12 women, 200 years

 

Bernardine Evaristo (2019), Girl, Woman, Other, Penguin books, pp.453

The book came to me as a gift, literally,

a discerning friend’s nod for my love of the literary.

I am glad this book and this author found me

they way they did,

when I was least expecting.

That’s when you are the most vulnerable

and completely open,

an attitude best suited to read

something so expansive as this novel,

the story and history of twelve women

through two centuries across many continents,

told in a compelling contemporary way.

 

Bernardine Evaristo,

writer, poet, playwright, professor,

the first black woman to win the Booker Prize

an accolade she shared with another great writer,

is a gifted story teller.

As you read through the novel

this aural quality pervades,

the prose is poetic and musical,

evocative and vivid.

So, you picture the protagonists and the places

and hear them speak and think,

walk through the gullies of your mind,

sashaying and shushing,

as they erupt into thoughts and doubts.

 

It is a tour de force of human history

in the last two centuries,

colonialism, slavery, racism, casteism,

sexism, queerphobia,

all roads taken

to be the human race we are today,

 explored within the microcosm

of individual lives,

specific plots and timelines.

 

And yet they interrupt each other,

invade and interact with one another

to give the map of a gnarly tree, the pedigree,

from which, these unlikely compatriots

hang like irreverent fruits.

They are ancestors and descendants,

peers and sisters,

exploring and bickering their way

through history and their stories.

 

Girl, Woman, Other has

the themes and temperaments

that Evaristo’s works tend to have,

 an evaluative perspective of received wisdom

from as many angles as possible,

and a lyrical quality to radical thoughts.

 

As winter buries us with an impossible longing

for a year that is fast slipping by,

this is the perfect companion

to soothe and comfort you,

enlighten and frighten you,

but above all give you so many opportunities

to live out the lives of others

however imaginary.

That’s what all good writers do.

 

Irish Love

 

Sally Rooney (2018), Normal People, Faber and Faber, London, pp. 266

This is the book you should take with you in summer to remember what it feels like to read a great love story. It is small town Ireland and two young people are in love as they move from high school through college and are just about to begin life. It is that time of life when it is perhaps the most awkward to write about love without sounding flippant or pedantic. It is difficult to speak of love that is so young and unsure, yet when done right it is the kind of quiet love that makes you yearn for good literature.

Sally Rooney does it right. Not just in the convincing way she portrays the protagonists, but also scooping up the sounds and smells of the small town, the flavor of its people, the tone and tenor of high school in the backwater stillness of the place, its intimacies and resentments. The book brings to life those who have adapted themselves for life in a quiet town that the world does not come to. It requires skill and an astute mindset to stay full of life and happy in any place, but more so in a quaint little space dancing to its own tune. The town is abuzz with news - rumours, love affairs, desertion, quiet suicide, seething anger and the whole melodrama that makes life. And amidst this are two people, vulnerable in their lack of self - consciousness, who manage to escape that world without meaning to, and stay connected with each other.

I admit it is difficult to write about it than read and enjoy it. Grab a copy and have a lovely summer! There is an adaptation streaming on Prime, but you are not going to, are you?

The Great Gender Data Gap

 

Caroline Perez (2019), Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, Chatto & Windus, London, pp. 411

As we celebrate the international women’s history month in March every year, there is no better way to gain perspective than grab a copy of this well-researched and witty book that fiercely lays bare the gender-shaped hole in human history. Caroline Perez, a writer, broadcaster, and an award-winning feminist campaigner, brings her excellent research acumen and flair for debate to illuminate how the human society has been designed to suit the default setting called male. As a result, the female gender has always had to either unfairly adjust to the setting that did not take into consideration its existence or vociferously demand change often inviting the wrath of everyone.  Using mundane everyday inconveniences such as phones that are too big for their hands or city planning that was oblivious to their existence, to systematic structural inequalities such as assumptions of merit and skills at workplace that affect their progress and well-being, the author argues how women had to contend in a world designed for men.

Divided into six parts and sixteen chapters, the book delves into specific examples spanning the private lives to the public where the female is made invisible and its implications for everyone. Perez uses different types of data such as statistics to case studies, quantitative inferences to in-depth interviews to make her point. What makes her job extremely challenging and the reader’s experience exceptionally rewarding is that she succeeds in showing us the absences. Demonstrating care and domestic work, she unpacks the working of millions of women working invisibly and silently to keep the visible acts of male achievement alive. She also pulls up female achievement which has for centuries masqueraded as male genius, unearthing artists, scientists, doctors, engineers, thinkers, creators, and dreamers who contributed something original to humanity. She then discusses how can we build a future that is gender acknowledging.

