Published in 2010 by Routledge, Gujarat beyond Gandhi: Identity, Conflict and Society, edited by Nalin Mehta and Mona G. Mehta is worth reading a decade later. The essays in the volume are varied and pick on different aspects of Gujarat. But it is the essay by Nalin Mehta that is truly worth spending time over. Much of what he documents at the state level is now being played out at the national level. Entitled “Ashis Nandy vs. the state of Gujarat: authoritarian developmentally, democracy and the politics of Narendra Modi”, Mehta plots in a detailed manner how this case against Nandy was filed by a “private citizen” against Nandy and Times of India (2008), where an article bemoaning the ‘culture of Gujarat politics’ and the middle classes for the state’s communal division, had been published. TOI distanced itself from the case. Nandy pointed out that this was a far cry from his experience with Khushwant Singh as the editor of Illustrated Weekly who fought the case slapped against them. Anyway, as Mehta adds, this “was a unique battle that was crucial for Indian public life across several different registers”. Prescient observation.
Reflecting on the issues raised by the case, Nandy rightly went on to argue that it was symptomatic of a larger Emergency-like culture and a disconnect with liberal cultures of intellectual dissent:
I was surprised because of the flimsiness of the case. I was surprised by the instances they cite in the police notice . . . they are not only trivial, they are comical. . .
This book, especially this essay, deserve to be resurrected from the graveyard of prohibitively expensive academic publications and made available to a wider audience. Conversations that essays like this can trigger must happen in real time and not decades later. Analyse. Debate. Discuss. Most importantly, testimonies such as this by people who have witnessed significant socio-political events and offered their opinion immediately, ensure that living histories are extensively shared and may perhaps unleash other memories. People will not feel isolated. Also, a collective feeling of sharing an experience may help develop a life force of its own to battle destructive energies.
In the Feb 2021 of the Seminar Magazine ( #738, ROAD TO JUSTICE: a symposium on thinking through the rule of law), I have reviewed noted feminist economist Devaki Jain’s memoir, The Brass Notebook. Here is the original url. I am also C&P the text below.
***
The Brass Notebook ( Speaking Tiger Books) is renowned feminist economist Devaki Jain’s memoir. Her life has been blessed with rich experiences given the freedom her father allowed her, which was unusual for the time. She had been fortunate that her Tamil Brahmin father did not impose the same restrictions and rituals upon her as he did on her elder sisters when it came to education, marriage, travel among others. Astonishingly she was even permitted by her father to stay alone in London after he had taken her there on an official trip as a companion.
Her trip was eventful; she managed to spend a few days with the then High Commissioner of India, Vijay Lakshmi Pandit. Later, Devaki attended a two-week seminar organized by the Quakers in Saarbrucken, Germany. There she met a Dane who persuaded her to accompany him. His plan was to hitchhike to England after taking a short detour to Copenhagen and then Sweden. Devaki agreed. Later she did an overland trip from England to India with another friend. She does remark in amazed wonder that ‘Looking back, it is surprising how little my father resisted.’ At this time, charmed by the idea of attending Oxford University, even though the admission process was over, she was admitted to Ruskin College, a relatively ‘new’ college that catered mostly to the working class and offered subjects like economics and industrial relations.
Years later when she met the principal H.D. Hughes and asked him why he had let her in, his reply was ‘Pure amusement …at the sight of this evidently upper class Indian girl in her early twenties, asking desperately to be allowed to study alongside men and women in their thirties with more than ten years of hard manual labour behind them. How, he said, could he resist such a social experiment?’
