The Hindu on Books | Ian Jack’s India, John Keay’s Himalayas, Vasudhendra’s historical fiction and more

Welcome to this edition of the The Hindu on Books Newsletter.

Welcome to this edition of the  The Hindu on Books Newsletter.

Tributes are pouring in for Ian Jack who passed away suddenly last week at Paisley, on the Firth of Clyde in Scotland. But though Clyde may have been “his heartland for much of his life,” the 77-year-old editor, journalist and columnist was interested in people, trains, canals, water – and India. As editor of Granta, which he took over from Bill Buford in 1995 and stayed at the helm till 2007, overseeing 48 issues of the magazine of “new writing” for 12 years, Jack devoted issue No. 57 (spring 1997) to India. To coincide with 50 years of India’s independence, he showcased writing by old and new writers, from R.K. Narayan, Ved Mehta, V.S. Naipaul, Jan Morris to Vikram Seth, William Dalrymple, Urvashi Butalia and Arundhati Roy (an extract from  The God of Small Things which would go on to win the Booker Prize). In his Introduction, he writes how he first arrived in India in 1976 during the last months of the Emergency as a reporter, and found the country “remote and austere, resolved to cope with its problems and fulfil its aspirations in its own way.” He travelled for weeks, picking up voices from the streets, and saw the force and meaning of “political freedom and universal suffrage” when his newspaper asked him to stay on and cover the 1977 elections called by Mrs. Indira Gandhi in which she and her party were swept to defeat. Jack would make India his second home for the next several years and captured many of the changes, not least the movement of Hindu nationalism from the margins to the centre of politics.

In 2015, Jack guest-edited a second Granta edition on India (No. 130/Another Way of Seeing) in which we were introduced to more “new writing” from the region. For instance, Vivek Shanbag’s celebrated novella  Ghachar Ghochar, translated by Srinath Perur, first appeared in English in this edition. The stellar list has a slew of writers including Hari Kunzru, Aman Sethi, Raghu Karnad, Samanth Subramanian, Katherine Boo and Anjum Hasan. In the Introduction, Jack celebrates the bustling publishing industry: “The Indian writer need no longer look over his shoulder at his imagined audience abroad; many if not most of his readers are much closer – are Indian like him and need no telling about samosas.” The present editor of Granta, Sigrid Rausing, who took over from Jack, recalled how he always obeyed his instincts for “the original, interesting and the true.” That’s the reason why perhaps he sent writers out to report on interesting things happening in the “real” world. “He was a gifted journalist and editor of immense common sense, and [had] an insatiable curiosity about the world around him.” 

In reviews, we read a prescription to revive and grow the Indian economy in a post-pandemic world by two veteran policy-makers, a book on the divide between the southern and northern States, new dystopian fiction by Tabish Khair and more. We also interview John Keay about his new book on the Himalayas, and Vasudhendra on his latest historical fiction. 

To understand how India should respond to epochal changes in the post-pandemic world, two experienced policy-makers N.K. Singh and P.K. Mishra have written  Recalibrate: Changing Paradigms (Rupa). The authors bring to bear decades of policymaking and institutional understanding, combining bottom-up microeconomic insights with top-down macroeconomic imperatives, to argue that India effectively needs a new social, fiscal and federal compact, writes Sajjid Z. Chinoy in his review. If the new social compact entails constructing an economy both more resilient to shocks and able to thrive in this new era, the writers argue that a new fiscal compact should ensure that “fiscal forbearance is followed by fiscal rectitude.” Where will those revenues come from? “Given the myriad of fiscal architecture questions, Singh bats strongly for an institutional response in the form of a Fiscal Council, now prevalent in more than 80 countries. Any fiscal compact , however, will only succeed if it is accompanied by a renewed federal compact. The GST has recently shown much promise, but more needs to be done to realise its full potential. Meanwhile, the heterogeneity of State finances will argue for a State-specific debt consolidation path, as the book recognises.”  

Review of  Recalibrate — Changing Paradigms: Path to recovery

Why are the southern States doing so much better than the north? That’s the question data scientist Nilakantan RS strives to answer in his new book,  South vs North: The Great Divide (Juggernaut) . At the time of independence, he writes in the Introduction, the southern States were indistinguishable from the rest of India in terms of their development metrics. Today, the difference couldn’t be starker. Backed with data, statistics, research and reporting, he provides the possible reasons, starting with the most important economic resource a State can have: its people. “A healthy and well-educated population with a reasonably well-run government is likely to have better economic prospects. The income levels and job prospects in south India are, unsurprisingly, significantly better than in the north,” he writes. In his review, S. Venkataraghavan says if there is one important takeaway for policy-makers all across India, it is that girls must be educated; and the government must ensure that they don’t drop out, by giving them nutritious meals and access to menstrual hygiene, as several southern States have done.