A literary affair

Historian Ramachandra Guha's 40-year relationship with his editor and friend, a fellow Stephanian, goes beyond mere indulgence-it's also culturally important for a host of reasons

The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir

Author: Ramachandra Guha

Publisher: Juggernaut Books

Pages: 243

Price:  Rs 699

In the Indian publishing landscape, there hasn’t been an occasion where an author has been able to substantially foreground a relationship with an editor in a book as compellingly as noted historian Ramachandra Guha has managed to do in his latest book, The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir.

It is also a privileged, indulgent endeavour. Who else but someone of Guha’s stature would be able to either get commissioned or have managed to pitch a personal history of a relationship he has nurtured for over 40 years with his editor, friend, fellow Stephanian, and co-founder of an independent press Permanent Black Rukun Advani?

Besides privilege and pedigree, it was the pandemic-induced travel restrictions that made Guha turn towards his “correspondence with Rukun (handwritten or typed from 1986 to 2003, via email thereafter)” instead of allowing him to explore “the archives [he] needed for [his] scholarly work.”

As Guha notes, “In many respects, this memoir also records a vanished world.” Here he is hinting at a world in which while “[a] few writers were much celebrated”, they were not seen as celebrities; where social media didn’t dictate the terms of engagement, and the number of the authors’ followers didn’t automatically make them an authority on their subject. Only their intellect did, and it was intellect that editors such as Advani pursued instead of centralising and bending the publishing process of a book towards its business (read: sales) end.

But where and how did the gregarious Guha meet reclusive Advani? In St Stephen’s College, where “in the 1970s, when [Advani] was already deep into serious books while [Guha] was an anti-intellectual sportsman.”  He adds, “Apart from being a sports type, I was boisterous and badly dressed. This may have further predisposed Rukun Advani against me.” Reading the fated encounter outside Allnutt Court in the college in which Mr Advani didn’t reciprocate his “Hello” suggests that the future historian and environmentalist was deeply disappointed.

Anyway, they meet again at a common friend’s wedding. Later Mr Advani, who had begun working as an editor at the Indian branch of the Oxford University Press (OUP) in the 1980s, proposed that Guha share his dissertation thesis, publishing another scholarly work for which OUP was increasingly being noted.

That sparked off a long correspondence between the two. Over the years, a relationship of mutual admiration, trust and respect developed. As Dr Guha notes in the Preface to this book: “In an author’s life, the person next in importance to his or her romantic partner is his  or her editor.” Interestingly, the book is dedicated to his “second-best editor”, Sujata Keshavan, his wife.

Divided into seven parts, the book begins with describing how Advani “ragged” the first-year history honours student Amitav Ghosh. As someone who studied engineering, the healthy idea of ragging by asking the person to identify a classical composition —  Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto  — doesn’t seem as terrifying as the unmentionable things that continue to happen in engineering colleges. The way Guha recounts this incident, calling Advani “the legend”, establishes the kind of effect the latter was perhaps having on the all-male Stephanian cohort.

If you look beyond the adulation, however, this book is culturally important for a host of other reasons. From recounting the history of Ram Advani Booksellers in Lucknow’s Hazratganj to how OUP under its brilliant editors Ravi Dayal and Rukun Advani managed to produce scholarly works like never before, The Cooking of Books  shines a light on how books are brought to life by a learned, sensitive, and self-aware editor.

Examples of Advani’s reflections on submissions are peppered throughout the book, but I particularly enjoyed the following: “Even ‘however’ and ‘so to speak’, placed in the middle of a nicely fluid sentence, can make it sound pontifical. Quieter, straighter, unbroken sentences are generally a lot more attractive. The need to sound authoritative is an academic ailment that should be replaced by the subtler desire to sound tentatively certain.”

Perhaps intellectual historians can pay heed to Advani’s advice to write readable books instead of books that are written to simply signal intelligence and pedigree. Another reflection of his biting wit is the reproduction of a “Swiftian, scatological takedown of the Subalternist descent into jargon” by Advani.

Though the book contains interesting anecdotes and encounters, it also unconsciously reflects how people who studied in great schools and colleges and worked in some distinguished departments remained connected. It must be noted that three years ago, Penguin published a “festschrift” for Mr Guha titled A Functioning Anarchy: Essays for Ramachandra Guha.  The volume, which included a piece by Advani, was edited by Srinath Raghavan and Nandini Sundar. Mr Guha has paid his debts squarely by offering this glorious eulogy in the form of a book, which could have easily been a handwritten letter of appreciation to Advani.

The reviewer is a Delhi-based writer and freelance journalist. On Instagram/X: @writerly_life