Non-fiction Posts

Tuesday Reads ( Vol 4), 9 July 2019

10 07 , 2019 No Comments

Dear Reader,

It is a tough choice to select the books I wish to mention in this newsletter. There is so much good literature being published — a delight to read. Many times the ideas and motives for a book are also tremendous. But sometimes the execution of the idea or perhaps even the production in the book fails. Sadly such moments leave the reader in a pall of gloom.

But let us begin with the first book, a gorgeous, gorgeous collection of essays by the late Oliver Sacks. British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and author who passed away in 2015. Fortunately he was a prolific writer and left a magnificent literary estate. His posthumous publications have included two collections of essays. Everything in its Place is the second of these books. It consists of his contributions to various magazines and newspapers. As always there is plenty to mull over. Sacks has the astonishing ability to make many light bulbs go on inside one’s head and think, “Exactly! This is it! He got it!”  Read on more in this blog post.

The second book which I read ages ago but was unable to write about since there was so much to dwell upon was debut writer Guy Gunaratne’s In Our Mad and Furious City. It is impossible to put in a nutshell the feeling that this book leaves you with. It is a mix between disturbing and thought-provoking narrative. Perhaps it is best to reproduce the book blurb:

For Selvon, Ardan and Yusuf, growing up under the towers of Stones Estate, summer means what it does anywhere: football, music and freedom. But now, after the killing of a British soldier, riots are spreading across the city, and nowhere is safe.

While the fury swirls around them, Selvon and Ardan remain focused on their own obsessions, girls and grime. Their friend Yusuf is caught up in a different tide, a wave of radicalism surging through his local mosque, threatening to carry his troubled brother, Irfan, with it.

Unsurprisingly this book has won or been shortlisted for many awards including the prestigious International Dylan Thomas Prize and Jhalak Prize. It has been a remarkable run for the filmmaker-turned-writer Guy Gunaratne. In Our Mad and Furious City is a tremendous book but it will be Guy Gunaratne’s third book ( if he ever does publish it) that will be the one to watch out for.

The last book is The Churches of India by Australian Joanne Taylor. It is a heavily illustrated book with an interesting collection of churches in India. This book is an attempt to put together a history of some of the better known churches of India. Unfortunately the definite article in the title raises expectations of it being a comprehensive overview of the churches in India, which it certainly is not. It is a book that is focused very much on the churches found on the well-established tourist circuit of Goa, Chennai, Kolkata, Mumbai, Delhi, Puducherry and Chandannagar. The influences of the Portugese, British and French colonial rulers is evident in the architecture. So the churches showcased are definitely magnificent and some of the buildings are many centuries old. Yet, the glaring gaps in the representation of churches even within the National Capital Region of Delhi such as of St. Johns Church, Meerut is unforgivable. It is a church that was consecrated by Bishop Heber when he visited India in the early nineteenth century. It is also the church associated with the events of 1857. It is about an hour and a half drive from the capital city of Delhi so its exclusion is surprising. Similarly by focusing predominantly on magnificent colonial structures with a scrumptious display of images gives the impression that Christianity came to the subcontinent with colonialism and that is far from the truth. Christianity came to the subcontinent with the arrival of one of Christ’s disciples, St. Thomas, nearly two millennia ago — mentioned briefly in the book’s introduction. Subsequently congregations are known to gather in different parts of the country with churches as simple and bare as mud floors and thatched roofs to the more elaborate colonial buildings as documented in this book. The vast silences of churches that exist in central India, north east India with its wide variety of churches belonging to different denominations or the northern states of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Jammu & Kashmir, to name a few, is inexplicable. Finally, glaring errors such as referring to The Cathedral Church of the Redemption as “Roman Catholic” (p.230) is preposterous. As stated accurately in the book it was built for the Viceroy in 1931 by Henry Medd. Given that the British designed and built it for their Viceroy, a representative of the British Crown, it has to be an Anglican or Protestant church — a fact misrepresented in the entry. While the hardwork of the author is evident in putting together histories of the churches profiled, the reader’s trust in the facts presented is weakened considerably by these errors. Books like this while fulfilling a wonderful requirement of documenting these beautiful buildings mar their very own credibility by being slipshod in factchecking. Perhaps this is something the editorial team could have assisted the author with rather than the entire onus resting upon the author alone?

Till next week!

JAYA

9 July 2019

Book Post 40: 23 June – 5 July 2019

08 07 , 2019 No Comments

Book Post 40 includes some of the titles received in the past few weeks. Wherever available Amazon’s Kindle widget has been embedded in the blog post. It will allow you to browse through the book before you decide to buy it.

