Penguin Random House India

Interview with Sonora Jha on “Intemperance: A Novel”

For Moneycontrol, I interviewed Sonora Jha on latest publication Intemperance: A Novel. It is published by Penguin Random House India.

Here is the interview:

Sonora Jha is the author of the novels The Laughter and Foreign, and the memoir How to Raise a Feminist Son. She won the AutHer Award for Fiction 2024 for The Laughter. After a career as a journalist covering crime, politics, and culture in India and Singapore, she moved to the United States to earn a PhD in media and public affairs. Sonora and her work have been featured in the New York Times and literary anthologies, on the BBC, and elsewhere. She is a Loyola Endowed Professor at Seattle University and lives in Seattle.

Her latest novel, Intemperance, is a love story. It is about a middle-aged, twice-divorced, Seattle-based professor, who decides to hold a swayamvar for herself as a fifty-fifth birthday celebration. She decides to lean upon her Hindu roots and resurrect a matrimonial tradition that is no longer practiced but remembered. It is an event held by the bride-to-be’s family where prospective male suitors are invited. Either the suitors line up for the bride to view. The person she likes, she garlands as her betrothed. Alternatively, the assembled suitors have to perform a series of tasks to prove themselves. These could be in the form of one challenging task or multiple rounds. The winner gets the hand of the bride.

The woman, a renowned and respected intellectual in an American town who had once declared she was “past such petty matters as love,” knows she is now setting herself up for widespread societal ridicule. To her surprise, a cast of characters shows up to support her call―a wedding planner looking for the next enchanting thing, a disability rights activist making a documentary film, and even, begrudgingly, her own young adult son. The Men’s Rights Movement protests her project, angry at her objectification of men. She must also reckon with a brutal love story in her ancestry that was endangered by the caste system―a story that placed a generational curse on those in the family who show an intemperance of spirit. As her whole plan spirals into a spectacle, the woman embarks on a journey to decide what feat her suitor must perform to be worthy of her wrinkling hand. What feat will define a newer, better masculinity? What feat will it take for her to trust in the tenderness of love?

Intemperance is at once a satirical feminist folktale and a meditation on how we might reach past all sense and still find love. It is published by Penguin Random House India.

The following interview with Sonora Jha was conducted via email.

What was the genesis of Intemperance?

After my last book, The Laughter, which was a dark satire, I found myself longing to write a love story. I started to toy with the idea of a protagonist who plans a swayamvar in middle age, and then I read bell hooks’ brilliant philosophy on love and marriage in Communion: The Female Search for Love. It all came together for me as I crafted a protagonist who makes the search for love a fiendishly playful act.

2. Why did you choose the title Intemperance? Why not How to live like a Feminist: A Memoir and a Manifesto, echoing your book How to Raise a Feminist Son: A Memoir and Manifesto (2021)?

Well, that was a memoir, and this is fiction. And this is not a manifesto either. The word “Intemperance” fit perfectly the practice of living unabashedly as a woman, living past the cautions of moderation and temperance.

3. For a writer, what is the difference between memoir, autofiction and literary fiction?

I believe there’s a bit of one’s own lived experience in every writer’s work, even if the writer is writing fiction from thin air. The norms of memoir dictate, though, that you hew close to fact. With autofiction, you can use your own life as a diving board and make leaps into fiction. This novel of mine is more fiction than autofiction.

4. When does the authorial narrative and the protagonist’s “I” merge, if at all?

It varies for every writer and every work. Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day uses the first-person “I,” but it’s clearly not Ishiguro writing about himself (he’s writing in the first-person voice of Stevens, an English Butler). In my novel, the “I” is the voice of an unnamed narrator, and I let some of my own ideas and interiority swim into hers even though the plot and characters in the story are not from my own life.

5. Transplanting an ancient Hindu wedding practice like a swayamvar into modern times is a way of testing your feminist ideas, is it not? Although conducting a swayamvar is like reality television today.

Yes, I decided to sharpen the concept of the swayamvar from a contemporary lens of power and agency. I decided to play with it. The protagonist encounters goddesses and princesses from Hindu mythology (as well as one character from Homer’s Odyssey) in the form of present-day people who either warn her against having a swayamvar or cheer her on. The book, however, becomes less about the spectacle and more about the journey, both inward and outward.

6. With every edit of the manuscript, does your feminism become stronger and sharper or does it have to be turned down a notch or two so as to be heard by a vast audience?

I didn’t set out to write a “feminist novel.” I set out to write a novel about a woman looking for love. The search for a true and beautiful love for a cis-gender, heterosexual woman today seems to me and several others to require a feminist way of loving, for her as well as for the man she seeks. I believe a vast audience exists for novels about love and novels with feminist stories. Men, women, non-binary people, everyone is aching for love and for fresh love stories with intemperate characters.

7. On p.167 you ask if “reclusiveness is allowed for women”? So, is it?

The protagonist wonders about this. I don’t. I believe healthy doses of solitude and reclusiveness should be everyone’s right to have. I claim these for myself. If more women claim time for themselves, we will have more delicious, richer partnerships.

8. Your novel has the classic structure of a novel and yet it has many elements of folklore and oral narratives with the interspersing of many micro-stories. Although, the presence of Alokendra and Heera’s story is much more than that. Please comment.

Thank you for appreciating that. I wanted to populate the novel with friends, found family, and community. People of all genders and sexuality. Gods and mortals. Sinners and saints. The fearful and the intemperate. I wanted to also show that the protagonist has a tradition in her ancestry where people loved passionately against all rules and against all odds. Placing a queer, inter-caste love story in the litchi orchards of 1895 Bihar gave me much joy as a writer. The protagonist is who she is today because of all the love that came before.

