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Tributes are pouring in for Ian Jack who passed away suddenly last week at Paisley, on the Firth of Clyde in Scotland. But though Clyde may have been “his heartland for much of his life,” the 77-year-old editor, journalist and columnist was interested in people, trains, canals, water – and India. As editor of Granta, which he took over from Bill Buford in 1995 and stayed at the helm till 2007, overseeing 48 issues of the magazine of “new writing” for 12 years, Jack devoted issue No. 57 (spring 1997) to India. To coincide with 50 years of India’s independence, he showcased writing by old and new writers, from R.K. Narayan, Ved Mehta, V.S. Naipaul, Jan Morris to Vikram Seth, William Dalrymple, Urvashi Butalia and Arundhati Roy (an extract from The God of Small Things which would go on to win the Booker Prize). In his Introduction, he writes how he first arrived in India in 1976 during the last months of the Emergency as a reporter, and found the country “remote and austere, resolved to cope with its problems and fulfil its aspirations in its own way.” He travelled for weeks, picking up voices from the streets, and saw the force and meaning of “political freedom and universal suffrage” when his newspaper asked him to stay on and cover the 1977 elections called by Mrs. Indira Gandhi in which she and her party were swept to defeat. Jack would make India his second home for the next several years and captured many of the changes, not least the movement of Hindu nationalism from the margins to the centre of politics.
In 2015, Jack guest-edited a second Granta edition on India (No. 130/Another Way of Seeing) in which we were introduced to more “new writing” from the region. For instance, Vivek Shanbag’s celebrated novella Ghachar Ghochar, translated by Srinath Perur, first appeared in English in this edition. The stellar list has a slew of writers including Hari Kunzru, Aman Sethi, Raghu Karnad, Samanth Subramanian, Katherine Boo and Anjum Hasan. In the Introduction, Jack celebrates the bustling publishing industry: “The Indian writer need no longer look over his shoulder at his imagined audience abroad; many if not most of his readers are much closer – are Indian like him and need no telling about samosas.” The present editor of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, who took over from Jack, recalled how he always obeyed his instincts for “the original, interesting and the true.” That’s the reason why perhaps he sent writers out to report on interesting things happening in the “real” world. “He was a gifted journalist and editor of immense common sense, and [had] an insatiable curiosity about the world around him.”
In reviews, we read a prescription to revive and grow the Indian economy in a post-pandemic world by two veteran policy-makers, a book on the divide between the southern and northern States, new dystopian fiction by Tabish Khair and more. We also interview John Keay about his new book on the Himalayas, and Vasudhendra on his latest historical fiction.
Books of the week
To understand how India should respond to epochal changes in the post-pandemic world, two experienced policy-makers N.K. Singh and P.K. Mishra have written Recalibrate: Changing Paradigms (Rupa). The authors bring to bear decades of policymaking and institutional understanding, combining bottom-up microeconomic insights with top-down macroeconomic imperatives, to argue that India effectively needs a new social, fiscal and federal compact, writes Sajjid Z. Chinoy in his review. If the new social compact entails constructing an economy both more resilient to shocks and able to thrive in this new era, the writers argue that a new fiscal compact should ensure that “fiscal forbearance is followed by fiscal rectitude.” Where will those revenues come from? “Given the myriad of fiscal architecture questions, Singh bats strongly for an institutional response in the form of a Fiscal Council, now prevalent in more than 80 countries. Any fiscal compact, however, will only succeed if it is accompanied by a renewed federal compact. The GST has recently shown much promise, but more needs to be done to realise its full potential. Meanwhile, the heterogeneity of State finances will argue for a State-specific debt consolidation path, as the book recognises.”
Review of Recalibrate — Changing Paradigms: Path to recovery
Why are the southern States doing so much better than the north? That’s the question data scientist Nilakantan RS strives to answer in his new book, South vs North: The Great Divide. At the time of independence, he writes in the Introduction, the southern States were indistinguishable from the rest of India in terms of their development metrics. Today, the difference couldn’t be starker. Backed with data, statistics, research and reporting, he provides the possible reasons, starting with the most important economic resource a State can have: its people. “A healthy and well-educated population with a reasonably well-run government is likely to have better economic prospects. The income levels and job prospects in south India are, unsurprisingly, significantly better than in the north,” he writes. In his review, S. Venkataraghavan says if there is one important takeaway for policy-makers all across India, it is that girls must be educated; and the government must ensure that they don’t drop out, by giving them nutritious meals and access to menstrual hygiene, as several southern States have done.
