Notes
Of books, of pure seduction
There are books you want to finish reading, often in a frenzy as it were. Part of the reading is associated with deadlines set by the library you have borrowed some books from, part from a natural desire in you to finish one book before you can lay your grasping hands on another. Desire, ladies and gentlemen, is not merely linked to the pleasures of the flesh or the greed for worldly possessions. It comes, in huge dollops, to those who think of the world as one gigantic library. Read, said God to His Prophet. Reading ought to be digested and chewed, averred Bacon. George Washington thought that the knowledge of books was the basis on which the world stood firmly. Read, said my uncle to me when I was barely out of nursery class. Read, said a recently deceased colleague of my father's on a blustery winter's day forty six years ago as he pushed a weighty encyclopaedia into my hands. It is experience which comes to many if not to all of us. Reading is of course pointless when passion does not come into it. There is Caroline Elkins, with her gripping tale of what British colonialism once did to Kenya in Britain's Gulag. It is not a new book and yet not very old either. You rush through the pages, expecting to get some new insight into Africa as it used to be. And you are not disappointed. The cruelty visited on Kenya's Kikuyu, the ill treatment meted out to Jomo Kenyatta were all part of a pattern. Africa is an endless reservoir of richly tragic history. And those with an avid interest in the continent (and I like to think I am in that tribe) would do well to read Elkins. I must return Elkins to the local library in a couple of days. So there's the rush, something which takes on a life of its own as I find my way down the winding passages of Karen Armstrong's life of Muhammad. Having recently read an admirable work on the Qur'an by Ziauddin Sardar (the review was on this page last week), turning the pages of Armstrong's work can only reveal new wonders. The history of the Quraysh, of their preoccupation with Al-Llah and al-Lat, al-Uzza and Manat is part of the study one drawn to the history of religious belief ought to engage in. Which brings me to the intense interest I have been taking in reading Wendy Doniger's The Hindus. You need time and loads of patience to tackle this tome, but once you sit down to read it, it is pure fascination that you plunge into. So what is happening here? Simply this, that there are all too often the moments when we need to read more than one book at a time. Something good comes out of that, surely, in the sense that when you have all that collection before you, you keep remembering that you have a deadline to meet. The problem with losing oneself in a single book at any given moment is that it tends to push one into something of complacency, that particular sort of laziness one cannot quite explain. And, therefore, alongside Elkins, Doniger and Armstrong I now have Sugata Bose with his pure waterfall of a work on Subhas Chandra Bose. He calls the work His Majesty's Opponent. I can assure you it is one of those substantive works for which you fight back sleep in order to read on. Even as you do that, you cannot help but let out a sigh when the eyes light upon some other books trying to draw your attention, right there before you. Neeti Nair's Changing Homelands is a compelling study of some of the factors which led to Partition in 1947. If your interest in history has not wavered in direct proportion to your ageing, you will want to read Nair. It makes you think, and think deep. Your thoughts assume a new, graver dimension as you confront the John Clifford Holt-edited The Sri Lanka Reader. Like The Hindus, it is a huge tome, the beauty of which comes through the various chapters and sections which in their combined totality give you the history of Sri Lanka on a platter. It is not just about Sri Lanka as you have observed it in modern times. It is almost an epic which speaks to you of the long heritage that has gone into the evolution of the country. Along the way, you cannot but be severely affected by the many afflictions the country's Tamils have historically suffered from. But, cheer up! There is Axel Madsen, with his Silk Roads to inform you of what it meant to be travelling through Asia in search of adventure in the innocent earlier phases of the twentieth century. The adventurers, and this you must know, are the very young Andre and Clara Malraux. There was a spirit in them, an intrepidity that led them into a search for Asian art even as it inexorably pushed them into bureaucratic trouble in Vietnam and Cambodia. It is a gripping read. And that reminds me of that old book on the Malraux persona, really a compilation of essays on him, by some of the more illustrious in the world of letters. Malraux: Life and Work, edited by Martine de Courcel, was published in 1976 and carries observations of the scholar from such intellectual powerhouses as Isaiah Berlin, Gaston Palewski, C.L. Sulzberger, Girija Mookerjee and Victoria Ocampo. It is a treasure one would not want to let go of, even if a fanatical bookworm's knife were to slowly insinuate itself into one's neck, causing the blood to stream furtively down the skin and on to the shoulder. A few years ago, the gastronomic delights offered by Chitrita Banerji in Bengali Cooking kept me riveted to thoughts of food for weeks. After all these years, it is now Fuchsia Dunlop's turn at provocation as I slurp my way through her taste bud-arousing Shark's Fin and Sichuan Pepper: A Sweet-Sour Memoir of Eating in China. Judi Dench stares at me out of her autobiographical work, And Furthermore, as does the ayatollah in Con Coughlin's Khomeini's Ghost. Ah, A.L. Lytton Sells' Thomas Gray seduces. The flesh in me is weak and the spirit absolutely willing to gormandise on the literary repasts thrown up by this old work.
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