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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter.
On the eve of B.R. Ambedkar’s birth anniversary on April 14, there’s a host of new books on the Constitutionalist, including two biographies. Also, soon to be released is a reinterpretation of The Annihilation of Caste. Ashok Gopal began reading about Ambedkar around 2003 and “opened” his eyes to caste “within and around me”. Over the next 15 years, Gopal pored over Ambedkar’s works, the information provided by his first biographer C.B. Khairmode, academic writings and so forth and has written a detailed biography, A Part Apart, The Life and Thought of B.R. Ambedkar (Navayana).
In an interview with The Hindu, Gopal told V. Geetha that while he was studying Ambedkar, he began to see quite a lot of what is written in standard works on him does not match what he himself said. “For example, his turn to Buddhism is generally explained without considering his deep thought on religion from his early years, and his concern for providing an ethical base to democracy. I spoke about such gaps to a few friends, and they suggested I should write about it.”
Aakash Singh Rathore’s biography of Ambedkar (Becoming Babasaheb/HarperCollins) aims to bring readers closer to Ambedkar’s experiences and personality, “to his life and times.” Syed Sayeed, a retired professor of philosophy, has written a new book, Understanding B.R. Ambedkar’s Annihilation of Caste (Permanent Black/Orient BlackSwan) reappraising Ambedkar’s most crucial work on the subject of caste. Ambedkar, he writes, believed genuine democracy was impossible without the eradication of caste and that caste reform, as advocated by Gandhi, was not enough. With caste politics moving far away from what Ambedkar had wished for the future, Prof. Sayeed’s reinterpretation of the original text is an important read for the times.
In books this week, we review the late Indian diplomat, S.K. Lambah’s book on India-Pakistan relations, Naveen Kishore’s new book of poems, and read up on books of the Mughal era with the NCERT deciding to revise history textbooks; we talk to Karan Thapar about his anthology of interviews and to writer-critic B. Jeyamohan on the release of the English translation of Ezhaam Ulagam (The Abyss).
Books of the week
Writer B. Jeyamohan during an interview with The Hindu, in Chennai. | Photo Credit: Jothi Ramalingam B.
B. Jeyamohan’s The Abyss (Juggernaut), translated into English by Suchitra Ramachandran from the Tamil Ezhaam Ulagam, is a gut-wrenching story about a begging cartel. In Jeyamohan’s work, beggars seek out the joys of life even as they endure great suffering. The protagonist, Pothivelu Pandaram, is a temple worker who trades in physically deformed beggars or “items”. Even though Pandaram treats them as wretched beings and inflicts unimaginable violence upon them, such as stuffing them into vans meant for transporting human waste, he is a protective father at home, desperate to fulfil the wishes of his three daughters. In an interview with Radhika Santhanam, he says while at least four characters in the book are inspired by people he has met, he did not personally know the man who inspired the character of Pandaram. “There are people like Pandaram in the world. They may even kill children, but they go home to their own without guilt.” Besides, The Abyss, Jeyamohan is also looking forward to the release of Mani Ratnam’s Ponniyin Selvan – 2 which he adapted for the screen from Kalki’s magnum opus on the Cholas.
From 2005 to 2014, the late Indian diplomat, S.K. Lambah, was the Indian face of back-channel talks with Pakistan, when a draft agreement or a “non-paper” was produced by the two sides on Jammu & Kashmir, which New Delhi believed would make borders irrelevant without redrawing them. His book In Pursuit of Peace on India-Pakistan relations is a go-to text for a comprehensive account of behind-the-scenes efforts to secure peace. Lambah’s book, says the reviewer Amit Baruah, will give the reader an insight into the grades and combinations of back-and-front-channels that have been used since the Simla Agreement of 1972 between India and Pakistan. “It will equally prove to be a chronicle of failure down the decades where brilliant diplomats of both countries could not arrive at a modus vivendi for their people to live in peace.”