9. A love story involving an elaborate wedding is the perfect formula for a successful book. So how many conversations and backstories did it take to create this incredibly perceptive feminist commentary to the swayamvar, in itself on the threshold of a very patriarchal institution —matrimony?

Subverting the idea of a swayamvar, stealing it away from the patriarchs and their collaborations (kings marrying off their daughters to other kings), making contemporary men in Seattle perform feats for the hand of an aging, twice-divorced women in her sexual prime…all this just spilled out of me. But yes, I am an academic with a journalistic background, so of course I did a lot of research into these practices and also into caste and disability and more. One of the continued conversations that was invaluable to me was with author and journalist Yashica Dutt, who wrote Coming Out as Dalit.

10. Will you ever consider dramatising this for theatre, say along the lines of Eve Ensler’s The Vagina Monologues?

I hadn’t considered that, but that’s a wonderful idea.

31 Oct 2025

“India in Triangles: The Incredible Story of How India was Mapped and the Himalayas Measured” by Shruthi Rao and Meera Iyer

15 08 , 2025 No Comments

The Great Trigonometrical Survey (GTS), an ambitious mission in the nineteenth century to map India using triangulation―a brilliant method that helped them measure every inch with accuracy. Along the way, they calculated the height of the world’s tallest mountain and revealed the true shape of the earth. The survey lasted nearly a hundred years and was led by several men, including William Lambton, George Everest and Andrew Waugh. But it wasn’t just them—thousands of people worked on this massive project.

India in Triangles is a fascinating account of the survey in India. The authors are able to share an important piece of history without dumbing down any information, even though the intended target audience is for young adults. This is the kind of book that will work supremely well in the crossover market for its readability, accessibility to information, listing and acquisition of the heavy equipment used in the mapping and of course, the stories involving the key people. It is a slim volume that is easily read like a thrilling adventure story. The fascination with which these pioneers chose to map the subcontinent does not dim with time.

Read an extract from the book on Moneycontrol. It is published by Puffin Books, Penguin Random House India.

Shruthi Rao has a master’s degree in energy engineering, and worked in the IT industry before she started writing. She is the author of multiple books such as 10 Indian Women Who Were the First to Do What They Did ,20 Indians Who Changed the World, Manya Learns to Roar, among others. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area, and loves books, desserts, trees, benches, science and long walks.

Meera Iyer loves listening to, researching and writing about stories of people and places, buildings and streets. She volunteers with the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH) to help protect and celebrate Bengaluru’s history and heritage. She loves coffee, dark chocolate and potsherds.

15 August 2025

“India in Triangles: The incredible story of how India was mapped and the Himalayas measured” by Shruthi Rao and Meera Iyer

23 07 , 2025 No Comments

India in Triangles is a truly fascinating account about the Great Trigonometrical Survey of India in the nineteenth century. It was a mission to map India by the British using triangulation. A method that helped them measure every inch with accuracy. Along the way, they calculated the height of the world’s tallest mountain and revealed the true shape of the earth.

Shruthi Rao and Meera Iyer tell a riveting tale of how India was mapped. It is an extraordinary story that incorporates mini biographies of the key people like William Lambton, George Everest, and Radhanath Sikdar, to name some. The authors have used scientific data, mathematical descriptions and historical details that could have fallen into the dangerous trap of being a complicated account; instead it is lucidy, swiftly moving, and despite being packed with information, it is immensely readable. They have also managed to create a text that does not dumb down its tone as if that is the only way for speaking to children. This book will work in the cross over market.

There are illustrations of the instruments used and even of the maps created. Unfortunately, some of the maps are quite unreadable and like black blotches of newsprint.

While I get the importance of watching costs in producing a book, surely, exceptions to the rule could have been in the case of India in Triangles. Firstly, when reproducing maps in a book, avoid doing a double page spread where the map falls into the gutter. Consider, printing the map in a folded paper. Make the experience immersive, tactile, and legible. Let the target audience know what it means to open a folded map and pore over it. Secondly, avoid using blurry, black and white print. Try and spend time with the design, even if the original reproduction of the map is of poor quality, and attempt to sharpen the image. It will take many hours to fix but ultimately, it will be worth it. When a book is a pleasure to read, the word spreads very quickly. Finally, even if this title is meant as children’s literature, surely there could have been an attempt to make the information in the boxes easier to read (or just do away with them!). To put faint white print on a dark background is uninteresting, dull and makes the text very difficult to read. Why is the joy taken out of reading because of the constant emphasis on cost? Surely, a decent balance can be struck between the two factors.

Sadly, this delightful book, has been printed on poor quality paper, that is rough to touch and is reminiscent of school textbooks. So, even if the layout, dimensions, and content of the book is not the same as the textbook, the memories that it throws up while holding such a book can mar the reading pleasure.

Reading a book is not just about reading the words on the page. Avoid making it into a workmanlike experience that is inevitably equated with reading school curricula. Reading should not be a chore. It should be a memorable pleasure and most certainly, when it is a book on the mapping of the Indian subcontinent. Tweaking a few design elements, looking at options in the market within the budget, to produce a low cost publishing may take a while to cobble but it will be worth it. It just requires a wee bit of imagination and a confident boldness, matching the astonishing clarity and perfect tenor with which the authors write. Their storytelling is filled with immense joy bordering on almost childish glee at stringing together the stories that make up this sparkling narrative.

This book is going to sell well. It will have a long tail.

All said and done, read it. It is published by Puffin Books, Penguin Random House India.

