The Book of Aleph (Volume 3)

the book of

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ALEPH BOOK COMPANY An independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India First published in India in 2014

by Aleph Book Company 7/16 Ansari Road, Daryaganj New Delhi 110 002 Copyright Š Aleph Book Company 2014 All rights reserved.

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Copyright in individual excerpts vests in the authors or proprietors. Copyright in this selection vests in Aleph Book Company. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted or stored in a retrieval system, in any form or by any means, without permission in writing from Aleph Book Company.

In the works of fiction in this selection characters, places, names and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN: 978-93-83064-21-2 Printed and bound in India by Disclaimer: All prices, publication dates, and other specifications in this volume are liable to change without notice.

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CONTENTS

| Note from the Publishers 6 Winter 9 Spring 15 Summer 45 Monsoon 65

Autumn/Winter 103 Paperbacks 143 Select Backlist 178 Index 183 About Us 192

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not e f r o m t h e pu b l i s h e r s

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Dear readers, Publishing houses take a couple of years to come to their fullest flowering, and so it has been with Aleph, for it is only this year, eighteen months after we first started publishing, that we will publish our first full list of fifty titles (of which approximately half will be paperbacks of the previous year’s hardcover titles). It is a list we are thrilled with, as some of the subcontinent’s greatest living writers have now chosen to publish with us, including Vikram Seth, Shashi Tharoor, Romila Thapar, Sudhir Kakar and Gurcharan Das. They will join noted international writers like Damon Galgut (twice shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), who has a new novel out (his first to be set mainly in India) this year and Wendy Doniger, who will publish Indian editions of three of her most iconic works. Other titles by celebrated authors to look out for are Man Booker shortlisted author Allan Sealy’s first book in a decade, a brilliant non-fiction book about his home in the foothills of the Himalaya; Justice Leila Seth’s new book on the most pressing civil rights issues of our time; legendary newspaper editor N. Ram’s book on the inside stories behind his greatest scoops; a searing, no-holds-barred autobiography from pathbreaking filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt; a collection of stories from award-winning novelist Jerry Pinto; new books from noteworthy writers of fiction like Timeri N. Murari, Kavery Nambisan, Shovon Chowdhury and Manjushree Thapa; memorable books about Bangladesh and Nepal by Salil Tripathi and Prashant Jha; a supple new translation of Kalidasa by the poet and scholar Mani Rao; a selection of Mahatma Gandhi’s works put together by Gandhi scholar Rakesh Batabyal that should pique the interest of the twenty-first-century reader; a riotous memoir by stand-up comic Radhika Vaz and much much more. 2013 was a rather good year for us. Our authors were nominated eight times for top literary prizes and won four times. Jerry Pinto’s Em and The Big Hoom won the Hindu Literary Prize 2012 and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction 2013, Nilanjana Roy’s The Wildings won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award and Chetan Raj Shrestha’s The King’s Harvest won the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award 2013. In 2014 we expect our books to be received just as well.We hope you will agree once you’ve finished browsing through The Book of Aleph:Volume Three.

New Delhi, January 2014

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© Meeta Ahlawat/The Hindu

VIKRAM SETH

Aleph Book Company is delighted to publishVikram Seth’s critically acclaimed global bestseller, A Suitable Boy, in the twentieth year of its existence. One of the longest novels ever written in the English language, it was hailed around the world on publication (‘puts a subcontinent between hardcovers’, wrote the

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Sunday Times). Set in 1950s India, the novel follows the lives and fortunes of four families, and focuses on the efforts of Lata Mehra’s mother and family to find her ‘a suitable boy’ to marry.

Today, the novel continues to add multitudes of admirers to the millions who have already fallen under its spell. One recent reader review on Amazon called it ‘the ultimate book on India’—evidently, its vast and rich attractions continue to remain as bright and alluring today as they were when the book was first published.

Aleph is also thrilled to announce that it has secured the rights to publish the sequel to A Suitable Boy. Entitled A Suitable Girl, the new novel, which is scheduled for publication in winter 2016, will revolve around the stories of Lata’s grandchildren and the events of the present day. ~ 8 9

Vikram Seth was born in India and educated here and in England, California and China. He has written acclaimed books in several genres: many books of poetry; a verse novel, The Golden Gate; a travel book, From Heaven Lake; animal fables, Beastly Tales; an epic novel, A Suitable Boy; and a memoir, Two Lives. His most recent novel, An Equal Music, was published in 1999.

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Rabindranath Tagore for the 21 st Century Reader translated from the bengali by

Arunava Sinha Rabindranath Tagore is the second most popular literature laureate of all time (after John Steinbeck) according to the official website of the Nobel Prize. He won the prize in 1913, but a hundred years later readers continue to flock to his work because it possesses all the qualities essential to keep it fresh and relevant—big ideas, complex themes, stylistic brilliance, and a deep engagement with nature, beauty, family, love, and passion.

Keeping the 21st century reader firmly in mind, this volume brings together some of Tagore’s most celebrated works of fiction—comprising novels, short stories and drama—and the best of his poetry and lyrics. Brilliantly translated by Arunava Sinha, this selection is evidence of his position as one of the world’s greatest writers.

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~ Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) published his first volume of poetry at the age of sixteen under the pseudonym Bhanusingha. In the course of a long and very productive writing career, Tagore wrote over 2,000 songs, many short stories, novels, plays, essays, autobiographies, poetry and dance dramas.

Among his songs are the national anthems of two countries—India and Bangladesh. He was an accomplished musician and developed a new branch of music called Rabindrasangeet.

Arunava Sinha translates classic, modern and contemporary Bengali fiction and non-fiction into English. Twenty of his translations have been published so far.

Twice the winner of the Crossword Translation Award, for Sankar’s Chowringhee (2007) and Anita Agnihotri’s Seventeen (2011), he has also been shortlisted for The Independent Foreign Fiction prize (2009) for his translation of Chowringhee.

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MAPS FOR A MORTAL MOON Essays and Entertainments

ADIL JUSSAWALLA

The worst thing about being a human being is being a human being. ‘I wish I was bird’, as the railway clerk in Nissim Ezekiel’s poem says. But if I were, the worst thing about being a bird would be being a bird.

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Welcome to the world of Adil Jussawalla, poet, columnist, critic.

The essays and entertainments collected in this volume take in everything from language to poetry, from ethics to model aeroplanes, from death and addiction to travel and alienation.

In these pages, you will meet poets, novelists, construction labourers, gamblers and, most startlingly, Jussawalla himself—as a boy who lost himself at the movies; as the acned adolescent on a ship watching a storm at sea; as the flaneur of South Mumbai.

Poignant, witty, melancholic and intense, this is the best of four decades of prose from one of India’s masters of the written word.

~ Adil Jussawalla has written four books of poems: Land’s End (1962), Missing Person (1976), Trying to Say Goodbye (2012) and The Right Kind of Dog (2013), a book of poems for young people. Jussawalla also put together the near-legendary New Writing in India (1974). He lives in Mumbai.

Jerry Pinto is a Mumbai-based author and columnist. His published works include a book of poems, Asylum; Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, which won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema in 2007; and the novel Em and The Big Hoom, winner of the Hindu Literary Prize 2012 and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction 2013.

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INDIA IN LOVE Marriage and Sexuality in the 21 st Century

Ira Trivedi

Economic prosperity and urbanization have had a tremendous impact on our society, and many of the nation’s traditional values have been jettisoned or entirely reinvented. Nowhere is this more visible than in the way we fall in love, view marriage and disregard sexual taboos. In her path-breaking book, Ira Trivedi presents, through real-life stories of phenomena like gay love, mating games on college campuses, arranged marriage, divorce and the burgeoning porn industry, a comprehensive portrait of sexuality, love and marriage in today’s India.

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~ Ira Trivedi is the author of three works of fiction: There is No Love on Wall Street (2011), The Great Indian Love Story (2009) and What Would You Do to Save the World? (2006). She writes extensively for publications such as the Hindustan Times, Outlook and Forbes. When she is not writing, travelling or teaching yoga, Ira is a connoisseur of the darkest of chocolates and the bitterest of green teas.

She makes her own chocolate and grows her own tea.

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Talking of Justice: Essays

Leila Seth

In her new book, eminent jurist and bestselling author Leila Seth discusses some of the most contentious issues facing the nation today, including violence against women; the nurture of the girl child; the need for a uniform civil code; women’s rights; prisoner’s rights; gender sensitization; social litigation; and how to be a good citizen, among others. Keenly observed, forthright and elegantly argued, each of the essays in this volume offers critical insights into problems that are being examined. The excerpt that follows is taken from an essay on the Justice Verma Committee on which Justice Seth served.

The committee was set up to recommend to the government measures that could be taken to ensure that those accused of committing aggravated sexual assault against women were tried speedily and received punishment commensurate with their crimes.

inside the justice verma committee

On Sunday, 23 December 2012, over a quiet lunch at home, a few friends and I were discussing the horrendous gang rape that had taken place the previous Sunday and the widespread outrage it had triggered around the country.The assault had been extremely brutal. Five young men and a boy of seventeen had gang-raped and brutalized with an iron rod a twenty-three-year-old paramedical student, leaving her for dead before fleeing. The culprits were swiftly apprehended and the facts of the case were reported in great detail in all the media.

Accompanied by a male friend, the victim had been making her way home after seeing a movie at about 8:30 in the evening. They had spring

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boarded a bus seemingly headed towards their destination. Besides the two of them, the only occupants of the bus were the five men and the boy. As the bus sped down Delhi’s ill-lit roads, curtains drawn across its windows, the young woman was raped repeatedly, and her companion was beaten senseless. After the men finished raping her an iron rod was used to further brutalize her and then the two victims were thrown out of the bus. When news of the assault reached the world at large, it triggered massive peaceful protests by young people, both men and women. To them the harrowing ordeal faced by Nirbhaya (or the fearless one as the young woman came to be christened by the media, as the law did not permit her real name to be disclosed) and her companion was symptomatic of the rape and sexual molestation their friends and most of them personally had experienced for years without stringent action being taken against the molesters and rapists. They wanted the state to enact sterner laws and deliver speedier and more effective justice. It was perhaps for the first time that young people had engaged in such large-scale protests spontaneously without being organized by political organizations or well-known leaders. It was the issue that mattered and people who did not know each other were discussing it openly amongst themselves, contacting each other on social media platforms and on other networks.The electronic media as well as the print media were giving them massive coverage. Sex and its discontents was now out in the open—a subject which had not been discussed as much as it should have been either in educational institutions or at home with parents. The police tried to disperse these large-scale demonstrations but the protestors bravely faced water cannons and other forms of intimidation on those cold December mornings when the protests were at their peak and returned, day after day, to keep up the pressure so that eventually the government was forced to make a commitment to do something to stop sexual violence. t h e

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But I’m getting ahead of my story. That Sunday, during lunch, my friends were curious about the sort of response they thought the government could be expected to make to the demands of the protestors; my cynical response was that it would appoint a committee or commission to look into the matter and thus postpone the decision for six months or more, so that the whole momentum of the protest would be lost.

Little did I know that just a few moments later, the then finance minister, Mr P. Chidambaram would telephone me and request me to be a member of just such a committee. I was a bit apprehensive and asked him about the composition of the committee. He told me that it would be headed by Justice J. S. Verma and that its third member would be a senior advocate. I knew that Justice Verma was a fiercely independent and courageous judge and felt it would be a privilege to work with him as I had admired him from afar.

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I then asked the finance minister when the committee would be expected to table its report and he replied: ‘Within 30 days’. Though the issue of sexual violence against women was very important and I felt strongly about it and now wanted to be a part of the committee, I had a previous commitment in Kolkata and would be out of town from 9 to 14 January 2013, and felt therefore that it would not be fair to accept. But Mr Chidambaram felt there would be time enough for me to be part of the deliberations of the committee and said I should say yes. In retrospect I am glad I allowed myself to be persuaded as it was a rare opportunity and experience to work with such a wonderful team on such an important issue.

Mr Gopal Subramaniam, a former Solicitor-General of India and an eminent jurist, was the third member of the Committee. He was a whirlwind of energy, compassion and learning. t h e

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The notification (that formalized the constitution of the Committee and its charter) was finalized on 23 December 2012 and published in the Gazette Extraordinaire under the Home Ministry (UT division) on 24 December 2012. On Christmas Day a public notice was issued in a number of newspapers requesting regular members of the public as well as eminent jurists, legal professionals, NGOs and women’s groups to share their ideas, knowledge and experience with the committee on possible amendments to criminal and other relevant laws to ensure that those accused of committing sexual assault of an extreme nature against women were tried quickly and received punishment that was appropriate to the crime. The notification also said that since the committee was hard-pressed for time, all suggestions should be submitted by 5 January 2013 so that the committee could submit its recommendations ‘within one month from today.’

Though the terms of reference for our committee seemed limited, we knew the report we put out would need to be comprehensive and meaningful, the issues it sought to address were too stark and troubling for it to be just another dutiful government committee offering. At our first meeting on 26 December in Room 222 at the imposing Vigyan Bhawan convention centre, Justice Verma read aloud a few paragraphs that he felt could be our mission statement: ‘In our present tradition bound society, structured on the basis of old values, when a woman is subjected to a crime like rape, it becomes a multiple crime.

She is raped at home, then in public life, followed by an agonizing crossexamination (by the police and) in the court, and the climax is reached when sensational reports about the crime against her appear in the media.The victim of the crime finds public exposure more agonizing than the crime (of rape) inflicted on her. (It is a continuing rape of her in full public view.)

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The even more humiliating aspect of the crime against a woman is that her status in the hierarchal structure of society also (obstructs) the way of securing justice for her.Thus her social status compounds her gender injustice.

In a well-known case, the most obnoxious situation was that the court acquitted the accused observing that the rapists were middle-aged and respectable men of a higher caste who could not commit rape of a lower caste woman. This is the tragedy a woman had to face compounding gender and social injustice.

Every rape, even that by a single individual, is a gang rape and an aggravated sexual assault.Taking a holistic view of such a crime, the laws relating to all its aspects must be reviewed for its prevention and punishment.The scrutiny need not be confined only to those laws which relate to the investigation, prosecution and trial of the incident of rape.’ 22 23

~ Leila Seth was the first woman judge in the Delhi High Court and the first woman to become Chief Justice of a state High Court. She was appointed as a judge in 1978 and retired as Chief Justice of Himachal Pradesh in 1992. In 1995 she was appointed as a one-member commission to examine the death in custody of Rajan Pillai and to suggest improvements in medical facilities for prisoners. She was a member of the Fifteenth Law Commission of India from 1997 to 2000 and a part of the three-member 2012 Committee (known as the Justice Verma Committee) that gave recommendations to government to amend the Criminal Law so that speedier justice and enhanced punishment could be given in cases of aggravated sexual assault.

She is the author of On Balance, an autobiography, and of the children’s book, We, the Children of India: The Preamble to the Constitution.

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THE BATTLES OF THE NEW REPUBLIC A Contemporary History of Nepal

PRASHANT JHA

In his introduction to the book, Prashant Jha writes, ‘This is a story of war and peace, of popular aspirations, the deepening of democracy and the death of a dream.’ In four connected sections, he then details the emergence and evolution of the Maoist and Madhesi movements in Nepal, the fall of the monarchy, the promise and failures of the country’s democratic institutions, and the pervasive influence of India.

A mix of reportage, history and political analysis, The Battles of the New Republic is a brilliant debut.

being nepali

It took a while for me to realize there was something different about us.

I used to study at Kathmandu’s Modern Indian School. In class, and outside, we usually spoke in Hindi. India was the reference point in most of our conversations. Gandhi and Panchatantra; The Jungle Book and the Mahabharata on Doordarshan. Independence Day was 15 August, and 14 November was Children’s Day. The assembly prayers were old Indian bhajans. Many classmates were Marwaris and Sikhs, which made me more familiar with Indian-origin ethnicities than with the multiple surnames that punctuate the Nepali social landscape.

It was comfortable, for there was a seamless linguistic and cultural homogeneity between school and home. My parents spoke to each other, and to me, in English and Hindi. I spoke to my brother in Maithili. My grandfather,Tatta, as we called him, listened to both Nepali spring

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and Hindi news on the radio even as we demanded his attention in the evenings. Games meant cricket, and Saturday afternoons were reserved for watching Hindi films on television. Buas from Patna came to visit us during their summer holidays; in December, it was our turn to go to Delhi and spend the long winter holidays with our mausis. Once or twice a year we took the ten-hour drive south to meet relatives in Rajbiraj, which we were told was our hometown.

I remember being conscious that Nepal and India were different countries; that they had different prime ministers; that Indian and Nepali news were in different languages; and that I was a Nepali, which meant that I was not an Indian like many of my cousins. But the lines were too blurred, and I was too young, for these distinctions to mean anything. It was as normal and happy a childhood as one could have had.

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But there were some unnatural moments.When we went out shopping to New Road or when my father took us out for a meal, anyone speaking in Hindi was immediately hushed up. It is a memory that has stayed with me: there was something wrong about being ourselves, speaking in the language we felt most comfortable in, when others were around.

And then, in Class 5, when I was eight years old, my parents shifted me to a new school, Loyola.

On my first day there, I was having lunch in the common mess. Two classmates whom I had seen but not spoken to in the morning were sitting opposite me with their plates. One of them asked where I was from.

Kathmandu, I told him. t h e

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‘Jha pani Kathmandu ko huncha? (Can a Jha be from Kathmandu?)

He’s Indian.’

The other boy came in, ‘Euta aru dhoti aayo. (Another Dhoti.) The Maade will have a friend now. Ha ha!’

I smiled weakly, not knowing what either Dhoti or Maade meant, and continued eating.

But there appeared to be a connection between being made fun of because of my surname, and being told that I was an Indian. And I realized that there was a reason why my father asked us not to speak in Hindi in public. It was important to turn away from who you were when confronted by people who weren’t family, by ‘normal’ people, by the ‘true Nepalis’.

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In hindsight, there were possibly two reactions a child could have had to that kind of conversation: go into a shell, or try to be more ‘normal’ yourself. And for some reason, perhaps due to the typical schoolkid instinct of recognizing where power resides in a classroom, I decided to do the latter.

So I hung out with the cool Kathmandu kids. I could not hide my poor Nepali, but fortunately the school had a speak-only-in-English rule which was strictly enforced. I joined the others in calling those with Indian-sounding surnames—the Bararias, Agarwals, Mishras and Chowdhurys—‘Dhotis’, which, I learnt, was a generic derogatory term to dismiss anyone ‘Indian’. And I called all Marwaris—the doubly damned, for they were Indian and rich traders—‘Maades’. My family had cultural and religious practices at odds with the other Nepalis.

During Dussehra, we went vegetarian; they feasted on meat. At the t h e

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end of the festival, the elders blessed them with tika, which was a big event in the calendar; we had nothing of the sort. But I did not tell my new friends this and pretended that we did the same.

In a few years, I left to study in Delhi. And I felt far more at home than I had done in Kathmandu, where I had constructed not only a schoolhome, friends-family separation, but also a web of lies to sustain the fiction that I was as much ‘Nepali’ as the other person in the classroom.

But the problem did not disappear, and the first thing classmates in Delhi’s Sardar Patel Vidyalaya asked was how I could be a Nepali.

‘You don’t look like a Nepali at all,’ they said. Or, ‘Are you a Bahadur too? We have one who guards our apartment.’ A bit older by now, I developed a somewhat more coherent response: you could be a Nepali without being a ‘Bahadur’ or ‘looking Nepali’, the subtext of which was having Mongoloid features.

It was only much later that I realized I was not unique. I was privileged, for I came from an upper-middle-class, upper-caste family which sent me to Delhi for better education. My class allowed me to escape the handicaps that came with my identity, and access the best opportunities available. All that I’d had to suffer for my surname, for speaking in Hindi and Maithili, for being a ‘Dhoti’, for having relatives across the border in India, were a few taunts.

But for precisely the same reasons, millions of people in Nepal had no access to power, were subjects of systemic discrimination, remained deprived of services, and lived every day with the burden of having to prove that they were indeed Nepalis.

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~ Prashant Jha is a journalist based in New Delhi, covering politics and media.

He has reported extensively on Nepal’s domestic politics, especially the transformation of the Maoists and ethnic movements, and the country’s place in the world, particularly its relations with India. He has also been a weekly columnist for Nepal’s leading papers.

Jha was born in Kathmandu in 1984, and completed his higher education in Delhi. The Battles of the New Republic is his first book.

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THE PAST AS PRESENT ESSAYS ON RELIGION AND HISTORY

ROMILA THAPAR

The past is often used to try and legitimize the present, especially by politicians, religious fundamentalists and the like.

In her new book, one of India’s greatest historians, Romila Thapar, through a series of incisive and brilliantly structured essays, argues that it is of critical importance for the past to be carefully and rigorously interpreted if our present is to be accurately portrayed. An important and necessary book at a time when religious fanaticism, strident forms of nationalism and the rewriting of history are increasingly becoming the order of the day in public discourse and the intellectual life of the nation. historical memory without history

If the current debate had grown from a genuine sense of enquiry, historians might have participated. But it is only too evident that the issue is a matter of political strategy on the part of those who are mobilizing in the name of faith and those who are reacting politically to the mobilization. Thus, from the point of view of archaeology and history, the Archaeological Survey of India was correct in stating that there is to-date no conclusive evidence to prove the historicity of Rama. Therefore the annulling of this statement was equally a political act. But lack of historical evidence is relevant to history and the historical construction of the past; it is hardly relevant to belief and faith. Accepting the existence of an avatara is a matter of faith, it cannot by definition be a matter of history. Doubting historicity is not blasphemy.

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If there is a strong faith—faith in the religious sense—among millions of people then it does not require to be protected through massive demonstrations, violence and the killing of innocent persons, all geared towards political mobilization. Nor do archaeology and history have to be inducted to keep that faith intact. Faith finds its own place and function, as do archaeology and history. And the place and function of each is separate.

Those that claim to speak in the name of faith in order to confront and beat down knowledge have so far been careful in India not to tangle with scientists. Scientific knowledge is believed to be beyond the ken of politicians.Yet scientists in their work do confront issues tied to questions of faith. Where does Indian society stand in relation to these confrontations? Other times and other places have seen fierce conflict, for example, between the Catholic Church and Galileo, and more recently between Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Political lobbies elsewhere opposing scientists have been and are extremely powerful, but nevertheless they do fall short—even if only just—of seriously damaging scientific knowledge through seeking the sanction of the State to oppose this knowledge. Part of the reason for this can be attributed to some societies allowing the relative independence of knowledge systems, be it archaeology, history or astrophysics. That this does not seem to be so in India is a qualitative disadvantage.

