The year that we have left behind was a testing time for the Indian republic. Under unremitting assault was everything I hold most dear – love, freedom, justice, kindness.
In troubled times like these, where do I turn? I turn to people I love, to my friends. I turn to myself. But I turn also to music, to films and to books.
It was books that spoke to me most this past troubled year. Books of conscience, books of courage, books of pain. Truth-telling, of prejudice, hate and violence. Of how these wrench and ravage people’s lives. Of brutal state persecution and societal injustice. Of our finest hearts and minds caged for years behind prison walls.
But also, of Kabir and the finest in our civilisational traditions. Of being raised in times when free, democratic, secular, socialist India was imagined and built. Of the daring dreams and pledges of the Constitution. And of the audacious hope of people’s resistance.
So let me list here some of the books of 2024 that linger most in my heart and mind.
City on Fire: A Boyhood in Aligarh, Zeyad Masroor Khan
This electrifying memoir of growing up in a ghetto in Aligarh seized my heart from its opening pages. Journalist Zeyad Masroor Khan draws on his memories of a childhood of communal and class segregation, casual discrimination and recurring riots to draw up an affecting narrative of India from the margins. His observations are acute, his descriptions vivid, his reflections thoughtful, but laced with irony and delicious self-deprecating humour. Despite everything, he speaks in the end of his memoir of why he came to believe that his father was right in choosing to stay on in India, unlike many of his relatives who migrated to Pakistan. Zeyad’s intelligent, funny and painful recollections pave the way for understanding what it means to be Muslim in India today.
India’s Forgotten Country: A View from the Margins, Bela Bhatia
In achingly beautiful prose, Bela Bhatia, an activist of exceptional credibility constructs a harrowing and necessary record of India’s forgotten people. Combining impeccable scholarship with a lifelong allegiance to justice, Bhatia bears first-hand witness to India’s catastrophic upheavals of caste and communal massacres, untouchability, ferocious caste discrimination, bonded labour, land hunger, widowhood, armed uprisings and forced displacement. Her searing log also draws within its sweep a wide gamut of resistances to injustice – individual and collective, peaceful and violent. Her book is a lodestar for the public conscience, a stirring reminder of the people the nation has brutalised and expelled in so many ways.
H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars, Kunal Purohit
Journalist Kunal Purohit takes us deep into India’s dusty hinterland to uncover how hate against Muslims is being systematically packaged into popular culture to reach millions of hearts and minds. We meet in the pages of his meticulously researched book singers and poets who create catchy songs and poems with stunningly violent and hateful lyrics. These songs enter every cell phone, they blare in political rallies, in religious celebrations, in family celebrations and outside mosques. We meet social media influencers who construct a false history and slanted interpretations of current events, all designed once again to nurture hate against India’s Muslims. Purohit’s book is a necessary read to comprehend how the slow daily drip of hate enters millions of lives and is rapidly radicalising the Hindu heart and mind.
Lynching in Indian Literature, Culture and Society, Abu Siddik
What most symbolises the dark times that India is passing through is the epidemic of lynching. This is the subject of Abu Siddik’s brave and significant book. He combines reportage, narrative, commentary, poetry and literature to weave an affecting portrait of the horror of these crimes, of criminal state complicity, and of the scale of fear and despair that lynching stirs in the hearts and minds of Indian Muslims. Some of the most compelling sections of the book draw terrifying comparisons with Jim Crow’s America, where the celebratory lynching of African American men continued for six decades. Siddik’s is a cautionary tale of what India is today and what it can become.
How Long Can the Moon be Caged: Voices of Political Prisoners, Suchitra Vijayan and Francesca Rechhia
This is a brave and indispensable record of how behind tall prison walls, brave men and women of rare moral and political courage are locked away by a state fearful of their dreams. This is a book of aching, terrible beauty, that bears witness to the stubborn endurance of idealism, of courage and humanity that shine through soul-numbing injustice. The writers describe the political prisoners who are incarcerated as men and women charged with “the crime of thinking, acting, speaking, probing, reporting, questioning, demanding rights, defending their homes, and, ultimately, exercising citizenship.” They introduce us to those jailed for these crimes – activists, poets, fact-checkers, journalists, lawyers, social workers, intellectuals and members of the Dalit community - and their valiant but mostly hopeless judicial battles, the fake evidence, the anguish of their loved ones outside prison, and what the writers describe luminously as “the community of resistance”.
