The Hindu On Books newsletter: Book bans in Kashmir, talking to Isabel Allende, forgotten voices from Punjab and more

The Hindu

3 days ago

Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. Last week, the Jammu & Kashmir Home Department banned 25 books, including works by prominent writers like A.G. Noorani, Sumantra Bose, Arundhati Roy and Ayesha Jalal, for 'propagating false narrative and secessionism'. In an order, the Home Department said the identified 25 books had been found 'to excite secessionism and endangering [the] sovereignty and integrity of India.' The books declared as 'forfeited' include Independent Kashmir by Christopher Snedden; The Kashmir Dispute 1947-2012 by A.G. Noorani; Azadi by Arundhati Roy; Confronting Terrorism by Stephen P. Cohen among others. Two books by Islamic scholars, Imam Hasan Al-Bana and Moulana Moudadi, are also on the list.
The J&K Chief Minister, Omar Abdullah, distanced himself from the move, saying he had never banned books and never would. 'The ban has been imposed by the L-G using the only department he officially controls – the Home Department,' Mr. Abdullah said, as opposition to the move grows across the country.
In reviews, we read Harleen Singh's The Lost Heer, Ravikant Kisana's Meet the Savarnas, an excerpt from a new book on Hiroshima, 80 years on, and we talk to Isabel Allende about her new novel.
Books of the week
In Harleen Singh's epic re-telling, The Lost Heer: Women in Colonial Punjab (Penguin/Viking), there are a myriad echoes of a storied past that situates the Punjab within the larger frame of the subcontinent's history, writes Geeta Doctor. An archivist historian born in Delhi but living now in Toronto, Canada, Singh finds his focus in the lives of women in colonial Punjab.
These are the women, mothers of famous sons who ruled and fought over royal fortresses and strongholds that defined the Punjab; their wives, consorts, courtesans and the daughters, who survived what Singh depicts as a stridently patriarchal society; and their hangers-on who made such lives possible. There are many references to the widows emerging from behind their veils sword in hand to exhort their subjects to resist the invader.
There are also equally fascinating portrayals, writes Doctor, of the English women who arrived there either as the wives of missionaries, or of the 'memsahibs' married to 'the newly installed 'administrocacy', if one may coin a word, who arrived often from Bengal, the seat of power.'
Ravikant Kisana, an academic specialising in cultural studies, uses Marilyn Loden's concept of 'glass ceiling' to describe savarna supremacy in Meet the Savarnas (Ebury Press). Loden, writes G. Sampath in his review, used it to explain how patriarchy and sexism hold women back. Kisana writes: 'Think of south Asia — India especially — as full of people sitting in a cramped and dirty basement… looking up at what is a glass ceiling for them but is, in fact, a floor above which lives a very small group of people.' The group above are the savarnas, who 'have access to all the switches in all the rooms of the house, including the basement. They switch on the lights and switch them off at will.'
A glass floor that's also a glass ceiling is a powerful image, points out Sampath. 'It encapsulates the invisible barriers that kick in to prevent someone from rising above their caste-mandated station while also protecting those above from falling lower, thereby cementing the segregation of the basement dwellers from those above ground. The vantage point of caste discourse in India is typically above the glass floor, looking down.'
'Kisana, in a startling inversion, points the lens of anthropological scrutiny upwards, from below the glass floor. What emerges is a searing social commentary that unpeels, with wit and precision, layers of congenital hypocrisy, narcissistic entitlement and delusions of grandeur that have propped up a hereditary elite's fantasies about themselves,' says Sampath.
When Isabel Angélica Allende Llona was around nine years old, she travelled with her grandfather to the Argentinian Patagonia, where he had sheep. 'We went by train from Santiago as far to the south as the train would go, continued by car, crossed the Andes on horseback, and on the other side, we were picked up by rangers,' she writes via email to Anushree Nande as they discuss her works, and particularly her new novel My Name is Emilia del Valle (translated by Frances Riddle, published by Bloomsbury).
'That journey is engraved in my memory. That's Chile for me, the country I long for,' says Allende. This deep longing and loss is present in every single book Allende, now 83, has written, including her bestselling debut The House of the Spirits (1982). From the moment she flew to Venezuela where she would remain for 13 years, Chile stopped being hers in the way it had till then, and everything changed forever, says Nande. 'Over the years, Allende would keep interrogating the themes of displacement and identity, of memory and family, as well as the potent links between the personal and the historical, through her stories.' Her new novel is set between San Francisco and Chile.
Spotlight
At 8:15 a.m. on August 6, 1945, the Japanese port city of Hiroshima was struck by the world's first atomic bomb that had been built in the U.S. by the top-secret Manhattan Project. Dropped by a B-29 Superfortress, a long-range bomber, the weapon destroyed large parts of the city, and killed tens of thousands.
Iain MacGregor's The Hiroshima Men (Constable/Hachette India) traces the path to the attack and its aftermath through the experiences of several key characters, including General Leslie Groves, leader of the Manhattan Project alongside Robert Oppenheimer; pioneering Army Air Force bomber pilot Colonel Paul Tibbets II; the mayor of Hiroshima, Senkichi Awaya, who died in the attack; and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist John Hersey, who exposed the devastation the bomb inflicted on a city and its people. Read an excerpt.
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