To say that the partial removal of an underwater formation in the Palk Strait is going to hurt the faith of millions is not giving faith its due. Is faith so fragile that it requires the support of an underwater formation believed to have been constructed by a supernatural power?

At the same time, formulating faith as a political issue in order to win elections is surely offensive to faith? Pitting it against history feeds the spring

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formulation.The intention is doubtless to make both faith and history helpless pawns in political chess.

Even within the definition of the project, what is at issue is not whether Rama existed or whether the underwater formation or a part of it was originally a bridge constructed at his behest, but a different and crucial set of questions that require neither faith nor archaeology.

They require far greater discussion involving intelligent expertise if we are to understand what the project of cutting a channel through the Palk Strait might achieve or what it might destroy. Will the removal of a part of the natural formation eventually cause immense ecological damage and leave the coasts of south India and Sri Lanka open to catastrophes, to potential tsunamis of the future? Or can it be so planned that such a potentiality can be avoided?

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Some detailed discussion is necessary as to what would be the economic benefits of such a scheme in enhancing communication and exchange. Such benefits should also be seen in terms of the future of local livelihoods in case they are negatively affected. Are there plans for the occupational relocation of local communities that they may at the end not be disadvantaged? We have become a society so impressed with figures and graphs that we tend to forget that each number is actually a human being. The benefits are mentioned by politicians and the media, but rarely explained in terms of the nittygritty. It is also equally important to know precisely what role will be played by the multinational corporations and their associates in India. Who will finance and control the various segments of such an immense project? It is only when such details are made transparent that we will also get some clues to the subterranean activities that are doubtless already simmering.

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~ Romila Thapar is Emeritus Professor of History at the Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. She has been General President of the Indian History Congress. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and holds an Hon D.Lit. each from Calcutta University, Oxford University and the University of Chicago. She is an Honorary Fellow of Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, and SOAS, London. In 2008 Professor Thapar was awarded the prestigious Kluge Prize of the US Library of Congress, which honours lifetime achievement in studies such as history that are not covered by the Nobel Prize.

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THE SMALL WILD GOOSE PAGODA AN ALMANAC

Allan Sealy

The Small Wild Goose Pagoda is a natural and social history of 433 square yards of India. On this piece of land in the foothills of the Himalayas, the Sealy family have a small brick house with one-and-a-half bedrooms, two-and-a-half gardens, front, back and side (three if you count a piece of public land outside the front boundary, fenced in and planted with trees), an old Fiat, an internet link with the world, and a terrace roof for walking on under the sky.

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In this remarkable book, his first in a decade, award-winning novelist and travel writer Allan Sealy gives us a compelling and evocative account of the drama of small-town life; at the same time it is an extraordinary meditation on work, family history, nature, Indian society, the passage of time and much more. A book that is destined to become an instant classic. ~ A little past midnight a man comes to the gate of the house hidden by trees and, finding it locked, glances each way, gets a grip on the top of the boundary wall, and hauls himself up in the shadows of the sodium streetlight. His right foot scrabbles on the flat of the wall, finds no hold and pushes in hard, so there’s a moment when he’s hanging out into nothing over the stormwater drain. A stick figure, all bent arms and legs. It’s done in two or three seconds.This spider, now balanced on the top of the wall.

Now not there. t h e

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He lands in a flower bed, on something stalky, his cheek brushed by the cobweb he fell through, a hand patting his back so he turns sharply into the angle of the wall, just a frond, then stumbles backward through a thorn bush out on to grass.

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The house is in darkness. He crosses the lawn and climbs three wide steps up into the verandah. Cautiously tries the mesh door. It opens, sticking a little. Unbolted means they’re away. Feels for the padlock and yes, it’s there, heavy, smooth edged, squarish, brass, not new, not old. Draws out the crowbar that hangs down the inside of his jeans leg, a sword he sometimes thinks, sticks the business end in behind the hasp, and begins to force. The hasp buckles but doesn’t give. He wastes no more time on it. Puts down the crowbar and takes out the small tools of his trade.Time he has. In twenty minutes the lock is laid open, its tines scattered on the floor. He lifts the bent staple and slides back the bolt. Pushes open the door. Pulls it to behind him.

In. Stands a moment while his eyes adjust. Always this first survey in the dark, his gaze sweeping a notional horizon. The terrain. Never less than knowable, so open to violation he sometimes walks down the street looking at women and thinking: my, you’re a nice house.

~ Allan Sealy was born in Allahabad in 1951 and educated in Lucknow and Delhi.

He is the author of The Trotter-nama, The Everest Hotel (shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize), The Brainfever Bird and other novels, and a travelogue, From Yukon to Yucatan. He lives in Dehradun, where he is apprenticed to a bricklayer.

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ARCTIC SUMMER

DAMON GALGUT

E.M. Forster, one of the most iconic writers of our time, lived when the British Empire was at its height. His last and greatest novel, A Passage To India, was written over a period of eleven years—and for nine of those years he was stuck, unable to move forward. A powerful personal story lies behind the writing, which comes to life for the first time in Arctic Summer.

It was in 1906 that Forster met Syed Ross Masood, a young Indian who had come to England to study law. It was the start of a life-long friendship that was also, on Forster’s side, a deep, unrequited love. Desperately repressed, living in the shadow of his mother, he was unable to act on his most intimate feelings. When Masood returned to India in 1912, Forster followed him—and it was on this journey, travelling through much of the country when it was still under British rule, that the first seeds of his novel were planted.

He started writing it in 1913 when he got back to England, but his creative impulse was soon blocked. He was only able to complete it in 1924, after he had gone back to India again, this time as the Private Secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas.

Between these two journeys lay much turmoil and passion: the writing of his unpublishable homosexual novel, his friendship with other writers like Virginia Woolf and C. P. Cavafy, the outbreak of the First World War, and a long stay in Alexandria, where he found unlikely fulfilment with an Egyptian tram conductor…

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Meticulously researched and vividly imagined by awardwinning novelist Damon Galgut, Arctic Summer conjures the figure of Forster, in all his sensitive, contradictory genius, as he struggled to write his masterpiece. ~ The night was cool. Cavafy had a half-cigarette in his holder, unlit, and he was waving it about as he talked in a long-suffering tone about his employment in the Ministry of Public Works. His department was the Third Circle of Irrigation and he was pained by the stupidity of his colleagues. ‘I have to check their grammar,’ he told Morgan, ‘in every memorandum, every letter. And no matter how many times I explain the correct use of the comma, they simply repeat their mistakes. And let us say nothing of the apostrophe! But I do not give up. I call them in and explain it all again, in the hope that one day the light may dawn.

What a happy day that would be! But I doubt it will ever come.There is no atom of poetry in any of them, not one.’

The mention of poetry seemed to trouble him; he reflected for a long moment, then looked mournfully at Morgan through his spectacles.

‘You have not asked to read my poems,’ he said.

‘I haven’t presumed. But I very much want to read them.’

‘They will all be Greek to you, precisely because they are written in that language. But more than that…’ He gave a shrug that was half a sigh. ‘My concerns are not those of most people, I am an unusual man.

I am drawn to the past, you see, the very old past, or else to the margins of current life. I am... Oh, what is the use?’ His eyes had left Morgan and were roaming beyond the corners of the room.

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Morgan said again: ‘I very much want to read them.’

‘You could never understand my poetry, my dear Forster, never.’

‘Perhaps I might.You should try it on me at least.’

‘No, no, no. What is the use?’ This seemed to be final, but he abruptly stood up. ‘Please wait,’ he said, ‘I am going to the bindery,’ and he disappeared into a back room.

When he reappeared soon afterward it was with a loose-leaf folder under his arm, in which Morgan could see pages hand-written in red and black ink. But the poet didn’t return to his chair. ‘Let us move to the red salon. The light is much better there.’

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The light was not better in the red salon; it was the room itself, the furnishings, that were of higher quality. There was no oil lamp here, only candles, which Cavafy began to move about in accordance with some private design. He only appeared satisfied when he had enshrouded himself in shadow and Morgan was near the window with a fitful yellow glow to read by.

The visitor was aware of being tested. Cavafy had become bored and indifferent, which could only mean he cared deeply. But Morgan’s Greek, unexercised since his days in Cambridge, didn’t feel up to the task. He was imperfectly aware of the meanings he held in his hand and after a few frowning, peering minutes could offer a mere paltry observation. ‘There are some coincidences, perhaps, it seems to me… between this Greek and public school Greek. I might be wrong…’

The effect was instantaneous. Cavafy snapped upright in his chair, t h e

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alert and awake in a moment. ‘Oh, but this is good, my dear Forster, very good indeed!’ He began to call fretfully for his servant: ‘Mirgani!

Come here immediately! Mirgani!’

Mirgani came and was told by his master to bring whisky.

‘My glass is not yet empty,’ Morgan said.

‘Yes, but that is the Palamas whisky. Poetry requires something better.

In the red glasses, Mirgani!’

Mirgani brought good whisky in red glasses, as well as a plate of cheese and olives. Candles were being snuffed out and others lit in a fresh configuration; it was Cavafy now who was visible and his guest who had sunk into shadow. The poems, too, had changed hands.

Morgan understood that his station had altered, now that he had proved worthy. The red salon, the red glasses: they signified an uptick in esteem. He tried to disport himself accordingly. But in a moment, when the poet began to read, there was no need to pretend.

Cavafy’s voice, with its cultivated English accent, was soft and certain. He was translating as he went, but it was clear that he knew his own words very well and the paper was almost unnecessary.

The long, pale face, with its saurian eyelids, its air of melancholic delicacy, seemed to vanish in a moment, into a mist, through which Morgan was led, down a winding passage that took him to an image of a midnight procession, ghostly but beautiful, passing out of the Alexandrian city gates, in a time long ago that might have been no time at all.

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~ Damon Galgut was born in 1963 in Pretoria, South Africa, and has lived in Cape Town for the past thirty years. He has published seven previous books, which have been translated into more than fourteen languages. His work has been shortlisted for the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the Dublin-IMPAC prize, and twice for the Man Booker Prize.

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THE BLACK HILL MAMANG DAI

‘Tell them about us, Kajinsha had said. Tell them we were good. Tell them we also had some things to say. But we cannot read or write. So we tell stories.’ In her new novel, Mamang Dai brings her famed gifts of empathy and clear, lyrical prose to the story of three unusual people caught in the currents of love and history in nineteenth-century India: a woman from the hills beyond Assam, a tribal chief from the high mountains further east, and a Jesuit priest from a far country across the oceans.

~ Mamang Dai is a poet and novelist based in Itanagar, Arunachal Pradesh. Her published works include a poetry collection, River Poems; a book of linked stories, The Legends of Pensam and a novella, Stupid Cupid. In 2011 she was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India.

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A TOWN LIKE OURS

KAVERY NAMBISAN

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Who is to blame for the saddest things that happen in a villageturned-town in southern India, a town like any other—where the name Princess belongs to a whore, where buffaloes defy nobility, where the water in the stream is black while the children are a poisonous white, where a nineteen-year-old mother becomes a criminal for wanting to live, and a man goes to prison for loving children? The chudayil’s finger points to Pingakshi, the red-eyed, all-seeing, all-forgetting goddess, and to that other divinity, Sugandha Enterprises, which owns half the town. In her seventh novel, Kavery Nambisan takes us again, as only she can, into the heart of rural and small-town India and into the lives of everyday people, where everything is extraordinary.

I’m a farmer’s daughter, one of six children, the youngest of three girls. Like any village girl I worked in the fields, fetched water, gathered dung, stacked sun-dried sheaves of paddy and fed the chickens. I used to do more, like go to school, which was a hutment five miles away, until my father saw the risk of letting a growing girl venture so far. There was also the issue of proper clothing. School meant long skirt and blouse; domestic life required only the shortest piece of a sari cut in three.

I loved school. I dreamed lessons at night. I listened to the teacher, and to the background music of the village, I absorbed everything. I think I was bright, and if I had carried on beyond the sixth standard I might have ended up inside a rocket to the moon, or just where I am, in this one-window room with a cow-turned-bull for company. We will t h e

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never know. So what does a girl not yet eleven and one of six children do when there is no more school? A few years of working alongside my sisters and I was sent to a bigger village where a distant, well-to-do relative needed help in his provision store. My family needed money.

I went wearing one of the two sets of long skirt and blouse that my mother rustled up for me out of sari bits. My age? Anything between twelve and fourteen. Sitting in that provision store I became bored.

One day, watching passers-by, I noticed a woman in a printed black sari and brocade blouse. The way she stood by the road, all by herself, swinging her shiny white handbag, made me so envious. Moments later an autorickshaw stopped by and she rode away. Over the course of a week I saw her a few times, and then she spoke to me.

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‘What a rotten-dull life you’re living, you poor girl. You’ll end up as an oppressed camel of a wife to a useless man. Only him to turn your beautiful eyes on! Better run when your young legs will let you, and find a much-much better destiny with people who will adore you for what you are. Such eyes, such lovely teeth!’ she said, pinching my cheek.

Not being allowed to step out of the shop, I did the only thing I could for diversion, which was to enjoy a bit of flirtation with the store-owner’s son. One day when the father wasn’t around, the boy tried to clutch at my just-rising breasts. I struck him off that day and many times afterwards. When my father came that Sunday to collect my payment for the month, I told him. I’d rather come home, I said.

Looking at the hundred rupees he had just received from his relative, my father told me not to complain about little things.

That night, I was told, he held a whispered conversation with my mother and the next morning, dressed in clean dhoti, shirt and turban, t h e

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made a decorous visit to the home of his benefactor. He talked marriage, made a decent offer along with the bride and was coldly refused, besides being told to do something, for his own good, about the promiscuous tendencies of his daughter. My apprenticeship ended the same day.

Unable to cope with the shame of refusal from his own relative, my father turned on me. He called me names, blamed me for seducing an honest young lad. ‘You will do every bit of housework in order to be fed,’ he said to me, as if I was not his child but a grown woman from the streets. ‘And if our god Mallikarjunappa shows mercy on you, he might send an ageing widower or a deaf-dumb or a cripple who will wed you without much ceremony. And that is important in these difficult times for a father burdened with two proper girls and a chudayil for a third.’

The cruelty of parents is hard to understand. I can see myself as that wretched, shamed daughter of my parents, my head lowered, listening to Father and then Mother fling hitherto unspoken abuse at me. Then the three brothers and a sister muttered their offerings while the last punished me with silence. It was convenient to proclaim their disgust at what I had done (what had I done?) and thus endorse their own virtue. ‘Chudayil,’ Father said, ‘you are a chudayil.’

A person’s nature can change completely in a matter of moments, and it happened that night. I lay down on the mat having had nothing but salted tears for dinner. Facing the backs of my sisters, I calmed my trembling body but my thoughts would not lie down and be quiet, there was such a din in my head. Chudayil? Chudayil? What did it mean, what was I supposed to do? Much later I learned that a chudayil, or chudail is the ghost of a woman who dies at childbirth. She pursues men and leads summer

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them to destruction. Chudails belong to Hindi-speaking lands and my father must have heard of them in his youth when he went to Benares on a pilgrimage. But that day when he struck me with the violence of his words, I did not know it. One of my sisters said that a chudayil brings terrible ill fortune to any man who loves her. She has two fangs among her upper row of teeth, at night she walks with her feet turned backwards, and she frightens even the spirits of dead ancestors.

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Just as the birds began to rustle and squeak, I fell asleep. Something had hardened in the marrow of my bones. My heart was no longer a fistful of flesh ticking away but a fired brick. The only alternative was to do what I wanted to do. In the morning I looked everyone in the eye as I went about my work. My brothers and sisters who treated me with contempt the previous night were now intimidated by my boldness. I did what I was told to do, spoke when spoken to. I thought intensely about school and imagined myself in the seventh and then the eighth standard, I thought about grammar and arithmetic, social science, games and PT. And I thought about being a woman who could stand by the road all by herself, swinging her handbag.

The men started to come soon after that, without any effort on my part; the first being the father of a girl who sat next to me in my school-going years, the girl with whom I had shared the lime pickle from my tiffin. I hid behind the haystacks, I bolted myself in the bathing room and tried to ward him off with a piece of firewood.

Even as I fought, I wondered if this was the preliminary scene of the rest of my life.Terrible fears came and left in the thirty minutes it took the chudayil to chase the man away.

I’m stopping right here, before you start suspecting me of exaggerating the truth. Only, the truth is almost always worse than the telling. t h e

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~ Kavery Nambisan is a writer and a surgeon. She is the author of six novels: The Truth (Almost) About Bharat, The Scent of Pepper, Mango-coloured Fish, On Wings of Butterflies, The Hills of Angheri and The Story That Must Not Be Told (shortlisted for the Man Asian Prize and the DSC Prize).

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THE BEDTRICK Tales of Sex and Masquerade

WENDY DONIGER

In a dazzling tour that runs from Kalidasa to Hollywood, from Shurpanakha to Rebecca and from Casanova to Bill Clinton, one of the world’s most famed and respected scholars of religion and mythology shows us the allure and the dangers of the ‘bedtrick’—sex with, or being seduced by, a partner who pretends to be someone else. This extraordinary book is both scholarship and storytelling at their best.

are all beautiful women alike in the light ?

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The ideal of beauty imprisons women in many ways, one of which is by assuming that all beautiful women look alike—indeed, that all beautiful people look alike. Why do beautiful male-female twins, who in real life can look very different (consider the gorgeous Cary Grant as a stupefyingly ugly woman in the film I Was a Male War Bride [1949]), look alike in stories such as Twelfth Night and the Japanese novel The Changelings? A particular culture at a particular time tends to regard beauty as a single ideal, a universal norm (‘36-24-36, blond hair and blue eyes…’), and to see all beauties as looking alike even in the light, in contrast to ugly people, each of whom is ugly in a different way, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families. Beauty binds in much the same way that otherness blinds, for beauty itself is often constructed as other, as nonhuman (‘angelic’, ‘divine’). All women look alike not only to men who don’t care about them but also to those who care too much, whose lust drives them to project the desired face, the perfect face of Helen of Troy, on to all the faceless others…

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The idea that all women are alike (both in the light and the dark), the refrain of rapists and seducers, became a staple of misogynist quips. In the film The Truth About Cats and Dogs (1996), where the protagonist encounters two women who pretend to be a single woman, he complains to a friend, ‘She seems entirely different from one day to another’; to which the friend replies, ‘Women are like that’. That is, one of the ways in which all women are alike is that all women differ from themselves from one day to the next. But all misogynists are not alike, even in the darkness of their misogyny. A commentary on the Kamasutra puts a peculiar twist on the sexist logic: Formerly there was adultery [paradarabhigamanam] in the world, as it is said: Women are all alike, just like cooked rice, Your Majesty; therefore, one should not get mad at them or get attached to them or take pleasure in them [rameta].

But [the sage and author] Audalaki forbade this state of affairs, and so people said: [The lawgiver] Manu forbids Brahmins to drink wine, and Audalaki forbids common people to take other people’s wives. (Kamasutra 1.1.9, Jayamangala commentary)

Thus, in the good old days, adultery didn’t matter, since women didn’t matter; if all women are like rice, there is no reason to make a fuss if someone dips his spoon in your bowl, as it were. But Audalaki changed all that and distinguished between women that one can and cannot have sex with.

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Romantic love or desire does not always regard all women as so much ‘cooked rice’. This ‘oriental’ metaphor of the cooking rice was satirized in the musical The King and I (1956) when Anna, pleading with the king to set free one of the many slave girls in his harem, said, ‘To you one woman is like another, as one bowl of rice is just like another bowl of rice’; to which he replied with another metaphor: ‘The bee goes from flower to flower, but the flower must never go from bee to bee’. The rice metaphor, which, as so often, equates sex and eating, remained current in India. At the end of the nineteenth century, a variant resurfaced in a Bengali text.

A guru said to his disciple, a certain king, ‘Everything is the same.’ In the night the king went into [his] room and said to his wife, ‘This woman is [the same] to me as you. Tonight I will sleep with her.’

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day the queen went to the guru and told him everything. The guru said, ‘Today at mealtime give him a cup of shit with [his] vegetables.’

The queen did this. The king, seeing the cup of shit near the rice, got angry and began to scold the queen. The queen said, ‘You have attained the realization that everything is the same—so why do you get angry whether it’s fish soup or shit?’ The king then regained his composure. He realized that he did not understand the teaching about the realization of the same. (Satyacharan Mitra, Shrishri Ramakrishna Paramahamsa, 118-19)

The metaphysical idea of monism (which Hegel, contra Schelling, characterized as a ‘night in which all cows are black’) is translated first into sexual promiscuity and then into omnivorousness. In the implicit exchange of sexual favours for food, the wife invokes the values of distinctiveness in the kitchen to remind her husband of the values of distinctiveness in the bedroom. t h e

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The connection between adultery and the sameness of women is constructed in a different way in another Hindu myth of the origin of adultery, the myth of Indra and Ahalya. According to one of the earliest tellings, in the Ramayana, all women were created identical, but then the Creator made one, Ahalya, with unique beauty. Ahalya, however, was forced to share her beauty with everyone else as punishment for having committed adultery. Thus, it is implied, if all women are the same, adultery will not take place—or, perhaps, not quite so often.

~ Wendy Doniger is the author of several classic translations of Sanskrit texts and books on religion and mythology. Her books include On Hinduism; The Hindus: An Alternative History; Siva: The Erotic Ascetic; The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology; Dreams, Illusion and Other Realities; The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade and translations of the Rig Veda and the Kamasutra. She is currently the Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago.

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Korma, Kheer and Kismet Five Seasons in Old Delhi

Pamela Timms

The author and her family left damp and dour Scotland, where jobs were scarce and sunny days even more so, ready for an adventure of epic proportions in India. A year later, she was heading for disappointment, with life in Delhi’s expat bubble offering little chance of experiencing the ‘real’ India. And then, unexpectedly, she stumbled upon a secret world in the medieval chaos of the Old City that would fundamentally change her life...

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Pamela Timms is a Scottish-born journalist who became a food writer when she moved to India and discovered a passion for its street food. She studied at the University of East Anglia and the Sorbonne, then began her working life in Paris. She returned to London to work for children’s charities before moving back to Scotland where she became a columnist with the Glasgow Herald. In 2005, she moved to India and started a blog, ‘eat and dust’.

She writes the ‘Piece of Cake’ baking column for Mint, and organizes Uparwali Chai or high tea events in Delhi, where she lives with her husband

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CHANAKYA RETURNS

Timeri N. Murari

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Chanakya Returns, the new novel by the author of The Taliban Cricket Club, covers a vast canvas of power, love, politics, betrayal, murder and intrigue. The greatest practitioner of statecraft the world has ever known, Chanakya, is reincarnated in the twentyfirst century as the adviser to the young daughter of the president of a state. In his first life, Chanakya deposed one king, brought another to power, helped create a great empire, thwarted the dreams of would-be world conquerors like Alexander and wrote the Arthashastra, a searing treatise on power 1,752 years before Machiavelli’s The Prince. In this novel, in his new avatar, Chanakya is acerbic, witty and ruthless in his advice on how to attain power. He poses the eternal question to his protégée, Avanti, the daughter of the president—Which is greater: The Power of Love or The Love of Power?

