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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books newsletter. Ruskin Bond, the grand old man of letters, turns 90 on May 19. What better way to usher in another birthday than with two new books? The Hill of Enchantment: The Story of My Life as a Writer (Aleph) offer insights into his life as a writer, and is great to read alongside his autobiography, Lone Fox Dancing (Speaking Tiger), published in 2017, in which he had written that his “is the story of a small man, and his friends and experiences in small places.” Well, his numerous books on nature, solitude, mysteries, trains, animals, people, life have never gone out of print and are often collected into anthologies and omnibuses. To coincide with his birthday, another book in the ‘How To’ series is also being launched. How To Be Happy (HarperCollins) collects Bond’s advice on life and happiness: “You can’t buy happiness. You can’t get it wholesale or retail or online. It inhabits a small space in your mind, and you must look for it there.” This volume can be read along with the series of ‘Little Books – of Happiness, Serenity, Love and Companionship’, published by Speaking Tiger. Bond has also been awarded the Sahitya Akademi Fellowship, the highest honour given by the literary organisation.
Happy birthday Ruskin Bond, and thank you for these lines, which were given to you one night in the hills when you saw ‘a single fox, dancing in the diffused light’: “As I walked home last night/I saw a lone fox dancing/In the bright moonlight./ I stood and watched,/Then took the low road, knowing/The night was his by right./Sometimes, when words ring true,/I’m like a lone fox dancing/In the morning dew.”
In reviews, we read an excerpt from a book on the first Indian diplomats after Independence, Nanak Singh’s translated 1948 novel on the riots after Partition, an anthology on Qurratulain Hyder’s work and a book on food of the Northeast. We also talk to journalist-writer Johann Hari about his experience of being on the weight loss drug Ozempic, and Jayasree Kalathil on translating Malayalam writer Sandhya Mary’s novel.
Books of the week
Decades ago, at the Centre for West Asian Studies in Jawaharlal Nehru University, it was a well-established practice to invite serving and retired diplomats to speak to students and researchers. That’s where Kallol Bhattacherjee first met the diplomats he writes about in his new book, Nehru’s First Recruits (HarperCollins), at the JNU seminars. One of the “first recruits” was Mirza Rashid Ali Baig who had to plan New Delhi’s welcome to visiting Soviet dignitaries Premier Bulganin and General Secretary Khrushchev in 1955, the first official visit by a superpower. Read an excerpt
At Home in India (Women Unlimited), edited and translated by Fatima Rizvi and Sufia Kidwai, gathers Qurratulain Hyder’s essays, autobiographical pieces, short stories, pen portraits and interviews. Besides the essays from As the World Turns (‘Kar-e Jahan Daraz Hai’), the volume has two autobiographical pieces, ‘Memories of an Indian Childhood’ and ‘The Magic Mountain’, among other works. In her review, Anusua Mukherjee writes that the essays “give us an inkling of the original people and places that lent themselves to her fictional universe. Since Hyder was markedly averse to discussing her literary works, letting them speak for themselves, these essays are invaluable in giving us a sense of the milieu from which Hyder drew her inspiration.” Hyder was honoured with a number of awards in her lifetime, including the Jnanpith, Padma Shri and Padma Bhushan, but she is not discussed as much as her elder contemporaries such as Ismat Chughtai. One reason behind this, says Mukherjee, is the fact that much of her work — Hyder was a prolific writer — still remains untranslated. “And Hyder is difficult to translate: her writing follows no rules — It flows like a wild river, taking along everything that comes its way.”
