Looking back on 2009, I find my bookshelf brimming with a remarkable range of writing — vigorous, ground-breaking and entertaining — in almost all genres: history, biography, anthology and fiction. Here’s a run through some of the best books of the year:
The Hindus: An Alternative History. By Wendy Doniger (Penguin; Rs 999). Argumentative, wide-ranging and controversial, this vast opus tracing the history of Hinduism from 2,500 BC takes robust swipes at Vedic literature, Hindu epics and much else in the evolution of the religion and its philosophy till the present day. What is original about the Sanskrit scholar and philologist’s history is her investigation of the role of marginal players — women, lower castes and animals — to the male-dominated Brahminical mainstream, suggesting, for instance, that Sita was more sexual than chaste. The English novelist Nancy Mitford, who wrote many well-informed histories of French notables, was once asked if her historical works were coloured by the lives of her notorious siblings, the Mitford sisters. “Of course,” she replied. “All history is subjective which is why most history books are about the dull lives of boring professors and their dusty libraries.” Doniger’s tome is laced with subversive wit and contemporary analogy. It may be hard to swallow in one go, but is an eminent volume to dip in from time to time.
The Painter: A Life of Raja Ravi Varma. By Deepanjana Pal (Random House; Rs 395). In his way Raja Ravi Varma was the MF Husain of the 19th century. A child prodigy at the court of the Maharaja of Travancore, he is sometimes called the first Indian modernist for bringing western realism to an array of indigenous subjects, especially in portraiture and mythological scenes. His art, much coveted still, is exorbitantly priced and often faked, but it made him a celebrity in his time. But Varma broke from the elitist mould to mass-produce his art in oleographs, bankrupting himself in the process. He was also a flawed genius: ambitious, obsessive and heartless. Deepanjana Pal’s biography is partly “faction”, but no less fascinating for bringing alive an artist’s life and times.
The Museum of Innocence. By Orhan Pamuk (Faber; Rs 650). The new novel by Nobel prize-winning writer returns to Istanbul of the 1970s to explore the nature of human desire amongst the city’s westernised elite. Like marry like in a class composed of merchant barons and the old Ottoman nobility against a backdrop of conspicuous consumption along villas on the Bosphorus. But what happens when the wealthy young protagonist Kemal falls in love with a shop girl living on the edge of shabby gentility? With delicacy and nuance, Pamuk captures the complex alchemy of attraction in a love story that is reminiscent of F Scott Fitzgerald, Saratchandra Chattopadhyay, WG Sebald and other great storytellers.
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders. By Daniyal Mueenuddin (Random House; Rs 395). A much applauded set of short stories, set in contemporary Pakistan, is the strongest debut of 2009. Reason: almost all sub-continental fiction is about, and for, the educated middle class, as if the rural-urban underclass, or the mutually predatory relationship between servants and masters, hardly exits. These characters are subtly dangerous like the treacherous undertow of a tide that will kill.
The Girl Who Kicked the Hornets’ Nest. By Stieg Larsson (Maclehose Press; Rs 495). The last of the Millennium trilogy by the Swedish thriller writer, who died tragically at the age of 50, takes his incomparably quirky heroine Lisbeth Salander, the dragon-tattooed computer hacker and her journalist friend Mikael Blomkvist, into the depths of espionage and Cold War intrigue unleashed by the Swedish secret service. The last of Larsson’s thrillers is longer, virulently more anti-establishment and peopled with darker, twisted villains than The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Girl Who Played with Fire. But like millions of his fans, I end the year with the sorry thought that there won’t be any more.
