Category: Non fiction

  • Empires of the Indus: The Story of a River

    Alice Albinia 

    I am showing signs of travelogue addiction, and this is the kind of book that creates it! It’s not just the content of the book, which is marvelous and makes for a treasure trove of information, but the sheer tenacity and guts the author displays, that has made me a fan. Spanning four countries, this book is the story of the river Indus, from its source to its destination, though not in a linear way. What it succeeds in doing, like the best travelogues do, is to also allow us to travel through time, in this case, even to the time before man existed. From Hindu mythology to the Harappa civilisation to Partition and the Kargil conflict and China’s occupation of Tibet, the book is not just the story, but the history of a subcontinent (at least a part of it) and the civilisations that rose and fell.

    The preface gives us an idea of the expanse of the river through its various names, given across lands and by everyone from Greek soldiers to Sufi saints.

    There are nuggets everywhere right from the beginning – the comparison of the arrangements of the Quran and the Rig Veda, the integrity shown by a citizen in the early days of Pakistan’s formation, a modern day citizen blaming Jinnah for the country’s authoritarian culture, a nation’s search for identity, and the vision of its founder, who was only human. The first chapter ‘Ramzan in Karachi’ is a book in itself, and this can be said of all the chapters! ‘Conquering the classic river’ is a slice of the Company’s India exploits, ‘Ethiopia’s first fruit’ shows the amazing ‘presence’ of Africa in the subcontinent’s history and present, and the facets of their absorption into the mainstream. ‘River Saints’ is about Sufism and its modern day remnants who are not beyond politics, religious conflicts and feudalism.

    ‘Up the Khyber’ is about the exploits of Mahmud of Ghazni, the sexual preferences in the frontier province, and the beginning of the author’s more difficult challenges as she zigs and zags through Taliban and smuggler territory. ‘Buddha on the Silk Road’ is an awesome chapter on the meeting of 3 great religions – Hinduism, Islam and Buddhism and how they influence each other in the area, down to the destruction of the ancient Bamiyan statues more recently. In ‘Alexander at the outer ocean’, the author stubbornly walks, despite very serious hardships, the route that the Sikunder-e-azam took. ‘Indra’s Beverage’ takes us back to Rig Veda times, the Aryans and ancient Stonehenge like relics that survive to this day, along with the Kalash tribe, which follows a religion that goes back beyond Hinduism. Some areas, as the vivid prose describes them, seem to exist the same way they did in Rig Vedic times. The incredibly advanced Harappa civilisation is showcased in ‘Alluvial Cities’, though the reason for their fall is still contested. Kashmir’s archaeological treasures are the focus in ‘Huntress of the lithic’ and it’s interesting to see how the same ‘painting’ has been reinterpreted across time by various people to suit their needs. In the final chapter, the author captures the startling contrast of man’s attempts to conquer nature and at the other end of the scale, his ever decreasing ability to live in harmony. This chapter is also a testament to her commitment to the book, and the mentions of Kailash and the possibilities of Meru were extremely interesting to someone like me, who is interested in Hindu mythology. The book’s final words, which makes us wonder how long the river which spawned civilisations will be around, is a melancholic gaze into the future.

    At 300 odd pages, every page of this book is packed, and there is no respite. But it’s completely worth it!

  • No Full Stops in India

    Mark Tully

    No Full Stops in India was published in 1991, and so the best part about it is that it involves a fair amount of time travel. It’s a collection of 10 essays with an introduction and epilogue that could pass off as mini essays too! While all of the essays are commentaries, what adds that little flavour is the author’s own involvement in it, which he somehow manages to balance with a near objective view. The first essay, for instance, involves the marriage of his cook’s daughter, and his experience at the village. But it also is about how communities in villages have been solving their own problems even better than the land’s relatively new legal system. It thus serves as an example of how we, the ‘educated elite’ make a clamour for egalitarianism without understanding the positives of the caste system.

    Cultural imperialism is the theme of the next essay and is brought out through the carvings at Mahabalipuram, and the interaction and friction between British artists (sculptors) and their Indian counterparts, whom they rate slightly lesser- as craftsmen. The essay also touches upon Dalit Christians and how they are discriminated against even within the Church.

    The Kumbh Mela is what the third essay is about and is a vivid telling of the massive festival. The author spends time with VP Singh’s brother, and meets the various people who ply their trade in this enormous festival – the pandas and later, the akharas who look to recruit people or get donations. In this, there is a note of sarcasm that creeps in occasionally, but Tully still manages to capture the faith driven fervour superbly. He has also correctly predicted the potential rise of communal parties towards the end of the essay.

