The Leaflet presents to you a curated list of books from 2023, perhaps for 2024. Happy reading!
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A review of books read and enjoyed in the previous year is a nod to what books can do. Broaden the imagination, help one cope with difficult circumstances with humour, provide a new lens to view an old problem and give one a sense of continuity with a distant past.
Books can also build a sense of community with other cultures and civilisations and help you see that the stranger is not so strange after all.
They can also reverse a Gramscian dictum and be about cultivating the ‘optimism of the intellect’.
Here is a list of 2023, perhaps for 2024.
Resistance of the Heart, Nathan Stoltzfus
The protest at Rosenstrasse by the German partners of Jews who were arrested was one of the few successful anti-Nazi protests at the peak of Nazi rule. When Jews in mixed marriages were taken away to the police quarters at Rosenstrasse to be ultimately deported to concentration camps, protesters comprising mainly German women who were married to Jewish men kept vigil outside the police headquarters, shouting slogans demanding that their husbands be released.
Books can also build a sense of community with other cultures and civilisations and help you see that the stranger is not so strange after all.
As one witness put it, “The accusing cries of the women rose about the noise of the traffic like passionate avowals of a love strengthened by the bitterness of life”. The protestors, “acted from the heart” as they “wanted to show that they were not willing to let their husbands go”, regardless of the danger.
The police threatened to shoot, but the women did not relent in the face of threats and finally, the Gestapo was forced to back down and release 1,700 Jews who had been rounded up.
For some of its protagonists, the protest “created an entirely new circle of friends that lasted a lifetime … it was a public confession of family ties- to Jews”.
Stoltzfus analyses the reasons for this success, tracing it back to the heart of Nazi rule. As much as the Nazis had command over the instruments of repression, it was vitally important for them to have public support.
Every action was carefully calibrated to ensure that public support was vocally expressed. As Hitler wrote, “The first foundation for the creation of authority is always provided by popularity.”
The protesters challenged the “seamless popular unity” and showed that it “existed only in propaganda”. They were “communicating dissent about the core of Nazi ideology” and the longer it continued the more the chances that it “would damage public morale that the regime stove to nurture, especially during the war”.
The protestors also tapped into deep-rooted beliefs about the sanctity of the family and drew upon the intimate bonds that held the family together. The institution with deep roots in religion, culture and tradition could not be so easily dismembered without triggering a “resistance of the heart”.
All of these reasons accounted for the backdown of the regime.
Stoltzfus also implicitly contrasts the role of protest and what it achieved with the role played by the organised Jewish leadership. Jewish organisations, when requested by the Gestapo, handed over detailed lists of all Jews including lists of those married to Germans. Those on the list were arrested, deported and killed.
This Life At Play: Memoirs, Girish Karnad
The autobiography provides one possible answer as to where the capacious nature of Karnad’s sympathies— be it on questions of caste, gender or sexuality— may have come from. He writes about his mother who was a widow with a child who remarried, defying the norms of the close-knit Saraswat Brahmin community.
In a backhanded compliment to his mother’s defiant personality, he writes that one of the achievements in his risk-averse father’s life was to marry a widow defying all social strictures!
Karnad journeys from Shirsi to Dharwad then to Mumbai and Oxford, with a final return to India. To him, college life is bookended by two poems. It begins with Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘Kubla Khan’ and he is ushered into modernity by T.S. Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’.
He realises the truth in a comment by a friend that his literary references in conversation were all English. This seems to have led him to Kannada literature with Dattātreya Rāmachandra Bēndre poem becoming the inspiration for the title of the autobiography, ‘Life at Play’.
The police threatened to shoot, but the women did not relent in the face of threats and finally, the Gestapo was forced to back down and release 1,700 Jews who had been rounded up.
The influence of the leftist culture was to condemn both the Puranas as well as ancient history as invariably regressive. In part, Karnad’s incessant mining of history and myth for the telling of stories that are about the quintessentially modern ideas of selfhood and choice are a response to this dismissal.
Be it Taledanda (about Basavanna), The Dreams of Tipu Sultan, Yayati, The Fire and Rain— myth and history are the deep wellsprings of his plays which, while rooted in the past, speak to the modern sensibility.
A.K. Ramanujan is an important presence in Karnad’s intellectual life and what Ramanujan says continues to influence him. Ramanujan once told him, the best translation emerges out of a feeling of jealousy on reading an excellent work.
Translation is nothing but the act of making the work one’s own. Karnad says he understood the meaning of this when he read U.R. Ananthamurthy’s Samskara: A Rite for a Dead Man, incidentally translated into English from Kannada by Ramanujan.
The feeling which nagged Karnad was that he should have written the novel. So he channelled that feeling of wanting to make Samskara his own by directing his first movie— the adaptation of Samskara.
Karnad’s corpus of work demonstrates the fine talent of making the past speak to the present. The autobiography provides an insight into this world of imagination.
The Annotated Prison Writings of Oscar Wilde, Edited by Nicholas Frankel
When Oscar Wilde was convicted for ‘gross indecency’ and sentenced to a harsh term of imprisonment, he continued to write in prison. He wrote a long essay in the form of a letter to his lover Alfred Douglas as well as the lyrical poem ‘Ballad of Reading Jail’. But his writings took on a different tone.
As he put it, his works henceforth would be to “form a library of lamentations” and he would be an “enigma to the world of pleasure, but a mouthpiece for the world of pain”. In De Profundis, he says, “I, once a lord of language, have no words in which to express my anguish and shame”.