6 July 2019

Oliver Sacks “Everything in its Place”

01 07 , 2019 1 Comment

British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and author Oliver Sacks died in 2015. A huge loss to the world particularly to the world of writing and reading. He read voraciously, wrote beautifully and with a precision that is a sheer delight to behold. Fortunately after his passing, some of his unpublished writings were published in a collection called River of Consciousness and now Everything in its Place puts together his contributions to various magazines and newspapers. As always there is plenty to mull over. Sacks has the astonishing ability to make many light bulbs go on inside one’s head and think, “Exactly! This is it! He got it!” In Everything in its Place there are two particular instances when this happens. One when he wistfully records the demise of print collections in libraries in favour of digital books thereby losing the opportunity of serendipitous gems such as the 1873 book Megrim. This is what he writes in his essay “Libraries”:

When I was a child, my favourite place at home was the library, a large oak-paneled room with all four walls covered by bookcases — and a solid table for writing and studying in the middle. …The oak-paneled library was the quietest and most beautiful room in the house, to my eyes, and it vied with my little chemistry lab as my favourite place to be. I would curl up in a chair and become so absorbed in what I was reading that all sense of time would be lost. Whenever I was late for lunch or dinner I could be found, completely enthralled by a book, in the library. I learned to read early, at three or four, and books, and our library, are among my first memories.

…

When I went to university, I had access to Oxford’s two great university libraries, the Radcliffe Science Library and the Bodleian, a wonderful general library that could trace itself back to 1602. …But the library I loved the most at Oxford was our own library at the Queen’s College. The magnificent library building itself had been designed by Christopher Wren, and beneath this, in an underground maze of heating pipes and shelves, weere the vast subterranean holdings of the library. To hold ancient books, incunabula, in my own hands was a new experience for me … .

I first came to New York City in 1965, and at that time I had a horrid, poky little apartment in which there were almost no surfaces to read or write on. I was just able, holding an elbow awkwardly aloft, to write some of Migraine on the top of a refrigerator. I longed for spaciousness. Fortunately, the library at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where I worked, had this in abundance. I would sit at a large table to read or write for a while, and then wander around the shelves and stacks. I never knew what my eyes might alight upon, but I would sometimes discover unexpected treasures, lucky finds, and bring these back to my seat.

…

But a shift was occurring by the 1990s. I would continue to visit the library frequently, sitting at a table with a mountain of books in front of me, but students increasingly ignored the bookshelves, accessing what they needed with their computers. Few of them went to their shelves anymore. The books, so far as they were concerned, were unnecessary. And since the majority of users were no longer using the books themselves, the college decided, ultimately, to dispose of them.

I had no idea that this was happening — not only in the Einstein library but in college and public libraries all over the country. I was horrified when I visited the library recently and found the shelves, once overflowing, now sparsely occupied. Over the last few years, most of the books, it seems, have been thrown out, with remarkably little objection from anyone. I felt that a murder, a crime had been committed: the destruction of centuries of knowledge. Seeing my distress, a librarian reassured me that everything “of worth” had been digitized. But I do not use a computer, and I am deeply saddened by the loss of books, even bound periodicals, for there is something irreplaceable about a physical book: its look, its smell, its heft. I thought of how this library once cherished “old” books, had a special room for old and rare books; and how in 1967, rummaging through the stacks, I had found an 1873 book, Edward Liveing’s Megrim which inspired me to write my own first book.

The second instance is when Sacks rues his failing eyesight is robbing him of the pleasures of reading print books. For him it was the print book that held the greatest appeal and no amount of technological innovation such as audio books could persuade him to think otherwise. He has a point when he writes in “Reading the Fine Print”:

In January of 2006, when my vision began to decline, I wondered what I would do. There were audiobooks — I had recorded some of them myself — but I was quintessentially a reader, not a listener. I have been an inveterate reader as far back as I can remember — I often hold page numbers or the look of paragraphs and pages in my almost automatically, and I can instantly find my way to a particular passage in most of my books. I want books that belong to me, books whose intimate pagination will become dear and familiar. My brain is geared towards reading — …

We each form unique neural pathways associated with reading and we each bring to the act of reading a unique combination not only of memory and experience, but of sensory modalities, too. Some people may “hear” the sounds of the words as they read (I do, but only if I am reading for pleasure, not when I am reading for information); others may visualize them, consciously or not. Some may be acutely aware of the acoustic rhythms or emphases of a sentence; others are more aware of its look or its shape.

… there is a fundamental difference between reading and being read to. When one reads actively, whether using the eyes or a finger, one is free to skip ahead or back, to reread, to ponder or daydream in the middle of a sentence — one read’s in one’s own time. Being read to, listening to an audiobook, is a more passive experience, subject to the vagaries of another’s voice and largely unfolding in the narrator’s own time.

…

Writing should be accessible in as many formats as possible — George Bernard Shaw called books the memory of the race. No one sort of book should be allowed to disappear, for we are all individuals, with highly indivualized needs and preferences — preferences embedded in our brains at every level, our individual neural patterns and networks creating a deeply personal engagement between author and reader.

This is so true! Any true-blooded reader would identify wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed. For me it rings true at another level too. My nine-year-old daughter prefers print to audio books for she claims “audio interferes with her imagination!” Till I read this essay I attributed it to a child’s quirk. Now I know better.

Read Everything in its Place! There is so much to discover.