Devaki’s adventurous spirit permitted her to challenge her boundaries constantly. She did this even by marrying out of her caste to the prominent Gandhian, L.C. Jain, a Jain from Rajasthan. It was this very feistiness that enabled her to very early on in her life begin to question inherited traditions of culture and knowledge. For instance, in one of her earliest publications, an essay, ‘The Social Image’, that she wrote for Seminar (‘The Indian Woman’, # 52, December 1963, pp 20-23), she states categorically that the social image of women is mostly a patriarchal construct that is enabled by their veneration of the panchkanyas – Sita, Ahalya, Draupadi, Tara and Mandadori. She argues that this imagery fails to accommodate many women who fall outside ‘this Sita orbit’. This neglect creates both environmental and internal pressures. For example, the woman who stays unmarried and follows a career is considered an aberration. Instead she sought for the celebration of more rebellious women in the ancient Hindu traditions, women who stood up for themselves, and didn’t define themselves in relation to men: Amrapali, a cultured and worldly courtesan; Gargi, an ancient philosopher; Avaiyar, a Tamil poet and scholar, among others.
Later she was fortunate to have her values endorsed while she was enrolled at St. Anne’s College for her PPE course. Her tutors, Iris Murdoch, Peter Ady, Jenifer Hart: three supremely intellectual women, took her seriously as a fellow thinker – a respectful intellectual engagement. ‘I was a woman among other women, and we were bound by ties of intellectual sympathy. I was being valued for my intelligence, hard work and achievement.’ A bond of sisterhood that she learned to value later as an economist and at the helm of Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST).
Devaki Jain is known for recognizing the value of a woman’s labour in real economic terms, whether towards the national economy or in the personal space. It was a slow and methodical process as she accrued experience as an economist, first by writing The Democratic Alternative at Minoo Masani’s invitation. Later as a lecturer in the Economics department, Miranda House, University of Delhi, she taught public finance. She would often walk across to the Delhi School of Economics to converse with eminent economists like Amartya Sen, K.N. Raj, Sukhamoy Chakraborty, and Jagdish Bhagwati to name a few. By 1972, she quit the university and the Indian Council for Social Science Research (ICSSR) helped her set up a new field-based project on the unrecognized contribution of women to the economy. Later she was commissioned by Sheila Dhar, Director, Publications Division, to edit Indian Women, to coincide with the UN International Year of Women, 1975. Contributors included, among others, Andre Beteille, Veena Das, Ashok Rudra, Romila Thapar, and Qurratulain Hyder. Ester Boserup, working on women in African agriculture, demonstrated the significance of gender roles in social analysis. Ashish Bose, a demographer, presented for the first time the falling sex ratio in India. The ratio declined from 972 females per 1000 males (1901) to 930/1000 (1971), prompting Amartya Sen to coin the phrase ‘India’s missing women’. Women of many different kinds were described in ‘Indian Women’: nuns, teachers, nurses, students, matriarchs. Later the Government of India also set up a committee to report on the status of women in India entitled ‘Towards Equality’.
This project pushed her into exploring her hunch that ‘the official figures on women’s participation in work were seriously underestimating the facts on the ground; I also suspected that what lay behind this underestimation was a deep methodological flaw in the approach to measurement.’ Her proposal to Raj Krishna’s Institute of Social Studies Trust (ISST) brought together her two interests – growing fascination with women’s role in labour, and her specialization in statistics. Her findings that the measurements were all wrong and much of the time data on women’s economic contribution was not even being collected. She also discovered that the female work participation rates were in fact higher than participation rates for men amongst the landless in India, ‘landless’ being a proxy for extreme poverty. This challenged the long-held belief that the main breadwinner of a household was generally a man.
The string of accomplishments Devaki Jain garnered are endless. For instance, she was one of three women who was invited to participate in Julius Nyere’s twenty-eight member South Commission. It was constituted to give voice to the shared perspective of the South, drawn from the experience of Non-Aligned Movement countries, and not simply imported from northern models that may or may not be suited to the conditions of these societies. She has worked with various national and international agencies committed to a gendered understanding of economics. Her strong friendships with well known feminists like Gloria Steinem and Alice Walker, have only strengthened her perspective on women’s rights. In fact, it is the fundamental principle that she agrees with and so heartily endorses Walker’s view that there is no problem in being called a ‘feminist’ or a ‘womanist’, whatever it takes for women’s liberation to be recognized and for a woman to earn her freedom – that is all that matters.
