Ramin Jahanbegloo’s new book titled Pedagogy of Dissent has a cover design depicting the iconic event of ‘The Death of Socrates’. This image contextualizes the urgency behind writing this book as it acts as an apt metaphor for capturing the continuing onslaught against dissent in our times.
This book is the fourth and last volume in a quartet by Professor Jyotirmaya Sharma, examining the restatement of Hinduism by some of its most influential exponents and thinkers. The first book Hindutva: Exploring the Idea of Hindu Nationalism discusses the thought of Dayanand Saraswati, Sri Aurobindo, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar and Swami Vivekananda, all of whom sought to marshal Hindu identity in the service of nationalism. The subsequent volumes focus on the thought and writings of Golwalkar and Vivekananda. The series is an attempt to look at the question of Hindu identity and the restatement of Hinduism in the late 19th and early 20th century.
Social history of South Asia’s indigenous medical traditions and practices and their troubled relationship with western medicine during the colonial period, marked a fundamental shift from the conventional descriptive accounts of these medical traditions. Such social histories of South Asian indigenous medical traditions, and their encounter and exchanges with western medicine were marked by two features: firstly, they were predominantly based on colonial records; secondly, they were primarily focused on the Ayurvedic system of medicine, not only because of Ayurveda’s projected overwhelming presence but also due to the prevailing dominant political and ideological atmosphere particularly since the late nineteenth-century, that was aggravated after 1947.
Politically correct, influential people in policy making circles in the West do not talk any more of the yellow peril, or use phrases such as population explosion, or metaphors like the population bomb. At the same time, partly due to the very reach and influence of such doomsday demographic discourses emanating from the West in the past, and the modified ones today, the elites and the middle classes in much of the Third World remain convinced that the cause of social and economic problems in their own countries stem primarily, if not only, from population growth.
The cover and title of the book promises much by way of an analysis of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, the founder of the Muhammadan Anglo-Oriental College, which later became the Aligarh Muslim University. The book however falls woefully short. It is difficult to find any substantial and meaningful discussion of the thematic elements mentioned in the subheading of the book: ‘Reason, Religion and Nation’. At various points the author, Shafey Kidwai, states his desire to dismiss the charge of separatism that has often been made against Sir Syed. Sadly, the writing of the book fails to convincingly dismiss the charge.
Ayo Gorkhali: A History of the Gurkhas offers an interesting addition to the ever growing study of Gurkhas. Gurkhas and their history continue to remain one of the subjects receiving wide scholarship, both academic and non-academic. The almost yearly publications of literature on the theme make it evident that the common thread among them is that most of these have been written by former military officers-turned-historians, often from the Gurkha Regiments.
Calcutta, rechristened Kolkata since 2001, has been defined with several names, City of Joy, City of Palaces, a decadent city, and so on, but whatever be its nomenclature, the city has a unique characteristic of its own. Though there are contradictory opinions regarding the establishment of the city in 1690 by Job Charnock, as the head of the British East India Company or not, this two-volume collection of eclectic essays seeks to explore Kolkata through areas not covered in the earlier works on the city, in terms of both topics and time.
Doniger’s is a work of passion. This is on display not only in the unfolding of the narrative of her Winged Stallions and Wicked Mares but graphically in the 1968 photograph of Doniger on her Anglo-Arabian mount Damien, which although frozen in stationery pose clearly shows the elegant seat of a consummate lover of the animal.
This book, contrary to what the title suggests, is not a crime thriller. It is, instead, a bit of obscure 19th century English social history in which an Indian, who was also a Parsi—and vicar to boot—faced what might have been deep racial discrimination. His name was George Edalji.He was accused of mutilating a horse and threatening to kill a policeman. The natives were outraged, had him arrested, tried and convicted him.
2021
Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s Funeral Nights points out, among a whole lot of other things, that language is one of the fundamental tools to recover, rehabilitate and moor a community’s identity. However, the Khasi language has not yet been made an official language under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution of India despite demands for its inclusion. The twenty-two official languages of India (which include Assamese, Manipuri and Bodo from Northeast India) carry both immense prestige and other benefits, including membership of the Official Language Commission itself. The pedagogic implications, employment opportunities, cultural and translation benefits and so on for an official language are centrally connected to the identity and sustenance of a community.
This is a comprehensive, well-structured book. The five sections of the book are titled ‘General Overviews’, ‘Pilgrimages’, ‘Travelling within the Country’, ‘Travelling Abroad’ and ‘Miscellaneous’. This is apart from the Introduction by the editor of the volume. The first section has essays on the historical and cultural matrices of early travel writings from Bengal (Jayati Gupta), secular travel culture as obtained in Bengal during the colonial period (Simonti Sen), and the generic shifts that occured in women’s travel writing in Bengal during the 19th and early 20th century (Shrutakirti Dutta).
