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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
On June 5, celebrated as World Environment Day, the hosts, Côte d’Ivoire in partnership with the Netherlands, pledged to campaign against plastic pollution under the campaign #BeatPlasticPollution. According to the UN, global plastic production has risen alarmingly in the last decades, amounting to some 400 million tonnes per year. Yet, only an estimated 12% of plastics produced have been incinerated and only an estimated 9% have been recycled. The remainder has found their way into the environment, including the oceans. In his 2021 book, Pollution is Colonialism, Max Liboiron focused on plastic pollution, tracing how it became a ubiquitous pollutant and arguing that “the structures that allow plastics’ global distribution and full integration into ecosystems and everyday human lives are based on colonial land relations, the assumed access by settler and colonial projects to Indigenous lands for settler and colonial goals.” Lucy Siegle’s book, Turning the Tide on Plastic (2018), is a call to arms to end the plastic pandemic, as she calls it, urging citizens around the world to adopt a “reduce, rethink, refill, refuse” approach and keep away from single-use plastics. A sea captain, Charles Moore, had discovered the world’s largest collection of floating trash in 1997 and wrote about it in Plastic Ocean together with Cassandra Phillips. Moore recounted his findings and showed how plastic, specifically, was contributing to a host of ailments. In fiction, several writers including Margaret Atwood (MaddAddam Trilogy), Richard Powers (The Overstory), Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg’s Curse), Sheela Tomy (Valli: A Novel) and others have chronicled the anxiety over climate change. More stories need to be written, like Alison Stine’s Trashlands (2021), set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future in which plastic has become the currency. In a junkyard that Appalachia has become, one of the key characters, Carol, is a “plucker,” pulling plastic from the rivers and woods, stuck in the eponymous dump of the title.
On Sunday, on the eve of World Environment Day, India lost Manoj Kumar Misra, a keen environmentalist and a champion of rivers, to COVID. A member of the Indian Forest Service, midway through his career, he opted out of government service to “explore the secrets of rivers,” spending most of his time on campaigns to clean up the Yamuna and others. Last year, to mark 50 years of the Wildlife Protection Act, 1972, he edited an anthology Wildlife India@50 (Roli Books), asking experts to take stock and also provide a reality check on conservation efforts. Misra told the writers to talk about their “lived” wildlife stories, and they spoke about everything, “from the making of legislation; need of inviolate habitats; intractable man-animal conflicts and dilemmas around hunting; ground realities; saving species like crocodiles, lions, tigers, elephants and the great Indian bustard; conservation challenges” and so forth. In his essay, ‘NGOs in Wildlife Conservation’, while arguing for better relations between the state and NGOs for better conservation, he personally rued the loss of three streams – Chornai or Choti, Badi and Hasdeo – which “once used to be free as a bird”, to make way for building a new reservoir, Bango Dam, on the river Hasdeo.
Review of Wildlife India@50: Wild encounters
In reviews, we read a new biography of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, notes on Pakistan, a book on how to avert a climate catastrophe and more. We also talk to Zai Whitaker about her new fiction set around the Irula tribals of the Eastern Ghats.
Books of the week
Atal Bihari Vajpayee and BJP leader L.K. Advani in New Delhi. | Photo Credit: Rajeev Bhatt
Abhishek Choudhary’s Vajpayee: The Ascent of the Hindu Right 1924-1977 (Picador India) is the first part of a two-volume biography of Atal Bihari Vajpayee, which busts several myths around the former PM who he says shaped policies of both the Jan Sangh and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). The early years of late Prime Minister captured in the biography, says Nistula Hebbar, are not just instructive on the manner in which Vajpayee dealt with questions of politics and ideology, but also the fluid lines between conservative and liberal politics in the years pre- and post-independence. “In what would seem unbelievable now, the book explores how both the Congress and the Sangh Parivar tried to co-opt each other for many years, till, the conservatives in the Congress were overrun by progressives.” Asked whether Indian socialists and the Emergency mainstreamed the Jan Sangh and the BJP, Choudhary said, “I don’t really agree because at that time the situation was such that to fight the Congress behemoth they needed the Jan Sangh. Earlier, the Jan Sangh had tried to tie up with right wing outfits like the Hindu Mahasabha and the Ram Rajya Parishad which had obscurantist views on caste reforms etc., but they could not because of these very reasons. The socialists and others saw that the Jan Sangh had a presence in electoral politics, and were not like the Mahasabha and other such parties. This ‘mainstreaming’ argument is only partly true as the Sangh Parivar was a part of almost all movements in independent India, from anti-cow slaughter to V.P. Singh’s anti-corruption movement. The Jan Sangh/BJP was bound to grow bigger with time, because they had an organised and disciplined cadre and were determined to acquire power.”
