Sumanyu Satpathy’s Will to Argue opens with a rather interesting excerpt from Jonathan Swift’s Battle of the Books about the ‘books of controversy’. Another excerpt from the same text, not quoted by the author, makes for a succinct comment on the momentous task that Satpathy has undertaken in this book.
[B]ooks of controversy being, of all others, haunted by the most disorderly spirits, have always been confined in a separate lodge from the rest, and for fear of a mutual violence against each other, it was thought prudent by our ancestors to bind them to the peace with strong iron chains.
—Swift, Battle of the Books
The book aims to bridge an exceptional number of spatio-temporal boundaries in the author’s quest to find a historically accurate and culturally specific definition of the term ‘controversy’. In order to look for such a definition, the book examines a set of select episodes, thematically arranged, from India’s colonial and postcolonial histories, including the language debates that the Indian nation and its fragments were fraught with in the colonial period; issue of literary productions and standardization, and their relationships with communities and identities;