ARVIND NARRAIN·JANUARY 1, 2024

The Leaflet presents to you a curated list of books from 2023, perhaps for 2024. Happy reading!

—

Read Part 2 here.

A review of books read and enjoyed in the previous year is a nod to what books can do. Broaden the imagination, help one cope with difficult circumstances with humour, provide a new lens to view an old problem and give one a sense of continuity with a distant past.

Books can also build a sense of community with other cultures and civilisations and help you see that the stranger is not so strange after all.

They can also reverse a Gramscian dictum and be about cultivating the ‘optimism of the intellect’.

Here is a list of 2023, perhaps for 2024.

Seven moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka

This book is a fictional coming to terms with the modern Sri Lankan history of disappearances, murder and civil war told by Maali Almeida, a young queer man who worked as a war photographer and was killed.

As a war photographer, Maali documented the atrocities perpetrated by some of the senior politicians during the 1983 killings.

After his death, as a ghost, Maali tries to find out why he was killed and seeks to intervene to prevent the killing of people who are still alive and whom he loves.

Books can also build a sense of community with other cultures and civilisations and help you see that the stranger is not so strange after all.

He now inhabits the world of spirits which are “perched on graves”, “hover behind mourners” and “occupy the trees and the railings”. They “lurch like the damned, with eyes of every shade and a talcum hue to their peeling skin”.

The killings by the Sri Lankan State as well as the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) and Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP) (the LTTE took out Dr Raneee Sridharran, the government took out Richard de Zoysa and JVP took out Vijaya Kumaratunga) mean there are many funerals and the funerals are “attended by a throng of spirits” as “ghosts love funerals more than humans love weddings”.

The tragic history of Sri Lanka emerges through the journey of the ghost of Maali Almeida. The ghost of Maali remembers “drinking at the bar”, the last night before he was killed, but has no memory of “being thrown to his death”. Maali wants to find out how he was killed and who killed him as he is motivated by the belief that “forgetting cures nothing. Wrongs must be remembered. Or your murderers will roam free. And you will know no peace.”

What is it like being a ghost? For Maali, “being a ghost isn’t that different from being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror”. Being a ghost means that you have feelings and thoughts but no ability to act. Your power lies in “whispering in other people’s ears” and hoping that they act.

Shehan Karunatilaka approaches the dark history of his country with humour and imagination and gets us to think about how in Milan Kundera’s words, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting’.

Oh, by the way, Milan Kundera passed away on July 11 this year.

Sparks: China’s Underground Historians And Their Battle For The Future, Ian Johnson

This book derives its title from a magazine started by young people from China which sought to bring attention to the failures of the Communist Party in the 1950s, especially the great famine which resulted in millions of deaths.

They started a magazine called Spark, which derived from the Chinese proverb made popular by Mao Zedong, that ‘a single spark can start a prairie fire’. After the first issue of the magazine was released, all those involved were arrested and sentenced to long years in imprisonment for being members of a ‘Rightist counterrevolutionary clique’.

The story of the courageous group which started Spark would have disappeared without a trace, if not for the convicted having access to their case records on release.

Some of those involved were executed in prison during the next campaign by the Communist Party during the Cultural Revolution. The poet Lin Zhao survived both the anti-Rightist campaign and the Cultural Revolution and was released but re-arrested later. She wrote in prison using pen and ink and when she was denied writing implements, she wrote with her blood on her clothing.

The story of the courageous group which started Spark would have disappeared without a trace, if not for the convicted having access to their case records on release.

One of them, Tan Chanxue, who was part of the magazine’s founding and spent fourteen years in labour camps, found that in her file were the issues of Spark as well as confessions under torture and love letters between two of the founders. She copied it out and used it to write her memoirs. So did other family members.

An underground filmmaker Hu Jie interviewed most survivors and made the film Sparks. Parts of Lin Zhao’s file including, “ink copies of her blood letters home”.

Lin Zhao’s grave has become, “one of the most visited pilgrimage sites for China’s human rights activists”, with the area being locked down on the “anniversary of her death”. Her grave is constantly monitored by “closed circuit TV”.

Lin Zhao herself has become an iconic representation of the ideal of freedom and rights lawyer, Xu Zhiyong, christened her, “a martyred saint, a prophet and a poet with an ecstatic soul, the Prometheus of a free China”.

Ian Johnson archives such stories of a search for a freer China right from the very founding of the Communist Party. China is not the totalitarian black box it is made out to be, but rather, resistance is very much part of its history.

