Category: Pushpa Kurup

“The River of Lost Footsteps: A Personal History of Burma” by Thant Myint-U

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

The River of Lost Footsteps

I really, truly loved this book. Let me tell you why. Myanmar is India’s neighbour alright but this is the first time I came across a book written by a Burmese author. It is both historical and personal and tells us what has been happening in this closeted country during the last 100 years. The legacies of British colonialism, the brutalities of the Second World War, the bloody civil war of the late 1940s, the Chinese invasion in the 1950s, independence in the 1960s and subsequent rule by the military are laid bare with rare insight and political acumen.

India and Burma have overlapping histories and a common experience of British occupation. Having lived in India all my life, I had read history and understood international relations through my own special nationalist prism. I found Myint-U’s perception of historical events refreshingly different and authentic too.

The book provides much food for thought. The author points out that like Bahadur Shah Zafar, India’s last emperor, who was exiled to Rangoon, Burma’s last king, Thibaw, was exiled to Ratnagiri in India. His description of the fall of Singapore in 1942 to Japanese forces is revealing: “Despite all the frenzied preparation (at the expense of Burma), the ‘impregnable fortress’ of Singapore fell on 15 February, and Lieutenant General Arthur Percival, with knobby knees and in short khakhi trousers, surrendered at the Ford motor factory to the much smaller force of General Tomoyuki Yamashita, the bull-necked ‘Tiger of Malaya’. No fewer than seventy-thousand imperial troops – British, Australians and Indians – had been defeated by thirty thousand Japanese.”

The author informs us that the Buddha died in 484 B.C. at the age of 80 after eating contaminated pork. When Chandragupta Maurya defeated Alexander’s general Seleucus Nicator and a peace treaty was concluded, the Macedonians “ceded most of the occupied territory in return for five hundred elephants.” The Burmese word for college, tekkatho is derived from Taxila. When Pagan was at the height of its glory in the 12th century, the kings and nobles wrote in Sanskrit and Pali and experimented with various Indian scripts until finally the Burmese language was reduced to writing (with a script from South India).

In 1106 when a delegation from Pagan reached the Chinese imperial court at Kaifeng, the emperor ordered that they be accorded the same rank and respect as the Cholas of South India. (The author calls them Colas. I guess he too is a victim of Americanization!) However, the Grand Council observed that the Colas were subordinate to the Sri Vijaya Kingdom of Sumatra whereas Pagan was now a big and independent kingdom. (This was one hundred years after Raja Raja Chola built the Brihadeeswara Temple at Thanjavur.)

In 1657 following the death of Shah Jahan, when Aurangzeb seized the throne, his brother Shah Shuja fled to Burma with his family and was sheltered by Sanda Thudamma, the king of Arakan. The king soon fell in love with Shah Shuja’s daughter Ameena and asked for her hand. Shah Shuja was horrified – and planned a coup in response. The plot was discovered and Shah Shuja fled to the jungle, where he was captured and killed. The princesses ended up in Thudamma’s harem, but soon afterward the king suspected another plot and slaughtered all the members of the Mughal royal family, including a visibly pregnant Ameena. A furious Aurangzeb besieged the Burmese kingdom. A year later when Chittagong fell to the Mughals, two thousand Arakanese were sold into slavery.

Ayutthaya, the capita of Siam (named after Ayodhya of the Ramayana), was razed to the ground by the Burmese in 1767. In the 18th century they were on an invasion spree – they routinely invaded Manipur, and on one occasion almost wiped out the entire population. In 1817 they occupied Assam.

Here’s something I really need to share: “The modern war rocket started its life, not in the West, as one might expect, but in India. In 1799, as the British laid siege to Seringapatam , Colonel Arthur Wellesly (the future duke of Wellington) advanced with his men toward a small hill nearby, only to be attacked by a tremendous barrage of rocket fire and forced to flee in complete disarray. When the fortress finally fell, among the enormous loot sent away to England were two specimens of Mysorean rockets.” This triggered a vigorous R&D program at the Royal Woolwich Arsenal and an improved version soon emerged – the Congreve rocket. Eight years later Copenhagen received the first shower of 40,000 rockets. In 1812 Washington DC was bombarded, burnt, and captured for the day. And the rest, as they say, is history.

The author can be forgiven for saying that Bihar is the birthplace of the Buddha. It was Gautama’s karma bhumi after all. What if he was born in Lumbini in Nepal?

Overall Assessment: Absolutely brilliant.

The River of Lost Footsteps – A Personal History of Burma
AUTHOR: Thant Myint-U
PUBLISHER: Faber and Faber Ltd., Bloomsbury House, UK
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2007

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Yuganta: The End of an Epoch” by Irawati Karve (translated from Marathi by the author)

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

Yuganta

I read M T Vasudevan Nair’s “Bhima -Lone Warrior” (Malayalam original ‘Randamoozham’) and Kavita Kane’s “Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen” before I read Karve’s “Yuganta”. None of these would make sense unless you’ve read the Mahabharata. This great epic which comes to us in simple Sanskrit verse tells the story of a family feud that ends in an 18 day battle at Kurukshetra. It is generally believed that this happened around 1000 B.C.

“Yuganta” reads like a collection of essays rather than a novel and the author brings her own unique perspectives and interpretation to the characters and events. When she speaks of Draupadi, Kunti , Gandhari, Krishna and Karna, she paints different shades of their complex personalities. “The Mahabharata,” she says, “is a record of human beings with human weaknesses.” She attempts to explain the deification of Krishna and points out that the Krishna of the Mahabharata is an ordinary mortal with only rare flashes of divinity (that could be attributed to later additions in the text). Krishna is killed by a hunter’s arrow and the Yadava clan is wiped out in violent internecine quarrels. The author suggests that the few miracles in the Mahabharata could be later additions.

One can learn a lot about the Mahabharata from the Introduction to this book, e.g. the names of the 18 divisions in the critical text together with the number of couplets in each. There are stories within stories and the thread of the main storyline is taken up after several digressions. The author notes that the Arabian Nights follows this model of narration. Karve is highly critical of Bhishma. She points out that he is more of a match-maker than a warrior. He never fought any major battle. However, he abducted the three princesses of Kashi in order to marry them to his half-brother Vichitravirya. Amba committed suicide by self-immolation, while Ambika and Ambalika were forcibly married to Vichitravirya. Later Gandhari was brought from a faraway land to marry the blind Dhritarashtra. Pandu was afflicted by vitiligo (or so I believed) but Karve describes him as an albino.

She goes on to say without mincing words, “Kunti, stout and no longer young, and the lovely Madri were married to the impotent Pandu.” She notes that Bhishma paid an enormous bride price to acquire Madri. Dhritarashta, Pandu, and the Pandavas (Karna included) were all conceived by the ‘niyoga’ method, involving the use of a substitute male stud in order to produce heirs. Pandu retired to the forests of the Himalayas with his two queens in the prime of his youth for no apparent reason. That is how Dhritarashtra became king.

Karve suggests that Pandu’s motive was to hide his impotence and obtain heirs by resorting to ‘niyoga’. Karve says of the Pandavas that they “were more concerned with getting a share of the kingdom and in keeping peace than in revenging the insults to their wife.” She emphasizes their pitiful request for five villages, which was turned down by Duryodhana. She notes that “Draupadi’s wrongs were avenged only by Bhima,” as it was he who killed Keechaka and later Dushasana. Dhritarashtra says to his wife after the war has ended, “We Kuru men have done great injustices to women. And we have paid in full for them too. In Amba’s wrath Bhishma was burned. I am still burning in yours. My children too have been destroyed in it. Kunti was also married to a deficient man…” He continues, “You feel, Gandhari, that you have been cheated and deceived, but think for a moment: in the three generations of our family every person has been cheated and deceived.”

