The power of words at The Hindu Lit for Life, Arshia Sattar’s new book and more

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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. Over two days in the weekend, January 18-19, The Hindu held Lit for Life, 2025, in Chennai, where an array of writers – Abraham Verghese, Jenny Erpenbeck, Nirmala Lakshman, Shashi Tharoor, Ira Mukhoty, David Walliams, Romulus Whitaker, Janaki Lenin, Stanly Johny, Salil Tripathi, Mukund Padmanabhan, S. Hussain Zaidi, Rajdeep Sardesai and others — exchanged views and ideas with a wonderful audience. The literary festival was thrown open by physician-writer Abraham Verghese who, in a 50-minute speech, elaborated how he became a doctor and an “accidental writer”, with geography playing a key part in his destiny. In a talk, ‘Writing as a Form of Self-Discovery’, sprinkled with anecdotes, references to favourite books, characters and quotes, Dr. Verghese talked about some of the lessons learnt along the way, and the journey from India to Ethiopia to the U.S. In a powerful message to the young in the audience exhorting them to read, Dr. Verghese said, “There is no way you can experience everything in the world, but through the medium of novels you can live several different lifetimes. The only instrument that can stop time in the world is the novel.”

Here are the highlights from day 1 and day 2. In reviews, we read the concluding part of Mani Shankar Aiyar’s memoir, talk to Arshia Sattar who is out with a collection of Sanskrit plays in English, and pay tribute to writer and critic Bruce King.

Books of the week

In the second and final part of his memoir, A Maverick in Politics (Juggernaut), Mani Shankar Aiyar stands true to his values, writes Gopalkrishna Gandhi in his review, despite the Congress’ total rejection of him. The book, of just under 400 pages, “gives us story after story of how his hopes of a role in and through the Congress rose, only to be hurled down, rose again, to once again be flung aside.” But Gandhi says the diplomat-turned politician’s memoir talks about a bigger loss – causes to which he remains as steadfast as can be, but are not being debated as much by others, like the goal of nuclear disarmament, reviving India-Pakistan relations and ensuring better water treaties.

Arshia Sattar’s new book, Vasanta (Juggernaut), is a collection of Sanskrit plays in English. She has transformed them into short stories. In an interview with Nandini Bhatia, Sattar says it is easier to translate from Sanskrit into other Indian languages because there is a shared vocabulary and a shared worldview but one can also become complacent and careless when one makes those translations slip into apparent cognates. She contends that classics should be translated anew for each generation: “that’s the way to keep them interesting and accessible.” Asked why she chose these particular nine plays/stories, Sattar says it’s because she knows them well and like them very much and wants readers to know them and enjoy them.

Spotlight

Bruce King (1933-2024) made himself a pivot of the story of modern Indian poetry in English. In rich tributes, put together by novelist and poet Jeet Thayil, King’s friends recall his love for “literature, music, academia, family, travel, friendship, and gourmandise” which were “generously shared.” King passed away at his Paris home in December. Scholar and teacher Vera Mihailovich-Dickman writes that it was King’s correspondence with poet Jayanta Mahapatra which gave him the idea to visit India, where he met Keki N. Daruwalla in Delhi, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra in Allahabad, Nissim Ezekiel, Dom Moraes and Arun Kolatkar in Bombay who introduced him to other poets and writers. “King lived his life wherever his interests took him,” says Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Thayil notes that with the Modern Indian Poetry in English (1987) alone, King became the centre of the story, and history, of Indian poetry.

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• Veteran journalist Arun Shourie raises several questions about Hindutva ideologue V. D. Savarkar and answers them after poring through his books, speeches and statements. What did Savarkar think of Hinduism?; what sort of a state did he envisage?; why is Savarkar being resurrected, are some of the questions Shourie asks in The New Icon: Savarkar and the Facts (India Viking).

• Marking the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Constitution on November 26, 1949, Gautam Bhatia relooks the statute as a document that “creates, shapes, channels and constrains power.” In The Indian Constitution: Conversations with Power (HarperCollins), he argues that constitutionalism has been characterised by a centralising drift with power located within the Union executive.

• Amitabha Bagchi’s new novel, Unknown City (HarperCollins), follows protagonist Arindam Chatterjee’s story from the bestselling novel Above Average. In the latest, Arindam examines how his views on love, betrayal, ambition, masculinity and loneliness have evolved over time, making it a journey of self-discovery.

• M. Mukundan’s Mayyazhippuzhayude Theerangalil was first published in Malayalam in 1974. An exploration of the history of Mahe (a quaint French colony) set in the 1940s, it was translated into English in the 1990s by Gita Krishnankutty. Harper, in association with DC Books, has relaunched On the Banks of the Mayyazhi to mark 50 years of the novel.

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