Books | Best of 2021 Books

My Choice

Open Open | 17 Dec, 2021

Pratap Bhanu Mehta, Political scientist and columnist

In literature, five original books published in 2021 that I read were Keerthik Sasidharan, The Dharma Forest (Penguin), at once an original lyrical and profound recreation of the Mahabharata, mining its inexhaustibility in truly creative ways. Apoorvanand’s Yah Premchand Hain (Setu Prakashan) is an incredibly meditative and subtle reading of Premchand. It is a model of what literary criticism can be. It is also a deeply moving reflection on the lived complexities of secularism refracted through Premchand’s oeuvre. The translation of Gyan Chaturvedi’s haunting Baramasi as Alipura (Juggernaut) was an excuse to revisit this amazing writer. Richard Zenith’s magnificent biography of Fernando Pessoa, Pessoa: A Biography (Liveright) both illuminates and makes even more mysterious one of the most extraordinary writers of the 20th century. The thought that Gandhi and Pessoa were in Durban at the same time adds speculative interest to a model biography. Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World (Pushkin Press), is an unusual and compelling novella of mathematicians losing their own selves.

Apoorvanand’s Yah Premchand Hain is incredibly meditative and a subtle reading of Premchand. It is a model of what literary criticism can be

In Indian intellectual history, four unusual items were J Sai Deepak, India that Is Bharat: Coloniality, Civilisation and Constitution (Bloomsbury), is not original, but is a systematic and serious window into a strain of thinking about India that is now becoming dominant. Ankur Barua, The Brahmo Samaj and Its Vaisnava Milieus (Brill), is a subtle book that at last punctures the too intellectualised contrasts between Brahmoism and wider Vaishnava practice; Caterina Guenzi, Words of Destiny: Practising Astrology in North India (SUNY Press), a sophisticated look at the teaching and anthropological practice of this art in Banaras; Jonathan Duquette, Defending God in Sixteenth- Century India: The Saiva Oeuvre of Appaya Diksita (OUP), is a fascinating study of this intellectual giant, but leaves unresolved the central mystery of Hindu Thought: why does Advaita and sectarianism go so much hand in hand?

Otherwise, 2021 was a sterling year for Indian Foreign Service scholars, especially on China: Shivshankar Menon, India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present (Allen Lane), is a masterpiece of rigour and scrupulous judgement; Nirupama Rao, The Fractured Himalaya: India, China and Tibet 1949-1962 (Viking), brings a narrative depth to this triangular relationship, and Vijay Gokhale’s The Long Game: How the Chinese Negotiate with India (Vintage) and his Tiananmen Square: The Making of a Protest (HarperCollins) are fine contemporary histories. They can be profitably read alongside Rush Doshi’s deeply researched, if slightly overdetermined, China: The Long Game: China’s Grand Strategy to Displace American Order (OUP).

Cheryl Misak’s Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (OUP) is a brilliant, evocative biography of Ramsey who died at the age of 26, but had made breathtaking contributions to mathematics, economics and philosophy. Amia Srinivasan is one of the most brilliant and original voices in contemporary political theory and her The Right to Sex (Bloomsbury) is bracing, provocative and profound.

William Dalrymple, Author

This year, two remarkable books on archaeology gave me particular pleasure. Edmund Richardson’s Alexandria: The Quest for the Lost City (Bloomsbury), is not, as its title might suggest, about Egypt, instead it tells one of the great stories of Afghan archaeology, exploration and espionage. Charles Masson’s desertion from the East India Company and his extraordinary travels and discovery of Hellenistic Afghanistan are here brought to life with passion, style, scholarship and empathy. Until now no one has uncovered the full, extraordinary, heartbreaking truth either about Masson’s remarkable life or his tragic death and burial in an unmarked grave. Richardson is a new star whose painstaking research and evocative prose has resulted in an utterly brilliant biography.

In River Kings (William Collins), the Scandinavian archaeologist Cat Jarman writes about the Vikings with great skill, clarity and narrative drive. Rather unfashionably, Jarman likes her Vikings violent, and her tale—replete with witches, human sacrifice, Greek fire and funeral orgies—is at least as lively as any Netflix Viking romp, and a great deal more intellectually satisfying. Jarman has an enviable gift for turning dry archaeological data into thrilling human stories as she weaves cutting-edge science with chronicles, histories and Nordic sagas, moving effortlessly from laboratory readings of carbon-14 to the tales of the Icelandic bard Snorri Sturluson and legends of the Valkyries. In this way, she gradually reveals the extraordinary history of the Vikings’ activity from Greenland and the Baltic to the walls of Constantinople and the bazaars of Baghdad.