The choice Avanti makes has all sorts of implications, not just for herself and her dysfunctional family, but also for the people of the state her family has ruled for years. A love story, an excellent fictional reconstruction of Chanakya, and a remarkably insightful novel about contemporary politics, Chanakya Returns is also a brilliant meditation on modern democracy and statecraft. ~ Love, I advised my protégée and I speak from experience on that subject, is fragile as rotting silks and will dissolve, disintegrate when infidelities, jealousy, deceit, betrayals, impotence infect it. The heart is not to be trusted as it is brainless and mistakes lust for love while the loins mistake love for lust. Love is a watery foundation on which to build one’s life. Love is violent too, be warned of its treachery. Men and t h e

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women murder for love, the clash of bodies, hearts and souls only leaves the ashes of defeat at the end when one is vanquished and abandoned on the battlefield of the bed. Like the flip of a coin, love can fall into hate. Believe me, love has sent more men and women to the gallows of tears, despair, grief and suicide than a thousand tyrants their enemies to the executioner. Power (and I shiver at the word) is an aphrodisiac, it is unending hot sex of 1,001 positions, it is magical, it is miraculous.

Your followers will worship you like an idol that can confer riches and miracles more than any god on those fortunate to worship you, and you will feel their outpouring of love in gratitude.Your subjects cannot take it from you, unless you give it away through foolishness, and you can keep hold of that lightning rod until you are buried in a grand tomb, accompanied by great pomp and ceremony and outpourings of grief.

My prince(ss) listened and made her decision accordingly. I wondered which would triumph—the power of love or the love of power. It is a crossroad—right or left—there is no middle way. Over the millennia men, and women, have been torn apart by such a conundrum.

I am Chanakya. Chan-ak-yha. Kautilya. I respond to either name and they possess the same meaning—falsehood. I lived from 350 to 283.

In your Gregorian calendar, Before Christ, both him and Mohammed, whomever they be, were centuries away in that future. Due to confusions in the universe that I cannot explain, I have returned to inhabit the body of a stranger. Reincarnated, though not entirely intact, with a fractured memory and morality. These new religions believe in heaven and hell, even in a Paradise, but mine recycles us continuously, as if there is a shortage of souls, until we attain moksha, if ever. It wasn’t instant, as you see.Two thousand two hundred and ninety-one years. It’s a slow process, a few patient souls queuing to return, taking a break from eternity and the collisions and catastrophes, of which there are countless, in our summer

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universe. I wondered whether I was waking from a dream or awakening into one. It’s a puzzle I need to solve, eventually. I have not revealed my true identity to anyone as I know from my previous existence that when you are among strangers, your true identity should be kept secret. You never know who is the friend or who is the enemy. Besides, who would believe that Chanakya has travelled through time and yet here I am— blood coursing through this body, a beating heart, skin perspiring in the heat, eyes watching, ears perking, nose twitching to earthly odours— only to discover he has been forgotten. No one remembers me. In my distant past I had guided the prince Chandragupta to appoint him Emperor of Maurya, and met Alexander.Which Alexander you may ask, as if there are many. The Alexander, King of Macedonia, who crossed the Sindhu River, to sit at the feet of my emperor and myself. He had read the works of Herodotus, who wrote an imagined account of the Hindu land a hundred years previously, and this had inspired Alexander to visit us.You call him ‘The Great’ but in my day he was a nuisance man, young and arrogant, with his greedy ambitions of conquest. I told him that for all the lands he had conquered he would end up possessing only enough for his grave, and to return home.

But in this present world, worse horrors awaited. My life’s work, my treatise on statecraft, Arthashastra, was stolen by that Italian plagiarist, Niccolo de Bernardo dei Machiavelli. I skimmed The Prince (Il Principe), a trifling work, a child’s primer to power, a bagatelle of thoughts and, if the Prince should follow such advice, he’ll surely end up in his own tower.

However, no one is Kautilyan or Chanakyan; they are Machiavellian.That is the problem with death—one thousand seven hundred and fifty-two years later your work appears under another man’s name, granting him the immortality that is rightly yours. And you are a helpless spirit, unable to scream ‘plagiarist’ and assert your copyright. Such is the fate of great minds.There is no shame in this world. I am comforted that as a plagiarist t h e

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he remained true to the theme of my great work, the Arthashastra— Kautilyan and Machiavellian describe one who deceives and manipulates others for gain; whether the gain is personal or not is of no relevance, only that any actions taken are important insofar as they affect the results.

My present physical past is of no consequence, and so I will be brief— mine is the story of rags to respectability, the stain of poverty cleansed from my face through wiles and the guile of using my own work to elevate myself advising men in the art of deception. I was among those unemployed until I found my pupil, Avanti. She is not the president of this state but the man’s daughter, an only child. You will note the limitlessness of my ambition. But you will ask: why not serve the president, impart your wisdom? He is old, he will pass. She is the heir, young and malleable, power waits. I had written that it is easier to inherit a throne than to win one by an outsider. Avanti is shy, unsure but aware of her strengths. And her favoured position in life. She is lonely, and accustomed to it, a good trait for a ruler. Chandragupta, the emperor I advised, knew power isolated and imprisoned.A ruler should be mentally and emotionally self-sufficient as he cannot trust those nourishments offered by others. I began service as a humble clerk though not humble myself. I ensured I was loyal to her alone and to none other. She noted this loyalty and confided her thoughts and emotions in me.

~ Timeri N. Murari is an award-winning writer, filmmaker and playwright.

Time magazine chose his film The Square Circle as one of its top ten films of 1997. Taj, his novel, has been translated into twenty-five languages. His latest novel, The Taliban Cricket Club, is also published by Aleph Book Company.

Murari lives with his wife in his ancestral home in Chennai.

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Consolations and Lamentations Khushwant Singh

‘Women—they cuddle up to me or wrap their arms around me, give me a hug and a kiss and flirt with me, and I feel good. Then many of them take advantage of me (alas, not sexually). They get me to praise them, write glowing things about their terrible poetry, or recommend them for awards they don’t deserve. This does not bother me.

Sometimes it annoys me that it doesn’t.’

In his new book, one of India’s great literary icons draws upon almost a century of uninhibited experience and seven decades of no-holds-barred writing to reflect on some of life’s pleasures, annoyances and abominations.

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~ Born in Punjab’s Hadali village (now in Pakistan) in 1915, Khushwant Singh is one of India’s best-known and most widely read authors and columnists.

He was founder-editor of Yojana, and editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India and the Hindustan Times. His several acclaimed and bestselling books include the novels Train to Pakistan, I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale, Delhi and The Company of Women; his autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice; and the two-volume A History of the Sikhs.

Khushwant Singh was a member of the Rajya Sabha from 1980 to 1986. He was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974; he returned the award in 1984 to protest the siege of the Golden Temple by the Indian Army. In 2007, he was awarded India’s second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan.

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UNEQUAL INDIA Stories of Destitution

HARSH MANDER

Over 35 per cent of India’s population lives in a state of chronic hunger; 60 per cent in rural India survive on less than 35 a day, 10 per cent on less than 15; 78 million Indians are homeless and another 95 million live in urban slums; over a million people still work as manual scavengers; nearly half a million children live on the streets.

Harsh Mander and his colleagues from Aman Biradari go beyond dry statistics and draw upon their work with victims of destitution, apathy and oppression to bring us face to face with an India we are afraid to see.

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~ Harsh Mander is a writer and social worker. He works with survivors of mass violence, street children, homeless persons and people living with hunger. His books include Unheard Voices: Stories of Forgotten Lives; Fear and Forgiveness: The Aftermath of Massacre; Fractured Freedom: Chronicles from India’s Margins and Ash in the Belly: India’s Unfinished Battle Against Hunger.

Aman Biradari, founded by Harsh Mander, works to promote equal citizenship, justice, communal harmony and peace.

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MURDER AND MAHIM Peter and Jende Investigate

JERRY PINTO

Life thumps along in the great metropolis of Bombay. And sometimes, people get killed—often brutally. A retired reporter and a hard-boiled cop try to solve the dark mysteries.

Jerry Pinto follows up his hugely acclaimed debut novel, Em and The Big Hoom, with a rich-as-life collection of detective stories that are fluent, spare and always entertaining.

‘These things don’t happen in Mahim,’ Milly said, angrily.

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‘What things don’t?’ Peter asked, mildly. He knew that his wife was not a morning person. She had never been. But now she was not an afternoon person either. Slowly her citric rages had begun to spill across the day. Eventually, she would not be a day person or a night person. The logical conclusion? She would not be a person at all.

‘Murder,’ she said and waved the tabloid at her husband.

‘It’s here already?’ he asked, slightly disturbed.When he had been a boy, the tabloids had come out in the evening.When he was an adolescent, they had shifted to the afternoon. Now they arrived, it would seem, with morning coffee.

Milly was reading the report with the concentrated attention of the dyspeptic. ‘In your gym too,’ she said, throwing it down amid the debris of the dining table’s morning meal. ‘In your very own gym.’ t h e

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‘EverFit isn’t my very own gym,’ he said. ‘I only exercise there.’

‘Forgive me, Senior Copy Chief,’ she said. ‘I should be more accurate in my diction.’ She was laying a little trap for him. She wanted him to say that she had used diction in the wrong sense. Peter sidestepped it neatly. He knew the original meaning of the word.

‘It’s time to go there, anyway,’ he said.

‘I can’t see what a man your age wants with a gym,’ said Milly.This was more formula than complaint. ‘Anyway, it’s probably closed. Scene of the crime,’ she added. ‘I remember the time there was a body found in a gunny sack outside this very building.’

Peter did not say that she had just remarked that murders did not happen in Mahim.

‘A woman, no?’ she continued with relish. ‘Cut into pieces, the paper said. But no one ever marked the spot or anything. They just arrested the Gurkha. But now maybe they’ve got modern. Maybe they have yellow tape and lumen lights. Like CSI.’ Peter shrugged and made for the door.

‘So where are you going?’

‘I’ll walk around the park then.’

‘Keep your eyes on the dogs,’ she said and grinned suddenly. ‘As if you ever could.’

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‘Looking is no sin,’ he said.

‘And if thine eye offend thee, pluck it out: it is better for thee to enter into the kingdom of God with one eye, than having two eyes to be cast into hell fire,’ said Milly, but her tone was mild.

‘Hell must be crowded then,’ he said, as he picked up his mobile, his hand towel and the bright blue identity card that certified him as another poor simp who had bought a Complete Health Plan, valid until the end of the year.

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There was a bunch of people standing around EverFit (Where Fitness Lives). When Peter was growing up there had been only two gyms in Mahim: Talwalkar’s was the big one; Slimwell was the little one.

Neither had a tagline. Now there was Cloud Zen (For Mind, Body and Spirit) and Zai’s Health (From A to Zai) and Barbaria (Unleash your inner Conan), all fighting for the Mahimkar’s time and hard-earned. And then there was EverFit for those, like him, who wanted a treadmill and a patch of ground on which to do surya namaskars when the rain came down and turned the park to red soup.

Inspector Jende was standing outside the gym, wearing his habitual expression of cultivated expressionlessness. The day had begun to heat up, sucking sweat from the city’s citizens to turn it into the acid rain that would be unleashed in a month or so.The gym was cordoned off.

The paanwala’s shop that stood to the left of it was open for business but the keysmith who had a little stand to the right of the gym had given up the fight and closed for the day.

‘Pittr,’ Jende said. ‘What you’re doing here?’

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‘Jay,’ said Peter. ‘Are you finally considering getting rid of that paunch?’

‘Don’t be silly. Late last night. Body found. Don’t read papers now?’

‘Who is it?’

‘You’re not on crime beat.’

‘You came home for a drink the day I took voluntary retirement, Jay. Remember?’

Jende beckoned to him and they walked into the gym. Kalsekar, at the reception, was looking shaken. It was the first emotion Peter had ever seen on his face which was usually set in surly uncommunicative lines, the face of Indians everywhere who found themselves in dead-end jobs. Peter nodded at the old man. Kalsekar tried to nod back. Peter saw that he was actually shaking. Death could do that to you; and murder was death rubbing your nose in your mortality.

They walked through the deserted gym, a long rectangular room. At its far end was a door that led to the changing rooms, a massage room, a sauna and a couple of pots. The body was in the massage room. The back of the head had been smashed in, a fine mess of red and black. No grey matter, Peter noted, just streaks of yellow.That would be body fat.

Ubiquitous: body fat. Ubiquitous, too, the war against it. The young man had been a foot soldier in that losing battle.

‘Vishal,’ Peter said. ‘Works here. Trainer.’

‘Yes. Old man identified him,’ Jende said.

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‘Family?’

‘Orphan.’

‘Weapon?’

‘I don’t know. We have to wait for medics.’

Peter looked around. It was all very ordinary. The posters of Arnold snarling on the walls.The rows and rows of dumbbells. A sign that said, ‘Please bring deo to the gym’.

‘Come,’ said Inspector Jende. ‘Thaane chal.’

‘Am I under arrest?’

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‘Don’t talk nonsense.You will know when you’re under arrest. Come and have one cup chai.’

They repaired to the police station across the road and waited for the tapri chai. Jende said, ‘Bola.’

Peter shrugged. ‘I don’t know much about the victim.’

‘Who is asking about victim? I am asking about anything, everything.

Full story of gym. Do not leave out anything.’

‘Okay. It seems to be owned by Muslims but run by Hindus.’

‘Jesus!’ said Jende, unconsciously adding another dimension to the problem of Religion in India. ‘Please nothing like that, haan?’ t h e

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‘I hope not. But there seems to be a Christian somewhere in the mess as well.’

‘Jesus Loves You?’ ‘Indeed. Why would they have that sticker above the door?’

‘I am light of the world?’

‘Yes, that one. I saw the poster behind the reception.’

‘Not you, na, Pittr?’

Peter thought this too bizarre to merit a response. Tea arrived.

‘Aage?’ Jende prodded.

‘There are three instructors. One masseur.’

‘Aah.’ ‘He’s a sixty-year-old man.’

‘So?’ ‘Nothing. Anyway, he’s in his gaon.’

‘On banks of the Ganga?’

Peter frowned. ‘You too?’

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The city had had a parochialism seizure. A young political party had decided that too many outsiders had arrived in the city and were taking away jobs from the locals. Out-of-townies had been beaten up.

The boys from the banks of the Ganga had had it especially bad. Many Marathi speakers felt sympathy for this stance, even if they disapproved, they said, of the violence.

‘Arre, where police has time to be political, haan?’ Jende said.

Peter looked carefully at his old school friend but Jende’s face remained the stoic mask of the misunderstood man doing his duty. He continued, ‘Vishal was a trainer. The other two are Rahul and Sihon.’

‘Sea-horn? This is a name or what?’

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‘Sihon,’ Peter corrected him. ‘I looked it up in the Bible. It’s there.’

‘So three boys. One massagewala. One old man at reception. Members?’

‘Many. Mostly college boys. And middle-aged ladies. And college girls.’

‘Means janta.’

‘Yes. Janta. Everyone. There is even one white girl.’

‘Chikni ya gori?’

‘Full gori. She’s from Poland, I think.’

Peter then recited gym timings and holidays, and talked about the sauna that did not work most days. He thought some more. ‘They t h e

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divide them up. Rahul does the young college boys. Vishal does the middle-aged ladies. Sihon does the girls.’

‘Does means like…’ and Jende moved his fist in a manner that suggested an infinity of lewdness.

‘Okay, bad verb. “Does” means “looks after”. Means when a college boy comes in, Rahul will give him a high five, ask him about his bike, his babe. Then he’ll ask why he’s late, what he’s planning to do, maybe spot him.That kind of thing. Sihon will do that for the young women.

And Vishal for the middle-aged ladies.’

‘Who does old men?’

‘No one.’

‘Means?’

‘Means they come and say “Hello uncle” once in a while and “Sab first class?” But nothing else.’

‘Poor Pittr.’

‘Poor Peter, indeed.’

They drank their tea.

~ Jerry Pinto has been a mathematics tutor, school librarian, journalist and columnist and is now associated with MelJol, an NGO that works in the monsoon

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sphere of child rights. His published works include a book of poems, Asylum; Helen: The Life and Times of an H-Bomb, which won the National Award for the Best Book on Cinema in 2007; and the novel Em and The Big Hoom, which won the Hindu Literary Prize 2012 and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction 2013. He has also edited an anthology of writings on Goa, Reflected in Water, and co-edited (with Naresh Fernandes) a similar anthology on his native city, Bombay, Meri Jaan.

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The Colonel Who Did Not Repent

Salil Tripathi

Between March and December in 1971, the Pakistani army committed mass atrocities on an unprecedented scale in the country’s eastern wing. Pakistani soldiers killed countless civilians and raped at least a quarter million women. Religion alone was unable to keep Pakistan’s two halves united. From that brutal violence, Bangladesh emerged as an independent nation, but the wounds have continued to fester. Coups and counter-coups followed, accompanied by long years of military rule during which collective amnesia gripped the nation, raising afresh the question: was Bangladesh a nation based on a religion (Islam), or language (Bangla)?

Four decades later, as Bangladesh tries to figure out its raison d’etre by bringing some accountability and closure to that blood-soaked past through a controversial tribunal prosecuting war crimes, Salil Tripathi travels through the length and breadth of the country, and offers a searing portrait of a nation on edge, narrating the story of the liberation war and its aftermath.

A quarter century ago I met a man who calmly told me how he had organized the massacre of a family. He wasn’t confessing out of a sense of remorse; he was bragging about it, grinning as he spoke to me.

I was a young reporter on assignment in Dhaka, trying to figure out what had gone wrong with Bangladesh, which had emerged as an independent nation after a bloody war of liberation fifteen years earlier, in 1971. The man I was interviewing lived in a wellappointed home. Soldiers protected his house, checking the bags and monsoon

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identification of all visitors. A week earlier he had been a presidential candidate, losing by a huge margin.

He wore a Pathani outfit that looked out of place in a country where civilian politicians wore white kurtas and black vests if they belonged to one party, or safari suits if they belonged to another, and men on the streets went about in lungis. He had a thin moustache. He stared at me eagerly as we spoke, curious about the notes I was taking, trying to read what I was writing in my notepad. He sat straight on a sofa, his chest thrust forward, as if he were still in uniform.

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His name was Farooq Rahman, and he had been an army major, and later, lieutenant colonel. He had returned to Bangladesh recently, after several years in exile in Libya. Before dawn on 15 August 1975, he led the Bengal Lancers, the army’s tank unit under his command, to disarm the Rokkhi Bahini, a paramilitary force loyal to President Sheikh Mujibur Rahman. When he left the Dhaka Cantonment, he had instructed other officers and soldiers to go to the upscale residential area of Dhanmondi, where Mujib, as he was popularly known, lived.

I had been rehearsing how to ask Farooq about his role in Mujib’s assassination. I had no idea how he would respond. After a few desultory questions about the country’s political situation, I tentatively began, ‘It has been widely reported in Bangladesh that you were somehow connected with the plot to remove Mujibur Rahman from power in 1975. Would you…’

‘Of course we killed him,’ he interrupted me. ‘He had to go,’ he said, before I could complete my hesitant, long-winded question.

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In 1975, Dhanmondi looked as it did at Independence, with roads lined with two-storey houses dating back to the 1950s. Today, there are multi-storey buildings, English-medium schools, new universities, shopping malls and hookah bars to lure younger crowds. Back in 1975, the area was quieter. In the evening, people strolled along the periphery of the large lake in the middle of the neighbourhood and at night you could hear the tinkle of the bells of cycle rickshaws.

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On 15 August 1975, before dawn, 700 soldiers, heavily armed, left their barracks and headed for the three homes where Mujib and his extended family lived. Everyone was still asleep at Mujib’s home, Number 677 on Road 32 in Dhanmondi. Mujib had heard his brother-in-law Abdur Rab Serniabat’s house at 27 Minto Road was being attacked. Serniabat was a minister in Mujib’s government.

Mujib’s personal assistant, Mohitul Islam, was at his desk when Mujib called him, asking him to call the police immediately. The phones weren’t working. When Mohitul (who survived the massacre) called the telephone exchange, the person at the other end said nothing.

Mujib snatched the phone and shouted into the mouthpiece.

When the rebel soldiers arrived, the guards outside Mujib’s house were hoisting the national flag. The guards were stunned to find army officers rushing in through the gate, ordering them to drop their weapons and surrender. There were a few shots.

A frightened servant woke up Mujib’s son Kamal, who got dressed and came down when Major Bazlul Huda entered the house with several soldiers. Even as Mohitul tried telling Huda that it was Kamal, there was a burst of gunfire; Kamal lay dead. Huda quickly went to the landing of the staircase when he heard Mujib’s voice. t h e

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‘What do you want?’ Mujib asked Huda, whom he recognised.

The soldiers pulled their triggers, spraying Mujib with dozens of bullets. Before his burial the following day in his birthplace, Tungipara, the imam noticed at least ten bullets still lodged inside Mujib’s body. When I visited the house in 1986, I saw dozens of bullet marks on the wall and staircase where he was killed. Mujib had collapsed on the stairs, his trademark pipe in his hands. He was dead by the time his body stopped tumbling down the stairs.

The killers then went inside the house, and one by one, killed everyone they could find: Mujib’s wife Fajilutunessa, Kamal’s wife Sultana, Mujib’s other son Jamal and his wife Rosy, and Mujib’s brother Naser, who was heard pleading, ‘I am not in politics.’

Then they saw Russell, Mujib’s ten-year-old son, who was crying, asking for his mother. He, too, was killed.

Around the same time, another group of soldiers had killed Mujib’s brother-in-law, Serniabat, at his home, and a third group had murdered the family of Fazlul Haque Moni, Mujib’s nephew, an influential Awami League politician who lived on Road 13/1, about two kilometres away from Mujib’s home.

Mahfuz Anam was at that time a young reporter at the Bangladesh Times. He lived across the Dhanmondi Lake, and had a clear view of Sheikh Moni’s house. ‘I saw what happened,’ he recalled. ‘Early that morning I was awakened by the sound of firing. I got up. My room was on the side of the lake. I ventured out to the boundary wall. I saw troops enter Sheikh Moni’s house. I heard plenty of firing, followed by screaming. I heard shots—some random, some from sub-machine monsoon

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guns. I saw the troops leave the house. It was all over in four to six minutes. I could hear the people inside groaning; it continued for some time.’