The author triggers many speculations citing ‘circumstantial evidence’. Is Yudhishthira really the son of Vidura? “When they were planning to call gods to father the children, it is very curious that the first god Kunti called was Yamadharma, the god of death,” Karve observes. She also raises some key questions. Did Krishna and Arjuna burn the Khandava forest in order to acquire more land for cultivation? Why was this made out to be a valorous feat? “Did Krishna and Arjuna feel that they had to kill every creature in order to establish unchallenged ownership over the land?” The Nagas were slaughtered in the process. Were they humans? An event that occurred during the Pandavas’ exile would be of interest to environmentalists: The Pandavas were constantly hunting because they had a large retinue to feed. One night, a stag appeared to Dharmaraja in a dream and said, “King, you are killing so many of us that we are on the way to extinction. Go into some other forest; give us respite. When we are multiplied enough you may come back.”

Karve calls attention to some interesting facts that may have eluded the casual reader. For instance, the Mahabharata makes no reference to writing. It appears that the Brahmins and Kshatriyas of the Mahabharata never did any writing, for messages were communicated through live messengers. The author reminds us that Indraprastha and Hastinapura have vanished from history but fails to mention that Kurukshetra and Dwaraka remain to this day.

Overall Assessment: Good read.

Yuganta: The End of an Epoch
AUTHOR: Irawati Karve
PUBLISHER: Orient BlackSwan
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1991 (Original version published in 1969)

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Sabriya: Damascus Bitter Sweet” by Ulfat Idlibi – Translated from the Arabic by Peter Clark

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

“She was like a hand grenade with the safety pin removed.” That, in essence, is Ulfat Idlibi for you! Explosive! Born in Damascus in 1912, she grew up amidst the French occupation and the accompanying violence. She went on to become Syria’s most acclaimed woman writer and died in Paris in 2007 at the age of 94.

No one can read this novel and remain unmoved. It describes life in Syria between the World Wars, underlining the pathos of the human condition, outlining the mute longing of young couples who rarely get to meet, describing clandestine love affairs and surreptitious messages passed through unsuspecting conduits, and bemoaning the emptiness clouding the lives of young women caught up in the deadly tentacles of a patriarchal society.

The story begins with a woman’s suicide. Barely forty days after her father’s death, Sabriya hangs herself from a lemon tree in the courtyard of her parental home. She had tended to the old man for ten long years after he had suffered a paralytic stroke. Her mother had died earlier. Her brother Sami and her lover Adil had chosen the path of insurgency and died heroic deaths. Sabriya is unmarried and her two surviving brothers, Raghib and Mahmud, are planning to sell the family home, when her suicide comes as a bolt from the blue. Sabriya’s young niece, Salma, discovers her diary in her room, and she is the narrator of this incredible story.

Idlibi’s language is an exquisite blend of poetry and prose, embellished with liberal doses of simile and metaphor. “She was still hanging from the lemon tree, like a black flag at half-mast, protesting loudly at oppression and injustice.” Who else could have described a gruesome corpse with such literary finesse? Sabriya’s private thoughts and her conversations with the many characters in the novel have unmistakeable feminist and nationalist overtones. Here are some samples:

  • In our country they train a girl, as soon as she is aware of herself, to serve the men, be it brother, husband or son. So when she has grown up she feels that such servitude is part of nature.
  • May Allah pardon you Sami, when you told me that my steadfastness was also part of the struggle and that I should have the courage of those who are fighting. Brother dear, this silent struggle is hard, very hard. It is unsung. It is heroism without the glory.
  • “Sometimes I almost explode with anger at you, Mother. A woman of your age, old enough to be a grandmother, having to seek permission from her husband whenever she wants to leave the house!”
  • “What cowards we are,” I observed to Mahmud. “Our county is being burnt and destroyed and we are like rats who have slunk into their holes.”
  • Why is it that the people of my country demand freedom and at the same time cannot grant it to each other? Half the nation was shackled in chains created by men. That is a wrong we refuse to acknowledge.
  • “Did you read in the papers about the battle raging between those for the removal of the veil and those who want to retain it?”
  • If the French left we would have Hitler or Mussolini here.

Umm Abdu, one of the stoic women in the story, utters some prophetic words, “What does the revolt, what do politics mean to us? It will be all the same to us whether it is the French or a national government that rules us. Or whether we are ruled by blue monkeys.” Adil’s words to Sabriya echo the same sentiment: “When we have achieved our independence we shall embark on battle among ourselves fiercer than the one we are waging with the imperialists.”

When we behold Syria’s tragedy today we can’t help but wonder whether the author had an eerie premonition.

Overall Assessment: Must read – especially if you are a woman.

SABRIYA: DAMASCUS BITTER SWEET
AUTHOR: ULFAT IDLIBI TRANSLATOR: PETER CLARK
PUBLISHER: INTERLINK BOOKS
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2003 (FIRST PUBLISHED IN 1980 IN ARABIC)

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Child of the Dark: The Diary Of Carolina Maria De Jesus” by Carolina Maria de Jesus – Translated from the Portuguese by David St. Claire

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

Child of the Dark

A spectacular diary penned by a virtually unlettered woman in a Brazilian slum. The language is raw and unrefined – and so are the emotions. Carolina was black, an unwed mother of three, a garbage-picker and ultimately a dreamer, who desperately wanted to write. And write she did. “The book is man’s best invention so far,” she says. (It needed a woman of the slums to say this.)

Carolina salvaged scraps of paper from garbage dumps and fashioned her diary. One day in 1958 a Sao Paulo reporter visiting the favela (slum) was astonished to hear a feisty black woman screaming at a group of men, “If you continue mistreating these children, I’m going to mention all your names in my book!” He got talking with Carolina. Later he convinced his editor to serialize the diary. The book emerged soon thereafter.

“Never had a book such an impact on Brazil,” says the translator. “In three days the first printing of 10,000 copies was sold out in Sao Paulo alone. In less than six months 90,000 copies were sold in Brazil…”

Carolina left no subject untouched. Religion, politics, philosophy, economics, sociology, racism, gender, human rights, man-woman relationships, parenting, animals, and even reincarnation are intricately women into the narrative. Here are some excerpts:

  • I am so used to garbage cans that I don’t know how to pass one without having to see what is inside.
  • I bore the weight of the sack on my head and the weight of Vera Eunice in my arms. Sometimes it makes me angry. Then I get ahold of myself. She’s not guilty because she’s in the world. I reflected: I’ve got to be tolerant with my children. They don’t have anyone in the world but me. How sad is the condition of a woman alone without a man at home.
  • Father’s Day. What a ridiculous day!
  • Brazil needs to be led by a person who has known hunger. Hunger is also a teacher. Who has gone hungry learns to think of the future and of the children.
  • I wonder if the poor of other countries suffer like the poor of Brazil.
  • I wonder if God knows the favelas exist and that the favelados are hungry?
  • The daze of hunger is worse than that of alcohol. The daze of alcohol makes us sing but the one of hunger makes us shake. I know how horrible it is to have only air in the stomach.
  • What they (favela children) can find in the streets they eat. Banana peels, melon rind, and even pineapple husks. Anything that is too tough to chew, they grind.
  • The white man says he is superior. But what superiority does he show? If the Negro drinks pinga, the white drinks. The sickness that hits the black hits the white. If the white feels hunger so does the Negro. Nature hasn’t picked any favourites.
  • If reincarnation exists, I want to come back black.
  • The cat is a wise one. She doesn’t have any deep loves and doesn’t let anyone make a slave of her. And when she goes away she never comes back, proving that she has a mind of her own.
  • The publishers in Brazil don’t print what I write because I’m poor and haven’t got any money to pay them. That’s why I’m going to send my novels to the United States.