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville (Simon & Schuster) by Akash Kapur is a forensic reconstruction of two deaths set against the background of the flawed tropical utopia of Auroville. It is beautifully written and structured, deeply moving, and realised in wise, thoughtful, chiselled prose. Like The Beach, it tells an extraordinary tale of a paradise lost, of an Eden gone awry, and of the dangers of utopian naivety: what happens when, inevitably, dreams collide with harsh reality. Like In Cold Blood, it is that rarity: a genuine non-fiction classic.

Akash Kapur’s Better to Have Gone is beautifully written and structured, and realised in wise, thoughtful, chiselled prose

Alex Renton’s Blood Legacy: Reckoning with a Family’s Story of Slavery (Canongate Books) is a moving, timely, well-written and strikingly thoughtful book that makes an important contribution to the growing debate on the horrors that accompanied Britain’s empire building. Renton’s forensic and remarkably honest analysis of his own family’s slave plantation papers and the darkness they contain, highlights Britain’s continuing failure to acknowledge the extreme toxicity of its imperial history. It makes a good counterpart to Sathnam Sanghera’s brilliant and much acclaimed Empireland (Viking) and like it, reminds us how deeply impregnated the British present still is with the half-forgotten imperial past.

On his trip to The Amur River (Harper), Colin Thubron’s horse rolled and threw him in a Mongolian bog, leaving him with two fractured ribs and a broken ankle fibula. With the grit of an explorer from an earlier age, Thubron doggedly carried on, riding, limping and boating 3,000 miles along the Amur river, past the razor wire and watchtowers of the Russian and Chinese border, surviving military manoeuvres, police interrogations and threatened deportations, as he moves slowly through Mongolia, Siberia and Manchuria until he finally reaches the Amur’s Pacific mouth. The book which he had produced at the end of this ordeal is no less remarkable than the journey itself: a miraculous late-style masterpiece, the equal of any of his earlier works, which will cement his reputation as one of the greatest prose writers in any genre.

Amit Chaudhuri, Author

I lighted upon both the wonderful books I’m about to mention here by chance. Last year, in November, I began to share with my creative writing MA class at the University of East Anglia my sense that modernism had emerged (in both the West and in India) from the encounter writers had had with texts often from outside Europe. Then I suddenly found myself speaking about Hegel’s inability to comprehend the aleatory nature of works like the Bhagavad Gita, or the meditative ambitions of Buddhism. A young man who had studied philosophy as an undergraduate spoke up for Hegel in an e-mail he sent me later, and, by coincidence, a review that James Wood had written of László Földényi’s book of essays Dostoyevsky Reads Hegel in Siberia and Bursts into Tears (Yale University Press) came up on the internet at the same time.

Enzo Traverso situates the out-of-place melancholy that some, not all, of us feel in the fall of the Berlin wall

I was interested to note, from Wood’s absorbing review, that Földényi was a critic of the European Enlightenment— not from some professionalised or narrow literary theoretical standpoint, but from the perspective of a reader, a devotee of literature, a human being, and, possibly, a Central European (Földényi is Hungarian).These essays confirm that the Enlightenment, whose watered-down legacy we have now come to understand as the ‘West’, cannot fully account for the wayward and multiple—Földényi’s word, in English translation, is ‘unbounded’—nature of existence. Földényi’s angularity, as a Hungarian, to the pristine construct called ‘European culture’ must have taken him to Dostoyevsky (Russians aren’t really European—that is, Western European—either) and to speculate richly on a brief remark in a memoir by a friend of Dostoyevsky’s, Vrangel, in connection with the time they both spent in Siberia in 1854 as conscript soldiers. Földényi reveals that the two, having a lot of time on their hands, were reading books, among them a textbook by Hegel. What might have Dostoyevsky’s response to Hegel been, Földényi wonders, given the German, in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, noted that Siberia, like Africa, was outside the bounds of human history? What does it mean to be out of bounds, or, phrased differently, ‘unbounded’? This poetic enquiry into what was, or is, left out by ‘Western history’ yields much richer results—results that our own part of the world can be in conversation with—than turning only to ideas like ‘ethnicity’ and ‘identity’, which themselves can display Enlightenment-like strictures.