1 July 2019

Krupa Ge “Rivers Remember” and Manu Pillai “The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin: Tales from Indian History”

30 06 , 2019 No Comments

Non-fiction books are the biggest sellers in the Indian book market. A testament to this fact are the number of books being commissioned. Take for instance two recent Westland/Amazon publications. Immensely readable and well-written books by award-winning authors — Krupa Ge’s Rivers Remember: The Shocking Truth of a Manmade Flood and Manu Pillai’s The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin. It is fairly obvious why they would capture the lay reader’s imagination. They are easy books to dip into with plenty of anecdotes.

Manu Pillai’s The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin has fascinating essays about figures from India’s history. It is primarily a collection of his articles from the weekly column he writes for Mint. So each essay is a self-contained story. It is a mixed bag of characters from rajahs and sultans, maharanis and begums, politicians, travellers, courtesans, devdasis and plenty more. The chapter headings are very inviting as well such as “The Italian Brahmin of Madurai”, “Rowdy Bob: The victor of Plassey”, “A Forgotten Indian Queen in Paris” and “The Seamstress and the Mathematician”. As he says in his introduction:

We live in times when history is polarising. It has become to some an instrument of vengeance, for grievances imagined or real. Others remind us to draw wisdom from the past, not fury and rage, seeing in its chronicles a mosaic of experience to nourish our minds and recall, without veneration, the confident glories of our ancestors. The collection …tells stories from India’s countless yesterdays and of several of its men and women. It is an offering that seeks to reflect the fascinating, layered, splendidly complex universe that is Indian history at a time when life itself is projected in tedious shades of black and white. There is much in our past to enrich us, and a great deal that can explain who we are and what choices must be made as we confront grave crossroads in our own times.

In his column “Why women hold the key to a new India” ( 29 June 2019, The Mint) Manu Pillai adds, “The colonizing of Indian minds in the colonial era by Victorian sensibilities was severe, added to which is generations of patriarchy—it will take time and patience before change comes to how history is imagined. Clubbing a courtesan with a mahatma may not immediately be understood or approved of by some. But that is precisely where the courtesan belongs, for, in the larger scheme of things and the big picture of our civilization, her role is no less significant than that galaxy of saints and monks we have all been taught to venerate.”

This is a magnificently well researched book where the lack of bibliographical citations to corroborate the quotes used in the text is an oversight that was not to be expected. For instance, the chapters on “William Jones: India’s Bridge to the West” and “A Brahmin Woman of Scandal” quote Jawaharlal Nehru and E.M.S. Namboothiripad respectively but there is no citation given. This despite every chapter having its own bibliography; yet these two men are quoted but not included in the bibliography. Compare this to the recently published Richard Evans Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History where even when Prof. Hobsbawm himself is quoted in the text, Richard Evans footnotes every quote with the relevant citation.

The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin is a pleasure to read in snatches. To read it from cover-to-cover would be too noisy as there are far too many characters from different periods of history and different backgrounds. But to read a couple of essays at a time is a delight. The book has been fabulously illustrated with charcoal drawings by Priya Kuriyan.

Award-winning journalist Krupa Ge’s Rivers Remember: The Shocking Truth of a Manmade Flood was probably spurred by the devastating loss of her parents’ home in the 2015 Chennai floods. It is a slim book that is more a heartfelt reaction to the floods. Here is an extract from the book published in The Wire. It has plenty of anecdotes with responses to the floods. Here is a witness account of the floods published on 11 December 2015 in the Hindu Businessline. While it encapsulates the immediacy of the moment it also highlights the dangers that the residents faced during the floods. Unfortunately the book publication is a missed opportunity as it could have been used to discuss in greater detail Chennai’s water problems, perhaps even included a thematic map or two depicting the natural waterbodies upon which the local population depended, the water consumption patterns and location of natural aquifers; instead there is one map of Chennai from 1914 as a frontispiece. Writing a book on a natural disaster requires a fair bit of understanding of the various issues at stake. A critical area is that of gender issues in disaster management. It is imperative that it is understood for immediate relief efforts but also if it is to be analysed with hindsight in a book such as this. For example, instead of stating in a one-sentence paragraph “Srinivasan and his friends rescued a new mother of twins and took her to safety with great care”, this could easily have been expanded upon to discuss the many issues involved in such a rescue mission. To quibble about the improvements a book could consider are an indication too of the author’s capabilities. The dissatisfaction as a reader stems from is that the potential is visible but has not been exploited to the hilt.

While both the books are fascinating to read perhaps the editors could have guided the writers a little more. The birth of every book is a constructive process between the author and the editor. It is a coming together of expertise to make a product that will hopefully be read by many. Both these books are timely and relevant but would definitely have benefitted by editorial advice to add more value to their texts. While non-fiction sales are booming it is a good idea to pause and reflect upon the importance of bringing to the fore academic editing skills while editing books that are positioned for a trade list and a lay reader. Cross-pollination of such skills is increasingly becoming a crying need as the boundaries between subjects that were previously considered to be exclusive academic domains make their way into trade lists and general book markets.