The junior officers’ coup had proceeded exactly as planned.There had been no resistance from the moment Huda and his team had reached Mujib’s home. After taming the Rokkhi Bahini, Farooq arrived at Mujib’s gate, eager to know what had happened at Mujib’s home.

Huda told him calmly, ‘All are finished.’

When we met a decade after those killings, I asked Farooq, one of the leading conspirators, ‘And the ten-year-old boy: did he have to be killed?’

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‘It was an act of mercy killing. Mujib was building a dynasty; we had to finish off all of them,’ he told me with a degree of finality, his arm slicing ruthlessly in the air, as if he were chopping off the head of someone kneeling in front of him.

~ Born in Mumbai, Salil Tripathi lives in London and has been a correspondent in India, Singapore and Hong Kong for various publications, including India Today and Far Eastern Economic Review. His writing has won awards at the Bastiat Prize in New York and the Citibank Pan Asia Journalism Awards in Hong Kong. He is a contributing editor at Mint and Caravan. He has also written for The Wall Street Journal, The International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, The New Republic, The New Yorker, The Guardian, The Independent, The New Statesman, and other publications. His books include Offence: The Hindu Case (Seagull, 2009), and two forthcoming works—a collection of travel essays, and a book on a major corporate scandal in India. t h e

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Salil studied at Sydenham College in Mumbai and has an MBA from Amos Tuck School at Dartmouth College in the US. His sons, Udayan and Ameya, swear by his cooking skills.

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The Family: Two Hundred Years of The Nehrus and The Gandhis

Pranay Gupte

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The Family: Two Hundred Years of the Nehrus and the Gandhis is the definitive work on the world’s most extraordinary political family. The Nehrus and the Gandhis constitute the longestlived political dynasty of the modern world. Its origins can be traced back 200 years to Kashmir, where the Nehrus belonged to the Kashmiri Pandit class. The dynasty has been in power for nearly a century, starting with its founder, British-trained lawyer Motilal Nehru, who was twice president of the Indian National Congress. It has produced three prime ministers—Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. The current leader of the Congress Party, Italian-born Sonia Gandhi, is widely perceived as the most powerful woman in contemporary politics. Her son, Rahul Gandhi, is expected to become prime minister of the country at some point in the future.

The Nehrus and the Gandhis are unique in that they have reinvented themselves from age to age to constantly remain relevant to the role of leading, or waiting to lead, one of the world’s most complicated and socially diverse nations—a nation soon to be demographically the world’s biggest, overtaking China in a decade. And, as India’s role in the comity of nations grows larger, it is critical to understand the one family that has led the country for much of its life as an independent nation.

The Nehrus and the Gandhis matter in the modern era because of the dynasty’s durability and its nexus to the masses in India. It is impossible t h e

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to overstate the affection that members of the dynasty have received from a vastly poor country.

The Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has enjoyed enormous popularity and power, suffered enormous tragedy (Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi were assassinated), and reversals of fortune; yet, except for a brief period—during the time of Indira Gandhi, and again after her death— it has ruled by popular mandate, unlike other dynasties and autocracies in South Asia and the East.

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How accurate is it to compare them to the great political dynasties from around the world, such as the Kennedys? Not very, it must be said, for only John Fitzgerald Kennedy went on to become president of the United States. But the Nehru-Gandhi dynasty has already produced three prime ministers, two prime-ministers-in-waiting— and Sonia Gandhi, who wields unparalleled power. A comparison to the Bushes, perhaps? They have never connected with the masses as the Nehrus and Gandhis have. So what’s the mystique all about? Why does it endure, even in this age of growing scepticism with politicians?

Does the answer lie in Indian history, in the faith of the people in their leaders? Is the mystique explained by the fact that all through recorded Indian history, the polity has always been organized around a central dominant figure or dynasty—medieval kings, the Mughal emperors, the maharajahs, the British? This book will seek to find indepth, plausible answers to these and related questions.

~ Pranay Gupte is a well-known international author, editor, foreign correspondent, teacher and senior strategist for conventional and social media. An economics and political science graduate of Brandeis University, he also attended the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

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Pranay was a staff reporter and a foreign correspondent at The New York Times for fifteen years, covering Africa, the Middle East and Asia. He was subsequently a global-affairs columnist at Newsweek International for eighteen years, and a contributing editor at Forbes and Asian Finance.

Pranay has written, co-written or edited fourteen books. His best-known work is Mother India: A Political Biography of Indira Gandhi.

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GREY HORNBILLS AT DUSK Nature Rambles through Delhi

BULBUL SHARMA

The sparrows have fled Delhi, the monsoons are not what they were and there will soon be more flyovers than trees in the city.

But the kingfisher still hunts here, the solitary hare rushes around at night, and the hornbill comes visiting. We only need to know where to look. Bulbul Sharma takes us on surprising, delightful journeys of discovery.

~ Bulbul Sharma is an artist and writer. She also works as an art teacher for children with special needs. Her books include two collections of short 86 87

stories (My Sainted Aunts and The Anger of Aubergines), two novels (Bananaflower Dreams and The Tailor of Giripul) and two books of non-fiction (Shaya Tales and The Book of Devi). She has also written four books for children—A Book of Indian Birds, Manu Mixes Clay and Sunshine, The Ramayana for Children and Tales of Fabled Beasts, Gods and Demons.

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Death of a SchoolMaster

Shovon Chowdhury

A schoolteacher lies dead in a small village near Calcutta.

It looks like the work of the New Thug Society, who are determined to free Bengal from Chinese oppression. Inspector Li of Lalbazar is not so sure. Under Governor Wen, who is suffering grievously from a lack of concubines, things in the Bengal Protectorate are sliding from bad to worse. Despite meeting all execution targets, the law and order situation continues to deteriorate. Resurrected members of the Bengal politburo stalk the land, demoralizing all those who thought they were dead. Telepathic spies from India lurk in the shadows, along with a Japanese ninja, who keeps slipping off rooftops because of the wet saris. The Maoists are still in the jungle, and remain strangely reluctant to re-integrate with the Motherland. Meanwhile, across the border, the Competent Authority is itching for war, and General Chen is eager to oblige him, having seen no action since the Small Activity in Bhutan.

Unimpressed by the rising threat of war, which is none of his business, Inspector Li doggedly pursues his prey. Why is Propagandist Wang so keen that he investigate something else?

What shenanigans are mining magnate Sanjeev Verma and his partner Agarwal up to, and how is Governor Wen involved?

Will Inspector Li be able to interview his suspects before General Chen shoots them all? And why does his ex-wife keep calling, even though her husband has more money than several members of the Central Committee?

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All this, and much more, is revealed in this book, which is both a great mystery story, and the finest portrait ever of Calcutta under Chinese rule, mainly because no one else has ever done one. Also features the Kolkata Knight Riders under Chinese management. ~ ‘You were the last person to talk to him while he was alive, sir.’ The old party member lay on the bed, frozen in the act of choking. The Complete Works of Sharatchandra,Volume 7, lay on his chest. His spectacles were broken and his hands were twisted. Death had come suddenly.

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Inspector Li frowned. He was standing in the bedroom of a Dak Bungalow near Jhargram, in the heart of Maoist country. Which logically ought to be all one country, now that China was in charge of Bengal, but the Maoists were waiting for the situation to stabilize.

He looked down at the shrunken, lifeless body. On the face of it, it was an open-and-shut case. It had thug written all over it, right down to the silver coin next to the pillow. Inspector Li was sceptical about the thug menace.The only shadow creatures he knew worked for the Ministry of Internal Security. Besides, he preferred facts to assumptions. Facts were solid. Assumptions had a way of changing. For example, he had assumed that his wife would stay with him, but the fact was, she was shacking up with a businessman in Beijing who had a life-size replica of the White House in his garden. She had become his top squeeze, and was bound to displace his wife in due course. They used to be the Romeo and Juliet of the Beijing police, Gao Yu and him, the tough cop and the hooker with the heart of gold. Li had always known she might leave him, but did it have to be for someone with tiger-skin underwear and a diamond t h e

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studded cell phone? It was why he had asked for a Calcutta posting after twenty years in Beijing. He couldn’t stand all the sympathy.

The victim was a senior clerk in the fisheries department, and a lifelong party member. He was trotted out of the closet during elections, and trotted back in afterwards. He was one of the Men in Dhotis. The party needed a thin layer of clean, white dhotis for all the goons to hide behind. Several neighbours had expressed their regrets, and they seemed to be sincere. The dead man used to spend his evenings teaching their children for free. He would give a couple of biscuits, which was all he could afford, to the poor ones.

Inspector Li picked up the dead man’s wallet. It was threadbare and patchy, like a dog with skin disease. It contained a few tattered notes, some loose change, and a visiting card.The visiting card was in Japanese.

Had the killer decided to make things easy for him, and left a card?

A Japanese bank robber had once actually done this, in the thirties, handing out visiting cards prior to the robbery, pretending to be a customer. Anything else would have been unacceptably rude. Inspector Li was not surprised by this. In his view, all Japanese were insane. They watched pornographic cartoons on their mobiles in public, engaged in unnatural sexual congress with plastic people, and had toilet bowls so advanced that no one else could use them. Inspector Li knew all this because he followed the news. CCTV kept them all up-to-date vis-a-vis the Japanese, and fed them with vital bits of information that helped form an impression about Japanese culture.

Lately, the tone had changed. China ruled Asia now.They were all one big happy family. The Japanese were the sons, the Koreans were the brothers, and the Bengalis were the idiot cousins.They hadn’t had time to figure out where people from places like Nagaland and Mizoram monsoon

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fit. They were too busy chasing them around the jungle. They were remarkably difficult to catch, and unexpectedly warlike. Casualties were heavy, and rising. The whole thing was far less fraternal than had originally been envisaged. Inspector Li was fond of travel, but that was one area he didn’t want to see in a hurry. Joining North Tibet and South Tibet hadn’t been such a good idea, either, in hindsight, creating one vast province where everyone hated them. Between India and them, there were more soldiers in the Indian subcontinent than anywhere else on the planet. The Assam Occupation Force alone was bigger than the entire US Army. Life was no picnic. For most Chinese officers in the New Territories, Calcutta was like a rest cure.

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A single gunshot rang out, somewhere in the distance. A CPM goon squad, probably. Or a Maoist execution. Or the People’s Armed Police, although they tended to be more liberal with ammunition. Or maybe it was barbarian-on-barbarian violence. It was none of his business. He had a crime of his own to investigate.

Inspector Li picked up the dead man’s mobile.The last call was to Bijli Bose. Could it really be him? The patriarch of the Communist Party of India (Marxist)? The grand old man of the party? He was reputed to be 121 years old. He had kept himself young by sucking the blood of the youth of Bengal, according to one version. Others thought it was because he drank nothing but the finest scotch. Could this poor old man have been in touch with such an exalted personage? Perhaps they were old party comrades, just spending an evening chatting about their days of struggle. It seemed unlikely. From what he had heard, Bijli Bose was not sentimental.

This was the point where he was supposed to forget he had seen his name. No one messed around with former politburo members, even if t h e

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they were black. It was a matter of principle. And this one was special.

This one was held in high esteem by the Motherland. He had helped prepare the way. Nothing good could come from pursuing this.

He punched the call button. ‘Hello?’ said a dry, quavering voice, echoing faintly, like a voice from the crypt. The phone was old, the video took time to kick in. ‘Hello,’ said the voice again, and then Bijli Bose shimmered into view. He was the Living Mummy. There was no flesh on his face, just paper dry skin stretched tight across bone, thin wisps of hair across an egg-like head.

‘Who?’ he whispered.

Bijli Bose spoke very little, to conserve energy, except when he was having fun.

Inspector Li waved briefly. He refused to salute a mobile phone.

‘I have a party member of yours…’

‘Who is dead.Yes.’ ‘News travels fast.’

A smile flitted across the thin, slit mouth.

‘You were the last person alive to talk to him, sir.’

The mummy remained still for a while. Had he fallen asleep? His eyes were still open. Inspector Li waited patiently.

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‘Come. Tomorrow. Morning,’ said Bijli Bose.

He remained on screen, mouth slightly agape, until a servant stepped into the frame and disconnected.

Inspector Li put the phone down and took one last look at the victim.

A woman, weeping silently, was trying to put his limbs in order.

Someone else came in with flowers. They covered his body with a crumpled, fraying sheet.

~ Shovon Chowdhury is a Delhi-based amateur humourist. His blog, shovonc. wordpress.com, has been widely condemned. In his spare time, he does advertising work for clients who cannot find anyone cheaper. His grandfather ran away from Dhaka to escape the Japanese bombing of the city in 1945, 92 93

not realizing that the war was about to end, and arrived in Calcutta just in time for the Great Calcutta Killings of 1946. These shared family experiences have left him deeply averse to sudden movement, which is why he has lived in Delhi for the past twenty years. He is too old to emigrate, but too young to give up.

He is the author of The Competent Authority (2013), also published by Aleph Book Company.

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S´iva The Erotic Ascetic

WENDY DONIGER ‘Every decade a scholarly book appears that is recognized immediately as a bench mark in its area of study…This study of the mythology of S´iva is, without doubt, such a book…one of the half-dozen most important studies of Indian religion and culture in modern times.’—The Journal of Asian Studies asceticism and eroticism in early indian mythology

S´iva—or one of his prototypes, Rudra—is associated with asceticism in a late R . g Vedic hymn which describes an ecstatic figure clearly disassociated from the sacrificial cult, a forerunner of the later yogis: The long-haired one sustains fire, poison, and the two worlds.… The wind-clad [naked] sages wear yellow and soiled [clothes]…. Frenzied by asceticism we pursued the winds. You, O mortals, behold our bodies. The sage…flies through the air. The horse of the storm, the only friend of the wind, the sage is impelled by the gods. He rules over both oceans, the Eastern and the Western. Moving in the paths of the apsarases and gandharvas [celestial nymphs and musicians], the path of the wild animals, the long-haired one is aware of our call.The long-haired one drank a vessel of poison with Rudra.

In addition to the actual use of Rudra’s name, there are several clearly S´aiva elements in this hymn—fire, long hair (later to become the matted locks of the yogi), nakedness, the ochre robe and soiled garments, apsarases, wild animals (particularly horses), and, above all, the frenzy, so clearly antithetical to the ritual of conventional Vedic religion and so essential to later S´aivism. monsoon

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the importance of chastity and creative tapas

Chastity was characteristic of Indian asceticism from the very start.

The Upanis. ads say that one may realize the Self by practicing tapas in the forest, free from passion. A Pura¯na passage states: ‘The 88,000 sages who desired offspring went South and obtained graves, but the 88,000 who did not desire offspring went North and obtained immortality.’

Sexual excitement represented a threat against which the ascetic must constantly be on guard. When Brahma¯ desired his daughter, he lost all the tapas which he had amassed in order to create, and a nymph fell from heaven when she destroyed her tapas by falling in love with a mortal man. In a late version of the story of Vis.n.u’s avatar as a boar, S´iva appears in a characteristic role, that of the ascetic who rescues a man from troubles arising from marital involvements: Once, long ago, when the Earth was in danger of drowning in the cosmic floods,Vis.n.u took the form of a boar and saved her. S´iva then said to him, ‘Now that you have accomplished the task for which you assumed the form of a boar, you must abandon that form. The Earth cannot bear you and is becoming exhausted. She is full of passion and she has become heated in the water. She received from you a terrible embryo, who will be born as a demon harmful to the gods.You must abandon this erotic boar form.’ Vis.n.u agreed with S´iva, but he kept the form of a boar and continued to make love to the Earth, who had taken the form of a female boar. Many years passed, and the Earth brought forth three sons. When Vis.n.u was surrounded by his sons and his wife, he forgot all about his promise to abandon his body. The sons played together and shattered all the worlds, but still Vis.n.u did not stop them, for he loved them, and his passion for his wife grew greater and greater.

Finally, he remembered his promise and begged S´iva to kill him. S´iva took the form of the marvellous s´arabha beast and killed Vis.n.u and his three sons, and the essence of Vis.n.u was freed from the boar form. monsoon

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Deluded by involvement with a woman and children,Vis.n.u finds himself unable to do what he knows to be right, and although he wishes to be free of his body—as the mortal sage wishes to escape from rebirth—he needs the help of S´iva, the great ascetic, to enlighten him.

Although in human terms asceticism is opposed to sexuality and fertility, in mythological terms tapas is itself a powerful creative force, a generative power of ascetic heat. In a late R . g Vedic creation hymn, it is from tapas that the One is born, and the Atharva Veda brahmaca¯rin creates by performing tapas in the ocean. In the Bra¯hmanas, Praja¯pati, the Creator, assumes the brahmaca¯rin’s role: Praja¯pati was alone here in the beginning. He wished, ‘May I exist, may I reproduce myself.’ He exerted himself and performed tapas, and when he was exhausted and heated, the waters were created from 96 97

him, for waters are born from the heated man.The waters said, ‘What is to become of us?’ He said, ‘You shall be heated.’ They were heated and created foam….

The creative power of ascetic heat, particularly when placed in water, is the starting point in all of these cosmogonic myths. From tapas, Praja¯pati proceeds to create fire, light, air, sun, moon, dawn, etc.

Another form of creation resulting from tapas and chastity is the production of rain. This theme developed from the R . g Vedic identification of rain with the sweat produced by ritual activity (the waters born from ‘the heated man’) and from the simple analogy of the shedding of seed and the shedding of rain, also found in the R .g Veda. Indra, leader of the Rudras and a fertility-god in his own right, is said to derive his cosmic forces from rain, which is stored in the sperm of living beings. Upon cremation, some people enter the smoke of the t h e

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pyre; they first become clouds, then rain, then vegetables, and, if eaten, are last emitted as sperm. Agni, the Rudras, the As´vins, and Indra are all closely connected with heat, as well as with the rain which it is their primary function to produce, because heat is needed to generate rain.

This belief is naturally very compelling in a land where the monsoon so dramatically shatters the intolerable heat of summer.

The motif of the seed as rain appears in an incident during the wedding of S´iva and Satı¯: Brahma¯ looked at Satı¯’s face and was filled with lust. As he became excited his seed fell upon the earth and turned into thundering clouds which covered the sky, releasing their water. S´iva was looking at Satı¯ and was fiercely excited by Ka¯ma, but nevertheless he raised his trident to kill Brahma¯.

A longer version of this story elaborates upon the nature of the clouds: Brahma¯ lifted the veil from Satı¯’s face and was overcome with desire. He spilled four drops of his seed upon the ground like a mound of snow.

Fearing [S´iva’s] tapas, Brahma¯ concealed the drops of his seed with his feet, but S´iva saw everything with his divine eye, and he said in anger, ‘Evil one, you have done a reprehensible thing, to gaze with passion upon the face of my bride at my wedding. Did you think to deceive me?’ At first he raised his trident to kill Brahma¯, but then, calmed by Vis.n.u, he instructed Brahma¯ to wander on earth in human form, as expiation. Then S´iva said, ‘These four drops of seed will become the clouds of doomsday in the sky.’ Immediately the seed became the four doomsday clouds, roaring and releasing water, covering the sky. Then S´iva was satisfied.

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DREAMS, ILLUSIONS AND OTHER REALITIES WENDY DONIGER

‘A brilliant analysis of the complex role of dreams and dreaming in Indian religion, philosophy, literature and art…

In [Doniger’s] hands, enchanting Indian myths and stories illuminate and are illuminated by authors as different as Plato, Freud, Jung…Borges, Picasso, Gombrich and many others. This richly suggestive book challenges many of our fundamental assumptions about ourselves and our world.’

—New York Times Book Review

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The earliest Indian reference to dreams, in the R . g Veda (c.1200 bce), describes a nightmare, but it leaves ambiguous the question whether what is feared is merely the experience of the dream (the process of having a bad dream) or the content of the dream (the events in the dream and the implication that it will come true): ‘If someone I have met or a friend has spoken of danger to me in a dream to frighten me, or if a thief should waylay us, or a wolf—protect us from that.’ Are the thief and the wolf part of the dream, too, or part of a contrasting reality? A different sort of ambiguity is posed by the waking dream, which is mentioned in the R . g Veda as an evil that one wishes to visit on one’s enemies.Yet another R . g Veda verse tells of an incubus who bewitches a sleeping woman in her dream. He shades off into the actual person who rapes the woman, either by transforming himself when she is awake or by manipulating her mind when she is bewitched by the demonic powers of illusion: The one who by changing into your brother, or your husband, or your lover lies with you, who wishes to kill your offspring—we will t h e

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drive him away from here.The one who bewitches you with dreams or darkness and lies with you—we will drive him away from here.

These scattered references reveal an assumed link not only between the world of dream and magic but between the worlds of dream and reality. They also give us an indication of what the ancient Indians thought people dreamed about: a friend warning of danger, a thief ’s attack, a wolf, or being raped by someone who assumes an illusory form. These motifs recur in later Indian dream books and myths about dreams.

By the time of the Upanis.ads (c.700 bce), the question of the reality of dreams was approached in a more systematic way. These texts speak of four states of being: waking, dreaming, dreamless sleep (all natural states), and the supernatural, transcendent fourth state, the identity with Godhead. Later Indian texts concentrated much of their attention on the first and fourth levels, waking and Godhead, and on the ways in which waking is a distorted image of Godhead. Dreamless sleep and dreaming are the intermediate steps: dreamless sleep gives us a glimpse of the true brahman, the divine mind that does not create; dreaming sleep gives us a glimpse of the god (Vis.n.u or Rudra) who creates us by dreaming us into existence.

Other Upanis.ads add certain significant details to the outline of the four states. Waking, one knows what is outside and is common to all men; dreaming, one knows what is inside, and one enjoys what is private. The private, internal nature of dreams is emphasized: ‘When he goes to sleep, these worlds are his…. Taking his senses with him, he moves around wherever he wishes inside his own body.’ The fact that the dream exists only inside the body of the dreamer does not, however, imply that it is unreal, as such a dichotomy (inside vs. outside, private monsoon

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vs. public) might imply in Western thinking. The fourth state, which is called the Self (a¯tman), is the one in which one knows neither inside nor outside; but the dreamer in the second state, it is often said, knows both of these. The third state, deep dreamless sleep, may also have the creative qualities that are usually associated with dreaming (the second state): in deep sleep, the sleeper constructs (minoti) this whole world and becomes its doomsday (apı¯ti).The dream of a universe created and destroyed is a theme that we will often encounter in Indian texts.

The question of the reality of the dream world is taken up in discussions of dreams as projections. The verb sr. j, used to express projection, means literally to ‘emit’ (as semen, or words), and it frequently occurs in stories about the process of creation (sarga, from sr. j) in which the Creator emits the entire universe from himself the way a spider emits a web.

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A man has two conditions: in this world and in the world beyond.

