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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. George Orwell (1903-1950) is having quite a moment in the 21st century – his books, Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (published in the 1940s), are still bestsellers in a world which is increasingly seeing dictatorships and totalitarian regimes imposing their own facts. Last year, American writer Sandra Newman came out with Julia, which retells the Nineteen Eighty-Four story through the eyes of Julia, the love of protagonist Winston Smith. Besides, Anne Funder wrote a biography on Orwell’s women (Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell’s Invisible Life). Now, travel writer Paul Theroux has written a novel, Burma Sahib (HarperCollins), about Orwell’s early years as an officer in colonial Burma. Orwell himself wrote his first novel, Burmese Days, about this experience which changed him in many ways. He had gone to Burma as Eric Arthur Blair, a son of the British Empire, but once he returned he changed his name to George Orwell when he was 28 years old. His work with the British Imperial Police in Burma for five years informed his future writing. Burmese Days itself is a scathing indictment of imperialism, and lays bare the dark face of British rule in the subcontinent. Theroux mines this story to write his own about the young Orwell and how Burma shaped his life, as the epigraph tells us: “There is a short period in everyone’s life when his character is fixed forever,” taken from Burmese Days.
Amid Israel’s relentless attack on Gaza, the 12th Palestine Book Awards have been announced. We spoke to Ibrahim Muhawi who won the Translation Award for Hussein Barghouthi’s Among the Almond Trees: A Palestinian Memoir (Seagull Books). Barghouthi, writer, poet, critic and academic, was in his 40s when he was diagnosed with cancer. He deals with this crisis by making the journey home to the village of his birth in central Palestine and his memoir is a reflection of what it means to be a Palestinian. Muhawi says, “The majority of Palestinian villagers who were driven out of their land took their house keys with them. It remains the symbol of their belonging to the land, their memory of it, and their right of return, enshrined in UN General Assembly Resolution 194, elevated in 1974 in Resolution 3236 to an ‘inalienable right to return.’ Memory is at the absolute centre of Palestinian consciousness of place.... The right of return is engraved in the collective memory of the Palestinian people.”
In books, we talk to Upamanyu Chatterjee about his new book, read Benjamin Labatut’s latest novel, and dig into a 1930s murder case in Bengal. We also talk to Yamini Narayanan about why the cow’s exalted status in India does not protect her.
Books of the week
Upamanyu Chatterjee (English, August) blazes a new trail with his latest novel, Lorenzo Searches for the Meaning of Life (Speaking Tiger). In it, he tells the true story of the life of an Italian, Fabrizio Senesi, an acquaintance of his in Sri Lanka for the last few years, and embellishes the central story with fictional characters. In the novel, he becomes Lorenzo Senesi, who as a Benedictine monk, is on a spiritual quest to find the meaning of life. Asked about his most famous work, English, August, a satire on the bureaucracy of which he was a part, Chatterjee tells Stanley Carvalho: “English, August belongs to the 1980s. Things have changed, the civil service itself has changed, small towns in India are not at all like Madna in the ’80s. I’m not sure if the novel would work in 2024 because protagonist Agastya Sen’s feeling of being out of place in his own country gives it its spurt. If I wrote it today, it would be a different book.”
Benjamin Labatut’s The Maniac (Pushkin Press) is a retelling of the life of mathematical genius John von Neumann, the Hungary-born polymath who established the mathematical framework for quantum physics, founded the field of game theory, played a crucial role in the building of the nuclear bomb, and took the initial steps to creating artificial intelligence. In his review, Suresh Menon says Labatut, the 43-year-old Chilean writer, explores the life of von Neumann through those around him, including his wives. “Labatut doesn’t do magic realism. Instead he is the master of realistic magic, filling his novels with real people and real events, and making it all seem fantastical and relevant.”
Dan Morrison’s The Poisoner of Bengal (Juggernaut) digs up a fratricidal killing with a plague virus in Calcutta of the 1930s. On November 29, 1933, Amarendra Chandra Pandey, a 22-year-old wealthy young zamindar was about to board a train from Calcutta’s Howrah station when a stranger collided with him. Though he felt a sharp pinprick in his arm, Pandey continued on to the family fiefdom of Pakur. Within a few days he developed a lump under his arm and fever. On December 4, he was dead. His half-brother, Benoyendra, the Raja of Pakur, was arrested from a train and charged with murder. Morrison, who now lives in Brooklyn, didn’t set out to investigate a murder from 1930s Calcutta, writes Sandip Roy, the reviewer. A story he was working on about ultraviruses and bacteriophages led him to the Haffkine Institute in India, the plague research laboratory set up by the Russian-French bacteriologist Waldemar Haffkine and he discovered a tiny news item about how the plague virus had been used to kill someone. That led him down the rabbit hole that was the Pakur murder case.
Spotlight
In her new book, Mother Cow, Mother India (Navayana), Yamini Narayanan argues that the cow – and the Ganga -- have both been harmed, in the name of being sacred. In an interview with Sudhirendar Sharma, she says, “What both the Ganga and the cow demonstrate, is the harm that has been done to both, in the name of their sacralisation. Sacralisation is a form of objectification, and any objectification that is non-consensual, is profoundly harmful to the one being sacralised. The Ganga and the cow have both been harmed – precisely in the name of being sacred – quite literally to their deaths.”
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- If Sathnam Sanghera’s previous book, Empireland, traced imperialism’s lasting impact on Britain, his latest, Empireworld (Penguin/Viking), examines the legacies of British empire across the globe. From the creation of tea plantations across the world, to environmental destruction, there’s an imperial hand to everything – after all, 2.6 billion people are inhabitants of former British colonies.
- In Savarkar and the Making of Hindutva (Princeton University Press), Janaki Bakhle writes the intellectual history of one of the most contentious political thinkers of the 20th century by examining his voluminous writings in Marathi, from political and historical works to poetry, essays and speeches, and his thoughts on Hindutva.
- Ma is Scared and Other Stories (Penguin) by Anjali Kajal has been translated from the Hindu into English by Kavita Bhanot. The stories revolved around everyday life and raises questions about gender, caste, oppression, safe spaces, or their lack. For her debut collection, Kajal dips into the lives of ordinary women in north India who struggle against all sorts of oppressions from caste to patriarchy.
- Jayant Kaikini, Kannada poet, short story writer, playwright, has followed up his award-winning short story collection No Presents Please, with Mithun Number Two and Other Mumbai Stories (eka). Translated by Tejaswini Niranjana, this collection is about young and old migrants who flock to Mumbai; how strangers become friends, families grapple with strife and children grow up against all odds.
