Category: Favourites

  • The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857

    William Dalrymple

    Once, during a trip to Delhi, seeing the way history seemed to come ‘alive’ in the old city at various corners, I asked my friend whether anyone had tracked what had happened to the descendants of the Mughals, and how they saw their legacy . In this book, William Dalrymple does shed some light on it, though a sad one. More than the last Mughal emperor, the book belongs to the First War of Indian Independence to which he was unwittingly bound. Bahadur Shah 2 or Bahadur Shah Zafar as we were taught in history classes, born in 1775, whose pen name meant ‘Victory’, and was depicted as the face of the revolution that almost threw out the British. A hapless man who was pulled by a desire to ensure that he did justice to his legacy, when all he wanted to do was write his poetry and live in the company of like-minded souls. A spiritual man who was even considered a sufi saint, and still is, at his grave in Rangoon.

    It is now history, but at some point it was the life lived by people like us. 1857 seems like tangible history, an era that can still be felt by its influence, even if minimal. Using records from all kinds of people – common men and chroniclers across Indian and British nationalities, the author creates a vivid portrait of Delhi, before, during, and after the uprising. Characters such as Ghalib sometimes add philosophical layers to this narration, and help us understand the cultural high point that was regained in Zafar’s court. It also shows Zafar as a normal human being of his era – with his own superstitions and insecurities, a subject of court intrigue courtesy his wife Zinat Mahal, his son Mirza Mughaal, Hakim Ahsanullah Khan, General Bakht Khan and others, despite being hailed as Padshah, the Lord of the World.

    The book also makes a point to showcase the relationship between religious communities before the event, and as the author reinforces many a time, Zafar deserves quite some credit in understanding the fabric that held his city together and maintaining the harmony there. He also points out that the real reason for the uprising was not political, but religious. What started as a fight between Hindu sepoys and the British ended as a fight between a rebel force that was made mostly of Muslim jehadis and British mercenaries made of Sikh, Muslim Punjabi, and Pathans. And it was a war that could have gone wither way.

    Late in the book, there is also a mention of a royal survivor – Zafar Sultan, Zafar’s brother’s son, who refused government pension, and made his living with a brick cart. Once, many years later, in his old age, he was abused and beaten up by a businessman. After quietly taking the first few blows, he hit the businessman hard enough to break his nose. He told the court that sixty years earlier, the man’s forefathers would have been his slaves and that he had not forgotten his lineage. Dressed in dirty suits, made to get up and salaam the British (when he used to consider it an insult for anyone to sit in his presence), and verbally abused regularly, Zafar himself was the recipient of several injustices at the hands of the British, who did not even give any consideration for his old age after they ‘captured’ him.

    What remains with me, and this is something I went back to, almost every time I picked up the book to continue, is the photo of Zafar, lying with his face to the camera – the face of a broken old man who through his life saw the dominion of his ancestors taken away from him until all he had was his city and an empty title, who had just been made to undergo a trial and many humiliations before it, eyes expressing melancholy, and resigned to his destiny.

  • The Algebra of Infinite Justice

    Arundhati Roy

    For a few years now, I have heard everyone – from sections of media to people in my social stream call Arundhati Roy everything from a Naxalite lover to a development hater to a deranged person, the last instance during the happenings in Kashmir. In fact, these days whenever there’s an issue of national interest with a scope for polarised opinions, I find many people asking about her take, just so they can heap more ridicule. And though I have never really been a fan of her award winning work of fiction, I have admitted to myself, and to a few of my friends, that I have found it difficult to objectively fault her arguments. After reading this book, I have realised why it is easy to hate her – she holds up a mirror in front of us, the kind of mirror that tells us how our apathy and desire to follow the path of least resistance is responsible for the larger problems we see around us.

    And she does that not just in some moral high ground, philosophising sort of way. She does so with historical perspectives and economical contexts and most importantly, hard data. And therefore, it is not easy to ignore her when she talks about the Narmada Bachao Andolan, the costs of what we call progress and the greater common good, the background games played behind the ‘developmental’ activities we see around us, America’s war against terror, the beginnings of fascism in India and how all of these are linked. The writer in her is in full flow, using sarcasm and wit to telling effect, to (ironically) show the seriousness of the issue. There is something very vulnerable about her when she talks about her dislike for the ‘writer-activist’ label.

