The Kingdom of Queens

Manu S. Pillai (2015). The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore, HarperCollins India, p.694

Chronicling the history of Travancore as it was a kingdom once and then a princely state in British India is no mean task, especially for a first time writer. Manu S. Pillai, the daring debutant, has accomplished such feat with natural felicity! Nearly seven hundred years of history of a small kingdom in southern India is unique not just because of its natural beauty or famed riches, but also because of its dramatis personae- the matriarchs of royalty. In retelling a story of ascent to power, women’s inheritance in family, war and palace coup, this book is riveting.

Pillai uses a rich array of historical documents, private papers and in-person interviews to reconstruct the story. He deftly balances out the famous incidents and anticipated characters with the rare and unheard-of incidents. For instance, the painter prince Ravi Varma makes a theatrical entrance and so do the well known maharajahs and dewans of commendable exploits like Marthanda Varma and Velu Thampi Dalawa. But in the broad brush narrative, the author does not lose the richness of details that personal eccentricities and social circumstances that gave birth to momentous events. We encounter the shrewd regent queens who govern ably surviving court intrigue and later come out as king-makers. No stone is left unturned to build the future of Travancore- the human, the divine and the abhorrent (black magic and sorcery) are in command to lay the foundations of its destiny.

In a book that follows the destiny of royalty and their princely state, rivalry and scandals are inevitable. But the best part of the book is the space given to a nuanced understanding of the social history of policies of reform. Land laws, health and education policies, equal opportunity and modernisation were ushered in Travancore through gradual and consistent investment in public policy. The priorities and personal weakness of its rulers and regents were sometimes obstructive to development and their obstinacy and nepotism deleterious; but the history of Travancore seemed to have a life that was vitalised by its social movements and democratic participation of its people. The temple entry proclamation to people of all castes, land reform, opening of education and employment to qualified individuals and movement for women’s emancipation require special mention for the way they have been built into the narrative. It is in echoing the other voice, that of the people, that the story of its rulers remain complete and coherent.

Historical narratives of the princely states that made up modern Kerala in accessible narrations in English are rare and this book fills that much needed gap. A magnificent effort for a first book!

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 Grim (Humour) that Stole this Christmas

The Sellout, Paul Beatty, OneWorld, pp. 289

The grim humour that stole this Christmas for me is Paul Beatty’s The Sellout. The first novel by an American author to win the Man Booker Prize, the book is a biting satire on race relations in a country that has just seen the end of an African American Presidency.  And it is in questioning these large symbolic breakthroughs in ameliorating the everyday lives of any group that is not mainstream that the book does unabashedly. The collective resistance under the leadership of Dr Martin Luther King, the rejuvenation set out by Harlem renaissance, the historic Presidency of Barack Obama are taken as one off events and questioned on both intrinsic and relative merits on the community they sought to better and ended up leaving worse off.

‘I whispered racism in a post-racist world’, says the protagonist, who is an African American tried in the Supreme Court for owning a slave and practising racial segregation. Indeed our protagonist is a product of experimentation from childhood and bears its brunt with an equanimity that accepts reality and attempts to change it by using its own logic. He makes it through his childhood home schooled and generously experimented upon by his father a behavioural psychologist. In this process he becomes an object and this experience of total isolation from agency exists in him with fierce bouts of resistance. He loses his family, his neighbourhood disappears from the maps and minds of the administration and he is left hanging listlessly with his friends in a no man’s land. From this window incognito, he strikes back using the very instruments that made him suffer. He makes the entire society flinch by unleashing the same kind of experiments back on them.

Of this novel, I can say the journey is the message. The language with its endless puns, metaphors and slang is abrasive and uncompromising. On writing this book, Beatty remarked, ‘It was hard for me to write, it’s a hard book to read.’ There is savage wit ripping off every holy cow, blurring the sacred, eviscerating the sacrosanct, lampooning nuance leaving us with just the heart of the problem. But then, Beatty trenchantly puts it in his novel, ‘being offended is not an emotion.’ Parts of the book make us laugh, then cringe and in many significant ways reflect the times we live in.

