Yes, another one! Yet another blog? For quite a long time, I have been reading blogs on books by other crazy popular bloggers and just been overwhelmed by the idea of starting my own: would any one care if I did write one or not? But it struck me that it was important that I do write one. And so, here I am…to strike up a conversation on books. Thank you for joining in…
The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told, Selected and Translated by Dasu Krishnamoorty & Tamraparni Dasu
Published by: Aleph
India has a rich repository of languages that adds to its multi cultural fabric. Apart from the 22 official Indian languages recognized under the 8th Schedule of the Constitution, there are hundreds of languages and countless stories being written and narrated over time in different tongues, stories that that would stay unread and lost to a majority if not for translations. Literary translations give a peek into the treasure trove of authors and their works and through them; a small opening into worlds we have not been familiar with but want to be. And though there are cross language translations from one Indian language to another, it is the English translations that find a wider readership across the country and beyond.
Aleph’s series of The Greatest Stories Ever Told has been effectively bringing into focus the works of authors writing in Bengali, Urdu, Odiya, Hindi, Assamese, Gujarati, Kashmiri, Tamil and Telugu recently through a selection of short stories from each language. Each anthology in the series have been equally appreciated and dissected by readers for their selection of authors and their works, which only shows how the ‘Greatest Stories’ are being noticed.
The latest addition to the series, ‘The Greatest Telugu Stories Ever Told’, Selected and Translated by Dasu Krishnamoorty and Tamraparani Dasu is a collection of 21 vibrant stories that are diverse in their range of themes, expression and setting. The introduction to the collection is wonderfully woven and points out that the inclusion of the stories have been made keeping in mind the diversity of Telugu writing cutting across the homogeneity of demographic and geography. The father-daughter translator duo in fact mentions their curation of stories as an ‘imperfect attempt at providing a sliver of a cross-section of some of the best writing to have emerged over the last several decades’.
With writings from Telugu not being so much translated into English as much as Tamil and Malayalam are, this anthology is a timely reminder of how much needs to be translated.
There are stories on the ravages of history, those around the politics of caste, about domestic lives centered around the challenge of stretching one’s income, about human assumptions around other people, about a child’s whim of wanting to skip school for a day and what eventually happens at the end of getting his way. From the political to the domestic, from stories on the dynamics of power in offices and society, to ones about personal prejudices, this collection touches on themes that are all too real and common.
Three stories around government employees struck me: one has a high level official realizing belatedly how everything revolving around him was due to the power vested in his designation and how retirement is going to strip it all away; another has a not so high level Government employee who has a good amount of money coming to him and how everyone in the family demands a part of it even as he has spent his entire life working so he could save some amount for a few things he has never been able to afford – a trip by train, some home appliances while yet another story features a few callous government employees posted in an impoverished area, on whose decision and action, rests the fate of a young boy who needs a caste certificate.
More than the situations in each story, what stands out are the many layers that emerge. ‘Water’ by Bandi Narayanaswami for instance looks at how people across the country today continue to run around to get some water to run their households and while at it, brings the politics of electoral rivalry as a plot point and highlights the ineffectiveness of the civic institutions and the failure of urban planning despite all the airs of ‘progress and development’. It also has a male protagonist who you want to drum some sense as he vacillates between being the lord of the house and feeling sorry for his wife as she runs around to get some water.
It is this overlapping of themes that are being balanced out in the short run of each story that makes this collection striking. The Madiga Girl by Chalam, a writer, philosopher and male feminist author addresses the male gaze and their toxic nature with an unnamed male protagonist clinically recounting how he has ‘impregnated’ his wife for ‘the sixth time in the eight years of our marriage’, his fantasy and lusting over the young girls in his wife’s village. He stalks a particular girl, all the while normalizing his behavior, almost giving it a male fantasy spin, something he is entitled to till the time he finds he is no different from other men who prey on young girls.
Vempalli Gangadhar’s “Festival of Love’ has a rhythmic lilt while bringing alive the festivities in the air around the Sankranti festival touches on how an upper class man considers it his entitlement to win the favours of a young girl. It is both a story that looks at young love, consent and entitlements. It is this overlapping of themes, all skillfully balanced out in the short run of each story that makes this collection striking. The translator duo of Dasu Krishnamoorty and Tamraparani Dasu has surely selected some of the best short stories written in Telugu with representation across the demography and those that have been written across different time periods. The bonus for readers in English of course is the discovery of writers you want to read more while hoping there will be more translations available!
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Writing letters to parents across the distance of geography while trying to take in a different culture, the settling in to a new world – this is something that is no longer the norm today where video calls and instant messages over various platforms reign. But when writing letters and receiving them was the only means to assuage one’s yearning for home and all things familiar or fall deeper into the sickness for home; one wrote about anecdotes and insights, about discoveries over things new and rare similarities while asking for validations that the home we left behind is still the same as we knew it.
‘An American Girl in India: Letters and Recollections, 1963-1964’, a collection of letters from the correspondence that author, academic and Indologist Wendy Doniger wrote to her parents during her first visit to India for a one year period is a reminder of that time, apart from being an insight into the first impressions of someone who would go on to become an authority on Hinduism and world mythology, as a young woman in a strange new country. The larger part of Doniger’s letters are around Shantiniketan while some are about the then Calcutta and her subsequent travel notes and impressions but more than a documentation of the author’s footprints, it is an intimate account full of discoveries and self realization, cultural shocks and assimilation, learnings and observations.