Oscar Wilde once wrote, “We are all in the gutter but some of us are looking at the stars.” Carolina was among the star-gazers – penniless, but with oodles of enthusiasm. She was not bogged down by poverty but battled the odds and clung to her dreams. She was illegitimate and so was her mother. She left home in search of work and ended up in the favela when she was pregnant. Her three children were fathered by white men of three different nationalities. The luxury of sentiment was not for her. When her daughter says, “Mama, sell me to Dona Julita because she has delicious food,” what could Carolina do but record it in her diary?

The book’s success enabled Carolina to buy a brick house and move out of the favela that had been her home for 12 long years. But her children were ostracized by the new neighbours and life continued to be difficult. Carolina wrote four more books but they did not sell. She had to sell her house and revert to her familiar life on the streets. When she died in 1977, a favela neighbour paid for her casket. She left behind 40 notebooks.

Carolina was the only Brazilian woman of colour to leave a written testimony of her struggles. That she could write at all was nothing short of a miracle.

Overall Assessment: Like a diamond solitaire emerging from a garbage dump, this book surely stands out.

Child of the Dark: The Diary Of Carolina Maria De Jesus
AUTHOR: Carolina Maria de Jesus TRANSLATOR: David St. Claire
PUBLISHER: Penguin
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 1962 (First published in Portuguese in 1960)

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China” by Leslie T. Chang

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

Factory Girls

This book is partly about factory girls in China and partly about the author’s own family history. The two parts don’t blend together and the reader often feels the lack of cohesion, although the book is well-researched and well-written. It reveals the inner workings of China’s economic miracle of recent decades – and for this reason alone it’s worth reading.

I really relished the parts where the author carefully tracks the lives of several young girls who leave their homes in rural China in search of a better future and find their way to the factories in large towns and cities. Their dreams and aspirations, successes and disappointments, factory-hopping and dating games make interesting reading.

From Wu Chunming’s diary, the author shares many entries. An entry made on May 24, 1994 reads: “We start work at seven in the evening and get off work at nine at night. Afterward we shower and wash our clothes. At around ten, those with money go out for midnight snacks and those without money go to sleep. We sleep until 6.30 in the morning. No one wants to get out of bed, but we must work at seven.” Another undated entry reads: “RIGHT NOW I HAVE NOTHING. MY ONLY CAPITAL IS THAT I AM STILL YOUNG.” Chunming had migrated to Dongguan from a village in Hunan province two years ago when she was seventeen. The author met her when she was nearly thirty.

The author’s grandfather travelled to the US to study and subsequently returned home only to be killed in Manchuria in 1946. Later he is turned into a martyr, but again the tide turns and his grave is desecrated. The grandmother stoically brings up her five children, moving them to Taiwan in 1948, and sending them to the US one by one. The author herself is born in America and works in Beijing as a WSJ correspondent for several years. She begins a serious investigation that culminates in this book.

Are there any revelations? Well, here are some insights and observations:

  • In traditional Chinese genealogies, a family traces its lineage back to the “first migrating ancestor” who settled in a new location.
  • Widows who remarried after their husbands’ deaths were often omitted from a genealogy, as were childless concubines and sons who became monks.
  • Chinese history museums have grey areas. Ancient civilization is glorified but we are reminded that it was also feudal and backward. Modern China was ravaged by foreigners. China triumphed in 1949 when the communists came to power. But dark events such as the Cultural Revolution and the Tiananmen massacre of 1989 were blacked out.
  • Chiang Kai-shek breached the dikes of the Yellow River and unleashed a flood to stem the Japanese invasion. But the flood killed several hundred thousand Chinese farmers as well.
  • Though the government promoted cremation and charged each family a hefty fine for a burial, many villagers simply paid up and proceeded to bury their dead.
  • A fake degree from a vocational college cost around $7.50 while one from a vocational high school could be obtained for half that price.
  • “The mobile phone was the first big purchase of most migrants. Without a phone, it was virtually impossible to keep up with friends or find a new job…….. In a universe of perpetual motion, the mobile phone was magnetic north, the thing that fixed a person in place.”
  • “People referred to themselves in the terminology of mobile phones. I need to recharge. I am upgrading myself.”

The human suffering that triggers migration and the inevitable emotional cost is clearly spelt out. In the author’s own words, “My grandmother pushed her children to leave. She felt that Taiwan was too small; America was the only place for further education. But the journey by ship across the Pacific Ocean was too costly to be taken more than once. Every time she said goodbye to a child, she knew it was for the last time.”

There is pathos, there is humour, and there is some measure of confusion. Three chapters stick out of the book like a sore thumb: “The stele with no name”, “The historian in my family” and “The tomb of the emperor”. They have nothing to do with factory girls.

Overall Assessment: Worth reading despite the complexity.

Factory Girls: From Village to City in a Changing China
AUTHOR: Leslie T Chang
PUBLISHER: Spiegel & Grau, an imprint of the Random House Publishing Group
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2008

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen” by Kavita Kane

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

Karna's Wife

If you haven’t read the Mahabharata, there’s no point in reading this one. Kavita Kane tells the story of the Mahabharata from a unique vantage point, that of Princess Uruvi, the only child of the King of Pokeya, who falls in love with Karna, the eldest Pandava, and marries him in the face of stiff opposition. With Karna’s birth being kept a secret by his mother, Kunti, the glorious son of the sun god, born with the golden kavach (armour) and kundals (ear-pieces) is condemned to be called a ‘sutaputra’ as he was raised by a humble charioteer.

The book has elements of a Mills & Boon romance with long conversations, imaginary sequences, and not-so-subtle appeals to the readers’ sentiments. Those who are sentimentally inclined will find the tears flowing. If you know your epics well, there is nothing that shocks, no new revelations, just another perspective. The book does not elevate Karna to another level, it merely evokes sympathy for his losses. The language is exquisite but delightfully Indian.

Many of the famous taunts that add spice to the Mahabharata have been repeated in this book. Draupadi insults Karna, Karna insults Draupadi, Karna insults Dronacharya and so on. However, the book has many original insights that are the unique inputs of the author herself. Here’s an example: ‘I almost feel sorry for Duryodhana,’ rued Uruvi as she sat with her husband in a rare moment of peace. ‘No one seems to be unconditionally on his side; he seems to be surrounded by half-hearted, disinclined warriors. Guru Dronacharya has already said he will only capture, not kill the Pandavas, while King Salya is the maternal uncle of Nakul and Sahadeva and an ardent Pandava supporter who has reluctantly joined the Kaurava side. Bhishma Pitamaha declares that he shall not kill the Pandavas!’

You have Kunti speaking about the practice of ‘niyoga’ wherein a woman conceives a child from another man with her husband’s consent. You are reminded that Satyavati (the Queen Mother) persuaded her illegitimate son Vyasa to perform niyoga on her daughters in law Ambika and Ambalika in order to produce Dhritrashtra, Pandu and Vidura for the continuance of the Kuru dynasty when her son Vichitravirya died without leaving an heir.