De Profundis is a love letter in which he excoriates his lover’s personality, “You must see that your incapacity of being alone: your nature so exigent in its persistent claim on the attention and time of others … You demanded without grace and received without thanks.”
He is scathing of Douglas’s capabilities observing, “You had the rudiments of an artistic temperament in its germ. But I met you either too soon or too late. I don’t know which.”
Jewish organisations, when requested by the Gestapo, handed over detailed lists of all Jews including lists of those married to Germans. Those on the list were arrested, deported and killed.
He also notes his own failure in the relationship as giving in to Douglas’s whims as Douglas knew that “by making scene you could always have your way, it was but natural that you should proceed almost unconsciously, I have no doubt, to ever excess of vulgar violence”.
He analyses Douglas as lacking in the capacity to love. “Love is fed by the imagination, by which we become wiser than we know, better than we feel, nobler than we are: by which we can see life as a whole; by which and by which alone we can understand others in their real and ideal relationships.” Douglas suffered from a “terrible lack of imagination”.
Douglas is motivated by hate of his father and “hate blinds people… Love can read the writing on the remotest star, but hate so blinded you that you could see no further than the narrow, walled in and already lust-withered garden of your common desires”.
What this fatal defect of the lack of imagination resulted in was Douglas’s inability to appreciate what “art was to me, the great primal note by which I had revealed, first myself to myself and then myself to the world; the real passion of my life; the love to which all other loves were as marsh water to red wine, or the glow-worm of the marsh to the magic mirror of the Moon”.
After plumbing the depths of degradation, Wilde says that suffering may be endless but it has to have meaning. For him, “the degradation of the body”, must become a “spiritualising of the soul”. The state he aspires to is not to “feel ashamed of having been punished”.
He thinks that this suffering may induce into his art, no less than his life, “a still deeper note, one of greater unity of passion, and directness of impulse. Not width but intensity is the true aim of modern art”.
The indictment of Alfred Douglas ends (as any love letter would) with Wilde concluding, “Even if I had not been waiting but had shut the doors against you, you should have remembered that no one can possibly shut the doors against love forever.”
Founding Mothers of the Indian Republic: Gender Politics of the Framing of the Constitution, Achyut Chetan
The patriarchal character of the Constituent Assembly has been often commented upon in academic literature. There were only 15 women members in the assembly out of 389, buttressing such a conclusion. Some of the comments of the male members further substantiated the truth of this proposition.
Chetan notes how the idea that a “woman’s destiny was in her home” was a part of the common sense of the assembly. Lakshmi Kant Maitra said, “The Law Minister or his honourable colleague will have to crouch before her however much he may thunder here” and where she rules with “a whip, a soft, silken cord made up of filaments of love which takes off all harshness and roughness … menfolk have submitted to her rule”.
In a backhanded compliment to his mother’s defiant personality, he writes that one of the achievements in his risk-averse father’s life was to marry a widow defying all social strictures!
More shockingly, J.B. Kripalani said that his wife, the eminent leader Sucheta, herself a member of the Constituent Assembly, “Is as good a housewife as any ancient woman.” He went on to report details proving her willing subservience: “She does everything for me, including brushing my chappals and washing my clothes.”
Chetan, while acknowledging this larger patriarchal reality, has a different purpose in mind. The question that animates the book is: There were only fifteen women members, but what did they do in the assembly?
To him, the presumption that “the logic of constitution-making is inherently patriarchal” does not allow for the telling of the story of what the women members achieved through their participation in the Constituent Assembly. He attempts to rebuild the “archives of women’s constitutional authorship”.
“Dakshayani Velayudhan (1912–74) was born in the slave-caste of Pulaya” and was “the first girl to wear an upper cloth, the first Dalit woman graduate in India, a science graduate, a member of the Cochin Legislative Council and of the Constituent Assembly”. She participated actively in the debates in the assembly and even crossed swords with B.R. Ambedkar.
The gems that Chetan unearths include the seminal contribution of the women members to the final shape of Article 25 of the Constitution which guarantees the right to profess, practice and propagate religion.
Hansa Mehta and Amrit Kaur were particularly exercised about the implications of the recognition of the freedom to ‘practice religion’. They were concerned that “several customs practised in the name of religion, e.g., pardah, child marriage, polygamy, unequal laws of inheritance, prevention of inter-caste marriages, dedication of girls to temples could be justified on religious grounds”.
They said that they were “naturally anxious that no clause in any fundamental right shall make impossible future legislation for the purposes of wiping out these evils”.
After plumbing the depths of degradation, Wilde says that suffering may be endless but it has to have meaning.
Article 25 as it currently stands owes much to the thinking of the women members as well as Dr Ambedkar, as they were anxious that custom should not be allowed to override constitutional provisions.
The “practice of religion” in the final version of Article 25 is circumscribed by, “public order, morality, health and other fundamental rights”, ensuring that the right to practise religion is subject to the Constitution.
Purnima Banerji was specifically concerned about the women family members of those detained in prison. She moved an amendment to include a clause, providing that “if the earning member of a family is so detained, his direct dependents shall be paid maintenance allowance”.
While this amendment was rejected, it remains a key concern to this day as families are driven to destitution when the earning member of the family is incarcerated.
Through such careful attention to the Constituent Assembly debates, Chetan opens out an archive of feminist constitutional possibilities even within a larger patriarchal framework.