Interestingly enough, the year that Doniger stayed in India happens to be an eventful period for India and for her own home, America. It is the year after the Indo China War and the beginning of shimmering tensions between India and Pakistan. It is also the year US President Kennedy gets assassinated. In between Doniger’s letters accounts about her immediate surroundings, her fellow students at Shantiniketan, the staff and their fascination with her; it is her keen eye on the larger political winds blowing around her that gives readers a fascinating peek into socio political environment in India from a wider perspective. Doniger writes about the palpable public ire against the Jawaharlal Nehru, the Indian Prime Minister for the Indo China War fiasco and his sidelining of political leaders in West Bengal in a succinct way even as she reacts in a most emotional manner to the news of Kennedy’s assassination.
Doniger’s letters to her parents has the nostalgia of her home and the things she has shared with them – it shows in her references to songs and films and lines and passages from books she has read, it has the usual concern that foreigners have about India – the hygiene and water (and some stomach upsets) but what stands out is the way she warms up to Indian scripture and dance through practice and constant engagement, the architecture of old temples and how they are more symbolic and artistic over the European designs of New Delhi and learning Bengali and Sanskrit as much as throwing herself into the intellectual philosophy of examining Hinduism and Indian mythology.
Her letters read like conversations full of wit, verve and humour making the reader in you a part of the scenes she is describing while adding an outsider’s account, but one from very close quarters and very often, without any prejudice and coming from a seeker’s humility. Many of her accounts cut close to home: the chaos that makes India what it is and the many dichotomies that exist in our socio cultural fabric. One of the many hilarious examples of the former is the author’s consternation over how ‘life is very approximate here’ when she arrives at Bolpur en route to Shantiniketan and she finds the sign at the railway station reading ‘Bolepur’ while the post office spells it as Bolpure and the students spell it as Bolpur or the way she describes with the most minute details the scenes around a family puja with kids and incense, the priest and his airs. Of the many dichotomies in India, she writes about how men and women are segregated in socio cultural settings and yet end up eloping, how ancient paintings in temples where people come to pray and make offerings depict the many shades of sex which is again, a taboo in conversations. Of course, these contradictions have gone on a different tangent politically and otherwise in India since the author’s observations decades earlier.
Shantiniketan comes alive through Doniegr’s letters – as a legacy of Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore’s worldview comes alive, its multi cultural synergy, the creative and artistic pursuits it facilitates for students not just from India but abroad as well. The only overbearing thing she finds is the over ‘Bengali-ness’ around her – the way newspapers devote themselves to everything Bengali with only a bit of what is happening in foreign shores.
Doniger’s letters are a testament of her awareness of how her white-ness and her American roots comes with its privileges of opening doors to her in her academic journey as well as in the social settings she finds herself in. They are also a nod to how a country that has emerged out of colonial rule remains fascinated with all things foreign. The passage on the author explaining her being Jewish and that all Jews do not live in Israel is a bittersweet tragic comedy of sorts, revealing how most of us go and slot people.
Reading the author’s early but very solid impressions about the India she saw and discovered decades earlier does make one wonder, of whether things have changed at all in the country and not so much in a good way. Doniger’s mentions of the prejudice against Muslims amongst the most educated and well connected people juxtaposed between accounts of how common people helped one another cutting across religions in the days leading to the Independence of India and the aftermath shines light on the deep fractures on religious lines on one hand and the ties of humanity on the other.
This is a book that takes readers to an earlier time along with the author and her discoveries and journeys into a country’s staggering cultural legacy while trying to find its way under the weight of communal prejudices and distrust.
Azad Nagar: The Story of a 21st Century Slave Revolt by Laura T Murphy
Published by: Harper Collins India
Fiction: Non Fiction.
Book summary:
Millions of people around the world today are enslaved; nearly eight million of them live in India, more than anywhere else. This book is the story of a small group of enslaved villagers in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, who founded their own town of Azad Nagar after staging a rebellion against their slaveholders. International organizations championed this as a nonviolent ‘silent revolution’ that inspired other villagers to fight for their own freedom. But Laura T. Murphy, a leading scholar of contemporary global slavery, who spent years researching and teaching about Azad Nagar, found that whispers and deflections suggested there was something troubling about Azad Nagar’s success.
Murphy embarks on a Rashomon-like retelling – a complex, constantly changing narrative of a murder that captures better than any sanitized account just why it is that slavery continues to exist in the 21st century. Azad Nagar’s enormous struggle to gain and maintain liberty shows why it is unrealistic to expect radical change without violent protest – and how a global construction boom is deepening and broadening the alienation of impoverished people around the world.
*My Review:
*Thank you Aleph Book Company for the review copy. All opinions are my own.
If you thought slavery doesn’t exist in India today; Azad Nagar: The Story of a 21st Century Slave Revolt by Laura T Murphy, Professor of Human Rights and Contemporary Slavery sets the record straight, showing just how much we are off the mark. It takes a mere 128 pages for the author to break down how we compartmentalize the plight of workers who do not have the agency to ask for a safer work environment or the long hours they put in for very low wages.