The other book I have in mind, again discovered by chance in the days of Zoom, is Enzo Traverso’s Left-Wing Melancholia (Columbia University Press). Though Traverso may (or may not) disagree with Földényi about Hegel and other things (Földényi speaks of the costs of the loss of the “metaphysical” dimensions of existence in contemporary life; Traverso owes part of his formation to Marx, I think), there is an overlap between the two books in terms of style (essayistic and poetic) and tone (melancholic). In fact, Földényi has a book called Melancholy. Traverso situates the out-of-place melancholy that some, not all, of us feel (the change that came over our ‘structures of feeling’) in the fall of the Berlin Wall. With the Soviet Union and the Left crumbling, many of us—not necessarily from the Left, not necessarily Europeans—experienced a sense of lostness in a world that now had no oppositionality, where all was pervaded by the excitement of the free market. The fact that some feel out of place today (and how could at least a few of us, in India, not feel this redundancy, given that, post-Independence, we were formed by socialism, a ‘mixed economy’, and state regulation?) remains not only largely unacknowledged, but without language. Traverso’s book is valuable for giving this post-1989 melancholy an identity, a vocabulary, and a history. The term ‘melancholy’ makes one wonder about the academic elites today that are supposed to belong to the ‘Left’ and have exuberantly embraced globalisation, and have no whiff of melancholy about them.

David Davidar, Publisher and author

Sometimes, the juries of literary prizes get it right. They manage to overcome lapses in judgement, tedious literary feuds, genuflections to eminences well past their sell-by date, conflicts of interest,and other such problems and give the award to the best book of the year. When this year’s Booker jury gave the prize to The Promise (Chatto & Windus) by Damon Galgut, in my view, they got it exactly right.

Damon has always been an exceptional talent, making masterpieces every couple of years or so, ever since he burst onto the literary scene at an absurdly young age with A Sinless Season. Until this one came along and confused the issue, my favourite novel was In a Strange Room, a book that seemed to be engraved on beaten copper, so beautifully was it written. Always a supreme stylist, in The Promise he displays an altogether different kind of virtuosity—the novelist as ventriloquist. The novel jags around between the perspectives and voices and thoughts of its principal characters without once missing a beat or striking a false note—a feat only a master of the craft could pull off.

The novel revolves around the Swart family—the parents, Manie and Rachel, and their children, Amor, Astrid, and Anton. The Swarts are white South Africans and employ Salome and her son Lucas, who are black. Manie had promised his wife on her deathbed that he would will Salome, the nanny, the house she lived in but goes back on this promise and this is the sharp end of the chisel that the novelist employs to chip away at the lies of his land. Damon investigates the faultlines that underlie his home country, South Africa, but the failures and cruelty of the Swarts and the land they are rooted in, could apply just as well to families and nations and societies anywhere that are unequal and brutal—the Swarts they are us!

When this year’s Booker jury gave the prize to The Promise by Damon Galgut, in my view, they got it exactly right. He has always been an exceptional talent, making masterpieces every couple of years or so, ever since he burst onto the literary scene at an absurdly young age with a Sinless Season

The conflict and sadness in the book are balanced by black humor and the gorgeousness of the prose. Everywhere you encounter writing like this: “…When the buildings fall away the old earth shows itself beneath its petticoats, bleached and bare. The day itself has a bony sheen to it, light pouring down from a hard, bright sky. All of this you know of old, but when you are past the township and at the spot where the farm begins, your eye goes straight to the tip of the spire of the big, ugly church building. Still seems like a shock and an intrusion…The First Assembly of the Revelation of Highveld, though what exactly was revealed to Alwyn Simmers (the pastor) has never been made apparent to anybody else. Nevertheless, there’s a sizeable crowd outside the church and the sound of hymns is painted on the air.”

A novel of ambition, deft characterisation, and acute insight, The Promise is, unquestionably, one of the great ones and it is, by far, the best novel I have read this year.

