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Journalism of Courage
Four extraordinary books I have recently read are Swang (Rajkamal Prakashan) by Gyan Chaturvedi; Khela (Setu Prakashan) by Neelakshi Singh; RSS: The Long and the Short of It (Eka) by Devanura Mahadeva, and The Second Wave: Reflections on the Pandemic through Photography, Performance and Public Culture (Seagull Books) by Rustom Bharucha. The first two are Hindi novels by two of our finest contemporary writers, and the other two are personalised discursive pieces in English, by an eminent fiction writer and an eminent dramaturg and cultural critic.
All the four deal with our horribly unhinged world. Employing different strategies that range from the carnivalesque to gentle irony and grim prognostication, the four writers do not let go of lightness of touch and retain hope amid the dark all around.
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (Penguin Random House) by Israeli author Yuval Noah Harari, along with its sequels, stood apart for me this year. I prefer reading non-fiction, and these books were technically sound, data-based and factual. Sapiens… traces a chronology of the human race and its evolution. It discusses how the evolution theory suggested by Darwin was natural, but now we are tampering with nature and life as we know it.
The books are a good overview of where we started from and where we are today and look ahead into the future. It was a mind-boggling read. Sometimes, we see what is obvious to us and miss what is actually going on. After reading the books, I pondered over the question that our generation may be the wealthiest in terms of resources and facilities but are we really the wisest in terms of what we are doing to ourselves or the way we are treating the planet? It makes us question our own decisions, and that of our ancestors and policymakers.
To survive and thrive in India requires resilience and optimism. Naushad Forbes’ The Struggle And The Promise: Restoring India’s Potential (Harper Business), lays out the tribulations we deal with every day as we seek, against quite remarkable and well-recognised odds, to grow into an inclusive and more prosperous society.
But moving beyond barriers, he uses data and exemplars to describe the state of India in the world, and charts a path forward with an agenda for action by government and business — for policy and participation to build the quality and scale of innovation
India needs to lead the world.
In 2022, I’ve read a lot of fiction, non fiction and academic works. But there are three I’d like to especially mention. The first is Orhan Pamuk’s The Nights of Plague (Penguin Hamish Hamilton). It’s set in a plague that spreads through the Ottoman Empire, and depicts the history of the political war between the Muslim and the Greek community very well. The way an epidemic is made a metaphor in the novel, and used to depict politics and dark corners of history, is very impressive.
Qayas (Rajkamal Prakashan), by Udayan Vajpayee, a Hindi novel. Qayas means ‘inference’, and the novel is about a murder, and all the different viewpoints the victim’s life is depicted with. It says that there is no such thing as an absolute truth and all truths are relative. Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) comes to mind, a story which presents a similar message: everyone’s communication is limited, yet it is the only way one can perceive a truth.
Usne Kaha Tha, an Urdu novel by Ashar Najmi, looks at the LGBTQ community viewed through the prism of humanity, without any societal pressures or moral judgement. In Urdu, this is a bold topic that is difficult to write. All characters in the story are first human, and then shown to have certain biological limitations, which modify their temperaments or sexuality.
I read mainly books about India, and this year I loved M Mukundan’s Delhi A Soliloquy (Eka), winner of last year’s JCB Prize for Literature. It’s a moving story of a Keralite’s journey through post-Partition Delhi. It looks at the city bottom up, with deep empathy, with all the good and bad which great cities hold.
The author sees what is often missed, the joy and sadness of ordinary lives, and has some excellent descriptions of the pleasure of eating good food as well as the sharpness of Delhi’s biting winter cold.
Three books, all in Hindi, stuck with me this year — the first one is Hindi Film Sangeet Ka Safar: Meel Ke Patthar (Antara Infomedia) by Vijay Verma on Hindi film music that goes beyond light stories and hearsay to analyse the deeper impact of Hindi film music. It introduces us to many creators, songs and what went into their making, making for academic heft and an engaging yet neutral narrative.
Babusha Kohli’s Baawan Chitthiyaan (Rajkamal Prakashan) cannot be boxed into any mould. Neither a story, nor a novel, neither prose, nor verse, its world of letters opens up to something sublime. It is a world that has its own bahar, radeef and kaafiya. Sometimes, it feels that it’s been written only for you. There is a lot of solitude in these 52 letters; and a lot of conversation, too.
Azadi Mera Brand by Anuradha Beniwal is a rebellious girl’s honest, unapologetic diary of travelling through distant lands. I was reading a travelogue after a long time and what began as a light, jaunty read turned into something with greater cultural significance as people kept joining her in her journey, enriching her, and us, with new life experiences.
