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In his new book, Northeast India: A Political History (HarperCollins), which was written before the current flare-up of tensions in Manipur, Samrat Choudhury points out that “Manipur remains suspended in an uneasy peace, prone to descending into fraternal conflict just as it was a thousand years ago, in the days when clan warred against clan and tribe against tribe.” Almost foretelling the conflict, the journalist writes that Chief Minister Biren Singh has failed to “paper over tensions between the three major communities in the State – Meiteis, Kukis and Nagas”, and that several crucial mutually interconnected issues have not really been resolved, either in the Imphal valley, the surrounding hills, or in Nagaland or northern Myanmar next door. In an interview with Abdus Salam, Choudhury says the unresolved issues relate to demands for some kind of autonomy in a three-way territorial issue, and that is at the heart of what has happened. The different communities are “either very strongly for or against the whole issue of separate administration and it is something which has happened before as well and it has been an issue that has held off the conclusion of the Naga peace talks.” The positions of the Meiteis and the Kukis, or for that matter even the position of the Meiteis vis-a-vis the Kukis and the Nagas cannot be resolved, he feels, without some amount of flexibility and creative problem-solving.
In reviews, we read Angela Saini’s book on the origins of patriarchy, the “greatest Indian stories ever told,” edited by Arunava Sinha, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s pandemic novel, and more.
Books of the week
People take part in a protest against the Islamic regime of Iran following the death of Mahsa Amini, in Istanbul, Turkey December 10, 2022. | Photo Credit: DILARA SENKAYA
As a science journalist who writes on racism and sexism, Angela Saini has often wondered how societies came to be structured the way they are – and what they were like before. Was there a time when men did not rule, “a lost world where femininity and masculinity did not mean what they do now?” In The Patriarchs: How Men Came to Rule, she writes that the word to describe women’s oppression – patriarchy – has become devastatingly monolithic, drawing in all the ways in which women and girls around the world are abused and treated unfairly, from domestic violence and rape to the gender pay gap and moral double standards. Taken together, she says, the sheer scale and breadth of it appear out of our control. In her review, Mini Kapoor writes that Saini details the staggering toll overarching male authority has taken, as well as the fightback against it.
Review of Angela Saini’s The Patriarchs — How Men Came to Rule: Gender rights and wrongs
In the introduction to The Greatest Indian Stories Ever Told (Aleph), Arunava Sinha, who has edited the volume, writes that all the 50 stories in the selection are in English, 43 of them are in fact translations into English from the various languages of India. “In reading these, you will live all the possibilities that India has to offer, possibilities that an individual cannot experience in a single lifetime. This selection is not just a representation of the multiplicity of magics that being an ‘Indian’ can offer, it is a portal to all the universes that the ‘Indian’ identity can inhabit. It is not the totality of those universes, but it is a gateway into them.” Reviewing the stories, Geeta Doctor says there is “something magical” in Sinha’s selection of stories. Along with humour, hungry ghosts, departed and real, there’s love, betrayal, magic realism and the tragic realism of Partition. Get ready to go back to the stories by Saadat Hasan Manto, Bapsi Sidhwa, Ruskin Bond, Subramania Bharati, Tagore, Khushwant Singh, Paul Zacharia, Vaikom Muhammad Basheer and others.
A gateway to everything Indian | Review of Arunava Sinha’s ‘The Greatest Indian Stories Ever Told’
The protagonist in Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s Soft Animal (Penguin) is Mallika Rao, who is in her late 30s, married to a seemingly nice man, but as she faces an endless number of lockdown days due to COVID-19, she is forced to take a close look at herself and what she wants in life, and thereby hangs a tale. She is not in a happy state of mind and that colours her view of love, life, friends, neighbours. Will she sink or swim and get out of the abyss? In her review, Sheila Kumar says the wit is pronouncedly sardonic, and that the progress of COVID-19 and its impact on residential associations are detailed with a dash of delicious cynicism. Her husband Mukund fails to deliver too – and the marriage becomes lonely. Kumar feels Soft Animal is a tale of sinking, then swimming, that is truly evocative.
To the abyss and back | Review of ‘Soft Animal’ by Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
Spotlight
Kunal Sen addresses his father Mrinal Sen, the acclaimed filmmaker, as ‘Bondhu’ which in Bengali means friend. Bondhu (Seagull), an intimate portrait of his father in his centenary year, is the Chicago-based author’s first book. In an interview with Kunal Ray, he says his father’s interest in cinema was largely incidental. He was a voracious reader, and “one day he came across a book on film aesthetics and was immediately smitten by the idea of making films.” Asked what makes Mrinal Sen’s films different from that of his contemporaries, Ritwik Ghatak and Satyajit Ray, Kunal Sen says his father was most keen on formal experimentation, and unlike most artists, never settled down after discovering a pattern that worked. “Throughout his career, he never made more than three or four films in a row before trying something distinctly different, even when he received considerable critical acclaim for the earlier style. I believe he was also more reactive to his surroundings and his time than the other two.” In Mrinal Sen’s oeuvre are films like Bhuvan Shome, Calcutta 71, Interview, Ek Din Pratidin, Kharij, Khandhar, Antareen and others.
Browser
- In The Indian Village: Rural Lives in the 21st Century (Aleph), sociologist Surinder S. Jodhka examines the changing nature of the village in India, which is a dynamic reality that lives on in an active relationship with the wider world. Besides other things, it enables the city to prosper, just as the city keeps the village going.
- As part of the ‘Literary Activism’ series, Amit Chaudhuri’s On Being Indian (Westland Books) documents what led to the protests around the Citizenship Amendment Act. Taking off from the protests, the essay, originally a talk delivered at Jamia Millia Islamia, elaborates on what it means to “be Indian.”
- Manjula Padmanabhan’s Stolen Hours and Other Curiosities (Hachette) is a collection of 25 stories which dream up inventive futures and also capture today’s world. From mosquitoes that infect people with Gandhian pacifism, a dystopia where everyone breathes canned air, a tourist vampire who is hungry for spicy Indian blood, her twisty science fiction is a spin on reality.
- The Greatest Punjabi Stories Ever Told (Aleph), selected and edited by Renuka Singh and Balbir Madhopuri, covers four generations of Punjabi writers, and includes tales by Gurbaksh Singh, Balwant Gargi, Sant Singh Sekhon and Amrita Pritam as well as work of contemporary writers like Ajmer Sidhu, Sarghi, and Jatinder Singh Hans.
