In the first three months of the Narendra Modi government, arguably the most distinctive and welcome policy change has been an attempt to improve India’s relations with our neighbours. By inviting leaders of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation to his swearing-in ceremony and visiting Bhutan and Nepal, the Indian prime minister has indicated a willingness to prioritise South Asian relationships. Until now, the Indian government has traditionally treated our smaller neighbours – Nepal, Bhutan and Sri Lanka – with an unfortunate blend of arrogance and sanctimony.
This condescension is accompanied by a broader ignorance of these countries in Indian cultural and intellectual life. In this context, two impressive new books on India’s neighbours – Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island (Penguin), an oral history of the Sri Lankan civil war, and Prashant Jha’s Battles of the New Republic (Aleph), a political history of contemporary Nepal – are especially timely and important.
These are two very different books. Samanth Subramanian’s debut, Following Fish, was the freshest and most enjoyable Indian travelogue of recent years. In This Divided Island, he turns his attention to far graver matters, but in a vivid, allusive prose that is full of visual detail and unexpectedly attentive to the absurd. Battles of the New Republic, by contrast, is a terse and direct book. Prashant Jha’s intention is to inform, with as much clarity and brevity as possible. This means that both books, in different ways, have the capacity to engage a wide audience.
The roots of conflict
Sri Lanka’s long civil war between the Sinhalese-dominated government and the Tamils of the north began in 1983, although Subramanian dates its first stirrings to 1975, when Velupillai Prabhakaran, the infamous leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, carried out his first assassination. It ended in 2009 with tens of thousands of civilian deaths, the government triumphant and Prabhakaran dead.
Subramanian seeks to illuminate the war and its aftermath through a series of interviews that reflect the range of experiences that the war engendered. His interlocutors include several ex-Tigers, in Sri Lanka and abroad; Tamils who bravely opposed the LTTE; two Buddhist monks, one socialist and one militantly nationalist; and a number of journalists. To integrate these interviews into a broader historical narrative as seamlessly as Subramanian has done is a rare achievement.
Some of the book’s most moving and eloquent passages document the devastating impact of the LTTE on Tamil society. While deeply sympathetic to the Tamils, Subramanian is rightly appalled by the Tigers themselves. Describing their expulsion of Jaffna’s Muslims, their ruthless persecution of rival Tamil groups, and their brazen recruitment of child soldiers in the last days of the war, he debunks the idea that the LTTE were in any way the best hope, let alone the saviours, of Sri Lanka’s Tamils.
Even so, the Sinhalese triumphalism that followed the war was intended to underscore the Tamils’ status as a defeated people. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s autocratic style and nepotism are well-known, but Subramanian exposes his bizarre cult of personality, exemplified by the attempts to insert him into the Mahavamsa, an ancient Sinhalese epic, as a modern-day improvement upon the legendary king Dutugemunu.
A striking and unusual feature of This Divided Island is the extent of the author’s self-reflection. Subramanian is acutely aware of the implications of his position as an Indian journalist in Sri Lanka. He admits to “deep well of self-doubt”, writing that to be a journalist is to be a “parasite” and “voyeuristic”, as well as of “the puffed-up arrogance of a visitor to a big country from a small one”. The question of authorial perspective is even more central to Prashant Jha’s Battles of the New Republic, an avowedly personal book.
Jha is a third-generation Nepali of Indian origin. He was educated, and now lives in Delhi, and this, his first book, is an attempt to grapple with political change in Nepal since 2001 and its underlying causes. The country’s 21st century has been characterised by permanent uncertainty and rapid transformations: the abrogation of parliamentary democracy under King Gyanendra, the Maoist insurgency, the political success and subsequent decline of the Maoists, and Nepal’s uneasy first steps as a democratic republic.
A Madhesi's view
This is the fascinating raw material that is the basis of Jha’s book. Battles of the New Republic combines three distinct narrative forms: straightforward political history, oral history, and memoir. Jha situates the story of Nepal’s evolving political identity within his own quest to understand his Madhesi identity and vice versa. Through potted biographies and extended interviews, he explores the individual motivations and foibles of Nepal’s key political actors.
This is a book of remarkable detail and comprehensiveness, with both historical and sociological depth. Its most absorbing sections, however, are the studies of individual leaders, most notably the Maoists Pushpa Kamal Dahal – better known as Prachanda – and Baburam Bhattarai. The willingness of Nepali politicians to engage with a young journalist is the inverse of the attitude of the Sri Lankan government to journalists, whether local or foreign. Samanth Subramanian was officially in Sri Lanka as a tourist, continually aware of the need to avoid official suspicion. Jha’s encounters with self-interested Nepali politicians are often dispiriting, although he retains a broad optimism about the potential for secular democracy in a society where its roots remain shallow.
Battles of the New Republic is both intellectually serious and accessibly written, and occupies the ambiguous space in between academic and popular. Jha’s unfussy prose is in contrast to the book’s section headings, which sound like the chapter titles of a jargon-filled doctoral thesis: “Politics of the Gradual Revolution”, “Politics of Partial Sovereignty”, “Politics of Inclusive Nationalism”, and “Politics of Shanti-Sambidhan”. One hopes that the general reader is not turned off by this. Prashant Jha and Samanth Subramanian’s books are essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand India’s messy, fragile and tragic neighbourhood.