23 July 2025

“Is a River Alive?” by Robert Macfarlane

03 06 , 2025 No Comments

This magnificent book arrived in the post today. I am going to read it asap. Meanwhile, I figured I should post the book blurb. It is published by Penguin Random House India.

From celebrated writer Robert Macfarlane comes this brilliant, perspective-shifting new book – which answers a resounding yes to the question of its title.

At its heart is a single, transformative idea: that rivers are not mere matter for human use, but living beings – who should be recognized as such in both imagination and law. Is a River Alive? takes the reader on an exhilarating exploration of the past, present and futures of this ancient, urgent concept.

The book flows first to northern Ecuador, where a miraculous cloud-forest and its rivers are threatened by goldmining.

Then, to the wounded rivers, creeks and lagoons of southern India, where a desperate battle to save the lives of these waterbodies is under way.

And finally, to north-eastern Quebec, where a spectacular wild river – the Mutehekau or Magpie – is being defended from death by damming in a river-rights campaign.

At once Macfarlane’s most personal and most political book to date, Is a River Alive? will open hearts, spark debates and lead us to the revelation that our fate flows with that of rivers – and always has.

ROBERT MACFARLANE is internationally renowned for his writing on nature, people and place. His bestselling books include Underland, Landmarks, The Old Ways, The Wild Places and Mountains of the Mind, as well as the book-length prose-poem, Ness. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages, won many prizes around the world and been widely adapted for film, music, theatre, radio and dance. He has also written operas, plays, and films including River and Mountain, both narrated by Willem Dafoe. He has collaborated closely with artists including Olafur Eliasson and Stanley Donwood, and with the artist Jackie Morris he co-created the internationally bestselling books of nature-poetry and art, The Lost Words and The Lost Spells. As a lyricist and performer, he has written albums and songs with musicians including Cosmo Sheldrake, Julie Fowlis and Johnny Flynn, with whom he has released two albums, Lost In The Cedar Wood and The Moon Also Rises. In 2017, the American Academy of Arts and Letters awarded him the E.M. Forster Prize for Literature, and in 2023 in Toronto he was the inaugural winner of the Weston International Award for a body of work in the field of nonfiction. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.

“Robert Macfarlane is a once-in-a-generation virtuoso, and I don’t know when his kaleidoscopic language and world-expanding scholarship have been used to more potent effect than in this impassioned, resounding affirmative to the title’s urgent question.”
—JOHN VAILLANT, author of Fire Weather

“Is a River Alive? is itself a river of poetic prose, an invitation to get onboard and float through the rapids of encounters with places and people, the eddies of ideas, to navigate the resurgence of indigenous worldviews through three extraordinary journeys recounted with a vividness that lifts readers out of themselves and into these waterscapes. Read it for pleasure, read it for illumination, read it for confirmation that our world is changing in wonderful as well as terrible ways.”
—REBECCA SOLNIT, author of Orwell’s Roses

“This book is a beautiful, wild exploration of an ancient idea: that rivers are living participants in a living world. Robert Macfarlane’s astonishing telling of the lives of three rivers reveals how these vital flow forms have the power not only to shape and reshape the planet, but also our thoughts, feelings, and worldviews. Is a River Alive? is a breathtaking work that speaks powerfully to this moment of crisis and transformation.”
—MERLIN SHELDRAKE, author of Entangled Life

“Is a River Alive? is one of the best books I’ve read in a very long time—exciting, brilliantly comprehensive, mind-altering. In one of its many stunning moments, Macfarlane describes the myriad rivers trapped and buried under the concrete of our cities. ‘Daylighting’ occurs on those rare occasions when these ghost-rivers are dug out & released to the surface to feel the sun, to expand—majestic creatures—and spread life once again. To read this book is to feel your ghosted soul undergo such ‘daylighting’—metaphysical, political, emotional, linguistic. Any soul going dormant, any citizen going numb, will be revivified and propelled back to their essential core, where rage, wonder, and imagination intertwine, and a powerful hope for the earth arises. A spellbinding, life-changing work.”
—JORIE GRAHAM, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet

“Is a River Alive? is a beautifully written, poetic testament to the vitality of the Earth and the forms of politics that can be based upon that premise.”
—AMITAV GHOSH, author of Sea of Poppies

“Like its subject, Is a River Alive? is a work of flow and counter-flow. It is lyrical, evocative, closely observed and deeply moving. Robert Macfarlane offers new ways to think and, just as importantly, feel about the majestic and mysterious non-human world.”
—ELIZABETH KOLBERT, author of The Sixth Extinction

3 June 2025

“GeoTechnography: Mapping Our Digital Societies” by Samir Saran and Anirban Sarma

12 05 , 2025 No Comments

In an era defined by rapid technological change, a seismic shift is underway, one that is transforming every aspect of our lives. From the rise of digital platforms that mediate our interactions–with markets, with governments and perhaps most importantly with each other– to the growing tension between our online personas and our real-world identities, the forces of technology, geography and society are colliding in ways we are only beginning to understand. Even as technology opens up new opportunities for civic engagement, it simultaneously disrupts the very foundations of societal cohesion.

The digital age has given rise to a new stage for global drama–one where surveillance, misinformation and the erosion of trust in multilateral institutions are playing out in real time. But as these forces evolve, so too must our understanding of how societies can navigate them. Will digital societies endure, or are they doomed to collapse under the weight of their own contradictions? Can democracy as we know it survive in a world where power is increasingly concentrated in the hands of a few tech giants? And as nations grapple with the changing dynamics of governance, how will international norms, laws and institutions adapt? In GeoTechnoGraphy, Samir Saran and Anirban Sarma offer a compelling analysis of the forces reshaping the modern world. Drawing on groundbreaking research and incisive insights, they examine how the convergence of geography and technology —geotechnography — is rewriting the rules of power. The book excerpt that has been published here is an excellent primer to the term “geotechnography”. Read the chapter excerpt on Moneycontrol.