Despite these slight “technical” hiccups these books are must reads. Manu Pillai’s The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin is unputdownable and Krupa Ge’s Rivers Remember: The Shocking Truth of a Manmade Flood as Jnanpith winner 2018 Amitav Ghosh says is an “absolute must read…[for] it brings …the full horror of the catastrophe”. More so when three and a half years later Chennai is facing a drought — a crisis highlighted by Hollywood actor Leonardo di Caprio’s in his instagram post.

30 June 2019

    “Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point” by Gyan Prakash

    26 06 , 2019 No Comments

    “The Emergency” in India refers to the controversial nineteen month period from 26 June 1975 to 21 March 1977 when the prime minister Indira Gandhi declared an emergency across the country. It was officially issued by President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed under Article 352 of the Constitution because of the prevailing “internal disturbance”. These Presidential powers conferred upon the prime minister to rule by decree. Elections were suspended. Civil liberties were curbed. The press was censored. Many opponents to the government were imprisoned. Human right violations like the forced mass sterilisation camps organised by the prime minister’s son, Sanjay Gandhi, were held.

    Much has been written about the Emergency. Many articles. Many books. Even now testimonies by those who witnessed Emergency are published such as this Scroll article by journalist Kalpana Sharma, ” ‘Himmat’ during the Emergency: When the Press crawled, some refused to even bend” ( 23 June 2015). A few months ago Dayton-Stockton professor of history at Princeton University, Gyan Prakash, wrote Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point. It is an extremely relevant and very readable account of not only the Emergency itself but also contextualising it within the events preceding it immediately and its far reaching consequences such as the rise of Hindutva forces in Indian democracy. The reason for his writing Emergency Chronicles is interesting too as Gyan Prakash witnessed the popular upsurge in August 2011 when he witnessed “a crowd of tens of thousands brave the searing Delhi heat to gather in the Ramlila Maidan, a large ground customarily used for holding religious events and political rallies. Young and old, but mostly young, they came from all over the city and beyond in response to a call by the anti-corruption movement led by another Gandhian activist, seventy-four-year-old Anna Hazare. The atmosphere in the Maidan was festive, the air charged with raw energy and expectations of change.” This event reminded Gyan Prakash of a similar student and youth upsurge organised by Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), veteran freedom fighter and once a close associate of Indira’s father, Jawaharlal Nehru. JP had emerged from political retirement to organise this movement that he called Total Revolution.

    In his introduction to the book, Prof. Gyan Prakash writes “Popular activism arises in the tension between these two ends of politics, demanding that the formal institutions of democracy — the elected government, law and the judiciary, press and the public sphere — respond to the people’s voice. The growing tide of such politics forms part of the global history of modernity since the emergence of mass societies and politics around the world beginning in the interwar period. In the present, it continues and is accelerating in the form of populism. This book explores the challenge of popular politics in India’s postcolonial history and studies Indira’s Emergency as a specific even in its broader experience as a democracy. What follows is an Indian story in the global history of democracy’s relationship with popular politics.”

    As Mini Kapoor in the Hindu while reviewing the book says, “…this seminal and vivid inquiry, it is not the date of that notice that Prakash questions. The question that animates this book is, to align it to the phrasing of the classified, how dead was democracy during the 21-month-long Emergency? The proclamation had after all been sought and signed, lawfully, under Article 352(1) of the Constitution of India.”

    Emergency Chronicles by a historian ensures that there is marshalling of empirical evidence to present a draconian period in modern Indian history. Gyan Prakash also proves that the tools to impose the Emergency already existed enabling the then prime minister to use existing constitutional structures. But with the keen scholarship of a historian he also extends his argument to the present to state that “the Emergency enjoys an afterlife”.

    Read Emergency Chronicles.

    26 June 2019

    Dr Christian’s “Guide to Dealing with the Tricky Questions”

    17 06 , 2019 No Comments

    A brilliant book for children, adolescents, parents and educators on initiating conversations about tricky stuff. It is by Dr Christian Jessen, a British physician, television presenter and writer.

    Watch this IGTV video posted on Instagram for more information:

    17 June 2019

    “Faber & Faber: The Untold Story: by Toby Faber

    14 06 , 2019 No Comments

    The big firms say that they intend to retain the imprints of the small publishers they absorb. But I doubt if that ever works for long. You might retain the imprint, but you must inevitably lose the elusive character of the individual firm, compounded by its proprietor’s personality and taste.

