Fiction is better than fact

Here is a collection of “new Indian writing” that defies the present state of Indian writing: its fiction is more interesting than its non-fiction, though there is less of it.

Urban Voice 4:
New Indian Writing
Editor: Sunil K Poolani
Leadstart; Rs 150; Pp 184

For instance, here is Ramachandra Guha with an essay titled “Social Banditry”, on re-reading historian E J Hobsbawm’s classic, Bandits. Hobsbawm makes a distinction between ordinary criminals and “social bandits”, who are drawn from the peasantry and have local support; Guha measures India’s Maoists against this definition. Match? Yes, he says, but also no.

Aakar Patel writes on “The Ugly Indian Middle Class”. The class has no “culture”, he says, and offers, among many other things, numbers and examples relating to classical music events (audience size and sophistication, ticket prices, financial support) in Indian and Western cities. Kankana Basu, in “Gone Away”, tells of the epidemic of lonely senior citizens in India, with children lovingly raised but now living in other cities or other countries.

Wider family bonds are dissolving, says Basu, and the price will eventually be paid by the children.

Shashi Warrier in “So Betrayed” recounts a chance meeting with a Bhopal gas survivor who tells how the tragedy changed his family’s lives. “Bush killed foreigners. Our government kills its own,” Warrier concludes.

Tishani Doshi in “A City Called Madras” nostalgises about genteel Madras before it became brash Chennai.

Full review here Business Standard

The reading life - Gandhi, Nehru, Ambedkar

As another August 15 passes by, here’s a thought: what would our country have been like if the leaders of the freedom movement had not been readers?

It’s easier to see them as writers. Mahatma Gandhi’s autobiographies, letters and other work have provided gainful occupation for thousands of scholars. Pandit Nehru, incarcerated in jail, bereft of reference books, set pen to paper and produced The Discovery of India, Glimpses of World History and Letters From A Father To His Daughter. B R Ambedkar’s Who Were The Shudras, Castes in India and the autobiographical Waiting For A Visa still hold the attention of readers.

And it is their progression as writers that historians and thinkers like Ramachandra Guha and Sunil Khilnani have written about. But to study the libraries of India’s leaders is to realise how relentlessly, and sometimes restlessly, all of them, from Maulana Abul Kalam Azad to Sarojini Naidu, read as a way of understanding the values by which India would be formed.

Gandhi came to English uneasily; the alien tongue made him a virtual prisoner of silence on his shipboard journey to England. In South Africa, as a lawyer who had got over his initial fear of speaking in public, he put together a formidable and eclectic library.

Full report here Sify

‘Nothing but a poet’

On the Mount Rushmore of Indian nationalist iconography, we can expect to see, as we pass by in an aeroplane, Gandhi’s and Nehru’s faces carved into the stone. The third face is a blur — but the myopic likeness is of course Ambedkar’s. The fourth visage just may be Tagore’s.

And this, you feel, is largely the company Tagore will keep in the days leading to his 150th birth anniversary: Nehru, Gandhi, Ambedkar. I repeat this litany verbatim from an article by Ramachandra Guha, who, reassessing Tagore, considers him eligible for a place in the constellation of India’s founding fathers. “If Tagore had merely been a ‘creative artist’,” Guha says, “perhaps one would not have found him fit to rank alongside those other builders of modern India.” Of course, Tagore was much more, as famous poets of colonised nations were especially doomed to be. WB Yeats, in ‘Among School Children’, describes his public role thus: “The children learn to cipher and to sing,/ To study reading — books and histories,/ To cut and sew, be neat in everything/ In the best modern way — the children’s eyes/ In momentary wonder stare upon/ A sixty-year-old smiling public man.” The children are learning to be citizens; they are perhaps also being civilised “in the best modern way”. (If anything, the Irish, as a subject race, had worse opprobrium heaped upon them by the English than the Indians did.) But Yeats’s sparse diction and his unobtrusive line-endings hint that, in the midst of the citizen-making, the intruder has been identified as both a diversion and a fake; the children, with their staring eyes and ‘momentary wonder’, have found him out: and we, like Yeats himself, are estranged from the public persona. Later in the poem, Yeats lets on that he knows perfectly what he is at 60: “a comfortable kind of old scarecrow” and “old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird”. Outside of the “momentary wonder” and the stares, to be an ageing poet, a mere “creative artist”, is to be nothing at all.

Full report here Hindustan Times

Past Present

I’ve forgotten where I’d read this, but way back when we were a newly independent nation wondering what our national language would be, someone (I forgot who) made a suggestion (which, fortunately, I do remember, or else I would have had to begin this post in some other way) that was dismissed immediately as ridiculous.Southerners (among others) objected strongly to the proposal that our national language should be Hindi. There were many reasons for this, but one related to script. Devanagari is not the script of the South, so the suggestion was this: to make Hindi more palatable to people from the South, it should be written in Roman – i.e., using the English script.

The suggestion was, as I said, dismissed immediately as ridiculous. Because who on earth would read Hindi in English and why should they anyway, when Hindi has its own script?

I think of this every time I see an advertising hoarding that writes Hindi (or Marathi) in English. It never, ever fails to make me chortle. Because it is ridiculous, but, since the 90s, this is what’s been happening in our popular culture. Perhaps old whatzisname who made that suggestion was right after all.

I’m not certain at all, but I think I read about this Hindi-in-Roman suggestion in Ramachandra Guha’s India After Gandhi, which is a history of the country since Independence. It is a huge, massive tome, the kind that is really hard on your wrists, but I found it utterly fascinating and read it at almost one stretch through a weekend.

Full article here Hindustan Times 

'Sonia would have been a housewife if..'