Think workers in sweatshops, think of employers taking official identification papers and refusing to give them back, think of landless farmers working for a pittance and compelled to take loans at interest rates that the landowner decides. We have never looked at this as a form of slavery, have we? Murphy makes the point on how the abolishing of slavery in India took on a new form of bondage that is entrenched deep within the set hierarchy of the caste system and how power is vested with the upper caste communities. Drawing on her work on contemporary global slavery, she highlights how slavery today means the inescapable forced labour that people across the world take up due to the situations around them – often with no means to survive or fend for themselves.
Murphy then links the overview of slavery to how the most marginalized communities in India remain in bondage across generations even as they are able to exercise their right to vote. The major part of the book is of course set around the uprising of the Kols, an impoverished Adivasi community in Uttar Pradesh, against their upper caste landowners in the year 2000. She examines the circumstances that led to the uprising and then dissects the many layers that got added over the years – whether things changed for the community and what exactly transpired during the course of the uprising.
And no, if you try to find more information about how an Adivasi community revolted against their landowners, eventually going on to establish an Azad Nagar of their own, you wouldn’t find much media coverage, at least not on Google. This reflects two critical areas about Azad Nagar and the Adivasi uprising. The first is the unsavoury truth that many in India, are still uncomfortable to acknowledge that slavery exists, just in a different way than it used to be. Secondly, the uprising in 2000 was a one off incident that did not lead to any institutional change over the years and did not merit much interest from the media to have been documented or discussed at length.
Murphy looks with a critical eye on the inter generational burden of debts leading to indebted labour with little in return and how welfare schemes and protective measures under the Scheduled Caste or Schedule Tribes do not make much of a difference as the signatories are vested in the hands of the upper caste land owners. She is just as critical about the narrative set by NGOs working with Adivasi groups heralding the uprising as a shining example of triumph and travels on ground, meeting the people who had taken part and connecting the dots over the events that unfolded. She finds that the making of Azad Nagar has achieved little despite the efforts put in by NGOs to make Adivasis the owners of land and that the community has new burdens to bear – their lives do not matter at all but are interchangeable for the development of the country, more so when there are profitable mining and quarrying opportunities.
Murphy’s writing provokes one to delve into the overall socio political realities of India: that while the country has the 4th highest number of billionaires in the world, the Adivasis are counted amongst the poorest people in the world. There is just the right balance of academic text with ground reportage style that makes this short book extremely readable while pulling the right punches.
Published by: Penguin India/Hamish Hamilton (India)
Book Blurb:
Gujarat, 1964. The agrarian system of renewable annual contract mandates full time labour on the houses and farms of landlords. In these bleak circumstances, Iso, a tanner by birth, graduates from being a child labourer to an adult serf on the estate of Mavaji. His life is one of humiliation, hunger and drudgery, and the only respite comes in the form of Diwali, Mavaji’s daughter. Between them exists a physical relationship that is shrouded in secrecy, shame and fear. Even as Iso creates distance between them, a chance encounter turns to violence and tragedy, and he faces the brutal sword of caste patriarchy.
Based on the blood-curdling murder of a Dalit boy by Rajput landlords in Kodaram village in 1964, Vultures portrays a feudal society structured around caste-based relations and social segregation, in which Dalit lives and livelihoods are torn to pieces by upper-caste vultures. The deft use of dialect, graphic descriptions and translator Hemang Ashwinkumar’s lucid telling throw sharp focus on the fragmented world of a mofussil village in Gujarat, much of which remains unchanged even today.
My Review:
A young boy and girl drawn to each other by the first rush of physical attraction, both straining to push against social proprieties:— this has been the basis of numerous love stories on screen and in print. And yet, in the hands of Gujarati Dalit literary icon Dalpat Chauhan, this template takes off on a fiery tangent, one that lacerates the comfort of the world you know, by taking you to another, where one’s caste determines how you live, breathe and die.
Known for his powerful commentaries of the oppression faced by Dalits and Adivasis through his plays, novels, poetry, short stories and critical essays; Dalpat Chauhan’s Vultures, translated from the Gujarati (Gidh, 1991) by Hemang Ashwinkumar is a horrifying reminder of the inequalities brought upon by the deeply entrenched caste system in India. Published in 1991, Gidh is based on a real incident, the murder of a young Dalit boy by upper class Rajputs in 1964 in a village in Gujarat, a little less than two decades after India attained its freedom.
The title of the novel is a nod to the very nature of society’s disposition towards vultures— , one marked by deep aversion and distaste. The vultures are figurative and they are also allegorical symbols to capture the way Dalits are treated and perceived.
In the introduction, the translator of the book, Hemang Ashwinkumar, a bi-lingual poet, translator, editor and critic, points out how “‘the vulture’s memory has been shunted to the margins by the custodians of cultural memory, for it is too stark and too discomforting to confront.”’ Here, he alludes to how literature and publishing perhaps, has given room to more dominant voices at the cost of marginalised ones.
The narrative in Vultures is stark right from the very beginning. An old Bhalabha walks to his home from a small shop owned by an upper class man. Bhalabha’s brief interaction with the small boy looking after the shop indicates there is little to be hopeful about in the story that lies ahead: the former blabbers away while the latter is least responsive.