The book highlights many of the injustices perpetrated against women in the interest of the ruling classes of the day. In an imaginary conversation between Uruvi and Bhishma, the former says, ‘….you kidnapped the three Kashi princesses, Amba, Ambika and Ambalika, for your brother King Vichitravirya. They were forced to marry him. Were you not responsible for the suicide of Amba, who eventually killed herself because they man she was in love with refused to marry her, fearing the wrath of the great Bhishma? Kings were so petrified of you that you easily bought over their princesses and forced them to marry Kuru princes. You did it with Madri for King Pandu and with Gandhari for King Dhritrashtra.’

Karan’s first wife Vrushali, the mother of his many sons, comes across as a drab and stoic character. One can’t help feeling sorry for the devoted consort who loses her husband’s affections to the charming princess who abruptly comes in the way.

The chapters could have been given more interesting titles. ‘Indraprastha’, ‘Draupadi’, ‘Krishna and Karna, ‘Bhishma and Karna’, ‘Kunti and Uruvi’, ‘Uruvi and Bhanumati’ are hardly inspiring. On the whole the book has the characteristics of a Hindi television serial – it is slow moving, with several dramatic scenes, unnecessary repetitive dialogues, tear-jerkers, and strong emotional content. The shocks are minimal because we already know the story.

Overall Assessment: Not very enlightening.

Karna’s Wife: The Outcast’s Queen
AUTHOR: Kavita Kane
PUBLISHER: Rupa Publications
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2013

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan” by Shrabani Basu

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

Spy Princess

I’d read “Victoria and Abdul” by Shrabani Basu and I’d been really, really impressed. It was about Queen Victoria striking up a great friendship with a young man, Abdul Karim, who had been brought from India to work in the palace. The stupendous amount of research that formed the basis for that book and the author’s way with words had made it a most enjoyable read. So I picked up the “Spy Princess” with a basket of great expectations. Noor is a fascinating subject, firstly because she was a spy, and secondly because she was a direct descendant of Tipu Sultan, the Lion of Mysore who died fighting the British in 1799. The book, however, disappoints as it enlightens. Too many characters, too many details, too many sub-plots make it a tiring read.

Born in Moscow to Hazrat Inayat Khan, an Indian prince who was a Sufi singer, and an American woman, Ora Ray Baker, Noor-un-nisa was the eldest of four siblings, and lived mostly in Paris and London. Neither her genteel upbringing in the Sufi tradition nor her sensitive, refined temperament had prepared her for the stupendous role she was to play during the crucial years of World War II. Noor was executed by the Nazis at the Dachau concentration camp on 13th September 1944. It was only two years after the war ended that this fact became known. On 16th June 1943 she had been airdropped in France along with three others, none of whom survived the war.

Noor’s story is a saga of personal tragedies. At twelve she fell in love with a Dutch boy but her parents didn’t approve. Her father wanted her to marry Alladatt Khan, a man from Baroda, but that was not to be. Noor lost her father when she was thirteen, and took upon herself the burden of looking after her mother and younger siblings. In a short story titled ‘Echo’ she wrote: “Amongst the nymphs who lived on a high mountain slope was a little one who talked and talked and jabbered and chattered, even more than the crickets in the grass, and more than the sparrows in the trees. Her name was Echo.” She soon began contributing poems and children’s stories in magazines and radio.

Noor had learnt the basic Indian ragas from her father and played the harp and the piano. While studying music at the Ecole Normale de Musique, she was involved with a Turkish Jew. The relationship lasted six years and left her emotionally drained.

Noor graduated in child psychology from the Sorbonne in 1938. Her English translation of the Jataka Tales was published in England in 1939. In 1940, she broke off her engagement and decided to move to England with her family. Hours after the fall of Paris they set sail on the last boat to leave France. In November Noor joined the WAAF (Women’s Auxiliary Air Force). Later she was chosen as an SOE (Special Operations Executive) agent and became the first woman radio operator to be infiltrated into occupied France to aid the Resistance. The average survival span for a radio operator was estimated by the SOE to be six weeks, and Noor was briefed about this. Her acceptance of the fatal assignment was whole-hearted.

Before leaving England, Noor told her family she was engaged to a British officer and they would marry when the war ended. The mystery man was never identified. In Paris, Noor was linked to Antelme (who was later executed by the Germans) but the nature of their relationship is uncertain. It was wartime after all – and Noor was an unfailing romantic.

For four months after landing in France Noor evaded capture, changing locations frequently, changing her appearance occasionally, and relying on her network of friends who provided cover. She was eventually betrayed and fell into the hands of the Gestapo. When Ernest Vogt at the Gestapo headquarters in Paris told Noor her sacrifice had been in vain, she replied calmly, “I have served my country. That is my recompense.” After making two daring escape attempts, Noor was labelled “highly dangerous” and transported to a prison where she was kept shackled for the next ten months. Despite interrogation, abuse and torture she revealed nothing and remained defiant until her last breath. She was only thirty when she died.

Had the SOE deliberately sent innocent girls to their deaths, knowing they would never return? The compulsions of a country at war cannot be viewed through a peace-time lens, and obviously one cannot expect simple answers.

In 1949, the George Cross, Britain’s highest civilian honour was bestowed upon Noor. France had awarded her their highest civilian honour in January 1946. Every year on Bastille Day (14th July) a band plays outside her childhood home, Fazal Manzil, on the rue de la Tuilerie. A square in Suresnes is named Cours Madeleine (The French know her by her code name ‘Madeleine’). There is a plaque in her honour at Dachau in Germany, and another at Grignon in France where she made her first transmission. In 2012 a bronze bust of the ‘spy princess’ was unveiled in Gordon Square Gardens, London.

Overall Assessment: Despite its shortcomings, this is a book that begs to be read.

Spy Princess: The Life of Noor Inayat Khan
AUTHOR: Shrabani Basu
PUBLISHER: Sutton Publishing, UK
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2006

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“The Silk Roads: A New History of the World” by Peter Frankopan

Books We've Read Admin1 Comment

The Silk Roads

Penned by an Oxford scholar, this 600 page chronicle has the potential to cause a paradigm shift in your world view. The narrative is embellished with nuggets of information about the ancient and modern worlds. It deftly removes the mask of ‘civilization’ from the face of Europe and reveals the true motivation behind many historically significant moves.

ON ISLAM AND CHRISTIANITY
• The Prophet Mohammed’s last words: “Let there not be two religions in Arabia.”
• The faithful (Muslims) had initially been told to face Jerusalem when they prayed. It was only in 628 (six years after his flight to Medina) that Mohammed decided on Mecca.
• When Mohammed came to Yathrib (Medina) the Jews in the town concluded a mutual defence agreement that offered protection for their faith and property. However, one rabbi opined that Mohammed was a false prophet, ‘for prophets do not come armed with a sword’.
• Muslims were tolerant towards other religions during the early decades of Islam. They rebuilt the church at Edessa (Turkey) when it was damaged by an earthquake in 679. The mosque of the Dome of the Rock, constructed at the start of the 690s, had mosaic inscriptions mentioning not only Mohammed but also Jesus and Mary. Muslim attitudes towards ‘kafirs’ hardened towards the end of the seventh century as a result of the antagonism between rival factions for the control of Islam. (Of the first four caliphs, three were murdered.)
• The Arab conquest of Sindh (Pakistan) in 711 yielded 60 million dirhams in immediate gains (not accounting for future taxes).
• “Islamic societies generally distributed wealth more evenly than their Christian counterparts, largely thanks to very detailed instructions set out in the Quran about legacies.”