But there is also a twilight juncture: the condition of the world of sleep [or dream, svapna]. In this twilight juncture one sees both of the other conditions, this world and the other world….When someone falls asleep, he takes the stuff of the entire world, and he himself takes it apart, and he himself builds it up, and by his own bright light he dreams…. There are no chariots there, no harnessings, no roads; but he emits chariots, harnessings, and roads. There are no joys, happinesses, or delights there; but he emits joys, happinesses, and delights. There are no ponds, lotus pools, or flowing streams there; but he emits ponds, lotus pools, and flowing streams. For he is the Maker [Kartr].

This text has not yet reached the extreme idealism of certain later schools (particularly Maha¯ya¯na Buddhism) that suggest that all perception is the t h e

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result of projection; rather, in one particular liminal state the dreamer is able to understand the relationship between the two worlds, both of them equally real and unreal. The dreamer takes apart the elements of the outside world, and like a bricoleur, rebuilds them into an inside world of dreams, without affecting their reality status. The text does not pass judgment on the substantiality of the elements out of which the external world is built and the internal world is rebuilt; the same verb is used here, and throughout Indian literature, to denote one’s perception of both worlds: one ‘sees’ (dr. s´ ) the world just as one ‘sees’ a dream. Moreover, the same verb (sr. j) that encompasses the concepts of seminal emission (making people), creation (making worlds), speaking (making words), imagining (making ideas), and dreaming (making images) is also used for the simple physical process by which a turtle ‘emits’ (i.e., stretches forth) its limbs, and this is one reason why God is often visualized as a turtle.

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GANDHI FOR THE 21 ST CENTURY READER Edited and with an Introduction by

Rakesh Batabyal

Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi—Mahatma Gandhi—is best understood as a man who transcended the boundaries of politics, nationality and unchanging ‘isms’ of every kind. His defence of freedom, defined in its widest sense, from political, religious and economic subjugation, has influenced and sustained struggles across the world against regimes and systems based on principles of inequality and discrimination. This reader brings together Gandhi’s most significant writings, highlighting his relevance to humanity in the twenty-first century.

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on the decision to suspend the non - cooperation movement after chauri chaura

Civil disobedience is a preparation for mute suffering. Its effect is marvellous, though unperceived and gentle. But I regarded a certain amount of excitement as inevitable, a certain amount of unintended violence even pardonable, i.e., I did not consider civil disobedience impossible in somewhat imperfect conditions. Under perfect conditions disobedience, when civil, is hardly felt. But the present movement is admittedly a dangerous experiment under fairly adverse conditions.

The tragedy of Chauri Chaura is really the index finger. It shows the way India may easily go if drastic precautions be not taken. If we are not to evolve violence out of non-violence, it is quite clear that we must hastily retrace our steps and re-establish an atmosphere of peace, re-arrange our programme and not think of starting mass civil t h e

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disobedience until we are sure of peace being retained in spite of mass civil disobedience and in spite of Government provocation. We must be sure of unauthorized portions not starting mass civil disobedience.

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As it is, the Congress organization is still imperfect and its instructions are still perfunctorily carried out. We have not established Congress Committees in every one of the villages. Where we have, they are not perfectly amenable to our instructions. We have not probably more than one crore of members on the rolls. We are in the middle of February, yet not many have paid the annual four-anna subscription for the current year.Volunteers are indifferently enrolled. They do not conform to all the conditions of their pledge. They do not even wear hand-spun and hand-woven khaddar. All the Hindu volunteers have not yet purged themselves of the sin of untouchability. All are not free from the taint of violence. Not by their imprisonment are we going to win swaraj or serve the holy cause of the Khilafat or attain the ability to stop payment to faithless servants. Some of us err in spite of ourselves. But some others among us sin wilfully. They join Volunteer Corps well knowing that they are not and do not intend to remain non-violent. We are thus untruthful even as we hold the Government to be untruthful.We dare not enter the kingdom of Liberty with mere lip homage to Truth and Non-violence.

Suspension of mass civil disobedience and subsidence of excitement are necessary for further progress, indeed indispensable to prevent further retrogression. I hope, therefore, that by suspension every Congressman or woman will not only not feel disappointed but he or she will feel relieved of the burden of unreality and of national sin.

Let the opponent glory in our humiliation or so-called defeat. It is better to be charged with cowardice and weakness than to be guilty of t h e

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denial of our oath and sin against God. It is a million times better to appear untrue before the world than to be untrue to ourselves.

And so, for me the suspension of mass civil disobedience and other minor activities that were calculated to keep up excitement is not enough penance for my having been the instrument, however involuntary, of the brutal violence by the people at Chauri Chaura.

I must undergo personal cleansing. I must become a fitter instrument able to register the slightest variation in the moral atmosphere about me. My prayers must have much deeper truth and humility about them than they evidence. And for me there is nothing so helpful and cleansing as a fast accompanied by the necessary mental co-operation.

I know that the mental attitude is everything. Just as a prayer may be merely a mechanical intonation as of a bird, so may a fast be a mere mechanical torture of the flesh. Such mechanical contrivances are valueless for the purpose intended. Again, just as a mechanical chant may result in the modulation of voice, a mechanical fast may result in purifying the body. Neither will touch the soul within.

But a fast undertaken for fuller self-expression, for attainment of the spirit’s supremacy over the flesh, is a most powerful factor in one’s evolution. After deep consideration, therefore, I am imposing on myself a five days’ continuous fast, permitting myself water. It commenced on Sunday evening; it ends on Friday evening. This is the least I must do….

All fasting and all penance must as far as possible be secret. But my fasting is both a penance and a punishment, and a punishment has to be public. It is penance for me and punishment for those whom I try autumn/winter

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to serve, for whom I love to live and would equally love to die. They have unintentionally sinned against the laws of the Congress, though they were sympathizers if not actually connected with it. Probably they hacked the constables—their countrymen and fellow beings—with my name on their lips. The only way love punishes is by suffering. I cannot even wish them to be arrested. But I would let them know that I would suffer for their breach of the Congress creed. I would advise those who feel guilty and repentant to hand themselves voluntarily to the Government for punishment and make a clean confession. I hope that the workers in the Gorakhpur district will leave no stone unturned to find out the evil-doers and urge them to deliver themselves into custody. But whether the murderers accept my advice or not, I would like them to know that they have seriously interfered with swaraj operations, that in being the cause of the postponement of the movement in Bardoli, they have injured the very cause they probably intended to serve. I would like them to know, too, that this movement is not a cloak or a preparation for violence. I would, at any rate, suffer every humiliation, every torture, absolute ostracism and death itself to prevent the movement from becoming violent or a precursor of violence. I make my penance public also because I am now denying myself the opportunity of sharing their lot with the prisoners. The immediate issue has again shifted. We can no longer press for the withdrawal of notifications or discharge of prisoners. They and we must suffer for the crime of Chauri Chaura. The incident proves, whether we wish it or not, the unity of life. All, including even the administrators, must suffer.

Chauri Chaura must stiffen the Government, must still further corrupt the police, and the reprisals that will follow must further demoralize the people.The suspension and the penance will take us back to the position we occupied before the tragedy. By strict discipline and purification we regain the moral confidence required for demanding the withdrawal of notifications and the discharge of prisoners. t h e

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If we learn the full lesson of the tragedy, we can turn the curse into a blessing. By becoming truthful and non-violent, both in spirit and deed, and by making the swadeshi, i.e., the khaddar programme, complete, we can establish full swaraj and redress the Khilafat and the Punjab wrongs without a single person having to offer civil disobedience.

Young India, 16-2-1922

~ A historian by training, Rakesh Batabyal has a doctorate in philosophy from Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU), New Delhi. He has been a Fellow at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and Fellow, National Institute of Punjab Studies, New Delhi. He is currently Associate Professor and Deputy Director at the Academic Staff College of JNU, and is also concurrently with the Centre for Media Studies, JNU. He held the Inaugural India Chair at the University of Tokyo in 2010.

Rakesh Batabyal’s published work includes Communalism in Bengal: From Famine to Noakhali, 1943-47 (Sage, 2005), The Penguin Book of Modern Indian Speeches (Penguin, 2007), as well as several articles in journals and newspapers on contemporary South Asian history. His monograph, JNU: The Making of a University, will be published by Harper Collins. He is currently researching political movements in Eastern Europe, particularly the solidarity movement in Poland.

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KALIDASA FOR THE 21 ST CENTURY READER TRANSLATED FROM THE SANSKRIT BY

Mani Rao

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Everyone knows of Ka¯lida¯sa. Some know the stories of his famous works S´a¯kuntalam and Meghadu¯tam. Yet, few have actually read him, even in translation. Not surprising considering that his world, and the conventions of Indian poetics, are so far removed from ours. We no longer compare women’s faces to lotuses or their figures to vines. And translations just cannot reproduce his metre. However, as readers of Sanskrit know, Ka¯lida¯sa’s brilliance is not just in prosody, it is in suggestiveness and unity of parts—how everything comes together. Mani Rao’s translation works with this complex unity without getting verbose, she helps ‘read’ the poetry for us, taking us into the nuances, and she uses contemporary language (so no more quaint addresses like ‘Hail, Majesty’ to King Dus.yanta on-stage). This is a translation that belongs to today—Ka¯lida¯sa renewed.

From Meghadu¯tam ~ Some yaks. a who made a mistake was cursed by his master: Suffer!

One entire year Heavy the pangs of separation from his beloved His prowess gone like a sun that has set He lived in hermitages on a mountain named after Ra¯ma Groves cool, waters pure, t h e

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Sı¯ta¯ once bathed here ~ Separated from her for months wasting on that mountain he looked lovesick His gold bracelets had given his forearm the slip (Good lovers pine thin) Looked at a cloud embracing a ridge on day one of the rainy season like an elephant butting a rampart ~ What! A cloud? A tumble of vapour, heat, water, wind To deliver a message from sense-able living beings 112 113

Not figuring that the eager yaks.a asked it—him—cloud The lovelorns’ DNA is so—poor things— They cannot discriminate animate-inanimate ~ Go without delay and you will surely see your brother’s faithful wife alive absorbed in counting days Women’s hearts: like a flower prone to wilt in separation— Hope’s the tie that holds it up ~ A short stop in these woods t h e

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where foresters’ wives pleasured A faster gait from shed moisture The next part’s crossed You will see river Reva raggéd on rock-rugged Mt Vindhya’s feet Like holy-ash streaks etched on an elephant’s limb ~ For a break, stay there in the hill called Nı¯cai with Kadamba flowers pert as if erect at your touch The hill advertises with grottoes that emit erotic aromas of prostitutes The youthful exertions of city-boys ~ From R.tusam.ha¯ra ~ A frog jumps out of a dirty pond

tortured by sharp extreme sun-rays

sits under a parasol-hood of a thirsty cobra ~ Hey choice-thighs, The earth

covered

reverberates

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Lots of passion Women love it! hear,

winter’s here

~ From Abhijña¯na S´a¯kuntalam ~ Ma¯DHAVYa¯: Do her eyes express inner feelings for you?

KING: Hermit-girls are not forward by nature.Yet:

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Averted her eyes when I faced her Smile, a hint at some other meaning Behaviour checked by modesty Love neither displayed nor hid Ma¯DHAVYa¯: You mean she didn’t sit in your lap the moment she saw you?

KING: As she was leaving with her friends her feelings towards me were rather obvious—shyly, of course.

A few steps, and the girl stopped, abrupt, ‘Ouch, my foot! Pricked by a leaf ’ Then lingered, face turned towards me, open Disentangling her not-at-all-entangled bark-dress from branches of shrubs Ma¯DHAVYa¯: Stock up on supplies then. I see you’ve turned the meditation-forest into a pleasure-garden. t h e

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From Raghuvam.s´a ~ To make words meaningful I invoke Shiva-Parvati Makers of the world Like word and meaning wed.

My theme the Solar Dynasty My talent no more than dim.

Folly, wanting to cross An ocean on a raft.

Seeking fame reserved for poets I’m a dunce going to be mocked Like a dwarf, arms greed-stretched For fruit accessible only by the tall. ~ From Kuma¯rasam . bhavam ~ is to the north. himalaya mountain of mountains soul mountain there anchored as if earth’s measuring rod east ocean to west ocean wide plunging into both

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~ Mani Rao is the author of eight poetry books and a translation of the Bhagavad Gita. Her poems and essays have been published in a number of international journals and anthologies. Translations of her poems have been published in Latin, Italian, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, French and German. She has an MFA from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas and is currently a PhD student of Religion at Duke University.

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This Unquiet Land Dispatches from India’s Fault Lines

Barkha Dutt

For a decade-and-a-half, Barkha Dutt, one of the country’s best-known and most decorated journalists, has reported from deep within the fault lines that scar our complex, unequal, bloodstained nation. In her first book, she takes us from the ravaged heights of Kargil to the riot-torn streets of Gujarat, from the violence that seethes beneath the surface of Kashmir to crimes against women and the poor.

~ Barkha Dutt, one of India’s leading journalists and television anchors, is Group Editor with NDTV, the country’s premier news and current affairs network. She became a household name with her reporting from the front lines during the Kargil conflict between India and Pakistan in 1999. Since then she has reported from conflict zones across the world, including Kashmir, Aghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Egypt and Libya; in addition to her war reporting, she has reported from the field on virtually every important national story.

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ON MOKSHA

SUDHIR KAKAR Moksha—release from the cycle of birth, death and rebirth, from desire, karma and suffering—is the highest goal in Hindu and Jain philosophy. As Nirvana, it is also the ultimate aim of life for Buddhists. To believers, this is about perfection and final bliss; to many of the rest, it is anti-life and pessimistic.

In this scholarly, insightful and also very personal book, one of India’s most celebrated and compelling thinkers brings his lifelong engagement with cultural psychology and the psychology of religion to investigate the concept of moksha—what it tells us about the human condition and our encounter with mortality.

On Moksha is part of a series of four short books on the Purusharthas or goals of life according to Hindu tradition: dharma, artha, kama and moksha.

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~ Sudhir Kakar is a leading psychoanalyst and writer. His acclaimed works include the non-fiction books The Inner World; Shamans, Mystics and Doctors; Intimate Relations; The Analyst and the Mystic; The Colors of Violence; The Indians and the memoir A Book of Memory; and the novels The Ascetic of Desire; Ecstasy; Mira and the Mahatma and The Crimson Throne (shortlisted for the 2010 Vodafone Crossword Award).

The French magazine Nouvel Observateur listed Sudhir Kakar as one of the world’s twenty-five most influential thinkers, and the German weekly Die Zeit had him on its list of twenty-one important thinkers for the twentyfirst century. His many honours include the Kardiner Award of Columbia University, the Boyer Prize for Psychological Anthropology of the American Anthropological Association, Germany’s Goethe Medal and the

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Distinguished Service Award of the Indo-American Psychiatric Association.

He is a member of the New York Academy of Sciences, and on the boards of the Sigmund Freud Archives in the Library of Congress, Washington and the Academie Universelle des Culture, France. In 2012, he was conferred the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the country’s highest civilian order.

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Unladylike Radhika Vaz* *Expert in the field since 1973.

Unladylike is a book of autobiographical essays that spans four decades of the author’s life. From stories about a childhood spent wishing she could change everything about her life (including her parents), to her chronically delayed puberty, and the self-esteem issues that accompany a flat chest, Vaz doesn’t pull any punches. She then takes us through her college years, where under the vigilance of Catholic nuns she grappled with a major decision—to have or not to have pre-marital sex, as well as the discovery that the female body is capable of some very strange sounds at very inappropriate times. Out of respect for various ex-boyfriends, she will dwell on just one man—her wheat-eating, milk-drinking Jat husband. From their extralong courtship (that he didn’t tell his mother about), to their wedding day and beyond, there are lessons for every girl who has ever thought ‘one day I’d like to be married’. The lesson is: ‘Don’t say you weren’t warned’. desperate women will do desperate things

Being a single woman is hard, at least it was for me. You walk into a bar on Friday night and for the rest of the evening you run around looking for a man you find attractive and, more importantly, who finds you attractive back. This by the way is much more complicated than it sounds and quite often we ladies must resort to all kinds of trickery to get a guy’s attention.

My weapon of choice used to be a push-up bra. I owned one and wore it constantly. To my great good fortune, my artificially enhanced bosom coupled with my ability (and willingness) to get drunk quicker autumn/winter

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than anyone else proved an unstoppable combination—I was cheap and easy and for a few years, my dance card was full (okay, so it’s not my dance card I’m talking about but you get the picture).

But as the old saying goes ‘Show me a cheap and easy woman and I will show you a bar-room of guys sick of fucking her.’Well, eventually that will happen and so I had to resort to more sophisticated deception.

They say (the same guys who came up with the aforementioned quote) that there is nothing more erotic than a good conversation.

This sounds like bullshit, and quite frankly it is, unless you modify the content of your conversation and stick to subjects that are flat-out sexual in nature.

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And that is how I found myself, one fine Friday evening, telling a man a blatant bloody lie. In an effort to make him think I was sexier and more desirable than I really was, I told him that I might be bisexual. I recall making some highly exaggerated claims that I was pretty sure he wanted to hear, claims that I hoped would give me an edge over the competition. My lesbian lies were accompanied by some girl-on-girl ‘dirty-dancing’ that I considered ample proof of my bisexual hotness, and I would make quite the performance out of it by grinding away with any and every one of my available (and equally desperate) girlfriends.

To me this was a harmless lie that all women could bandy about with impunity because the chance of having to physically prove it was zero. Because—let’s face it—the chance of hooking up with a man charming enough to get two girls to agree to go down on each other is also zero. And so there we were, a bunch of fake bisexuals harmlessly running around having fun.

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But as the old saying goes (the last one, I swear)—all good things must come to an end, and in my case the reason for this end was a new wave of women telling a new set of lies. These girls were running around telling men that they enjoyed giving blow jobs! Apparently the task was so very pleasurable to these stupid cows that the mere thought of it would turn them on.They were telling this lie and the men believed them and so now, when I showed up with my ‘might be bisexual’ story no one was interested. And the reason I was, and still am, so upset over this was because I could not tell this blow jobs lie, because this was one I would be called upon to prove, and I didn’t want to prove it because I don’t enjoy giving blow jobs.To me blow jobs are like cooking—I have no natural flair for it, on top of which I am operating from a recipe that was handed down to me from another woman who didn’t know what she was doing either.

But the point of this is not my lack of innate talent, the point is these women must be stopped or we will all be forced to give blow jobs on an increasingly regular basis and we all know we only give them in two situations: (1) when you have forgotten to buy a birthday gift, and (2) if you live with your parents and must perform your duties in the front seat of a very small car.

You may be familiar with the second scenario. It’s 2 o’clock in the morning, you are crouched over the stick-shift, your head bobbing up and down, slamming into the steering wheel. It’s late, your jaw is locked, and in a fit of consideration for your ‘date’ you have curled your lips over your teeth and so now the blood has stopped circulating in the lower part of your face. Everything is numb, you are trying not to breathe, you are trying not to gag, and you are trying to create the adequate amount of saliva. You are praying this will end but you give shitty blow jobs and so it’s going to take fucking forever. autumn/winter

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Ladies—can we all just please stick with the bisexual thing? Like I said, very few men are cool enough to pull off getting you and your best friend naked, but all of them, including the stupidest one, will remember that you said you enjoy sucky-sucky.

~ Radhika Vaz is a New York-based comedian who has trained with members of the prestigious Groundlings School in Los Angeles, as well as at the Upright Citizens Brigade and The Magnet Theatre in New York City. Her first one-woman show ‘Unladylike: The Pitfalls of Propriety’ has played to soldout audiences in New York, Los Angeles, Mumbai, New Delhi, Gurgaon and Bangalore, and she has been performing her second show ‘Older. Angrier.

Hairier’ since July 2013. She is a freelance writer and has written for Chicken Soup for The Indian Couples Soul, and her column ‘Read it and weep’ appears in the Times of India Crest Edition.

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Border Crossing

Shashi Tharoor

In Border Crossing, his first novel in over a dozen years, one of India’s finest writers of fiction gives us a genuine masterpiece that brilliantly combines a poignant account of the passionate love affair between two diplomats at the United Nations (characters who will leave an indelible impression on the reader’s mind) with a gripping tale of political and diplomatic intrigue. Stylish, insightful, and impeccably written, Border Crossing is the work of a writer at the height of his prowess.

~ An elected Member of Parliament, and minister of state for human resource development in the Government of India, former minister of state for external affairs and former Under-Secretary General of the United Nations, Shashi Tharoor is the prize-winning author of fourteen previous books, both fiction and non-fiction. A widely published critic, commentator and columnist, he served the United Nations during a twenty-nine-year career in refugee work and peacekeeping, at the Secretary General’s office and heading communications and public information. In 2006 he was India’s candidate to succeed Kofi Annan as UN Secretary General, and emerged a strong second out of seven contenders. He has won India’s highest honour for overseas Indians, the Pravasi Bharatiya Samman, and numerous literary awards, including a Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. For more on Shashi Tharoor, please see www.tharoor.in.

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ALL OF US IN OUR OWN LIVES

MANJUSHREE THAPA

Tara and Bishnu, who share little besides their Nepali origin, return to the country of their birth: she to start a new life after separating from her husband; he to settle his half-sister’s future upon his stepfather’s death. When her work with an international aid organization brings Tara to Bishnu and his sister’s village, their lives intersect, bringing into sharp focus questions of identity, freedom and belonging, and the stark realities of corruption and foreign aid in Nepal.

~ One of South Asia’s most respected writers, Manjushree Thapa is the 126 127

author of two novels, Seasons of Flight and The Tutor of History; a collection of short stories, Tilled Earth; and four books of non-fiction—The Lives We Have Lost: Essays and Opinions on Nepal; Forget Kathmandu: An Elegy for Democracy (shortlisted for the Lettre Ulysses Award); A Boy from Siklis: The Life and Times of Chandra Gurung and Mustang Bhot in Fragments. She has also compiled and translated The Country is Yours, a collection of stories and poems by forty-nine Nepali writers.

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MEMOIRS

Mahesh Bhatt

The celebrated filmmaker Mahesh Bhatt has lived an extraordinary life, rich in varied experience, full of highs and lows. In his gripping and unusually sensitive memoirs he writes of his life in cinema, and of his loves, gurus, enemies and fellow inhabitants of the film world. And he writes as he lives—fearlessly, honestly, passionately, with never a dull moment.

memories of a woman who died twice

I’m standing outside the morgue where the body of a woman I loved lies unclaimed. Parveen Babi is dead. I have a vision of the bed we shared, and her dressing table crowded with bottles of perfume. Then the smell of putrefying corpses invades me. The friend who had called to tell me of her death had said that the body was found three days after she died. It had begun to decompose.