    Geoffrey Faber in The Publishers’ Circular and Booksellers’ Record, 12 August 1939

    Faber & Faber: The Untold Story by Toby Faber, grandson of the founder, Geoffrey Faber is a fabulous account of a publishing firm that is synonymous with setting the gold standard in literary publishing, including poetry. Toby Faber details this history by mostly presenting edited excerpts of correspondence from the official archives of the firm and presumably some from his family such as the diaries of Geoffrey Faber and his personal correspondence. Toby Faber’s commentary in the opening pages of every chapter and occasionally between the reproduced correspondence helps contextualise the moment in history. Faber is responsible for launching/ closely associated with the careers of many prominent writers and poets such as Siegfried Sassoon, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Stephen Spender, Ezra Pound, Ted Hughes, Lawrence Durrell, Tom Stoppard, Samuel Beckett, Vikram Seth, Kazuo Ishiguro, William Golding, Wilson Harris, Sylvia Plath, Seamus Heaney, Barbara Kingsolver, Sebastian Barry, Gunter Grass, Harold Pinter, Mario Vargas Llosa, Milan Kundera, Peter Carey, DBC Pierre, Sally Rooney, and Anna Burns. Establishing the bedrock of this magnificent list of A-list authors can be attributed to Nobel laureate T. S. Eliot and the poet Walter de la Mare’s son, Richard, who were a part of Faber’s founding editorial team. They gave shape to the editorial policy of Faber & Faber and thus gave the publishing firm its distinctive identity of publishing excellent modern literature. Some of the other editors-at-large who joined the firm were musicians Pete Townshend of the WHO and Jarvis Cocker of Pulp.

    In 2019 Faber is celebrating its ninetieth year. It was established on 1 April 1929 by Geoffrey Faber. Interestingly as this wonderful historical account describes, Faber & Faber arose like a phoenix from the ashes of Faber & Gwyer. A firm that had in turn been built by the distinguished lawyer, Maurice Gwyer* and Geoffrey Faber on the foundation laid by the Scientific Press, estd. 1880s. The Scientific Press had been established by Gwyer’s father-in-law, Sir Henry Burdett. This publishing business had been inherited by Sir Henry’s daughters, one of whom, Alsina, married Maurice Gwyer. Curiously or perhaps with some astute business sense, Geoffrey Faber persuaded the Maurice Gwyer to launch a magazine for nannies called The Nursing Mirror. Unfortunately as sometimes happens in businesses, the two partners fell out over what are keen strategies or sheer foolhardiness. Despite the steep learning curve Geoffrey Faber decided to reinvent himself and launch a new firm, Faber & Faber.

    This ability to reinvent itself and respond to the changing times is embedded in the DNA of Faber & Faber. It is evident in the manner in which the firm took to publishing paperbacks although in principle for a long time remained a firm known for its hardback publications. It also at critical junctures of its history restructured itself and launched new firms such as Faber Music, Faber Academy, Faber Digital and Faber Factory. It also has a fine children’s literature list too. In the early years it also managed to “discover” new authors by encouraging T. S. Eliot to continue the publication of the literary journal Criterion. Later there was a fortuitous discovery in the slush pile of the manuscript originally called Strangers from Within submitted by William Golding, to be published as Lord of the Flies.

    Faber & Faber is a superb history on how this publishing firm came to attain its legendary status. Extraordinarily it has retained its independence through its nine decades of existence. Toby Faber attributes this ability of the firm to hang on to its indepedence as being “lucky”. He says:

    That repeated ‘luck’ points to something else: a publishing philosophy that, without ignoring commercial imperatives, has always focused on excellence and the long term, whether that applies to relationships with authors that last for decades, or to books that enter the literary canon. A philosophy like that can lead to books that continue selling; Faber’s backlist has given it the income as the core of its financial stability.

    Philosophy alone, however, is not enough. It needs to be allied in good editorial taste.

    Of course there have been extremely tense moments about Faber & Faber’s survival. In some particularly gloomy years the royalties earned from the musical adaption of T.S. Eliot’s poem Cats by Andrew Lloyd Weber kept the firm afloat. There have been conversations about mergers but ultimately the directors have steered Faber & Faber firmly to an even stronger footing. One of the notable moments in its history was when the widow of T. S. Eliot decided to support the firm. So while the Faber family holds a fifty percent stake in the company, Valerie Eliot joined the firm as a “sympathetic shareholder”.

    Faber & Faber is known for its enviable stable of authors. Apart from those already mentioned, since 1990, Faber authors have won more Nobel prizes, the Man Booker, the Costa awards etc. While the book is a glowing account of a fiercely independent firm there are also moments of regrets such as losing out on publishing James Joyce and George Orwell. At times this history reads like an old boys publishing club that did occasionally publish women — Anna Burns was their first woman writer to win the Man Booker Prize in 2018. As Toby Faber points out that this win “itself [was] an indication of the firm having travelled a very necessary distance from the chauvinistic 1980s. The same could be said of Barbara Kingsolver’s victory in the Orange Prize for Women’s Fiction in 2010”. Be that at it may, Faber’s list is fantastic and makes every author proud to be a part of it. A testament to this is an excerpt of the correspondence between Indian author Vikram Seth and the then Managing Director Matthew Evans.

    Author Vikram Seth to Matthew Evans, 28 May 1985

    After we had lunch yesterday, it struck me that you would be a good person to send my novel in verse to. If you like The Golden Gate, you might want to do a British edition — and even if that doesn’t happen, reading it might somewhat increase your affection for a city that is — I promise — far from dreary and provincial.