    So the next time, I hear something said against her, I am going to ask the person if he/she has read this book. They may not agree with her, but at least this will give them perspective and basis their interest, they can look for counter arguments. What I seek from them is exactly what I seek from myself – an acknowledgment of one’s own role in the issues of today and developing the strength to not look away.

  • The Pregnant King

    Devdutt Pattanaik

    ‘The Pregnant King’ is Devdutt Pattanaik’s first work of fiction, in which he takes the story of Yuvanashva and distorts the timeframes to juxtapose it with characters in the Mahabharata, whereas in reality, the tale of Yuvanashva is recounted twice in the epic, as one predating it by many generations.

    Yuvanashva’s tale is special in at least two ways – it involves his mother Shilavati who possesses all the qualities to be a king, but cannot, only because she is a woman and Yuvanashva himself, king of Vallabhi, who accidentally drinks a potion meant for his queens (for them to become pregnant) and gives birth to a son. Is he the child’s father or mother, that is the answer Yuvanshva seeks. By bringing in various characters like Shikhandi, born a girl, but who uses a Yaksha’s masculinity to become a man, Somvat, who becomes Somvati during the course of a night by exchanging his gender with the yaksha, Arjuna, who lives for a year as a woman courtesy Urvashi’s curse, Ileshwara/i whose gender changes with the moon’s cycles and Adi-natha himself, seen as a hermit and a nymph, the author manages to not just show the nature of gender roles but also gives profound perspectives on dharma – its rigidity and fluidity, the dynamic nature of matter and the static nature of the soul, its various symbolism, and ‘the imperfection of the human condition’.

    This is an amazing read, and that’s not just because I am really interested in mythology. Ancient in origin, and contemporary in narration, the questions it raises belong to a different era and yet manifest themselves now in another form.

  • Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India

    William Dalrymple

    In his introduction to the book, William Dalrymple explains how he has tried to invert the travel writing style of the eighties, highlighting the subject and relegating the narrator and his journey to the shadows. And that’s how this book manages to be a set of nine mini-biographies that are linked by the book’s tagline – ‘In Search of the Sacred in Modern India’. Each ‘story’ not only manages to show the protagonist, his/her belief systems, trade/artform in the context of a region that’s rapidly changing the way it looks at religion, spirituality and the world in general, but also manages to trace its (artform/trade) evolution across the centuries of its existence, and the inividual’s outlook towards his own journey. In that sense, it is also my favourite kind of travel writing – across time.

    From Kerala to Dharmasala and Tarapith to Sehwan, the characters flow, and though all of them are interesting in their own way, my favourites were the ‘The Singer of Epics’ – the story of a bhopa in Rajasthan, and “The Monk’s Tale”, the story of a Buddhist monk who takes up arms against the Chinese, is then forced to fight for the Bangladeshis against Pakistan and finally spends his last years in Dharmasala atoning for his acts by hand printing prayer flags.

    The narrative and the prose make the book very accessible, and the only concern I had was whether the author had let romanticism affect the truth of the stories a tiny bit. A great read.

  • The Lady and the Monk: Four Seasons in Kyoto

    Pico Iyer

    In the autumn of 1987, Pico Iyer begins his journey into Japan, one that would last a full cycle of seasons. Depending on the prism you choose to see it through, the book could be many things.

    It could be a travelogue, though quite different from any I have read yet, and yet one that not only dispels any ‘second-hand’ notions (eg. the Japanese’ take on Kurosawa was surprising) but also captures the nuances of a place unknown to me, in a very sensitive manner.

    It could be the journey and yearning of one human being to understand and experience a culture alien to him/her. Him, from the perspective of Pico in Japan, whose original wonder and positive bias changes into a more pragmatic view as time passes, and her, from the perspective of Sanchiko, a vivacious Japanese lady with a husband and two children, whose heartfelt desire it is to escape the confines and constraints of her culture and upbringing.

    It could be a glimpse into the world of Zen – its monasteries and about living in the moment, without the baggage of the past or the future.

    It could be a relationship between cultures – not just east and west, as shown between the author and Sanchiko or other nuances captured through various other characters, but also within Japan itself – the free spirited Sanchiko versus her friends and family who are against this freedom she desires and wants her to just make the best of her marriage and the duties it entails.

    Or it could be an elegant love story, with Japanese poetry and beautiful descriptions of nature, and in the way of Japanese, one with a poignant ending, just like the story which seems to be the inspiration for the title.

    A wonderful read, and an armchair journey that has given me much to think about.