It is a portmanteau word that cleverly describes the coming together of spatial distances as examined by geographers and the world of technology. It is true that technological advancements in the twenty-first century have broken past geo-political barriers to create online/cloud communities. It raises many questions about our realities, identities, security, data management as well as of responsibilities. This is the crux of the discussion in GeoTechnoGraphy. There are plenty of examples offered to illustrate the eight chapters.

These are worth listing as they are illuminating about the flux in this relationship between tech giants, technology, politicians/governments/nation states, and individuals. The chapters are: “Children of Our Landscape: Geography, Affinity and the Rules-Based Order”, “The Death of Geography? Cyberspace, Borderless Worlds and the New Tribalism”, “The Mediated Self: A New Relationship with the World”, “From Censers to Censors: Is Big Tech the New Clergy?”, “Achilles’ Last Stand: The Resuscitation of Autonomy”, “Apocalypse Now: Will Digital Societies Survive?”, “Terminated? AI and Our Human Future”, and “Rebooting History: A Rules-Based Order for the Digital Age”. Mukesh D. Ambani, Chairman and Managing Director, Reliance Industries Ltd., says that “GeoTechnoGraphy explores the dual forces shaping our future: the transformative potential of technology on society and the perils of the contest for dominance. A book that is as timely as it is thought-provoking”.

Marietje Schaake, Fellow, Standford University says that “This must-read book guides us through the dramatic changes of our time”. Nandan Nilekani, Cofounder and Chairman, Infosys, and Founding Chairman, UIDAI (Aadhar) says that it is “A bold and visionary work that offers a profound rethinking of the forces shaping our world.” Undoubtedly, GeoTechnoGraphy requires pauses between reading so as to gather one’s thoughts but it is worth spending time with. Buy it. Read it. Think about it. Reflect upon it. Samir Saran is the President of the Observer Research Foundation (ORF). His research focuses on issues of global governance, climate change and energy policy, technology and media, and India’s foreign policy. As ORF’s President and member of the Foundation’s Board, he provides strategic direction and leadership to the foundation’s multiple centres on fundraising, research projects, platform design and outreach initiatives including stakeholder engagement.

He curates the Raisina Dialogue, India’s annual flagship platform on geopolitics and geo-economics, and is the founder of CyFy, India’s annual conference on cybersecurity and internet governance. Samir is the Chair of World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Geopolitics and a member of WEF Global Risks Advisory Board. He has served as a Commissioner of The Global Commission on the Stability of Cyberspace. He is a member of the Board of Directors at ORF America. He is also a part of Board of Governors of The East West Centre. Samir has authored four books, edited important journals and publications and written several academic papers and book chapters. He is featured regularly in Indian and international print and broadcast media. His latest publications include The New World Disorder and The Indian Imperative with Shashi Tharoor, Pax Sinica: Implications for the Indian Dawn with Akhil Deo and Raisina Chronicles: India’s Global Public Square with India’s External Affairs Minister, S. Jaishankar. Anirban Sarma is Deputy Director of ORF Kolkata and a Senior Fellow at ORF’s Centre for New Economic Diplomacy. He is also Chair of the Think20 Task Force on ‘Our Common Digital Future’. Anirban’s research focuses on the use of technology for sustainable development, the digital economy, the media, and international cybersecurity cooperation. In the tech-for-development space, his research has explored issues around online safety, the future of work, digital public infrastructure, data for development, digital health, cleantech, and women’s empowerment and inclusion, among other areas. Anirban was formerly the Chief International Outreach and Communications Officer at the National Digital Library of India, a flagship project of the Ministry of Education. He earlier served at UNESCO for over eight years, designing and managing UNESCO’s initiatives on ICTs, access to information and media development across South Asia. He has also worked at Weber Shandwick, a global public affairs agency, supporting projects for leading clients at the firm’s Centre of Excellence.

12 May 2025

Tuesday Reads ( Vol 3), 25 June 2019

25 06 , 2019 No Comments

Dear Reader,

I have just finished reading Amitav Ghosh’s magnificent novel Gun Island. It is about Dinanath Datta, a rare books seller whose life gets entangled with an ancient legend about the goddess of snakes, Manasa Devi. It is a fascinating story that begins in the Sunderbans to New York to Venice. Gun Island has a fantastic cast of characters but it is also a story very relevant to our times for its focus on the situation of migrants and climate change.

At the New Delhi book launch held on 13 June 2019, India Habitat Centre, Amitav Ghosh was in conversation with Raghu Karnad. It was a very special evening as it occurred two days after the untimely demise of the playwright, Girish Karnad. So the book launch morphed into this public memorial for Girish Karnad too. It began with the new Jnanpith winner Amitav Ghosh’s tribute to another Jnanpith winner Girish Karnad. The conversation began with Raghu Karnad, son of Girish Karnad, saying, “My father was a chronicler of Karnataka and of this country, I consider you to be a chronicler of this planet. Interconnecting the countless parts we are in the midst of but miss. They are forces of language, war, or even eco-system.” These opening remarks triggered off a fascinating conversation about “unlikely coincidences” and “meaningful resonances” that exist between space and time. Also what does it mean to try and rationalise events that defy rationalist thinking but at times it is impossible to do so. A significant proportion of Gun Island dwells upon the global migrant crisis. During the conversation Amitav Ghosh commented that “the central literary question is how do you talk about the slow violence that eats itself into peoples lives and never finds its way into newspapers? In the papers every day there are so many reports about violence but this slow violence does not get attention. We have learned to turn our eyes away from it. The issue is how do we find ourselves back to recognise the violence unfolding around us. Poetry is better able to respond to the catastrophe and cataclysm we see around us. Poetry does not have that commitment. Poetry has always responded to every natural event. You see it in Byron and in pre-modern Indian poetry which is not poetry for the sake of poetry — it is devotional. We have to find ourselves back to that…back to being able to talk about other things apart from us.”