    I’ve told Anne Freedgood at Random House — who tells me that TCG is out at a few British houses — thatI’d like to send it to you, and she says that’s fine. ( She showed it briefly to Robert McCrum, but when he offered to consider it only for the poetry list, she refused. The book is fiction, and to put it on a poetry list would be to kill it.) [. . . ]

    The book is due out in February 1986, and I can think of nothing more pleasurable than to appear simultaneously on the fiction lists of the British and American houses I most respect.

    To read some more excerpts from the book, here is a link to the Guardian. To commemorate 90 years a fabulous collection of 90 short stories have been released.

    Faber & Faber: The Untold Story is a wonderful, wonderful history of an iconic publishing firm.

    14 June 2019

    *Sir Maurice Linford Gwyer, GCIE, KCB, KCSI, KC (25 April 1878 – 12 October 1952) was a British lawyer, judge, and academic administrator. He served as Vice-Chancellor of Delhi University from 1938 to 1950, and Chief Justice of India from 1937 to 1943). He is credited with having founded the prestigious college Miranda House in 1948 in Delhi, India. Gwyer Hall, the oldest men residence for the university students is named after him. ( Source: Wikipedia )

    Note: All pictures used in the gallery are off Twitter. I do not own the copyright.

    “It’s Not About the Burqa” edited by Mariam Khan

    05 06 , 2019 No Comments

    I am a woman, but I am also a Muslim and a person of colour, and these identities cannot be separated. I can’t set aside being a woman of colour when it comes to being a feminist and I can’t set aside being a Muslim woman when it comesto being a feminist.

    It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race is a superb collection of essays exploring what it means to be a Muslim woman today. The anthology has been edited by Mariam Khan. The idea was sparked off by British politician David Cameron’s comment in the Daily Telegraph which reported him to consider Muslim women to be traditionally submissive. It sparked off a Twitter storm where #TraditionallySubmissive quickly spread. While watching this annoyance unfold online, Mariam Khan realised she had to do something as she kept reading these perceptions “about” Muslim women. It resulted in this magnificent anthology. In her introduction Mariam Khan says:

    It’s Not About the Burqa brings together Muslim women’s voices. It does not represent the experiences of every Muslim woman or claim to cover every single issue faced by Muslim women. It’s not possible to create that book. But this book is a start, a movement: we Muslim woman are reclaiming and rewriting our identity. Here are essays about the hijab* and wavering faith, about love and divorce, about queer identity, about sex, about the twin threats of a disapproving community and a racist country, and about how Islam and feminism go hand in hand. Every essay in this book is unfinished, because each one is the beginning of a very necessary conversation.

    *It’s worth pointing out at this stage that though ‘hijab’ is now more commonly used to describe a scarf that covers the head, in the Quran, the word ‘hijab’ denotes ‘partition’ or ‘curtain’. ‘Hijab’ can also refer to a standard of modesty.

    It’s Not About the Burqa is a magnificent book for the stories it shares are no different from any other feminist publication. The preoccupations of the contributors are like that of any other woman — challenges of being a single woman, voicing an honest opinion and facing the consequences of it, single parenting, childcare, sexuality, negotiating life while encountering patriarchal structures on a daily basis, cultural patriarchy and #MeToo. It even recognises the problematic challenges created by “Well-meaning feminists [who] are often the people who perpetuate an exclusionary feminism that centres their experience as universal.” Most importantly the contributors to this book do manage to address the ignorant remark made by David Cameron and one that is unfortunately echoed by many others too. The essayists do it magnificently by sharing their experiences and opinions. The essayists have strong voices that will resonate with many readers, not necessarily only Muslims. As Mona Eltahawy says in her essay upon discovering feminist books in her university library in Jeddah:

    Those books were irresistible. And they terrified me. So much so that I would pick them up, read a few pages, put them down in fear and walk away, only to be drawn back again the next day. I was terrified because I knew on a visceral level that those books — that feminism — would unravel something that I needed, something that would change me forever.

    It’s Not About the Burqa will do this for many more readers too.

    5 June 2019

    Interview with Sarnath Bannerjee on “Doab Dil”

    30 05 , 2019 No Comments

    Graphic novelist Sarnath Bannerjee’s Doab Dil is an extraordinary piece of writing or “faction” as he would like to call it. It is based on a few years of intense reading with a panel, sometimes a double panel, dedicated to a writer – fiction, non-fiction, or even a lyricist. It is an “extraordinary” book for every time you flip through it there is something more to discover. The selection of the writers with the brown drawings is like entering an accessible portal for a walk through a history of reading. A reading that is a combination of the canonised writers along with the lesser known. It is like browsing through the bookshelves at a library where the familiar writers are placed with the lesser known names. Sarnath Bannerjee is known for his graphic novels Corridor, The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers, The Harappa Files, and All Quiet in Vikaspuri.  Yet Doab Dil is a pivotal piece of work as it marks a transition from his early works to something new and exciting to come. It is to be found as he mentions, in the “spaces between the text and images form the central backbone of the book”.

