BOOKWORM
WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING LATELY
Image credit: DOLLAR GIRL on Unsplash.
India: A Short History by Andrew Robinson, Thames & Hudson, $22.95. How, exactly, does one write a “short history” of any country, let alone India?
How far back does one go? What does one include and what does one relegate to a footnote, if that? Can the entire history of a country fit in one slim volume? It can, if one were to use really, really tiny point size for the text!
Andrew Robinson has spent years in India, starting in the mid-1970s when he taught at a school in the Himalayas. He worked for Granada Television while The Jewel in the Crown was being made. He published a biography on Satyajit Ray. And by the looks of it, read practically every book on India and its history. VS Naipaul, Nirad Chaudhuri, Gurcharan Das, RK Narayan, William Dalrymple, they are all quoted in this book.
But professional historians, he writes, are handicapped by a “lamentable lack of indigenous records for the periods preceding the Muslim chroniclers”.
He quotes Romila Thapar: “The chronology of the earlier part of Indian history is notoriously uncertain compared to that of China and the Mediterranean”.
It’s an erudite work, filled with the stories behind the stories. Such as the fact that the practice of Sati, or a widow immolating herself on her husband’s pyre, gained encouragement from the equivalent of a typo when yomiagre meaning house was changed to yomiagne or fire.
That Chanakya, regarded as Machiavelli, has also been compared to Otto von Bismarck and Henry Kissinger.
That the relationship between Rabindranath Tagore and Mahatma Gandhi inspired Nehru and many others including Aung San Suu Kyi, Amartya Sen and the scientist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar.
That the physicist J Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, “famously quoted some words of Krishna to Arjuna in the Bhagwad Gita – ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of world’”– to describe his feelings after watching the first detonation of the bomb in the American desert in 1945.
And it is peppered with little-known, fascinating facts. To wit:
The Fables were based on the Indian folk tales, Panchatantra.
The Hindi expression ratti-bhar (meaning insignificant) has its origins in ratti, a weight used by jewellers in the Indus Valley.
He covers it all. The Aryans, Buddha, Alexander, Ashoka, the Hindu dynasties, the coming of Islam, the Mughal Empire, the British in India...down to Anna Hazare and the current government... As in so many periods of its long history, India of the early twenty-first century is a land of unique, sometimes puzzling and frequently disturbing contradictions, he concludes.
The British In India by David Gilmour, Penguin, $27.99. As India marks its 74th Independence Day this month (August 15), this look back at the tumultuous years of the British raj presents stories of the people who ruled, lived in and loved or hated India.
David Gilmour quotes Khushwant Singh who had said he had known three types of English people in India: Those who disliked the country; those who liked it for the sport, the servants and the standard of living it gave them but ignored the Indians; and those who liked everything about India.
Readers will find Clive and Curzon, of course, but also others like Rumer Godden, MM Kaye, George Orwell or Rudyard Kipling who sometimes make an appearance in other books on India (all were born in India and Kipling was regarded an “unofficial recruiting agent for three generations of British boys” who were inspired to come to India after reading his books) along with those like William Hickey who “was dispatched to India by a father exasperated by his indolence, dishonesty and extravagance”. Or Henry Cunningham who wrote Chronicles of Dustypore in 1875, the first novel about British life in India; and Benjamin Rice who spent many years in Bangalore, and translated the Bible into Kannada.
Gilmour introduces us to people we’re unlikely to meet anywhere else. Like Anna Louisa Evans, a Quaker, who came to India in 1886 to run an orphanage and remained there until her death 60 years later. Or Sir Vere Henry Levigne who developed Kodaikanal. Levingepuram, a village nearby and a temple devoted to him at Vellakavi pay tribute to him. “...although he died in 1885, Indian boys in the area were still being named Levingedurai in the twenty-first century.” Or Lieutenant Hervey who described Bangalore as “one of the best stations on the country” with “English fruits and vegetables thriving”.
He describes real people, real lives, in the heat and the dust and in the hills, where the British took refuge come summer.
The government of India, ran a Simla joke of the 1870s, was ‘a despotism of office boxes tempered by the occasional loss of a key’.