Anyone who believes in an equal human society must read this work. So should individuals who are design thinkers and want to make a difference. So should young students and experienced researchers. This book indicates where we have been blind-sided and how to go about correcting ourselves. This work speaks of our unfair and unequal self-fulfilling psychological prophecies that have systematically failed to acknowledge girls and women as creative, constructive and capable human beings. My hope is that through works such as these, we have the persistence to also unearth other gender-shaped absences that have languished in the dark shadows of history.

  

 

 

Negotiating Rights in Neoliberal India

Zoya Hasan (2018), Agitation to Legislation, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, pp.178

We live in an age of social movements that connect local political demands of small communities to global movement of production and consumption. From Occupy Wall Street in the United States to Indignados in Greece and Spain, these movements articulate demand for rights based on claims of inequity and injustice. Beyond political resonance, they are tied by the same structures that they seek to transform- the withdrawing state, privatized services and coalition politics of neoliberal capitalism. These movements are vehicles of new discourse of politics as increasingly the old vocabulary of ‘class’ seem reductive as groups grapple with fragmented and multiple identities. In this context, this work explores rights movement in India through three prominent case studies.

The author of the work, Zoya Hasan is Professor Emerita at Jawaharlal Nehru University, one of India’s best universities for social science research. This book is a collection of three lectures she presented at the National University of Singapore. The work presents an overview of the campaign for right to food, the campaign against corruption and the campaign for women’s reservation bill for political representation. Woven within the history of contemporary India, Hasan contextualizes the narratives within the fold of neoliberalism. She explores the relationship between public protests, political mobilization and policy making.

Formal and Informal Politics

Hasan places the public movements for rights against the neoliberal paradigm of development that has made social entitlements to basic services such as food, health, education and employment legally enforceable. She specifically examines what makes some social mobilizations more successful in turning into laws than others. For analyzing this question, she explores the process through which public protest interacts with formal political mechanism, prioritizing itself, negotiating the specifics and competing with demands for rights forwarded by other movements. This framework pits the interaction between social movements and political parties as a site of competition, contention, dominance and resistance.

I found this work illuminating on two counts. One, Hasan deals with social movements in conjunction with party politics and traces the journey of a demand from the ground into the wells of the Parliament. Two, she compares the competing dynamics of various social movements that push some forward at the expense of others. For example, as she points out, the right to food campaign in India was successful in becoming an enforceable law because it was ensconced in a gamut of a group of ‘rights’ that gave it a sense of coherence and urgency that something like women’s reservation bill lacked. This type of insight makes it interesting to know what makes public protest click or fizzle out.

If you have been following contemporary social movement literature as a scholar, this is a great introduction to Indian case studies. If you just want to make sense of the politics of public protests, then this is a great first step!

Bring Back the Lost World!

Torill Kornfeldt (2016), The Re-origin of Species, Cntxt, pp. 236

Swedish science journalist Torill Kornfeldt introduces the idea of ‘de-extinction’, a process by which biological research attempts to re-introduce a version of extinct species as a method of conservation. Using preserved genetic material, there are scientific communities in different parts of the world that are trying to ‘rewild’ and ‘repopulate’ the lost species. This nostalgia for the lost world is associated with a vision of the future that raises ethical, moral, philosophical and scientific questions peculiar to the epoch we live in - the Anthropocene.

Fundamentally, rewilding changes the relationship between humans and nature. The species that get picked to have another go in this planet are the charismatic species that humans adore (beginning with Dinosaurs!). Furthermore, repopulation should happen in large numbers for species to thrive. The new species must be morphologically similar and perform the same ecological function. There is also the question of suffering of the animals who are being experimented upon as part of a concerted human vision. Of course, these questions come up only after we have successfully overcome the technical difficulties in genetic engineering.

Even though it appears as a story straight from scientific fiction, it was fascinating to understand the conviction and the decades of effort some of these projects have gone through. The age of the Anthropocene throws up many challenges and mass extinction is one of them. There are many ecological movements and genetic engineering technology that have come about to defend the planet. The de-extinction project - edgy, extreme and emotionally charged - is one of them.

This book is an English translation of the original Swedish version and there are a few bumps in editing. However, that does not really deter you from the flow of the story-telling. Kornfeldt uses the lively first-person narrative to bring out these stories and that is a great delight! Go for it!

Reborn

Nadia Murad (2017), The Last Girl, Virago, pp. 306

This is the inspiring story of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi girl born in rural Iraq, her extra-ordinary escape from sexual slavery by the Islamic State (IS) and her ongoing battle against sexual violence in war-torn regions as a Nobel laureate and an Ambassador of Peace. Born in the village of Kojo in Iraq, Murad led the ordinary life of Yazidi women with dreams and hopes for a peaceful future even as the rumblings of war and ethnic cleansing was all around. Gradually, what was commonplace - a family outing, harvest in the village field, pilgrimage to a holy shrine and communal celebration become more and more difficult as a minority community in a country increasingly defined by a narrow definition of nationalism.