    Here is an extract from Sarnath Bannerjee’s introduction to the book:

    …I was commissioned ninety murals for the new Deutsche Bank building at Canary Wharf, London. The curators, Alastair Hicks and Mary Findley, gave me an open brief, which is always a scary thing. After struggling through many meetings at Winchester House, we finally came up with the idea of making the whole building read like a book. Two years of intense reading suddenly came into sharp focus. This was my chance to archive my readings, to put my thoughts into drawings and, in doing so, preserve the books in my mind.

    Doab Dil brings together drawings and text like two converging rivers. The fertile tract of land lying between two confluent rivers is called a doab (Persian do ab, two rivers). It is a rich, draught-free, populous tract where civilizations are born. These spaces between the text and images form the central backbone of the book. I have used bits of text that I have assimilated from my reading and mixed them with my own writing and interpreted them through drawings.

    It is not surprising that authors find it easier to talk about reading than writing. Doab Dil is written in that spirit – a book by one reader to another.

    ******

    Here is a lightly edited interview with Sarnath Bannerjee via e-mail.

    JBR: Why and how was Doab Dil conceptualised? How long did it take to be made? 

    SB: Doab Dil is a book about reading than writing. A kind of deep and slow reading that produces wayward thoughts. Often reading provides a springboard for ideas, places and characters. It opens up one’s imagination beyond the merely personal. 

    There are some themes that Doab Dil explores. Gardens as places of enquiry as well as places where class and taste are played out. Dark Arcadias. Utopia and Suburbia. Originally the book was called “Common Utopias”. Sections of the book also look at work, enlightenment, history and end with a few popular songs that echo the theme of the book.

    It took a couple of years to write and draw and many years of reading. 

    JBR: You refer to the Olympic Games project in the introduction but I am unable to see how the two are connected except for the book concept?

    SB: The end product for both the projects have been large murals, they were drawn with expanse and detail in mind. The drawings themselves are self-contained and often tell parallel stories. This is the formal connection between the two works. 

    Some of the characters that appear in Doab Dil seem to be distant cousins of the characters that appear in my Olympic project. In both these, I have tried to practice the discipline of the unsaid. I have used minimal text but tried to expand the scope of the theme. In successful cases, the frugal text has brought out details and complexity of a larger tonal universe.  

    JBR: What made you switch to non-fiction reading? 

    SB: It wasn’t a conscious choice and i haven’t switched to non-fiction. Every now and then I stumble upon a good non-fiction book, I start reading it reluctantly and slowly get drawn into it. It just is not my first preference. Information and facts don’t interest me so much. Neither does opinions. But i have a great appetite for imagination. Imagination is proper therapy to get through life.  If i need to know about something, like a city or a political event, i look for fiction around the theme.

    Ever since I started working on my History Biennale project six years back. I have been reading a lot of books on rhetoric and history. That’s how it started. Also, many of my academic friends are converting their thesis into books, that gives me a steady stream of books to read. 

    JBR: Which was the first nonfiction book you read that got you hooked and spurred on this reading spree? 

    SB: The Little History of the World by Ernst Gombrich, Cheese and Worms by Carlo Ginzburg, Mumbai Fables by Prof Gyan Prakash etc. 

    JBR: In Doab Dil what came first — the text or the illustrations? 

    SB: At first came reading, then pictures then the writing. 

    JBR: “Doab Dil” are two Hindustani words but the text is in English. Would you like to see this book translated into Urdu or Hindi? 

    SB: I would very much like to, I don’t like the fact that my books are only in English. I would most love to write in Bengali. I have a good sense of the language, but I am not yet confident about writing in Bengali although I believe an app exists that will help me in this task. 

    JBR: These read like meditative pieces on literature irrespective of form. You glean tit-bits from modern classics to contemporary pop across nations and cultures but they all work together beautifully. How did you make your selections? 

    SB: I think I have my mother’s instinct. Or so I think. I have work intuitively. I don’t think I am very clever about structure and nor do I have a head for analysis. I am mostly driven by a kind of reportage. 

    JBR: What has been the reception to this book?   

    SB: Honestly, I have no idea.

    30 May 2019

    “The Begum: A Portrait of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s Pioneering First Lady”

    29 05 , 2019 No Comments

    The Begum: A Portrait of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s Pioneering First Lady by Deepa Agarwal and Tehmina Aziz Ayub is a good account of a fascinating woman. Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan’s life mirrors the history of the subcontinent. Namita Gokhale, writer and co-director, Jaipur Literature Festival, wrote a wonderful introduction to the book. The following extracts from the introduction have been published with permission of the publisher, Penguin Random House India.