In keeping with her strong characteristic of recognizing her self-worth and preserving her dignity, she documents the sexual harassment she faced from her maternal uncle and later by a well known Swedish economist at Balliol College, Oxford in 1958. She was interviewed for the job to be his junior research assistant from Asia to work on his magnum opus, a three-volume work on development. She had been interviewed at the home of the then Swedish Ambassador to the UK, Alvar Myrdal. Reflecting upon the incident in the wake of the #MeToo movement, Jain realizes that in 1958 she had no recourse to retribution as there is now for women who work for men and are sexually harassed. Different age, different rules. But why a doyen of feminism like her chooses not to reveal the name of the aggressor, when she doesn’t hide the specific familial relationship with her maternal uncle (who she also doesn’t name) is puzzling. At any rate, it was her choice to make and must be respected.
The title, The Brass Notebook, has been inspired by Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook where Devaki Jain uses ‘brass’ as for her it has warm associations with her childhood, but it is also ‘a hardier, homelier metal than gold. It represents not perfection or unity, but an honourable imperfection consistent with my own limits.’ This clearheaded understanding of what it means to be a woman, chart her own career and who values her labour were pathbreaking concepts then and to some extent are even now – nearly six decades later. The Brass Notebook is a snapshot of a life well lived by a pioneering feminist and an excellent role model for subsequent generations.
Dr SanjayGupta’s new book, Keep Sharp, is an absorbing read about how to keep oneself fit and healthy, especially our brains. He shares the widely held belief that grey matter stops developing in early adulthood. But now new theories say that that is no longer true. The brain can remain sharp if encouraged to do so by adopting better lifestyle behaviour such as regular exercise, eating home cooked food ( preferably slow cooked and less reliance on takeaways), meditating, reading more, less of digital consumption and definitely hydrating more with regular water than sugar-based drinks. His concern stems from the growing number of people who are diagnosed with dementia, a condition for which no known cure exists as of now, but cannot be ruled out in the near future given the rate at which medical science is advancing. Dr Gupta, who has travelled widely as a reporter with the CNN and continues to practice as a brain surgeon recognises the urgent need to appeal to people while they are healthy to take charge of their lives. He is very keen that folks wrought a change in their life now with the hope that it will mean a better old age. He also focuses on caregivers or as they are defined as now, ” invisible second patients” and the need to understand the stress that they imbibe. Caregiver burnout is very real and hence, self-care is critical. Perhaps it’s design in the book is unintentional but the message that comes across is that devastating impact of caregiving is akin to being in a war zone. But he states often enough in the book that “I’ve noted that the people who live better– and longer — are the ones who hold on to hope.”
I like the way he has likened caregivers to “invisible second patients”. Apparently it is parlance commonly used in the medical fraternity. It has not been coined by him. But at least he has made it visible to the lay reader and I think by doing so, it has been a phenomenal act upon his part. It is almost cathartic for a medical professional to recognise how stressful caregiving can be.
Having been a caregiver myself for many years, it’s heartening to read an experienced doctor confirm many of the practices that one has unwittingly woven as regular practice into one’s life. For example, eating a balanced diet, preferring slow cooked homefood to commercial food, no snacking, water vs juices/sodas, daily exercise, reading etc. Perhaps it happened by witnessing the slow degeneration of a healthy individual. A large part of the cargiving is taken up by creating the right meals and exercise. So basic. As he constantly emphasises in his book that these are some aspects of one’s cargiving that should be non-negotiable. Everyone is busy but not busy enough to fit in some self-care on a daily basis. It helps in the long run as he can affirm from the patients he meets or the autopsies he has conducted and reviewed the state of brains.
Dr Gupta has created as 12-week brain training programme that may sound easy or tough depending on the nature of one’s current lifestyle. But it is doable. Worth exploring.