As Bhalabha slowly makes his way home, the narrative acquaints the reader with the lay of the village itself: the segregation of houses by caste, the difference in atmospherics with each lane wearing a different air by, due to the nature of the work that the members of each caste take up.
Lost in the dredges of his memory, Bhalabha becomes our narrator. He provokes some tough questions, as he takes us through the fate of a neighbour whose young son, Iso, a tanner, is an indentured labour at a landlord’s house.
The barren world of the lowest in a toxic feudal order is brought home with the token payment that Iso and others like him receive in return for round the clock work– a bowl of gruel. It is emphasized in the description of how animal carcass is carved out, distributed for food and then cured in the sun. The weight of dead animal, the stench, the clamour for meat amongst humans, and birds, and animals of prey, and the lastly the dark reminders of the acute hunger of those who toiling in the fields, face even as they stock the granaries of the more privileged who exploit them; all of these establish the mood and caste politics of the setting.
There are only two female characters in the narrative, and both are victims of the system. There is Vhali, – Iso’s mother who slaves away just like her husband does, to keep the home running but who must hold her tongue in check and be servile to him. Then there is Diwali, the young girl who, like Iso, has been married off as a minor. She discovers the temptation of physical desires and longing, and throws caution to the wind with the safety net of her social place as the landlord’s daughter. But Diwali’s transgressions make Iso a victim.
The author’s references to how animals fare much better than those deemed to be of low caste ensuring you are left disconcerted. A passage where Iso is being beaten to near death, the pain making him imagine himself as a buffalo being cut and carved up will stay on with you, as will the book. Go read!
The Greatest Kashmiri Stories Ever Told, Selected and Translated by Neerja Mattoo
Published by: Aleph Book Company
Fiction: LiteraryFiction, Translation, Kashmiri Literature
Book summary:
The Greatest Kashmiri Stories Ever Told spans almost a century of work by some of the finest writers of short fiction in the language. The storytellers included here range from the earliest practitioners of the craft of short story writing—Dinanath Nadim, Somnath Zutshi, Ali Mohammad Lone—to more contemporary writers like Dheeba Nazir.
Some stories in this collection are realistic dramas that hold up a startlingly clear mirror to society, such as Sofi Ghulam Mohammad’s ‘Paper Tigers’, or lay bare the pain of losing one’s homeland, as Rattan Lal Shant does in ‘Moss Floating on Water’. Then there are others like Ghulam Nabi Shakir’s ‘Unquenched Thirst’ and Umesh Kaul’s ‘The Heart’s Bondage’, that look beyond the exterior and focus on the complex inner lives of the women of Kashmir.
Selected and translated by Neerja Mattoo, the twenty-five stories in this volume, all born out of the Kashmiri experience, will resonate with readers everywhere.
About the Translator:
Mitra Neerja Mattoo is an eminent writer, teacher, and translator who has taught in Kashmir for over three decades. She has published five books, the most recent being the critically acclaimed The Mystic and the Lyric: Four Women Poets from Kashmir. Her works have been published by the Sahitya Akademi,
*My Review:
*Thank you Aleph Book Company for the review copy. All opinions are my own.
The Greatest Kashmiri Stories Ever Told, selected and translated by Neerja Mattoo brings together 25 short stories is a stark reminder of how literature suffers but also holds on tenaciously in the face of the complexities that beset a troubled place. The array of stories across writing styles and approach in terms of the themes they tackle is a poignant note on how much of Kashmiri literature remains buried under the weight of personal and political trauma.
Right from the translator’s note detailing how much of the Kashmiri literary canon is absorbed into the Indian literary space, this collection brings home to the reader the universality of stories across cultures and geography while remaining unique because of them. Are these stories of Kashmir: the food and the socio-political culture, the brooding despair of not knowing what will happen in life? Or are these stories of human lives that are defined by the situation around them? I dare say it is the latter.
And so you have stories centered around the domestic sphere or those set in neighbourhoods that are perceived as being socially acceptable but how it is within itself, its own world made of imperfections. There are stories of young friends who are good for nothing for other people and who have no sense of the import of life situations and yet they reveal their most basic emotion and empathy when least expected. There are stories of communities that are knit together by their shared anguish of the insecurity of their lives, the hopes they hold that someone will come back from their beholden duty of protecting themselves and there are stories of exploitation, by men of other men and to such an extent that they don’t have a mind of their own, an exploitation borne from the privilege and power of wealth and the servitude that acute poverty leads to on the other.
My only grouse with the collection is that of the 25 stories, only 2 are by women writers but then the realities of writing emerging from troubled spaces is that women are less likely to write or have the space for their work to be nurtured. This is a lovely addition to the Greatest Stories Ever Told series brought out by Aleph Book Company though I wish they would increase their font size (my eyes hurt!!).
This series has received flak from readers who question the selection or non selection of certain stories but I am of the firm belief that adjectives like ‘Greatest’ or ‘Best’ are subjective and nowhere in any of these editions has any of the editors who worked on them said they were the ONLY greatest stories ever. I have been an editor myself for a newspaper and edited a few short stories myself and it takes a broader reading of the texts we get to read to realize that word play isn’t easy and a lot of thought is behind the process. There is not going to be one compact collection of short stories, which are the greatest and the rest not there yet. Every reader, every editor will have his or her own list because of different sensibilities.