    ****

    Reflecting on how and what to write while introducing this important biography, I wonder once again if it is one or two books I have before me. This collaborative account, co-authored by Deepa Agarwal and Tahmina Ayub, mirrors the fissures and fault lines that divided Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan’s life into two astonishingly symmetrical halves. A well-researched portrayal of an intrepid and passionate woman, it presents her personal narrative and political convictions, and mirrors the history of the subcontinent, in a timeline truncated by the uncompromising contours of the Radcliffe Line.

    Sir Cyril Radcliffe arrived in India on 8 July 1947. The eminent barrister was given all of five weeks to divide up a nation, a culture, a people. His brief was to ‘demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of the Punjab on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims’. A handful of men—five persons in each ‘boundary commission’ for Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west—worked day and night on a hurried and ignominious exit from an increasingly precarious and unstable empire. Equal representation given to politicians from the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, each hostile and intractable in their positions, only added to the tensions.

    In New Delhi, at 8 Hardinge Road, a sprightly forty-three year-old woman, all of five feet tall, was hastily putting together some personal belongings. Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan was preparing to depart in a government aeroplane for Karachi airport, where her husband Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan was soon to be sworn in as the first prime minister of Pakistan.

    The future first lady was leaving her magnificent double storeyed home, set in three acres of garden, for an unknown and uncertain life in a newly formed nation. This elegant colonial bungalow (now 8 Tilak Marg) had been her home since her marriage. Both her sons, Ashraf and Akber, had been born here. 8 Hardinge Road had become the focal hub for the activities of the Muslim League. Her husband had been appointed finance minister of the interim government, and indeed the papers for the interim budget presented on 2 February 1946 had been taken directly from his home to Parliament House.

    Not so far away, at 10 Aurangzeb Road, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had also made preparations to depart Delhi, and India. However, he had been more pragmatic than the idealistic and high-minded Liaquat Ali and had sold his house to the industrialist Ramkrishna Dalmia for Rs 3 lakh. Liaquat and his wife Ra’ana, on other hand, had decided to gift their home to Pakistan—it was to become the residence of the new nation’s future high commissioner. ‘Gul-i-Ra’ana’, the bungalow that her adoring husband had named after her, would henceforth be known as ‘Pakistan House’. Their vast and eclectic library was also gifted to the new nation in which they had invested their hopes and lives.

    What were the thoughts and emotions that jostled in her mind and heart as she observed all that she had struggled for come to fruition, even as the looming shadow of Partition prepared to bathe the two nations in a fierce spasm of blood and sacrifice?

    Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, born Irene Ruth Margaret Pant on 13 February 1905, to an apostate Brahmin lineage, was a practising Christian until 1933. After her marriage, she converted to Islam and was renamed Gul-i-Ra’ana. This fiercely independent lady, who carried her myriad identities within a core self of unchanging conviction, departed this world on 13 June 1990, by which time she was known, recognized and honoured as ‘Madar-e-Pakistan’ or ‘Mother of Pakistan’.

    The first half of her life was spent in undivided India, where she transited two religious identities, and repudiated a third, albeit through her grandfather. With almost mathematical precision, her eighty-six years were divided into forty-three years plus some months in each of her two lives. She was an intimate witness to history—the two nations, the bifurcation of East and West Pakistan, the creation of Bangladesh, the course of the Cold War, the rise of Gorbachev, and the increasingly unequivocal hold of the army in Pakistan. From Jinnah, through Zulfikar Bhutto and to General Zia-ul-Haq, she spoke her mind and held her own.

    Before her marriage, she was a professor of economics in Delhi’s prestigious Indraprastha College. Her doctoral thesis had been on women in agriculture in rural Uttar Pradesh. Begum Ra’ana was an important, even crucial, catalyst to Jinnah’s return to politics and the unfolding of the ‘two-nation theory’. In the summer of 1933, she and her husband met Jinnah in his home in Hampstead and appealed to him to return to India. Unafraid to champion difficult causes, she was radical in her attempts to bring about gender equity within the Islamic State of Pakistan and unflinching in her defence of her friend Zulfikar Ali Bhutto when he was facing the gallows. And at all times, she was charming and gracious as an accomplished diplomat and stateswoman.

    Where then did she get her steely resolve and infinite reserve of strength? How did she negotiate the transitions and transformations of history with such seeming ease? I have always been fascinated by this formidable woman, and her ability to stand tall in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society even after losing her husband, with no grown male—or indeed female—relatives to support her in the newly birthed nation of Pakistan.

    …

    Begum Ra’ana was born Irene Pant. We share maiden surnames, and a common ancestry. I was born Namita Pant, and a faded family tree documents these connections, with a branch of it cryptically cut off. With his conversion to Christianity, her grandfather Taradutt Pant had placed himself outside the pale of caste and kinship. Yet whenever I encountered the half-told stories of Begum Ra’ana, I could sense the mountain grit in her, the legendary strength that comes so naturally to Kumaoni women. There was also a strong family resemblance—to my sister, to several of my aunts. I wanted to know more about her, to understand her as a determined woman, a thinking, feeling human, a creature of her times and circumstances.

    ….

    29 May 2019

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