of the spectrum of pluralism and religiosity. Those who believe in Hindutva ideology cannot find a distinction between the diverse Muslim Indian leaders of the past, he says. “Now, the difference between Aurangzeb and Akbar, clear as night from day, is being gradually blurred. Repeated attempts are being made to nibble at Akbar’s greatness, letting us know through an incident here, a rechristening attempt there, that Akbar was not so great after all.” Votaries of Hindutva prefer to “settle present-day disputes with the weapon of history, real or imagined.... In their world of binaries, you are either with them or against them.”
Recycling myths: an excerpt from Ziya Us Salam’s Being Muslim in Hindu India
Soma: Poems by A.K. Ramanujan (Penguin), edited by Guillermo Rodriguez and Krishna Ramanujan, brings together the poet’s ‘Soma’ poems, numbering 22. Drawn from the A.K. Ramanujan papers at the University of Chicago, the poems, writes the reviewer K. Srilata, constitute rich archival material and offer the reader an opportunity to excavate from discarded poetry drafts, another Ramanujan altogether – one who between the 1970s and the early 80s was fascinated by the Soma plant. Believed to have consciousness-altering properties, the elixir from the Soma plant was supposedly consumed by Hindu gods and priests during rituals. The drink was also personified by a god of the same name. “The ‘Soma’ poems, while not entirely unselfconscious, do sing to us from a different place than Ramanujan’s other poems.”
Not the same Ramanujan | Review of ‘Soma’, edited by Guillermo Rodriguez and Krishna Ramanujan
Writer Vikram Seth is one of the 19 individuals celebrated in Over the Rainbow: India’s Queer Heroes (Juggernaut) by Aditya Tiwari. The diverse list includes scholars Ruth Vanita and Saleem Kidwai, activist Grace Banu, filmmaker Rituparno Ghosh, designer Wendell Rodericks and others. The idea is to introduce young readers to these people and give them a basic overview of them and their achievements. The profiles, writes the reviewer Aditya Mani Jha, are concise, lucidly written, and accessible. “In the preface, Tiwari makes a very important point – that India has always had several indigenous queer traditions and histories that have always operated independently, with little correspondence to analogous movements in the West. To better understand Indian queerness, therefore, it is vital that these homegrown identities and structures are studied thoroughly.”
Review of Aditya Tiwari’s Over the Rainbow — India’s Queer Heroes: Seeing the light
In The Lords of Wankhede (Rupa), veteran sports writer R. Kaushik and former India player W.V. Raman pen their collective memories, observations, and anecdotes of Indian cricket between 1983 and 2011, the two times India lifted the World Cup. In his review, K.C. Vijaya Kumar says that the book isn’t exactly a cut-and-dry chronological retelling but a nuanced take on events and people who have shaped Indian cricket. “This is Kaushik’s voice enlivened with the sardonic insights that Raman is known for. It helps that Kaushik has reported exhaustively from the mid-1990s till date, while Raman has been the quintessential insider, graduating from playing to coaching and commentary. This book is essential reading for all those interested in the tides that influenced Indian cricket.”
Review of The Lords of Wankhede by W.V. Raman and R. Kaushik: Cover drive
Spotlight
Asked to describe her new book, Mad Sisters of Esi (Harper), Tashan Mehta says it is a “madcap, joyful, very strange novel about two sisters and their quest across three universes. It is essentially a love letter to our wildness.” It is a book of fables, myths, and dreams transporting the reader into a maze of alternate universes with delightful female characters. In an interview with Radhika Santhanam, Mehta says she doesn’t think about the reader, only the story, when asked if she ever thinks about who will be reading her as she drops readers into the worlds she has created without much explanation. “It’s a question of not how best will the reader understand it, but how best will the story live inside the reader. Because every book is a conversation....[The story of] Esi is only exciting because you spend all those pages building it up before you come to it. So, it was really important to open this way – [drop them in the middle of a whale and into chaos].”
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- Aryans: The Search for a People, a Place and a Myth (Hachette) is historian Charles Allen’s last book. He offers a definitive account of the Aryans in his book, with their grand sweep of language, mythology, contested histories, and conflict. The book, being released posthumously, has been edited and completed by David Loyn, an award-winning author.
- Writer Manreet Sodhi Someshwar’s last book in the Partition Trilogy is out. Kashmir (Harper), which follows Hyderabad and Lahore, explores the events and exigences that led to Kashmir becoming a battleground two months after India became independent in August 1947. She says she wrote The Partition Trilogy with a goal to put faces on the ones who lived, loved and lost in that cataclysm, especially women.
- The Greatest Malayalam Stories Ever Told (Aleph), selected and translated by A.J. Thomas, is a collection of fifty short stories. There are masters such as Karoor Neelakanta Pillai, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer, Lalithambika Antharjanam, Ponkunnam Varkey, Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai, S. K. Pottekkatt, Uroob, O. V. Vijayan, M. T. Vasudevan Nair, and Paul Zacharia, as well as accomplished new voices like N. Prabhakaran, C. V. Balakrishnan, Aymanam John, Chandramathi, and others.
- In Kanchenjunga Whispers: Legends and Tales from The Elgin (Rupa), a hotelier, Rea Oberoi, spins stories around the land of the Kanchenjunga. In her telling, there are forest shamans, bodhisattvas, hidden tribes, gods and goddesses, and other myths, as she travels through the Himalayas. She takes readers into the land of the thunderbolt and rolling tea gardens and she tries to cross over to Shambhala—the land of enlightened beings.