The Nameless God by Savie Karnel is an extraordinary novel for little kids. It is simply told. Set in Dec 1992 but in a nameless town where communal tensions erupt after the demolition of Babri Masjid on 6 December. It is a story about two friends — Noor and Bachchu — who find themselves caught in the communal riots that have broken out. On the eve of the riots, the boys had created a nameless god of their own and very sweetly, not knowing what items to use to decorate their makeshift altar, had gathered items associated with Hinduism and Islam. The boys saw no wrong in assimilating the two cultures they were intimately familiar with.
It is a story set in the near past but is so obviously a story that is affecting our present every day. It is a simply told story about very tough subjects that are not always openly discussed with children — religion, communalism, politics, secularism, the Constitution etc. At the same time, the basic messages of friendship, respect, kindness, humanity and India’s syncretic character come through strongly in the novel. It is obvious it is in our citizen’s DNA. And yet children are being slowly indoctrinated by the toxic prejudices of their elders. This has to be countered by sharing histories that are being scrubbed out of the public conscious and are being rapidly replaced by new ones that are being created. This is done effectively in The Nameless God.
This is a powerful story by a debut novelist with a strong voice, Savie Karnel . The author does not mince words. A story that will resonate with many and should be adopted by schools as a middle grade reader. It must also be translated and made widely available in the local languages. We need more of our own stories and histories being made available to school children than bombarding them with stories from other lands especially about Nazi Germany. Those too must be heard but we are at such a critical juncture of our nationhood that books like The Nameless God are essential to kick-start difficult conversations. It is time.
Rajkamal Prakashan Group are hindi publishers who have been in existence for many decades. They have an enviable stable of authors whom they published when they were new on the horizon and are today considered as literary giants — Premchand, Nirala, Mahashweta Devi et al. Recently they have diversified their portfolio to digital formats as well. During the pandemic they launched their WhatsApp groups where information was circulated to their subscribers. Apart from which the editorial team led by Satyanand Nirupam would glean seminal essays or identify extracts from their backlist, design little booklets that could then be easily circulated as a pdf via WhatsApp. Last heard, the number of people subscribing to this were in thousands. It is a firm that I admire for their innovation and ability to recognise talent, nurture it and maintain relationships.
Many moons ago, Satyanand Nirupam, Editorial Director, Rajkamal Prakashan very kindly agreed to a Q&A for my blog. He too has garnered immense experience in this business. He was part of the team that helped set up Penguin India’s Hindi imprint and much else. Unfortunately, after I sent the questions, the pandemic happened and circumstances have made it very tough to think clearly and respond. For now I am posting these questions here.
When and why did you join publishing? It has been many years since you were in Hindi publishing. What are the major transformations you have noticed in the world of Hindi publishing since you began to now?
2. Rajkamal Prakashan is one of the most prominent Hindi publishers. Its lifespan coincides more or less with that of Independent India. As a result your firm has a phenomenal archive. What are the changes you have noticed in the kinds of literature archived from seventy years ago and now? ( Here it may be a good idea to mention the formidable list of Hindi writers associated with your firm.)
3. Recently, Rajkamal Prakashan began an experiment of publishing “very contemporary” narratives such as bloggers, travelogues or even short short pieces like journalist Ravish Kumar’s musings about being in the city. Would you like to comment more upon this new fledging list and its reception with readers?
4. Do you have a translation programme as in do you translate books from other languages into Hindi and vice versa? If so what are the kinds of books that you seek to publish in Hindi? What are the books that have proven to be successful, sometimes unexpectedly?
5. How many titles in a year do you publish? Is this a mixed bag of frontlist and revival of backlist?
6. How does Rajkamal Prakashan distribute its books? Are these available online and offline or do you explore more innovative ways of selling books?
7. How significant are literary festivals in helping promote authors/ books/ ideas or perhaps even rediscovering some?
8. The price points are always a sensitive issue in the Indian book market. How does it fare in Hindi publishing? Can you afford to increase the sales price of your books? How does this impact your publishing programme?
