We keep discovering professional tools in unexpected quarters. One of the challenges of handling complaints from the readers of this 137-year-old newspaper is dealing with nostalgia. Nostalgic complaints have the power to stop you in your tracks, as they are full of vigour and emotion. But do they always pass the critical empirical test? There is a huge gap between memory and the reality of the past. Early this month at the Music Academy in his acceptance speech, singer Sanjay Subrahmanyan, Sangita Kalanidhi-elect, gave me a hint as to how to look at this issue rather dispassionately. “I do not subscribe to the view that the standards of music have fallen, even though this has been a documented refrain from the time the British published an official gazette and noted the same in the middle of the 19th century,” he observed. This may be true of some of the criticisms levelled against contemporary journalism too.
Well-known reviewer and writer K. R. A. Narasaiah recently raised the issue of reduced space for non-fiction in the newspaper. He recollected the reviews of at least three to four books in the Tuesday editions earlier, in addition to the monthly Literary Review. In the changed format, he felt, the space for non-fiction has been reduced to reviewing a single book and more space is dedicated to cinema. Has The Hindu reduced its space for >books ? Is the >review section getting short shrift? Is the focus of reviews more towards literature rather than non-fiction? I did a content analysis of the newspaper over the last three months to ascertain the facts and found that the space for books decreased for a brief period. However, with the introduction of the >Weekend Reading page, the balance was not only restored, but also resulted in an exhaustive coverage of books and ideas. I would also like to point out that G. Sampath’s review essay of Akshaya Mukul’s book, > Gita Press and the Making of Hindu India , was carried as a lead article on the editorial page.
Let’s take a look at the newspaper’s coverage of books on December 27, 2015. The books are covered in three distinct sections. The literary review section of the Sunday Magazine has reviews of fiction ( > A Hero for Hire ), >poetry (Nine ), non-fiction ( >George Yeo on Bonsai, Banyan and the Tao ), a >column on translation by Mini Krishnan and an >interview with author and playwright, Colm Toibin . About a dozen books were listed in the two sections, the reading room and the fine print. They were: The Seasons of Trouble by Rohini Mohan, Democrats and Dissenters by Ramachandra Guha, What Pet Should I Get by Dr. Seuss, The Snow Queen — a book on colouring designed by artist Helen Crawford White, Here I Am by Jonathan Safran Foer, Asking for It by Louise O’Neill, On the Battlefield of Merit by Daniel R. Coquillette and Bruce A. Kimball, The Keeper by David Baldacci, Living Rivers, Dying Rivers — an anthology edited by Ramaswamy R. Iyer, Blood on my Hands by Kishalay Bhattacharjee, The True and Splendid History of the Harristown Sisters by Michelle Lovric and Pratyaha: Everyday Lifeworlds — edited by Prasanta Ray and Nandini Ghosh.
In the main paper, on the >Weekend Reading page, M.G. Vassanji’s memoir “ >Of places called home ” looked at the role of Indians in making East African society multicultural, and the brief note on the author spells out two books — A Place Within: Rediscovering India and And Home Was Kariakoo: A Memoir of East Africa . The lists section looked >at six books that had a profound impact on 2015: Who Was Shivaji? , by Govind Pansare; Go Set a Watchman , by Harper Lee; Lost Ocean , by Johanna Basford; Farthest Field , by Raghu Karnad; The Story of the Lost Child , by Elena Ferrante; and Don’t Let Him Know , by Sandip Roy. The section ‘ >Shelf Help ’ offered a glimpse of the creative world of Albert Camus and Thomas Ligotti. The section, ‘ >The book in my hand ’, is an unconventional introduction to books by getting famous personalities to share what they are reading at a given time. This week, diplomat and writer Navtej Sarna talked about Balraj Sahni’s My Pakistan Travelogue, along with Russian classics such as Fathers and Sons and The Brothers Karamazov . Academic Kancha Ilaiah spoke about The Norton Anthology of World Religions, which was put together by Wendy Doniger.
If this is not extensive coverage of books and ideas, I wonder what else would be. It would take magazines like Biblio , which are exclusively dedicated to books, to exhaust and overtake this list. I am reminded of what Milan Kundera said: “Now time has a very different look; it is no longer the conquering present capturing the future; it is the present conquered and captured and carried off by the past.”
readerseditor@thehindu.co.in