Retelling the story of those who founded the Spark is not an example of ‘stored memory’ but ‘functional memory’ when the collective memory becomes a way to talk about the contemporary moment, be it the protests against the hard lockdown during Covid or any other moment of resistance.

Sparks is a documentation about the tribe of China’s underground historians, “counter historians, journalists and filmmakers”, those who seek to build a collective memory of realities that the Communist party would rather bury.

From these narratives, Johnson concludes that, “people still resist”, “independent thought lives in China” and one should not fall prey to the “banal” point that, “an authoritarian regime is authoritarian”.

The sources of inspiration for China’s dissenters are both Chinese literature as well as the heroes in China who have resisted in very difficult circumstances.

What serves as a frame for the entire book is the quotation from Hannah Arendt’s book, Men In Dark Times, which serves as an inspiration for journalist Jiang Xue’s work as a counter-historian.

Arendt profiles the lives of figures during the Nazi holocaust who kept alive the flame of thought and action figures such as Bertol Brecht and Walter Benjamin.

Arendt profiles the lives of figures during the Nazi holocaust who kept alive the flame of thought and action figures such as Bertol Brecht and Walter Benjamin.

As Arendt puts it “Even in the darkest of times we have the right to expect some illumination, and that such illumination may well come less from theories and concepts than from the uncertain, flickering, and often weak light that some men and women, in their lives and their works, will kindle under almost all circumstances and shed over the time span that was given them on Earth.”

Whether the illumination is the light of a candle or that of a blazing sun, only the future will tell.

Johnson concludes that for China’s underground historians, Arendt’s quote is “apt because it is open-ended”. One does not know in which way the future will end, but what is clear is that “in dark times, light is precious; it always matters”.

Read Part 2 here.

Arvind Narrain

Arvind Narrain is an author and legal scholar, and the author of ‘India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance’.

The Leaflet presents to you a curated list of books from 2023, perhaps for 2024. Happy reading!

—

Read Part 1 here.

A review of books read and enjoyed in the previous year is a nod to what books can do. Broaden the imagination, help one cope with difficult circumstances with humour, provide a new lens to view an old problem and give one a sense of continuity with a distant past.

Books can also build a sense of community with other cultures and civilisations and help you see that the stranger is not so strange after all.

They can also reverse a Gramscian dictum and be about cultivating the ‘optimism of the intellect’.

Here is a list of 2023, perhaps for 2024.

China, Spain and the War: Essays and Writings, Jawaharlal Nehru

Most of these short essays were written just before the Second World War and in the early war years. They provide a perspective on those critical years, from the viewpoint of India as well as other colonised countries.

What position should India take as a victim of imperialism in the conflict between fascist and imperialist powers? Can one stand on principle when it comes to crafting a position in international affairs?

Books can also build a sense of community with other cultures and civilisations and help you see that the stranger is not so strange after all.

To Jawaharlal Nehru, principles are important, but that meant that he “was always attaching himself to lost causes”, be it “Manchuria, Abyssinia, Czechoslovakia or Spain”, all of which presented a “sorry tale of misfortune and disaster”.

But he thinks it is important and even though Spain, “may lie low today”, “I am proud … that India stood by her in her hour of need”. He says that “even if it were a vain delusion, I would still stand for values for which we have laboured in India … if I deserted these values, what would I cherish in India? For what kind of freedom do we struggle here?”

Both the Spanish Republic and the Chinese Republic represent the value of freedom that India should stand for. As he puts it: “In this age when black reaction grips the world, and culture and civilisation decay, and violence seems to reign unchecked, the magnificent struggles of the Spanish and Chinese republics against overwhelming odds have lightened the darkness of many a wanderer through the pathless night.

“We sorrow for the incredible horrors that have taken place, but our hearts are full of pride and admiration for the human courage that has smiled through disaster and found greater strength in it, and for the invincible spirit of man that does not bend to insolent might, whatever the consequences.

“Anxiously we follow the fate of the people of Spain, and yet we know they can never be crushed, for a cause that has this invincible courage and sacrifice behind it can never die.”

The importance of the articulation of principles in international affairs is that it provides a framework around which countries can rally. As Nehru puts it, India’s position on the war is opposition to both fascism and imperialism and the requirement that Britain must express the aim of war as the ending of imperialism as well.

From India’s viewpoint, “Events in China, Abyssinia, Austria, Palestine, Czechoslovakia and Spain moved her people profoundly, and British imperial policy in regard to them was resented and condemned.”

