by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Mayabhushan Nagvenkar,
Book: Ocean Rimmed World; Author R.N. Joe D’Cruz; Publisher: Oxford University Press; Pages: 563; Price: 575
Universally, the travails of fishermen at sea are unending. Written originally in Tamil, and translated into English by G. Geetha, R.N. Joe D’Cruz’s novel “Ocean Rimmed World” explores the hardship, toil, labour of coarse love and change-induced conflict in the lives of the fisherfolk community in his native Tuticorin, in southeast Tamil Nadu, which is in the news of late after protests against corporate giant Sterlite Copper turned violent.
Set in the community of Parathavars, the intricate plot which spans 55 years, tracks the numerous changes in the lives and fortunes of the clan, supplemented by the powerful narratives of three fishermen who are clinging to a log in the sea after an accident, and are awaiting rescue.
D’Cruz’s story massively accentuates his commitment and belief in his gutsy and equally committed characters, who wage battles every day with their lives and with their chief antagonist-cum-provider, the ocean.
Replete with indigenous references to fishing gear, deities, day-to-day phrases, the book vividly brings to life the sea, the landscape and the lives of the fisherfolk community in Tuticorin, through its 563 pages.
The novel intimately touches the lives of Kagu, Thokalatha, Gothra, Soosai, Thomanthirai and the finally the indomitable Siluvai and their silent almost sage-like struggle with the sea, amid sweeping changes around them, as India moves from British hands to Independence.
Through the small, hardy community of Parathavars, the author tells the reader about how modernisation, which includes the coming of electricity to the rural hamlets, the advent of trains, changing lives, relationships, social mores and even faith of a small set of people living on the fringes of “civilisation”.
Religion is not something you can really get away with, especially in rural India. In this book, religion has two faces, of deceit — in the way it is practised and imposed — and unquestionable faith.
The book is without a doubt marked by the sheer craft of the author, whose taut lines should tug a sincere reader’s gut, like in the passage below, which describes the situation confronting Siluvai, the last survivor clinging to the wooden log, as he waits on for help mid-sea.
“Having wept and wept, Siluvai felt his heart choke. He could no longer cry. As he had been afloat for a long time, his anus had shrunk and he had lost all thought of passing stools. On account of the raw fish, crab and seaweed he had eaten, his stomach churned violently from time to time. It was to save him that his maama had let himself be sucked into the whirlpool — his heart kept reminding him again and again.
“The log he lay on was partly submerged in water. There was not a shred of cloth on him except his underwear. His hair had turned brown and brittle. The skin over his back was dry, crusted with salt. He was unable to move his head or limbs. He lay unconscious. Was it day? Was it night? He knew nothing. The log was drifting along the neevadu (water current)”.
“Ocean Rimmed World” is not only a lesson on the myriad vagaries of the ocean, but also dealing with change and death.
For the fisherfolk in Tuticorin, like anywhere else in the world, the vast ocean does giveth aplenty, but it also taketh away on a whim.
(Mayabhushan Nagvenkar can be contacted at mayabhushan.n@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Tanks: 100 Years of Evolution; Author: Richard Ogorkiewicz; Publisher: Osprey Publishing; Pages: 392; Price: Rs 499
Their looming profile and bristling armaments make them the most easily identifiable piece of military hardware. But tanks, which represent a watershed in the age-old military technology contest between offensive and defensive capacities and mobile and static weaponry, are at their best only when their key attributes are in sync.
Their entire story, which dates from much before they first trundled on to the battlefield in World War I — as this book shows — hinges on the development and interplay of these attributes: Mobility, protection, firepower and communication.
Experts, however, differ on these attributes’ relative importance. As an anecdote goes, a tank officer recalled that, in his training, there were three modules: Driving, where they were told that immobile tanks were of no use; radio, where they were told that lack of communication made tanks useless; and gunnery, where they learnt that without firepower, tanks were essentially a 50-tonne portable radio.
But as Richard Ogorkiewicz recounts here, the development, modification and testing of these attributes not only underlines the evolution of tanks but also of human ingenuity and technology — and stubbornness to change.
Concentrating on mobility, firepower and protection, he presents a “comprehensive account of the worldwide evolution and employment of tanks from their inception to the present day”.