The two books that stole my heart this year are: Vinaya Chaitanya’s thought-provoking translation of Sri Narayana Guru’s poetic works, A Cry in the Wilderness: The Works of Narayana Guru (Harper Collins) and Baran Farooqui’s marvellous translation of Khalid Jawed’s intensely poignant novel, The Paradise of Food (Juggernaut). There may seem little in common between the two, but two shared features stand out. First, they are both translations – not surprising perhaps, given the apparent drought in the Indian-English fictional imagination and the rise of mediocrity in Indian English non-fiction. Secondly, they are both calls to humanity. Narayana Guru’s call to inner strength in the worst of times shines serenely through Chaitanya’s translation (indeed, shapes it). Jawed’s novel replaces both the subject (they who petitions) and the citizens-to-be (readers of novels, dreaming a new nation) with the human (baptised by poetry alone). The other romping, rambunctious read of the year was Daisy Rockwell’s translation of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand (Penguin), which is surprisingly similar to R Rajasree’s Kalyaniyum Dakshayaniyum Ennu Peraaya Randu Shreekalute Kata in its aesthetic choices and cheekiness.
Feminist sisterhood, it seems, is real, and reaches beyond distances that separate authors of feminist texts.
Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Chatto & Windus) by Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman — about four incredible women who radically changed philosophy — is a book everyone interested in the history of ideas must read.
Akshaya Mukul’s stellar biography of Agyeya, Writer, Rebel, Soldier, Lover: The Many Lives of Agyeya (Penguin Random House) was a highlight, as was Suchitra Vijayan’s Midnight’s Borders: A People’s History of Modern India (Context). Both books liberate their respective subjects from old tropes/stereotypes and are richly researched.
I have been reading a lot of economic sociology on elite cultures. Among the many books I read on the subject, I loved Serious Money: Walking Plutocratic London (Allen Lane) — an ethnographic account of London’s super-rich — by Caroline Knowles. I read a lot of fiction, too. The Easter Parade (Vintage) by Richard Yates and Either/Or by Elif Batuman (Jonathan Cape) were favourites, as were Nilanjana Roy’s Black River (Context) and Annie Zaidi’s Bread, Cement, Cactus: A Memoir of Belonging and Dislocation (Cambridge University Press). For those interested in economics, I urge you to read J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century (Basic Books).
Without hesitation, my pick is Vinayak Chaturvedi’s masterpiece, Hindutva and Violence: VD Savarkar and the Politics of History (Permanent Black), a scholarly, detached, dispassionate journey through VD Savarkar’s voluminous speeches and writings to let the man’s own words chill the reader’s blood to the bones. “Violence,” Savarkar asserts, is “at the centre of the formation of the Hindu as a Hindu” and “Hindus understand themselves as Hindus through acts of violence”.
The author’s “critique” is directed at Savarkar’s “world of ideas” since the “threads of his thoughts” have become “central to the public debate in India… (and) the violence of Hindutva” has “replaced the non-violence of Gandhi”. It is this that accounts for the 2002 Gujarat pogrom, the political rise of the saffron forces, and the blatant majoritarianism that has substituted equal rights for the minorities. This requires each of us to match up to the responsibility of restoring compassion and decency to our public life.
I enjoyed reading Whole Numbers and Half Truths (Context) by Rukmini S. The book dives into various routinely collected datasets from India — all of them telling stories not obvious at first look. So much data is collected but never used to make informed policy decisions. This book is eye opening, exposing myths and misconceptions and telling the human stories behind dry statistics. Eminently readable and written in an engaging style, the book kept me engrossed and I also learnt a lot. Most people take numbers at face value — a deeper pursuit of such data reveals truths quite different from first impressions.
One of the more absorbing new titles I read this year is Crimson Spring by Navtej Sarna. It is truly well-crafted, using the Jallianwala Bagh tragedy to pull together multiple individual narratives like so many streams leading to a defining event in India’s struggle for freedom. The story of India’s freedom movement has been dominated by Mahatma Gandhi and the doctrine of non-violence, but many others contributed in different ways and, sometimes, through violent acts born out of deep
anger and in reaction to barbaric and unmitigated oppression.
The book uncovers the many wounds that were inflicted on ordinary Indians using the searing example of Punjab itself. The author has very skilfully woven together history with fictional and semi-fictional stories that add up to a compelling, emotive and moving testament. Crimson Spring will hold you in its embrace through all its pages.
The three books that stood out for me this year are the 2019 Ananda Puraskar-winning Bengali novel, Subarnarenu Subarnarekha (Dey’s Publishing), by Nalini Bera; Hindi novel, Kaale Adhyaay (Bharatiya Jnanpith & Vani Prakashan), by Manoj Rupda, and Hul! Hul!: The Suppression of the Santal Rebellion in Bengal, 1855 (Bloomsbury India), by Peter Stanley.
In the first, set among a people called Hatua, who inhabit the region along the river Subarnarekha on the border of West Bengal and Odisha, and speak a mix of “half- Bangla, half-Odia”, the lives of the Hatua through the eyes of the narrator, a young boy named Lolin, come alive.
In Rupda’s powerful Hindi novel, Irma Madavi, a young, Gond woman — who lived in a village in Bastar region of Chhattisgarh, amidst the crossfire between the corporate-government nexus and the Adivasis determined to save their land from the said nexus — disappears in the forest one day. Her younger half-brother — the unnamed narrator of the novel — goes in search of the sister who had raised him.
