It is sad to hear of eminent litterateur and academician Nabaneeta Dev Sen‘s passing away. She had been suffering from cancer for a while. She is known an incredible body of work but one essay of her’s that gets discussed often is “When women retell the Ramayana”, published in Manushi. Prof. Sen had presented this paper at “The Sita Symposium”, Columbia University, New York. ( Download the pdf.)
8 Nov 2019
Book Post 49 includes some of the titles received in the past few weeks. Wherever available Amazon’s Kindle widget has been embedded in the blog post. It will allow you to browse through the book before you decide to buy it.
3 Nov 2019
The Reith Lectures were inaugurated in 1948 by the BBC as a ‘stimulus to thought and contribution to knowledge’ and has remained a flagship programme in Radio 4’s broadcasting ever since. The name marks the historic contribution made to public service broadcasting by Lord Reith, the founder of the BBC. John Reith maintained that broadcasting should be a public service which ‘enriches the intellectual and cultural life of the nation’. It is in this spirit that the BBC each year invites a leading figure to deliver a series of lectures on radio, aiming to advance public understanding and debate about significant issues of contemporary interest.
The first BBC Reith lecturer was the philosopher, Bertrand Russell, and in the seventy years since there have been seventy-seven different speakers. Usually a set of four lectures are delivered every year by the invited speaker. In Remarkable Minds nineteen lecturers have been featured by journalist, broadcaster and author, Anita Anand. These span topics across art, science, nature, technology, history, religion, society, culture and politics. In each case a highlight essay from the lecture series has been chosen.
Anita Anand is the presenter of the Reith Lectures. In her foreword to Remarkable Minds she writes:
The Reith Lectures are often controversial, but have also proven themselves to be remarkably presecient too. …
The Reith Lectures not only reflect the time in which they were delivered, but often take a scalpel to the insecurities faced by the world at the given moment. …
Though the subject matter of the Reith Lectures has certainly been diverse, that cannot always have been said of the lecturers. Initially they were exclusively male until Margery Perham, the colonial historian, delivered her lectures in 1961. They were also all white. Robert Gardiner, the Ghanaian professor and economist, who served the United Nations broke the mould in 1965, when he delivered his series of lectures considering the state of race relations internationally. Since then, the effort to find diverse voices from a spread of disciplines, with a wealth of different experiences has been tangible and a real credit to successive Radio 4 controllers.
Remarkable Minds is a wonderful introduction to the variety of subjects introduced and discussed during the Reith Lectures. In fact the entire collection of lectures may be heard on Apple Podcasts. Here is the link.
18 September 2019
No big colonial sword needs to come down and slash the fabric of the nation,” …. “Muscle by muscle, atom by atom, we are being torn from within. We are our own bomb.”
Forces of history are at work, he says. Forces too big to fight. He reels off dates. 1947, 1857, 1799. I slapped my head. Spare me. I don’t understand kings and queens. I am a simple man.
…
Slathered on the walls, wrapping all the way around the street. Every shutter, all the way up to the white mosque. It is true. That puffed-up face, like mouldy pastry. The fellow has called us aliens in our own land. He lost the election and we thought, that would teach him. Now here was, his face pasted on my wall.
Award-winning novelist and playwright Annie Zaidi’s novella No Prelude to a Riot is a disturbing, hard-hitting story set in a nameless city. It is about the rising communal tensions and the anxiety of living under constant siege. What comes across equally poignantly is the writer’s own attempts at writing a story that is extremely close to the reality of today. To be writing under a sense of constant siege, where the lines between the fictional characters and plot are blurred, is not an easy task. Sometimes it seems as if the voices of the characters are not strong enough, probably due to the circumstances they live in, yet they do manage to slip in what they have to say, jolting the reader with their pronouncements. It leaves a sinking feeling in the stomach.
Earlier this year Annie Zaidi won the $100,000 Nine Dots Prize for her essay Bread, Cement, Cactus. It will be expanded and published as a short book by Cambridge University Press in 2020. The Nine Dots Prize is a book prize for creative thinking that tackles contemporary societal issues. Entrants for the prize are asked to respond to a question in 3,000 words and the winner receives $100,000 (Rs 69.83 lakh) to write a short book expanding on the essay’s idea. The question this year was “Is there still no place like home?” “Zaidi’s entry, ‘Bread, Cement, Cactus’, combines memoir and reportage to explore concepts of home and belonging rooted in her experience of contemporary life in India, where migration – within the country, especially from villages to cities – is high,” the Nine Dots Prize said in a statement.