Ira Mukhoty, Author

Madhouse at the End of the Earth: The Belgica’s Journey into the Dark Antarctic Night (WH Allen) by Julian Sancton is a work of non-fiction which tells the story of the 1897 Belgian expedition to Antarctica, headed by the idealistic and ill-prepared Adrien de Gerlache. De Garlache wanted to lead the first scientific expedition to the South Pole but failed, becoming instead, and almost accidentally, the first party to winter in Antarctica. As their vessel, the Belgica, becomes locked into the ice, Sancton brings to life both the stifling claustrophobia and ethereal beauty of a landscape that had never been witnessed. Sancton was able to access a huge amount of research materials, including logbooks, journals and letters, and so he is able to create a haunting sense of the human drama involved as these men journey through the endless Antarctic ice and reach into the deepest recesses of their physical endurance and mental grit. Not all of these men will return, one will lose his mind, and all will be forever shaped by their captivity in the polar winter. A mesmerising book that gives us the chance to witness, almost palpably, a most unique adventure.

Madhouse at the end of the earth gives us the chance to witness, almost palpably, a most unique adventure

Almost 20 years after her debut in 2002, Mary Lawson has published a work of literary fiction, A Town Called Solace (Chatto & Windus). Set in a small, nondescript Canadian town in the 1970s, A Town Called Solace is three interlinked stories in one. The central story revolves around a family suddenly struck down by terror when their teenage daughter disappears. Meanwhile, a no-longer-very-young man from the city moves into the house next to theirs, bearing boxes that he refuses to unpack, while an old lady lies in a hospital bed, sifting the remorse and guilt from her memories. Lawson slowly spins the delicate web that will connect all three stories, in prose that is supremely sure, stately and fluid. This is a story that flows and ebbs like the tide, that cannot be hurried, yet retains a coiled urgency and power.

Aatish Taseer, Author

Better to Have Gone: Love, Death and the Quest for Utopia in Auroville by Akash Kapur (Simon & Schuster). I absolutely loved this book. I went to school with kids from Auroville. I spent many a misspent vacation tooling about that Utopia down south, racing down its red earth roads on Enfields, smoking spliffs and drinking cold Kingfishers. Not for one moment did I envisage the scale and history of the enterprise that to my mind seemed like little more than a hippy-dippy seaside commune—a relic of the 1960s. Kapur’s scorching book, which uses the story of his wife’s parents’ tragic relationship, to dramatise the founding of Auroville, opened my eyes. I read it with my heart in my mouth. Through the story of Diane, a Belgian hippie, and John Walker, the trustafarian scion of a glamorous American family with connections to the Kennedys and Isaiah Berlin, Kapur threads through the whole story of the founding of Auroville, with its terrible internecine battles. He also does something else: One has always half-suspected there existed a fanatical character beneath the veneer of the happy hippy, all peace-and-love. Kapur, non-judgmental to a fault, lays bare that puritan zeal, as well as the moral squalor of hippy life. Better to Have Gone reads like a thriller, but is one of the severest indictments of the 1960s that I have encountered.

The Magician by Colm Tóibín (Viking). I am obsessed with the Manns. What a fucked-up fascinating family! There’s Thomas, all buttoned up on the outside, a cauldron of homosexual passion on the inside, now fixated with beautiful Italian waiters, now harbouring an incestuous longing for his own son, Klaus. Everyone is gay. Klaus is gay. Erika, Mann’s daughter, is gay. She married Auden, who is gay too, as the Manns are sent into exile when the Nazis come to power in Germany. Sexuality, here, as in Savarkar’s case, feels connected to nationalism and boy love. Thomas has his flirtation with German militarism, which he walks back from when he sees the horror of what it has wrought, and his books are being burnt in the Opernplatz. The Mann family has the atmosphere of Visconti’s The Damned. It’s a combustible mixture of fetishism and fascism, sex and suicide that Tóibín brings to life. He was wonderful on James—another profile in sexual repression—he’s even better on Mann.

PS: for all those people who fear the indiscretions of writers, hell hath no fury like an angry old queen repressed!

I don’t normally like histories that drive an agenda (and this one obviously does) any more than I like the agenda itself, but it is hard to read this book, without feeling that we have been trifled with in our understanding of the Ottomans