THE SLAVE TRADE
• The customary greeting in Italy, ‘Ciao’ does not mean ‘hello’ – it means ‘I am your slave.’
• Venetian merchants became involved in the slave trade in the mid 8th century.
• From the 8th to the 10th centuries, slaves were the currency used for trade between Europe and the East. Money was a later addition.
• A ninth century prayer from France: “Save us, O Lord, from the Savage Norsemen who destroy our country; they take away….our young, virgin boys.”
• The Roman empire at its height required 250,000 to 400,000 new slaves annually to maintain its slave population, but the size of the market was substantially larger in the Arab world (centuries later).
• One writer opined, “There is no equal to the Turkish slaves among all the slaves of the earth.” Another account mentions a Caliph and his wife owning a thousand slave girls each.
• There were guide-books for slave-purchase. Wrote one 11th century author, “Of all the black (slaves), the Nubian women are the most agreeable, tender and polite.”
• Jewish merchants played a key role in trafficking boys and girls from Europe and castrating the males on arrival. Eunuchs were highly valued. “If you took Slavic twins, wrote one Arabic author in this period, and castrated one, he would certainly become more skilful and ‘more lively in intelligence and conversation’ than this brother – who would remain ignorant, foolish and exhibit the innate simple-mindedness of the Slavs.”
• The Arabic word for eunuch comes from the ethnic label referring to Slavs.

POT POURI
• Rustichello of Pisa and Marco Polo of Venice struck up a friendship in a Genoese prison. Genoa had been victorious in separate naval battles against Pisa and Venice – and the poor men had been captured. Rustichello had spent a decade in prison before the world traveller came along. It was he who carefully recorded “The Travels of Marco Polo”.
• The Mongols were “far removed from our common perceptions of them.” They combined military dominance and selective brutality with religious tolerance, political savvy and liberal taxation.
• The Incas had meticulously recorded births and deaths.
• Elihu Yale was Governor of Madras for 5 years. He returned from India with priceless loot that included five tons of spices, diamonds and precious objects. Before his death (in Wales) he donated generously to a college in Connecticut that now bears his name. (Wikipedia describes Yale as merchant, philanthropist and slave trader.)
• European powers often resolved their disputes by exchanging their colonies. Madras changed hands between the French and the British. When Portugal ceded Bombay to Britain as part of the dowry of Catharine of Braganza in the 1660s, the Portuguese Governor of Bombay predicted that this move would spell the end of Portugal’s empire in India. It did.
• After Robert Clive defeated the Nawab of Bengal in 1757, over two million pounds flowed into the pockets of East India Company employees. Clive became the richest man in the world. The Bengal Famine of 1770 followed soon thereafter.

Everything about this book is interesting. The fonts are reader-friendly but you need both hands to hold the book.

An unforgiveable faux pas: The Guru Granth Saheb is described as “the great scared text of Sikhism.”

Overall assessment: It would make Oxford proud.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
AUTHOR: Peter Frankopan
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury
YEAR OF PUBLICATION: 2015

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram” by Dang Thuy Tram

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace

At the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Ming City, Vietnam, I paid the princely sum of fifteen US dollars for the diary of a dead woman I had never heard of. As I began to read, the realization dawned on me that hers was a true rendering of history – and every word was dynamite. This was no ordinary woman, no white-collared doctor, no run-of- the-mill revolutionary. She had the heart of a humanist, the soul of a poet, and the grit of a guerrilla fighter. “For the first time I dig a grave to bury a comrade. The shovel hits a rock, and sparks fly like the flame of hatred in my heart.”

On 22nd June 1970, Dr. Dang Thuy Tram, barely aged 28, was shot dead by American soldiers as she walked along a remote trail in Duc Pho with three others. Her diary made its way to the United States and remained for decades in the possession of Fred Whitehurst who worked for the FBI, turned whistleblower, and finally tracked down Thuy’s aged mother in Hanoi to hand over the precious memoir. Published in 2005, the diary was an instantaneous hit. The English translation emerged in 2007. Thuy’s last words express her deep anguish and sense of hopelessness in the face of a powerful destiny: “I am no longer a child. I have grown up. I have passed trials of peril but somehow, at this moment, I yearn deeply for Mom’s caring hand. Even the hand of a dear one or that of an acquaintance would be enough. Come to me, squeeze my hand, know my loneliness, and give me the love, the strength to prevail on the perilous road before me.”

Born in a cultured, ‘bourgeois’ family, Thuy learnt to play the guitar and the violin. She qualified as a doctor and was accepted for higher studies in surgical ophthalmology. Yet she chose to move south and join the resistance in December 1966. Her beloved country was at war and America was no mean foe. Part of her motivation was her desire to re-unite with the love of her life, a man she simply calls ‘M’. Thuy had loved him from an early age but he had joined the North Vietnamese army four years earlier. The truth about their break-up remains shrouded in mystery. Thuy’s diary is actually the second volume, the first having been lost in the war zone during a miraculous escape on 31st December 1969. Did she write about her heartbreak in the first volume? We may never know.

The pocket sized diary was often scribbled in dark, humid, underground shelters or narrow caves in the mountainside. US President Richard Nixon is a “mad dog.” American soldiers are “devils” or “bandits”. Thuy speaks of revenge but never kills a fly. She only saves lives. Thuy speaks of young men dying in her arms, of performing amputations without anaesthesia, of a great many medical challenges. In mid 1969, she wrote, “I will not be there when they sing the victory song.”

Of her broken relationship she says little, but her words are powerful. “The trust stemming from ten years of waiting and longing does not erode easily, but when it cracks it’s hard to repair.” And, “I know the roots of my love still lie deep within my heart, dormant but not dead. It can sprout, it can grow if spring returns. A part of me is still that young girl you know, the one who loves to feel cool raindrops on her face.”

Her writing is embellished with simile and metaphor, and the play of emotions mingles with practical descriptions of life’s harshest realities. There is poetry in every sentence. One marvels at the ebullient romanticism of the young woman in an environment shrouded by the horrors of war. Bravery and optimism, pathos and idealism – a plethora of intense feelings gives the diary a powerful voice that reaches out to even the most disinterested reader. Some excerpts:

  • My soul is as full, as tumultuous, as a river after days of torrential rain.
  • My youth has been soaked with the sweat, tears, blood, and bones of the living and the dead.
  • The hand-basket is heavy, but my worries are much heavier.
  • Hatred is bruising my liver, blackening my gut.
  • This war has robbed me of all my dreams of love.
  • Oh! Cruel American bandits, your crimes are piling up like a mountain. As long as I live I vow to fight until my last drop of blood in this thousand-year vendetta.

The diary begins on 8th April 1968, when Thuy had already spent two years among the fighters. The words she used to pay tribute to a fallen comrade are entirely appropriate and applicable in her own case: “Your heart has stopped so that the heart of the nation can beat forever.”

Overall Assessment: Must read.

Last Night I Dreamed of Peace: The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram
AUTHOR: Dang Thuy Tram (translated from the Vietnamese by Andrew X Pham)
PUBLISHER: Rider
Date of Publication: 2007

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Women at War: Subhas Chandra Bose and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment” by Vera Hildebrand

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

women-at-war

This is a book about extraordinary women caught up in events most extraordinary. Set in the early 1940s when World War II was raging across the globe, it traces the founding of the INA (Indian National Army) in Singapore, the remarkable role played by Subhas Chandra Bose, and the origin, activities and eventual disbanding of the all-woman Rani of Jhansi Regiment.