Prelude to a Riot is a novella that explores similar concepts of home and belonging while rooted in the very real and disturbing issues of communal violence, a growing intolerance of the other and crumbling of democracy. It is shattering to realise that Prelude to a Riot, Tabish Khair’s Night of Happiness, Nayantara Sahgal’s The Fate of Butterflies and Ravish Kumar’s The Free Voice are critical contributions to contemporary literature, offering perspectives while bearing witness to the current socio-political events.
18 September 2019
Book Post 44 includes some of the titles received in the past few weeks. Wherever available Amazon’s Kindle widget has been embedded in the blog post. It will allow you to browse through the book before you decide to buy it.
16 Sept 2019
British neurologist, naturalist, historian of science, and author Oliver Sacks died in 2015. A huge loss to the world particularly to the world of writing and reading. He read voraciously, wrote beautifully and with a precision that is a sheer delight to behold. Fortunately after his passing, some of his unpublished writings were published in a collection called River of Consciousness and now Everything in its Place puts together his contributions to various magazines and newspapers. As always there is plenty to mull over. Sacks has the astonishing ability to make many light bulbs go on inside one’s head and think, “Exactly! This is it! He got it!” In Everything in its Place there are two particular instances when this happens. One when he wistfully records the demise of print collections in libraries in favour of digital books thereby losing the opportunity of serendipitous gems such as the 1873 book Megrim. This is what he writes in his essay “Libraries”:
When I was a child, my favourite place at home was the library, a large oak-paneled room with all four walls covered by bookcases — and a solid table for writing and studying in the middle. …The oak-paneled library was the quietest and most beautiful room in the house, to my eyes, and it vied with my little chemistry lab as my favourite place to be. I would curl up in a chair and become so absorbed in what I was reading that all sense of time would be lost. Whenever I was late for lunch or dinner I could be found, completely enthralled by a book, in the library. I learned to read early, at three or four, and books, and our library, are among my first memories.
…
When I went to university, I had access to Oxford’s two great university libraries, the Radcliffe Science Library and the Bodleian, a wonderful general library that could trace itself back to 1602. …But the library I loved the most at Oxford was our own library at the Queen’s College. The magnificent library building itself had been designed by Christopher Wren, and beneath this, in an underground maze of heating pipes and shelves, weere the vast subterranean holdings of the library. To hold ancient books, incunabula, in my own hands was a new experience for me … .
I first came to New York City in 1965, and at that time I had a horrid, poky little apartment in which there were almost no surfaces to read or write on. I was just able, holding an elbow awkwardly aloft, to write some of Migraine on the top of a refrigerator. I longed for spaciousness. Fortunately, the library at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine, where I worked, had this in abundance. I would sit at a large table to read or write for a while, and then wander around the shelves and stacks. I never knew what my eyes might alight upon, but I would sometimes discover unexpected treasures, lucky finds, and bring these back to my seat.
…
But a shift was occurring by the 1990s. I would continue to visit the library frequently, sitting at a table with a mountain of books in front of me, but students increasingly ignored the bookshelves, accessing what they needed with their computers. Few of them went to their shelves anymore. The books, so far as they were concerned, were unnecessary. And since the majority of users were no longer using the books themselves, the college decided, ultimately, to dispose of them.
I had no idea that this was happening — not only in the Einstein library but in college and public libraries all over the country. I was horrified when I visited the library recently and found the shelves, once overflowing, now sparsely occupied. Over the last few years, most of the books, it seems, have been thrown out, with remarkably little objection from anyone. I felt that a murder, a crime had been committed: the destruction of centuries of knowledge. Seeing my distress, a librarian reassured me that everything “of worth” had been digitized. But I do not use a computer, and I am deeply saddened by the loss of books, even bound periodicals, for there is something irreplaceable about a physical book: its look, its smell, its heft. I thought of how this library once cherished “old” books, had a special room for old and rare books; and how in 1967, rummaging through the stacks, I had found an 1873 book, Edward Liveing’s Megrim which inspired me to write my own first book.
