IN THE FIRST PART of this two-part series, I explored books that reminded me why Gauri Lankesh matters, what is happening in Kashmir post-abrogation of Article 370, the imaginative frontiers of viro-capitalism, how colonialism, racism and human rights came together in the Tokyo Trial and an alternative imagination of Indian Constitutionalism.
In this concluding piece, I delve into how art, love and dispossession collide in Palestine, the battle for justice in Chile post-Pinochet, the plural roots of Kannada culture and the irreligious futures imagined by Periyar.
6. Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad (Jonathan Cape, 2023)
This is the story of the performance of Hamlet in the occupied West Bank by a troupe of Arab Israelis in which the protagonist, Sonia Nasir, is an actor who is a UK citizen but of Palestinian origin. Part of the narrative is how Sonia gets slowly involved in the play directed by Mariam, who is an Israeli citizen of Palestinian origin.
The play is set against the backdrop of Palestine which is a "tiny place" that "occupies such a large space in the global mind." For the protagonist who returns to Palestine to visit her sister, Palestine is an ever-present reality in spite of living in the UK. As she puts it, "even if I cannot live in it, my soul will reawaken if there is a Palestinian State."
The history of Palestine, from the Nakba to the daily protests in the West Bank to the restrictions on movement in the West Bank, along with the stories of those who protest, those who collaborate and those who choose to leave the country, forms the backdrop to the performance of the play, giving Hamlet a particular Palestinian resonance.
What does it mean to perform Hamlet in the West Bank against this backdrop? While the book is about these complicated histories, it is also about questions of the meaning of art, love, sex and marriage on which there are several acute and moving observations.
What does art mean in the context of a suppressed people? As Mariam puts it, "when you read a novel about the occupation, and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger like a wound is dressed for a brief time… you might feel a flowering in the chest at this sight of your community's resistance embalmed in art, beauty created out of despair." Does creating art out of dispossession only mean that the suffering is relieved temporarily and "perhaps our Hamlet would be just another version of the narcotic…?"
However, the play is not easy to perform in the West Bank – from challenges of securing funding, the hours spent getting through checkposts, to the search for a venue, to Israel's efforts to not allow the play to be performed, to Israeli soldiers intimidating the audience during the performance of the play. To do a play in the West Bank was to "throw our efforts into the audience and leave us cowering before the faceless gods of Fate and State."
Sonia's acting as Gertrude is interspersed with her thoughts on her failed marriage to Marco, a writer in London. Her marriage collapses as her attraction to Marco “shut off like a tap. I did not like his smell, and when he touched me, which was rare, I felt a cat's repulsion." There is a brief affair with one of the Palestinian actors and one senses Sonia's need for connection and the inability of sex to fully provide that form of human connection. Alcohol is a stimulant which lubricates this human connection or as Sonia describes it, "alcohol was clinging delicately to the inside of my head, trimming my awareness of myself and my surroundings."
Is the connection Sonia craves to be satisfied by a relationship, or by her work as an actor, or by her increasingly satisfying connection to both art and politics in Palestine?
7. 38 Londres Street, Philippe Sands (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2025)
38 Londres Street is the story of the search for justice for the crimes committed by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet during seventeen long years in which Chile became a byword for disappearances, murders and torture. During these seventeen years, over 40,000 people were illegally detained or tortured and more than 3,000 people were murdered or disappeared. 38 Londres Street, which was the headquarters of the Chilean Socialist Party, was expropriated, made over to DINA and used as a secret interrogation and detention centre.
The struggle for justice for the crimes committed by Pinochet is interwoven with the struggle to bring Walther Rauff to justice, who during the Nazi era operated gas vans which killed 90,000 Jews. Rauff, post the defeat of Nazi Germany, takes refuge in Latin America, eventually landing up in Dawson Island in the Chilean Patagonia.
Both Pinochet and Rauff are sought to be extradited for the crimes they committed, with both extraditions finally failing. As Pablo Neruda put it, describing the decision of the Chilean Supreme Court not to extradite Rauff for his crimes, "there is no denying that this man understands vans. Nor can I deny that my country's judiciary, its Supreme Court, has a well-adjusted conception of reality: It protects people who efficiently organize collective murder and transport in vans."
The failure to extradite Rauff in the 1960s leads to another malign connection between Rauff and Pinochet. Rauff was the informal adviser to the Pinochet regime in its "interrogation techniques" as well as behind the design of the camp at Dawson, which was said to be "the only camp in Chile with the design of a concentration camp." So Rauff had the dubious distinction of participation in two mass crimes – one by the Nazis against the Jews and the second, by Pinochet against the people of Chile.
