A compilation of essays on the role of hierarchies in Indian society is well-timed and a valuable reference book

On one side lies Yuvan Aves’ Intertidal: A Coast and Marsh Diary; on the other is an advertisement for a township proclaimed to be “Chennai’s Switzerland”. The words that catch my eye are “100% Flood Free Area”.

Since the floods of 2015, the citizens of Chennai keep a wary eye on the sky every time clouds gather. Often, when talking about heavy rains, local weather bloggers will add a “will not cause flooding” clause. But the intertidal is an area that undergoes periodic flooding during high tides. Aves compares this with the flooding of the human mind, as he combines his explorations of the coastal and marshy areas of the city he calls home with his growth as a teacher, nature educator, activist and author.

Period of healing

I am almost reduced to tears by his opening passages describing the Urur Kuppam beach, where I spent quite a bit of my childhood. The Prologue is hard to read; the account of the physical and mental abuse Aves endured as a child is stomach churning. When he turns 16, Aves decides to run away. Fortunately, he makes his way to his school director, who offers him a way out. The next five years, which he spent at Pathashaala School, were “a period of healing but also of recasting the meaning of my own suffering and changing its architecture within me.”

Interestingly, the chapters all have the word ‘meditation’ in the title: Ocean Meditation, Tree Meditation and so on. As you read, you can see why. While recording his observations, Aves also offers readers a way to engage not just with the book but also with the world around them. Even as you enter a world you have probably never seen before through his words, you can also recognise the impact of your own actions on that world.

Take, for example, this passage about decorator worms: “I find another worm in Velan’s boat with a different sense of style. It has used a bit of green plastic from a singleuse bag; blue plastic from a tarpaulin sheet; thick clear packaging from an Amazon parcel; black plastic from a meat bag; a piece of betelnut sachet and a Sunsilk shampoo sachet; then some shell fragments, seafan bits and nylon strands. It wears what it has found and liked in its corner of the seabed. The fashion sensibilities of the decorator worm are changing.” A telling statement on plastic pollution in the marine environment.

Intertidal: A

Coast and Marsh Diary

Yuvan Aves Bloomsbury

₹699

‘Rain meditation’

An evocative passage takes me back to my early days in Anaikatti, when the power would go off during the rains and I would practise what Aves calls “rain meditation”. I make a mental note to try it again and then it strikes me: I don’t have to wait for the rain. This is a form of meditation that can be practised any time. What it involves is to slow down your thoughts and enter the world around by opening your senses.

Despite the impact of urbanisation and industrialisation on Chennai’s landscape, Aves’ accounts show us the wealth of connections between humans and the natural world. Connections we are letting go off. This book is a reminder to hold fast to those fraying threads and to strengthen them so that we preserve not just the earth but also our own sanity.

Translator, writer and clinical professor in the Department of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at New York University, Tahira Naqvi says in her introduction to Ismat Chughtai In Her Own Words: Letters & Interviews, that letters by writers have little meaning unless read in tandem with their works. And that reading someone else’s letters becomes a subtle act of voyeurism for nosy readers who were not meant to be privy to the author’s inner life.

The letters written by rebellious

To be fair, the omission of such topical aspects of caste does not detract from

Urdu writer Ismat Chughtai to her family, friends, editors, and other associates, actually enables readers to develop a connect with the people she is writing to. Her candour and outspokenness that made her the oneofakind literary icon, are definitely not worth missing.

Fearless expressions

A660page compilation of essays on a hotbutton issue, by academic experts from India and abroad, The

Oxford Handbook of Caste could not have been timed better. Its publication fortuitously coincided with the political buzz generated by Bihar’s caste census followed by the Bharat Ratna for its social justice pioneer Karpoori Thakur. Though this treasure trove omits to mention Thakur, let alone his impact on the Hindi belt, one of its 42 essays is titled “Census, Caste Enumeration and the British Legacy”.

Since its focus is, however, on tracing the colonial history of the caste census until the last one that took place in 1931, this essay has nothing about the abortive attempt to revive such enumeration at the national level in the 2011 census, a precursor to the ground broken by Bihar in bringing out its report in 2023. Similar is the omission of any reference to Karpoori Thakur, a member of the lowly caste of Nais or barbers, despite at least two essays being devoted to reservations. One of those essays is specifically on the concept of “backwardness”, the very context in which the former Bihar chief minister happened to be posthumously honoured for introducing reservations in 1978 for not only “other backward classes” (which included dominant castes from among Shudras) but also “most backward classes” (which included some Muslim categories).

