The feisty bookshelf of 2017

This year has been a good one for the organisation I work with - the Hyderabad Book Trust, with four books primarily concerned with women, published. All four are translations, two new and two re-issues of long out-of-print books.

The reprints are ‘Nenu Phoolan Devi, a translation from ‘I, Phoolan Devi: The Autobiography of India's Bandit Queen’ translated by Navatha and published by us in 1999, and ‘Oka Thalli’, a translation from ‘Hazaar Churasher Maa’ by Mahasweta Devi was translated from the Bengali by Soorampudi Seetharam, and first published in 1983. I personally rate ‘Nenu Phoolan Devi’ as one of the best books HBT has published.

Both Phoolan Devi and Sujatha (of Oka Thalli) face violence in their lives – Phoolan, from her very birth in an impoverished Mallah family in Uttar Pradesh, her marriage as a child and the sex torture that followed, her flight into the ranks of dacoits, the attack on her by a gang of landlords, and her murder later. Despite this litany of violence inflicted on her, Phoolan’s life is testimony to her grit and determination to live life on her own terms. Sujatha, on the other hand, living among the rich, saw violence in the life and death of her son.

Our new arrivals – ‘Manaku Teliyani MS: Devadasi Putrika Nundi Sangeetha Samragni Varaku’ and ‘Kolimi Ravvalu: Gauri Lankesh rachanalu’, are again hugely women-centred. The MS biography by TJS George and translated by Volga, foregrounds her birth and upbringing in a devadasi household, her turning away from the path shown by her fiercely ambitious mother and her assimilation into the Tamil Brahmin fold by marriage to another fiercely ambitious man. Was MS’ life a tragedy as Carnatic vocalist TM Krishna says? Did her assimilation into Brahminism spell defeat for the devadasis?

‘Kolimi Ravvalu’ is a selection of writings of Gauri Lankesh, the spirited warrior against Hindutva and caste, who was shot dead recently outside her home in Bengaluru. The selection reveals different aspects of Gauri – not just the warrior, but also a lover of humanity in all forms, a lover of animals, an appreciation of the arts, a keen eye for national and state politics.

Other books
Among the 2017 women-specific books, I have read some remarkable ones and one hugely disappointing one. Kamila Shamsie’s ‘Home Fires’ was absolutely riveting even if one did not know the story of the Greek Antigone. She combines intimate family drama with the issues confronting the Muslim in today’s world.

‘Pachinko’ by Min Jin Lee is the story of a Korean woman who raises a bastard. It speaks of all the stuff most good novels do – family and love, but it also asks questions that have never been, more timely. What does it mean to be part of a nation? And what can one do to escape its tight, painful, familiar bonds?

Celeste Ng in ‘Little Fires Everywhere’ explores the simmering race dynamics in a small mid-West town as well as inter-family issues. It also addresses the privileging of adoption of Asian babies by White families. Remember our Lambada babies being sold abroad in thousands a decade ago?

Suzy Hansen’s ‘Notes on a Foreign Country’ asks the question, why does the rest of the world hate the US. It was surprising to see such insight from one on the other side of the wall. (She’s American.) The question is global but her answers are from her lived experience as an American.

‘The Underground Railroad’ by Colin Whitehead is not written by a woman but its protagonist is Cora, the slave who flees the South. The first several pages set us onto the well-trodden slave story and then... science fiction meets fantasy and a picaresque adventure tale, all against the backdrop of a reimagined 19th-century America. The book won the 2017 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, The good news is that Santhasundari is translating the novel for HBT into Telugu and it should be out soon.

One book – not released this year, but which I could lay my hands on just now is the deeply moving’ Last Night I Dreamed of Peace - The Diary of Dang Thuy Tram’, 2008 translated by Pulitzer Prize-winning Vietnamese American journalist Pham from Vietnamese into English. This is the lost diary of a Vietnamese doctor which was recovered decades later and then became a bestseller in both Vietnam and English.

Vietnam majorly impacted our lives and it is thrilling to read of the idealistic young North Vietnamese doctor. who describes her labours in makeshift clinics and hidden hospitals during the escalation of the Vietnam war.

Another important book out this year is Sujatha Gidla’s ‘Ants Among the Elephants’. I had been following drafts of this book for some time and marvelled in the rich detail and the broad strokes of the author. One such chapter (now removed from the printed book along with several others) was excerpted for our OUP Anthology of Dalit Literature in 2016.

I was astonished to find that the printed book contains several historical inaccuracies, particularly about the Telangana movement, the ML movement in the undivided state, about those who worked in these movements and their families - and that the publishers had not fact-checked it. Perhaps the reason they did not do so is that western publishing houses can pick up and exoticise our cultures and histories with impunity.