Ashenden : Somerset Maugham (4.0/5.0)

 

Most people know James Bond, that invincible British super spy, or Jason Bourne - his American cousin. If you are not happy with your spies being so energetic and gadgety, or their world's so black and white, u have John Le Carre's spies and spymasters such as George Smiley  or The Spy who came in from the cold. John Le Carre's aesthetic was apparently influenced by  Graham Greene's books that touched upon the spying business such as The Confidential Agent or The Quiet American. But before all of these there was Ashenden - one of the original gentleman spies.

Ashenden was introduced by Somerset Maugham in a series of loosely connected stories. Ashenden was a writer in England who was tapped by the secret services to work for them at the break of the First World War. He was stationed in Geneva, in neutral Switzerland, and got his assignments from his brilliant and ruthless boss known by his monosyllabic code name R. In course of his assignments Ashenden meets a lot of interesting characters and is involved in a lot of intrigue. However, he does not run after any bad guys or is himself chased in any alley. He mostly travels across Europe handling agents and spending a leisurely time. 

Somerset Maugham is one of my favourite authors of the English language (along with Graham Greene). Unlike a lot of the greats he is super smooth and easy to read. I specially like his short stories, of which he has written many covering his life in England, Europe and his travels to the far east. Ashenden stories are very similar in the pace and style to a lot of his other short stories and just happen to be about a spy.  

Ashenden is also the alter-ego for Somerset Maugham who was himself tapped by the British secret services during the First World War. He has used that experience as a raw material for his stories. Though he was not so impressed with the life of spies as evidenced by the scene in his first book, which I have reproduced below. Ashenden the author is being recruited by R , who is trying to lure the author with what great material he can collect a member of the secret services

" I'll tell you an incident that occurred only the other day and I can vouch for its truth. I thought at the time its would make a damned good story. One of the French ministers went down to Nice to recover from a cold and he had some very important documents that he kept in a dispatch acse. They were very important indeed. Well, a day or two after he arrived, he picked up a yellow haired lady at some restaurant or other where there was dancing, and he got very friendly with her. To cut a long story short, he took her back to his hotel - of course it was a very imprudent thing to do - and when he came to himself in the morning the lady and the dispatch case had disappeared."

R finished and looked at Ashenden with a gleam in his close-set eyes." Dramatic, isn't it ? he asked.   

"Do you mean to say that happened the other day ?"

"The week before last."

"Impossible," cried Ashenden. "Why, we have been putting that incident on stage for sixty years, we've written it in a thousand novels. Do you mean to say that life has just caught up with us ?" 

☺

I thoroughly enjoyed the Ashenden stories and just like his other short stories these will make for great vacation reading.

The palace of Illusions : Chitra Banerjee Divakurni (4.0/5.0)

 

Life is too short to read mediocre books. I keep a high bar for books that I pick up. It's a fact of life that when one keeps a high bar one will reduce the Type 1 error but at the same time some Type 2 error will creep in. In English, that means that while one will hardly read any mediocre books there will always be some good books that will pass below the radar.

That is what happened with me when The Palace of Illusions first came out fifteen odd years back. I thought this one more new age mediocre pulp feminist takes on Mahabharat. When the book was selected as a reading for my book club I had no option but to pick it up. I stand corrected, the book is a unique and distinctly feminist take on the Mahabharat, but it's definitely not mediocre.

The book is largely a re-telling of Mahabharat from the point of view of Draupadi. The main attraction of the book is that it is another pretext to revisit the Mahabharat. I am convinced that Mahabharat is one of the top cultural heritages of this country. It is an amazingly complex and layered tale where nothing is what it seems - good people do evil deeds while the evil beguile gods with their penance. God himself encourages brother to kill brother for reducing the pressure of human beings on earth.With such brilliant source material its very difficult to go wrong - but not impossible. Chitra Divakaruni , who is a teacher of creative writing at a university in the United States, skirts this line by a good margin.