As friends turn unreliable and strangers surround their lives, everything Murad and her family knew as a way of life comes to a standstill. She loses most of her family and her village overnight in a mass massacre and young girls and women are abducted as sex slaves and sold through an unbreakable chain of buyers and tormentors by the IS. In a first-person account, Murad details the harrowing sexual, mental and spiritual abuse as a woman and minority citizen as she is held captive and exchanged for money all across IS-held Iraq.

Throughout this inhuman and terrifying ordeal, Murad clings to the comforts of a happy past spent among her people and that of a gritty future she is determined to make for herself. She has to grieve for her lost self even as she mourns the loss of others. She has to define the meaning and purpose of her life from the searing pain of her past. She has to make home in a new country and fight for the rights of others like her. The strongest motivation to do so is the determination that she should be the last girl to go through such gruesome struggle for dignity and self.

I read and re-read this overwhelming story over a period of many days. The journey with her is filled with deep darkness and absolute light as she emerges alive and takes on the mantle of a survivor. It is baptism by fire that we all need to understand the kind of torture women and children go through amidst war and conflict.

The Second Homecoming

Arundhati Roy (2017). The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Penguin, pp. 445

When Arundhati Roy debuted with The God of Small Things, we were introduced to the expanse of spaces between people in her world, that both shaped and blurred them. Love, hate and everything between flowed among the characters like subterranean rivers, silent and deep. Exactly two decades after her first novel, she has arrived with The Ministry of Utmost Happiness. This is a story that is a world apart from that intimate exploration of the tiny village-world of Aymanam of her first novel. The world that this story takes places is all of India that is relegated. It is the spirit that pervades border and the heartland with equal alacrity, which does not fit with the temperament of the big narrative that makes India today.

The protagonist is characteristically, a trans-person, who is also a single parent. She occupies the ultimate borderland-between the alive and the dead- and lives in a cemetery in old Delhi. Strangers, who are mostly renegades, pass through and affectionately people her world. They come from the forests of central India to the valley of Kashmir, belong to all genders, creed and credo. They fight a narrative that steals their truth, hides their identity and muffles their voices. Yet, they are all thieves of another kind- secret keepers of conscience and inheritors of a disowned pedigree. In the corner, away from the rest of the world, they find friendship and fellow feeling, laughter and love.

Between the first and the second novel, there is a two decade long pause- in which Roy traveled many worlds within India. Her books of non-fiction, Listening to Grasshoppers, Broken Republic and The Algebra of Infinite Justice, critique and question the Indian state from the point of view of the adivasis, the displaced people at the wrong end of development and communities at the borderlands, especially Kashmir. Through this work of fiction, Roy explores the intensity of what it means to be marginal and the terror and insanity of violence that pervades lives at the margin. On her impulse to write fiction again, she recently remarked in an interview to The Hindu, “There was this huge sense of urgency when I was writing the political essays, each time you wanted to blow a space open, on any issue. But fiction takes its time and is layered. The insanity of what is going on in a place like Kashmir: how do you describe the terror in the air there? It is not just a human rights report about how many people have been killed and where. How do you describe the psychosis of what is going on? Except through fiction.” It is these layers of truth and the insanity of violence that is at the heart of this stunning second novel. 

Delhi and the Dark Arts

Elizabeth Chatterjee (2013) 

Delhi Mostly Harmless: One Woman’s Vision 
of the City 

Random House India, pp. 283

I began the year reading Liz Chatterjee’s portrait of Delhi based on the one year she spent collecting data as a doctoral student of the University of Oxford. There are many portraits of modern Delhi, beginning with the elegy written evocatively for the older courtly Delhi in 1940 (Twilight in Delhi by Ahmad Ali), to the modern project in the making that Delhi has become in the recent decades penned by academics (Unsettling Memories by anthropologist Emma Tarlo). My personal favourite books are those by that incorrigible breed of Flâneurs (City of Djinns by William Dalrymple) and novelists (Midnight’s Children and The White Tiger). There is also the attempt to know Delhi through its people (Capital by Rana Dasgupta) or visuals (Delhi: The Making of the City by Malavika Singh and Rudrangshu Mukherjee).