Ambitious effort

Chughtai’s words breathe power; her imagery, description, style and fearless expressions seamlessly build the narrative of the times she lived in, even though the carefully curated collection contains letters from different decades and many that were left incomplete or not posted. It exposes the conflicts and tension

Ismat Chughtai

The Oxford Handbook of Caste Edited by Surinder S. Jodhka, Jules Naudet

Oxford University Press

₹999

the credit due to its editors, Surinder S. Jodhka and Jules Naudet, for this ambitious compendium. Topicality can hardly be the yardstick for evaluating a book that is clearly for the ages. Even so, its staggering range of essays does include other topical aspects of caste. Take the section of five essays labelled “Caste and the Religious Realm”, a subject that has gained greater traction in the wake of the Ayodhya temple inauguration. While one of those essays deals with “Hinduism and Caste System”, another delves into “Caste and Hindutva”.

The Hindutvarelated essay authored by American anthropologist Joel Lee could well be taken as representative of the quality of the insights offered by the compendium. Lee brings out three texts that between men and women created by society and how only those who could break free from social conundrums moved forward.

Succinctly translated by Naqvi from Chughtai’s original Urdu letters, the compilation draws an interesting canvas about life in an upper middle class progressive Muslim family in early 20th century. There is a delightful amount of revelation packed in the 275 pages of

“illuminate the role played by caste” in shaping both the ideology and practice of Hindu nationalism.

The first is A Dying Race, a pamphlet composed in 1909 by retired military officer U.N. Mukerji. To begin with, based on “an uncritical reading” of the previous decennial census, Mukerji concluded that the rate of increase of Hindus compared with that of Muslims was “extremely small”. And then, the bulk of the pamphlet was devoted to what he diagnosed as the ultimate cause of Hindu diminution: “our caste system”. In Mukerji’s view, caste was “an insuperable bar” to the attainment of the kind of unity and solidarity that was exemplified by Muslims.

The Hindu angle

Lee writes: “In conjoining an argument animated by the enumerative logic of the modern state, a narrative of Hindus threatened by Muslim growth, and a naming of caste division as an existential threat to the Hindu ‘race’, Mukerji articulated a discourse from which Hindu nationalism has continued to draw ever since.”

This is borne out by the text that followed in 1926, Hindu Sangathan: Savior of the Dying Race. Its author Swami Shraddhanand, an Arya Samaj and Congress leader, proposed a Hindu consolidation by replacing the the comprehensive volume that contains eight interviews and more than 50 letters written over a 30year period.

Written or spoken, words that flow out of Chughtai are full of uncanny wisdom, wit and sarcasm. Her letters are moving and admonishing at the same time, sometimes funny, but consistently reveal her deep love for her family and her involvement with their problems. The texts are conversational, informal and filled with everyday reflections. With same gusto, she could shock people with her frankness and also show empathy with her literary preoccupations.

Lessons for feminists

The doyenne of Urdu literature was ahead of her times. Chughtai’s towering status as thinkerwriter endeared her to her followers. The

Translated from the Urdu by Tahira Naqvi Women Unlimited

₹625 multitude of castes on the ground with the fourfold Varna system valourised by the scriptures. A corollary to such a “return” to an idealised Vedic past was a switch from birth to “character and conduct” as criteria for determining one’s Varna.

The most influential text is of course V.D. Savarkar’s Hindutva: Who is a Hindu? published in 1923. Savarkar too prized the Varna system although it undermined his contention in the same text that Hindus constituted a single race. If he believed in the “common flow of blood from a Brahmin to a Chandal”, it was because he held that all that the Varna system had done was to “regulate its noble blood”. This is how Joel Lee summed up Savarkar’s endorsement of miscegenation: “Noble blood, that is, is a gift of the higher Varnas to the lower, retained and distributed according to judicious principles favouring the overall health of the race.”

Such fascinating content notwithstanding, it’s not an easy book to read. This is not only because of the sheer volume of information packed into it or the inherent complexity of the subject. The essays are all by academics and for academics – so they tend to be theoretical and abstruse. As the editors put it, they tried to provide “a comprehensive account of the available social science research” on caste in the hope that it would “help orient future research”. All the same, even for laypersons, this tome is a reference book of immense value.

Topicality can hardly be the yardstick for evaluating a book that is clearly for the ages. Even so, its staggering range of essays does include other topical aspects of caste

The reviewer is the author of the recently published Caste Pride: Battles for Equality in Hindu India. interviews about her life and work are marked by truthfulness, honesty and spontaneity and her audacious approach when she was charged with obscenity for her story Lihaaf and other strident writings, is a learning for all those who embrace feminism, socialism and secularism.

Included in the carefully curated collection is an unposted letter to actor Saira Bano whom she reprimands for her failure to fight like a wild cat for her rights when her marriage with Dilip Kumar was failing. Chughtai’s advice, “don’t make people pity you”, underlines her dislike for women sacrificing or succumbing to societal pressures.

Taken together, her letters of encouragement to friends or family to cheer them up during partition or her angry exchanges with Urdu editors in India and Pakistan over joblessness and violence, her endearing deals with her grandson over movie time, detailing her visits to villages, capture reality and provide a collective update on history. The reader’s assessment of Ismat Chughtai, a fiercely independent and selfassured woman who told things the way they were, can only be further illuminated because reading her is a journey to reason, much like her life.