    One of the most interesting essays in No Full Stops in India is the fourth one, especially for my generation which grew up watching Ramanand Sagar’s Ramayan! The author reminded me of the impact of this mega serial long before we had reality TV and TRPs – taxi drivers who knocked on the author’s door asking for permission to watch it in his house, cabinet swearing in postponed so everyone could watch it, and so on. He spends 2 days with the Sagars while they’re shooting the Uttararamayan section (owing to public demand) and there Ramanand Sagar tells him how he has handled feminists and also the story of his own life. There is an amusing part about the filming of a scene – Lakshman having biscuits between takes, reusing marigolds for extra takes, and so on.

    Operation Black Thunder is a more serious essay which involves covering the whole event live. This was an era before live TV and omnipresent crews and the author tries to delve deeper into how a section of the Sikhs and the Central and State governments reached this point, with interviews of civil servants and military, police personnel.

    Colonialism in Calcutta is probably my favourite essay as Tully takes us through the city where Marxism, industries and religion co-exist side by side amidst bare remnants of an earlier era. In between are interesting anecdotes like the Oberoi Hotel’s origins. This happens to be the author’s birthplace and the affection does really come through.

    The next one was a surprise since it dealt with a modern day case of Sati and it has never been proved whether it was suicide or murder. The author gets the varying perspectives of the villagers, politicians, civil servants, activists, the extended family, and it does bring out how laws at the end of day, should be made understanding the minds of the people they are made for.

    Typhoon in Ahmedabad also surprised me but apparently that’s the name they use for riots! This is an era before Narendra Modi left his indelible mark and does show that riots existed long before him. The poor – both Hindu and Muslim, seem the most affected in the politically motivated result of a nexus between politicians and the underworld. SEWA’s activities also get some space as does Ahmedabad as a city.

    A journey into Madhya Pradesh in what was the national vehicle of the time – the Ambassador, makes up the next essay. The destination is the village of an artist who has made it (relatively) big in Bhopal with the help of a government program. Jabalpur, the inconspicuous geographical centre of India, represents eminently the feel of a tier 3 city in the mid-late 80s. This essay also covers ground on tribals, their belief systems and I also found what could be the precursor to Arundhati Roy’s essays about the Narmada.

    The last essay is about Digvijay Narain Singh, the politician from Bihar who also happens to be the author’s close friend. He belongs to an era when politicians had a conscience, and while you could say that the author is biased, much of the perspective is reportage – opinions from others. The politician’s relationships with Nehru, Indira Gandhi are well chronicled and throws light on the kind of politician who took the responsibility of being a public servant seriously.

    The epilogue is a note on Rajiv Gandhi, and through this, the state of India as a nation. It ends with the news of Rajiv’s death and the author’s perspective on what this means for a nation.

    In essence, No Full Stops in India is a wonderful read that gave me insights about a time when I was too young to dwell on things happening around me and events that ultimately affected the present I live in.

  • An Ordinary Person’s Guide To Empire

    Arundhati Roy 

    Arundhati Roy continues right from where she left off (actually she never has) in The Algebra of Infinite Justice. This time, contexts and facts get repeated in essays, and that might put you off, but that should not take away from the messages.

    An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire, published in 2004, a couple of years after the other book, consists of 14 articles written between June 2002 and November 2004. The theme of the book is the working of the Empire, not the traditional imperial one built on a smattering of trade and an all powerful military, but the more modern, relatively more subtle one with many simultaneous strategies – ‘neoliberal capitalism’ aided by the IMF, World Bank etc, corporate globalization spearheaded by multinational corporations, and finally a healthy dose of good old state sponsored military might. As Roy writes, add oil and mix. Not to forget the media that makes the entire effort come out smelling of roses. “In this era of crisis reportage, if you don’t have a crisis to call your own, you’re not in the news. And if you’re not in the news, you don’t exist. It’s as though the virtual world constructed in the media has become more real than the real world.”

    A lot of the conversation is around Iraq, where the latest version of the above drama is being played out, but in many essays there are historical references of how the US has honed its ‘process’ through various wars it has fought. Creating, funding and then making a huge hue and cry over eliminating armies/heads of state who step out of line. Saddam being the latest. A series of acts that had spawned and now fuels a global threat – terrorism. Two opposing camps feeding off each other. “Al Qaida vs Al Fayda”.

    But the story is global, from the police in Kerala displaying the tribals’ bows and arrows as dangerous ammunition to encounter killings from Mumbai to Kashmir to Andhra Pradesh and indiscriminate and illegal uses of POTA to state sponsored terrorism in Gujarat and hunting down Maoists in Jharkand. The story is also of how democracy is just a process of ‘cyclical manipulation” We really have no choice.