Gun Island is an unputdownable book. It will sell well but more so because of the old fashioned word-of-mouth recommendations. At the book launch there were whispers overheard of Amitav Ghosh probably being a contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature in the coming years. Who knows?! But for now it would be interesting to see if this book makes it to the shortlist of the more prominent literary prizes around the world like The Booker Prize. It is certainly a book that cannot be ignored!

Of all the books I read in the past week Gun Island was exceptional.

More anon,

JAYA

25 June 2019

“The Begum: A Portrait of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s Pioneering First Lady”

29 05 , 2019 No Comments

The Begum: A Portrait of Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, Pakistan’s Pioneering First Lady by Deepa Agarwal and Tehmina Aziz Ayub is a good account of a fascinating woman. Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan’s life mirrors the history of the subcontinent. Namita Gokhale, writer and co-director, Jaipur Literature Festival, wrote a wonderful introduction to the book. The following extracts from the introduction have been published with permission of the publisher, Penguin Random House India.

****

Reflecting on how and what to write while introducing this important biography, I wonder once again if it is one or two books I have before me. This collaborative account, co-authored by Deepa Agarwal and Tahmina Ayub, mirrors the fissures and fault lines that divided Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan’s life into two astonishingly symmetrical halves. A well-researched portrayal of an intrepid and passionate woman, it presents her personal narrative and political convictions, and mirrors the history of the subcontinent, in a timeline truncated by the uncompromising contours of the Radcliffe Line.

Sir Cyril Radcliffe arrived in India on 8 July 1947. The eminent barrister was given all of five weeks to divide up a nation, a culture, a people. His brief was to ‘demarcate the boundaries of the two parts of the Punjab on the basis of ascertaining the contiguous majority areas of Muslims and non-Muslims’. A handful of men—five persons in each ‘boundary commission’ for Bengal in the east and Punjab in the west—worked day and night on a hurried and ignominious exit from an increasingly precarious and unstable empire. Equal representation given to politicians from the Indian National Congress and the Muslim League, each hostile and intractable in their positions, only added to the tensions.

In New Delhi, at 8 Hardinge Road, a sprightly forty-three year-old woman, all of five feet tall, was hastily putting together some personal belongings. Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan was preparing to depart in a government aeroplane for Karachi airport, where her husband Nawabzada Liaquat Ali Khan was soon to be sworn in as the first prime minister of Pakistan.

The future first lady was leaving her magnificent double storeyed home, set in three acres of garden, for an unknown and uncertain life in a newly formed nation. This elegant colonial bungalow (now 8 Tilak Marg) had been her home since her marriage. Both her sons, Ashraf and Akber, had been born here. 8 Hardinge Road had become the focal hub for the activities of the Muslim League. Her husband had been appointed finance minister of the interim government, and indeed the papers for the interim budget presented on 2 February 1946 had been taken directly from his home to Parliament House.

Not so far away, at 10 Aurangzeb Road, Muhammad Ali Jinnah had also made preparations to depart Delhi, and India. However, he had been more pragmatic than the idealistic and high-minded Liaquat Ali and had sold his house to the industrialist Ramkrishna Dalmia for Rs 3 lakh. Liaquat and his wife Ra’ana, on other hand, had decided to gift their home to Pakistan—it was to become the residence of the new nation’s future high commissioner. ‘Gul-i-Ra’ana’, the bungalow that her adoring husband had named after her, would henceforth be known as ‘Pakistan House’. Their vast and eclectic library was also gifted to the new nation in which they had invested their hopes and lives.

What were the thoughts and emotions that jostled in her mind and heart as she observed all that she had struggled for come to fruition, even as the looming shadow of Partition prepared to bathe the two nations in a fierce spasm of blood and sacrifice?

Begum Ra’ana Liaquat Ali Khan, born Irene Ruth Margaret Pant on 13 February 1905, to an apostate Brahmin lineage, was a practising Christian until 1933. After her marriage, she converted to Islam and was renamed Gul-i-Ra’ana. This fiercely independent lady, who carried her myriad identities within a core self of unchanging conviction, departed this world on 13 June 1990, by which time she was known, recognized and honoured as ‘Madar-e-Pakistan’ or ‘Mother of Pakistan’.

The first half of her life was spent in undivided India, where she transited two religious identities, and repudiated a third, albeit through her grandfather. With almost mathematical precision, her eighty-six years were divided into forty-three years plus some months in each of her two lives. She was an intimate witness to history—the two nations, the bifurcation of East and West Pakistan, the creation of Bangladesh, the course of the Cold War, the rise of Gorbachev, and the increasingly unequivocal hold of the army in Pakistan. From Jinnah, through Zulfikar Bhutto and to General Zia-ul-Haq, she spoke her mind and held her own.

Before her marriage, she was a professor of economics in Delhi’s prestigious Indraprastha College. Her doctoral thesis had been on women in agriculture in rural Uttar Pradesh. Begum Ra’ana was an important, even crucial, catalyst to Jinnah’s return to politics and the unfolding of the ‘two-nation theory’. In the summer of 1933, she and her husband met Jinnah in his home in Hampstead and appealed to him to return to India. Unafraid to champion difficult causes, she was radical in her attempts to bring about gender equity within the Islamic State of Pakistan and unflinching in her defence of her friend Zulfikar Ali Bhutto when he was facing the gallows. And at all times, she was charming and gracious as an accomplished diplomat and stateswoman.