The best thing about this book is that it tells us of women we have never heard of before – women of Indian origin born elsewhere, who were nevertheless willing to lay down their lives for the freedom of an unseen motherland. In India, many of us have heard of Captain Lakshmi (Dr. Lakshmi Swaminathan Sehgal, daughter of Ammu Swaminathan and sister of danseuse Mrinalini Sarabhai) but the other names are new to us. Danish researcher and author, Vera Hildebrand, tracked down 22 surviving Ranis in India, Singapore, Malaysia and the United States and recorded their statements. She also interviewed male soldiers of the INA and Japanese co-fighters. She pored over piles of documents and her conclusions are presented in this book. (Interestingly, the Netaji Research Bureau housed in the Bose family home in Kolkata denied access to the voluminous records in their custody, including catalogues.)

On 22nd April 1945, Bose had ordered all INA documents destroyed. British Intelligence had interrogated all INA prisoners and defectors but the original reports seem to have disappeared. Copies made by Colonel Hugh C Toye and shipped to England are surviving. The author managed to view them at the British Library, UK. Five of the Ranis had unpublished memoirs or voluminous diaries – Janaki Thevar Athinahappan, Asha Bharati Sahay Choudhry, Aruna Ganguli Chattopadhya, Eva Jenny Murty Jothi and Dhanam Lakshmi Suppiah Ratnam.

The author critically examines Netaji’s contribution to Indian nationalism and the advancement of women’s equality. The book also mentions several women revolutionaries in India’s freedom struggle, whose names have largely been excluded from history books – Pritilata Waddedar, Kalpana Dutta, Bina Das, Suniti Chowdhury and Shanti Ghosh. Mrs. Lilavati Chaganlal Mehta and her two daughters, Neelam and Rama, were among the first to join the Ranis in Burma. The INA had about 50 Burma-born Ranis. From Malaya, there were many Tamil-speaking estate workers.

On the night of 4th April 1945, a group of 51 Ranis were retreating from their camp in Myanmar to relative safety in Thailand, escorted by Lieutenant Khushal Singh Rawat and led by Ponammah Navarednam and Janaki Bai. Two of these women fell to sniper bullets while on a freight train from Rangoon to Bangkok, and were buried on Burmese territory, somewhere along the railway line. Stella Thomas and Josephine died unhonoured, with no tributes, no memorials, and no customary encomiums. They were probably South Indians recruited from Malaya. While serving in Burma, Janaki Bai lost her father and Labanya Ganguli Chatterji was widowed barely six months after her wedding.

When the war ended, Labanya studied medicine as did Gian Kaur and Gauri Bhattacharya. All of them settled in India. Japan-born Asha Sahay settled in India along with her father, Anand Sahay. Dacca-born Anjuli Bhowmik had been only twelve years old when she joined the regiment along with her fourteen year old sister Shanthi. Manwati Pandey came from a family of Indian nationalists. Post independence she married Dr. K C Arya and settled in Kanpur. She is known as Lt. Manwati Arya and has authored several books including a few on the INA. While travelling from Rangoon to Maymyo in 1944 she had cut her long tresses short as most of the other Ranis did. In 2008 when the author asked her if the girls had regretted giving up their hair, Manwati replied with a hearty laugh, “We were ready to give our heads, so who cared about the hair!”

Overall Assessment: Very interesting.

Women at War: Subhas Chandra Bose and the Rani of Jhansi Regiment
AUTHOR: Vera Hildebrand
PUBLISHER: HarperCollins India
PUBLICATION DATE: December 2016

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“I am a Troll: Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army” by Swati Chaturvedi

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

troll

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, “the leader of the world’s largest democracy follows and felicitates trolls.” Shocked? Well no, not really. Everyone knows he’s the most Twitter-friendly person on the planet. I’ve no idea whether journalist Swati Chaturvedi is lying or telling the truth, but what she has to say in this book is definitely worth serious consideration. At least some of the information she passes on can be easily verified by a tech savvy person. While many of us do suspect that trolling is not a random harmless activity of stray individuals but a targeted intervention by well organized groups having a definite (often political) agenda, we rarely have evidence to back our beliefs. This book makes an attempt to bring out certain home-truths about trolling, fake news and false propaganda.

Describing internet trolls as “the goons of the online world,” the author goes on to share her own experiences of online stalking and sexual harassment and her disappointment at the inaction of the Delhi Police (which incidentally is controlled by the BJP-led Central Government). Referring to the “use of lies by verified Twitter users to generate communal hatred” she states that, “It’s akin to giving them the equivalent of a megaphone and a primetime TV slot.”

The book is full of revelations. “In a Right to Information petition, the Prime Minister’s Office (PMO) said that the PM’s handles, @Narendramodi and @PMO, are run by the PM himself.” Modi follows 1375 people on Twitter, and his own followers number 21.6 million. (The numbers have since risen to 1640 and 26.3 million. I checked!) Of the people he follows, “twenty-six accounts routinely sexually harass, make death threats and abuse politicians from other parties and journalists, with special attention being given to women, minorities and Dalits.” The author names many of them and provides screen-shots of some of their most offensive tweets. Honestly, I wonder how Twitter puts up with the stuff!

Pictures of Burhan Wani’s funeral procession in Kashmir were tweeted by @ggiittiikkaa with the crude comment, “20k attended funeral of terrorist Burhan. Should have dropped a bomb and given permanent Azadi to these 20k pigs.” The author points out that this was retweeted 1184 times and liked 1086 times. Priti Gandhi (@MrsGandhi), self proclaimed ‘huge fan of Nathuram Godse’, who was “thrown out of the BJP when she tweeted a fake endorsement of Mr. Modi by Julian Assange of Wikileaks before the 2014 general election,” is currently a national executive member of the BJP Mahila Morcha. Tinu Jain, who is ‘followed by the PM’, was arrested in Gwalior in September 2106 for running a sex racket.

Every day the BJP’s IT cell sets the tweet agenda for the day. Synchronized tweeting, trending hastags, bots (algorithms acting in social networks to appear as real users), the ‘hit list’ of leading journos – all activities are controlled and coordinated by 11 Ashoka Road, New Delhi. Sadhavi Khosla’s account of the modus operandi is very interesting. The book also profiles a few trolls whom the author met and interviewed. Tweeting and trolling are becoming paid occupations, the evidence suggests. And online hate often results in offline violence.

Ankit Lal, social media chief of the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) informed the author that Twitter handles in remote locations in Thailand are regularly tweeting BJP-created Modi hastags. Has the BJP hired a marketing agency in Thailand to do their trolling? Or are they using virtual private networks (VPN) to hide their location and identity? Is their online support base diminishing? Ankit Lal’s report which forms part of the Appendix is worth scrutinizing.

The book attributes Modi’s spectacular 2014 election victory to the effectiveness of his social media campaign. Further, the author notes that the PM, in his 2016 Independence Day speech, lied about the electrification of a village in Uttar Pradesh and used the PMO twitter handle to tweet the speech. Power Minister Piyush Goyal tweeted pictures of Nagla Fatela villagers watching the PM’s speech on TV. The gram panchayat immediately contradicted the claim and maintained that they still had no electricity. The tweets were hastily withdrawn.

The author here is taking a major risk, considering the outpouring of hate messages and violent threats that customarily follow any attempts to malign any of the sacred cows in our political firmament. At the same time, one realizes that what she has exposed is barely the tip of the iceberg. The rest is yet to come – for not all voices can be silenced by online intimidation.

(I did some quick reality checks before publishing this review and found that some of named Twitter handles are definitely interconnected. Their tweets are vitriolic, hate-filled, and illogical, they encapsulate lies and half-truths rather than verified facts, and furiously tweeting and retweeting seems to be the main occupation of the persons involved. And yes, NaMo does follow them!)