The call came just when I had got off a plane from Hyderabad, where, strangely, I had spoken about her at the Police Academy. It was in the context of madness or communalism, or both, I can’t remember very clearly now. I do remember that I switched off my phone soon after the news, because I knew that journalists would start calling me for quotes with which to embellish their stories. How had we fallen in love? Why had it ended? What did I have to say to those who saw me as the architect of her tragedy? I would answer them all, but not now.

Outside the morgue, I decide that I will claim her body if her family does not, and give her a decent burial. At least in death, she would have autumn/winter

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the dignity life had denied her for so long. What, after all, would I be without this woman? She made me. I rose from her ashes.

For she had died once before. I had witnessed that death, far more terrible than the body shutting down, and a part of me had died with her. ~

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Parveen and I were two lost souls who found each other, as lost souls often do. We were both in our late twenties, she already a star, I a nobody. Her relationship with Kabir Bedi had just ended and she was devastated. She looked hunted. But I didn’t recognize the signs of schizophrenia till months later. I was too wrapped up in myself: my career as a filmmaker was going nowhere; everything I touched became a wasteland. I was also beginning to flirt with danger— drinking heavily, having LSD and looking for solace in the madness of Bhagwan Rajneesh. There was a dark pleasure in sinking. Desolation becomes an addiction.

I was already a married man then. I had married, at twenty-one, the girl I fell in love with at sixteen—Lorraine Bright, a beautiful orphan whom I had wanted to protect. Though utterly lost myself, I liked playing the role of a protector. It had started with my mother, a woman damaged by the man she loved. I had tried to shield my mother from the pain and failed. And I failed with Lorraine. Despite all the promises of undying love that I had made, when another beautiful, lonely and vulnerable woman came along, I betrayed Lorraine. I became my father, the man I had condemned for his infidelity and cowardice. It was a moment of moral collapse, and in that moment I understood how easy it is to fall. I understood my father. Most of us can claim to be good only because life hasn’t pushed us into situations where we can be bad. t h e

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There was something else that brought Parveen and me together.

Through my childhood, I had seen my Muslim mother masquerading as a Hindu, wearing a bindi and looking for refuge in my father’s faith.

She lived in fear: ‘Beta, yeh unka mulk hai,’ she would tell me. ‘Jaisa woh kehte hain, hamein waise hi rehna hai.’ (This is their country, son.

We must do as they say.) She did not want her identity to contaminate our future. This was not something I understood or accepted, but it marked me. I saw the same fear, magnified many times over, in Parveen’s eyes when she told me about escaping a Hindu mob during a riot in Ahmedabad. The nuns at the convent where she was studying had put her in a tempo and arranged mattresses on top of her. Parveen spoke of the interminable journey out of the neighbourhood, when she felt that she would die of suffocation under the mattresses, but was too afraid to move and lay on the metal floor, gasping silently. There was terror in her eyes when she recounted that journey. I would see it again later, on many occasions, when there were no mobs chasing her and the demons were all in her mind.

But fear and insecurity had no place in our lives in the early days of our relationship.That was a time of wine and roses; there was an almost overwhelming intensity to our love. Parveen was also a very generous person, never shy of the grand gesture. She liked buying me things, especially when we travelled abroad, but she was way too intelligent not to see that these didn’t thrill me. So one day she said to me, ‘I want to buy you what you love most, as a token of my love. What do you want?’ ‘Books,’ I said.That afternoon, we drove to Thacker’s Bookshop in her car and returned with a boot full of books. ~ I was known as Parveen Babi’s boyfriend. That was my identity.

I didn’t care, nor did she. But the paparazzi did. When it became t h e

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impossible to ignore them, we went away to Gstaad in Switzerland to be with U. G. Krishnamurti, whom I had met the previous year.

UG was an extraordinary man, brutally honest but also strangely compassionate, and Parveen took to him immediately. I have a very vivid memory of one conversation that ended abruptly when she pushed her hand towards UG and said, ‘What is my future?’ She held his gaze, but the anxiety as she waited for his reply was unmistakable.

‘I see a sudden break in your lifeline,’ UG said hesitantly. Her face changed completely in that instant, and her eyes shone with dread— it was the look you would see in the eyes of a deer trapped in the headlights of a speeding car. She froze with fear. And I wondered why. What had I missed in all our days and nights together?

Sometime after we left Gstaad, I woke up one night in the London apartment where we were staying, to find her sitting up in bed and staring fiercely at her palm. She was terrified of some approaching doom, though she couldn’t tell me what exactly she feared. Through that holiday, she descended into some kind of abyss, emerging once in a while, but only briefly. She would hug me, trembling, but nothing I said consoled her. All my attempts to erase the memory of UG’s prophecy failed.

And then one day madness claimed Parveen. It was the beginning of the end of her world. I remember the day I found her hiding in a corner of her bedroom, cowering like an animal before a butcher’s blade. ‘They’re trying to kill me, Mahesh,’ she whispered. She had make-up and costume on, having run away from the set of Prakash Mehra’s Jwalamukhi. ‘They tried to crush me with a huge chandelier.

They’d brought it there just to kill me.’ ‘Who, Parveen, who tried to kill you?’ I asked. ‘Amitabh Bachchan,’ she said. It was a series of breakdowns after that. On her worst days, she did not respond to me autumn/winter

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or anyone else. Only those who have experienced the fires of madness can understand how it devastates not just that one person but also family, friends and lovers.

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The doctors diagnosed her condition as paranoid schizophrenia.

She was genetically predisposed to the illness and had probably inherited it from her father, they said. It would take her at least six months to limp back to normalcy. But the high and mighty of the film industry who had invested in Parveen only wanted her back at work. No one would listen to me; they had no reason to. When all attempts at reason failed, and I saw the doctors under pressure from harried producers agreeing to give her electric shock therapy, I took her to UG in Bangalore. I can still recall the day I handed over Parveen’s shivering body—for that was all she was then—to the man who would care for her, calm her and help her heal over several months.

Parveen came back to Bombay and to films. She did so against UG’s advice; he was certain she was going back to disaster. But he knew her well by now—short of locking her up, there was nothing anyone could do to keep her from show business and self-destruction. ‘I’m not a religious man,’ UG wrote to me from Gstaad on 6 June 1980. ‘I have never believed in the efficacy of prayer. Notwithstanding, I should go to the village church one of these days and offer a prayer to our good Lord Jesus and ask for the well-being of Parveen Babi…and leave her to her inevitable fate, which is, of course, insanity.’

I tried hard to keep Parveen away from Bombay. I argued with her, telling her that the hyper-competitive, emotionally over-heated environment of the movies would cause a relapse. I wasn’t sure I had the strength to see her suffer again—the terrors, the paranoia and the t h e

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loss of dignity. ‘I can’t let you commit suicide,’ I said. But as in her worst days, so in her best, I could not reach her anymore.

‘Let her go, Mahesh. You are part of the problem,’ UG told me. ‘You will always be in that world and she needs to get out. She’s drowning.

Nothing can save her. Leave her, or she’ll take you with her.’ ~ It was raining the night it ended. We were in her bedroom. We undressed and got into bed, and as I moved to kiss her, she said, ‘It’s either UG or me.’

I froze. She was trembling again. After a while, she said, ‘I love you.’ I didn’t say ‘I love you, too.’ In the dim light I saw tears in her eyes. She was silent and did not stir as I put my clothes on. I began to walk away.

She said, ‘Put off the AC, it’s very cold.’ I did, and walked on to the main door. When I opened it I heard her call: ‘Baba!’ That was what she called me in our intimate moments. Baba. I did not answer or look back. My steps quickened as I approached the old lift, and as I pressed the button I heard footsteps behind me. I took the stairs. I heard her running after me. I could smell her. At the landing I turned around briefly. She was coming towards me, stark naked, with her hair loose.

She stopped a few steps above me. I turned and walked down and out into the damp night. Somehow, I was certain that she wouldn’t follow me. She didn’t. I never went back.

I told the world our story in my autobiographical film, Arth, and shot to prominence after years of failure. Parveen had stopped caring about everything by then—herself, Mahesh Bhatt, the world.

‘She’s drowning,’ UG had said. ‘Leave her, or she’ll take you with her.’ autumn/winter

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I don’t think that was why Parveen and I separated. I had lost her before that. I feel no guilt. But the fact remains that I survived, she went under. The deepest wound we suffer is our inability to protect those we love. Sometimes, life is like a river in spate: nothing you do can change its course.

~ Mahesh Bhatt is one of India’s best-known film directors, and a prominent producer and screenwriter. His debut film, Manzilein Aur Bhi Hain, made when he was twenty-three, was banned by the Indian censor board. His other landmark films include Arth, Saaransh, Zakhm, Janam, Naam, Sadak, Kaash, Aashiqui and Dil Hai Ke Manta Nahin.

Mahesh Bhatt is also the author of two books—U. G. Krishnamurti: A Life and A Taste of Death: The Last Days of U. G. Krishnamurti.

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Bofors and Other Great Indian Controversies N. Ram

In his first full-length book, eminent journalist and political commentator N. Ram looks back on the highlights of his extraordinary journalistic career. The book includes stories that have never been told before about path-breaking investigations like the one into the Bofors arms deal, as well as the author’s insights into subjects that he has specialized in such as Sri Lanka, Tamil politics, the news media, and national and international politics.

our news media

Some of the finest work done by the Indian press, historically and in contemporary times, is its investigation and exposé of political corruption, ministerial misconduct, and government misdeeds. In fact, corruption in its myriad forms and tremendous scale presents limitless investigative opportunities to India’s independent news media; it also enables them continuously to win strong public support for the work they do. Given plenty of opportunity to investigate independently, build on investigations done by official watchdog bodies, and do agenda building on the theme of corruption, the press has done itself proud.

The Bofors howitzer deal scandal captured the imagination of political India in the late-1980s, so much so that Bofors became a synonym for sleaze and skulduggery in various Indian languages. The opening shot in this case was fired by a well-informed broadcast over Swedish Public Radio, which then, curiously, went silent over the affair. The prolonged investigation and document-backed exposé of the scandal autumn/winter

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by The Hindu, in which I played a part, is generally reckoned to have contributed to the downfall of a corrupt government.

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In the last few years, the press and news television have aggressively probed, and agitated on, a series of corruption scandals that have shaken political India and eroded the credibility of the Manmohan Singh government. A contemporary shortlist of India’s choicest corruption scandals would include the 2G-spectrum scam, the scandal around the 2010 Commonwealth Games, the Adarsh Housing Society scam in Mumbai, the mining scandal spread across several states, and of course Coalgate—the coal block allocation scandal that promises to be the biggest of them all. In every one of these cases, the irregularities and suspicious transactions were exposed by constitutionally or statutorily created authorities. But the role of the news media has been crucial in keeping up the heat, contributing new information or angles, and following up—thus helping to build a democratic public agenda on the theme of political corruption.

The publication in early 2011 of a series of articles based on the U.S. Embassy cables on India, made available by Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks, provided the reading public and historians of contemporary India a wealth of information on foreign and domestic policy issues, and on corruption, the cover-up of corruption, and ministerial and official misconduct. One cable supplied explosive information on the 2008 ‘cash-for-votes’ scandal, where parliamentary votes were sought to be bought to help the Manmohan Singh government squeak through a no-confidence motion in the Lok Sabha. Hearteningly, the publication of the story in the press triggered the launch of a criminal investigation under the watch of the Supreme Court of India.

But we need to enter a caveat here. The energy and motivation the t h e

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Indian news media have shown in going after political corruption has been missing in investigating and exposing corporate corruption. ~ When it comes to economic issues and policies, the mainstream media’s contribution turns out to be anything but democratic.

This was not always the case. In his celebrated study of poverty and famines and also in subsequent discourses, Amartya Sen has commended the historical role of Indian newspapers in exposing hunger-related facts on the ground in extreme cases and, in concert with other democratic institutions, preventing the government from pursuing disastrous policies and thus guaranteeing ‘the avoidance of acute starvation and famine’.

Today, unfortunately, a number of factors operating in the Indian media industry have virtually shut out news, analysis and comment that challenge the neo-liberal economic policies that have held sway over the last two decades. Mainstream press and broadcast media coverage has tended to adopt a uniformly laudatory tone, keep out or underplay the criticisms and objections, censor the negative socioeconomic effects, especially among the poor, and provide little space to the voices of robust criticism and opposition, including those raised from the ranks of professional economists. ‘A good newspaper, I suppose, is a nation talking to itself ’, the American playwright Arthur Miller once remarked on the critical forum role of the press. There is no sign of the Indian news media performing this role in a vital area affecting the interests of hundreds of millions of people.

What is indisputable is that Indian journalism is facing increasing pressure from proprietors, advertisers, marketing personnel, corporate managers, and even senior journalists to present and prioritize ‘feel autumn/winter

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good’ factors—rather than highlight the reality of how hundreds of millions live and what to do about this. Poverty and mass deprivation, basic livelihood issues, the impact of policies on these issues, the state of agriculture and the countryside remain massively undercovered in Indian newpapers and the broadcast media. There are dedicated exceptions to the rule and their work is significant. P. Sainath’s investigations of rural distress, farmers’ suicides, and mass migrations are in the finest traditions of people-oriented, investigative, agendabuilding journalism. Such influential and iconic work, along with the lively contributions of young idealistic reporters on these subjects in various Indian languages, suggest a way out of this bind—provided a public culture of valuing such journalism can be built up. ~ 138 139

The issue of ‘paid news’ exploded in the public sphere in the aftermath of the 2009 General Elections. A section of the press revealed that a large number of newspapers and also several television channels had sold promotional news packages of specified size, using an under-thetable rate card, to candidates in the State Assembly and parliamentary elections. Candidates who could not pay, or refused to pay, were blotted out of news coverage. There were special rates for negative coverage of the candidates’ opponents. This involved violations of the law, was tantamount to extortion in several cases, and mocked every rule of ethical journalism. It was as much a rogue practice as the UK’s phonehacking affair.The scandal of paid news led to a damning report by a subcommittee of the Press Council and calls for external regulation of the press and private television channels. It also led to some critical debate on a wider phenomenon—paid news not as a rogue practice but as a deeper, industry-wide phenomenon that was not confined to election coverage.

Manipulation of news, analysis, and comment to suit the owners’ financial or political interests; the downgrading and devaluing of t h e

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editorial functions and content in some leading newspaper and news television organizations; systematic dumbing down, led by the nose by certain types of market research; the growing willingness within newspapers and news channels to tailor the editorial product to subserve advertising and marketing goals set by owners and senior management personnel; advertorials where the paid-for aspect of the news-like content is not properly disclosed or disclosed at all; private treaties; paid election campaign news and bribe-taking for favourable coverage. If this is what it takes to have thriving newspapers and other news media, then there is something seriously wrong with this growth path. ~ It is likely that the relative freedom of the Indian news media will come under increasing pressure and threat unless they move briskly to set their house in order. They need to ensure that transparency, accountability, and social responsibility are more than slogans. With no code of values or practices binding journalists and the media industry, and no mechanisms for self-regulation such as internal news ombudsmen in place within major news organizations other than one or two, the vulnerability to government and legislative forays in disciplining the news media through external regulation is becoming increasingly evident.

Nobody knows what the long term holds for India’s news media.

It should be possible, through some kind of regulation, to reform the system to put an end to the major ethical transgressions, not to mention rogue practices like paid news. The object of regulation must be the same as what the Leveson Inquiry in the UK set before itself: to support ‘integrity and freedom of the press while encouraging the highest ethical standards’. But let us have no illusions about what it autumn/winter

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will take to reverse the tendencies that put enormous pressure on independent, professional journalism in India. My personal hope is that feel-good journalism, focus-group-led journalism, ad-dictated journalism, journalism that sees no need to take account of basic realities can be discredited by good, sensitive, progressive journalism that attracts a substantial measure of public support.

~ N. Ram, Chairman of Kasturi & Sons and former Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of The Hindu and Frontline magazine, is a political journalist with literary interests. He has written on a range of socio-political subjects and specialized in investigative journalism. Along with Susan Ram, he is the biographer of the great Indian writer, R. K. Narayan, whom he knew well. Ram was elected president of the Contemporary India Section of the 72nd session of the Indian History Congress (2011). He was awarded the 140 141

Padma Bhushan (for Journalism), in 1990. He has also received the Asian Investigative Journalist of the Year Award from the Press Foundation of Asia (1990); the B. D. Goenka Award for Excellence in Journalism (1989); and a Columbia J-School Alumni Award (2003).

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ON ARTHA

GURCHARAN DAS

Artha—‘material well-being’—was one of the main aims of the classical Indian life. With a 5,000-mile coastline, ancient India had a vibrant tradition of business enterprise with risk-taking. Apart from seafaring merchants, there were local traders, skilled craftsmen and bankers who provided capital. The pursuit of wealth was respectable and economic independence was a necessary condition for living the good life. However, the chase of artha was bounded by dharma—there was a right and a wrong way to profit. These ideas remain relevant in the twenty-first century.

In this book, acclaimed author and columnist Gurcharan Das throws light on the material basis of the human condition, and how to think sensibly about our economic lives.

On Artha is part of a series of four short books on the Purusharthas, or goals of life according to Hindu tradition: dharma, artha, kama and moksha.

~ Gurcharan Das’s most recent book is India Grows at Night: A Liberal Case for a Strong State. He is also the author of two other non-fiction works, The Difficulty of Being Good and India Unbound, as well as the novel A Fine Family and three plays—Larins Sahib, Mira and 9 Jakhoo Hill—collected in the anthology Three Plays. He studied philosophy at Harvard and was CEO Procter & Gamble India before he became a full-time writer. He writes a regular column for the Times of India and four Indian language papers and periodically for the Financial Times, New York Times and Wall Street Journal.

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January 2014

Of Birds and Birdsong

M. Krishnan

Edited by Shanthi and Ashish Chandola

144 145

India is home to over a thousand species of birds—ranging from glittering sunbirds, peacocks and pheasants, through unassuming inhabitants of town and countryside like crows, sparrows and pigeons, to those that are rare and threatened like the Indian Bustard. In this book, many of them are brought to vivid life by one of the country’s greatest naturalists and nature writers.

M. Krishnan’s prose is studded with evocative descriptions of nature, literary allusions, stylistic flourishes, humour and, most rewardingly, precise observations and original insights into over a hundred species of birds in a variety of habitats.

This is a work that will delight bird lovers of every stripe. As Zafar Futehally, one of the country’s best-known ornithologists says in his foreword, ‘Every piece in this collection has something original even for the seasoned naturalist.’

Reviews ‘The finest naturalist and nature writer in the land.’—Ramachandra Guha ‘As a naturalist [Krishnan] has no equal.’—E. P. Gee ‘If Ernest Hemingway were to write about ecology and nature, he would have written like Krishnan.’—The Indian Express ‘This is a masterpiece of great nature writing, natural history, and wit at its best, by one of India’s greatest naturalists ever.’—The Hindu As a naturalist, M. Krishnan (1912-1996) had few peers. A brilliant writer and photographer, his writing was showcased to fine effect in a newspaper column called ‘Country Notebook’ that appeared continuously in the Sunday Statesman for forty-six years. Krishnan was awarded the Padma Shri in 1970.

Shanthi and Ashish Chandola are well-known wildlife cinematographers, writers and photographers. This is the second collection of Krishnan’s writing that they have edited.

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February 2014

The King’s Harvest

Chetan Raj Shrestha

Winner of the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award 2013 Shortlisted for the Shakti Bhatt First Book Award 2013

146 147

Just before midnight on New Year’s Eve, in a village above the Rangeet river in Sikkim, a woman hacks her husband into forty-seven pieces, then walks to the nearby police station and turns herself in. At first, the murder seems an open-and-shut case to Dechen, the tough, foul-mouthed lady cop in charge of the investigation. But as she begins to delve into the lives of the dead man and his wife, she discovers a world of lies, deceit and some hard truths.

On a day of endless rain, a man emerges from thirty-two years of isolation to meet his king in Gangtok. Journeying across leech-infested forests and forbidding valleys, he tells his children the story of his life—one that has been full of drama and magic.

These two novellas, united by their strong sense of place, showcase Chetan Raj Shrestha’s enormous gifts as a storyteller.

Reviews ‘The King’s Harvest announces the arrival of a great new literary talent…

[Shrestha is] a writer to watch.’—Jerry Pinto, Man’s World ‘I read fiction primarily for pleasure, and these two stories gave me that…

[Shrestha] is also a skilled craftsman of sentences, which, to a discerning reader, is a cause for delight.’—Samrat, TimeOut Mumbai ‘A powerful and honest debut… The pithiness of the narrative and the charm of controlled detailing that one is delighted to experience in a novella have been brought back to readers of Indian English fiction.’—Namrata Chaturvedi, Biblio Chetan Raj Shrestha was born in 1978 in Gangtok, Sikkim. He is a trained architect, specializing in conservation architecture. He has lived in Darjeeling, Bengaluru, Mumbai and Sydney.

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June 2014

Tiger Fire 500 Years of the Tiger in India

Valmik Thapar

148 149

The tiger has captured the imagination of human beings from the beginning of recorded history. It has been feared, worshipped, admired, hunted, studied, photographed, written about, immortalized in art and poetry, and has enthralled king and commoner alike. Tiger Fire celebrates this magnificent predator by bringing together the very best non-fiction writing, photography and art on the Indian tiger from the first written description of a real-life encounter with the animal by the Mughal Emperor Babur in the sixteenth century to photographs and studies of the last of the species surviving in the wild today.

Conceived and edited by the world’s foremost authority on the Indian tiger, Valmik Thapar, the book’s contributors are drawn from an array of renowned naturalists, writers, photographers, and tiger enthusiasts down the centuries.The book contains stories and reports of tiger hunts, attacks on humans by tigers, fights between the tiger and other animals such as the leopard, the bison, the wild dog, the boar, and the elephant, narratives about tigers rearing their young, finding mates, and wild tigers forging bonds with humans.

A lasting testimonial to an animal that has dazzled the human race, Tiger Fire will be treasured by everyone who possesses it.

Valmik Thapar has spent several decades serving the wild tigers of India. During this time, he has written more than twenty books and made or presented nearly a dozen films for the BBC and several other television networks on the tiger and Indian flora and fauna. He has also created a major non-governmental organization dedicated to conserving wildlife, the Ranthambhore Foundation. He continues to campaign and fight for new ways to save wild tigers and nature in India.

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June 2014

Exotic Aliens

Valmik Thapar

with Romila Thapar and Yusuf Ansari

150 151

In the sixteenth century, Dutch traveller Jan Linschoten noted the absence of lions throughout the Indian subcontinent. Two hundred years later, the British shikari and writer, Captain Thomas Williamson, emphatically declared:‘There are no lions in Hindustan.’ Much the same was said about the cheetah in the region.

