A whirlwind of words Lit for Life in Chennai whipped up a storm of writers, speakers, fans and foodies.
There’s a buzz every time the Jaipur LitFest comes along, and this time there was a bigger buzz thanks to the presence of Rishi Sunak who appears to carry quite lightly his legacy as a former UK prime minister. This is refreshing, given the crass VIP culture that prevails in India, trampling upon anything and anyone ordinary. What makes the Chennai LitFest special is the presence of ordinary folk thronging the seats and aisles of thoughtfully curated sessions spanning a range of subjects. The feeling you get is that you don’t have to be a somebody to participate, and this was true this time round as well. I bumped into a couple, for instance, who had travelled all the way from Madurai with their two young daughters just for the experience. The overarching mood was not to ‘be seen’ but to listen, to absorb, to engage, to be lost in worlds, real and imagined, that sharp, sensitive, creative minds unravel.
What was the fallout? Every single table at home is now piled high with books to read — all recently acquired, one way or another. Such a fabulous way to begin the year, on the reading front at least.
At a time in history when textbooks in India are being recast at the will and pleasure of dispensations, it’s encouraging to find a whole new crop of young historians making their presence felt. Among them, the two most compelling voices are those of Manu Pillai and Anirudh Kanisetti, both of whom enthralled the audience at the Chennai event. Interestingly, both give due recognition to India south of the Vindhyas, a region that is often ignored when the history of India is told. As journalist Prem Panicker has remarked, ‘Do yourself a favour — particularly you lot banging on about how you only learned about Mughals in school — and read Kanisetti’s Lords of the Deccan.’
The Lords of the Deccan: Southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas won the 2023 Yuva Puraskar from the Sahitya Akademi, and Kanisetti’s new book, Lords of Earth and Sea: A History of the Chola Empire was featured in an absorbing discussion at the festival. Manu Pillai observed: ‘Ambitious in its scope and rich in depth and detail, Lords of the Deccan is an outstanding debut. With his evocative retelling, Anirudh Kanisetti restores medieval south India to the prominence and centrality it deserves in general imagination.’ Having travelled through the pages along with the Chalukyas, the Rashtrakutas and others, I cannot wait to get to the Cholas.
Manu Pillai too received the Yuva Puraskar, for his first book, The Ivory Throne: Chronicles of the House of Travancore, in 2017. His other books are Rebel Sultans: The Deccan from Khilji to Shivaji (2018); The Courtesan, the Mahatma & the Italian Brahmin (2019); False Allies: India’s Maharajah’s in the Age of Ravi Varma (2021); and Gods, Guns and Missionaries (2024); the last was featured at Lit for Life.
Historian William Dalrymple says it is: ‘A brave and magnificent book, and a vital intervention: as elegant as it is witty, as erudite as it is wise, and as stylish as it is scholarly. Manu Pillai is fast becoming one of India’s most accomplished and impressively wide-ranging historians.’
The overarching mood, at the LitFest, was not to ‘be seen’, but to listen, absorb, engage, be lost in worlds, real and imagined, that sharp, sensitive, creative minds unravel.
History or the recording of historical events can never be an exact science, which is possibly why it is often misty and mired. Everything depends upon intense and corroborated research, and a nuanced understanding of lives and times. It has to try to be as objective as possible, while keeping in mind the ever-changing nature of lives and times. The subjectivity of such a task leaves it open to interpretation, misinterpretation and reinvention. It is in this context that chroniclers such as Kanisetti and Pillai shine, both in rigour of approach and manner of writing.
Talking about exact sciences, there’s this elegant little book by the Japanese writer Yoko Ogawa called The Housekeeper and the Professor. Just 180 pages long, small-sized, neatly designed, it blew my mind. A housekeeper is assigned to take care of a mathematics professor who, after an accident 17 years ago, is left with only 80 minutes of memory at a time. That is, after every 80 minutes, he forgets everything and has to start all over again. In the housekeeper’s words: ‘It was clear that he didn’t remember me from one day to the next. The note clipped to his sleeve simply informed him that it was not our first meeting, but it could not bring back the memory of the time we had spent together.’
The only thing intact in his brain is his ability with mathematical equations. During her stint with the professor, the housekeeper, who is the narrator, and her 10-year-old son who comes over every day after school, go on journeys of mathematical discoveries. ‘The mathematical order is beautiful precisely because it has no effect on the real world,’ she remembers him saying. ‘Life isn’t going to be easier, nor is anyone going to make a fortune, just because they know something about prime numbers. Of course, lots of mathematical discoveries have practical applications, no matter how esoteric they may seem. Research on ellipses made it possible to determine the orbits of the planets… But those things aren’t the goal of mathematics. The only goal is to discover the truth.’
The story is so beautifully told that it will mesmerise even a person who fears numbers. Just see what the professor says in response to a question about who discovered zero: ‘The ancient Greeks thought there was no need to count something that was nothing. And since it was nothing, they held that it was impossible to express it as a figure. So someone had to overcome this reasonable assumption, someone had to figure out how to express nothing as a number. This unknown man from India made nonexistence exist. Extraordinary, don’t you think?’ Making nonexistence exist, extraordinary indeed to say it like that. I don’t know Japanese so I don’t know how true this translation by Stephen Snyder is to the original. But in itself it is so smooth, so elegant, so evocative, so simple. Is it the Japanese language itself?
But, coming back to history, there’s another little book that piqued my interest: The Great Flap of 1942 by Mukund Padmanabhan. This is an engaging and detailed account of ‘how the Raj panicked over a Japanese non-invasion’. Padmanabhan was inspired by his mother’s story of how the family (except for her father) moved from Madras to the inland town of Coimbatore due to a fear of invasion by the Japanese. He says he later discovered that ‘there was not a single person I knew whose family hadn’t fled Madras in 1942’.
I can vouch for this. My maternal grandparents lived in places like Avinashi, Pollachi and Coimbatore around the time of World War II, and my mother remembers how, when she was about 8 or 9, a whole lot of her cousins from Madras landed up at their home to stay for a while. She remembers talk about the Japanese coming and all of them being told to run the other way if they saw a ‘short’ (kulan) person! We think history means that which happens, not that which does not, and that’s where we’re wrong, as this book shows.
As always, so much to read, so little time!
The columnist is a children’s writer and senior journalist
