The Guide on Queen’s jubilee read; False Allies, poems of grief and more 

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. To coincide with the platinum jubilee of Q

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. To coincide with the platinum jubilee of Queen Elizabeth, The Reading Agency, along with the BBC, has compiled a list of 70 books – The Big Jubilee Read -- from across the Commonwealth, 10 each for every decade of her reign beginning 1952.

The first decade features three books by Indian writers, V.S. Naipaul’s poignant novel A House for Mr. Biswas, R. K. Narayan’s masterly book, The Guide, and Attia Hosain’s coming-of-age story set against Partition, Sunlight on a Broken Column. Over the next few decades, other Indian origin writers who find place are Anita Desai ( Clear Light of Day), Salman Rushdie (and his ‘Booker of Bookers Prize’ winner Midnight’s Children) and Rohinton Mistry ( A Fine Balance). Debut novels of Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things (which also won the Booker Prize), and Raj Kamal Jha’s The Blue Bedspread are on the list too. Apart from Bapsi Sidhwa ( The Crow Eaters), there are no other Pakistani writers; Mohammed Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes is surely one of the big misses or Kamila Shamsie’s In the City by the Sea. Two Sri Lankan writers, Shehan Karunatilake ( Chinaman) and Anuk Arudpragasam ( A Passage North) make the cut. Other well-known authors include Anthony Burgess ( A Clockwork Orange), Margaret Atwood ( A Handmaid’s Tale), Kazuo Ishiguro ( Remains of the Day), J.M. Coetzee ( Disgrace), last year’s Nobel laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah ( Paradise) and a host of others. Critics called out the surprise omissions of J.K. Rowling and her Harry Potter books (the writer has faced accusations of transphobia) and J.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. 

In reviews, we read Manu Pillai’s portrait of princely India, a book on Bengal beyond the Bhadralok, a Jamia Millia Islamia student’s account of the police attack on university students, publisher of Seagull Naveen Kishore’s poems of grief and more. 

Manu Pillai’s False Allies (Juggernaut) is a revelation about an India caught between the mandarins of the Raj, the rising scribal class of Indians and five princes as it follows the footsteps of Raja Ravi Varma. While Ravi Varma may be credited with creating the images of Hindu mythology, it is his commissioned work in royal households that Pillai uses to tell a tale that’s different from the one we are used to hearing and reading. In his review, Serish Nanisetti writes that Pillai, who also happens to be a Malayali, uses the artist’s life and work as a sutradhar (a connecting thread) between the kingdoms of the five princes. “He smashes the notion that the royalty of pre-independent India was only about exotic lifestyles, indulging in baubles of extravagance or wasting away in a haze of opioids. Instead, a complex nuanced world is revealed using the royal goings on in Travancore, Padukkottai, Baroda, Mysore, and Mewar. Pillai shows the readers how the princes, their queens and ministers deftly played the chess game set by the British Raj.”

False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma review: An alternative princely drama

The content of Nothing Will Be Forgotten (LeftWord) is as direct as its title. A Ph.D. scholar at Jamia University, Nehal Ahmed, was present on the campus during the days leading up to the police attack on Jamia students on December 15, 2019. What he witnessed on that “darkest day of his life”, he documents in detail. The 138 pages, says Soma Basu in her review, centre around the peaceful agitation turning into a warzone and the unique gathering of Muslim women in nearby Shaheen Bagh to lead the protest against the Citizenship (Amendment) Act, 2019 (CAA). “Ahmed writes a passionate first-hand account of a student shattered by the violence inside his university and how it led to a creative resistance and evolved into an inspiring movement spanning three months.” 

Nothing Will Be Forgotten: From Jamia To Shaheen Bagh review: An account of fear and hope