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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
The shortlist for the Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay NIF Book Prize, 2022, has been announced with five books on diverse topics making the cut. If Ghazala Wahab’s Born a Muslim (Aleph) is a narrative about what it means to hail from the Muslim minority community in today’s India, Shekhar Pathak’s The Chipko Movement: A People’s History (Permanent Black/Ashoka University), translated by Manisha Chaudhry, is about the lessons from Chipko and the battles that remain to protect mountain and forest. Rukmini S.’s Whole Numbers and Half Truths: What Data Can and Cannot Tell Us About Modern India (Context/Westland) explains India’s health, population, social mindsets and other indices through data, and Suchitra Vijayan travels to the borders on the east, west and north to understand what it means for the people living there in Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India (Context/Westland). Swethaa S. Ballakrishnen’s Accidental Feminism: Gender Parity and Selective Mobility Among India’s Professional Elite explores contemporary ideas of feminism and gender parity, rounding up the pick of five books from a longlist of ten.
According to the jury, led by political scientist and writer Niraja Gopal Jayal, “This year’s shortlist is extraordinary, in terms of the wide range of themes covered, and the diversity of topics and perspectives.” The winner of the ₹15 lakh prize will be announced on December 1.
In reviews, we read Jayati Ghosh’s examination of the government’s response to COVID-19 and its economic fallout, Ian McEwan’s new novel which straddles the generations from post-World War II to the pandemic, a book on wildlife conservation, and its successes and failures in India, and more. Urvashi Butalia writes a personal tribute to Ian Jack, the journalist and writer who passed away recently, calling him a friend of India.
Books of the week
Jayati Ghosh, a former professor at JNU, who is now with the University of Amherst, narrates how the pandemic played out in India against the general global setting in The Making of a Catastrophe (Aleph). Much of the narrative is familiar enough but there is merit in bringing it all together in one place. In his review, T.T. Ram Mohan writes that Ghosh “sees no redeeming feature to the government’s response to the pandemic. The people suffered and the economy stuttered to a halt. Others will find her judgement harsh.” To take the public health issue, for example, Ghosh thinks the nationwide lockdown of 2020, believed to be the most stringent in the world, was a tragic mistake. She argues that cases of COVID infection went up, nevertheless, so a complete lockdown was needlessly “brutal”. Ram Mohan says things might have been worse but for the lockdown. “Our health record in the first phase was better than that of many advanced economies, including many that did not opt for such a stringent lockdown. The Economic Survey of 2020-21 had mounted a solid defence of the government’s approach. It would have been helpful had Ghosh attempted a point-by-point rebuttal.” Ghosh writes with passion about the plight of the poor and the small-scale sector during the pandemic, segments that suffered the most during the pandemic. But her prescriptions, such as more government spending backed by taxes on the rich, are unlikely to enthuse many, points out Ram Mohan.
Review of The Making of a Catastrophe by Jayati Ghosh: the state in the time of COVID-19
Edited by Aparajita Datta, Rohan Arthur and T.R. Shankar Raman, At the Feet of Living Things (HarperCollins) chronicles the successes and failures of conservationists at the Nature Conservation Foundation. According to the reviewer, Neha Sinha, the book succeeds in two chief ways: understanding that protagonists in wildlife conservation are also people, and gauging the many ways an individual and community can view an animal. “Covering hornbills in North-Eastern India, coral reefs in Lakshadweep, snow leopards in the Himalayas, elephants and rainforests in Tamil Nadu, dugongs in Andamans, bonnet macaques in Karnataka, this book does not claim to cover all species or landscapes within the country. What it does in great detail though is tell the story of what happens after an intervention or beyond the ‘happily ever after’ of social change. This is the more challenging script to write.”