One of the main quirks of the book is that it is told from the point of view of Draupadi - but the Draupadi of this book seems like an alter ego of the 20th century Chitra Divakaruni. The author has also introduced a whole Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu thi vibe with the supposed tension between Kunti and Draupadi - again I don't know if this was  directly referenced in the original sources. Then there is Draupadi's obsession with Karn , which I think finds mention in several other sources as well. Despite , or maybe because of, these quirks the books remains true to Mahabharat and is a distinct well written book.

While speaking of Mahabharat I would also take the opportunity to mention 2 other takes on the book. Devadutt Patnaik's Jaya remains one of my favourite versions of the Mahabharat - its an erudite take on the book which combines various traditions and provides the authors own interpretation. Then there is Shashi Tharoor's Great Indian Novel  which makes a clever use of the Mahabharat to tell the story of Indian democracy. 

Maila Anchal : Phanishwar Nath Renu (5.0/5.0)

It's the year 1946 in a remote village of Marygunj in Bihar, near the Nepal border. Villagers hear that the authorities are looking for a young man in their community. Baldev, a known nationalist trouble maker  is promptly tied and delivered to the police station. The villagers are shocked to learn that the officials wanted to consult  Baldev and actually call him Baldevji. In those pre newspaper days in the villages , news travelled at a glacial pace and the villagers did not realise that it's almost fashionable to be a nationalist and a follower of Gandhi baba.This opening act sets up the novel which is a heartbreakingly realistic portrayal of village life in India about the time when the country got its independence. 

The book is set in Marygunj, an indigo village named after the young dead wife of a long forgotten british collector. It is a typical village of the time with a few dominant families and many more poor ones. The main strand of the novel is about the arrival in the village of the idealist young doctor to set up a malaria research centre. In the course of his stay he takes care of and falls in love with the daughter of the rich and prominent householder in the village. The resemblance to 'Sachiv ji' and 'Rinky' is not coincidental. It is possible that this is one of the earliest usage of the 'pardesi babu' trope, used in so many old hindi movies and continued in 'Panchayat'. Their love story carries on in the backdrop of the Doctor's work, of the village politics and somewhere in the background, a country called India getting its independence. 

The village life that emerges from this book is not Gandhi's romanticized version. It comes across more like the sink of ignorance, casteism and exploitation that Ambedkar saw them as. What hits a 21st century reader first is the abject poverty in which so many villagers lived. The kind of poverty where there are people who have not had a poori or owned a shirt ever in their lives.

Then there is the exploitation. Exploitation of the poor , who are forever in debt - no matter how hard they work. Of women, specially of the lower castes - by their  families, by the rich, by the 'religious' gurus. Women who have to provide comfort to some lord who has their father's / husband's signature on a blank piece of paper. Surprisingly the book also shows how some lower caste women had more sexual agency then their upper caste peers. 

Freedom struggle in the country did not really impact the day to day lives of the villagers A few Congress programs in the village were largely objects of curiosity. Despite this, Gandhiji or Gandhi baba comes across as someone who was revered as a larger than life figure, almost a saint if not a god. 

It is largely believed that the Congress party lost its idealism in the Indira era, when power shifted from Nehru and first generation of freedom fighters. However, this book shows how the decay started even before Indepence , the moment power was in sight. Idealists in the party were being sidelined or even ridiculed in favour of the merchant classes who had lately become fervent Gandhians. One congress worker remarks that the new district Congress president was the same liquor shop owner whom they picketed a few months back. Actually even today, if we think about it, we can see all around us industrialists who benefitted from their 'support' to the Congress.

This book is an essential read for an understanding of where is the Indian society coming from. It's reputation as one of the most consequential books in Hindi literature, after Premchand's Godan, seems well-deserved.

The Shortest History of India : John Zubrzycki (4.0/5.0)

As the means of travel and communication improved over the millenia, people across the world now have a common set of news and that will possibly translate to a common history for later. Few hundred years back every region had its own unique history and a few thousand years back every village or town had its own. In that sense there might no such thing as a national history.  