9. What has been your experience with audio books?
10. Rajkamal Prakashan is one of the first regional language publishers to actively venture into acquistions and mergers to create a Rajkamal Prakashan Group/ Samuh. What are the pros and cons of this arrangement?
11. Having worked in multinational publishing firms as well, what do you think are the important similarities and differences between the contracts offered to authors?
12. How vibrant and relevant is the diaspora as a book market for readers of Hindi publishing?
Beginners by best-selling author, Tom Vanderbilt is a self-help book. Psychologically very uplifting. It is down-to-earth and humble. It is nice to see a memoir-cum-selfhelp book share with all humility one’s own shortcomings and the learnings gleaned from challenging oneself. It is very challenging at the best of times to hurl oneself into an “intensely immersive learning environment” but to do it over and over again as the author has done is commendable. One does learn even if it is to come to terms with one’s own limitations, not be an over reacher and yet continuously be alive to the myriad learning prospects life throws up— accept them and be challenged.
To begin the book with a chess match where he loses to his own daughter is a great start. Tom Vanderbilt does not come across as a snoot or with a large ego. But what is astonishing is the number of things he tries his hand at — chess, jewellery design, swimming, choral music, surfing etc. This book talks about how one is challenged to think beyond one’s own comfort zone especially once the children are born. This is a curious book as it criss-crosses genres such as self-help, parenting, psychology, education, lifeskill classes/workshops, corporate trainers etc. It will work also because it is so accessible in its easy style of chatting to the reader. It is also a positive book to read during the pandemic as it is motivating in the classical sense. It will do well in translation.
This book arrived today — Gribblebob’s Book of Unpleasant Goblins by David Ashby. My daughter immediately picked it up and was glued to it. Refused to budge. Ever so often one heard snorts of laughter and giggles. Or she would turn up with eyes shining and read out snippets from the book and repeat to say how much she was loving it. Made no difference to her whether I had understood the snippet or not, she was just very delighted with the story. It had magic, goblins, an invisible dog, children and the pace was just right.
Now I have been instructed to read it. You must.
Oh, BTW, David Ashby wrote this book to disprove a fortune teller who had predicted that David would never write a book. Well, now he has and if kid is to be believed, it is an “AWESOME BOOK!”
Cover illustration is by Jen Khatun and cover design by Anna Morrison.
25 Jan 2021
Update: On Instagram, David Ashby spotted the post and has been delighted with my daughter’s response. This is what he wrote: I am so happy to hear that Sarah enjoyed reading #Gribblebob – and especially that she read bits of it out loud to you! When I wrote it I read each new chapter out loud to my children as a bedtime story and so it’s lovely to know that it still works that way. Please tell her that I think she’s an AWESOME READER!!
Selective telling of histories to children serves multiple purposes. Not least in reminding newer generations of the atrocities of the past. Mostly these are written in the hope that histories are not repeated in this cruel manner. Historical fiction is rapidly becoming a popular genre for children’s literature as it straddles that space between reading-for-lesiire and edutainment. The Girl Who Said No to the Nazis ( Pushkin Press) falls into this category as it puts the spotlight on the brave Sophie Scholl who was ultimately executed for standing up to the Nazis. Today, she and her brother, Hans, are celebrated as heroes of WW2, but at that time their well-meant bravado of creating the White Rose group cost them their lives. They were in their twenties. Sophie was 21.
Creating these stories in lands where there is political and social stability makes sense as reading these stories don’t rock one’s world. There is that comfort of knowing these incidents happened way back in the past. But this kind of a book while understandably is essential reading, is too close to comfort for many other countries. It is horribly disconcerting and worrying. It makes one ask the question — how necessary is it to share such books with the young? How much should they aware of the horrific events of the pasting? At what age is it appropriate to introduce this literature for a healthy discussion? How worrying is it for some that in their lifetime they may see some of these “historical events” actually happen in their countries, exactly as described. Or should they be kept in ignorance for a little while longer? How important are these books to trigger conversations and understand the devilish nature of a bunch of individuals that can wreak havoc upon society and unleash communal violence and pogroms, all in the name of creating a clean and pure society?