With the help of renowned historians, Romila Thapar—who analyzes historical accounts and representations of the lion in early India—and Yusuf Ansari—who looks back at the lives of the Mughals and their famed hunts— Valmik Thapar cogently lays out his meticulously researched thesis: that neither of these animals were indigenous to the Indian subcontinent; rather, they were exotic imports. He argues that, over the centuries, the lion and cheetah were brought into the country from Persia and Africa by royalty, either as tributes or to populate their hunting parks and menageries.

Tracing the history of the lion and the cheetah for over 5000 years, and substantiated with pictorial evidence, Exotic Aliens is a pioneering work that could turn field biology on its head.

Reviews ‘Filled with coloured plates, [Exotic Aliens] is a prize addition to anyone who is interested not just in natural history and conservation but also in style and content.’ —Afternoon Despatch & Courier ‘[Exotic Aliens] is one of the most intriguing books I have read in recent times.

It challenges conventional belief. It marshals its thesis brilliantly. Every library should have one.’ —Sanctuary Asia Valmik Thapar is India’s foremost wildlife conservationist and an internationally renowned natural historian.

Romila Thapar is one of India’s most eminent historians. She writes on early Indian history, and is Professor Emeritus, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.

Yusuf Ahmad Ansari is the author of two books and is currently working on a biography of Akbar.

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June 2014

The Freethinker’s Prayer Book

Khushwant Singh

In this gloriously eclectic and deeply personal collection, India’s grand old man of letters—and the most unusual agnostic of our times—brings together prayers and precepts by prophets, poets and philosophers, and his favourite passages from the seminal texts of the world’s major faiths. The Bible and the Guru Granth Sahib speak to us from these pages, as do the Quran and the Vedas.The songs of mystics like Kabir, Rumi and Teresa of Ávila mix with the verse of poets like Ghalib, Tagore and Keats. In the final section, Khushwant Singh shares some of his own life codes and those of the rebels and mavericks he most admires.

Reviews ‘My only spiritual experience ever has been Khushwant Singh’s The Freethinker’s Prayer Book.’—Mani Shankar Aiyar 152 153

‘A beautiful collection of quotations that needs to be kept by the bedside, readily available to those who wish to reach out to read, feel and understand profound thoughts, most elegantly expressed.’ —Tribune Born in Punjab’s Hadali village (now in Pakistan) in 1915, Khushwant Singh is India’s most widely read author, columnist and journalist. He was editor of The Illustrated Weekly of India, National Herald and the Hindustan Times. His several acclaimed and bestselling books include the novels Train to Pakistan; I Shall Not Hear the Nightingale and Delhi; his autobiography, Truth, Love and a Little Malice; and the two-volume A History of the Sikhs.

Khushwant Singh was awarded the Padma Bhushan in 1974, which he returned in 1984 to protest the siege of the Golden Temple by the Indian Army. In 2007, he was awarded India’s second highest civilian honour, the Padma Vibhushan.

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July 2014

The Kingdom at the Centre of the World Journeys into Bhutan

Omair Ahmad Bhutan is often described as one of the most isolated countries on earth. In this unprecedented portrait of the Himalayan kingdom, Omair Ahmad shows that the opposite, in fact, is true; that Bhutan has been a part of, and been shaped by, some of the most transformative events in Asian and world history.

Beginning with Padmasambhava’s epic work to establish Buddhism in the Himalayas in the eighth century, this book examines the evolution of Bhutan, through the centuries, into the intriguing and distinctive nation that it is today.

154 155

Reviews ‘It is [Bhutan’s] riveting mosaic that Omair sets out to explore, and does so with the verve of a true literary explorer… [weaving] history with personal observation, fact with anecdote, trends with personal interaction, and analysis with readability.’—India Today ‘This is a wonderful addition to any library, not least because it is a perfect mix of political history and travel writing…it teaches and enlightens the reader about the kind of people who are now running [Bhutan].’—Afternoon Despatch & Courier ‘[Omair Ahmad’s] approach is scholarly and he writes with the deftness of a master storyteller…Ahmad moves with dexterity through the stories— historical and mythological—of the men who shaped Bhutan’s political destiny.’—Time Out Omair Ahmad is the author of Jimmy, the Terrorist (winner of the Vodafone Crossword Award for Fiction and shortlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize) and The Storyteller’s Tale. He grew up in Saudi Arabia and India, and has been a journalist, policy analyst, bartender in a coffee shop and semi-employed in a variety of odd vocations in a few countries. He currently lives in New Delhi.

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August 2014

The Competent Authority

Shovon Chowdhury

Shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award 2013

156 157

A couple of decades from now, India is not shining—the Chinese have nuked large parts of the country; Bombay has been obliterated; Delhi is in the throes of rigorous reconstruction; Bengal has seceded and is now a protectorate of China; the Maoists have taken over much of what remains.

The most powerful person in the country is a deranged bureaucrat called the Competent Authority, who has used his official position as the head of the Bureau of Reconstruction to subvert all forces of governmental authority.

Cloaked in anonymity, his identity known only to his terrified minions, the CA rules the remnants of India with an iron fist.

The only person who can stop him is Pintoo, a mutant twelve-year-old from Shanti Nagar, where all the poor people live. Determined to thwart the CA’s plan and save the country from disaster, Pintoo employs three reluctant henchmen to help him: Pande, a corrupt and vicious policeman, Chatterjee, a pessimistic but determined CBI officer, and Ali, the last surviving member of Al Qaeda.

Laugh-out-loud funny and a blistering satire on Indian society, The Competent Authority is a superlative feat of the imagination that is unlike anything you have ever read before.

Reviews ‘In its scope, ambition, imagination and sheer reading delight, The Competent Authority is quite simply the novel of the decade about India.’—India Today Shovon Chowdhury is a Delhi-based amateur humourist. His blog, shovonc.wordpress. com, has been widely condemned. In his spare time, he does advertising work for clients who cannot find anyone cheaper.

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August 2014

Punjab A History FROM Aurangzeb to Mountbatten

Rajmohan Gandhi

158 159

For centuries, the fertile land of five rivers in the north of the Indian subcontinent was coveted by numerous empires and invaders. In this, the first major account of undivided Punjab, award-winning historian, biographer and scholar, Rajmohan Gandhi, gives us its history during its most tumultuous phase from the death of Aurangzeb to its brutal partition in 1947.

Relying on fresh sources as well as previous accounts provided from opposing perspectives, the author fashions a compelling narrative about the great events of the time in the region.

The author also delves into the idea of Punjabiyat—Punjabiness—the literature and poetry of creative giants like Bulleh Shah, Waris Shah, Iqbal, the spiritual teachings of the Sikh Gurus and Sufi saints, and, above all, the testimonials and narratives of ordinary Punjabis, to create an unforgettable portrait of undivided Punjab.

Reviews ‘Rajmohan Gandhi brings to this history… his usually competent scholarship and writing skill, as well as fairmindedness of a high order. He combines very wide reading with the capacity to use all kinds of minor but interesting details to draw the big picture, and by this device, keeps the reader’s attention constantly engaged...’—Irfan Habib ‘Gandhi’s truthful interpretation of history will open a new chapter of understanding—both India and Pakistan need it urgently.’—Millennium Post Rajmohan Gandhi’s previous book, A Tale of Two Revolts: India 1857 and the American Civil War, was published in 2009. Until end-December 2012 he taught political science and history at the University of Illinois.

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September 2014

Courage and Conviction An Autobiography

General VK Singh

160 161

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Kunal Verma

General VK Singh served in the Indian Army for forty-two years, retiring as Chief of Army Staff on 31 May 2012. His distinguished career saw him on the front lines of combat—in the Indo-Pak War of 1971 which led to the creation of Bangladesh, and in Sri Lanka as part of the Indian Peace Keeping Force. Considered one of the world’s foremost experts in counter-insurgency operations, he is also known for the principled stand he took on many issues during his tenure, from arms procurement to the deployment of the army against the Maoists.

Trained at the National Defence Academy and the Indian Military Academy,VK Singh served in regions (and in roles) crucial to India’s security.

From his early days as company commander at the Line of Control in Poonch, to commanding elite formations—Victor Force in Jammu and Kashmir and the vast Eastern Command that shares international boundaries with Nepal, Bhutan, China, Myanmar and Bangladesh—to his experience of military operations and exercises such as Blue Star, Brasstacks and Trident, General Singh’s story makes for fascinating reading.

Candid, compelling and occasionally controversial, this is the story of a straight-talking soldier not afraid to stand by his convictions.

A third-generation army officer, General VK Singh served with both the 2nd and 25th Battalion of the Rajput Regiment. A highly decorated soldier, he was the twentyfourth Chief of the Indian Army.

Writer and filmmaker Kunal Verma has produced many critically acclaimed films for the Indian armed forces, including The Standard Bearers on the NDA, and a documentary on the Kargil War. He has also authored The Long Road to Siachen: The Question Why and the Northeast Trilogy.

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October 2014

A Matter of Rats A Short Biography of Patna

Amitava Kumar It is not only the past that lies in ruins in Patna, it is also the present. But that is not the only truth about the city that the author explores in this vivid, entertaining account of his home town. We accompany him on journeys and memories through many Patnas, the myriad cities locked within the city—the shabby reality of the present-day capital of Bihar; Pataliputra, the storied city of emperors; the dreamlike embodiment of the city in the minds and hearts of those who have escaped its confines… Full of fascinating observations and impressions, A Matter of Rats reveals a challenging and entertaining city which exerts a lasting pull on all those who drift into its orbit.

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Reviews ‘A Matter of Rats is disconcerting, sophisticated, and recklessly courageous.The stories gathered here bring Patna to life, and accrete to an almost unbearable intensity.’—Teju Cole, author of Open City ‘A Matter Of Rats is a pint-sized attempt at understanding the city through its people.’—The Sunday Indian ‘This book is not a love letter to Patna. It is more personal than a love letter, and less sentimental than the average memo.’ —Livemint Amitava Kumar is the author of several works of non-fiction and a novel. His latest book, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Bomb, was judged the Best Non-Fiction Book of the Year at the Page Turner Literary Award. He is Professor of English at Vassar College, New York.

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October 2014

Butterflies on the Roof of the World

Peter Smetacek

Shortlisted for the Tata Literature Live! First Book Award 2013

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Bhimtal, in the Western Himalaya, has more species of butterfly than most countries in Europe. It was to this lepidopteran paradise that Peter Smetacek’s father (who was descended from ‘forest folk’ in Silesia) moved his family so they could all pursue their passion for butterflies. Peter caught his first butterfly at the age of three. After this, there was no looking back, and today Peter oversees the largest private collections of butterflies and moths in India.

In this book, we accompany him on expeditions deep into the mountains of the Himalaya, high desert landscapes of Ladakh, leopard and bear-infested forests of Kumaon, scenic meadows of Garhwal, and all manner of other habitats, as he attempts to capture rare and interesting species—an all-black butterfly that hasn’t been spotted for over a century, drunken moths that behave no differently from their human counterparts when they are tipsy, high-elevation butterflies that sail over mountain peaks, and caterpillars that are worth more than their weight in gold.

Reviews ‘Smetacek cleverly interweaves anecdotes with scientific facts and factoids about these delicate—and yet tough—insects—and their role in telling us about the state of our environment.’—Financial Express ‘[A]n engrossing tale rich in history and science, a travelogue spun around the fascinating world of butterflies. The storytelling is reminiscent of legendary naturalist Gerald Durrell and travel writer Bruce Chatwin.’ —Livemint Peter Smetacek, an authority on Indian butterflies and moths, has published sixty papers on them and has described a dozen new to science. He pioneered the use of lepidoptera as indicators of climate change with a paper published in 1994. He lives with his wife and two children in Bhimtal, where he runs the Butterfly Research Centre.

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October 2014

Shadow Play

Shashi Deshpande

Aru and Rohit get married and settle down into the life of a working couple in a big city. Aru, still coming to terms with her mother Sumi’s death in a road accident and her father Gopal’s desertion of the family prior to that, remains the force that binds the lives of her sisters and her aunts. But tragedy strikes the family again, in the form of a devastating act of terrorism and a heinous crime, and Aru has to face some of her life’s toughest moments.

Shadow Play is a masterful meditation on kinship, marriage, ambition and the changing face of urban India. Filled with a memorable cast of characters, it is a deeply humane and contemplative work—as much about the ephemeral nature of human life as it is about the enduring relationships that give it meaning.

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Reviews ‘There is a wonderful quiet way in which Deshpande unselfconsciously, and without an iota of self-indulgence, assumes the omniscient authorial voice, a way in which she almost naturally draws you, the reader, into the exercise with her, revealing some things, hinting at others, suggesting caution…[Deshpande] deal[s] with the worlds of women, families, relationships, abjuring grand passions or cataclysmic events. And yet, the cataclysms are there in the random attack, the accidental death, or even the throwaway remark which can change things forever.’—Urvashi Butalia, The Indian Express Shashi Deshpande is the author of eleven novels, a number of short story collections, four books for children and a book of essays. Her best known novel, That Long Silence, is considered a landmark in Indian writing in English. Among her other novels are Small Remedies, Moving On, In the Country of Deceit and Ships that Pass.

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‘Her talent for nuance – for picking out from life’s bewildering array of greys the precise shades of her story – is, simply, brilliant.’

—Tehelka

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Shadow Play i kinship, ma changing fac a memorabl tells the stor understandi extreme cru who atones f its women b death; and G family torn of violence.

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November 2014

Tales of Fosterganj Ruskin Bond

It is the early 1960s, and chance has brought a struggling writer to Fosterganj, a forgotten hamlet on the outskirts of Mussoorie. Little happens here, apart from the occasional mule train clattering down a cobbled street; and the writer hopes to live like a recluse, maybe finish a book or two. But appearances, as always, are deceptive, and soon he’s caught up in a series of unusual adventures: close encounters with a leopard and a sinister black bird; a drunken evening in the company of several hens and a penurious prince; a long night spent locked inside a haunted palace; an expedition into the mountains in search of a rare aphrodisiac…

Peopled with characters both charming and eccentric, Tales of Fosterganj is storytelling at its effortless best.

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One of India’s finest and most popular storytellers, Ruskin Bond is the author of several bestselling novels and collections of short stories, essays and poems. These include The Room on the Roof, A Flight of Pigeons, Time Stops at Shamli, Our Trees Still Grow in Dehra, Rain in the Mountains, Roads to Mussoorie and Tigers for Dinner.

Ruskin Bond was awarded the Padma Shri by the Government of India in 1999.

In 2012, the Delhi government gave him its Lifetime Achievement Award.

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November 2014

The Hundred Names of Darkness

Nilanjana Roy

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In the sequel to her critically acclaimed, bestselling novel, The Wildings, Nilanjana Roy takes us back to the Delhi neighbourhood of Nizamuddin, and its unforgettable cats—Mara, Southpaw, Katar, Hulo and Beraal. As they recover slowly from their terrible battle with the feral cats, they find their beloved locality changing around them.Winter brings an army of predators— humans, vicious dogs, snakes, bandicoots—along with the cold and a scarcity of food... Unless Mara can help them find a safe haven, their small band will be wiped out forever.

With the assistance of a motley group of friends—Doginder, a friendly stray; Hatch, a cheel who is afraid of the sky; Thomas Mor, an affable peacock; Jethro Tail, the mouse who roared; and the legendary Senders of Delhi—Mara and her band set out on an epic journey to find a place where they can live free from danger.

With all the brilliance and originality of its predecessor, The Hundred Names of Darkness brings the story of Mara and the enormously appealing cats of Nizamuddin to a breathtaking conclusion.

Reviews ‘The Hundred Names of Darkness is a delightful menagerie, with other animals who are as cute, cuckoo and charismatic as Mara and the cats.’

—Deepanjana Pal, Firstpost Nilanjana Roy spent most of her adult life writing about humans before realizing that animals were much more fun. Her first novel, The Wildings, won the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prize 2013. Her column on books and reading for the Business Standard has run for over fifteen years; she also writes for the International Herald Tribune on gender.

Her fiction and journalism have appeared in several journals and anthologies, including The Caravan, Civil Lines 6, Guernica, The New York Times’ India blog, Outlook and Biblio.

Nilanjana lives in Delhi with two cats and her husband, and on Twitter @nilanjanaroy.

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November 2014

Filomena’s Journeys A portrait of a marriage, a family & a culture

Maria Aurora Couto

172 173

In 1935 Filomena Borges, aged twenty-six, married for love and moved from her grandmother’s village, Raia—where she had arrived as an orphaned child—to one of Goa’s most prominent and fashionable towns of the time, Margão. This move, from rural peace and simplicity to urban buzz and formality, from a modest landowning family to one of formidable eminence, was to transform her life, but in ways she could not have imagined. Chico, the man who had charmed her, turned out to be as troubled as he was passionate.

An unusually gifted musician, he lacked the discipline and conviction to rise above the limitations of great but vanishing privilege. The frustration broke Chico, and his decline threatened to destroy his family. Until Filomena took a leap into the unknown and moved with her young children to Dharwar, a town across the border, in Karnataka, to fashion a secure future for them all…

A compelling and poignant family memoir, Filomena’s Journeys is also a revealing examination of Goan society and culture in the twentieth century.

Reviews ‘Couto takes us on a multi-layered journey into the intimate lives of upperclass Goan society. Although [Filomena’s Journeys is] essentially a memoir, Couto doesn’t compromise on the in-depth scholarship she is renowned for, seamlessly weaving historical figures and vignettes into her narrative…

In this story alternating between individual failing and triumph, despair and perseverance, is a story of universal courage and spirit—an absolute tour de force.’—Selma Carvalho, O Heraldo Maria Aurora Couto was born in Goa and studied in Dharwar and New Delhi (where she later taught English literature at Lady Shri Ram College, Delhi University). She is the author of the widely acclaimed Goa: A Daughter’s Story and Graham Greene: On the Frontier. In 2010 the Government of India honoured her with the Padma Shri for her contributions in literature and education. She lives in Aldona, a village in North Goa.

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December 2014

On Hinduism

Wendy Doniger Through this magisterial volume, one of the world’s greatest scholars of Hinduism enlarges our understanding of the ancient and complex faith.

Drawing upon Doniger’s writing over forty years, the book examines many of the most critical and contested issues in Hinduism—from the fierce debates about whether it is a polytheistic or monotheistic religion, to the recent challenges to its innate pluralism; from the ambivalence about noninjury (ahimsa) in Hinduism’s sacred texts, to the position of women and Dalits in Hindu society.

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Reviews ‘On Hinduism is a treat…held together by Doniger’s strong and distinctive voice which carries both wit and wisdom, both the exuberance of wonder and the weight of experience. Doniger is one of the most important scholars of Hinduism and of religion in general—her work continues to provoke, to startle and to challenge in the best of all possible ways.’ —Arshia Sattar, Mint ‘This massive tome is outstandingly readable, written in a crisp and elegant manner pleasantly spiced with humour and a stimulating idiosyncrasy…there is always a festive appreciation of the many cultures of Hinduism, blending incisive criticism with delighted enjoyment.’ —Tanika Sarkar, The Indian Express ‘Doniger’s references are wide-ranging and allude to everything from the vedas to Kipling and Jai Santoshi Ma. Erudite and accessible, this book is both wise and wonderful.’—Manjula Narayan, Hindustan Times Wendy Doniger is the author of several books about Hinduism, which include the acclaimed bestsellers The Hindus: An Alternative History; Siva, the Erotic Ascetic; Hindu Myths and translations of the Rig Veda and Kamasutra. She has taught at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London and at the University of California, Berkeley. She is currently Mircea Eliade Distinguished Service Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Chicago.

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December 2014

Perpetual City A Short Biography of Delhi

Malvika Singh Malvika Singh’s love affair with India’s capital city began when her family moved there from Bombay in the 1950s. Her personal account of Delhi past and present explores the still magnificent ruins of Delhi’s monuments, its vigorous and colourful markets, its broad and tree-lined avenues, its famous university, tucked away on the Ridge, and bustling Chandni Chowk.

Intertwined with this narrative is Singh’s own story of the life she forges within the city, the remarkable Delhiites she has met, and the turbulent changes, both political and social, that she has witnessed over the decades. While she mourns the Delhi that once was, her spirit is buoyed by the indomitable spirit of the city.

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Reviews ‘A heartfelt love letter to Delhi that is part history, part family memoir and part indignant call to arms: why do we tolerate the neglect of India’s greatest city, asks Mala Singh. More importantly, she brilliantly shows why we should care and how we need to learn to value the nation’s extraordinary capital city.’

— William Dalrymple Daughter of the late Romesh Thapar, Malvika Singh is the publisher of Seminar, a prestigious monthly magazine of ideas, founded in 1959. She has authored several books: Bhutan: Through the Lens of the King; New Delhi: Making of a Capital; Delhi: India in One City; and Snowdon’s India. She has edited Delhi: The First City; Chennai: A City of Change; Hyderabad: A City of Hope; Kolkata: A Soul City; Lucknow: A City Between Cultures; Mumbai: A City of Dreams; Freeing the Spirit: Iconic Women of India. She has also worked extensively in theatre and film, and was decorated as a Dame in the civil merit honours list of the King of Spain in 2009.

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SELECT BACKLIST

Between Clay and Dust MUSHARRAF ALI FAROOQI

Format: Demy PB 216pp Price: Rs 295 ISBN: 978-93-82277-30-9 Territory: Indian subcontinent (excluding Pakistan)

Em and The Big Hoom JERRY PINTO

Format: B format PB 232pp Price: Rs 295 ISBN: 978-93-82277-31-6 Territory: Indian subcontinent 178 179

The Taliban Cricket Club TIMERI N. MURARI

Format: Royal PB 336pp Price: Rs 295 ISBN: 978-93-822-7733-0 Territory: Indian subcontinent (excluding Sri Lanka, Nepal and Bhutan)

Chronicle of a Corpse Bearer CYRUS MISTRY

Format: Demy PB 248pp Price: Rs 295 ISBN: 978-93-82277-35-4 Territory: Indian subcontinent

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Accidental India: A History of the Nation’s Passage through Crisis and Change SHANKKAR AIYAR

Format: Royal PB 352pp Price: Rs 395 ISBN: 978-93-82277-39-2 Territory: Indian subcontinent

The Wildings NILANJANA ROY

Format: Royal PB Illustrated 256pp Price: Rs 295 ISBN: 978-93-82277-48-4 Territory: Indian subcontinent

Tilled Earth MANJUSHREE THAPA

Format: B format PB 224pp Price: Rs 250 ISBN: 978-93-82277-51-4 Territory: Indian subcontinent

Seasons of Flight MANJUSHREE THAPA

Format: B format PB 256pp Price: Rs 250 ISBN: 978-93-82277-49-1 Territory: Indian subcontinent

select backlist

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Format: B format PB 472pp Price: Rs 395 ISBN: 978-93-82277-02-6 Territory: Indian subcontinent

r e v i se d a n d update d ‘[Manjushree]…does a fantastic job defending democracy and republicanism and deserves the highest praise for doing it during a turbulent time in Nepali history.’