A Venetian at the Mughal Court: The Life and Adventures of Nicolo Manucci by Marco Moneta, Translated from the Italian by Elisabetta Genecchi Ruscone
Published by: Penguin Vintage/Penguin India
Fiction: Non fiction: History, Travel.
Book summary:
The man who witnessed India’s history in the making.
Venetian Nicolò Manucci’s story is distinct from those of other European travellers and adventurers who documented their stay in India. The young teenager, who arrived on Indian shores with little education and few connections, lived here till his death at the age of eighty-two. He was witness to some of the most dramatic events in the subcontinent’s history.
Living by his wits, he started his career as chief artilleryman in Dara Shukoh’s fratricidal battle against Aurangzeb for the Mughal throne. Thereafter, Manucci joined Rajput general Jai Singh in his campaign to subdue the Maratha leader Shivaji.
However, Manucci had no stomach for a prolonged military career. With a great capacity for learning and immense good fortune, he made his way into the Mughal court, incredibly, as a court physician to Aurangzeb’s son Shah Alam. In service of the future Mughal emperor, Manucci was to head back to the Deccan once again to meet the challenge posed by Shivaji’s son Sambhaji. Manucci would spend the rest of his life within European settlements in Madras and Pondicherry. And his in-depth knowledge of the Mughal court would prove useful in negotiations between the Europeans and the Mughal authorities.
Marco Moneta tells the gripping story of a man who was witness to the intrigues and rivalries in Mughal and European territories, and who not just survived but rose to a position of influence and respect in a hostile and alien world.
About the Author:
Marco Moneta has authored a volume on the great Italian poet and philosopher Giacomo Leopardi. Over the last decade, his interests and research have been aimed at the interactions between Europeans and Indians in the early modern age. A Venetian at the Mughal Court is the first result of a work in progress on European travellers to South-East Asia in the seventeenth century.
About the Translator:
Elisabetta Genecchi Ruscone is a social anthropologist and has published several works in English and Italian on her research into the cultures of Oceania.
*My Review:
Thank you Penguin India for the review copy. All opinions are my own.
A Venetian at the Mughal Court: The Life and Adventures of Nicolo Manucci by Marco Moneta and Translated from the Italian by Elisabetta Genecchi Ruscone is a non fiction that brings history alive. This is a book that is as much a rich narrative of the socio political history of the then India (or a major part of it ) towards the end of the 17th century and the beginning of the 18th as much as it is a memoir of a young illiterate Italian who came to India as a teenager and found himself in the thick of things, eventually becoming an important voice in political dealings between different camps and whose accounts of his observations and experiences form the core.
If you thought History is not something you can ever warm up to, you don’t know what you are missing if you do not read this one. Manucci’s life is the adage of ‘truth is stranger than fiction’ holding true: from a young boy left with no support in an alien country, he uses his intelligence and his ability to adapt to situations around him and becomes a part of the Mughal Court. He works his way through different rulers in various capacities: as a diplomatic negotiator due to his linguistic skills and his practice of socio cultural customs, as a soldier in the artillery unit and as a medical practitioner, the latter by dint of his personal intelligence. his ability to connect physical ailments to matters of hygience and diet and an insatiable desire to read up on medical treatment and use that knowledge to treat the cases that came to him.
Marco Moneta’s writing is clever in the way he balances Manucci’s accounts in the books he wrote with those of other European contemporary travel and history writers. He becomes not only the reader’s guide into Manucci’s writings but also in the larger backdrop of the situation around him then, the socio cultural narratives abound in India and the political landscape. In doing so, he draws up a grand canvas on which Manucci brings colour and depth. Those who love to read History/non fiction, this one is for you and for those who stay away from History, this one is still for you: read it as a narrative full of plot twists and you will have quite the ride.
The Unforgiving City and Other Stories by Vasudhendra, Translated by Mysore Nataraja
Published by: Penguin Viking/Penguin
Fiction: Short Stories,Literary fiction
Book summary:
From the Karnataka Sahitya Akademi winner Vasudhendra comes a powerful collection of stories that shock, move and amuse by turns. As the characters struggle to find their feet in a fast-changing India, they mirror our unspoken dilemmas, torn loyalties and the loss of innocence.
In the extremely popular ‘Red Parrot’, an innocuous image from childhood returns to haunt a man when he visits his idyllic hometown. In ‘Recession’, the desire for a child leads a couple down unexpected paths. In other stories, a young woman in love rethinks her future when buried family secrets are suddenly revealed; a boy learns that insomnia may be the symptom of something more ominous; lonely apartment residents discover the thrills and perils of social media.
Deftly crafted with gentle wit and a lightness of touch, each gripping story exposes the deepest contradictions of modern life. The fluid translation retains the flavour and nuances of the original Kannada, creating a rich reading experience.