The second instance is when Sacks rues his failing eyesight is robbing him of the pleasures of reading print books. For him it was the print book that held the greatest appeal and no amount of technological innovation such as audio books could persuade him to think otherwise. He has a point when he writes in “Reading the Fine Print”:
In January of 2006, when my vision began to decline, I wondered what I would do. There were audiobooks — I had recorded some of them myself — but I was quintessentially a reader, not a listener. I have been an inveterate reader as far back as I can remember — I often hold page numbers or the look of paragraphs and pages in my almost automatically, and I can instantly find my way to a particular passage in most of my books. I want books that belong to me, books whose intimate pagination will become dear and familiar. My brain is geared towards reading — …
We each form unique neural pathways associated with reading and we each bring to the act of reading a unique combination not only of memory and experience, but of sensory modalities, too. Some people may “hear” the sounds of the words as they read (I do, but only if I am reading for pleasure, not when I am reading for information); others may visualize them, consciously or not. Some may be acutely aware of the acoustic rhythms or emphases of a sentence; others are more aware of its look or its shape.
… there is a fundamental difference between reading and being read to. When one reads actively, whether using the eyes or a finger, one is free to skip ahead or back, to reread, to ponder or daydream in the middle of a sentence — one read’s in one’s own time. Being read to, listening to an audiobook, is a more passive experience, subject to the vagaries of another’s voice and largely unfolding in the narrator’s own time.
…
Writing should be accessible in as many formats as possible — George Bernard Shaw called books the memory of the race. No one sort of book should be allowed to disappear, for we are all individuals, with highly indivualized needs and preferences — preferences embedded in our brains at every level, our individual neural patterns and networks creating a deeply personal engagement between author and reader.
This is so true! Any true-blooded reader would identify wholeheartedly with the sentiment expressed. For me it rings true at another level too. My nine-year-old daughter prefers print to audio books for she claims “audio interferes with her imagination!” Till I read this essay I attributed it to a child’s quirk. Now I know better.
Read Everything in its Place! There is so much to discover.
1 July 2019
I am a woman, but I am also a Muslim and a person of colour, and these identities cannot be separated. I can’t set aside being a woman of colour when it comes to being a feminist and I can’t set aside being a Muslim woman when it comesto being a feminist.
It’s Not About the Burqa: Muslim Women on Faith, Feminism, Sexuality and Race is a superb collection of essays exploring what it means to be a Muslim woman today. The anthology has been edited by Mariam Khan. The idea was sparked off by British politician David Cameron’s comment in the Daily Telegraph which reported him to consider Muslim women to be traditionally submissive. It sparked off a Twitter storm where #TraditionallySubmissive quickly spread. While watching this annoyance unfold online, Mariam Khan realised she had to do something as she kept reading these perceptions “about” Muslim women. It resulted in this magnificent anthology. In her introduction Mariam Khan says:
It’s Not About the Burqa brings together Muslim women’s voices. It does not represent the experiences of every Muslim woman or claim to cover every single issue faced by Muslim women. It’s not possible to create that book. But this book is a start, a movement: we Muslim woman are reclaiming and rewriting our identity. Here are essays about the hijab* and wavering faith, about love and divorce, about queer identity, about sex, about the twin threats of a disapproving community and a racist country, and about how Islam and feminism go hand in hand. Every essay in this book is unfinished, because each one is the beginning of a very necessary conversation.
*It’s worth pointing out at this stage that though ‘hijab’ is now more commonly used to describe a scarf that covers the head, in the Quran, the word ‘hijab’ denotes ‘partition’ or ‘curtain’. ‘Hijab’ can also refer to a standard of modesty.