Wives unhappy with their husbands’ frequent transfers which meant they never stayed long enough in one place to have a proper home or plan a garden, families that sent their children back to England for schooling and bore the separation as the “price of empire”, and missionaries who set up schools in India, the ubiquitous “babu” whom the British disliked on sight and the “India bores” who couldn’t stop talking about their time in India even years after they and left the country...”
Gilmour’s prodigious research presents them in astonishing detail.
The book is, as he says, a social history, not a political one, about individuals rather than institutions.
Fun fact: The potted plant garden so popular in India even today originated in the British practice of putting plants in pots to regulate sun, shade and watering!
The Life of Yogananda by Philip Goldberg, Hay House, USD 26.99. Swami Yogananda has had a global impact, thanks to his memoir, Autobiography of a Yogi.
Millions who have read the book, first published in 1946, have been awestruck by Yogananda’s mystical experiences, otherworldy claims and simple teachings.
But does the Autobiography tell the yogi’s full story? No, avers Philip Goldberg. The book was devoted to tales about other people and largely overlooks the journey of a man, from humble beginnings to a rockstar-like status in the depression-era United States. Goldberg sets out to fill in the blanks in the life of Yogananda. Don’t expect to find grand mystical experiences, transformative instructions on how to live life or revelations. It is the story of Mukunda Lal Ghosh, from his birth in 1893 (the same year that Mohandas Gandhi accepted a position in South Africa and Swami Vivekananda stole the show at the World’s Parliament of Religions in Chicago) to his journey to the US and gaining international acclaim as “the twentieth century’s first superstar guru,” as the Los Angeles Times called him.
In many ways it reads like any other immigrant’s tale – challenges, crises, financial woes and settling-in experiences – bracketed between two World Wars, the Great Depression and unprecedented social changes. Goldberg maintains a respectful distance from his subject and doesn’t come across as being reverential.
The result is an objective, thoroughly-researched account of Yogananda’s remarkable life.
He was... fun loving, playful, mischievous and... a practical joker who liked silly gags, such as (according to Swami Kriyananda) ,“Your teeth are like the stars, they come out at night”.
Yogananda told disciples not to waste time with diversions like radio and movies, but enjoyed mechanical toys and popular comic strips like Blondie and Bringing Up Father.
Goldberg reveals that Yogananda enjoyed picnics and long drives, whether spontaneous or planned.
The Life of Yogananda peels back the layers of mystery and mysticism to present an ordinary man who scaled extraordinary heights.
Nine Lives by William Dalrymple, Bloomsbury, INR 499. Nine Lives is about nine people, each one on a different religious path, and each life is a portrait of India, a nation torn between modernity and ancient traditions, of colonial style politics of the grand old Congress Party and the muscular nationalistic Hindutva.
A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet, and then spends the rest of his life trying to atone for the violence by hand-printing the best prayer flags in India.
A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her best friend ritually starve herself to death.
William Dalrymple’s prose has the power of a good documentary .
Riding a Donkey Backwards, retold by Sean Taylor, illustrated by Shirin Adl, Candlewick Press, $24.99. Why does Mulla Nasruddin carry his front door on his back? Why does he ride a donkey backwards? These beloved wise and foolish tales are retold for a new generation.
TEEN REVIEW by YASLEEN MULTANI of Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, Simon & Schuster, $20.99. I recently read Fahrenheit 451, and it was an eye-opener for me and I’m sure it will be for many others.
Set in the future, it presents how books are outlawed and frowned upon, and instead of firemen saving houses from fires, they set the houses of book readers on fire. It showed me how important it is for people to stay connected with each other through books. Books are an important part of our lives as they are a way to explore and learn. Fahrenheit 451 shows us the dent put in society by not reading, not learning, and not asking questions. People have become so consumed with their devices, that they don’t realize that their life is slipping away, and they haven’t accomplished anything. It is important for us to spend time with our family, our friends, and continue having adventures instead of using technology as an excuse.
The impact Fahrenheit 451 had on me was unreal. I never realized that this could potentially be our future. Now I know why society needs to stay connected through human interaction. Technology is important, it helps make our lives easier, but there is a line, and I believe that we have crossed it. Future generations should not deprived of a fun-filled, adventurous, curious childhood. Everyone should read this book.
• Yasleen Multani is a youth volunteer at Brampton Library.