Dr Ramachandra Guha is much more than just a historian and biographer. An Indo-American Community Visiting Professor at the University of California at Berkeley, his books include a pioneering environmental history, The Unquiet Woods, and an award-winning social history of cricket, A Corner of a Foreign Field.

Dr Guha, 49, is also the author of India After Gandhi: The History of the World's Largest Democracy, published by a division of HarperCollins.For long, he was respected among the intelligentsia for being a historian. But his frequent television appearances that reflected his young attitude and clarity of developing history made him popular among the masses. His passions include the environmental movement in India, cricket and Indian history. With sheer eloquence and passion, Dr Guha took the analysis of cricket and cricketers to a higher pitch.

''The Congress, historically, has been inclusive' In Part-I of an exclusive interview to rediff.com's Sheela Bhatt, Dr Guha, in his own masterly ways, explains the making of Congress party, its historic journey and, deciphers the nuances of its core philosophy. Read Dr Guha's views to know what lies in future for the party and for India.

What kind of thoughts come to your mind as the Congress completes 125 years?
I would like to separate my views and prejudices about today's Congress, and, my sentiments as a citizen of India from the perspective of a historian. For the historian, the first thing to remember about the Congress is, of course, that it is the most important political party in the history of modern India. Globally, the Republicans in America and Conservatives of Britain and the Congress party of India are three of the most important, most durable and most influential political parties in the history of the world. The Labour party in Britain was born after the Congress in India. So, the Congress is the most important political party in the non-Western world. It had a profound impact on national liberal movements in Asia and Africa. It wasn't restricted to India. In fact, the African National Congress took its name from the Indian National Congress.

Full interview here Mynews

Ramachandra Guha moves to Penguin India

Penguin Books has acquired the rights to publish seven books by the renowned historian and biographer Ramachandra Guha, in what is perhaps the most significant literary acquisition in recent times. According to reports, Guha will get an advance of Rs 1 crore for the books.

The first of the seven books that Penguin will publish, in 2010, is The Makers of Modern India. This major work shall trace the evolution of modern India from the nineteenth century to the present through the lives and works of the country’s most influential political thinkers.
The Past and Future of Indian Democracy, a book of essays on the issues and individuals who together define, champion or challenge the idea of democracy in free India, will be published in 2011.

Subsequently, Penguin will publish Guha’s magnum opus, a definitive two-volume biography of Mahatma Gandhi. This, the biggest, most comprehensive and important biography of Gandhi ever, will equally be a portrait of India and South Africa in his lifetime and an examination of his contemporaries in the struggles he led. The two volumes will be published in 2012 and 2015, respectively.

These four titles are certain to be the biggest non-fiction works in the subcontinent over the next few years.

In addition to these, Penguin India will re-issue three titles from Ramachandra Guha’s remarkable backlist. Revised and expanded editions of Savaging the Civilized, Guha’s biography of Verrier Elwin; Environmentalism: A Global History; and The States of Indian Cricket, a collection of Guha’s cricket writings, will all be published in 2011. Penguin already publishes Ecology and Equity, Guha’s book on environmental issues (co-authored with Madhav Gadgil).

Ramachandra Guha is among the most widely respected historians and non-fiction writers of our times. Born in Dehradun in 1958, and educated in Delhi and Calcutta, Guha pursued an academic career for ten years before becoming a full-time writer. He has written on a variety of subjects including environmentalism, sociology, social and political history, and cricket. Over the years, his books have been critically acclaimed and have found a widespread popular following as well. This is especially true of his recent book India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, which was published last year. Also in 2008, Guha was named one of the hundred most influential intellectuals in the world by Foreign Policy and Prospect magazines. Early this year, Guha was awarded the Padma Bhushan. He is also managing trustee of the New India Foundation, a non-profit body that funds research on modern Indian history.

Ramachandra Guha’s move to Penguin is among the biggest events in the Indian publishing industry in recent years. Speaking about his move to Penguin India, Ramachandra Guha said: ‘I am delighted to be published by Penguin. I have long admired their excellence in all aspects of publishing—editing, production, design and marketing. I look forward to a long and productive association’.

Ravi Singh, Publisher, Penguin Books India, added: ‘It’s a great privilege to be the publishers of such an original and influential thinker and historian. These books, to be published over the next six years, are on the most significant and fascinating aspects of our national life. It doesn’t get any bigger or more important than this in contemporary non-fiction.’

India focus at London Book Fair

More than 45 leading Indian writers, translators, critics, academics and industry professionals will be coming to the London Book Fair, to take part in a varied programme of events based on themes of cultural and linguistic diversity, designed to enable better market understanding through contemporary literature between India and the UK. This is the first time such a wide variety of authors has been showcased in this way, and the event will bring together the largest representation of Indian writers ever assembled at a publishing trade show.

Writers including Javed Akhtar, Amit Chaudhuri, Namdeo Dhasal, Ramachandra Guha, Jaishree Misra, Daljit Nagra, Anita Nair, Bhalchandra Nemade, Nandan Nilekani, K Satchidanandan, Shankar, Vikram Seth and Pavan K Varma will take part in a series of ten seminars and readings at the Fair, as well as additional events in London and around the UK. These events will highlight the richness and diversity of contemporary Indian literature, with over 15 Indian languages represented across a total of 40 events.

The British Council is hosting the following seminars:
- Imagining India: the world of fiction
- Home and the world
- Literature of identity
- Literature of conflict
- India writes
- India translated
- Literature of the cinema
- Bestsellers and popular writing
- Literature of ideas
- Battle for the Indian reader

Susie Nicklin, Director Literature, British Council, said: “Many people in the UK feel they know India and her writers, which is not surprising given their justified success in this country; many readers in India feel they are au fait with British contemporary literature. In fact, all of us will benefit hugely from this opportunity — a major part of an ongoing British Council programme – to discover more about each other’s literary cultures and societies.”