It’s Not About the Burqa is a magnificent book for the stories it shares are no different from any other feminist publication. The preoccupations of the contributors are like that of any other woman — challenges of being a single woman, voicing an honest opinion and facing the consequences of it, single parenting, childcare, sexuality, negotiating life while encountering patriarchal structures on a daily basis, cultural patriarchy and #MeToo. It even recognises the problematic challenges created by “Well-meaning feminists [who] are often the people who perpetuate an exclusionary feminism that centres their experience as universal.” Most importantly the contributors to this book do manage to address the ignorant remark made by David Cameron and one that is unfortunately echoed by many others too. The essayists do it magnificently by sharing their experiences and opinions. The essayists have strong voices that will resonate with many readers, not necessarily only Muslims. As Mona Eltahawy says in her essay upon discovering feminist books in her university library in Jeddah:
Those books were irresistible. And they terrified me. So much so that I would pick them up, read a few pages, put them down in fear and walk away, only to be drawn back again the next day. I was terrified because I knew on a visceral level that those books — that feminism — would unravel something that I needed, something that would change me forever.
It’s Not About the Burqa will do this for many more readers too.
5 June 2019
The East Was Read is an anthology of essays on the impacts of socialist culture in various parts of the Third World. Wang Chaohua and Pankaj Mishra recall with fondness the meaning of these books for their very different lives in China and in India respectively. Deepa Bhasthi goes on an emotional journey into the library of her grandfather, a communist intellectual. Rossen Djagalov writes a short history of Progress Publishers. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o talks about how he wrote Petals Of Blood in Yalta on the sidelines of the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association in 1973. Sumayya Kassamali writes about Faiz in Beirut, giving us a sense of the cultural worlds that drew in both the Soviet Union and the Third World Project. Across the Third World, people grew up reading inexpensive beautifully-produced books from the Soviet Union — children’s books, classics of world literature, books on science and mathematics, works of Marxist theory. One such prominent publisher responsible for producing beautiful books, many in translation, was Progress Publishers. The following extracts from the essay have been reproduced with the permission of the publisher.
****
(p. 78)
As an heir to the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia’s literature-centrism, the Soviet state, down to its very bureaucracy, believed in literature’s capacity to change society and made an enormous investment in literacy campaigns and the wide accessibility of literature through publishing houses, bookstores, libraries, and public readings. As a testimony to that belief, by the time the USSR ceased to exist, its Writers’ Union had approximately 10,000 members, that is, 10,000 professional writers who could live off their literary work—a number probably never matched in history, before or after. It was not only a matter of financing: through street names and monuments, school curricula and press reports about writers, the state helped to institutionalize the idea of the intelligentsia as the spokesperson of the people. It also helped to cement the idea that literature is an authoritative source of values. And yet from the second half of the 1920s onward, Stalinism also did much to compromise that ideal by increasingly using literature instrumentally, censoring it to better reflect its talking points, and otherwise controlling it.
…
(p. 81 – 83)
Progress’s origins could be found in the utopian visions of the immediate post-Revolutionary period. In the realm of literature, one of the main generators of these was Maxim Gorky, who proposed a World Literature publishing house that would translate all foreign literatures into Russian, Russian literature into all the major languages of the world, and finally, all of the above in to the languages of the Soviet Union. An economically devastated and politically isolated Civil War era Russia, however, was not a place where such visions could be realized. A World Literature publishing house did appear between 1919 and 1924, focused only on one part of Gorky’s vision: the translation of world classics into Russian. While it offered much-needed employment to Petersburg writers as translators and editors, paper shortages, organizational difficulties, and lack of funding ultimately meant that most of their translations remained unpublished.[1]
With time, however, the resources at the disposal of the Soviet state grew and elements of these early visions began to be realized even if compromised to one degree or another by the growing Stalinist stratification. Founded in 1931, a Moscow-based literary magazine with issues in several languages, Literature of the World Revolution (renamed in the beginning of the Popular Front period to International Literature) may have been the most visible structure of Soviet literary internationalism. Yet more significant, especially as far as non-Soviet readers were concerned, was the establishment that same year in Moscow of the Publishing Cooperative of Foreign Workers (ITIR), Progress’s predecessor, which translated books into foreign languages.[2]By that time, there were already several other foreign-language newspapers in the city: the Polish Tribuna Radzecka, the French Journal de Moscou, the English Moscow News as well as The Communist International, which was publishing issues in German, English, French, Spanish, and Chinese. Besides, the Executive Committee of the Communist International (ECCE) was already translating and printing the works of Lenin and other political literature in different languages.[3]
ITIR drew its translators and editors from both polyglot Soviet citizens with foreign experience and political refugees, often with Comintern connections. Indeed, its staff reflected the composition of Moscow’s foreign community and its shifts: from the influx of Spanish refugees in the late 1930s to their retirement or departures for Mexico, Cuba, or Spain in the 1960s and ’70s, from the return of the Moscow-based East European exiles to their countries in themid-1940s to the increasing numbers of non-Western subjects in post-Stalin-era Moscow such as the main translator of nineteenth-century Russian literature in Hindi—Madan Lal Madhu (1925–2014).