Review of Nilakantan R.S.’s South vs North: The Great Divide: Apples and oranges
The Body by the Shore (HarperCollins) by Tabish Khair is not your regular crime fiction, though the title is a teaser. In this novel, Khair moves into a post-pandemic dystopian world, to Denmark in the 2030s, a welfare state where everyone is welcome but no one belongs. In her review, Geeta Doctor writes that at times Khair can be poetic, with the writing “as evanescent as the scent of violets that he perfumes the text with.” At other times, however, he “becomes didactic”, pushing an agenda as if he were an inter-planetary salesman for ‘microbiomes’ on earth. “There is no single revelatory moment but a series of case studies. It also appears to be a direct reference to the effect of COVID-19 and the manner in which the virus has dominated our mind-sphere.”
A post-pandemic dystopia: review of Tabish Khair’s The Body by the Shore
Spotlight
John Keay’s new book, Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World (Bloomsbury), is written through the stories of its pioneers. In an interview with R. Krithika he explains why he chose to profile the mountains: “While we know about the various mountain chains and about Tibet, the realisation that the whole Himalaya region is a distinct eco-zone and has a distinctive history is worth a study in its own right. The idea was to try and define what we mean by the Himalayas, which I take to mean the whole of the bruised area on the physical map of Asia. We think of other ecosystems like Amazonia or Antarctica. I think the Himalayas is just as important because it is the only high altitude eco-zone on our planet.” Keay feels the Himalayas needs more in-depth studies. “In the case of Antarctica, there’s a sort of international agreement whereby the whole southern continent is protected from pollution and political activity. So, everything that goes into Antarctica has to come out. It’s the opposite with the Himalayas. Everything that goes there seems to get left behind: the materials of climbing and camping, and even bodies. I would like to see all the states that have an interest in the Himalayas sign some kind of agreement to help protect and conserve the beauty of the region, and also its unique flora and fauna.”
When you say Himalayas, I think of Kashmir: John Keay
Fiction writer Vasudhendra is among the new voices in contemporary Kannada literature. His latest book, Tejo Tungabhadra (Viking/Penguin), is a historical novel about late 15th and 16th century India and Portugal, drawing history from the common man’s perspective to the social life of Lisbon, Goa and Vijayanagara. In an interview with Stanley Carvalho, Vasudhendra says Kannada literature is vibrant but that though its literature is rich in creative works, it hasn’t gone beyond the State’s borders due to lack of good translators. He is happy with the translation of Tejo, saying that Maithreyi Karnoor, a creative writer in English and award-winning translator, has done a great job, retaining the original flavour and nuances.
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- Pranab Bardhan’s A World of Insecurity (Harvard University Press) takes into account the retreat of liberal democracy in the 21st century from Wisconsin to Warsaw, Budapest to Bengaluru, and sees the problem as not inequality – but insecurity, both financial and cultural.
- In Chip War (Simon&Schuster), Chris Miller writes about the fight for the world’s most critical resource – microchip technology – with the West and China increasingly in conflict. He recounts the history of how tiny silicon chips have come to define the world.
- The Greatest Goan Stories Ever Told (Aleph) is the latest in the series, and it features short fiction from Goans living in India and abroad over the last century, in English and translated from the Portuguese, Konkani, and Marathi. Edited by Manohar Shetty, the 27 stories feature writers ranging from Laxmanrao Sardessai and Vimala Devi to contemporary writers like Damodar Mauzo and Jessica Faleiro.
- A diabolical double murder in Agra, an unsolved killing in the hills of Burma, a poisoning attempt that cost a maharaja his gaddi, Sunil Nair’s Tales of Crimes Past (Hachette) has gripping stories from the days of the Raj.