The Pinochet case was a landmark moment for international law as "after fifty years of quietude, genocide and crimes against humanity were back on the agenda" as "ideas about international justice" sprang into life and seeped "into public consciousness."
Sands documents the convoluted battle to extradite Pinochet from Chile. When Pinochet is in London for medical treatment, a Spanish judge requests the arrest and extradition of Pinochet, which results in a Bow Street Magistrate issuing an arrest warrant for Pinochet. This was the "first such arrest warrant for a former head of state, for international crimes."
When the arrest warrant was challenged in the Divisional Court, the court ruled that "Pinochet had an absolute right to immunity." However, on appeal in the House of Lords, six judges voted against immunity on limited charges. The ruling was welcomed by Amnesty International as "a fundamental step forward", as it allowed "extradition for all thirty-five cases of torture and the 1,198 cases of the disappeared", which sent a "powerful signal to prosecutors and courts across the world."
However, the Home Secretary, Jack Straw, on the basis of "unequivocal and unanimous" medical reports, concluded that Pinochet's health had deteriorated and he was "not capable of meaningful participation in a trial." Pinochet finally flew home "503 days" after he was arrested.
Pinochet's legal travails do not end with a return to Chile, with prosecution being initiated against him in Chile. The Chilean Supreme Court ruled that he had no immunity and was mentally fit to stand trial. However, he suffered a heart attack and "serially indicted, stripped of all immunities, he was taken to hospital, where he died."
Chile post the arrest in London became a different place. The place of torture, 38 Londres Street, is declared a national historical monument. The place of torture in Dawson Island also becomes a place of memory. Though Pinochet evades justice, Sands documents an emerging culture of accountability in terms of the filing of numerous cases against others who participated in the crimes committed by the Pinochet regime.
Sands's response to the question as to whether both "Rauff and Pinochet got away with the crimes they committed?"
"Sort of."
38 Londres Street is the story of the search for justice for the crimes committed by Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet during seventeen long years in which Chile became a byword for disappearances, murders and torture.
8. Rama, Bhima, Soma: Journeys in Kannada Literature, Srikar Raghavan (Context, 2025)
Raghavan's investigation into the cultural life of Karnataka traverses the lives and words of Kannada literary figures well known in the English-speaking world such as Ananthamurthy, Kuvempu and Karanth, to equally important figures in Karnataka such as Devanuru Mahadeva, Kothiganahalli Ramaiah and D.R. Nagaraj from the anti-caste spectrum, to progressive writers like Kum Veerabhadrappa and men of letters like P. Lankesh. The range Raghavan traverses is astonishing and opens a window to the cultural life of Karnataka for the English-speaking world.
There are figures he writes about who should be better known in the English-speaking world such as Nagaveni who wrote Gandhi Banda, the story of which revolves around a young "widow named Draupadi who marries a spirited Muslim youth named Adrama." This novel, with its suggestion of "Hindu-Muslim bonhomie" in the freedom movement, "riled the RSS."
There is also Bolwar Mahammad Kunhi who wrote Swatantrada Oota (The Run for Freedom), in which the author captures the predicament of the Indian Muslim. If he does not "do namaaz five times a day" he has no place in heaven, and if he does not "proclaim his allegiance to India five times a day, there is no place in the country for him."
Kum Veerabhadrappa in his Gandhi Clasu wrote of cultural life in Karnataka through the maxim that if one threw a stone in Dharwad it would land on a poet or artist. In his description, these writers were "weird… Loose pajamas, jubba, scraggly beard, cigarettes, beedis, a very peculiar and distinct kind of intellectual conversation, some book or other in everybody's hand…"
There is also the description of the "eccentric genius of Kannada literature", Shankar Mokashi Punekar, who wrote Avadeshwari, a novel set in the "Ayodhya of Vedic times." In Ananthamurthy's words, Punekar's novel shows how explorations of "vritti dharma, kula dharma, rta", "can lead to a deeply moral conscience."
The Left and Dalit currents of culture in Karnataka are explored through an engagement with the activist and cultural work of Du Saraswathi and the historical investigations of Saketh Rajan. For Raghavan, explorations of caste and class are significant not only in terms of contemporary writers but also in terms of the cultural traditions. As he notes, the Anglophone academia may have some familiarity with the dasas like Kanakadasa and Purandaradasa who followed Vedantic traditions, but the siddhas, like Manteswamy or Kodekallu Basava, are scarcely known. The recovery of the siddha tradition would be a "monumental act of reclaiming cultural memory."