    It gets scary when she writes how “Modern democracies have been around for long enough\ for neo-liberal capitalists to learn how to subvert them. They have mastered the technique of infiltrating the instruments of democracy-the “independent” judiciary, the “free” press, the parliament-and moulding them to their purpose. The project of corporate globalization has cracked the code. Free elections, a free press, and an independent judiciary mean little when the free market has reduced them to commodities available on sale to the highest bidder.”

    And somewhere in all this, is the thread of the slow attrition of the concept of justice, especially for the poor and the powerless. “… for most people in the world, peace is war – a daily battle against hunger, thirst, and the violation of their dignity.” The saddest one is about the man in Hasud, a town that was supposed to be ‘relocated’ entirely, courtesy a dam. The man was given a cheque of Rs.25000 as compensation for demolishing his hut. Thrice he went to the town in a bus to cash it. Then his money ran out, and he walked, miles and miles, on his wooden leg. “The bank sent him away and asked him to come after three days.”

    Roy has her critics, and she might have many faults, but it is when she brings out such incidents that I feel she is doing justice to the written word and her skill with it. For this reason, do take time to read it.

  • The Collected Stories: Paul Theroux

    Paul Theroux

    For a while now, I’ve been stuck inside my cocoon of Indian writing and travelogues, except for occasional forays. My biggest peeve was that I couldn’t identify with international fiction. And Paul Theroux, with this book, just laughed. 🙂
    The book has 5 parts, the last 2 with an obvious connection, but the remaining stories spans geographies, contexts and webs that humans create with their emotions and relationships. The first three have troubled marriages, stagnant relationships, death, deception, love and separation, set everywhere from Russia to Africa to Asia. Some of them poignant, and some of them seemingly mundane. There’s even a story that seems to be set in the future – Warm Dogs, quite chilling, actually. My favourite from all these sections is ‘Algebra’, a wonderfully simplistic study in human relationships. The characters are people who I could easily identify with, not just because of the ways in which they have been etched, but also the excellent prose that made me ‘feel’ the settings they were in. Places and events are so well described that it’s easy to imagine the foreign locales that one has never seen. There are subtle twists, ones which require you to pay attention – ones that ‘reward’ you for it. 🙂
    The next two sections are based on the postings of a fictional Foreign Service office, first in Ayer Hitam, a boondocks in Malaysia and then in London. The characters overlap in stories, even as new ones are brought to the fore and stories written about them. The Ayer Hitam section felt like a mashup of English August and Malgudi Days, if you can somehow imagine that. 🙂 Over stories, the characters become familiar to you, and it’s almost as though you were there in the offices, the bungalows and houses and at the parties – a fly on the wall.
    London, though more ‘civilised’, and full of potential, paled a bit in comparison (for me) to the earlier section. However, the office politics and the constant realignment of relationships (including the narrator’s own) kept me engaged right till the very end. In a way, the first and last stories are about coming full circle.
    I like an author’s story collections, because it gives me a feel of the author – the breadth and depth, and I’m immensely happy to have discovered one, whom I feel will be a favourite. Someone who reminded me that in the end, a good story is essentially all about the human condition. The book goes straight into my favourites. 🙂

  • Old Path White Clouds: Walking in the Footsteps of the Buddha

    Thích Nhất Hạnh

    The story of the Buddha, through a couple of narratives – one that of the cowherd turned monk Svasti, and the other, probably that of Buddha himself, which moves back and forth to also tell us about Siddhartha’s early life, before and during his enlightenment. The book also lays a lot of stress on the teaching of the Tathagata, while also documenting the political and socio-cultural milieu that existed across the 80 years that the Buddha lived.

    The book, drawn from over 24 sources across multiple languages, also has a lot to offer beyond the teachings themselves. The Buddha’s own experiments on attaining enlightenment, based on the prevalent practices, followed by his own thinking that took him beyond them, his relationships with the kings of his time, and the influence of his teachings over them and how they ruled their kingdom, the way that the sangha was politicised even during his own lifetime, how religion slowly crept into the path, though the Buddha stressed that the community was only for supporting those who were trying to attain enlightenment, and how the religion tried to influence the politics of the time. It seems as though things haven’t changed at all in this part of the world.

    The simplicity of language while explaining the teachings, is worth a mention here, though quite obviously, it is easier read than done. Despite the changes the world has seen in the centuries that have passed, I could instinctively feel that just as the Buddha had said – enlightenment was within every person, and the teachings can at best serve as a raft – “the finger pointing at the moon is not the moon itself.” The next time I see the monks, across the multiple sects, I will wonder how many follow the eight fold path and the 200+ precepts that their spiritual teacher had pointed out. The book paints a picture of a human, who through his own efforts and practice, showed others how to attain enlightenment. Not a doctrine, but a life lived.The last chapter, when Svastti recollects how it all began and understands that the true way to respect the Buddha is to implement his teachings in daily life, is probably the best summary of the book, and the most moving, as well.