Truth is a refugee in our times. Exiled from its home under the sun, it seeks shelter. We shun it in polite drawing room conversations and in WhatsApp groups, too embarrassed by this distant relative from our village. It keeps away from TV studios for fear of being lynched. Like a beggar on the street, it is invisible, too familiar to make it to the front pages, too old to be worthy of news.
In 2024, truth found temporary shelter under the covers of some books. These were not academic tomes where truth was unrecognisable, wrapped in layers of theory. Most of the books that gave me a glimpse of truth this year narrated some true story. From stories of this year to stories that went back half a century, from political stories to personal narratives, from stories of despair to those of hope. Or books that can help us learn lessons from these stories. Let me focus here on some books published in 2024, in India and on India. (My apologies for non-inclusion of some books that I meant to read, should have read, but did not manage to).
The most straightforward and obvious story of the year was captured in 2024: The Election that Surprised India (Harper Collins) by Rajdeep Sardesai in his racy, engaging yet balanced prose that brings out the best in the author. A senior editor who has not lost touch with the ground, a TV celebrity not afraid of admitting his mistakes. In case you did not follow this extraordinary election blow by blow, you can relive it with this book. Even if you did, the chapter on “media takeover” is worth a read; it promises a full-length book.
Rahul Bhatia’s The Identity Project: The Unmaking of a Democracy (Context/ Westland) tells the story of the dismantling of democracy in India over the last decade through granular and meticulously researched accounts of many ordinary and some not-so ordinary lives. The trials and tribulations of Nisar, a survivor and witness of the 2020 riots in north-east Delhi, serve to weave a captivating story of the Citizenship Amendment Act, anti-CAA protests and Delhi riots, which in turn connect to the history of the rise of the RSS and, interestingly, to the mega-data gathering mission of Aadhaar, “the Identity Project”.
Neha Dixit’s The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian (Juggernaut) ends where Bhatia’s story begins. This is the story of India between two cataclysmic events over three decades, from the demolition of Babri Masjid to the Delhi riots of 2020, seen through the life of Syeda, a working class woman who suffered after both upheavals. Engagingly narrated with extraordinary empathy and astonishing details, this story of Syeda’s repeated spatial and job displacements offers a home to the truth beyond and beneath the headlines. Shorn of academic jargon, this is subaltern studies for our times.
Hilal Ahmed’s Brief History of the Present: Muslims in New India (Penguin/Viking) is less vivid than both these accounts (and less dark than Bhatia’s), but as I have already discussed in this column (‘Neither villain, nor victim’, IE, October 22) its plain prose helps to give a more rounded picture of the political predicament and future possibilities of Muslims in this “New India”.
Thank You, Gandhi (Penguin/Viking) is an unusual book for more than one reason. Its author, Krishna Kumar, well-known as the country’s leading educationist, a writer on pedagogy and a creative writer in Hindi, does not often comment on contemporary politics, as he does here. The book is hard to classify. Draped as fiction, a story about a dead friend’s unfinished manuscript, it is a commentary on how far India has travelled from its foundational ideas. It is a lament, a sigh, an indictment. But it also offers reasons for hope. Gandhi is the prism, the interlocutor and also the principal metaphor here: “It’s time I said to Gandhi: Bye and thanks. I want to say, abide with me, but I don’t know where I might take him for comfort.”
Many other books offer hope in different forms. Anand Kumar, an eminent sociologist and himself an anti-Emergency activist, has written a synoptic account of that dark period in India’s journey and how we came out of it. Emergency Raj ki Antarkatha (Setu Prakashan) draws upon many Hindi sources not hitherto tapped in the well-known histories of the Emergency. More importantly, it questions popular narratives about Vinoba Bhave’s support to the Emergency and Jayaprakash Narayan’s endorsement of RSS and Jan Sangh. Gentle Resistance: The Autobiography of Chandi Prasad Bhatt (Permanent Black), a high-quality translation from Hindi, offers an insight into the simple and tough lives of “andolanjeevis” of yesteryears through the life of a Sarvodaya worker, an environmental activist, the founder of the Chipko movement.
In Being Hindu, Being Indian: Lala Lajpat Rai’s Ideas of Nationhood (Penguin/Viking) Vanya Vaidehi Bhargav, a young political theorist, takes the trouble to convert her academic labour into an accessible book that takes a fresh look at this nationalist hero, widely believed to be a forefather of today’s Hindu nationalism and invites us to ask a difficult question: Can secular politics draw upon not just the legacy of those like Gandhi who were practising Hindus, but also those like Lajpat Rai who were spokespersons of the Hindu community (in the context of colonial Punjab, where they were a minority) when they were not stoking anti-Muslim communalism?
Can secular politics draw its intellectual resources from a tradition that it has neglected and rejected? The republication of Nirmal Verma’s four volumes of selected essays (Shatabdi Ke Dhalte Varshon Mein and Doosare Shabdon Mein) and interviews (Sansar mein Nirmal Verma: Poorvarddh and Uttararddh, edited by Gagan Gill) published by Rajkamal Prakashan is a major occasion that deserves collective reflection. While Verma’s fiction has been justly lauded and analysed, the vast body of his essays on history, memory, culture, art and our nationhood has either been neglected or boxed as “right wing”. A careful reading of his essays, especially those written in the 1970s and early 1980s, offers a new path not just to question the modernist and secular worldview but also to a foundational critique of the politics of Hindutva from an Indian perspective.
Finally, a very different window to the truth of our times is Baal-o-Par, the most comprehensive collection of poems by Gulzar (Harper Collins, translated by Rakhshanda Jalil), along with 89 Autumns of Poems (Penguin/ Hamish Hamilton, translated by Pavan K Varma) following his Jnanpith Award this year. Gulzar is not a political or activist poet, but a careful reading would reveal deep hints about the times we live in. My favourite lines are from a poem “Hawa badli hui hai” (The wind has changed): “Hawa ka rukh badalne laga hai/ Naye jhande nazar aane lage hain/ Yahi hota hai jhande fadfadate hain hawa mein jab/ Hawa bhi fadfadane lagti hai jhanda pakad kar (The wind is blowing in a new direction/ New flags have started appearing/ That’s what happens when flags flutter in the wind/ The wind too flutters, clasping the flag!)”.
The challenge of our times is to ensure that truth does not flutter with the wind and the flag.
Post script: It doesn’t fit here but I cannot complete a list of books this year without mentioning Sopan Joshi’s Mangifera Indica: A Biography of the Mango (Aleph), a birthday gift from my wife and children in view of my obsession with mangoes. A juicy book, full of anecdotes, research and wisdom, that wipes off any bitter taste of the times we live in.
The writer is member, Swaraj India, and national convenor of Bharat Jodo Abhiyaan. Views are personal
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