Raghavan re-introduces one to the great figures of Kannada literature and also introduces writers, thinkers and activists who should be better known to the English-speaking world.
Raghavan re-introduces one to the great figures of Kannada literature and also introduces writers, thinkers and activists who should be better known to the English-speaking world.
9. Sanna Sangatigalu, Rahmat Tarikare (Navakarnataka Publications)
Rahmat Tarikare is among the most important of contemporary Kannada writers and critics. He has most recently authored Bahutva Karnataka, which translates as 'plural Karnataka', and makes the case that Karnataka should not only be diverse but also plural – a condition in which groups of different identities respect one another as compared to merely tolerating each other.
Sanna Sangatigalu, which translates as 'Small Matters', brings together a series of short essays by Tarikare written over a period of time. In the introductory essay, Tarikare cites the epigraph to Kuvempu's novel The Bride in the Hills as his inspiration.
Tarikare travels throughout Karnataka and brings to our attention the truly inspiring picture of ordinary people making culture. There is the story of Adeeb Akhtar whose humorous writings Tarikare reads and then writes to him saying he would like to meet him. Akhtar invites him for a conversation at his place of work, which is a shoe shop opposite the Bannur Bus Stand. There is also the story of Mangalore's Jogi Anandnath who is a timber lorry driver and at the same time someone who is a repository of local knowledge of the Nathpant tradition.
From singers who work in the fields to writers who work in shoe shops, to singers who write petitions for a living, to artists who are truck drivers, an extraordinary range of people in small villages and towns embody the cultural depth of Karnataka.
The spirit Tarikare brings to the fore is that of incessant questioning. As he puts it, to suppress questioning is to suppress the human spirit! Tarikare extols the love of reading and notes that "books sharpen the reader's sensibility, enhance the love of life, encourage the spirit of questioning and keep humanity alive."
Kannada, for Tarikare, is a language which from the time of Pampa has welcomed words from other languages and in that process enriched itself. The plural culture of Karnataka which Tarikare brings to the fore, be it the Urs celebration, the celebration of Ugadi or Muharram, emerges at the interstices of religion and humanity.
10. Periyar: A Study in Political Atheism, Karthick Ram Manoharan (Orient BlackSwan, 2022)
Periyar's political style of communication was often direct, not literary and sometimes laced with "vulgarity", often directed against "gods, patriarchy, caste and caste supremacists." The speeches which might appear "highly provocative now", were meant to "appeal even to the least literate person." It is likely that this direct form of address, with speeches delivered in a "lively and dialogic manner in public forums", along with his "sense of humour and acerbic wit", drew people to him.
Manoharan sees Periyar as belonging to a philosophical tradition of anti-philosophers, meaning those who seek to dismantle systems as opposed to those who seek to erect systems.
Manoharan sees the communication style as essential to Periyar as "the true thinker, the authentic pedagogue relies on face-to-face speech, on the uniquely focused dynamics of direct address, as these knit questions to answer, and living voice to living reception."
Manoharan sees Periyar as belonging to a philosophical tradition of anti-philosophers, meaning those who seek to dismantle systems as opposed to those who seek to erect systems. In that sense, Periyar has an affinity with Friedrich Nietzsche and Mikhail Bakunin. If there is to be a core philosophical concept which was Periyar's intellectual mainstay, it was political atheism — a "fundamental suspicion of the theological that tends to influence the political."
His political quest was for "an ideology that would build in India a camaraderie beyond religious and caste identities, an ideology that is opposed to religion and all forms of social inequities." He was not "enamoured of statism" and in his suspicion of all forms of power, his thinking had some affinities with Bakunin.
Periyar was a radical both in social and political life. In a speech at "a wedding ceremony in 1969 he declared that he plans to campaign for the abolition of marriage in the future." His critique of the "Aryan Hindu religion" did not mean a return to the values of a hoary Tamil past. Rather, he was invested in "constantly imagining new irreligious futures."
Periyar repeatedly asserted that "people should have attachment towards humanity and human society and not towards god, religion, caste, language or nation." For Periyar, political atheism meant that "it was possible and desirable to live without god and the state without a political theology. That was central to his idea of freedom."
Manoharan delineates Periyar's political atheism as a "radical freedom that included the freedom to criticize and be without religion, the freedom towards a casteless egalitarian society, sexual freedom, and a freedom to imagine alternate forms of politics."