Between February and September of 1948, Nanak Singh, regarded as the ‘Father of the Punjabi novel’, signed off on forewords to two novels that recounted the catastrophic events in the run-up to Independence and Partition. Over the last few years, his grandson, the now-retired diplomat Navdeep Suri, has been translating his works and bringing them to a wider readership. Two years ago, Suri published the English translation of the first of the 1948 novels, Hymns in Blood (Khoon de Sohile), and now comes the sequel, A Game of Fire (Agg di Khed). “Ideally,” says Mini Kapoor in her review, “they would be read in sequence, but it’s a measure of Singh’s mastery as a storyteller that A Game of Fire can be read as a standalone novel, with the backstory lightly filled in.” This is what Singh writes in the Foreword: “I can assure my readers that my account of the incidents related to Pothohar (where the first novel is set) and Amritsar (where the second is set) is authentic, accurate and recounted with all the honesty that I could muster.” He thus beseeches the reader to take the book “as a historical narrative and not as a work of fiction”
Dolly Kikon and Joel Rodrigues, both anthropologists, have edited a new anthology, Food Journeys – Stories from the Heart (Zubaan), which cover the Northeast’s food diversity. Other anthropologists, academics, a singer, a dancer, a novelist, photographers and documentary filmmakers add to the story. In an essay, Vikram Doctor writes why it is important to document the food of a region that has more to it than bamboo shoots. “The edible shoots are undeniably important in the region of lush hills and river valleys casually marginalised as the ‘Northeast’. It is a place with complex histories and very diverse communities, crossroads for trade, war and displacements and a reservoir for remarkable biodiversity. A wide variety of plants and animals are foraged and hunted there, and fermented, smoked and processed in multiple ways. There is much more than bamboo shoots.” He says “this patchwork project works so well it should be considered for other attempts to capture the diversity of food systems in different parts of India.”
Spotlight
In the backdrop of the world getting fatter (1 billion people lived with obesity in 2022 according to a Lancet study), writer-journalist Johann Hari researched and wrote his new book, Magic Pill: The Extraordinary Benefits and Disturbing Risks of the New Weight-Loss Drugs (Bloomsbury). As pharma companies develop drugs to curb obesity, Hari looks at both the big and small picture. “This is a mass experiment, carried out on millions of people, and I am one of the guinea pigs,” he says, as he brings himself into the Ozempic debate. In a conversation with Sunalini Mathew, Hari stresses that he is not an expert. “I’m a journalist who goes on a journey to speak to the experts, to speak to all kinds of different people, to try to get to the bottom of what’s going on and with these drugs.” Early on in the book, he says “the drug seemed to change more than the patients’ bodies. It seemed to change their minds.” Mathew says the book takes an honest look at a complex situation, where changing food systems meet burgeoning medical companies, and people are crushed in between.
Sandhya Mary’s Maria, Just Maria (Harper), translated from the Malayalam by the award-winning Jayasree Kalathil, is a witty and insightful investigation into contemporary society’s binary ideas such as normal and abnormal. It’s a poignant and humorous novel written from the perspective of a child, a girl, born in Kerala, into a Syrian Christian family. Sharing her experience of translating this book, Kalathil tells Vidhya Anand that she usually only translated books she likes as a reader herself. “I don’t go by literary importance, or if the writer is well-known. The books that I like must also sit well with my personal politics. When it came to Maria, Just Maria, I’m quite partial to books that have children as the protagonists. I like books narrated from their point-of-view, or books that have one or two children as the main characters. In the hands of good writers, I think that does something to the way in which you can write a book. It’s about writers who don’t condescend children or writers who don’t see children as lesser human beings.”
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- A 239-page book, Indian Rocketinte Shilpikal (‘The Architects of the Indian Rocket’), published by DC Books in Malayalam, recounts stories and incidents from the infancy of what is now the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO). Penned by former ISRO scientist V.P. Balagangadharan, it has brief bios of 31 men, scientists and administrators, and anecdotes from their journeys.
- Why do people feel anxious? Samir Chopra, who teaches philosophy, argues that anxiety isn’t always or only a medical condition. He provides insights from many philosophies, including Buddhism, existentialism, psychoanalysis, and critical theory, and shows how anxiety has been viewed as an inevitable human response to existence in Anxiety: A Philosophical Guide (Princeton University Press).
- Fool Bahadur (Penguin) by Jayanath Pati, translated into English by Abhay K, is a story about a young law officer in colonial Bihar, who hustles his way through bureaucratic corridors negotiating corruption to win the coveted British title of Rai Bahadur. Said to be the first novel in Magahi language published on All Fool’s Day in 1928, the satire is a fictional spin the author puts on his own experiences.
- Meeti Shroff-Shah’s A Matrimonial Murder (Bloomsbury) is the second book in the Temple Hill mystery series. This story too takes readers to the busy Temple Hill neighbourhood of Mumbai where Sarla Seth, owner of a well-known matrimonial bureau, has been receiving threatening messages. Then, an employee is found murdered in office; when a journalist asks questions, and the police arrives, the mystery deepens.
