The Hindu on Books | A biography of Chennai, the plurality of the Ramayana, and more 

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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.

“A city is a living, throbbing organism with a soul of its own and, it would often seem, a thinking mind.” Veteran journalist and writer T.J.S. George’s short biography of Bangalore, Askew, makes the point that like individuals, cities derive their character from the values associated with them; “cities have memories and dreams, they nurture ambition and bemoan failure.” Mr. George walks readers through both ‘old’ and ‘new’ Bangalore – from gleaming skyscrapers and lively dance studios to colonial-era bungalows, legendary haunts like Koshy’s and new eating places, conveying an “armoury of stories” picked through the decades he has lived in Bangalore. In his new book, V. Sriram profiles Chennai and explores how it combines the old and the new, pulsing with life, energy and opportunities – all attributes of a grand city.  

In reviews, we read the new biography of Chennai, a remarkable book on diverse interpretations of the Ramayana, the memoirs of former SBI chairperson Arundhati Bhattacharya, a profile of the Constitution, a collection of women’s poetry and more. 

Books of the week

In Chennai: A Biography (Aleph), a fine raconteur of the city, V. Sriram, touches on everything significant to the city --  its history, yes, but also art, food, aromas, the people, the civic administration, architecture, cinema, its politics, its language, temples, music, traffic, its constant aspiration to become Singapore but never quite getting there, Margazhi, theatre, hospitals and education, its gutters, slums, beaches, housing complexes, and of course, the Cooum, Chennai’s most infamous river. In her review, Ramya Kannan writes that while Sriram clearly loves the city, he has no compulsion to judge, allowing its acknowledged flaws to rise in the narrative, tackling it with his tongue firmly tucked in his cheek. “In manner and form, Sriram’s narrative is not very distant from the style of his guru -- the father of Madras history, S. Muthiah. It’s easy to see other similarities too -- in his devotion to history, telling the stories of the past that seem to help you make sense of the future, the diligence with which he teases out a mere nugget from history, the green room gossip tales he seems to know of. But make no mistake, Sriram is striking his own path too, through this book, but also with his involvement with the city through social media, the history walks and the videos.” 

In Living Ramayanas: Exploring the Plurality of the Epic in Wayanad and the World (Eka/Westland Books), Azeez Tharuvana explains how Wayanad in Kerala, a melting pot of many communities, has come up with several versions of the epic. Tharuvana also draws the reader’s attention to the epic, as told across Asia. Indonesia, for example, has many variants such as the Hikayat Seri Rama, the Sri Rama Pathayani Ramayanam, Ramakelinga apart from episodes that show up in folklore. In her review, R. Krithika says that in the first part of the book, translated from Malayalam by Obed Ebenezer S., the author recounts the stories and the various places in Kerala associated with the epic. He then embarks on an exploration of how these tales came into existence and the reasons for their survival. One, he points out, is that Wayanad developed a culture of its own due to its geography. Second, many communities migrated and settled here at different times bringing with them their own legends and myths, which they then sited in this area. He also discusses the possibility of oral transmission and the stories being transplanted to the location of the hearers.  

Hanya Yanagihara has followed up her ambitious second novel, A Little Life, with a 700-page tome on time travel, To Paradise (Picador). It has three sections – one takes place in 1893, the second in 1993, and the third in 2093. Each third is hinged on a David, a Charles, a Nathaniel, who occupy the same town house, or the minds of those living there, in Washington Square Park of New York’s Greenwich Village. In his review, Prathyush Parasuraman says that the writer toys with history and plays oracle for the future. As the centuries unfold, however, “the emptiness of Yanagihara’s project becomes clear. She flings at us slabs of information. But details don’t make a world….You can feel her toying around with sentences intended to evoke shock or tears.” As a result, a feeling of artifice creeps through. 

Arundhati Bhattacharya is the first woman to have led the over 200 years old State Bank of India (SBI), one of the world’s largest. Her book, Indomitable (Harper Business), follows her from birth in Bhilai, through college in Calcutta, marriage in Kharagpur, motherhood and rise from a probationary officer to the top post at SBI. But as Puja Mehra points out in her review,  Bhattacharya has held back so much that Indomitable cannot be called a memoir. For instance, the challenges during the author’s time at SBI, bad loans, frauds and defaults, get perfunctory treatment. “Bhattacharya doesn’t tell us anything we don’t already know. She offers no observations or analyses to better inform our understanding of India’s banking sector.” Though the book keeps you engaged till the last page, says Mehra, you can’t help feeling that the author had a great story which she chose not to tell. 

Of Dry Tongues and Brave Hearts (Red River), edited by Reema Ahmad and Semeen Ali, is a collections of poetry, prose and painting by women, many of them new voices, and some unheard before. This jagged collection, says the reviewer Saikat Majumdar, poses fundamental questions about the relation between art, passion, marginality, and the vagaries of everyday life. “The sheer range reimagines the relation between creativity and passionate selfhood through a spectrum where the accomplishments of craft are uneven. But the honesty never is, and since in the end, honesty occupies the true heart of artistic craft, it also invites us to broaden our understanding of technical finesse beyond the usual and the expected.” 

Spotlight

Selective focus on flag, Indian constitution or Bharatiya Savidhana preamble old scattered text paper placed on Indian flag - Concept of Freedom, Nationality and patriotism | Photo Credit: lakshmiprasad S

Is the Indian Constitution a classic? Aakar Patel, who in his column Leather Bound, writes on classics raises this question and tries to answer it. The Constitution is not a perfect document, he says. “No document can ever be perfect because the idea of eternal law is flawed. But constitutions survive, largely intact, because so much thought has been put into them about the future.” He argues that the Indian Constitution is a classic because the problems lie only in the footnotes and interpretations. “The basic book is an exceptional text and one for the ages. Enough space remains for it to still easily reoccupy its rightful position among the world’s greatest documents.” 

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• In 2020, when the pandemic forced the government to announce a lockdown, several States adopted digital contact tracing and drones to monitor citizens. Siddharth Sonkar analyses the history of privacy in India and establishes why objecting to interference with privacy is the pressing need of the day in What Privacy Means: Why It Matters and How We Can Protect It (Hachette India). 
• December in Dacca: The Indian Armed Forces and the 1971 Bangladesh Liberation War (HarperCollins) by K.S. Nair is an anecdotal account of the 1971 war. The book sets the battles within their diplomatic, strategic and tactical contexts. Providing a glimpse into the lives of some of the heroes once the dust had settled, Nair celebrates India’s military and moral victory. 
• When the kids are grown, Mercy Garrett moves herself out of the chaotic family home to her neat studio in Anne Tyler’s new novel French Braid (Chatto & Windus). Yet it is a clutter of untidy moments that forms the Garrett’s family life over the decades, and it all began in 1959, with a family holiday by a lake, whose effects ripple through generations. 
• In Sabaa Tahir’s All My Rage (Razorbill), the story travels from Lahore to California as Misbah and Toufiq migrate to the U.S. and open a motel there. Their son Salahuddin and his best friend Noor understand each other the way nobody does, until The Fight, which destroys the bond. The two must ask themselves what their friendship is worth. 

That is all for this week. We look forward to hearing from you, be it about this newsletter, our reading list, your literary queries or the book you are reading now. You can find us at www.thehindu.com/books and on Facebook and Twitter at @TheHinduBooks