As he puts it, “We have no intention of shouting Heil Hitler; neither do we intend to shout British Imperialism Zindabad.” World peace for India means “freedom and democracy and the ending of the domination of one nation over another”. The freedom of India has “been woven into the larger picture of world freedom”.

The question of standing on principles, even if it is a lost cause, is essential to leadership. India, in her position on the war in Gaza, has abandoned the principle of anti-colonialism and peace, thereby forfeiting any claim to leadership in the Global South.

The importance of the articulation of principles in international affairs is that it provides a framework around which countries can rally.

It is essential to rediscover Nehru as someone who could articulate an Indian position that spoke for the Global South. Any claim to global leadership must be based on the articulation of principles not just interests.

So Nehru teaches us. 

A Part Apart: The Life And Thought of B.R. Ambedkar, Ashok Gopal 

The biography by Ashok Gopal is an intellectual account of B.R. Ambedkar’s life, providing a contextual understanding of both his career as well as his writings. Ambedkar, according to Gopal, was a philosophical pragmatist, which meant that “he was not overwhelmed by the present or burdened by the past … the material available from the past and the present was for him a resource to achieve valuable ends in the here and now”.

Ambedkar’s approach was to discourage “hero worship”, what he expected from the pupil was only to take “guidance from his master, with the pupil not bound to accept his master’s conclusions”.

What we know of Ambedkar is less than what we know of Gandhi only because “Ambedkar did not have secretaries who kept a record of all that he wrote or spoke”.

India, in her position on the war in Gaza, has abandoned the principle of anti-colonialism and peace, thereby forfeiting any claim to leadership in the Global South.

Gopal traces the intellectual influences on Ambedkar and in particular the influence of John Dewey who “without subscribing to Marxism”, was a “critic of capitalism”. Another strand of Ambedkar’s work was the distinction between the social and the political and his exploration of the politics of the social. The Congress party to him was a body of men who were “political radicals and social Tories”.

Theorising the social was one of his key contributions. He saw the caste system as a “tower without a staircase”, with every Hindu born on a floor and condemned to die on the same floor. The “Untouchable” was “saturated with servility” and the “abjection” was the result not of foreign rule, but of the “rule of our own people”.

The challenge to the law of caste finds its most famous expression in the Mahad Satyagraha, which according to Gopal was grounded in both “law and moral and political philosophy” and challenged the Hindu social order for the “first time”.

Even compared to the Nehru Report it “proclaimed a higher autonomy— the freedom and power of human beings to decide how their social life was to be regulated, and what sort of religion and scriptures they would follow or reject”.

There are also striking references to Ambedkar’s personal life and what was particularly poignant was the intense feeling that life was a “garden full of weeds”, on having to bury “four precious children … all sprightly, auspicious and handsome”.

The intellectual journey moves from the first critic of the social to the Chairperson of the Drafting Committee of the Constitution to finally moving beyond the framework of law to challenge the Hindu social order through conversion.

What runs as a thread through the book (and through Ambedkar’s life) is his commitment to thinking encapsulated by his formulation that, “there can be no finality in thinking”. The mode of thinking is guided by principles that challenge the blind following of rules.

Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India, Manoj Mitta

Mitta’s book is a vast legal archive on caste and the law which explores how the legislature is one of the modes utilised for the fight against Untouchability. Mitta tells the story of the emerging norm against caste hierarchy through the voices of lesser-known protagonists in the battle against Dalit subordination.

One of the pioneers was Maneckji Byramji Dadabhoy, who in 1916 was the first person to move a resolution in the Imperial Legislative Council on improving the condition of the ‘Depressed Classes’. This led to the first “ever discussion in the national legislature on Untouchability”.

Strangely enough, this Belchi story is little known. The oblivion is at least partly to do with “the failure of law journals to record the vital decisions of the Patna High Court and the Supreme Court in the Belchi cases in 1981–82”.

He excoriated the “socio-religious conditioning of the Hindus”, saying that “any man made after the image of god, endowed with brains and a moral sense, should pollute his fellow being with his touch, is incredible. The very idea is revolting and is enough to shock humanity”.

He noted, “It is, sir, a shame to Hindu society, it is a shame to Hindu culture, it is a shame to India.” Mitta brings to attention the fact that “though Indians had been members of the legislative councils since 1861, it took fifty-five years for any legislator to talk about, let alone excoriate, this rampant social evil”.