Therein lies the problem of writing an Indian history , specially once that goes back more than a few hundred years back. Several attempts have been made - notably Discovery of India  by Jawahar Lal Nehru. The breadth of the topic is sure to intimidate anyone attempting to approach it. This book does a tidy job of balancing the breadth and depth of this topic within 275 odd pages. 

It starts with theories of Homo Sapiens arriving on the subcontinent moving on to the  migration of the Aryans and the Harrapan civilization. In his description of this period the author seems to be influenced by Tony Joseph's Early Indians (Another interesting book that addresses , well as the same suggests - Early Indians) This is followed by Maurya / Ashoka empire and the 'Classical Golden Age' of the Gupta's. Muslim rulers such as the Delhi Sultanate , Deccan Sultanate and the Mughals are covered - including the contemporary Rajputs and Marathas. South Indian dynasties such as the Chola's , Chera's , Pandya's etc are discussed as well. 

The book covers the arrival and the occupation of the British as well as the freedom struggle. It even comments on India after the british rule - all the way upto Modi raj. (Suffice to say, the author would not be counted as a modi bhakt).  

I think this is a good effort and a great place for a concise breadth view of Indian history. One amusing note was that the author seems to go out of his way to trivialise the brutality of some of the muslim rulers. Those minor hiccups notwithstanding - This is a book I would recommend.    

Dethroned - The Downfall of India's princely states : John Zubrzycki (4.5/5)

                                                           

'India protests new laws disenfranchising minorities in Bhopal and Kathiawar' or 'Indian government exhorts Hyderabad and Bikaner  to update age of consent for women to  18'. Imagine the headlines in an India where states such as Hyderabad, Jammu and Kashmir, Bhopal and hundreds of others co-exist under alongside 'India'. India being the newly independent erstwhile British India. This was not only a plausible scenario but also a highly probable one. As a matter of fact the 'Instrument of Accession'  that the princely states signed with the independent India gave control of only 3 spheres to 'India' - foreign affairs, defence and communications. 

The Indian subcontinent that the British ruled had two main systems of government. The British crown directly ruled the so called 'British India', which was approximately three fifths of the land mass. A substantial two fifths was divided among almost 550 princely states. These states managed their own internal affairs under the crown's protection. Their fiefs ranged from a few square kilometers to hundreds of thousands of kilometers in the case of Hyderabad and 'Jammu and Kashmir'. The rulers of these states fully expected to be independent once the British packed their bags and left. Congress leadership realised that having hundreds of these 'independent states' would be a nightmare to manage. This would also have deprived the citizens of these princely states the full benefits of Independence. The task of assimilating these states fell to the unlikely pairing of Vallabhbhai Patel and VP Menon. As the name suggests , this book covers the few months in 1947-48 within which this project was completed with an epilogue of subsequent events.

Sardar Patel was a london trained barrister from Gujrat who traded his suits for dhoti kurta when he answered Gandhi's call. He  was one of the towering leaders of Congress with a huge mass following of his own. The lessor know VP Menon from Kerala was a man of many experiences. While starting his professional life as a teenage labourer at Kolar mine fields he then rose to be at the top ranks of the British administration in India. These two used every one of the old 'sam - dam - dand - bhed' to assimilate the princely states. They lulled them into a false sense of security, painted lurid pictures of people's revolt and if all failed threatened with direct use of force to ensure that the princely states fell in line. In my view the two them did the dirty work required to ensure that India came out of the British rule as one cohesive geographical unit. Specially knotty issues emerged in the case of some princely states. Hyderabad and Junagarh had muslim rulers but largely Hindu populations while the scenario was reversed in the case of Kashmir.

Zubrzycki does a good job of throwing light on this very significant part of the Indian history. He covers biographical aspects of  Patel, Menon and the major princes interspersed with a taut narrative of the events. A major source for the book is Menon's own book on the subject 'Story of the Integration of Indian states'

This is not only a good read but one of the more important books that I have read in some time.