—The Kathmandu Post

Essays and Opinions on Nepal

Cover design and calligraphy by Nikheel Aphale

‘If you want to understand Nepal and its recent past… begin by reading [this book].’—Business Standard

non - fiction

M a n j u s h r e e T h a pa

180 181 { SPECIAL

ABRIDGED EDITION}

‘It’s hard to think of an epic poem more dazzlingly splendid...Farooqi has given world literature a gift.’

—Time

GHALI B L A K H N AV I AND

A BD U L L A H B I L G R A MI

‘The translation by Musharraf Ali Farooqi is a bravura performance...Nothing that readers in India, or elsewhere, have read would have prepared them for its lightness, deftness and frothiness.’—Hindustan Times ‘Stupendous...a major achievement...Farooqi has opened a window to a very different world.’—The Telegraph

CLASSICS

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‘This sensitive new translation by Musharraf Ali Farooqi is filled with lyrical resonance...a marvelous dovetailing of fantasy, history and religion. [Readers] will love losing themselves in this complex yet ancient world of the imagination.’—The Washington Post

Translated by

Format: B format PB /flaps 568pp Price: Rs 495 ISBN: 978-93-82277-12-5 Territory: Indian subcontinent

‘The Iliad and Odyssey of medieval Persia, a rollicking, magic-filled heroic saga... in an interpretation so fluent that it is a pleasure to sit down and lose oneself in it.’

— William Dalrymple in The New York Times Book Review

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY

Chanakya’s New Manifesto proposes a comprehensive blueprint for change.

We cannot continue as we are, and must gather the resolve to bring in effective governance, a true democracy, a corruption-free State, a security-conscious nation and an inclusive society. If we fail, India may never succeed.

Our future is at stake.

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The first translation into English of a beloved medieval IndoPersian epic, The Adventures of Amir Hamza is the gripping account of the exploits of Amir Hamza, the greatest warrior of his time, defender of the True Faith, lover of blindingly beautiful women and scourge of infidels, demons, trolls, devs and assorted evildoers. In Musharraf Ali Farooqi’s extraordinary translation, which took nearly a decade to finish, Hamza’s magical world comes thrillingly alive.

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CH AN AK YA ’S

CHAN AK YA ’ S NE W MAN IF ES TO pavan k . varma

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‘It is indeed a wonderful book, replete with poetry, elegant turns of phrase, choice abuses, jokes, drama and suspense...Quite simply, this dastaan in any language is an antidote to the cares of this world.’

—Gillian Wright in India Today

T H E A D V E N T U RE S O F

ad

‘It is a testament to the quality of Farooqi’s rendering of the text into English that he both conveys a sense of the art of the “sweet-lipped historians” and “nimble scribes of fancy”, and produces a real page-turner.’—The Times Literary Supplement

AMIR HAMZA

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Format: B format PB 278pp Price: Rs 295 ISBN: 978-93-82277-52-1 Territory: Indian subcontinent

In The Lives We Have Lost, Manjushree Thapa asks these vital questions, and many others. And, in seeking answers, finds the nation still muddling its way from crisis to crisis, in desperate search of a centre that will hold.

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The Lives We have Lost: Essays and Opinions on Nepal MANJUSHREE THAPA

Manjushree Thapa

al

The Constituent Assembly of Nepal, in its very first meeting, abolished the monarchy in May 2008. After that watershed event, however, the way forward has been stalled by vexing questions. How is power in such a fractious polity to be shared? Which form of governance is best suited to the country: republicanism? federalism? How are the excesses of the decade-long civil war to be reckoned?

How is the People’s Liberation Army to be integrated with the Nepal Army?

To what extent should neighbours be allowed to interfere in the internal politics of the nation? And why is it that the Constituent Assembly, years after it was elected, cannot draft a Constitution that is acceptable to all?

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Chanakya’s New Manifesto analyzes the multiple challenges facing the country today and proposes clear and unambiguous solutions to them.

Chanakya (c. 380-270 BCE) was classical India’s greatest thinker and teacher.

Through his unparalleled ability to devise result-oriented military, political, and administrative strategy, he overthrew one king, crowned another and paved the way for the establishment of India’s first great empire.

His seminal work, the Arthashastra, arguably the world’s first comprehensive treatise on statecraft and governance, was written approximately two thousand years before Machiavelli’s The Prince.

What would Chanakya do if confronted with the various crises that beset contemporary India?

Using this question as the starting point for his new book, celebrated writer and thinker Pavan K. Varma has drawn up a practical and detailed plan, modelled on the Arthashastra, to bring about reform and change in five key areas that require urgent attention— governance, democracy, corruption, security, and the building of an inclusive society. Whether it is laying the foundation for an independent and effective Lokpal, or decriminalizing politics and successfully weeding out the corrupt, the solutions he proposes are substantive, well within the constitutional framework, and can make all the difference between intent and action.

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Chanakya’s New Manifesto is both a call to action as well as a deeply insightful account of the challenges facing the country today. It is a book that should be attentively read by everybody with a stake in India’s future.

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‘Forget Kathmandu combines passion with insight to describe a complex and troubled country. Written in clear, vigorous prose, it is one of the most important books on not just Nepal but also contemporary South Asia.’

—Pankaj Mishra

Wide-ranging in scope—the book spans the beginning of the monarchy, through the early democratic movements, to the present—Forget Kathmandu is many things: history, memoir, reportage, travelogue, analysis. But, above all, it is an unflinching, clear-sighted attempt to make sense of the ‘bad politics’ that plagued—and continues to plague—the country. It remains as worryingly relevant to present-day Nepal as it was when first published in 2005.

Cover design and calligraphy by Nikheel Aphale

Manjushree Thapa

‘[Forget Kathmandu is] reminiscent of the late great W. G. Sebald’s non-fiction as an engaging detective story.’—Hindustan Times

Forget Kathmandu MANJUSHREE THAPA

In June 2001, the king of Nepal and almost his entire family were massacred.

Unrest, simmering over the previous decade, boiled over, and pushed the nation into free fall. In 2005, the dead king’s brother reinstated monarchy, crushing any hope that parliamentary democracy would flourish in Nepal.

A period fraught with uncertainty and intense turmoil ensued: the Maoists waged a bloody People’s War; the monarchy mounted a bloodier counterinsurgency effort; political parties bickered and fought endlessly; and the citizens bore the brunt of it all.

Format: B format PB 304pp Price: Rs 325 ISBN: 978-93-82277-00-2 Territory: Indian subcontinent

An Elegy for Democracy

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Written with style and sophistication, also honesty and emotion…a must-read.—Outlook

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‘Activities in Nepal, especially those that set a good example...do not often breach the international consciousness. [A Boy from Siklis] does just that, narrating Nepal’s revolutionary approach to protected areas in a fluent and personalized manner.’—Himal Southasian In late September 2006, Chandra Gurung organized an event in remote Ghunsa village in Eastern Nepal to celebrate a landmark in the country’s conservation history: the handing over of ownership of forest areas by the government to local inhabitants. The handover also marked the apex of Chandra’s career as an environmentalist. On the way back from Ghunsa, the helicopter ferrying Chandra and others crashed, killing everyone aboard.

MANJUSHREE THAPA

A Boy from Siklis traces Chandra’s Gurung’s remarkable life—his birth in the tiny village of Siklis; his education in Nepal and abroad; his work, first with the King Mahendra Trust for Nature Conservation and then as head of the World Wildlife Fund Nepal—and his meteoric rise as he became one of the keystones of natureconservation efforts in Nepal.

Format: B format PB 220pp Price: Rs 250 ISBN: 978-93-82277-50-7 Territory: Indian subcontinent

A compelling story of a life lived with verve and an honest desire to make lasting difference, A Boy from Siklis is also a valuable and illuminating history of nature conservation in Nepal, caught up in the country’s thorny politics.

Cover design and calligraphy by Nikheel Aphale

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A Boy From Siklis

The Life and Times of Chandra Gurung ‘This is how heroes should be judged—not only by what they achieved in their own lifetimes, but also in their continuing influence.’—Nepali Times

M a n j u s h r e e T h a pa

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An erotic encounter arises in a house full of voluptuous women preparing tempting food in ‘Stolen’.

A local artist embarks upon a wild affair with her Russian neighbour in ‘A Touch of Sun’. A schoolgirl experiences exquisite pleasure at the hands of a stranger in ‘The Causes of Blindness’.

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and succumbs to irresistible new cravings in ‘A Pleasant Kind of Heavy’. In these and other stories, memorable sexual encounters take place in settings as diverse as a small locality of Mysore, a transatlantic jet, an abandoned bridge in Chennai and a tiny studio apartment in America. Bold, sensuous and unabashedly erotic, these nine stories announce

ARANYANI

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the arrival of an electrifying new talent—a writer who will take you on a wild, shocking and seductive exploration of the human body

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and psyche.

W

hen his queen, Arjumand Banu—Mumtaz-i-Mahal, the Chosen One of the Palace—died, Shah Jahan wanted to build a monument that was the image of his perfect love for her. For twenty-two years, twenty thousand men laboured day and night to fulfil the emperor’s obsession. The result was the Taj Mahal, a marble mausoleum lined with gold, silver and precious jewels.

In this complex and fascinating book, Murari has written much more than a historical romance. He has skillfully recreated the period against which the story is set: the opulence of the palace and the grinding poverty of seventeenth-century India, the vicissitudes of Shah Jahan’s reign and the often bitter conflict between men of different faiths.

‘Timeri N. Murari has recreated this evergreen love story of seventeenth-century India with the lucidity of a poet. The book reverberates with the message that love is all powerful.’ —The Tribune

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‘A historical novel written with amazing simplicity, the book also gives a fascinating description of how the immortal monument of love was built.’ —The Statesman

‘An exotic, passionate novel, sensual and violent by turn, always compelling.’

— The Guardian

Taj a Story of Mughal India

This powerful novel narrates the story of the Taj on two parallel levels. The first one tells the passionate love story of Shah Jahan and Arjumand till her death through the voices of three main characters—Arjumand, Shah Jahan and Isa, Arjumand’s favourite eunuch. The second recounts the later years of Shah Jahan’s reign, the building of the Taj Mahal and the bloody pursuit of the fabulous Peacock Throne by his sons. Intertwined with the narrative about the building of the Taj is the story of Murthi, the Hindu craftsman sent as a gift to the emperor to carve the famous marble jali around Arjumand’s sarcophagus.

Cover photograph © Roy Tapping Cover design by Tania Das Gupta

A pregnant woman discovers

A Pleasant Kind of Heavy and Other Erotic Stories

TIMERI N. MURARI

Taj

Taj: A Story of Mughal India TIMERI N. MURARI

Format: B format PB 368pp Price: Rs 295 ISBN: 978-93-82277-34-7 Territory: Indian subcontinent

a Story of Mughal India

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY

TIMERI N. MURARI

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It is the last year of the nineteenth century in the village of Chevathar in southern India. Solomon Dorai, the headman, is desperately trying to hold together the fraying ends of village life at a time of huge social and political unease. When violence finally erupts, it takes Solomon and the traditional structure of the village with it.

‘The House of Blue Mangoes is a Tolstoyan social saga…a solidly absorbing, richly informative Indian novel that should please a lot of readers— just about anyone, in fact, with an interest in the subcontinent, or anyone who’s looking for a good read.’

—Alice K. Turner, Washington Post ‘I was caught up in his world, almost able to taste the lavish, spicy meals, see the sunrise with its “ordinary violence of dawn” and recognise the eccentric Indians or the English clergyman, who being in love with India is eager to martyr himself for it…and he writes beautifully. ‘ —Sunday Telegraph

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‘In the best sense, he knows how to tell a good story.’

—Independent on Sunday ‘Davidar’s writing is a joy.’

—Glamour

www.alephbookcompany.com

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY

An independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India

The Solitude of Emperors is a stunningly perceptive novel about modern India, about what motivates fundamentalist beliefs, and what makes someone driven, bold or mad enough to make a stand.

Cover photograph ©Lalie Sorbet 2012 | Cover design by Bena Sareen

Format: B format PB 550pp Price: Rs 450 ISBN: 978-93-82277-94-1 Territory: Indian subcontinent

THE HOUSE OF BLUE MANGOES

DAVID DAVIDAR

‘The House of Blue Mangoes is a perfect body of work, honed and polished to a high gloss.’

—Justine Hardy, The Times

‘A master storyteller.’—Time

DAVID DAVIDAR

‘David Davidar is one of the most remarkable people in publishing.’

—Scotland on Sunday

A year after his arrival in Bombay, Vijay is caught up in violent riots that rip through the city, a reflection of the upsurge of fundamentalism everywhere in the country. He is sent to a small tea town in the Nilgiri mountains to recover, but finds that the unrest in the rest of India has touched this peaceful spot as well, specifically a spectacular shrine called The Tower of God, which is the object of political wrangling. He is befriended by Noah, an enigmatic and colourful character who lives in the local cemetery and quotes Pessoa, Cavafy and Rimbaud but is ostracized by a local elite obsessed with little more than growing their prized fuchsias. As the discord surrounding the local shrine comes to a head, Vijay tries to alert them to the dangers, but his intervention will have consequences which he could never have foreseen.

The House of Blue Mangoes DAVID DAVIDAR

‘Unflinching. Unsentimental. Deeply moving. I loved it.’

—Kiran Desai

THE SOLITUDE OF EMPERORS

‘Brings the art of grand narrative back to the Indian novel.’

—India Today

‘The House of Blue Mangoes is a rare thing: a deeply intelligent novel that’s also a cracking page-turner, and it’s one of the best books I’ve read in a long time.’

—Diana McPartlin, South China Morning Post

‘We do not know what to do with one of our most precious resources, solitude, and so we fill it up with noise and clutter...’

Suffocating in the small-town world of his parents, Vijay is desperate to escape to the raw energy of Bombay in the early 1990s. His big chance arrives unexpectedly when the family servant, Raju, is recruited by a right-wing organization. As a result of an article he writes about the increasing power of sectarian politicians, Vijay gets a job in a small Bombay publication, The Indian Secularist.

There he meets Rustom Sorabjee—the inspirational founder of the magazine who opens Vijay’s eyes to the damage caused to the nation by the mixing of religion and politics.

‘Davidar’s pages [are] the boldest and the biggest after Midnight’s Children.’—S. Prasannarajan, India Today

New York Times Book Review

An independent publishing firm promoted by Rupa Publications India

‘A novel of feeling as well as of ideas, and a delightful and thoroughly satisfying one.’

—Scotsman

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‘Gripping…The House of Blue Mangoes is a polished and accomplished work.’

—Akash Kapur,

ALEPH BOOK COMPANY

Cover photograph ©oochappan Cover design by Bena Sareen

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Three generations of Dorais come and go in the village by the sea, winning and losing the battle of Chevathar.

There are Solomon’s sons: the dazzling, athletic Aaron and the studious Daniel, both exiled by their father’s death but in different ways, both determined to make their mark on the world. And there is Daniel’s son, Kannan, faced with a set of challenges that could break him if he isn’t strong enough...

THE HOUSE OF DAVID BLUE MANGOES DAVIDAR

‘He has produced a masterpiece.’

—Khushwant Singh, Outlook

‘David Davidar has done what few authors and fewer debut novelists can hope to—he’s created a world entire, a fictional universe both compelling and complete.’

—Nilanjana Roy, The Hindu

‘Davidar skilfully mixes the political with the personal to create an engrossing read.’

—Daily Mail

The Solitude of Emperors DAVID DAVIDAR

Format: B format PB 296pp Price: Rs 295 ISBN: 978-93-82277-95-8 Territory: Indian subcontinent

THE SOLITUDE OF EMPERORS DAVID DAVIDAR ‘[An] ambitious disturbing novel…[As] this book hurtles towards its dramatic denouement, it offers us quite a white-knuckle ride…Davidar has a keen eye for detail, and an elegant turn of phrase. This is (a) daring novel that engages with Indian realities: it looks sectarian violence and intolerance in the eye, and does not turn away.’

—Independent

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INDEX Winter 2014 {Feb} p7

A SUITABLE BOY: 20th Anniversary Edition VIKRAM SETH

Format: Royal PB Price: Rs 995 Publication date: February 2014 Territory: Indian subcontinent p10 RABINDRANATH Tagore for the 21st Century Reader ranslated FROM the BENGALI T

by Arunava Sinha

Format: Demy PB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: January 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-27-9 Territory: World p12 Maps for A Mortal Moon: Essays and Entertainments Adil Jussawalla

Format: Demy PB/Flaps Price: Rs 395 Publication date: February 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-67-5 Territory: World SPRING 2014 {March-April} p16 India in Love: Marriage and Sexuality in the 21st Century Ira Trivedi

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: March 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-13-2 Territory: Indian subcontinent index

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p17

Talking of Justice: Essays Leila Seth

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: March 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-96-5 Territory: World p23 THE Battles of the New Republic: A Contemporary History of Nepal Prashant Jha

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: March 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-99-6 Territory: Indian subcontinent 184 185

p29 The Past as Present: Essays on Religion and History Romila Thapar

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: April 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-01-4 Territory: World p34 The Small Wild Goose Pagoda: An Almanac Allan Sealy

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: April 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-48-9 Territory: Indian subcontinent t h e

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p37

Arctic Summer Damon Galgut

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: April 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-25-5 Territory: Indian subcontinent

p43

The Black Hill Mamang Dai

Format: B format PB/flaps Price: Rs 295 Publication date: April 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-23-1 Territory: World

Summer 2014 {May-June} p46

A Town Like Ours Kavery Nambisan

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: May 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-00-7 Territory: Indian subcontinent p52 The Bedtrick: Tales of Sex and Masquerade Wendy Doniger

Format: Demy PB/flaps Price: Rs 295 Publication date: May 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-97-2 Territory: Indian subcontinent

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p56 Korma, Kheer and Kismet: Five Seasons in Old Delhi Pamela Timms

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: May 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-14-9 Territory: Indian subcontinent

p58

Chanakya Returns Timeri N. Murari

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: May 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-02-1 Territory: Indian subcontinent 186 187

p62 Consolations and Lamentations Khushwant Singh

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: June 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-76-7 Territory: World

p64 Unequal India: Stories of Destitution Harsh Mander

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: June 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-42-2 Territory: World

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Monsoon 2014 { July-Sep} p66 Murder and Mahim: Peter and Jende Investigate Jerry Pinto

Format: B format PB/flaps Price: Rs 295 Publication date: July 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-06-9 Territory: Indian subcontinent p75 The Colonel Who Did Not Repent Salil Tripathi

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: July 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-18-7 Territory: Indian subcontinent p82

The Family: Two Hundred Years of The Nehrus and The Gandhis Pranay Gupte

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 695 Publication date: August 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-36-1 Territory: Indian subcontinent p86 Grey Hornbills at Dusk: Nature Rambles Through Delhi Bulbul Sharma

Format: B format HB Price: Rs 295 Publication date: August 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-65-1 Territory: Indian subcontinent index

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p87

Death of a SCHOOLMASTER Shovon Chowdhury

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: September 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-79-8 Territory: Indian subcontinent p93

S´iva: The Erotic Ascetic Wendy Doniger

Format: Demy PB/flaps Price: Rs 450 Publication date: September 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-22-9 Territory: Indian subcontinent p98 Dreams, Illusions and Other Realities

188 189

Wendy Doniger

Format: Demy PB/flaps Price: Rs 450 Publication date: September 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-23-6 Territory: Indian subcontinent Autumn/Winter 2014 {OCT-DEC} p104 GANDHI FOR THE 21ST

CENTURY READER

Edited and with an Introduction by Rakesh Batabyal

Format: Demy PB/flaps Price: Rs 295 Publication date: October 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-73-6 Territory: World t h e

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p110 KALIDASA FOR THE 21ST CENTURY READER TRANSLATED FROM THE SANSKRIT BY Mani Rao

Format: B Format PB/flaps Price: Rs 295 Publication date: October 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-75-0 Territory: World p117 This Unquiet Land: Dispatches from India’s Fault Lines Barkha Dutt

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: November 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-16-3 Territory: Indian subcontinent p118 On Moksha Sudhir Kakar

Format: B format HB Price: Rs 295 Publication date: November 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-17-0 Territory: World p121 Unladylike Radhika Vaz

Format: B format PB/flaps Price: Rs 295 Publication date: November 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-17-5 Territory: Indian subcontinent

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p125 Border Crossing Shashi Tharoor

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 595 Publication date: December 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-72-9 Territory: Indian subcontinent

p126 All of Us in Our Own Lives Manjushree Thapa

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: December 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-11-8 Territory: Indian subcontinent

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p127 Memoirs Mahesh Bhatt

Format: Royal HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: December 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-20-5 Territory: World

p135 Bofors and Other Great Indian Controversies N. Ram

Format: Demy HB Price: Rs 495 Publication date: December 2014 ISBN: 978-93-83064-18-2 Territory: World

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p141 On Artha Gurcharan Das

Format: B Format HB Price: Rs 295 Publication date: December 2014 ISBN: 978-93-82277-29-3 Territory: World

Photo credits Unless otherwise specified all photographs are courtesy of the respective authors.

Pages 26, 30, 77, 105, 111: Wikimedia Commons Page 38: Dora Carrington/Wikimedia Commons

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A B OUT U S

Aleph Book Company is an independent publishing company founded in May 2011 by David Davidar in partnership with R.K. Mehra and Kapish Mehra of Rupa Publications India. Ravi Singh joined the start-up about six months later as co-publisher.

Aleph will publish approximately fifty books this year in these subject areas: literary fiction and quality non-fiction in the following genres— history, biography, memoir, narrative non-fiction, reportage, travel, current events, music, art, science, politics, nature, religion, sociology, psychology, philosophy, and business. For further information on how to submit your manuscript and where to buy our books please visit our website, www.alephbookcompany.com 192

Everything we do owes much to the efforts of the team of professionals who make the firm what it is.The founders and directors of Aleph Book Company would like to gratefully acknowledge the contribution of the following people who were instrumental in putting together, marketing and distributing The Book of Aleph: Volume Three and the books on the company’s list. In alphabetical order they are: Adilah Ismail, Aienla Ozukum, Ankit Pahwa (and his team), A.K. Singh (and his team), Aruna Ghose, Bena Sareen, Chander Shekhar (and his team), Dibakar Ghosh, Hina Mobar (and her team), Meenakshi Singh, Neeraj Gulati, Pujitha Krishnan, Raj Kumari John, Ritu Vajpeyi-Mohan, Simar Puneet, and Sudeshna Shome Ghosh.

The Book of Aleph:Volume Three was designed by Bena Sareen

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