Ananda Lal’s edited volume, Indian Drama in English: The Beginnings, is a significant milestone in the genre. A researcher’s delight, the book has immense value for its reconstruction of text and authorship to fill the ellipses in the history of Indian English Drama. It comprises three nineteenth century plays—Krishna Mohan Banerjea’s The Persecuted (1831), Michael Madhusudan Dutt’s Rizia (1849) and Kaminee (1874) by an anonymous author. Lal’s introduction to each of the plays makes it a substantial and insightful read.
To the adage ‘journalism is literature in a hurry’ Oscar Wilde added that ‘the difference between literature and journalism is that journalism is unreadable and literature is not read.’ Amitava Kumar’s short novel A Time Outside This Time, all of two hundred odd pages, explores the space between fiction and journalism, trying to turn journalism into literature and making it readable too. Playing on Ezra Pound’s definition of literature as news that stays news, the novelist narrator of A Time Outside This Time conjectures if ‘by bringing news into literature we make sure that daily news doesn’t die a daily death?’ Kumar’s turning the news into literature in the novel has a serious purpose.
Pachpan Khambe Laal Deewarein’s poignant profile of a professional woman chafing against her suffocating context continues to resonate in its recent English translation, long after its first publication in 1961. The Hindi novel had acquired a cult status, birthing a television series and generations of loyal readers to whom the protagonist Sushma Sharma’s travails spoke viscerally. Lecturer in Hindi (or History, as the novel suggests variously) and warden of a hostel at a women’s college in Delhi some time in the late 50s, Sushma seeks to separate her professional and personal lives and assert her hard-earned financial independence.
Atamjit. Translated from the original Urdu by Ameena Z. Cheema, Rana Nayar, Swaraj Raj and Vivek Sachdeva
Independent India, as a secular nation, was born in Partition. The legacy of this fracture continues to implode and explode the very idea and ideals of post-Independent India. Indian creative imagination has continuously engaged with the ever-changing trajectories of this fracture, especially communalism. Since Partition these creative responses, in fact, have evolved as a distinct sub-genre within Indian literature. While the initial creative responses to Partition were underlined by an emotive surcharge that oscillated between memory and forgetting, the lived and the thought, or the exigencies of traumatic immediacy and the demands of nation building, the later ‘re-visits’ have tended to be more ideological and analytical in their thrust and have increasingly focused on the protean character of the phenomenon.
2021
Some writers become legends in their own lifetime; respected and admired by their peers, loved by legions of readers despite a slender output. The Bangladeshi novelist and short story writer Akhtaruzzaman Elias is one such. He wrote just two novels and five collections of short stories and yet earned fulsome praise from fellow writers. Mahasweta Devi saying ‘I would have considered myself blessed if I could have achieved a fraction of his quality in my writing’ reminded me of the Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib saying that he would have happily given away his entire collection of poetry for this one sher by Momin Khan Momin: ‘Tum mere paas hotey ho goya/Jab koi doosra nahi hota.’
Literary biographies, as a genre, has remained popular in the West, covering a wide spectrum, from the purely documentary and factual to the wildly and extravagantly imaginative. The latest in the genre that created a buzz when it came out was The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World by Maya Jasanoff that had as its subject Joseph Conrad, the great writer of Polish origin and stylist of the English novel.
The book traces the journey of Jia, an immigrant of Pashtun origin living in a place that is not named. The story unravels following a family’s life story partly in England and partly in Pakistan. The predicament that is being faced by the protagonist leads her to journey on the path of reluctant self-discovery. A father murdered, a feudal lord dead, Jia Khan trained as a Barrister is compelled to face what was to be done as she belongs to a clan which has connections with a crime syndicate, a family business…
The portrayal of children who resent getting stifled within the regimen of home and school is a recurring feature of children’s fiction in Bangla, although they are by and large unable to break free of it. In the sub-genre of domestic fantasy within it, the child tries to find an outlet from the regimen of home and school for a while, but the most radical implications of her/his breaking out of the system get contained within the predominantly middle-class worldview of the narratives. Detective stories deviate from this sub-genre umbrella inasmuch that the child gets caught or initiates an adventure in which s/he is able to realize her/his fantasy of solving a mystery.
2016
In 2016, the publishers Harvill Secker/Daily Telegraph announced a crime-writing competition and the winner was Abir Mukherjee, a young chartered accountant based in London, whose five-thousand-word entry has ultimately resulted in the debut novel A Rising Man. The historical whodunit spans a few days in April 1919, beginning in a diary-like form on the 9th of April to be exact. Set in Raj-era Calcutta of the 1920s decade, it features English cop Captain Sam Wyndham, and his Indian sidekick, Sergeant Surendranath Banerjee or Surrender-not, as his British superiors were wont to call him…