About the Author:
Vasudhendra runs his own publication house, Chanda Pustaka, which publishes and encourages new writing in Kannada and has instituted the Chanda Pustaka Award which recognizes young short story writers. The author of thirteen books in Kannada,Vasudhendra has won many literary awards, including the Kannada Sahitya Academy Book Prize, the Da Raa Bendre Story Award and the Dr U.R. Ananthamurthy Award.
About the Translator:
Dr Mysore Nataraja is an acclaimed writer in Kannada and has published several collections of poems, plays, short stories and essays. He is the recipient of many literary awards including the Gorur Award (2004) and Alwa’s Nudi Siri Award of Mudubidri (2018).
*My Review:
Thank you Penguin India for the review copy. All opinions are my own.
Vasundhendra’s The Unforgiving City and Other Stories, translated from the Kannada by Mysore Nataraja has 12 stories to offer its readers, each a deft narrative weaving in contemporary elements with the vestiges of the old. The stories set in contemporary backdrops builds on traditional elements so well that I ending up reading them one after the other, and finishing the collection within a day!
From a company employer set on hiring women employees who are not planning pregnancies to cut maternity leave in ‘Recession’ that touches upon to the rush for high pressure jobs cushioned by lifestyles on credit basis and what happens when the bubble bursts to When The Music Stops that looks at parents taking to changes in their life due to the urban choices that their offspring makes, one that includes warming up to accepting an inter marriage prospect, these stories show how the old and new ways sometimes merge together: tentative, uneasy but inevitable.
The beauty of the urban and traditional facets and elements in the stories lie in the way they are not placed at odds with one another. The author does not pitch his characters in a face off nor make the reader take sides but gently probes the ways in which both are part of our times. The stories are relatable and believable expect for ‘Nimmi’ which has an element that can happen only in the realms of fiction but there too, the narrative is one of that looks at the lonely lives of an older parent and how he gets attached to a dog gradually while his son works abroad.
The Red Parrot does go all out in terms of pointing out how the urban eco system breaks the traditional ways but here again the author doesn’t harden stances but reflect the larger worldview of how onerous the task is to reconcile development without moving away from the beauty of nature in it’s earlier ways. The title story is embellished with numerous strands: urban living set in an apartment complex with residents connected over social media chat forums and where the engagement reflects the larger narrative in the country today of people taking sides and being split in the middle with unrelated opinion getting more traction than anything else which is then linked to how society today still looks at single women and those emerging from an earlier marriage. This goes out from me as a major recommendation for everyone who loves a good narrative and very good writing.
What Vasundhendra does with his stories in this collection is place both sides of society as we know today: its traditional core and its fast advance into an overwhelming new world that is diametrically opposite and yet has come about to be. His stories emerge from the sides mixing and trying to blur the hard and at times jagged edges and it his narrative, the characters that he places in the situations they are in and how they emerge or submerge to it that makes each story quite the thing it is. Go read.
The Odd Book of Baby Names by Anees Salim
Published by: Penguin Hamish Hamilton/Penguin India
Fiction: Literary fiction
Book summary:
Can a life be like a jigsaw puzzle, pieces waiting to be conjoined? Like a game of hide-and-seek? Like playing statues? Can memories have colour? Can the sins of the father survive his descendants?
In a family – is it a family if they don’t know it? – that does not rely on the weakness of memory runs a strange register of names. The odd book of baby names has been custom-made on palace stationery for the patriarch, an eccentric king, one of the last kings of India, who dutifully records in it the name of his every offspring. As he bitterly draws his final breaths, eight of his one hundred rumoured children trace the savage lies of their father and reckon with the burdens of their lineage.
About the Author:
Anees Salim is an advertising professional and critically acclaimed author. Three of his earlier novels have been accorded a host of literary prizes. His works have been translated into several languages. The Odd Book of Baby Names is his latest novel.
My Review:
Anees Salim’s The Odd Book of Baby Names is a testament to his story telling skill and narrative flair. Eight unforgettable characters hold center stage with their stories and distinct voices; each, a progeny of a King who lies dying after a spell of living in a realm of his own. The eight are just the known progeny of a King rumoured to have fathered over a 100 children, each given a name by him and nothing else. The novel is pegged around a book of names that the King has written down of each of his children born across his kingdom and to women from different social strata. The names are entered along with a brief meaning but very tellingly, without the names of the women he has bedded reflecting how women were dispensable to the larger scheme of things for powerful people.
Set in the mid 60s in an unnamed location but with enough hints to suggest it is Hyderabad and it’s last King that is being fictionalized, Salim’s latest novel effectively captures the decaying world of a ruler and his kingdom, the hold he once had over his people and courtiers but also touches upon the decay of the physical body and mind. As the King lie dying over the days, the lives of the 8 offspring unfolds, each revealing how little he means to them but throwing a giant shadow over them by his absence and the fact that they are of him. Some of the 8 offspring cross paths, some in close proximity, the rest not knowing they are related but every single one of them carrying the burden of being his child in myriad ways. Parts of the narrative strike a socio political chord, especially in the sections that hint at the way Hyderabad and its Nizam was co opted into India and then left in disarray, parts of it flesh the tumult and landscape of a by gone era, parts of it making you chortle with a deadly humour and overall so seductive that you want more than what the 207 pages has to offer.