Where then did she get her steely resolve and infinite reserve of strength? How did she negotiate the transitions and transformations of history with such seeming ease? I have always been fascinated by this formidable woman, and her ability to stand tall in an overwhelmingly patriarchal society even after losing her husband, with no grown male—or indeed female—relatives to support her in the newly birthed nation of Pakistan.

…

Begum Ra’ana was born Irene Pant. We share maiden surnames, and a common ancestry. I was born Namita Pant, and a faded family tree documents these connections, with a branch of it cryptically cut off. With his conversion to Christianity, her grandfather Taradutt Pant had placed himself outside the pale of caste and kinship. Yet whenever I encountered the half-told stories of Begum Ra’ana, I could sense the mountain grit in her, the legendary strength that comes so naturally to Kumaoni women. There was also a strong family resemblance—to my sister, to several of my aunts. I wanted to know more about her, to understand her as a determined woman, a thinking, feeling human, a creature of her times and circumstances.

….

29 May 2019

“The Journey Of Indian Publishing” by Jaya Bhattacharji Rose

03 02 , 2019 No Comments

I recently contributed to How to Get Published in India edited by Meghna Pant. The first half is a detailed handbook by Meghna Pant on how to get published but the second half includes essays by Jeffrey Archer, Twinkle Khanna, Ashwin Sanghi, Namita Gokhale, Arunava Sinha, Ravi Subramanian et al.

Here is the essay I wrote:

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AS LONG as I can recall I have wanted to be a publisher. My first ‘publication’ was a short story in a newspaper when I was a child. Over the years I published book reviews and articles on the publishing industry, such as on the Nai Sarak book market in the heart of old Delhi. These articles were print editions. Back then, owning a computer at home was still a rarity.

In the 1990s, I guest-edited special issues of The Book Review on children’s and young adult literature at a time when this genre was not even considered a category worth taking note of. Putting together an issue meant using the landline phone preferably during office hours to call publishers/reviewers, or posting letters by snail mail to publishers within India and abroad, hoping some books would arrive in due course. For instance, the first Harry Potter novel came to me via a friend in Chicago who wrote, “Read this. It’s a book about a wizard that is selling very well.” The next couple of volumes were impossible to get, for at least a few months in India. By the fifth volume, Bloomsbury UK sent me a review copy before the release date, for it was not yet available in India. For the seventh volume a simultaneous release had been organised worldwide. I got my copy the same day from Penguin India, as it was released by Bloomsbury in London (at the time Bloomsbury was still being represented by Penguin India). Publication of this series transformed how the children’s literature market was viewed worldwide.

To add variety to these special issues of The Book Review I commissioned stories, translations from Indian regional languages (mostly short stories for children), solicited poems, and received lovely ones such as an original poem by Ruskin Bond. All contributions were written in longhand and sent by snail mail, which I would then transfer on to my mother’s 486 computer using Word Perfect software. These articles were printed on a dot matrix printer, backups were made on floppies, and then sent for production. Soon rumours began of a bunch of bright Stanford students who were launching Google. No one was clear what it meant. Meanwhile, the Indian government launched dial-up Internet (mostly unreliable connectivity); nevertheless, we subscribed, although there were few people to send emails to!

The Daryaganj Sunday Bazaar where second-hand books were sold was the place to get treasures and international editions. This was unlike today, where there’s instant gratification via online retail platforms, such as Amazon and Flipkart, fulfilled usually by local offices of multi-national publishing firms. Before 2000, and the digital boom, most of these did not exist as independent firms in India. Apart from Oxford University Press, some publishers had a presence in India via partnerships: TATA McGraw Hill, HarperCollins with Rupa, and Penguin India with Anand Bazaar Patrika.

From the 1980s, independent presses began to be established like Kali for Women, Tulika and KATHA. 1990s onwards, especially in the noughts, many more appeared— Leftword Books, Three Essays, TARA Books, A&A Trust, Karadi Tales, Navayana, Duckbill Books, Yoda Press, Women Unlimited, Zubaan etc. All this while, publishing houses established by families at the time of Independence or a little before, like Rajpal & Sons, Rajkamal Prakashan, Vani Prakashan etc continued to do their good work in Hindi publishing. Government organisations like the National Book Trust (NBT) and the Sahitya Akademi were doing sterling work in making literature available from other regional languages, while encouraging children’s literature. The NBT organised the bi-annual world book fair (WBF) in Delhi every January. The prominent visibility in the international English language markets of regional language writers, such as Tamil writers Perumal Murugan and Salma (published by Kalachuvadu), so evident today, was a rare phenomenon back then.

In 2000, I wrote the first book market report of India for Publisher’s Association UK. Since little data existed then, estimating values and size was challenging. So, I created the report based on innumerable conversations with industry veterans and some confidential documents. For years thereafter data from the report was being quoted, as little information on this growing market existed. (Now, of course, with Nielsen Book Scan mapping Indian publishing regularly, we know exact figures, such as: the industry is worth approximately $6 billion.) I was also relatively ‘new’ to publishing having recently joined feminist publisher Urvashi Butalia’s Zubaan. It was an exciting time to be in publishing. Email had arrived. Internet connectivity had sped up processes of communication and production. It was possible to reach out to readers and new markets with regular e-newsletters. Yet, print formats still ruled.