The Incarcerations and the Search for Democracy in India, Alpa Shah
Alpa Shah prises open a terrifying window into the shadowy world of the crumbling of India’s democracy. She does this through her careful and comprehensive documentation of the notorious BK-16 case in which an array of intellectuals, writers, teachers, lawyers, trade unionists, scholars and cultural activists were incarcerated for years without the trial even commencing. The book evokes shock about how evidence was falsely implanted and justice repeatedly failed, and simultaneously inspiration and hope by its incandescent accounts of heroic women and men willing to lay down their lives fighting for justice for India’s most oppressed people. Her report is necessary, brave, meticulous, harrowing and immensely humane. It is a harrowing account of what happens when India’s democracy crumbles.
From Phansi Yard: My Year With the Women of Yerawada, Sudha Bharadwaj
Sudha Bharadwaj’s prison diary from her year as a political prisoner in the Yerawada Jail in Pune should be mandatory reading for every thinking Indian. The book starts with an interview in which she recounts with characteristic modesty her inspiring life journey. Born to two distinguished academics in the United States, she had a privileged childhood in Cambridge and the Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi. She cast all of this away, choosing instead to live and work for decades in a working-class settlement in Chhattisgarh of iron ore miners, led by the legendary Shankar Guha Niyogi. She describes her arrest as accused in the BK-16 conspiracy. Her slim book compiles her jottings in a notebook during her year in prison. These are piercingly compassionate accounts of her fellow women prisoners. In her own words, “Some prisoners pray, some weep, some just put their heads down and work themselves weary. Some fight defiantly every inch of the way, some are inveterate grumblers, some spew gossip. Some read the newspaper from cover to cover, some shower love on children, some laugh at themselves and at others”. The unforgettable glimpses of these women that emerge from Sudha’s book stay long with the reader, and the needless cruelty, the loneliness, the despair and the acts of kindness within an Indian women’s jail.
We, the People, and Our Constitution, Neera Chandhoke
This is the first in a series of ten short books edited by Neera Chandhoke and me, on the principal ideas of the Indian constitution. We believe we must bring these together at a time when each of these ideas is under dire onslaught. Neera Chandhoke vividly opens this series by describing how the Indian constitution came to be written. Unlike in many newly independent countries, she documents how the constitution was not given to India by the departing coloniser. It was a constitution given by the Indian people to themselves, forged through struggle and extensive deliberation. It did borrow ideas from around the world, but it was as Indian as the republic it created. She underlines how the Indian constitution is as much a political and moral document as it is a legal one.
Fraternity: Constitutional Norm and Human Need, Rajmohan Gandhi
It is fitting that the first thematic volume in our series on the ideas of the constitution is on Fraternity, because of all the ideas that form the core of constitutional morality, perhaps the most endangered is fraternity. The word for this in the Hindi version of the constitution is bandhuta, a resplendent word meaning that despite all our differences of religion, caste, language, class and gender, we are all bound to each other. It is fitting also that this volume is written by leading public intellectual and political activist Rajmohan Gandhi who is also the grandson of both Mahatma Gandhi and P Rajagoplachari. Gandhi elaborates in his monograph that fraternity is a solidarity that excludes no one, and why it is a condition necessary for India’s survival.
Liberty: The Indian Story, John Harriss
John Harriss, a globally renowned scholar of India’s political economy writes meticulously about the idea of Liberty as mandated in the Indian constitution, and as imagined by those he refers to as the Founders – the authors of the constitution and the leaders of India’s freedom struggle. He traces encroachments to the freedom of the individual by laws and executive actions through the journey of the republic. He speaks also of the expansion of positive freedoms, or in the words of Nehru for every Indian to have the “opportunity to develop himself according to his capacity”. He underlines that without massive improvements in employment, education and decent health care, the constitutional pledge of liberty for all will be emptied of meaning for very many Indians.
Secularism: How India Reshaped the Idea, Nalini Rajan
Political philosopher Nalini Rajan confronts the many contestations and debates the Indian idea of Secularism to affirm both its legitimacy and imperative. She unpacks this around a triage of ideas of state neutrality towards all religions, equal citizenship and religious freedom. She also speaks about some inherent tensions between these ideas. Even as the deviations in the practice of almost every political party and most governments since Independence and many significant court judgments reveal the fault lines with respect to secularism, Rajan persuades us that this does not change the reality that the idea of secularism is inseparable from the idea of a just and inclusive India that our founders had sought to build.