Liz Chatterjee is part flâneur and part anthropologist. Her memory of the city, its people, and its stories come out not in anecdotes or metaphors but as disjointed parts of a person. She literally senses the city around her and her chapters are arranged in anatomical terms- eyes, noses, hearts, veins and so on. And sometimes she gropes the pragmatic old lady Dilli followed by rubbing shoulders off the new city of Delhi. The savvy that carries an Indian along, part oblivious and part accommodative to the paradoxes and contradictions of any part of India she resides in-with  boisterous openness to outsiders and cold conservatism that builds hierarchy, the invisible ropes of high morals and low traps of indignity, can be mind boggling.

The usual dilemmas of finding a safe perch, making friends, settling into a routine in a new city is there; but what makes Liz’s story poignant is the solitude of a researcher, a foreigner, a non-Delhite- who is both an insider and outsider to the story. Liz is an enterprising raconteur and this comes out best in her uncanny ability to get her analysis right- she calls jugaad, the dark art that requires ingenuity to fix things, to have savoir-faire and not such technical skills. She is blunt and direct when describing the hundred indignities a woman goes through in private and public space, some very specific to the city. Through every difficult experience, what remains intact is her sense of humour.

What make her book delightful are those parts where she tries to preserve the experience of being with someone who is hardly likeable. She uses her sense of olfaction to store a million things that is worth a thousand words or photographs of the city she has lived in for a year. In one of my favourite parts of the book, she says, of the faint coconut oil that scents a woman’s hair, to the stink of stolen cigarettes, the mixture of sweat and cheap cologne and names a number of such things that made this story her own, ending with the glorious fragrance of burnt flat in the first rain of the season. Then she finds the right words for such a nose for nostalgia- manvasanai in Tamil and petrichor in English for describing the Greeks God’s blood through the veins of rock.

And in the end, she concludes, ‘Delhi, the delirious city, city of the tense present, future imperfect’. Comparing her across the globe, New York  may be a wise guy, Paris a coquette, Rome a gigolo, Berlin a wicked uncle and London an old lady- Delhi looks like an ageing Tsarina- ruthless, capricious, avaricious, paranoid and like all grandes dames, jingles with theatricality, bling and the so –bad-it’s-good.  At the same time, the modern city of Delhi, built for rulers and administrators,   is a sophisticated cougar, modelling herself to the twenty first century with overconfidence and attempts at self assertion of an adolescent. This duality of a theatrical old-hand who has witnessed human history and a restless adolescent trying to seek attention and assert her presence, makes the city difficult to like or understand but hard to ignore.

The Luminaries

 

   

The Luminaries, Eleanor Catton, Granta, 2013

“There is no truth except truth in relation and heavenly relation is composed of wheels in motion, tilting axes, turning dials; it is a clock work orchestration that alters every minute, never repeating, never still.”  

                                              

Eleanor Catton, all of 29 years won the 2013 Man Booker Prize for her second book, The Luminaries. Born in Canada and raised in New Zealand, Catton had literally travelled pole to pole, wondering at the sky turned upside down and all the restless inhabitants of the firmament, who with their limitless influence on the human life beneath, would partner her in grand and breathtaking story telling. The book begins with the arrival of a stranger in the gold fields of New Zealand in the 19^th century. He abruptly enters a stormy world of greed, passion and ambition and soon becomes an impromptu witness and inevitable insider. The intimate world of a digger’s town, rankled by a series of mysteries too incredible even for the schemers and conspirators, is slowly brought to light. It seems as though every man in town has an insignificant piece of the puzzle and a great claim to the outcome of fates. The sea farers, opium traders, masters and slaves are thrown into a devilish world of death, disappearance and treasure. In a land where every fellow is a stranger to the next man and foreign to the soil, the muddied and stained states of affairs conjure up unlikely alliances. 

A young heir to great wealth goes missing on a night an infamous prostitute tries to commit suicide. A hermit in the woods ends up dead with immeasurable wealth stowed away in his cottage. A harmless trunk disappears, a strange woman appears with occult powers to exorcise secrets from planets and stars. A rich tapestry unfolds to reveal a brilliant and exquisite story that gradually impacts the reader with a style that is substantial, grounded and strong. 

Catton remains true to the moods of strange times in a virgin land that is slowly being ravished by all kinds of men. The subtle pull of tension between the white man and the aborigine, master and slave, man and woman- all of whom covet wealth and safe passage to a serene future- is brought out exceptionally well. The capricious ambience of a gold mine that lures and traps men, smothers and nourishes their ambition, leads to unimaginable conflicts in the lives of the characters. In a land where one wills his destiny through the sheer acuity of one’s perception as if one is playing at whist, death and danger lurk like shadows. The only thing that is fixed and unassailable is what the mythical stars weave with their cold hands over slouch hats and flayed corpses- inchoate tales of elusive destinies. A brilliant book from a promising author!