Overall Assessment: The author has opened a Pandora’s box.

I am a Troll- Inside the Secret World of the BJP’s Digital Army
AUTHOR: Swati Chaturvedi
PUBLISHER: Juggernaut Books, New Delhi, India
DATE OF PUBLICATION: December 2016

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster” by Svetlana Alexievich

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

voices-from-chernobyl

The 1986 nuclear disaster at the Chernobyl nuclear power station in the erstwhile USSR is a horror story we’ve all heard. The site is now in Belarus – a tiny country with a tiny population. The Nazis obliterated 619 villages and their populations during World War II, and the Chernobyl fiasco wiped out 485 villages. Of those who remain 20% are said to be living on contaminated land.

This book by Ukraine born Nobel laureate Svetlana Alexievich traces the events that unfolded during those days of horror and the slow death and disease that transformed the lives of innocent people in the vicinity. The author raises a poignant question, “Why repeat the facts – they cover up our feelings.”

It comes as no surprise that the book is full of heart rending stories. Any sensitive person will have a hard time getting through it. Half way through the book you’re sure to stop and ask yourself: Do we really need nuclear energy, leave alone nuclear weapons?

Here’s a simple narrative: “Tell everyone about my daughter. Write it down. She’s four years old and she can sing, dance, she knows poetry by heart. Her mental development is normal, she isn’t any different from other kids, only her games are different. She doesn’t play “store” or “school” – she plays “hospital”. She gives her dolls shots, takes their temperature, puts them on IV. If a doll dies, she covers it with a white sheet. We’ve been living with her in the hospital for four years, we can’t leave her there alone, and she doesn’t even know that you’re supposed to live at home.”

Nikolai Kalugin, a father says, “I want to bear witness: my daughter died from Chernobyl. And they want us to forget.” He shares a painful memory: “My daughter was six years old. I’m putting her to bed, and she whispers in my ear, ‘Daddy, I want to live. I’m still little.’ And I had thought she didn’t understand anything.”

Anatoly Simanskiy, a journalist says, “Yesterday my father turned eighty. The whole family gathered around the table. I looked at him and thought about how much his life had seen: Gulag, Auschwitz, Chernobyl.”

Vasily Nesterenko, former director of the Institute for Nuclear Energy at the Belorussian Academy of Sciences, shared some real pearls of wisdom: “No they weren’t a gang of criminals. It was more like a conspiracy of ignorance and obedience. The principle of their lives, the one thing the Party machine had taught them was never to stick their necks out.” He had this to add: “The State always came first, and the value of a human life was zero.” And this: “People feared their superiors more than they feared the atom.”

Vladimir Ivanov, a former first secretary of the Satvgorod regional Party committee told the author, “It was the military way of dealing with things. They didn’t know any other way. They didn’t understand that there is really such a thing as physics. There is a chain reaction. And no orders or government resolutions can change that chain reaction. The world is built on physics, not on the ideas of Marx. But what if I’d said that then?” Perhaps he wouldn’t have lived long enough to speak to the author. (This speculation is mine alone!)

A quarter century after the fall of the Soviet Union, as we read these personal testimonies we are left with a feeling of great sadness. But there is a faint thread of humour too, like a rainbow emerging from the dark clouds. An Ukranian woman is selling big red apples at the market, calling them ‘Chernobyl’ apples. Someone advises her to drop the advertisement as no one would buy them if they heard they were from Chernobyl. The woman then says coolly, “They buy them any way. Some need them for their mother-in-law, some for their boss.”

Overall Assessment: The author has done a brilliant job. Steel yourself before you read the book.

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster
AUTHOR: Svetlana Alexievich (translated from the Russian by Keith Gessen)
PUBLISHER: PICADOR
DATE OF PUBLICATION: 2006

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination” by Joyce Appleby

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

shores-of-knowledge1

Marco Polo, the 13th century traveler, landed in a Genoese prison on his return from the Far East. His cell-mate was a writer and that’s how his story came to be told. ‘The Travels of Marco Polo’ was Columbus’ favourite book. Columbus was Genoese but his sponsors were the King and Queen of Spain. When he returned from the West Indies in 1493 he presented them with six Taino Indians, besides many species of plants and animals. Columbus made three more voyages to the Americas in the next decade, and when Hispaniola ran out of gold, he introduced sugarcane cultivation using forced labour. Religious conversion happened simultaneously. In the meantime the indigenous peoples encountered European induced diseases such as small pox and died in droves.

On Columbus’ second voyage, the Spaniards discovered pineapple on the island of Guadeloupe. Little did they know the ‘Indians’ had imported these plants from Brazil and Uruguay in their ancient canoes!

There are stories within stories. Spaniards invaded Cuba in 1511 and Mexico in 1521. Seven decades after Columbus’ arrival the New World had seven times as many Africans as Europeans. Eventually it was Amerigo Vespucci (a Florentine) whom the great new continents were named after. Unlike others before him Vespucci realized that the spot where he had landed (Brazil) was part of a new continent. His travel accounts published in 1502 won him instant fame. Martin Waldseemuller, a German cartographer, while preparing a new map in 1507 chose the name ‘America’ for the two continents in the western hemisphere. The rest is history.

Balboa discovered the Pacific Ocean, but it was Magellan who named it. John Cabot (a man from Genoa) had explored Greenland, Newfoundland and the east coast of North America under the English flag in 1497-98 but he didn’t get much press. (Cabot’s expedition is believed to be the first by Europeans to mainland North America since the Vikings landed five centuries earlier.)

Hernan Cortez, conqueror of Mexico, wrote about the Spanish occupation of Tenochtitlan and their utter surprise at finding resplendent buildings, stone statues, gold artifacts, frescoes, floating gardens et al. Bartolome de Las Casas (traveler and writer) denounced the cruelty of the conquistadors in his 16th century book “The History of the Indies”. When other European writers mentioned the Aztecs’ human sacrifices and the cannibalism of the Caribs in the Lesser Antilles, Las Casas reminded them of the biblical story where God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his only son.

Ferdinand Magellan did not really circumnavigate the globe but one of his ships did. Magellan was killed in the Philippines and only one of his five ships, the Victoria, returned to Spain in 1522 with 18 survivors and 26 tons of cloves, nutmeg and cinnamon. Magellan was Portuguese but he took Spanish citizenship in order to participate in the exploration.

The book is full of interesting facts that a lover of history and sociology is sure to lap up with immense pleasure. Here are some samples:

  • Jeanne Baré, the first woman to circumnavigate the globe (1766-69), went on Bougainville’s expedition disguised as a man, but on landing in Tahiti was instantly recognized as a woman by the natives.
  • The Aztec jugglers whom Cortez brought to Spain were later sent to Rome to entertain the Pope. That’s when rubber balls had their European debut. Yes, the Aztecs were rubber-tappers!
  • Francis Drake looted the Spanish silver fleet during his 1577-80 circumnavigation of the globe. This enabled Queen Elizabeth to pay off her country’s debt.
  • In Java, Antonio Pigafetta (a writer accompanying Magellan) “learned about the practice of suttee, described by his native interpreter in glowing terms as a ceremony in which a flower-bedecked widow happily accepted her duty to join her husband’s corpse on the funeral pyre.”
  • An island near Borneo “was occupied by Muslims who, though as naked as the other natives, adhered strictly to Muslim rules about diet and hygiene.”
  • “When the Lutheran archbishop of Uppsala, chided him (Carl Linnaeus) for placing humankind among other primates, Linnaeus replied airily that he knew of no way that would follow from the principles of natural history to make a generic difference between humans and simians. Either the archbishop should find one or cease his complaint.” Wow! So much for the Creation myth and the cute tale of Noah’s Ark!
  • “Thomas Jefferson, then the United States foreign minister to France, supposedly brought back the recipe for French fries, which he served over the next decade at the White House.”
  • In 1867 America bought Alaska from Russia. The purchase was described as “Seward’s Folly” after Lincoln’s secretary of state, William Seward who had negotiated the treaty.
  • In 1785 Napoleon Bonaparte, then aged 16, made an effort to join a naval expedition but did not qualify. The two ships carrying 220 men met a tragic end after leaving their last port of call in New South Wales, Australia in January 1788, and were never heard of again.