This book was turned down eighteen times by established publishers before being accepted by a small two people publishing company in Scotland called Oneworld. It is also the publisher’s second Booker in a row after last year’s winning novel ‘A brief history of seven killings’.  As far as the Man Booker prize goes, satire barely makes it as favourite. Yet, out of the 155 books that entered the prize this year, The Sellout was the unanimous choice of the jury and is a great work of fiction comparable to the tradition of Jonathan Swift and Mark Twain.

The Renegade Apostle

Amos Oz (author)/ Nicholas de Lange (translator), Judas, 2016

There are two stories here, both of them, timeless and tender. In the fringe of Jerusalem in harsh winter, Shmuel lives a contented life, going about his graduate studies at the University, political activism with like-minded friends and a tender longing for the woman in his life. The quiet of his commonplace life is suddenly disrupted and he is compelled to be the conversation companion to the aging and argumentative Gershom Wald. In the closed confines of that mysterious house, he meets the enigmatic Atalia. The avid Zionist in Wald and the mysterious Atalia open to him a world of new possibilities.

Shmuel’s enquiry into the character of Judas, the traitor of the son of God, ends in his assessment that Judas may not be the renegade apostle, but an ardent believer whose immutable faith leads to his own tragedy and his teacher’s. More than anyone, Judas was awaiting the ultimate miracle from his master, the return from death, even as Jesus questions himself relentlessly. It is with Jesus on the Cross, irreversibly lost to the world, that Judas comes to terms with the complete breakdown of his faith and the fatality of his persuasion. With the core of his belief shaken, the only possible way out is death.

By traversing with the beliefs of Judas, we are travelling through one of the most sought after and abused road of treachery and betrayal that has simmered in medieval Europe between Judaism and Christianity. What is the most inventive part of the book is Shealtiel Abravanel, the only man who opposed the Zionist project as the modern apostate equivalent of Judas. Traversing through the veins of old Jerusalem of Jesus and Judas, Shmuel unwittingly also crosses the dreams and destiny of the sparring friends Wald and Abravanel, insider and outsider, believer and traitor, Zionist and apostate in a war of ideas about truth, faith and mercy.

One of the boldest novels from a perpetual favourite for the highest honour in Literature, the Nobel Prize, Amos Oz does it again long after his magnum opus ‘A Tale of Love and Darkness’ and does it with the panache of a master storyteller. His is a vision that brings together the proximity of diametrically opposite notions of trust and betrayal, love and hate, the safe confines of lost inheritance to the words and ideas of our times. And in doing so, how tender the strength of our views looks in the eyes of the other and how the certainty of our justices shudders in the pain on the other side! Truth, ever so fragmented, lies in so many voices on both sides of the transgression.

Arguing for India: Essays on Democracy

Ramachandra Guha (2016) Democrats and Dissenters, Penguin Allen Lane, pp. 316

This book, as the author points out in the beginning, is the fourth in the series of political history and commentary on the career of Republic of India. Beginning with India After Gandhi, Makers of Modern India, Patriots and Partisans, we have the fourth in the series, a collection of essays like its immediate predecessor. This book  speaks of political events as well as the protagonists who shaped the contours of modern India. Guha succeeds in bringing out the nuances in understanding the twists and turns, the largest democracy in the world has taken. Of sketching the personal eccentricities of the varied personalities especially scholars like Dharmanand Kosambi and Eric Hobsbawm, Guha is tender and delicate. It is in these deeply intimate portrayals of the scholar and his work, that Guha is non pareil.

Guha begins with an unerring analysis on the imminent death of the Indian National Congress and compares it in context with other emerging political alternatives. Conceding the life these popular alternatives are likely to take on in the contemporary history, Guha laments the value that an inclusive, nationalistic, secular political front had in safe keeping some of the cherished ideals of the Indian Constitution- namely democratic political order, equality and freedom of expression, political liberalism and secularism. He ruminates on the nature of Indian Constitution, its elements of idealism as well as caution in the wake of independence when the foundation of the democracy was threatened by extremism from the left and the right. The essays in the first part deal with the political evolution from the birth of independent India, through the contours of differences that people and political movements shaped, in the country. An important value of this work lies in the rich comparative perspective with South Asia with India’s Kashmir problem, Sri Lanka’s Tamil Nationalism and Pakistan’s fight with terrorism.