And while this is a story that Ogorkiewicz is well qualified to tell, as one of the foremost civilian experts on tanks, he adds a number of interesting nuggets. Say, the role of major car-makers — Rolls-Royce, Fiat, Daimler, Renault, etc., in the evolution of armoured military vehicles, and unexpected countries with roles in tanks’ history.
Also a long-time independent member of several scientific advisory committees of the British Defence Ministry, the author notes that while tanks’ military importance and general interest have led to a number of books on them (including three authoritative works by him): “There is much more to be said about them, not only because of the more recent developments or because of tanks’ worldwide proliferation but also because of the misconceptions about their origins and other developments.”
He kicks off on this mission by revisiting conventional history of self-propelled, armoured military vehicles, whose origins, we learn, go back further than we thought to the year of Napoleon’s birth (1769) — though this particular venture by a French military engineer got nowhere, nor did the brief revival of interest in the mid-19th century.
Ogorkiewicz shows how the course only began via development of armoured cars in various European armies in the early 20th century — with Italy taking an early lead here.
He then charts the development, the false starts and piecemeal attempts that marked tanks in World War I, before going on to how they faced another problem post-war, when even the victors (save France) reduced the inventories while traditionalist high commands disparaged their contribution or ruled out their independent use.
Recounting how tanks made a comeback courtesy some visionary and dedicated British military theorists — along with the mistakes the country’s military leadership made and their consequences in the next World War — he takes up developments in this field in other major powers: France, the US, Italy, the Soviet Union and Germany, as well as in Poland, Sweden and Japan.
A chapter on development of strategic use of tanks offers a thoughtful prelude to an armoured battle view of the Second World War.
Ogorkiewicz then deals with the changed battlefield after the Second World War, and how tanks survived the onslaught of hand-held — and then more sophisticated — anti-tank weapons. Apart from the five dominant tank powers — the US, the Soviet Union, Britain, France and Germany — he also takes a look at other countries which tried, including Switzerland, Israel and Argentina.
Asian countries, especially China, Pakistan and India, get their own section, in which he makes an incisive summary of Indian armoured forces’ developments, shortcomings and achievements, before offering his assessment of the future and some technical appendices.
Though not a book for the casual reader due to its wealth of technical detail, it gives an expansive look not only at tanks, but the transforming paradigms of war-fighting, which changed from soldiers walking or riding to find and engage the enemy to long-ranging, combined-arms operations. Military buffs, this is for you.
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Saket Suman,
Book: Conceptualising Man and Society; Author: Pradip Kumar Bose; Publisher: Orient BlackSwan; Pages: 162; Price: Rs 595
What is a man’s relation to the society in which he lives and how much of this goes into shaping the larger perspectives of sociology? A social animal that a man is, his interactions with society take place at various levels, but speaking strictly in the Indian context, this new book shows that there are “opposing tendencies and ideological tensions” in the writings of early Indian sociologists, thereby suggesting that our understanding of Indian sociology may have been skewed to some extent.
“Conceptualising Man and Society” by Pradip Kumar Bose, a former professor of sociology at Kolkata’s Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, elaborately analyses different facets and concerns of five early Indian social anthropologists: Radhakamal Mukerjee (1889-1968); G.S. Ghurye (1893-1984); D.P. Mukerji (1894-1961); Nirmal Kumar Bose (1901-1972); and Ramkrishna Mukherjee (1919-2016).
In doing so, it touches upon their major works and propagations, sort of examining their social understanding and even relating it to the present times. What makes this book a riveting read is the fact that all these five sociologists and anthropologists seem to have been interested in the larger sociological and philosophical issues like tradition, values and community.
The author contends that the “colonial connection” has gone a long way in shaping the ideological nuances of Indian sociology and anthropology. He finds that there were two distinctive characteristics of Indian sociology in its formative years — its appropriation of the colonial discourse and the opposite tendency of criticising and rejecting Western categories of knowledge. So in both the cases, there was a set “colonial connection” where the sociologists either appropriated the colonial discourse or rejected it.
There was another tendency too. The author finds evidence in the writings of some of the mentioned sociologists that they were critical of the application of methods, categories and concepts of Western origin for the study of a culturally distinct entity as Indian society.
