THE PAGE OF REASON
As the world darkened further in 2019, our books offered more perseverance than they did escape
RReaders should be sceptical about year-end lists that purport to tell you what to read. There are few things more irrelevant to a volume of fiction and poetry than the year it was published. This is different for non-fiction, but only slightly. Perhaps what any given year does is impact the choices readers make, the books they seek out, the inchoate feelings that they perhaps wish to see reflected back at them in print. For instance, would it be surprising if we turned to Animal Farm, a book published in 1945? All animals being equal, but some more equal than others is a concept that might resonate with Indian readers right now.
A translation by Daisy Rockwell of Krishna Sobti’s last novel, A Gujarat Here, A Gujarat There, was published early this year. Robbed of the music of its Punjabi-inflected Hindi, and at times rambling, Sobti’s valedictory novel, written at 92, is not her best but is a vivid reminder of what we lost at birth, the fissures that opened up over 70 years ago that we continue to exacerbate and deepen, as if we are immune to falling into and through the cracks. ‘Who is the killer’, Sobti writes. ‘Who is the criminal? Who is the revolutionary? Enmity among friends is evil. Friendship
among enemies—also evil. But now all the friends and enemies are gone.’ The Anatomy of Hate by journalist Revati Laul, was published in December 2018, so beyond the purview of this list, even though it only really entered into the consciousness of reviewers this year. It showed how those cracks Sobti mourned have mutated into a ‘denial that has engulfed us all’.
Valeria Luiselli, in Lost Children Archive, possibly the best novel published this year, shows us how the language of alienation works. The narrator reads Lord of the Flies (1954) to her stepson and we understand that William Golding’s dystopia is recognisable as our world: ‘Maybe there is a beast...’ she reads, ‘maybe it’s only us’. And again from Golding, a feeling Indian readers, just like Americans contemplating their president’s position on ‘illegal’ migrants, might recognise: ‘The world, that understandable and lawful world, was slipping away’. The Mexican-born Luiselli made this year’s Booker longlist; the prize was eventually shared between Bernardine Evaristo, the first Black woman to win the Booker, and Margaret Atwood, for The Testaments, the sequel to her 1985 novel The Handmaid’s Tale. In the latter, a group espousing an extreme ideology seizes control of the US, suspending constitutional privileges, censoring newspapers and enforcing its particular hardline interpretation of Christianity. Not that that could ever happen. Anywhere.
Arguably, the most experimental novel this year was Babu Bangladesh! by Numair A. Choudhury, who is from the Rushdie school of South Asian novelists, or rather, as Rushdie himself acknowledges, from the singular tradition established by G.V. Desani. ‘It is noteworthy to mention that partitioning British India’, Choudhury writes, ‘was the very first experience Viscount John Radcliffe had in nation-state forming.’ And, here some Indian readers might permit themselves a wry smile, though ‘fences are often built in an attempt to reinforce Radcliffe’s Award, few value the British prize; they tuck their lungis under and jump over the enclosure when needed.’
No annual review would be complete without a reflection on the ever-decreasing space for books in the mainstream Indian press. Perhaps it is indicative of a correspondingly decreasing willingness to ask questions of each other or ourselves.
—Shougat Dasgupta