The Ottomans: Khans, Caesars and Caliphs by Marc David Baer (Basic Books). Remember the story (no doubt, apocryphal) of the Viennese master baker, Peter Wendler, who after the second siege of the city, in 1683, created that croissant in the shape of a crescent, to mark (and surely, to mock) the vanquishing of the armies of the Grand Vizier Kara Mustafa…Well, it is one in a long line of tales designed to turn the Ottomans into an evil Muslim other lurking menacingly on the frontiers of a truer Christian Europe. In fact, the Ottomans were far more European, both in the way they saw themselves, and in their deep interconnectedness to Europe than anyone is prepared to admit. Baer’s book is a much-needed correction. In their willingness to accept the mantle of Rome, and in the number of converted Europeans who rose to the highest positions in their administration, he shows us in persuasive and riveting detail how deeply integrated a part of Europe the Ottomans truly were. I don’t normally like histories that drive an agenda (and this one obviously does) any more than I like the agenda itself, but it is hard to read this book, without feeling that we have been trifled with in our understanding of the Ottomans. In accepting religion as the only basis of division—rather than as merely one such basis—we have failed to see, somewhat ahistorically, how culture can matter more than faith. Later, of course, as insecurity crept in, the Ottomans lost their ability to absorb diversity, but Baer’s book gives us an invaluable insight into many centuries of thrilling variety and cultural cross-fertilisation, before the inevitable yearning for purity—ever the hallmark of a culture grown fearful— kicked in.

Arundhathi Subramaniam, Poet

The Unfettered Note: Indian Women Seers and Their Songs by Subhadra Desai (Aryan Books International) is a work of joyous scholarship. This book by a classical musician and academic offers a trajectory of women’s voices in sacred music—from Vedic seers to Bhakti sant kavis.

The Gita: Mewari Miniature Painting (1680 -1698) by Allah Baksh by Alok Bhalla and Chandra Prakash Deval (Niyogi). I’m still immersed in this astounding visual exposition of the Bhagavad Gita—the first-ever publication of 385 miniature paintings by a 17th century Muslim miniaturist, Allah Baksh. Alok Bhalla’s commentary is measured, exploratory, precise, offering the right mix of context and reflection, detail and ellipsis.

The Secret World of Mehlli Gobhai: The Man Who Found Art Everywhere by Jerry Pinto (Pratham Books). A moving tribute to Mehlli Gobhai, an artist well-known and dearly beloved of many of us in Mumbai’s cultural world, this book offers a way of looking at art, a way of looking at friendship, a way of talking to children, a way of making magic and discovery a part of one’s daily life.

A Bit of Everything by Sandeep Raina (Context). Something about this novel of tragic dispossession as told by a narrator—a teacher from small-town Kashmir, engaging in his familiarity and fallibility—is deeply moving. Raina’s first book explores questions of woundedness, injustice and identity in ways that are urgent, tender, puzzled, human.

Names of the Women by Jeet Thayil is a novel that combines near-scriptural simplicity with gravitas

Names of the Women by Jeet Thayil (Jonathan Cape). A novel that combines near-scriptural simplicity with gravitas, this quietly radical re-imagining of the New Testament documents the lives of 15 women—shadowy, overlooked, forgotten—who met Jesus, never abandoned him, and embodied his truth in their own unique ways.

Hunchprose by Ranjit Hoskote (Hamish Hamilton). A book of hypnotic, visionary verse about a world marching triumphantly to its annihilation. About fugitives wounded by stories they did not script. The apocalyptic poem about the town where you must “ask for your directions in whispers, tell no one your birth-name” is eerily familiar.

A Sky Full of Bucket Lists by Shobhana Kumar (Red River). Love, death, pain, desire, everydayness suffuse this warm yet unsentimental book of haibun crafted with subtlety. Gentle prose explodes into the sudden plumage of verse: “dissent/ the black-blue/ around her eyes.”

A Long Walk in Sunlight by Arun Sagar (Copper Coin). The need to remember the trifling, the ordinary, the forgettable—passport, wallet, ticket, the passengers on a train, “Australian and sporty, and loud”—makes for a poetry that is striking in its refusal to strain after effect. I found this volume’s determination to stay quiet, to honour the commonplace, invigorating.

KR Meera, Author

A Farewell To Gabo And Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha by Rodrigo Garcia (HarperVia). I was 17 when I read One Hundred Years of Solitude. It felt as if the author was my real self and I was only a thought of his. Even his life experiences in life were mine too and he had been writing them for me in better metaphors and clearer language. I haven’t felt this about any other writer ever. Even in this book, I wept on reading, “I heard years ago that there comes a time in the life of a writer when you are no longer able to write a long work of fiction. The head can no longer hold the vast architecture or navigate the perilous crossing of a lengthy novel.” This is true because I have been feeling this on completing Ghathakan (Assassin) months ago.

The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State by Josy Joseph (Context). Josy Joseph is one of the very few journalists I trust in these post-truth times. I have read his A Feast of Vultures three or four times not because it was a pleasure to read, but because the prose is captivating and packed with information. The Silent Coup is no different, the prose is flawless, the narration smooth but the content is unsettling to the extent that I wake up in morbid fear recalling some parts of the book.