In this context, the author finds Radhakamal Mukerjee and D.P. Mukerji to be serious critics of individualism, who argued that the Western notion of the individual has “no relevance” for the understanding of Indian social culture.
“Thus, attempts were made from the very beginning to introduce Indian categories or conceptual systems into their interpretations of Indian society,” Bose points out.
The author also finds that early Indian sociology was greatly influenced by nationalism or the discourse of nationalism. He examines the works of Nirmal Kumar Bose who, according to him, is one of the best examples of a nationalist social thinker, and finds a lot of Gandhian ideology seeped in his writings.
“Bose privileged culture and history in his method and analysis because he believed that the idea of India can only be demonstrated through the cultural diversity of the nation. His view of caste as a system which was effective in reducing conflict and competition and instrumental in guiding the economic life by a ‘moral code’ represented the nationalist thinking of caste,” the author writes.
However, he maintains that there was a dramatic shift in the understanding of sociology during the post-independence era, when, according to him, it began to be conceived only as the study of Indian society.
“In the post-independent era methodological nationalism was combined with empiricist epistemology so that ‘scientific’ study of society could depend on a neutral and dispassionate observation of the world. Fieldwork and surveys became two major instruments for collection of information to be used not simply for research work but by the state for the governance of the population,” Bose finds.
But in these methods, Bose says, the “highly asymmetric power relation” between researcher and interviewee is “detrimental to the quality of the data collected” and they provide a “false aura of objectivity”, which makes the results — as we have seen in recent times — vulnerable to political manipulation.
At the same time, the book points out that these methods also provided objectivity, value-neutrality and a scientific quality of the information collected.
The book does not record the history of Indian sociology but raises certain theoretical issues about its historical trajectory.
(Saket Suman can be contacted at saket.s@ians.in)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Vikas Datta,
Title: Smoke And Ashes; Author: Abir Mukherjee; Publisher: Harvill Secker/Penguin Random House; Pages: 352; Price: Rs 599
Its foundations already shaken by Jallianwala Bagh, the British Raj now faces a new type of freedom struggle — one utilising the country’s teeming millions as willing “martyrs” to put pressure on the rulers while eroding their loyalists. With former imperial capital Calcutta a hub, can its hard-pressed policemen tackle a case of serial murders, avert a massacre and ensure a royal visit is successful?
Captain Sam Wyndham of the city CID finds himself tasked with dealing with all three matters in the third installment of Abir Mukherjee’s thrilling and well-researched historical crime series.
While either of the tasks would test any capable man, our hero must also try to rise above his secret, shameful, vice — liable to have adverse personal and professional consequences (as we learn in the tense, nightmarish first chapter).
Though Wyndham can count on Sergeant “Surrender-Not” (Surendranath’s pronounceable Anglicised version) Banerjee, but his loyal aide now is hampered by his own problems, with the Non-Cooperation Movement causing bad blood between him and his family and friends, all on the other side.
While confrontation looms between the regime and the freedom fighters, spearheaded by the canny but principled lawyer Chittaranjan Das and his key aide, especially after the Congress volunteers are banned, the city is rocked by a series of brutal murders, including of a British scientist and a Goan military hospital nurse.
For not only do the corpses bear two gaping holes in their chests, their eyes have been gouged out.
Wyndham and Banerjee are given the case, but Military Intelligence’s secretive and devious Section H, headed by old adversary Major Dawson, soon take over — though that doesn’t stop our duo from digging on.
Matters meanwhile comes to a head as the authorities schedule a trip by the visiting Prince of Wales to the restive city, while Section H now reveal the serial murders may have its roots in a series of military experiments, where poison gas was tested on some sepoy “volunteers” — and that a consignment of the gas has now gone missing.
Will Wyndham manage to overcome his secret weakness — and the military intelligence operatives their own agenda — to solve the case? Will this also forestall a monumental disaster if the poison gas is in the hands of the suspected murderer as well a likely clash between security personnel, led by hot-heads, and the protesters, looking to bait the imperial masters into more violent overreach. And then there is the Prince of Wales’s visit.