Personally I feel children should be exposed to such books but the adults immediately in their vicinity must be fully informed/equipped to have these conversations as well. Tough balancing act since it is not easy for all adults to discuss such topics clinically without letting their own biases trickle through. Or perhaps it is, since it is events in the past, but can they connect the dots to the present?
On 23 Jan 2021, the Romain Rolland Prize was announced. At first there was a session on the “Challenges of Translation” with Emmanuel Lebrun-Damiens, Diplomat. Counsellor for Education, Science and Culture at French Embassy in India / Ambassade de France en Inde & Director of French Institute in India, Maina Bhagat, Director, Oxford Bookstores & Apeejay Kolkata Literary Festival, Chinmoy Guha, translator, Dr Christine Cornet, Attachée Débat d’Idées et Livre, INSTITUT FRANÇAIS, Delhi with Jaya Bhattacharji Rose.
The winners of the prize are translator Dr S A Vengada Soupraya Nayagar and publisher Amutharasan Paulraj of Thadagam Publishers for the #Tamil translation of the French novel ‘Le mariage de plaisir’ (“A Marriage of Pleasure”). by the eminent award-winning French-Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun. The publisher and translator will be invited by the French Institute in India to the Paris Book Fair 2021 (Livre Paris 2021) where India will be the guest of honour.
Romain Rolland Book Prize, started in 2017, aims at awarding the best translation of a French title into any Indian language, including English. An Indo-French jury takes into account the qualities of the translation and the publication.
The presentation of the prize was followed by a fascinating conversation between the author, translator and publisher with Jaya Bhattacharji Rose. Interesting details emerged from the discussion especially since Tahar Ben Jelloun firmly believes that “Translation is a gift of friendship from an unknown language and culture.” There were some wonderful insights from Dr Nayagar regarding the process of translating and facing the challenges of communicating cultural practices accurately without any faux pax.
This AKLF event is in association with Institut Francais and Alliance Du Bengale.
The recording of the conversation is available at: https://www.facebook.com/TheAKLF/videos/247540610074687/
I lost a great-grandmother to the influenza epidemic of 1917-18. She died in Meerut. My grandfather was three years old at the time. He always told us that his mother died when he was very young in this epidemic. It was swift. He regretted her death since he got the archetypal stepmother who did everything to stop him including trying to smother him with a pillow or was it a pile of clothes (?). I forget now. Dada always maintained that if his mother had lived, she would have supported his dream to become a doctor. His stepmother thwarted his chances. He set up a factory making blankets for soldiers during WW2 but wound it up fast as he was allergic to the wool. Then he set up a workshop to fix agricultural machinery and automobiles in Meerut and its hinterland. He died aged 101, in 2016. Just a little before the Covid19 pandemic alert. If Dada had lived he would have probably had some hazy recollection of 1918 or even how the elders had reacted. Crucial stories to learn from.
Chinmay Tumbe’s The Age of Pandemics (1817-1920): How they shaped India and the World ( HarperCollins India) is an excellent account of the cholera, plague and influenza pandemics. He details the probable cause and effect, the eerie parallels in (mis) management of political powers in the name of governance and wild human behaviour in response to a pandemic alert, especially that of migrants and the inevitable disastrous economic consequences. His reliance on historical records and oral histories makes for fascinating storytelling especially for his insights on how economic recovery strategies may be considered. It is more than just statistical analysis, it is about being prepared and managing human expectations. Even his excessive use of data is not a hindrance. It is useful. His parting words of bearing this present pandemic with humility and patience must be taken to heart.
And yes, Meerut was one of the cities severely affected by the Influenza pandemic.