Nothing is more evocative than the author’s tender portrayal of people. The intellectual and intimate portrayals of ideologues in the second half cover the celebrated debate with Amartya Sen as much as a sensitive account of his contemporary Andre Béteille. The arguments Guha picks with these personalities are also arguments on and about India. The debaters are fierce defenders of democracy and within its rich pluralistic tradition, they argue, dissent and concede with fiery logic but with utmost dignity.

These essays are delightful to read and ruminate on. The book throws light on a fascinating array of new information patiently researched and poignantly written by one of India’s foremost historian and tenacious researcher. More importantly, the work is an invitation to dialogue on some of the searching problems that modern Indian democracy faces- from citizen rights to freedom of expression, from equality and dignity to dissent in the democratic tradition.

The Mountain Girl

The Black Hill, Mamang Dai, Aleph, pp.295

Every hour was a preparation and prayer to bid farewell to the grounds and leaves. Tidy the place and pack things to be elsewhere. Both Father Crick, the Missionary from France imbued with the original passion of his vocation and Gimur, the Abor woman longing to explore the mountains share this thirst for an adventure.   ‘A fire draws people together’, say the elders of the tribe and it was a curious fire that lay in the pit of their spirit that kept stoking them to wander away in search of new meanings.

This novel is a fictionalized account of Father Nicholas Crick the nineteenth century missionary from the Missions Étrangères de Paris to Tibet to spread the word of God. But Tibet, like a Holy Grail, remains unattainable to him. Throwing himself to the fate, the padre has to depend on the kindness of strangers and tribesmen for safe passage to the forbidden land that Tibet was. He makes his way through the treacherous mountains of North Eastern India, being the messenger and the medicine man, healing bodies and souls. His strange alter ego is Gimur the wild woman, breaker of all taboos, mother and daughter, who is prodded into an all or nothing passion to save the people she loves.

Set in the backdrop of Colonial India where the British were guarded in their approach of the tribesmen of north eastern India, the coming of Father Crick is an omen. He becomes the unwitting part of a dramatic war between the British and the ferociously territorial people, as they fight for their land, gods and livelihood. And the two people who are peace makers, nomads and believers of peace are thrown into the pit of deceit from which there is no safe passage.

Intensely researched and evocatively written, Mamang Dai’s novel is a superb and thrilling account of an adventure. As it narrates the compelling story of politics, faith and struggle for land, the story sheds light on the history of the Abor and Mishmee peoples in Colonial India. By tracing the history, the story also gives a possible direction for the future political course that the claim for land and belonging would take.

Mamang Dai is a writer with great sympathy for her characters and understanding of the complex historical context she seeks to explore. Her prose flows like the rivers that shape the contours of her story. I found the writer as a gift from a dear friend from Assam and cherish the discovery. Dai is one of the promising writers to look out for in Indian writing in English.

Interesting Times

Svetlana Alexievich, 2016, Second-Hand Time, 

Juggernaut, pp. 570

“Our children aren’t like us. What are they like? Their own time, each other.”

Somewhere in the book is the Chinese curse, ‘May you live in interesting times’. This is the story of the lives and times of the erstwhile Soviet Union, its fall and the time that came after. What was one day politics became forbidden the next, what was once crime became business later. How did people live through the nation once envisioned, in the protracted kitchen spaces of democracy where there was dissent and disillusionment? Svetlana writes, ‘Freedom was materialised out of thin air: everyone was intoxicated by it, but no one had been really prepared. Where was this freedom? Only around kitchen tables where out of habit people bad mouthed their government….it is when you can live without having to think about freedom, Freedom is normal.’ That little patch of freedom was the kitchen talk.

How did these people normalise the war time spirit that flowed into their peace times, into generations of loyal dreamers? From the soldiers of a war, people had to transform themselves to its public servants. When the future determined by a great idea comes to a standstill with the fall of the idea, faith, beliefs, lives are lost not to death but to time that keeps flowing. Then time does come second hand. This space of black and white- of what once was and is lost- blurs your vision and ruins your spirit. It is a dangerous place to live because there is no time to enjoy life there. How did they negotiate belief, faith, joy, love and sorrow and above all the vicissitudes of everyday desires?