In Risk and Resilience in the Era of Climate Change (Palgrave Macmillan), Vinod Thomas explains why it is imperative to prioritise climate policy and how to go about it. In his review, G. Ananthakrishnan writes that the biggest contribution made by the book is to provide a theoretical framework that could help policymakers assess climate risk on the one hand, and adopt or create new resilience metrics to measure the effectiveness of policy actions on the other. “The book compares the climate crisis with COVID-19, one of the strongest shocks suffered by the entire world in recent times, and uses it to provide a contrast on how governments see cause and effect of problems. The book, written with a focus on climate policymaking, should particularly appeal to politicians and bureaucrats whose task it is to future-proof countries to face a future of unparalleled risk.”
A Pakistan Army soldier stands guard at a hilltop post near the Line of Control in Charikot Sector, Kashmir. | Photo Credit: Reuters
Some three decades after his assignment to Pakistan as The Hindu’s Correspondent from mid-1990, Kesava Menon has written a book, Never Tell Them We Are the Same People: Notes on Pakistan (Speaking Tiger). His memories, anecdotes and analyses, says the reviewer T.C.A. Raghavan, are tempered by reflections on what has changed both in India and in Pakistan in the intervening period. “The long gap, Menon writes, ‘seems appropriate’; not so long ‘that memories have faded into soft sepia’ but the ‘distancing in time has probably helped the attainment of better balance’.” The book is a readable and closely written account of an exciting tenure in Pakistan plus a reflection on Pakistan’s evolution in the past three decades and a wealth of anecdotal details of different experiences and situations, writes Raghavan.
Review of Never Tell Them We Are the Same People — Notes on Pakistan: Across the divide
Spotlight
A new novel by Zai Whitaker (in picture) follows the tenuous lives of an Irula family. Today, several members of the community catch snakes for laboratories that produce antivenom. | Photo Credit: Shaju John, Gnaneswar Ch., M. Karunakaran, R. Ragu, M. Karunakaran
In her new novel, Termite Fry (Bloomsbury), Zai Whitaker traces the changing livelihoods of the Irura tribal community who live in Tamil Nadu’s Eastern Ghats, setting her story around a young girl and her family. Whitaker, best known for her children’s books, tells this “fiction based on truth” through the lives of Thenee and three generations of her family, who catch cobras, live in huts deluged by scorpions, eat roasted termites, talk to birds and have an intimate knowledge of their surroundings and the forest. In an interview with Divya Gandhi, Whitaker explains why the narrative takes a political turn midway through the book: “Political decisions are important markets in the lives of Adivasis all over the world. I felt that the sudden ban on the snake skin trade was a good metaphor for this; so I decided to build the story around this event. It was definitely a good move in terms of snake conservation, but the ban removed the central Irula livelihood without offering any alternative employment.”
Walking with scorpions, talking to termites: Zai Whitaker on her new novel based on Irulas
Browser
- The writings and speeches of thinkers such as Swami Vivekananda, Aurobindo Ghosh, Gandhi, Rabindranath Tagore, B.R. Ambedkar and others show that the pursuit of freedom was both individual and political, argues Dennis Dalton in Indian Ideas of Freedom (Harper).
- As a historian, Romila Thapar has been preoccupied with a range of issues and ideas. The Future in the Past: Essays & Reflections (Alpeh) gathers her essays on use and misuse of history, the myths surrounding Aryans, religious fundamentalism and why dissent is important.
- Athena Liu is a literary star but when she dies in an accident, June Hayward steals her unpublished manuscript and gets it published as her own under a pseudonym. Called a darkly comic thriller, Rebecca F. Kuang’s new novel, Yellowface (Harper), is a satire on privilege and identity.
- The East Indian: A Novel (Harper) by Brinda Charry tells the story of Tony who finds himself indentured on a Virginia tobacco plantation. Set in the early days of Empire, it explores the world of indentured labour of the 1600s.