Stanley’s book, a military history, is by no means is a complete account of the Hul, the Santal Rebellion of 1855; but it does two notable things: it establishes the Santals as a migrant community; and, instead of deifying Santal fighters, it presents them as ordinary humans, with their goodness and flaws, who were victims of a regime and its system.
The Brass Notebook (Speaking Tiger) by Devaki Jain and Monsoon Economies: India’s History in a Changing Climate (MIT Books) by Tirthankar Roy are the two that immediately come to mind. Reading Jain’s autobiography, The Brass Notebook, brought home to me the vitality of Indian feminist movement and the era of reimagining economic and social development from a post-colonial perspective. Given the elite background from which Jain hails, it is interesting to see the way in which she grappled with her sense of dispossession as an activist from the global South. As an admirer of her husband Laxmi Jain, I was particularly struck by the passages that dealt with their relationship and brought the gentle strength of LC Jain alive.
I love economic history and Roy is an elegant writer, bringing the political economy of water to life. His depiction of water famine in an increasingly thirsty nation, tells a fascinating story of encounters between seasonality, agricultural dependence of Indian economy, miracles of modern engineering and the real cost of disturbing a delicate ecological balance.
Maybe I am expected to mention some of the many excellent books that I have read this year related to politics, history and economics, with a focus on India and Brazil, but I will concentrate on books on architecture — a theme I love, and one of the many sources of my happiness and excitement for living in India: Baolis, of the series Delhi Heritage: Top 10, published by Niyogi Books. The young educator and heritage activist Vikramjit Singh Rooprai offers precious information including through comparative charts and floor plans, a discovery for most Delhi residents.
INTACH’s Vernacular Architecture of India is a monumental undertaking with in-depth analysis and more than 1,600 excellent photos by Tejinder S. Randhawa on “traditional residential styles and spaces”, adapted to different climates, regions, materials and historic influences. Portrait of a House (Spontaneous Books), a conversation between two brilliant Indian minds, the Pritzker Architecture Prize winner BV Doshi and respected photographer Dayanita Singh, is unique in many ways. It is a book on beauty, love, presence and sharing.
This year has been a time for very different books. Among them, two of my favourites are Welcome Home (Yellow Kite) by Nejwa Zebian and The Fate of Fausto (Harper Collins) by Oliver Jeffers.A brilliant deconstruction of what actually happens in the process of attachment, Zebian’s book urges us to build homes within ourselves rather than other people, in order to lead fulfilling lives that are not dependent on the actions or reactions of others. Zebian bares her own vulnerable story with great courage and inspires us to do the same as we build lives that mean more and heal more.
Jeffers’ book is a lyrical, illustrated fable that tells a contemporary story about greed, conquests and happiness. I adore his style of storytelling and how he illustrates deeper concepts in deceptively simple ways. The sparse imagery helps us sense the story at hand and fill the spaces with our own experiential nuggets. I first bought his books for my child but have now started buying them for myself. I find myself reaching out for one every time I want life to be a bit simpler!
I liked Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi (Rajkamal Prakashan), the English translation of which, Tomb of Sand, won the International Booker Prize this year. In the novel, a serious subject such as the Partition and its psychological aftermath has been dealt with in an engaging and humorous manner, without ever losing sight of its contemplative, emotional undertones. I congratulate not only the author but also the translator, Daisy Rockwell. I don’t think the term ‘translator’ does her full justice. Her work here was beyond translation and more like trans-creation.
Since this was the year I had one of my biggest exhibits, pivoted around the Ganga, I was looking for references on the sacred feminine. Ganga to me is beyond time and context, she is the source of life, at once resilient and selfless in spirit. So, I was looking to read up on the power of Shakti.
That’s how I chanced upon art historian Alka Pande’s book, Shakti: 51 Sacred Peethas of the Goddess (Rupa Publications). It transported me to the various locations where, according to Hindu mythology, Sati’s body parts fell. It helped me understand the people, geographies and cultural metaphors of those places, each reinterpreting Sati in their localised contexts. I was
amazed at how the diverse legends of Shakti have survived hundreds of centuries and acquired contemporary character. The mother goddess is both creator and destroyer and is the centrifugal force of the universe. My Ganga embodies this Shakti.
A friend and I stood at Bengaluru’s Lightroom bookstore and read Brendan Wenzel’s A Stone Sat Still (Chronicle Books). By the middle of the book, we were reading it out loud, whispering some lines, being awed by the powerful story about a stone, and what it means to the world, the animals who live with it, and the way it transforms as time passes. A marvel of perspective and nature.
I read anything Kyo Maclear writes, but her book Bird Art Life Death: The Art of Noticing the Small and Significant (Fourth Estate) is an exploration of everything the title suggests, and much more. An invitation to slow down, to linger with nature and art for meaning making in the face of loss. A book that made sense to me as I struggled with writing anything this year.