The pioneer was a Parsee, Dadabhoy and his role was acknowledged by Ambedkar as well. It was Dadabhoy’s initiative that, “led to data collection throughout British India on a hitherto unexplored subject”.

The antecedents of the Hindu Marriage Act, 1955, recognising marriage between any two Hindus regardless of caste, lies in the 1918 Bill by Vithalbhai Patel that proposed that the ban on inter-caste marriage be lifted.

When the Hindu Marriages Validity Act, 1949, which for the first time recognised inter-caste marriages, was passed, it was proposed to call the law, Patel Hindu Marriages Validity Bill.

This, according to Mitta, would have been a “fitting tribute to the lesser-known Patel brother” as “the bill that struck at the sanctity of endogamy, validating even pratiloma marriages”.

Another lesser-known pioneer is a Dalit legislator, Veerian who was blocked from entering a road in his native place of Kamalapuram village, “as it was located in an agraharam”.

Veerian “shot off a telegram to the chief secretary to the Madras government, portraying his debarment as a violation of his civil rights”, triggering a movement that led to the passing of legislation for the right of all persons to access public facilities like roads and wells without discrimination.

When it comes to contemporary India, it is riddled with cases of mass crimes against Dalits. Invariably, there is impunity for mass crimes, be it Kilvevenmani (1968), Tsunduru (1991), Bathana Thola (1996), Lakshmampur Bathe (1997) and Shankarbigha (1999).

The one exception to this general trend has been the killings at Belchi (1977) which Mitta documents. Belchi, which often finds mention as the beginning of Indira Gandhi’s comeback, was the first mass crime against Dalits which resulted in not only conviction but also the award of death penalty and execution for the perpetrators.

The pioneer was a Parsee, Dadabhoy and his role was acknowledged by Ambedkar as well. It was Dadabhoy’s initiative that, “led to data collection throughout British India on a hitherto unexplored subject”.

While Mitta says that “the very idea of the death penalty is repugnant” he also notes that the “hanging of Mahabir Mahto was a milestone in the history of Untouchability. It is still the first and only recorded instance of a killer of Untouchables being judicially executed”.

Strangely enough, this Belchi story is little known. The oblivion is at least partly to do with “the failure of law journals to record the vital decisions of the Patna High Court and the Supreme Court in the Belchi cases in 1981–82”.

This book is perhaps the “first attempt to record the legal history of Belchi from the commission of the crime to the execution of the death penalty”.

Vivekananda: The Philosopher of Freedom, Govind Krishnan

Narendranath Datta, or Swami Vivekananda, as he is popularly known, is one of the icons of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and is seen as a symbol of Hindu pride.

Krishnan shows how Vivekananda has been misappropriated to suit the RSS’s ideology, “Vivekananda’s thought on all themes important to Hindutva nationalism including the place of minorities in India”, stands in “stark opposition to the thought of RSS icons like Savarkar, Golwalkar and Hedgewar”.

For the sangh, the key element is “social control of the individual”. Social authority exercised through “the family, through cultural norms, religious tradition, and societal diktats have to control individual choice and agency”.

For Vivekananda, “Liberty is the first condition of growth … just as a man must have the liberty to think and speak, so he must have liberty in food, dress and marriage.”

Vivekananda, in this careful delineation, emerges as a philosopher of freedom, who “saw the sacred scriptures as texts to be treated critically, not sacrosanct objects which should be worshipped blindly”.

He did not “recognise the authority of any scriptures in any usual sense”. For him, “religious books were only signposts and aids on the way to true religion”. The goal of religion was “human freedom”. An obsession with “ritualism had led to the moral decay of Hinduism”.

He is a “reformer within the Hindu spiritual tradition”, who is seeking to put forward the idea of radical equality. The hierarchies based on caste and religion have no place in Hinduism as for him, there is “no difference between man and man” and “all beings are alike divine”.

Vivekananda, in this careful delineation, emerges as a philosopher of freedom, who “saw the sacred scriptures as texts to be treated critically, not sacrosanct objects which should be worshipped blindly”.

The constitutional category of the free individual has not become a part of a “social and cultural life”, neither has the constitutional ideal of equality. One way of nourishing these ideas is through a return to the writings of Vivekananda.

Krishan argues that the progressive discourse has also been complicit in this misreading of Vivekananda and the best “antidote” to the “Sangh’s misappropriation” is for more people to read his work.

Read Part 1 here.

Arvind Narrain

Arvind Narrain is an author and legal scholar, and the author of ‘India’s Undeclared Emergency: Constitutionalism and the Politics of Resistance’.