By now multinational publishing houses such as Penguin Random House India, Scholastic India, Pan Macmillan, HarperCollins India, Hachette India, Simon & Schuster India had opened offices in India. These included academic firms like Wiley, Taylor & Francis, Springer, and Pearson too. E-books took a little longer to arrive but they did. Increasingly digital bundles of journal subscriptions began to be sold to institutions by academic publishers, with digital formats favoured over print editions.

Today, easy access to the Internet has exploded the ways of publishing. The Indian publishing industry is thriving with self-publishing estimated to be approximately 35% of all business. Genres such as translations, women’s writing and children’s literature, that were barely considered earlier, are now strong focus areas for publishers. Regional languages are vibrant markets and cross-pollination of translations is actively encouraged. Literary festivals and book launches are thriving. Literary agents have become staple features of the landscape. Book fairs in schools are regular features of school calendars. Titles released worldwide are simultaneously available in India. Online opportunities have made books available in 2 and 3-tier towns of India, which lack physical bookstores. These conveniences are helping bolster readership and fostering a core book market. Now the World Book Fair is held annually and has morphed into a trade fair, frequented by international delegations, with many constructive business transactions happening on the sidelines. In February 2018 the International Publishers Association Congress was held in India after a gap of 25 years! No wonder India is considered the third largest English language book market of the world! With many regional language markets, India consists of diverse markets within a market. It is set to grow. This hasn’t gone unnoticed. In 2017, Livres Canada Books commissioned me to write a report on the Indian book market and the opportunities available for Canadian publishers. This is despite the fact that countries like Canada, whose literature consists mostly of books from France and New York, are typically least interested in other markets.

As an independent publishing consultant I often write on literature and the business of publishing on my blog … an opportunity that was unthinkable before the Internet boom. At the time of writing the visitor counter on my blog had crossed 5.5 million. The future of publishing is exciting particularly with neural computing transforming the translation landscape and making literature from different cultures rapidly available. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is being experimented with to create short stories. Technological advancements such as print-on-demand are reducing warehousing costs, augmented reality is adding a magical element to traditional forms of storytelling, smartphones with processing chips of 8GB RAM and storage capacities of 256GB seamlessly synchronised with emails and online cloud storage are adding to the heady mix of publishing. Content consumption is happening on electronic devices AND print. E-readers like Kindle are a new form of mechanised process, which are democratizing the publishing process in a manner seen first with Gutenberg and hand presses, and later with the Industrial Revolution and its steam operated printing presses.

The future of publishing is crazily unpredictable and incredibly exciting!

3 Feb 2019

A Note on “The Women’s Courtyard” Translation by Daisy Rockwell

03 01 , 2019 1 Comment

Here is the entire note by the translator, Daisy Rockwell, from her recent translation of Khadija Mastur’s Aangan, translated as The Women’s Courtyard. It has been published by Penguin Random House, 2018.

The note has been excerped with the publisher’s permission.

The Women’s Courtyard has been translated before as The Inner Courtyard, by Neelam Hussain, and published by Kali for Women in 2001. Retranslation is still a rarity in the context of modern South Asian literature but the practice enriches the field of translation, offering readers different prisms through which to read a text. When I choose to retranslate a work, it is usually because I feel I have something substantially different to offer from the previous translator or translators. All the same, I draw comfort and inspiration from the work of previous translators, who may have seen things differently than I did and send me scurrying back to my dictionaries and expert friends for more information.

Khadija Mastur’s writing style is spare and elegant. Unlike many Urdu authors she does not favour heavily ornamented writing and turns of phrase full of literary allusions. I felt inspired to reproduce this clarity in English, after seeing that Hussain’s translation struggled with this quality, attempting to elevate the language to a more formal register of English than was used in Urdu. See, for example, Mastur’s description of Safdar Bhai, and the two contrasting translations, below:

Mastur: Safdar Bhai kitne vajīha magar kaisī maskīn sūrat ke the.

Rockwell: Safdar looked so handsome, but so meek.

Hussain: How tall and well built Safdar Bhai had been and yet how diffident his mien.

Not only does Hussain divide descriptive adjectives into phrases, but in the case of the second phrase, maskīn sūrat ke, she introduces a flowery and somewhat archaic-sounding descriptor, ‘how diffident his mien’.

These embroideries of the original, in which Hussain seeks to somehow augment the original text, stretch even to ordinary narrative sentences, such as the following:

Mastur: Dūr kahīñ se ghaṛiyāl ke gyārah bajāne kī āvāz ā rahī thī.

Rockwell: From somewhere far off came the sound of the bell striking eleven.

Hussain: A distant clock struck the hour. The sound of its measured strokes rolled over her. It was the eleventh hour of the night.

Here, Hussain’s rendition conveys a breathless dramatic tension that is absent from the original, which merely alerts us to the passage of time.

Hussain also occasionally inserts new ideas into the text, such as below, where she actually adds foreshadowing to the original sentence that describes Aliya worrying about her sister Tehmina Apa:

Mastur: Rāt kā qissā bār bār yād ātā aur voh anjām ke khauf se ek lafz bhī na paṛh saktī thī.

Rockwell: She kept thinking about what had occurred the night before, and was so fearful of what might happen she couldn’t read a single word.

Hussain: The inexorable end of Apa’s fated love was before her eyes and she was unable to concentrate on her work.

Mastur merely writes of Aliya’s ‘anjām kā khauf,’ her fear of the outcome, whereas Hussain announces to us that Tehmina’s ‘fated love’ is coming to an ‘inexorable end’. This embellishment on the original text both spoils the suspense of the story and romanticizes Tehmina’s love for Safdar by referring to it as a ‘fated love’.

