Karnataka’s pluralism, Kavitha Rao’s new book, a Tolstoy in Jaipur and more

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Welcome to this edition of The Hindu on Books Newsletter. The firebrand Kannada writer, advocate and activist, Banu Mushtaq, whose collection of stories, Heart Lamp (Penguin), translated by Deepa Bhasthi, has been longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, has enriched the Kannada literary arena for decades with her stories about Muslim families with women characters who fight for their rights and assert themselves. In an interview with Sathish G.T., Banu Mushtaq said she is writing another set of short stories, which will be her seventh collection. “Over the years, the distance between people has been growing. Some people whom I have known for decades hardly talk to me in person, but they are curious to know my political views on social media platforms,” she noted. Besides the anthology, Mushtaq is also working on her autobiography, which is “half done,” and is hopeful that it will be completed soon.  

Talking about his new book Rama Bhima Soma (Westland Books) on the making of modern Karnataka, Srikar Raghavan said the State has historically been a multilingual, plural and multicultural society. In an interview with Preeti Zachariah, Raghavan said he studied the intense idealism of the 1970s generation and used it as a launchpad to explore that effervescent moment and narrate the social, cultural and political histories of modern Karnataka. And though he gives the perspectives of stalwarts like Kuvempu, Shivaram Karanth, U.R. Ananthamurthy, D.R. Nagaraj and M.M. Kalburgi, Raghavan also focuses on lesser-known voices from the late twentieth century while also engaging deeply with the seminal shakers and movers of the Kannada world of letters.

In reviews, we read Michel Houellebecq’s latest novel to be translated into English, an excerpt from Kavitha Rao’s new book, and read about writers and their craft in a book edited by Sonia Faleiro. We also write about meeting a Tolstoy at the Jaipur Literature Festival – Daniil Tolstoy, the great grandson of Leo Tolstoy.

Books of the week

man on a boat in the outer space with colorful cloud,illustration | Photo Credit: Grandfailure

Controversial French writer Michel Houellebecq’s new novel, Annihilation (Picador), translated by Shaun Whiteside, has two storylines – in one, a technically-savvy group of mysterious terrorists stages perfect attacks; and in the other, deals with the life of a high-level apparatchik in the French Ministry of Finance. In his review, Anil Menon writes that there isn’t much of a plot. Houellebecq, he says, “has always been better at narrative perversions such as irrelevant quips, rants, and info-dumps, than at making conflicts, cliffhangers and other embarrassing inducements for the more dimwitted reader.” But though Houellebecq’s style has similarities with those of Edgar Allan Poe, Marguerite Duras, and other novelists of the Balzacian persuasion, Menon says that unlike them, he is flippant and self-indulgent, and that his novel suffers on that account. “He has a sense of chaos and evil that contemporary literature badly needs, but his sentimentality prevents him from achieving the tragic grandeur to such efforts. A certain divine madness is missing.” 

In her new book, Spies, Lies and Allies (Westland Books), Kavitha Rao profiles two forgotten revolutionaries who tried every means to muster support for Indian independence. The dual biography traces the extraordinary lives of Virendranath Chattopadhyaya, brother of Sarojini Naidu, and M.N. Roy, who pioneered the communist movement in India, popularly known as Chatto and Roy. While Chatto’s luck ran out during the Stalin purge of 1937 and he was executed in Moscow, his fellow revolutionary, “the dashing and charismatic” Roy, seven years younger, had done what Chatto had wanted to do but couldn’t. Roy won Lenin’s friendship, founded one of the branches of the Communist Party of India, climbed to the top ranks of international communism, then cannily fled the Soviet Union in 1930, escaping Stalin’s purge. Read an excerpt here. 

How I Write (HarperCollins), edited by Sonia Faleiro, grew out of the South Asia Speaks Masterclass series, conceived as a space for writers of South Asian origin to speak about their craft. In his review, Sanjay Sipahimalani says the book is a candid compendium of perspectives by 18 noted practitioners of fiction and non-fiction on “what it means to be a creative person navigating and responding to a tumultuous world”. They speak about, among other things, writing habits, influences, and, perhaps most importantly, how their circumstances have shaped their work. “In one of the more powerful conversations, Jamil Jan Kochai tells Karan Mahajan that fiction gives him ‘the space to explore the contradictions occurring throughout my life and the way they impacted how I saw myself, how I saw history.’ His reflections on personal and historical complexity are underscored by critic Parul Sehgal who, speaking with Isaac Chotiner, deplores the pressure on South Asian writers to make their work ‘legible’. She cautions against the urge to ‘simplify, flatten, and overexplain’ because much is lost when writers reduce their characters and stories to meet predetermined standards.”

Spotlight

Gopalkrishna Gandhi and Daniil Tolstoy at the Jaipur Literature Festival | Photo Credit: VISHAL BHATNAGAR

At the Jaipur Literature Festival held earlier this year, Daniil Tolstoy, great-grandson of the Russian great Leo Tolstoy who had ties with Gandhi, had a session with Gandhi’s grandson, Gopalkrishna Gandhi, in which they spoke about war and peace and the values both Tolstoy and Gandhi espoused. In a meeting with Kallol Bhattacherjee, Daniil said though the Tolstoy family left Russia in 1917, following the Bolshevik revolution when Czar Nicholas II was eliminated along with his family, the family continued to have ties with their Russian family. In fact, Daniil, who lives in Sweden, said he ran an organic farm near the old family estate in Yasnaya Polyana, south of Moscow, till the Ukraine war began in 2022. “Travel to Russia was complicated by the war,” he said. At the session, Daniil said the war with Ukraine could have been avoided. “I think things were mishandled by both parties, but Russia should not have been provoked into a war. Moscow should have found a solution through diplomatic means.”

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• The Nehru-Era Economic History and Thought & Their Lasting Impact (Oxford University Press) by Arvind Panagariya studies the economic model taken up by Jawaharlal Nehru. His two foundational projects to build modern India were a political project aimed at establishing democracy with universal suffrage, and an economic one aimed at ending poverty. Three-quarters of a century later, his political project is a resounding success, but the opposite is true of the economic one, argues Panagariya.
• Ghee Bowman’s The Great Épinal Escape (Context) takes readers back to 1944 when after Allied forces had bombed a French town, Indian soldiers who were prisoners of war escaped to the border aiming to reach Switzerland. To get to the neutral territory of Switzerland, the escapees had to get around Nazis and their collaborators. Bowman pieces together the story of this great escape, captured in an eponymous book and film, helmed by Steve McQueen. This book tells the story of the “brown” escapees in full.
• Abdulrazak Gurnah, who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021, is out with his new novel, Theft (Bloomsbury). It narrates the story of three young people growing up in the Zanzibar of the 1990s. Karim, Fauzia and Badar dream of fresh opportunities in their young country, but how will Badar, an uneducated servant boy, fare in an unequal world? When he comes to work at the house of Karim, he finds true friendship which is brought under immense strain subsequently. This is Gurnah’s 11th novel.
• Published in collaboration with the Ashoka Centre for Translation as part of the Chronicles series, My Truth is the autobiography of an important figure in Gujarati literature. Narmadashankar Dave (1833-1866) was a poet, playwright, essayist, critic and social reformer and was a key figure in the 19th century Gujarati cultural sphere. Translated by Abhijit Kothari, it captures the life and struggles of Narmadashankar Dave, popularly known as Narmad.