Is there an analogy in the 8 protagonists living separate or connected lives and yet disconnected from one another with the way citizens trudge through the decisions that present day rulers take with no thought for how it affects the common man and woman hoping they would be noticed and taken care of ? That would be for the author to disclose.
But what the writing and the structure of the narrative tells you is that here’s creative magic happening and all you have to do is submit. The mood, the expression and tone in the narrative shifts every time there is a change in who is the narrator, just the thing that tells you, here is a wordsmith at work. Go read this if you are looking for something off the track but in a very good way.
The Plague Upon Us by Shabir Ahmad Mir
Published by: Hachette India
Fiction: Literary fiction
Book summary:
Kashmir in the 1990s, a setting not very different from today…
As blood drips from the pellet-stricken eyes of young men, Oubaid watches a plague of blindness spreading through the streets of his homeland, Kashmir. A voice in his head tells him that he knows who brought this plague, but acknowledging it would mean Oubaid must confront his past and the horrors he has witnessed…
The Plague upon Us portrays Oubaid’s memories from the perspectives of four residents of the Kashmir valley who were once childhood friends – a militant, a rich man, the daughter of a social climber and a member of the Brotherhood. As the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle fall into place, there unravels the full tragedy of a people looking for solace and a place to call home.
A searing and power-packed reflection of our times, this brilliantly crafted novel announces the arrival of an arresting new voice in contemporary fiction.
About the Author:
Shabir Ahmed Mir is a writer and poet and has been awarded the Reuel International Prize for fiction in 2017. The Plague Upon Us, Shortlisted for The JCB Prize for Literature is his debut novel.
My Review:
Kashmir, of contested space and troubled lives, of complicated narratives and numerous players with agendas that are politically motivated or are out there for personal gain or both, ones that are at odds with one another, or meeting briefly and then opposing one another again. Kashmir, of lives that are too fragmented to be able to admire the scenic landscapes, that tourists come to exclaim over and label as ‘heaven’ but which remain a living a hell for its natives. It is all of this in the context of Kashmir that is the setting of Shabir Ahmad Mir’s The Plague Upon Us.
Shortlisted for The JCB Prize for Literature this year, Shabir Ahmad Mir’s debut novel captures the vortex that Kashmir has been in over the years, leaving a trail of numerous people who continue to be traumatized beyond repair, dead bodies beyond recognition and forced disappearances by flagging the political flashpoints of what keeps a militarized state going, the fault line that were created, all through strong character arcs and their background stories.
An invocation from Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex sets the tone for the book:
‘By such death, past numbering, the city perishes:
unpitied, her children lie on the ground spreading pestilence,
with none to mourn:
and meanwhile young wives, and grey haired mothers with them,
uplift a wail at the steps of the altars, some here, some there,
entreating for their weary woes.
The prayer to the Healer rings clear, and blent therewith
The voice of lamentation.’
Mir’s writing is striking: it reads like poetry, almost like a ballad on suffering with staccato bursts of pain and anger. The economy of words used throughout the narrative can come across as mere story telling but read between the lines, in between the conversations of various players, and you can see that there is more than meets the eye. The tone is reflective, at times, a rant or politically charged and then, deeply philosophical. But mostly, it asks how does one look at truth and reality when you have been played and placed in layers of what could be truth or what could be falsehoods?
Following the fate of four childhood friends over the same time frame and mostly over the same turns of events but each filling in an additional layer, the narrative brings in a host of characters of different hues, from their different positions and by doing so, repeatedly asking what is truth if it can be manufactured, what is life it you are fated to suffer, what is free will if your wings are clipped and the sky is a torment, out there, but beyond your reach? The four main protagonists cuts across socio economic backgrounds and it is only in their names and trajectories that we can see who they represent, a device that effectively stays away from pigeon holing which side is right or has more credibility as the one wronged. Each of the main characters and those around them are impacted by violence both physical and psychological and reach a point where the male protagonists in turn perpetuate the same form violence on to others to devastating effect.
The four narratives touch upon everything from the old feudal power structures in Kashmir adapting to the changes taking around them by playing dirty with different forces to stay in the game and how they have been living for generations by exploiting nomadic communities; the aspirations of youthful ideology getting stranded at the crossroads with no way out except taking to the gun, either of the Government or those against it; the fate of women and young children and the trauma of men bruised raw by circumstances around them, the collective anger and trauma of suffering, the burden of survivor’s guilt, the saviour complex that the Armed forces bring to the table despite knowing they can only keep their guns busy, in turn only adding to the calumny, the lack of credibility and political leadership.
This is an assured debut that says what it has to, with an insight that is nuanced and is fiercely honest. The book works on many levels: the writing; the character arcs and the way they lead their lives in the shadows, wary and unsure of how events around them will place them; the dashes of magical realism in between the talks of political history and ideology. The blurring of fact into fiction is done just right: those who know a bit of Kashmir will find the facts: the brief political and electoral history covered through the background stories of a few characters, the shift from calls for Azaadi by many to blurring it with the ones for Jihaad and the infamous PAPA II interrogation center operated by the Border Security Forces from the late 80s to the mid 90s fictionalized as TALK 1 operated by the Army.