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This condescension is accompanied by a broader ignorance of these countries in Indian cultural and intellectual life. In this context, two impressive new books on India’s neighbours – Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island (Penguin), an oral history of the Sri Lankan civil war, and Prashant Jha’s Battles of the New Republic (Aleph), a political history of contemporary Nepal – are especially timely and important.
These are two very different books. Samanth Subramanian’s debut, Following Fish, was the freshest and most enjoyable Indian travelogue of recent years. In This Divided Island, he turns his attention to far graver matters, but in a vivid, allusive prose that is full of visual detail and unexpectedly attentive to the absurd. Battles of the New Republic, by contrast, is a terse and direct book. Prashant Jha’s intention is to inform, with as much clarity and brevity as possible. This means that both books, in different ways, have the capacity to engage a wide audience.
The roots of conflict
Sri Lanka’s long civil war between the Sinhalese-dominated government and the Tamils of the north began in 1983, although Subramanian dates its first stirrings to 1975, when Velupillai Prabhakaran, the infamous leader of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam, carried out his first assassination. It ended in 2009 with tens of thousands of civilian deaths, the government triumphant and Prabhakaran dead.
Subramanian seeks to illuminate the war and its aftermath through a series of interviews that reflect the range of experiences that the war engendered. His interlocutors include several ex-Tigers, in Sri Lanka and abroad; Tamils who bravely opposed the LTTE; two Buddhist monks, one socialist and one militantly nationalist; and a number of journalists. To integrate these interviews into a broader historical narrative as seamlessly as Subramanian has done is a rare achievement.
Some of the book’s most moving and eloquent passages document the devastating impact of the LTTE on Tamil society. While deeply sympathetic to the Tamils, Subramanian is rightly appalled by the Tigers themselves. Describing their expulsion of Jaffna’s Muslims, their ruthless persecution of rival Tamil groups, and their brazen recruitment of child soldiers in the last days of the war, he debunks the idea that the LTTE were in any way the best hope, let alone the saviours, of Sri Lanka’s Tamils.
Even so, the Sinhalese triumphalism that followed the war was intended to underscore the Tamils’ status as a defeated people. Sri Lankan President Mahinda Rajapaksa’s autocratic style and nepotism are well-known, but Subramanian exposes his bizarre cult of personality, exemplified by the attempts to insert him into the Mahavamsa, an ancient Sinhalese epic, as a modern-day improvement upon the legendary king Dutugemunu.
A striking and unusual feature of This Divided Island is the extent of the author’s self-reflection. Subramanian is acutely aware of the implications of his position as an Indian journalist in Sri Lanka. He admits to “deep well of self-doubt”, writing that to be a journalist is to be a “parasite” and “voyeuristic”, as well as of “the puffed-up arrogance of a visitor to a big country from a small one”. The question of authorial perspective is even more central to Prashant Jha’s Battles of the New Republic, an avowedly personal book.
Jha is a third-generation Nepali of Indian origin. He was educated, and now lives in Delhi, and this, his first book, is an attempt to grapple with political change in Nepal since 2001 and its underlying causes. The country’s 21st century has been characterised by permanent uncertainty and rapid transformations: the abrogation of parliamentary democracy under King Gyanendra, the Maoist insurgency, the political success and subsequent decline of the Maoists, and Nepal’s uneasy first steps as a democratic republic.
A Madhesi's view
This is the fascinating raw material that is the basis of Jha’s book. Battles of the New Republic combines three distinct narrative forms: straightforward political history, oral history, and memoir. Jha situates the story of Nepal’s evolving political identity within his own quest to understand his Madhesi identity and vice versa. Through potted biographies and extended interviews, he explores the individual motivations and foibles of Nepal’s key political actors.
This is a book of remarkable detail and comprehensiveness, with both historical and sociological depth. Its most absorbing sections, however, are the studies of individual leaders, most notably the Maoists Pushpa Kamal Dahal – better known as Prachanda – and Baburam Bhattarai. The willingness of Nepali politicians to engage with a young journalist is the inverse of the attitude of the Sri Lankan government to journalists, whether local or foreign. Samanth Subramanian was officially in Sri Lanka as a tourist, continually aware of the need to avoid official suspicion. Jha’s encounters with self-interested Nepali politicians are often dispiriting, although he retains a broad optimism about the potential for secular democracy in a society where its roots remain shallow.
Battles of the New Republic is both intellectually serious and accessibly written, and occupies the ambiguous space in between academic and popular. Jha’s unfussy prose is in contrast to the book’s section headings, which sound like the chapter titles of a jargon-filled doctoral thesis: “Politics of the Gradual Revolution”, “Politics of Partial Sovereignty”, “Politics of Inclusive Nationalism”, and “Politics of Shanti-Sambidhan”. One hopes that the general reader is not turned off by this. Prashant Jha and Samanth Subramanian’s books are essential reading for anyone who hopes to understand India’s messy, fragile and tragic neighbourhood.