In 1963 Maulana Bhashani met Mao in Peking and Mao spoke to him about Pakistan, USA, USSR, and China. China’s relationship with Pakistan was extremely fragile at the time, Mao said to Bhashani, and the United States, Russia and India would do their utmost to break this relationship. Mao said: ‘You are our friend and if at the present moment you continue your struggle against the Ayub Government, it will only strengthen the hand of Russia, America and India.
The two authors of this book have over the years developed a type of book-making for themselves. The idea is to pick up some subject of recent history which is full of incident and drama, visit the site, read up as much as you can, interview such of the participants as are still around and then write a blow-by-blow, minute-byminute account.
Biography, according to Lytton Strachey, is ‘the most delicate and humane of all the branches of the art of writing’. It is also a difficult art particularly when the story told is that of Jawaharlal Nehru, a man who strode the world like ‘a gentle colossus’ until very recently, and whose life was an open one, openly lived almost in ‘the glorious privacy of light’.
Looking Back The past, it is said, is a strange land, but it is also one in which serendipity has a role. Looking back at our first four (then quarterly) issues, we found to our delight that all our founders had contributed. In this section, ‘TBR@40: Looking Back’, we carry excerpts of reviews from these issues; the only exception is the review of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi’s Hind Swaraj, which was the first review of the Millennium issue.
2006
I loved Deepa Balsavar’s The Seed the sec- ond I saw it. This little book about a girl who finds a seed and plants it, is so full of warmth and colour that it is impossible not to go back to it again and again. The words are simple—the sentences no more than three or four words long. Its protagonist, a small girl who looks about four years old, appears in a skirt and top with a curly mop of hair. She is immediately relatable and full of animation, buzzing through the pages with energy.
‘I went from one platform to another looking for my picture before I came across these three men calmly sitting and reading their newspapers’ commented Raghu Rai in his explanation to an amazing image that juxta poses frenetic motion with an absolute indifference to the chaos around. Motion is represented by a flurry of blurred figures while the readers are clearly in view, the sharp image picking up the furrowed brow of the perhaps myopic man who holds his paper at a distance. It is Churchgate Station, Mumbai in the nineties and Rai waits for his moment to record a calm focus amidst the ‘human deluge’.
Indian classical dance is rather a favourite subject of coffee table books for obvious reasons. The visual appeal and allure of the images lend itself to glossy books on the theme, of which there are many. Hastily put together primers also abound in the market. Of late, serious academic scholarship has had much to offer on the subject. Davesh Soneji, Avanti Meduri, Priya Srinivasan, and many others have contributed a great deal through their academic writing in the form of books and scholarly papers.
TBR completes four decades of publication. Which were the most significant books on Hindustani classical music published in these years? Four titles immediately come to mind, one symbolically for each decade. Right on top is Sheila Dhar’s brilliantly funny memoir Here’s Someone I’d Like You to Meet (1995) now available in the omnibus edition Raga ’N Josh (Permanent Black, 2005, 2015). The book is an anecdotal classic about the earthy world of Hindustani vocalists, a perennial favourite among music lovers.
Ever since the movies were invented, people have been writing about them. There was WG Faulkner, who, in 1912, became the first regular critic in a British newspaper (The London Evening News). ‘The picture theatre has taken a firm place in the social enjoyment of the people,’ he declared. ‘It is no longer a matter of wonder; it has become an everyday part of the national life.’ Americans like Otis Ferguson and James Agee followed.
I must, of course, begin by congratulating The Book Review on her 40th birthday. For survival and growth with integrity, and for what it is doing to encourage discussion and debate, without which, as Romila Thapar and TBR have recently reminded us, we cannot have democracy. There are increasing signs that this is indeed the case. I was scared when I gave a talk on socalled Love Jihad recently. After Professor Kalburgi’s assassination, my mother called me to say I should install a spy-hole in my door, if I didn’t have one. Do not open the door to strangers, she said.
In T.H. White’s The Once and Future King, Merlyn asks his owl Archimedes, ‘What is your favourite bird?’ ‘Archimedes thought this over for some time, and then said, “Well, it is a large question. It is rather like asking you what is your favourite book.”’I’ve been reading for six-and-a-half decades. Learnt reading at mum’s knee through a wonderful Lucy Mabel Atwell book. Obviously one cannot talk about all the books one has read.
2014
Wandering idly through my mind’s library, pausing at books that I had read long ago, at those I remembered vividly and others that had receded from immediate recall, I realized that somehow, I had always been drawn to non-fiction. Essays, letters and diaries, memoirs, travel writing of the interior-monologue-George Schaller variety, biographies.
1979
In the last forty years Bangalore has exploded from a sleepy ‘air-conditioned garden city’ into one of the most chaotic megalopolises of India, its economy dominated by business corporates like Infosys, Wipro and Biocon, and a host of others which have come up in their shadow. There was a time when it was a city whose hotels filled up only during the horse racing season and emptied immediately thereafter, whose finances were controlled by two distillaries, and whose intellectual reputation was sustained by half a dozen research establishments protected from the hurly-burly of the outside world by hefty government funding and sprawling green lawns.
It is now twenty-five years since Peter Hopkirk’s book was published, the great game between Imperial Russia and Great Britain in Central Asia that he celebrated is forgotten, as dated as marbles in an age of video games, but it remains worth reading, not just because it is beautifully written, but because it still raises questions, sets off trains of thought, and goads the reader to explore the issues he writes about. Few books do this, and those that do age well.
The title of this short essay invokes the title of a landmark volume, published in 1985, Bringing the State Back In, edited by Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer and Theda Skocpol. It expresses the theme that unites a clutch of books, all of which were published in the mid-1980s and had an enduring impact on scholarship in a field of Indian politics. In different ways, these accounts of the political economy of development and redistribution underscored the centrality of the state.
Usually, when the editors of this jour nal ask me to write something, I decline. But this time I had to accept because they asked me to write something about the most influential writer in economics in the 20th century. It was—as the Americans say—a no-brainer because there is only man who fits the bill: John Maynard Keynes, who stands out by a mile. To me, he was as much an economist as a very deft political thinker.
Homosexuality, lived out freely and fearlessly, places before the individual and society a real set of imperatives, challenges and opportunities: to put reason and humanity before fear, habit and prejudice; to test our unexamined assumptions regarding some of the basic elements of human life—the family, marriage, parenthood, independence, loneliness, companionship, fidelity, promiscuity .
When Gerda Lerner’s Creation of Patriarchy appeared, nearly 30 years ago, in a pre-globalized era, middle class, mainly upper caste feminists teaching in colleges in Delhi (and elsewhere) read it avidly, begging, borrowing (but hopefully not doing more than that), and discussing it in the small, intense study circles that dotted the cityscape.
It was a perplexing moment when the editors of TBR asked me to comment on a book on religion that had been important in its time and continued to be so in our own. This request, I have to admit, made me more acutely aware of the distinction that ought to be made between a book on religion and about it. At least in the context of Hinduism (however debatable that term might be), a book on religion or more generally, a text motivated essentially by a religious inspiration or consciousness does not appear to have been produced in a long time.
During the 1980s, at the Department of Sociology, Delhi School of Economics, structuralism was the grand theory with which we were expected to learn about the intricacies of kinship, the contradictions of myths, and the underlying meanings of all cultural transactions. Structuralism was represented, by leading faculty members, as the theory of culture and the theory of social and cultural change. But, pouring for months over Elementary Structures of Kinship and later over The Raw and the Cooked had left me disenchanted.