Book Box: Reading India, becoming India

Hindustan Times

2 days ago

When my siblings and I were young, we saved the ribbed fancy sheets from imported chocolate boxes. A week before your birthday, Independence Day, we would paint them with orange and green bands, a blue wheel in the centre—our own handmade flags, fragile but fiercely ours.
On the morning of your birthday, we woke early for the flag hoisting, first at school and then with my father, often chief guest somewhere, accompanied by my mother, my siblings, and I in our best traditional clothes. After the flag went up and my father spoke in hesitant Hindi, we all stood singing the national anthem. Back then, you felt like a living presence.
In college, you became the subject of fiery debates—about brain drain, about the young who took subsidised education and left for America. I studied Shakespeare, Keats, and Hardy, but in my free time I turned to The Discovery of India and My Experiments with Truth. You were still an emotional reality.
Then came the years when I rarely thought of you directly. I was busy in my bubble - building a career, raising babies, and only sought you out in the stories I chose for my children—Chitra Divakaruni's Victory Song, the tale of a little Bengali girl in the freedom struggle; accounts of women like Jahanara by Kathryn Lasky. Later, there were more books to discover—a graphic history of the The People of the Indus Valley by Nikhil Gulati, the lushly illustrated Book of Emperors by Ashwitha Jayakumar , picture books like Topi Rockets from Thumba by Menaka Raman. I bought them for my daughters, for friends' children, and for myself.
By now your economic borders opened, and imported chocolate boxes sat openly on grocery shelves. Flags were no longer hand-painted, but sold in bulk by little boys at traffic lights a week before your big day.
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I loved the reality of you, we all did. Our three girls piling into the Scorpio for monsoon weekends in Malshej Ghat or Matheran; Konkan train rides; historical walks in Delhi's Lodhi Gardens; road trips from Punjab's plains to Manali's mountains. But as we sped across your spanking new highways, with the pleasure also came the guilt - the realisation that we were privileged Indians to be able to see so much of your beauty.
The girls grew. One studied engineering in Vellore. Another built a career in your Silicon Valley, in Bengaluru. The youngest made her home in Delhi, working with Parliament and citizens to strengthen democracy.
In those years I thought about you every day, but in a fleeting frustrated way when I read about bridges collapsing, forests being decimated and journalists being murdered. I continued to feel guilty for my privilege, and for not fighting for you, the way so many of my countrymen and countrywomen were.
I read the memoirs of these nation builders - in books like The Brass Notebook by economist Devaki Jain, Madam Sir: The Story of Bihar's First Lady IPS Officer by Manjari Jaruhar, Land, Guns, Caste, Woman: The Memoir of a Lapsed Revolutionary by Gita Ramaswamy and The Personal is Political by Aruna Roy.
Reading India
Reading became a substitute for doing. It made it easy to love you from a distance. With my book club, I started an India Reading Project: one book from each state, in one of your many languages. We read unforgettable works like Hangwoman by K . R Meera and The Many That I Am: Writings from Nagaland, all bursting with uncomfortable truths. I turned the last page of Poonachi by Perumal Murugan with a lump in my throat, but then I shut the book and went on with my day.
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Today, I tally my betrayals: the broken bridges I didn't protest, the forests I 'liked' but didn't save. I know I am but one among your 1.4 billion, but on this day, your birthday, I promise you that while I will still read, I will also do. I know that reading about Rahul Bhatia's The Identity Project isn't enough—I will invite him to speak to my students, turning one book club conversation into a hundred young minds thinking about their civic duties. Maybe that's not much. But it's a start.
With love and gratitude, Sonya
And for you, dear Reader, a question - what is your one concrete step?
(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya's Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or reading dilemmas, write to her at [e-mail]. The views expressed are personal)