Albert Camus’ The Plague looked at the affliction of the mind, of the darkness that was the reign of the Third Reich with a Cholera epidemic as a metaphor. And in The Plague Upon Us, Shabir Ahmad Mir goes directly for the bone in the first passage of the book with red and black mirroring the mood in Kashmiris: red for rage, red for the blood that is being shed and black for the bleakness, the indescribable horrors and the weight of trauma, the unsure footing of everyone caught in a precarious setting, the blackness that consumes everyone in a cesspool of not knowing what comes next, the black following the red in a helpless dance. Mir’s main characters are compelling and one cannot help but feel bad for each one of them while seeing them emerge from childhood games to more deadly and fatal ones, each a victim of who and where they are and how they don’t matter in the end in the larger scheme of things. The plague in Kashmir is both red and black. It is an affliction across generations, a curse to be avoided if only one knew how.
The Plague Upon Us is all of 232 pages and yet it brings out with a sharp essence not just the complexities that lie with Kashmir and its people but also the more universal concepts of morality, the quandary over what are rights and what are wrongs. The latter is done, for good measure, by bringing in references to literary analogies starting with Oedipus Rex yes, but also starting and ending each of the four narratives in a surrealistic setting where the conversation is akin to the Arabian Nights. A main character who starts out as a simple youth stumbles on an article that his journalist father had written about Nicholas Gogol’s writings, a writer known for his surrealism and the grotesque while Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment becomes a topic of discussion between two characters. But it is how the beginning and the end are tied together, all the while holding the pieces in between: the descent into personal hells that touch upon one another to become a poisonous collective hell, the incoherent blabber of a character hinting towards the futility of words that emerge from and around Kashmir by various actors, the trajectory of a character in a headspace that is selective about what he has done, and bordering on madness, the losing of the grip over reality that makes Shabir Ahmad Mir’s hold on the reader complete.
And no, he offers no hope, not in the narrative and not through his characters, he offers no solution for surely, that would be akin to the empty promises that the powers that be have been spouting with little showing for it over the years.
How are You Veg? Dalit Stories from Telugu by Joopaka Subhadra, Translated by Alladi Uma and M Sridhar
Published by: Stree
Fiction: Literary fiction, Translation, Dalit Writing
Book summary:
Translated for the first time into English, Joopaka Subhadra’s stories expose the lives of Madiga women, the most oppressed among Dalits in Telangana. As she declares that she has drawn these from lived experiences, the reader in turn witnesses the cruelties in the lives of the Dakkalis, who are wandering bards, disturbance in the old feudal hierarchies with the arrival of educated Dalit youth, lack of compassion in society for women with disabilities and the absence of accountability in Government institutions, society and the State. The Stories reveal the subtle discrimination practised despite education and employment. Those on the politics of food are particularly intriguing.
About the Author:
Joopaka Subhadra is a Telugu Dalit activist, poet and writer. She has also written numerous political essays, book reviews, songs and journalistic pieces. Through her work, she has been instrumental in establishing Mattipoolu Women Writers’ Forum. Her writings have been published in various literary and feminist journals.
About the Translators:
Alladi Uma and M Sridhar teach English at the University of Hyderabad and have been doing collaborative work in translation. Their translations as well as articles on the subject have appeared in many journals. They published a translation of a collection of short stories by Volga entitled The Woman Unbound: Selected Short Stories. They have won the Jyeshtha Literary Award and Katha Commendation Prize for their translations.
*My Review:
*Thank you Stree for the review copy. All opinions are my own.
Translated from the Telugu by Alladi Uma and M Sridhar, How are you Veg? by Joopaka Subhadra is a compilation of 23 short stories that the author says reflects the lives of the Madigas, most oppressed amongst the Dalits of Telangana. The stories make you think and look deeply within at how we can even barely comprehend that in this day and age, there are people who are not treated as equal in society, communities that are marginalized because of what they eat and what work they are restricted to doing across generations.
The beauty of this collection is that the stories, the tone of the characters are not restricted to voicing the injustices that are heaped on them, the oppression they face from others but also talk about the oppression within and how that plays out under the weight of patriarchal norms and belief systems, the abuse of people with physical disabilities.
The stories are then a mix: there are those that make you examine where each of us would stand in case we come across someone who has lived through generations of caste trauma and violence. For after all, don’t many of us even equate food habits with pure/impurity without looking at where that privilege comes from, looking down at those who eat non vegetarian fare and further equating it to morality? There are stories that bring out how for each step that is taken forward, like say reservations in institutions and electoral systems, there are many steps backwards and sideways. One story that looks at how a woman is propped up to win an election in the local body and she is made to realize that she has to think, act and be like the others of the high caste since the position is suitable for them. Another one is about how parents send their children to hostels to educate them, fighting off generations of being kept out of the education system in the hope that they would break the caste barrier and yet, there they are grossly mistreated because of who they are and what they represent.
Joopaka Subhadra’s writing has a strong narrative voice, one that makes you feel you are in the thick of things. Her subtle yet strong positioning will make you just a bit aware of how our own entitlements and privileges comes at the cost of the suffering of others. The stories in this collection bring out in just so many ways how even young children become aware of the way they are looked and treated with, reacting to it with childlike horror or indigence or just reconciling themselves to it, setting the pace for how the rest of their lives will be. Make this a must read!
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