We learn how all this pans out in the course of this riveting mystery, full of twists and turns till well into its denouement, where the Britain-based Mukherjee ably using historical record (save in case of one rather high-stake standoff) to deliver an engaging, realistic backdrop to the action.
And then, the author provides some incisive literary and historical flourishes. This can be the curious relationship between the setting and the principal protagonist, with Wyndham, mulling why he felt at home there, feels “that, in its own way, Calcutta was as flawed and dysfunctional as I was: a city built in the middle of a fetid Bengal swamp, populated by misfits all struggling to survive against the odds”.
Or the new politics of the freedom struggle — say, how Wyndham saw Mohandas Gandhi, a view that may have then been of a maverick but would gain increasingly gain traction among his more understanding compatriots — in how even the sight of “man in his little dhoti” had persuaded millions, beyond the big cities’ “parlour-room revolutionaries” to “boycott British products, resign from government posts, and generally create a bloody nuisance”. Mukherjee also can’t resist to show the strategy resonated with the Bengalis.
And then, there are the historical personages, say Das’ aide, “a young, bespectacled Bengali, with a moon face and neatly parted, prematurely thinning, black hair”, recently returned from England, where he had topped the Civil Service entrance examinations but declined to join the service, and returned to India to fight for independence. Sounds familiar?
It is all this that keeps this from being just another exotic murder mystery to serve as a vivid portrait of Indian history’s course at a crucial time. Crime fiction aficionados, its not only for you!
(Vikas Datta can be contacted at vikas.d@ians.in )
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Books
By Kushagra Dixit,
Book: The Climate Solution; Author: Mridula Ramesh; Publisher: Hachette India; Pages: 295; Price: Rs 550
Mridula Ramesh’s new book “The Climate Solution” presents a plethora of information, facts, figures and data on climate change in the context of India and provides a roadmap for the way forward.
However, for anybody who has keenly observed the increasing environmental perils and national politics and international diplomacy around it, is bound to be left disheartened as the offering is some sort of a compilation of widely reported material on the environment.
This is not to suggest that the title is not worth the reader’s time. The book does justice, or at least tries to, and highlight the topic of environment and climate change by subtly connecting them with some region-specific and some widespread social practices.
The chapter “Women in Peril”, for instance, picks a social evil from a small South Indian village and connects it to the larger narrative around women empowerment. Now Ramesh relates this example to convey that with the increase in climate change, the opportunities for women workforce in the agricultural sector will stand challenged.
Over the past few years, environment issues have gained voice and terms like climate change, global warming and even Paris Agreement are now a part of common knowledge, at least in the urban landscape. This change is particularly because of the efforts of hundreds of environmentalists, conservationists and activists.
And, anyway, at a time when 40 degrees celsius has become a norm in the Indo-Gangetic plains during the summer, any endeavour that tackles this piercing issue is a welcome move.
Simple narrative, easy-to-read language and parallels drawn from Indian scriptures make “The Climate Solution” a captivating read.
The book offers some great stories and peeps into the past for lessons we need today. Lessons are drawn from success stories like how cotton cultivation revived itself in Punjab. It also touches on an ongoing conflict between two lobbies and asks whether or not we need genetically modified (GM) crops. It manages to be fair, not giving the issue of GM an activist-like treatment but rather giving facts of its need and side-effects.
It quotes a lot of “experts”, some figures such as “six Indian cities produce 30,000 tonnes of garbage every day” and how the waste management industry can create over half a million jobs. However, these figures are like “known population of tigers” — always a rough estimation with huge error scope, often inaccurate, and need more clarity and research. This book, however, lacks it.
This perhaps is the reason that even though this book could be about perils of climate change and stuff around it for dummies, it cannot be a text book for the same.
Coming to the most important factor — “Solutions” — the book touches on many topics and talks about and and comments on solutions like electric vehicles, harvesting, power and others. The solutions are not new, they are already being worked upon. In fact, some solutions — like the one on water policy under a strong enforcing authority and common ownership — does make sense, but hardly in the Indian context.
India is unique, needs indigenous solutions and examples from across the world may inspire but cannot be replicated here, a senior UN official once said in an interview.
However, what is impressive is that Mridula Ramesh has made and honest effort to keep the ball rolling.
—IANS