In his new novel, Lessons (Jonathan Cape), Ian McEwan tells the story of Roland Baines against the broad sweep of World War II, the end of Empire, the Cold War, and bringing it right down to the more recent issues of Brexit and COVID-19. In his review, Andrew Whitehead says that Lessons takes in the profound sense of optimism and liberation that came with the breaching of the Berlin Wall, and the numbing despair of the storming of the Capitol in Washington a generation later – “From peak to midden in thirty years,” as McEwan puts it. This is an old man’s novel, contends Whitehead – McEwan is 74 years old, about the same age as his protagonist – in as much as it is tinged by an acute sense of reflection: “never sentimental, always sharply observed, often unflinching, but inescapably from a vantage point of advancing age.”
Review of Lessons by English novelist Ian McEwan: A powerful, panoramic work
Roopa Pai’s Cubbon Park: The Green Heart of Bengaluru (Speaking Tiger) profiles a green space dear to Bengalureans. Together with Lalbagh, Cubbon Park is an essential lungs in an urban space. In his review, K.C. Vijaya Kumar writes that Pai highlights the strategic location of the park, wedged as it is between Bengaluru’s twin-hearts: City and Cantonment, and then weaves in its past laced with Mysore royalty and British aristocracy before acknowledging the current denizens of the city. “The tome highlights the role played by the erstwhile chief engineer Richard Sankey in designing the park, which was inaugurated in 1870 and ‘would go on to become one of the city’s most beloved green spaces.’ The author goes back and forth in tying up the links, be it with Sankey, commissioner Sir Mark Cubbon, whose name got posthumously linked with the park, or Richard Meade.” She throws light on the park’s varied flavours, be its flora and fauna, tryst with music and the clubs that exist within it.
Review of Roopa Pai’s Cubbon Park — The Green Heart of Bengaluru: Where the earth speaks
Spotlight
Illustration for The Hindu | Photo Credit: Satheesh Vellinezhi
Ian Jack came to India as a journalist nearly half a century ago. And that first visit itself began a long relationship with India and things Indian, writes Urvashi Butalia as she pens a tribute to the journalist, writer and editor who passed away suddenly on October 28. The Indian connection, says Butalia, allowed him to pursue an abiding interest in trains, mostly steam-driver, and the railways. Armed with old and somewhat tattered copies of old railway guides, the Bradshaw’s, Ian travelled on trains, watched engines huff past, went to locomotive yards, spent time in the rail museum and read up old files in the Railway Ministry. Several of these stories find place in Mofussil Junction: Indian Encounters 1977-2012, a book “that captures so much of what connected him to India.” Ian put together two India editions for Granta, the magazine he edited for years. He brought grace and nuance to everything he wrote, says Butalia, for “he had no interest in posturing or practising the kind of muscular journalism that is so prevalent today.”
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- Amid shifting contemporary geopolitics, Strategic Challenges: India in 2030 (HarperCollins) covers strategic challenges India is likely to face by 2030. Experts including Vijay Gokhale, Vikram Sood, Arun K. Singh, Air Marshal Raghunath Nambiar, Vice Admiral Shekhar Sinha, Kiran Karnik, and others, write on the difficulties and opportunities.
- The economist, Nouriel Roubini, who was nicknamed Dr. Doom until his warnings of the 2008 housing bubble came true, says there is another crisis looming. In his new book, Megathreats (John Murray/Hachette) he writes about 10 overlapping, interconnected threats, and warns the world must act now to stave off the crises.
- In Manjhi’s Mayhem (Penguin), Tanuj Solanki weaves the story around a security guard of a posh café who wants a shot at the good life and is ready to do anything for it. When damsel-in-distress Santosh seeks his help, Sewaram Manjhi cannot refuse and is soon sucked into a vortex of mayhem, which, if he survives, could hold the key to a golden life.
- The business journalist, Udayan Mukherjee, is back with another novel, No Way In (Bloomsbury), which is set during the 2014 national election. Sabita, a cook from Assam, works for a rich family in Kolkata. As she tries to build a life far away from a violent past, destiny has other plans, and her journey becomes entwined with that of new India.