This is history written from below, sewing the voices of many as they retell their story as they experienced the rise and fall of the soviet. In a form that mixes reportage and oral history, Svetlana leaves a narrative documentation that brings voices and counter voices open to new interpretations of a lost time. Like an epic chorus or a collective novel, the gathering strength of many voices gives us truth through meandering prose of contradiction. Svetlana lets people speak for themselves with their jumbled memory, immediacy, proximity and nostalgia as well as the terrible efforts at erasing longing and arriving at closure. It is futile to draw ‘meaning’ or interpretation in the narrative; rather what is overwhelmingly rich is the context that one person is- it is in her vast miniature expanse that every event happens and every value shatters and is remade. What makes these voices poignant is the way in which each individual comes to terms with a great idea that was bestowed on them, the collective memory that is left unarchived and now the history that is hidden from everyone. It is a history that is washed with intimate feelings. 

To Question or Not?

Romila Thapar et al (2016) The Public Intellectual in India. Aleph, 170 pages

This book deals with the question-what type of society do we wish to construct? A meaningful discussion on organising institutions that adhere to the values that we cherish can happen only in a liberal space. ‘Being a liberal is an attitude of mind’, Romila Thapar writes, that allows space for expression of ideas filtered through ethics and reasoned thinking. A public intellectual is a person who creates and guards this liberal space by bringing in varying perspectives on issues of public interest. In this role, she is an autonomous thinker pursuing the epistemic logic of seeking truth. Secondly, she is also the crusader of the ethical logic that stands for social justice. The problem is that both these interests can conflict with each other. How to resolve this ‘internal’ conflict forms one part of the book.

The second part of the book is about the external space and time in which the public intellectual resides. In this dynamic space, public intellectuals belonging to different schools of thought debate issues that are relevant to our society. From these ideational discourses, forces that shape institutions of the state as well as society are formed. Furthermore, the public intellectual also makes a large and varied corpus of knowledge interrelated and accessible to a wider audience. She is in this sense both interpreter as well as producer of knowledge for others.

An educated public in today’s times is likely to be a discerning public that can effectively participate in democratic processes concerning power and its distribution in society. This process that relates knowledge to society makes an ordinary individual think analytically, creatively, autonomously and logically.

A wide range of questions about questioning is raised in this book. What are the battles to fight and what are the battles to let go? What is the role of silence in understanding things around us and in expressing our thoughts? What are the rules of thinking and framing questions? These are some of the provocative and illuminating thoughts presented in the essays of the book with a vibrant tone and contemporary context.

A detour of historical tradition of the public intellectual also gives some useful insights to our own construction of the ideal. At a time when the liberal space is narrowing due to various vested interests both of states and of corporations, the question of autonomy and justice remains open to construction. One of my favourite parts in the book is the contemplation on the absence of the right liberal in contemporary India.

What makes the book enriching is its own identity as a battlefield of debates among five public intellectuals of India today. This is an important work of our times that questions our fundamental assumptions about the way knowledge forms and transforms society.

What is Wrong with Regular Economics?

Richard Thaler (2016), Misbehaving: The Making of Behavioral Economics, WW Norton & Company

Since Adam Smith’s time, the ‘invisible hand’ has ruled the dynamics of markets and equilibrium, at least in the academic corridors of economics. Real life economics, the way people make decisions from choices presented to them thinking about tradeoffs of their present selves with their future, of potentials gains with risks of losing has played out differently. People are not wholly rational- always knowing what is best for them, always knowing how to achieve what is best for them. If that were so, we would have less collision paths in the places we work, the people we marry and the investments we make. We think and feel, we are not intelligent enough to make balanced assessments of all options and so we make mistakes.