Strangely—perhaps by accident—a pivotal passage is missing from Hussain’s translation. I can attest as a translator that it is far too easy to drop bits of a text in the course of translation. The phone rings, the dog must be let out, one’s attention is divided—and there goes a paragraph. Usually these mistakes can be rectified in editing, when one notices that something is missing or when a transition between paragraphs makes no sense. An extra set of eyes helps too. In this case, the passage in question is Jameel’s first physical assault on Aliya. Aliya has been reading about the horrors of Ghengis Khan and his army, when Jameel comes to speak with her. She tries to make him go away, or stick to the topic of her exams, when he grabs her and kisses her (or more—the text is not entirely clear on this point, but it reads clearly as sexual assault). After this she feels shaken and defiled.

Finally, language changes, cultural norms change and politics change. All great works deserve multiple translations, and English can only be enriched by multiple versions of classic South Asian texts. With this fresh translation, a new generation of readers will be introduced to The Women’s Courtyard, and perhaps a few who know some Urdu will take the plunge and try reading the book in the original.

3 January 2019

Times Lit Fest, Delhi, panels on “Cultivating the passion of reading in children” and “What India Reads”

02 12 , 2018 No Comments

The Times LitFest Delhi ( 1-2 Dec 2018) was organised at the India Habitat Centre, New Delhi. I moderated two sessions with the both panel discussions focussed on reading. The first panel was on how do cultivate the love of reading amongst children.

TOI, 2 Dec 2018

My co-panelists were Saktibrata Sen, Programme Director, Room to Read India Trust; Manisha Chaudhry, co-founder Manan Books; Sonya Philips, Founder, Learning Matters Foundation and is a reading specialist and Shailendra Sharma, Principal Advisor (Hon) to the Director Education, Government of NCT Delhi, India. The freewheeling conversation was on ways to promote reading. Every panelist spoke about their strengths and initiatives. From being a part of the government as is Mr Sharma and realising that it is critical to have a reading corner in every class and every section. So much so that the Delhi government has now allocated a handsome budget of Rs 10,000 / section to buy books.

L-R: Manisha Chaudhry, Shailendra Sharma, Sonya Philips, Saktibrata Sen and Jaya Bhattacharji Rose

Fact is that even today few families can afford to buy newspapers, magazines, let alone books. So the first time many children particularly in the government primary schools hold a book is their school textbook. Few have any role models in the adults and older children in their immediate environment and as Principal Advisor to the government, Mr Sharma’s job is to introduce the love of reading. Both Mr Sharma and Mr Sen were of the view that reading is a lifeskill that is critical and needs to be learned beyond just being able to identify your name in whatever written script the individual is familiar with. Mr Sen, representing Room to Read, is involved in setting up partnerships with the governments to set up libraries. In India the Room to Read India Trust is working with 11 state governments. Ms Philips stressed on how till Grade 2 a child learns “how to read” but after that the emphasis is on “learning to read”. Ms Chaudhury with her many years of experience in publishing, looking at multilingual publishing and the critical need for children to have books in their own languages rather than only in English is what spurs her on to create new material every single day. She has recently launched two new magazines in Hindi called Mithvan and Chahak, the latter is meant for the early grade reader.

Everyone was of the agreement that it is important to create the joy of reading and align it as closely as possible to the child’s lived experience rather than alienate him/her from using complicated language in the written word. This was illustrated beautifully by an anecdote Mr Sharma shared about the complicated language used in a Hindi textbook to describe food which was a far cry from what is commonly used at home on a daily basis. Manisha Chaudhry spoke of her earlier initiatives to publish in tribal languages.

Alas we ran short of time otherwise it was promising to become a wonderful conversation on how to cultivate the joy of reading in children.

Join Sonya Philip, Manisha Chaudhury, Shailendra Sharma and Jaya Bhattacharji Rose in conversation with Saktibrata Sen – brought to you by Room to Read in the session, 'Cultivating the Habit of Reading in Children' at #TLFDelhi

Posted by Times Lit Fest – Delhi on Saturday, December 1, 2018

L-R: Ranjana Sengupta, Parth Mehrotra, Jaya Bhattacharji Rose, Udayan Mitra and Himanjali Sankar.

The second panel discussion was on “What is India reading?”. The panelists consisted of commissioning editors of four prominent publishing houses — Himanjali Sankar, Simon & Schuster India; Ranjana Sengupta, Penguin Random House India; Parth Mehrotra, Juggernaut and Udayan Mitra, HarperCollins India. Once again a freewheeling, adda-like, conversation about trying to figure out what India reads. The role of a commissioning editor has changed quite a lot in recent years. Traditionally commissioning editors were responsible for forming reading tastes but as Udayan Mitra pointed out that at times now the editor has to commission based on events and trends too. It is a kind of commissioning that did not exist earlier.

Today readers are accessing books through multiple platforms and in various formats — ebooks and audio books. It becomes increasingly difficult to ascertain how and what anyone is reading, let along a sub-continent like India where so many languages abound and there is rich regional literature too. Measuring reading tastes as Juggernaut is doing with their app and also because they are able to control their production pipeline while platform is something few are able to do even now. Most editors and publishing houses rely on print products that once released into the market are impossible to track. Some may be sold through brick-and-mortar stores, others through online spaces and yet other copies get sold as remaindered copies and secondhand books.

Listen to the conversation. So much was said. Many important bases within the Indian publishing landscape were touched upon. So much to think about.

What is India Reading? watch the conversation live at #TLFDelhi with Udayan Mitra, Himanjali Sankar, Ranjana Sengupta and Parth Mehrotra talking to Jaya Bhattacharji Rose.

Posted by Times Lit Fest – Delhi on Saturday, December 1, 2018

All in all two fantastic conversations that I was glad to be a part of.

2 December 2018