A Drop in the Ocean: The Story of My Life, Syeda Saiyidain Hameed
Syeda Hameed’s memoir shines with all the qualities that make Syeda herself a significant public figure in the turbulent times of changing India. There is in the pages of her memoir her humanity, her love for poetry, her truth-telling even about difficult periods in her personal life, her profound commitment to secularism, her deep religious faith and her throbbing love for her country that is changing beyond recognition. She recalls early in the book her single childhood encounter with prejudice, and her bewilderment and anguish in the ways that in India today bigotry has become routine. She recalls the influences of Nehru (who presented her with an award for her writing as a child), of Gandhi’s close comrade Maulana Azad, of India’s first president Zakir Hussain, of her uncle film writer and director Khwaja Ahmed Abbas, and her brief association with Indira Gandhi. Her personal story glows with the heady story of the building of free India but does not flinch from accounts of contemporary attacks on what she believed constitutes the soul of the idea of the land she loves.
The Personal is Political, Aruna Roy
Aruna Roy’s remarkable life overlaps almost completely with the life of independent India. Her memoir therefore reads also as a compelling narrative of growing up in democratic India, of its dreams and also its fractured freedoms. Aruna writes as a feminist, a humanist, a socialist. Her accounts are riveting, of being raised in a progressive middle-class Tamil household; her marriage to a charismatic Brahmo Samaji and national squash champion who is drawn to an unexpected offbeat vocation of changing rural India; her brief years in the elite Indian Administrative Service, her resignation and her voyage of discovery of rural India; her rage at the inequities of gender, caste and class; her wonder at the wisdom of the unlettered; and her struggles for gender equity, for labour rights, for the right to work and, for what she will most be remembered, the right to information. In these pages, political insights, grace, pique, humour and outrage all alternate, to weave together an illuminating and engaging account of an extraordinary life of meaning. There is hope, there is audacity, there is struggle, and there is bearing witness to the persistence of stubborn historical injustices combined with the new ones that free India brought in its wake.
The Notbook of Kabir: Thinner than Water, Fiercer Than Fire, Anand
Anand offers us an exquisite treasure, an eclectic, intelligent, sometimes maverick, even playful curation of Kabir’s poetry. The Kabir that Anand seeks out in the pages of his book is the poet who is astride a song, not trapped in books of learning. Anand’s is a compilation into which the reader can dip and find new meaning at every turn of her life. In lyrical and iridescent prose Anand describes why Kabir, in every age, has meaning amongst those who are “hungry for love and equality”. Kabir’s poetry for Anand is “a realisation of fraternity among strangers” across centuries. He describes Kabir’s sung-and-heard writing as Kabiri, a boundless community of poetry, a fabric without stitches, wear and tear, woven together by the poet, the singer and the listener into a “warm blanket of words”. Anand’s Notbook of Kabir is a book that will not age.
Audacious Hope: An Archive of How Democracy is Being Saved in India, Indrajit Roy
Indrajit Roy’s Audacious Hope is a luminous work of engaged scholarship. It acknowledges the ravages of India’s democracy – the crumbling of institutions, the cult of the strongman, widening inequalities and the politics of hate - and the dangers each of these poses to the future of the Indian people. And yet Roy locates hope - iridescent realist hope – in the non-violent struggles of people in resistance to oppression and autocracy. You meet in the pages of his book people who rose up against the violence of caste, who fought anti-farmer statutes and the changes in citizenship laws that discriminated against Indian Muslims. You meet activists, poets, writers, filmmakers, stand-up comedians, students, workers, farmers and lawyers, each of who wage brave battles to defend secular democracy. The book is ultimately a meditation on what makes up the soul of a democracy, and this is people who are willing to stake everything for what is humane and just, people committed to fight righteous battles even if they are destined to lose. Hopelessness, Roy concludes stirringly, is a luxury no Indian can afford who cares about the future of their democracy. You fight the darkness of oppression, he reminds us, with your imaginations for the better future you strive to build from the ruins of the past.