Baby Doll: Short Stories by Gracy (translated from the Malayalam by Fathima EV) (Harper Perennial). Gracy has always been one of the best writers in Malayalam. Her work enjoys a special place in the feminist writing in Malayalam as it has shocked and shaken the existing framework of themes and plots. This collection inimitably portrays the real world. These deceptively simple stories are magically truthful, which Fathima EV has captured with ease in the translation.

Gracy has always been one of the best writers in Malayalam. Her work enjoys a special place in feminist writing in Malayalam as it has shocked and shaken the existing framework of themes and plots

What’s A Lemon Squeezer Doing In My Vagina? A Memoir of Infertility by Rohini S Rajagopal (Ebury Press). At first, I was not prepared for the brutal satire, the graphic narration, the defeating honesty of this book. Rajagopal’s journey to motherhood made me cry, because the book is one of its kind, and it is so sensitive. What she has written is not just about infertility, but about a human condition.

TCA Raghavan, Historian

2021 saw a rich sheaf of books from former diplomats, appropriate for a year, which was the 75th anniversary of the formal establishment of the Indian Foreign Service. Two excellent books that topped the list for me are Shivshankar Menon’s India and Asian Geopolitics: The Past, Present (Allen Lane) and Nirupama Rao’s The Fractured Himalaya: India Tibet China 1949-62 (Viking).The most recent addition to this list is Chandrashekhar Dasgupta’s fine India and the Bangladesh Liberation War (Juggernaut). Fascinating also is Vijay Gokhale’s Tiananmen Square: The Making of a Protest (HarperCollins) which, for me at least, filled a longstanding gap in providing an Indian perspective of those dramatic events of 1989.

A new and perhaps the most complete version of the Frontier Gandhi’s autobiography, I liked My Life and Struggle (Roli Books) edited by former Pakistani civil servant Imtiaz Ahmad Sahibzada, especially as I read it as the drama in Afghanistan unfolded. As we discuss the nature of the dramatic comeback of the Taliban, this autobiography provides a platform to reflect on an age that is past—when a Pathan could combine social activism (including on girls’ education and empowerment) with a political philosophy rooted in Gandhian non-violence. Meghnad Desai’s Rebellious Lord (Westland) was another autobiography I enjoyed—both for some wicked anecdotes as also as an accomplished example of an essentially Indian sensibility looking at, and working in, Europe.

Other history books that I particularly enjoyed are Radhika Singha’s The Coolie’s Great War: Indian Labour in a Global Conflict, 1914-1921 (HarperCollins)—looking at the Indian experience of World War I—specifically the role of Indian labour—from a refreshingly different lens. Fascinating also is a collection of letters of Alexander Cunningham, the first Director General of the Archaeological Survey of India when it was set up in 1871. Upinder Singh’s fine introduction to The World of India’s First Archaeologist (Oxford University Press) by contextualising Cunningham’s letters provides a tantalising glimpse of archaeology and politics in a colony in the second half of the 19th century.

This year saw a rich sheaf of books from former diplomats, appropriate for a year which was the 75th anniversary of the formal establishment of the Indian Foreign Service. Two excellent books are Shivshankar Menon’s India and Asian Geopolitics and Nirupama Rao’s The Fractured Himalaya

Different, but not entirely unrelated, is Jairam Ramesh’s The Light of Asia (Penguin), which delves deep into just how influential Edwin Arnold’s poem on the Buddha was on the Indian political mindscape in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Presently, I am enjoying Manu S Pillai’s most recent book False Allies: India’s Maharajahs in the Age of Ravi Varma (Juggernaut) both as an engrossing read as also for providing a healthy dose of revisionism to the long-held view of the Indian princes as decadent.

Tridip Suhrud, Author and Gandhi scholar

The last year-and-a-half have brought us life stories, both autobiographies and biographies. Devaki Jain (The Brass Notebook) (Speaking Tiger), Isher Judge Ahluwalia (Breaking Through) (Rupa), Girish Karnad (This Life at Play) (Fourth Estate) and Amartya Sen (Home in the World) (Allen Lane) proved that the lure of the autobiographical mode persists. Ritu Menon’s Zohra! A Biography in Four Acts (Speaking Tiger) and Keshav Desiraju’s Of Gifted Voice: The Life and Art of MS Subbulakshmi (HarperCollins) are biographies of exceptional empathy and knowledge. Jairam Ramesh’s biography of Edwin Arnold The Light of Asia (Penguin) was a source of delight, while Jyotirmaya Sharma’s book on Gandhi’s search for non-violence, Elusive Non-Violence: The Making and Unmaking of Gandhi’s Religion of Ahimsa (Context) will continue to enrich my thinking for a long time.