Naveen Kishore’s Mother Muse Quintet (Speaking Tiger) is an ode to the inevitable passage of time, to memory as it attempts to mark this passage, “to the love that is careful remembering and to the loss that is forgetting.” In her review, K. Srilata, writes that the quintets serve as a mood map, the verses circling back to the poet’s relationship with his mother and to the intimate and ordinary magic of the memories they share. “The poems,” she says, “linger on loss, on the trauma that is his mother’s gradual fading out, on death and dying. The work he does of ‘overly’ remembering, a resistance to letting go, the holding on to the ungraspable, to the slippery, to the dying, has universal resonance.”
Memory as a mood-map: review of Naveen Kishore’s Mother Muse Quintet
The National Council of Educational Research and Training has decided to drop certain chapters on the Mughal Empire from the CBSE Class 12 history textbooks. They include ‘Kings and Chronicles; the Mughal Courts (C. 16th and 17th centuries)’ from the book Themes of Indian History-Part II. This move is said to be an attempt at “syllabus rationalisation” to avoid “overlapping” and “irrelevant” portions. In a column on books, Bibliography, in our Text and Context section, Ziya Us Salam, explains why the Mughals need to be studied. The glory of the Mughal Age has been neatly summed up by Ebba Koch in her recent book, The Planetary King: Humayun Padshah Inventor and Visionary on the Mughal Throne where she writes, “The Mughal dynasty was perhaps one of the most glamorous and charismatic in the history of mankind. It was a driving concern of the first six padshahs to construct their image for posterity and be remembered as great rulers.” There is something to be learned from every king, Humayun to Akbar to Aurangzeb. Globe-trotter and interculturalist Count Herman Keyserling, who was in India in 1911-12, hailed the Mughals as “men of action, refined diplomats, experienced judges of the human psyche and at the same time aesthetes and dreamers.”
Understanding the Mughals: there are lessons to be learnt from every king
Spotlight
Karan Thapar | Photo Credit: VV Krishnan
Karan Thapar’s new book, Sound & Fury (Bloomsbury), is a selection of 21 of his most recent interviews. In an interview with G. Sampath, Thapar rues the near death of the aggressive interrogative interview, particularly of politicians. “Today, we interview politicians by virtually sitting in their lap and asking questions that they may have paid you to ask. If you watch any interview with the Prime Minister, he is never really challenged with the criticisms the Opposition may have made. He is asked a simple question: ‘The Opposition says this of you, what do you think?’ He is given a platform to reply to them. There is nothing tough about it.” What he feels disconcerting about is the big change between pre-2014 and post-2014 – “no longer are interviews conducted to question, challenge or expose. They are done to endorse, reinforce, or worse still, to provide a platform.”
Karan Thapar and the death of the interrogative interview
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- Six months after 9/11, the CIA captured Abu Zubaydah, announcing he was number three in Al Qaeda. He was ferried to a secret site in Thailand and subjected to “enhanced interrogation techniques” that would have violated U.S. and international laws. He remains imprisoned in Guantanamo, never charged. Cathy Scott-Clark and Adrian Levy recount what happened in American black sites around the world in The Forever Prisoner (HarperCollins).
- The Penguin Ray Library has released two volumes of The Best of Satyajit Ray, encompassing his life and work. While his films, from Pather Panchali, Charulata, Jalsaghar to Sonar Kella are well-known, the two volumes open a window to Ray’s fiction and non-fiction, written in Bengali and English. His detective stories around the adventures of Feluda, the chronicles of Professor Shonku, short stories, writings on filmmaking, all find a place in the collector’s boxset.
- Actor and writer Manav Kaul’s new book, Rooh (Penguin), is a dialogue about Kashmir and starts with a poem: “I keep looking in the direction /From where your fragrance wafts in/From where your taste/Takes me to the front of a blue door and white walls”. Kaul who was born in Baramulla writes in his author’s note that the main journey of this imaginary novel is inwards, “of a traveller who is struggling to collect the lived portraits of his childhood.”
- In What Will People Say? (Speaking Tiger), Mitra Phukan explores this question: how much of our life is our own and how much is dictated by society. The story revolves around the relationship between a Hindu widow and a Muslim divorcee. When gossip about their love threatens to derail her daughter’s future, Mihika must decide if her shot at a second innings in love is worth it.
Published - April 11, 2023 11:58 am IST
