The Hindu On Books

The Hindu On Books | On World Book Day, remembering Sudhir Kakar, reading Dalit literature and more

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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter, and wishing all readers a happy World Book Day. In Salman Rushdie’s new book, Knife, about the attack on him in August 2022, he writes that language can be used as a knife, as he has done, to “cut open the world, reveal its meaning, its inner workings, its secrets and its truths,” in short, he has chosen to answer violence with art. In a world where inequalities and divisions persist, often perpetuated by political leaders, and book bans are prevalent, the power of reading cannot be underscored enough.

One of India’s most well-known psychoanalysts and writers, Sudhir Kakar, has passed away, leaving behind a rich legacy of books, including among others, The Inner World (which has never been out of print since its first publication in 1978), Shamans, Mystics and Doctors, Intimate Relations, The Colours of Violence, The Analyst and Mystic, The Kipling File, Young Tagore: The Makings of a Genius and so forth. The Inner World probes the development of Indian identity, exploring social roles, traditional values, and customs, and thereby unravelling Indian society. He liked to think of the book as a contribution to social psychology in general and the social psychology of Hindu society in particular. In the Introduction, he writes that the book is concerned with the psychological themes which pervade Indian childhood, and relates these themes to the traditions and institutions of culture and society in India. Kakar drew data for this study from diverse fields, anthropological accounts, sociological studies, mythology and folk tales, and is a great primer on the behavioural patterns of Indian society, looked at through the prism of “empathy and introspection.”

NEW DELHI, 25/07/2008: Author Sudhir Kakkar during an interview in New Delhi. Photo: V.V. Krishnan | Photo Credit: KRISHNAN VV

He wrote Indians: A Portrait with Katharina Kakar, profiling the Indian individual and psyche, attempting to understand what sets Indians apart from citizens of rest of the world; and what sets Indians apart from other Indians. Among his other great books, his slim volume on Tagore, for instance, should be read by everyone wanting to discover the poet. Kakar explains what he is attempting to do in the Introduction. “I view the opening sentences of [Tagore’s] Jibansmriti (My Reminiscences) as an invitation to a psychological biographer to mine them for emotional truths rather than facts and thus lay bare the deeper motivation of Rabindranath’s life and work that are not available (or even possible) in his ‘historical’ biographies.” In probing the inner world and mind of Tagore, Kakar also emphasises the need for the psychobiographer to have some understanding of “the spirit of the times” in which his subject lived. “In RT’s case [Kakar’s private name for the poet], the zeitgeist is that of Bengal in the second half of the nineteenth century under British rule, mediated to the child, Rabi, by his upper-class family that was unorthodox in many ways as it sought to negotiate the divide between its Hindu tradition and a West-inspired modernity.”

In reviews, we read a new book on the Constitution, a biography of Enzo Ferrari, Bora Chung’s new stories and more.

Books of the week

Mathew John’s India’s Communal Constitution (Cambridge University Press) is a thoughtful exploration of the gap between the Indian Constitution’s “liberal promise of equal liberties” to all citizens, and actual constitutional design and practice, which has often “cast the identity of the Indian people along religious lines,” says Gautam Bhatia in his review. “John frames his argument as a descriptive and diagnostic one, aiming to excavate how the ‘communal orientation of the Indian Constitution … [exerts a] drag … on its liberal goals’.” In his attempt, says Bhatia, John’s book joins a recent set of works that have sought to move beyond a framing of the Constitution as an inherently progressive document, whose workings have been stymied through the many failures of the political class and of the judiciary, and goes a step further -- he compels all of us to take a deeper, and more critical look at the Constitution itself.

Enzo Ferrari, who died at 90 (in 1988) wrote his autobiography, My Terrible Joys, in 1962. In recent years biographies have appeared at a fair clip, says Suresh Menon, including a comprehensive one by Luca Dal Monte, a one-time Ferrari employee, titled Enzo Ferrari: The Definitive Biography of an Icon (Hachette India). Dal Monte told the New York Times, “In Italy, there was the Pope and then there was Enzo.” Menon writes that the Enzo who emerges from the book is a complex man, a mix of the ingenuous and the ingenious. “He read Stendhal and Leopardi and loved Kafka. He dealt with the Fascist government in Italy for business reasons, as he dealt with the occupying forces. He saved lives, protecting them from the Nazis. He himself was on the hitlist for assisting the resistance.” Dal Monte gives readers the standard biography and adds enough new material to make it the definitive one, says Menon. 

In 2022, Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny, translated into English by Anton Hur, was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize. Your Utopia (Hachette), translated by Hur too, there are a host of characters, “some human, some decidedly not, all imbued with strong streaks of strangeness.” In her review, Sheila Kumar writes that she hesitates to categorise the collection of shorts as pure science fiction; “there is a wry cocking of the snook at human laws and constructs. There is the deconstruction of corporate monopolies, land grabs, ecological missteps, the misuse of advanced technology, of love, loss, anger, dismay. If dystopia seems to be the central theme, it’s an ironical touch given that the title has the opposite word — ‘utopia’ — in it, it is a dystopia that though woven through with surreal elements, is relatable to us. Though decidedly weird, nothing is really absurd. This is basically speculative fiction at its most creative, imaginative.”

Spotlight

April is Dalit History Month, and we have been reading a host of old and new books to understand how oppression, caste hierarchies and divisions have been challenged. The victories may be small but it is all the more imperative to explore literature to understand what is happening/has happened on the ground and the links to global histories of racism and social exclusions. In an essay, Soma Basu traces how Dalit writers have foregrounded stories of the marginalised and thought of ways to fight for equality. From B.R. Ambedkar (Annihilation of Caste) to Daya Pawar’s Baluta, translated by Jerry Pinto, Baby Kamble’s Prisons We Broke, translated by Maya Kothari, and Manoranjan Byapari’s autobiography, the books “are relevant in present times when there seems to be a lack of understanding for the marginalised.”

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• Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries (Aleph) by Sumana Roy is an ode to small-town living. She introduces readers to a diverse set of individuals who are known to be “provincial”. Through “postcards” from the outskirts of India and the world, Roy delves into the lives and works of Tagore, the Bhakti poets, Kishore Kumar, Shakespeare, Coetzee, Naipaul, the Brontës, Annie Ernaux, and others.
• Mitali Mukherjee’s Crypto Crimes (HarperCollins) unravels various aspects of the crypto network in India, from places it flourishes (interiors of U.P. and Bihar, and Karnataka) to what it is being used for (narcotics, drugs, illegal betting) and enforcement officials struggling to track down transactions.
• Coins in Rivers (Hachette India) by Rochelle Potkar is a collection of poems on love, grief, anger, dissent around the themes of motherhood, womanhood and citizenship. Poet Jayanta Mahapatra calls her work rich in imagination which is “carefully employed to [suit] her poetic purposes.”
• Penguin is republishing International Booker Prize-winner Geetanjali Shree’s first novel, Mai, translated by Nita Kumar, with a new cover. The English translation of the book was first published in 2000 and then again in 2017. The novel tells the story of a mother in an Indian household, both a central figure, and on the margins of decision-making.