Peter Geoghegan’s Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics (Head of Zeus) and Jan-Werner Muller’s Democracy Rules (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) kept alive the promise, however flawed, of self-rule. Declan Walsh’s The Nine Lives of Pakistan: Dispatches from a Divided Nation (Bloomsbury) prompted me to learn more about the neighbourhood through Shivshankar Menon (India and Asian Geopolitics) (Allen Lane) and Kanti Bajpai (India Versus China: Why they are Not Friends) (Juggernaut). If one needed anymore reminders of the structures of thought, political-economy and governance, which permit and do not permit us to think of the earth that we inhabit, Dipesh Chakrabarty (The Climate of History in a Planetary Age) (Primus), Amitav Ghosh (The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis) (Allen Lane) and Bruno Macaes (Geopolitics for the End Time: From the Pandemic to the Climate Crisis) (C Hurst) came as exceptionally finely crafted warnings. Robert Macfarlane’s Underland (Penguin) reawakened the joy of reading about Nature, and his older work Landmarks and Helen Macdonald’s Vesper Flights and previous work H is for Hawk have been a source of deep joy. David Abulafia (The Boundless Sea: A Human History of the Oceans) (Penguin) and John Barton (A History of the Bible) (Allen Lane) were a lesson in the craft of the historian.

Jyotirmaya Sharma’s book on Gandhi, Elusive Non-Violence: The Making and Unmaking of Gandhi’s Religion of Ahimsa will continue to enrich my thinking for a long time

Despite Akhtaruzzaman Elias’ Khwab Nama (in Arunava Sinha’s translation, Hamish Hamilton) the year did not bring the magic of stories. It was Rodrigo Garcia’s A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes (HarperVia) that marked this year’s reading. His meditations on his parent’s deaths were strangely comforting when one was hoping for a death with dignity for a loved one.

Tishani Doshi, Author

Four gorgeously meandering books I loved this year were Amit Chaudhuri’s Finding the Raga: An Improvisation on Indian Music (Hamish Hamilton), which I read with complete pleasure and zero desire to classify as memoir, philosophy or commentary. It flows from the very first line— “That was a time of unsettlement”—and is full of the verve of a journey without a fixed destination, the quiet burnish of a series of opening paragraphs that refuse to coalesce into crescendo. For the reader, it is like sitting in on a jam session—the music flows over you, and every now and then, you catch a note that holds you, and opens a door. This mood was mirrored in Anuk Arudpragasam’s novel A Passage North (Hamish Hamilton), which similarly shifts the readers’ relationship with time as they enter the novel—a long train journey, which also happens to have within its folds one of the most beautiful contemporary meditations on Kalidasa’s Meghaduta. A novel which makes readers complicit in the tragedy of war; brings them to the boundary and says, see; makes them linger in the complicated spaces of intimacy. Deborah Levy’s Real Estate (Hamish Hamilton), the third of her living autobiographies, is equally uninterested in pinning things down, luxuriating instead in a sequence of desire and dreaming about houses she may never inhabit, as she travels from her empty nest in London to New York to India to Paris.

All three books, ostensibly about music, the trauma of war, and real estate, respectively, are also about a relationship to language—as world-making, as failure and longing, as building site. Finally, a book of poems—Time, by the late Etel Adnan (Nightboat Books), translated by Sarah Riggs, which, in keeping with the atemporal theme of my reading this year, is a sequence of postcard-like poems, where breath, death and landscape are totemic. A gorgeous unfolding of language where “words dress in Phoenician purple,” ancestors are always with us, “music will/ displace sky.”