This idea of the blundering, floundering regular person is at the heart of Richard Thaler’s Misbehaving. When the stakes are high, the problems are complex and people are not experts, we make mistakes, we behave foolishly and we misbehave. The assumption of the pedantic rational genius is a myth, but it is also a costly myth. It is not just the accumulated mistakes of people that should worry us, but the assumptions that are made of us and the policies that are taken on behalf of us in the real world. Policy making is populated by experts who assume our rational boundaries and design structures that can trip us and confuse us. Ever since, Harold Lasswell called public policy the ‘policy sciences’ in the 1950s to the present day, discounting our irrationality and randomness of events has cost us wealth erosion, work place stress and general disharmony with the things around us.

Thaler’s enchanting narrative retells the story of how a group of young and vibrant minds began to question the neatness of the formulas and the elegance of the solutions by counter posing them with the clumsiness of understanding and confusion in vision. People behave through pattern recognition, swapping long and hard logic for short heuristic jumps, riskier and profitable options to safe loss-averse choices and making a penny’s worth by playing games that are not always moral or legal. In a world besotted with mental accounting, misremembering and biases, how can we still design public policies to make people obey traffic signals and encourage them to save more through pension funds?

Peppered with small and big milestones of understanding the real world through the eyes of economists, psychologists and sociologists, this narrative of the birth of applied behavioural science is both fun and deeply instructive. Questioning theoretical insights with the practical edge of wisdom, abstract rational powers with short sighted mistakes; it lays bare our incapacities to deal with the complex world. Therefore, what is at the disposal of an expert is sound evidence and some tricks to nudge and prod us into ways that might be good for us. In a world of bounded rationality, will power and resources, saving us from ourselves might be effective sometimes.  A wonderful read!

The Historian as the Detective

"It often seems to me that all detective work is wiping your false starts and beginning again.”
         -Agatha Christie, Death on the Nile

Over the century, the detective has managed to remain in his carapace, intact in idiosyncrasy. She may have gained a savoir faire of a new time, harbour new skills or exhibit stranger eccentricities. But her functional personality that houses- a keen sense of the narrative, the estimation and exploration of human nature, the unravelling of the story one layer at a time- remains intact. The acquired expertise to compete with conflicting narratives posed by the antagonist, knowledge of exacting depth and constant tendency to be an outsider make her both intriguing as story teller and endearing. So too is the reluctant but tenacious historian who peels off layers of a plot by the sheer tenderness of his labour and tenacity of pursuit. And this is what Siddhartha Mukherjee does by retelling intimate histories of maladies and human endeavours.

He has come upon us as a medical historian, the elusive counterpart of lawyer detective- the pugnacious logician and police hunter combined. His method is laborious as much as exacting like his choice of subject. He prefers intimate histories, counting each day of the story, taking tours and detours, chasing red herrings and stumbling upon the truth almost as an aside to the story. Both in his The Emperor of all Maladies and The Gene, this sense of serendipity that makes us party of stunning chance encounters and the weight of history that is laid with care on the reader’s purview makes it breathtaking and evocative. The duality of lightness and burden, accidents and intentions, mutations and inheritance, loss and gain also renders the stories he tells with a human voice. This voice is capable of being in awe at the endurance of human endeavours and quail in terror at the vicissitudes of life. We are witness to a battle of man v life, human v metastasis and inheritors v ancestors.

The detected soon assumes a compelling role as the narrator, exhibiting the fallacies of the original detective, man. The ever truant cancer cells multiply in utter defiance of the laws that govern the biological world; the genes bury their secrets in reams of junk letters and codes. It seems that anything worth investing has this truancy of its own that refuses to be captured in a single human story.

Therefore, the story that Siddhartha Mukherjee painstakingly narrates is many stories folded into one book, it has as many truths as there are readers. It divides and combines the vantage points, always shifting, always transient to make the victor vanquished and the dead alive. His narrations are magnificent and compellingly human- the protagonists are everyday heroes, housed in the everydayness of their work and life except that one fine day they were called to witness some miracle and were easily compelled to embark on a journey to understand it.

As in his The Emperor of  all Maladies, a biography of cancer, he repeats the same tenor and vigour with The Gene, an intimate history of man. Here’s a historian turned detective, who remarkably solves one case and leaves open many questions difficult to answer.