…
(p. 83 – 84)
In the history of publishing, there has probably never been a press so linguistically ambitious. In its first year (1931), it published in 10 West European (English, German, French, Italian, Dutch, Swedish, Norwegian, Danish, Spanish, and Portuguese), seven East European (Serbo-Croatian, Czech, Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, Polish, and Lithuanian), and five Asian languages(Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Persian, and Turkish). And while the first post-Second World War decade saw the emergence of an Afro-Arab (Arabic, Amhara, Yoruba, Hausa, Swahili) and Indian (Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Tamil, and Telugu) sections, it was in the post-Stalin era that non-Western languages came to dominate the overall publishing plans. Over the course of the1960s alone, the number of ‘Eastern’ languages doubled, from15 to 28. By 1980, the Indian section was producing more titles than the English one, which had led the publishing house since its foundation. (Throughout this period, books in the colonial languages—English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese—were also being sent to Africa, Asia, and Latin America by ITIR’s distributor, Mezhkniga.) By the time it came to an end in 1991, Progress was a behemoth publishing yearly close to 2,000 new titles with a print run approaching 30 million copies.[4]
…
(p. 85-86)
It was publishing in foreign languages, however, that accounted
for the vast majority of Progress’s output. Many around the world fondly remember
Progress’s cheap, high quality editions of otherwise unavailable Marxist literature.
In addition to the classics of Marxism and Leninism, the other three areas Progress
published in were politics, textbooks & illustrated materials, and fiction.
Fiction emerged as a distinct field of the publishing house only gradually, as the
classics of Marxism-Leninism and contemporary political studies had initially been
the main focus of ITIR’s work. Over the course of the 1930s, however, some of the
publishing house’s more distinguished translators such as Alice Oran, George Rui,
Maximilian Schick, Hilda Angarova, Jose Vento, Angel Errais, Margaret Amrome, Ivy
Litvinova (Soviet foreign minister Maxim Litvinov’s wife) began to translate the
classics of Russian and early Soviet literature into foreign languages. Slowly,
over the post-war era, the literature section became the largest of Progress’s four
thematic sections, reaching in 1981 a volume of 404 titles. The following year,
1982, it evolved into an independent publishing house, Raduga (Rainbow). By that
point, the editorial choices for texts to be translated could easily veer away from
the safe classics to include more debatable contemporary Soviet literature such
as Valentin Rasputin and Chinghiz Aitmatov’s novels. There has never been another
publishing house worldwide that could compete with its ability to popularize Russian
and Soviet literature abroad, or more generally, any publishing attempt of such
scale to create a direct translation link between two non-Western literatures, bypassing
the monopolies of London, Paris and New York. And yet, together with all other Soviet
projects for world literature, this one has been largely forgotten, except maybe
for the occasional volume in public libraries and private collections.
[1]Maria Khotimsky, ‘World Literature, Soviet Style: A Forgotten Episode in the History of the Idea’, Ab Imperio, vol. 2013, no. 3, 2013, pp. 119–154.
[2]Petr Petrov, Kistoriiizdatel’stva ‘Progress’, Moscow: Progress Publishers,1987.
[3]For more on Moscow’s cosmopolitanism of the 1930s, see Katerina Clark, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism, and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931-1941, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011.
[4]Ibid., pp. 67, 108.
28 May 2019
Book Post 37 includes some of the titles received in the past few weeks.
27 May 2019
Every week I post some of the books I have received recently. In today’s Book Post 34 included are some of the titles I have received in the past few weeks.
22 April 2019
