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Women seem to have written more interesting books this year as compared to men, writes
Nargis was the
granddaughter of a Brahmin widow who eloped with a Muslim sarangi
player. If her grandmother had defied society to live with the one she
loved, so did Nargis. At the height of her popularity, she decided to
get married to a relative non-entity but one whom she liked as much as
he liked her. With Sunil Dutt, she entered the world of public life,
which involved service of the people. That Nargis and Sunil won the
confidence of those whom they served was clear when he was repeatedly
chosen by the same constituency to be their Member of Parliament right
until his death. In India Remembered too family archives provide the main source of information for the mother-daughter duo who delves into the troubled days of Partition to provide a personalised account of the events. Talbot’s version of the Partition days as An American Witness to India’s Partition is more in line with informing his own people, the American’s, of how to make sense of the tumultuous demise of the British Empire in the East. Indians, their lives and concerns feature in a big way in these reports.
Women seem to have written many more interesting books this year than men. The one by Myra MacDonald takes a close womanly look at the history of the Indo-Pak confrontation in Siachen and simply calls all that macho pomposity to be the Heights of Madness. As she trudges across the white heights, she observes the military logic of sending young men to die in the cold so that their leaders can claim to have protected national honour. She comments on bureaucratic pig-headedness in not allowing the soldiers adequate logistic support. She reconstructs individual acts of bravery such as that of Bana Singh who in 1987 won the only victory in this war which has been going on since 1984. She is no peacenik but does insist that neither the individual field commander nor the national leaders should lose sight of commonsense while executing a war that claims a heavy human toll in terms of the physical and mental well-being of the soldiers.
Mukul Kesvan, for one, pokes fun at the European way of self-determination when he argues that this does not work in multi-cultural societies. His Ugliness of the Indian Male provides us a cock-eyed look at the foibles of the Anglophonic Indian who has an opinion on everything that is important from Hindi films to Hindu bashing, Indian nationalism to Indian secularism and even has a small poem with the title Tonguing Mother. An absence did jar in this book of interesting essays: there is no comment either on farmers’ suicide or on globalisation.
Webster’s Social History of Christianity is very Punjab specific. After going into the details of caste, community and religion in north-western India during colonial times, Webster says that Christianity in this region had Indian roots and was not something imposed by colonialism. This is something for us to ponder given the burgeoning conflicts between various deras and Sikhs.
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Their
children, Namrata and Priya, have brought out a book on their parents
which adds a personal touch to the gaps that are left behind in Desai’s
book. Memoirs of our Parents is a well-balanced recollection,
based on
personal archives, of how the children looked upon their parents. Both
books have carefully chosen pictures from the Dutt family album,
including the one in which young Sanjay is shown with his pants down,
literally. A similar book of remembrance reconstructing an important
period of contemporary history is by Pamela Mountbatten and India Hicks.
Talbot’s
reports, begun when he was just 23, could fruitfully be read to provide
insights into the American way of thinking which led them to remain the
dominant world power throughout the 20th century: focus on the people
and not just the shenanigans of those in power; winning over minds is
just as important as winning wars. The much-deserved lotus award that
the government of India gave him in 2002 and many other Indian honours
indicate that even at personal level, Talbot was highly successful in
winning over minds.
Sumantra
Bose inquires into the matter of contestations over land across the
globe to examine the possibility of bringing peace in areas as diverse
as Bosnia, Cyprus, Jaffna, Jerusalem and Kashmir. His Contested Lands
focuses on the importance of self-determination and regional
cooperation. Once the conflict begins to go out of hand, he argues, one
constructive way of resolving it would be to involve outsiders in
mediating a resolution. Even while he means well not many in India will
agree with his prescriptions.
Among
the books directly concerned with the country, the most important this
year was Ramachandra Guha’s general history of India after Gandhi.
Without doubt this remains the most readable and comprehensive
general history of India since Independence. Yahswant Sinha’s Confessions
of a Swadeshi Reformer recounts his role in engendering the current
streak of economic prosperity that India is witnessing. He was the one
who had mortgaged India’s gold to the Bank of England to pay for
imports. Later, he played an important role in pushing forward the
business-friendly reforms that had been initiated in the 1980s. The more
important nuggets in his story concern politics. For example, he tells
us of the Chief Election Commissioner T. N. Sheshan being an emissary
between Chandrashekhar and Rajiv Gandhi during the general elections of
1991. Did that high-profile CEC thereby violate his oath of office?
Sinha has nothing to say on such anti-constitutional actions.