The story of the potato is a must-read. And that’s not all. Pedro Alvares Cabral, Charles Darwin, Alexander Humboldt, the Medicis of Florence, Adam Smith, Voltaire, Alexander Selkirk, Captain James Cook, and a horde of other stalwarts make guest appearances that are sure to leave the reader absolutely delighted.

Overall assessment: A scholarly masterpiece.

Shores of Knowledge: New World Discoveries and the Scientific Imagination
Author: Joyce Appleby
Publisher: W .W. Norton & Co.
Year of Publication: 2014

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

“Farewell to Manzanar” by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and James D. Houston

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

farewell-to-manzanar

When the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in December 1941 at the climax of World War II, every American of Japanese descent suddenly became suspect. The Franklin Roosevelt government reacted by rounding up all Japanese Americans and carting them off to remote camps, where they were forced to subsist in sub-human conditions. Manzanar was one such camp on the edge of California’s Mojave Desert and in this book a former inmate gives a first person account of her family’s interment in this hellhole. After decades of silent denial, the author relives long forgotten memories and recollects heart-wrenching details to produce this deeply disturbing memoir.

Jeanne’s father (a native of Hiroshima) was interrogated, taken into custody and deported to North Dakota. Ko Wakatsuki had come to Hawaai at the age of 17 in search of work, moved to Idaho and later California, where he married a Japanese girl and had 9 children. His arrest and three year incarceration changed him. He became despondent, alcoholic, abusive, violent and eager to be invisible. In 1945 after the war ended, the family returned to Southern California and in 1952 they moved to San Jose.

Jeanne was seven years old and the youngest of the brood when the tragedy enveloped her family. Manzanar effectively robbed her of the simple joys of childhood. Growing up in this strange new place with minimal facilities, communal toilets and communal kitchens, deeply affected her – and the return to civilization was just as difficult when the camp was disbanded after three years.

Jeanne recounts her father’s behavior during a school visit by her parents: “I was standing at the head of the table shaking the principal’s hand, when papa rose, his face ceremoniously grave, and acknowledged the other parents with his most respectful gesture. He pressed his palms together at his chest and gave them a slow deep Japanese bow from the waist. They received this with a moment of careful, indecisive silence. He was unforgivably a foreigner then, foreign to them, foreign to me, foreign to everyone but Mama, who sat next to him smiling with pleased modesty. Twelve years old at the time, I wanted to scream. I wanted to slide out of sight under the table and dissolve.”

The California born author describes the incredible pain of growing up Japanese in post-war America. “Easy enough as it was to adopt white American values, I still had a Japanese father to frighten my boyfriends and a Japanese face to thwart my social goals.”

Jeanne met James D. Houston while attending San Jose State University and they were married in 1957. Her husband co-authored her autobiographical novel, which was published in 1973 and won many accolades before being adapted into a TV film in 1976. The book has since become a part of many school curricula to inform pupils about the Japanese American experience during WWII. It presents a thought-provoking account of a dark and embarrassing chapter in American history.

Overall Assessment: Must read, especially if you are Japanese American.

Farewell to Manzanar
Authors: Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston and  James D. Houston
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Date of Publication: 1973

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.

 

“Mafia Queens of Mumbai ” by S. Hussain Zaidi with Jane Borges

Books We've Read AdminLeave a comment

mafia-queens-of-mumbai

There is high drama, there is intrigue, there is gang warfare, there is crime and punishment – and in the midst of it all, in the soft dark under-belly of the Mumbai underworld. there are ‘crime madonnas.’ We in India have heard of the notorious triumvirate that ruled India’s commercial capital then known as Bombay – the Tamilnadu born Haji Mastan, the Chennaiite Varadharajan Mudaliar and the Afghanistan born Karim Lala – until the Emergency intervened to bring about a reversal of their fortunes. When Vardha (as Varadharajan Mudaliar was known) died in Chennai in 1988, Mastan chartered an aircraft to bring his body back to Bombay for a funeral that any king would have envied. Mastan was the darling of Bollywood and we have seen pictures of him with Dilip Kumar, Sunil Dutt, Madhubala and countless others. We have also heard of Dawood Ibrahim, Chota Rajan and other sundry characters, many of whom are absentee ganglords, rather than hands-on local dons. But the names of the women in mafia-land are new to us. Thus this book is an eye-opener in more ways than one. It tells us the mafia is not a male club.

Take Jenabai (Zainab) Chaavalwali, who participated wholeheartedly in the Independence movement and opted to remain in Bombay with her five children in 1947 when her husband Darwesh chose to migrate to Pakistan. In times of acute grain shortage, she acted as a middle-woman between wholesale grain merchants and dealers. Wow! Later she married Iqbal Gandhi but never called herself Mrs. Gandhi. She met Vardha who initiated her into the art of bootlegging in the early sixties. Soon she became rich and famous as Jenabai Daaruwali. Vardha introduced her to Mastan. Dawood Ibrahim was then a teenager and his parents Ibrahim Kaskar and Aamina were close friends of Jenabai. It was Jenabai who intervened to bring about a truce between the Pathan gang and the Ibrahim brothers, Dawood and Sabir, sometime in 1980. The truce was short-lived, but Jenabai herself lived until the ripe old age of 74.

The women in the book are spectacular – and that’s a gross understatement. Kudos to Zaidi for bringing them into the public gaze! Ever heard of Gangubai, the matriarch of Kamatipura? Well she owned a black Bentley and met Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru to lobby for the decriminalization of prostitution. She smoked bidis, drank Ranichaap (whatever that is!), chewed paan and gambled to her heart’s content. And yet, they say she had a heart of gold. She never married but adopted several children.

Did you know that from the early nineties the Mumbai drug trade (vaguely estimated at 1000 crore) was dominated by a female troika – Jyoti Adiramalingam, Mahalaxmi Papamani and Savitri? You won’t find them on Wikipedia. Google their names and you’ll draw a blank. But the authors actually met two of them. Sapna Didi, who tried her best to avenge her husband’s murder by Dawood’s men and lost her life in the attempt and Bollywood starlet Monica Bedi, the love interest of Abu Salem, are also featured in the book, perhaps to attract new-gen readers.

Is the female of the species more deadly than the male? Read the book and find out. Written by India’s best known crime reporter, “Mafia Queens” delivers a lot more than it promises. The style of the master storyteller is unmistakable. Faction and fiction are artfully blended together to present a fascinating experience. “Mastan called for his black Mercedes and walked Jenabai to the car. As the car left Baitul Suroor, the lights in the villa gradually dimmed and faded to black.”

Overall Assessment: Not to be missed.

Mafia Queens of Mumbai: Stories of Women from the Ganglands
Author: S Hussain Zaidi with Jane Borges
Publisher: Tranquebar Press (an imprint of Westland Ltd.)
Date of Publication: 2011

Contributor: Pushpa Kurup lives in Trivandrum, India and works in the IT sector.