Mani Shankar Aiyar, Politician and author

Through much of the year, Ghazala Wahab’s Born a Muslim (Aleph), a sensitive, intelligent, perceptive analysis of the condition of India’s biggest minority community since Partition and into the future, was in the lead, but in the last few months it has been facing severe competition from a series of memoirs and histories by distinguished former members of the Indian Foreign Service. The toughest of these challenges comes from Chandrashekhar Dasgupta’s defining history of India and the Bangladesh Liberation War (Juggernaut) that gives convincing answers to questions that have been haunting the birth of Bangladesh for 50 years: Did India engineer the partition of Pakistan? How did it view the Awami League’s sweep of the polls in East Bengal? Why did India not take military action immediately after the horrendous crackdown on Pakistanis by Pakistan that led to ten million of them seeking refuge in India? What persuaded Indira Gandhi to sign the long-pending treaty with the Soviet Union? Why did China turn a deaf ear to Kissinger’s pleas to intervene? What drove the US to take the adamant, inhuman line that it did in defiance of public opinion in the US and the urgent advice of its Consul-General in Dhaka? What were the intentions and consequences of the nuclear-powered USS Enterprise steaming into the Bay of Bengal just as the joint command of the Mukti Bahini and India was poised to deliver the final blow?

Another November 2021 publication that challenges Ghazala Wahab’s lead is Nirupama Rao’s The Fractured Himalaya (Viking) that could arguably be described as the definitive history of India-China relations in the Nehru period, 1949- 1962, a subtle, nuanced, balanced and thoroughly documented work that elegantly traces the ups and downs of India’s initial understanding and later transformation of its relationship with China. A third IFS work, Kathmandu Dilemma by Ranjit Rae (Vintage) supplements, in some respects, the Nepal dimension of the India-China relationship, besides being an invaluable, if somewhat biased guide, to the evolution of one of India’s most difficult relationships in its immediate neighbourhood, made more difficult by India’s pretentions. A fourth would be Ambassador Preet Mohan Singh Malik’s Sikkim, a harsh critic of Jawaharlal Nehru’s China and Sikkim policy, with whom I am obliged to differ.

Two books by Pakistani scholars also deserve praise, Ishtiaq Ahmed’s Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History (Viking), a massive and not always non-controversial study of the Quaid’s “successes, failures and role in history”, and a delightful romp through Benazir Bhutto’s two terms as prime minister by her most sceptical and irreverential minister, Javed Jabbar, But, Prime Minister (Paramount) that is, alas, difficult—read impossible—to find in Indian bookstores.

Finally, two key books on the challenge to India’s secularism, Aakar Patel’s Our Hindu Rashtra: What It Is. How We Got Here (Westland) and Salman Khurshid’s magisterial Sunrise over Ayodhya: Nationhood in Our Times (Vintage) that, in my view would have been better titled ‘Sunset over Ayodhya’, a point of view the author anticipates.

And how can I end this survey without mentioning Amartya Sen’s memoir of his first three decades, Home in the World (Allen Lane), which I reviewed in Open (‘A Prologue to Greatness’, August 6th, 2021).

Mini Kapoor, Literary Critic

Bewilderment by Richard Powers (William Heinemann) was the most powerful novel I read this year. Set in the near future, it can be categorised as science fiction, and yet not quite, as it explores the avenues open to us for ways of grieving. The narrator Theo, an astrobiologist who explores signs of life beyond earth, and his nine-year-old son Robin are grieving the death of their wife/ mother, the fragility of our planet, and the fraying of democracy as a rightwing, Trump-like administration consolidates power in the US.

And as readers, we also mourn the erosion of compassion as social media doesn’t let even a pre-teen be once a story goes viral. Robin is enrolled in the trials of an AI-driven programme that enables a subject to approximate another’s (in this case his mother’s) emotional state, and it all goes well till it suddenly does not. Powers pulls the threads of the novel together skilfully and heart-tuggingly in the end, as he compels us to think of the strange, moving the line between what we can and cannot know, between the places and states of mind that we can and cannot inhabit.

Bewilderment by Richard Powers was the most powerful novel I read this year. Set in the near future, it can be categorised as science fiction, and yet not quite, as it explores the avenues open to us for ways of grieving

In a year of great fiction, Intimacies by Katie Kitamura (Vintage), about a woman, the narrator, interpreting at “the Court” in The Hague is another novel that gripped me. “The Hague was a quiet city, and almost strenuously civilized,” she says early on. “But the more time I spent there, the more its air of courtesy, the preserved buildings and manicured parks, imparted a sense of unease.” That unease is explored at many levels in an interior dialogue, as she tries to understand what’s said and what’s not in her evolving relationship with a fellow globalised professional at The Hague—and as she explores her discomfort over the power of words and communication while interpreting for a powerful man accused of war crimes.