I never had a chance to enjoy history in school. I loved physics, mathematics, and languages while tolerating chemistry, but my rather unpleasant fling with history-lessons ended within a year. Preferring to read verbatim from the textbook in an irritating manner, the teacher managed to put me off in a matter of seconds. History became history. Period.
History took its revenge. Even many decades later I still get confused between Chandragupta II and Chandragupta Maurya, the Cholas and the Chalukyas, McMahon and Mac Mohan. I try to overcome my lack of knowledge by watching movies, but directors are infamous for twisting facts to enhance the entertainment quotient of their product. I read books, but history is always written from the angle of the victors.
Into the second month of the Covid lockdown, I picked up The Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru. Admiring the style and the language, I remained glued to the book for about three months. Sometimes I had to go through a page, again and again, to grasp its meaning completely. By the time I reached the mid-point and the discussion about the Sailendra Empire started, my speed of reading would have put a slug to shame in a slow race. The scholastic work started inducing me to deep slumber. Finally, I had to keep it aside for future reading with great respect.
I started looking for some temporary exciting relief and did not have to wait for long. Rujuta Diwekar more than compensated for the serious contemplation by providing almost comic relief with 'Don't Lose Your Mind, Lose Your Weight'. The book is dedicated to 'Bebo', and the author keeps reminding the reader about her closeness with the actor every twenty pages or so. The language is fantastic (Lungs "provide O2 to the body and throw out CO2"), the arguments are exhilarating ("Agastya Muni once drank the entire ocean!"), and the quotes are profound ("Prabhate Mal Darshanam", "Time, time ki baat hai jhonny", "Your butt has become like lollipop", etc.). The slug transformed into a steed, and I read two hundred pages in two days. The author got tired by now, catching her breath by discussing typical case studies. I got too exhausted to continue and let the remaining hundred pages go unread.
Back to serious reading, I picked up A Promised Land by Barack Obama. Having witnessed the dog eat dog battle of political parties in every general and regional election in India, I found the description of the American elections very engrossing. There were so many comparisons to make! The easy flow, the first-person account of the incidents, the reasons behind important decisions, the close look into the lives of the Obamas, the childlike attempt to prove oneself above board—the book was unputdownable for several weeks. However, as it progressed and went deeper into issues I could not relate to or had lost interest in, glancing over and skipping of pages started. Chapter 24 caught my attention. It devotes about five pages to India and is the only section that discusses the country in detail. A close relative had once forwarded a WhatsApp post mentioning that Rahul Gandhi is the only Indian mentioned in the book. The post is incorrect. Expressing reverence for Mahatma Gandhi and respect for Dr. Manmohan Singh, Obama writes that Dr. Singh confided in him by saying, "In uncertain times, Mr. President, the call of religious and ethnic solidarity can be intoxicating. And it's not so hard for politicians to exploit that." Obama agreed with him. Apart from mentioning Gursharan Kaur, Jawaharlal Nehru, Indira Gandhi, and Rajiv Gandhi, Obama describes Sonia Gandhi as a "striking woman in her sixties, dressed in a traditional sari, with dark, probing eyes and a quiet, regal presence" and comments that "she listened more than she spoke, careful to defer to Singh when policy matters came up ...."
Obama describes Rahul Gandhi as smart, earnest and good looking with a nervous and unformed quality, "as if he were a student who'd done the coursework and was eager to impress the teacher but deep down lacked either the aptitude or the passion to master the subject." Obama also expresses concern over the "divisive nationalism touted by the BJP", and sums up his thoughts about India in these words:
... I found myself asking whether those [humanity's baser] impulses—of violence, greed, corruption, nationalism, racism, and religious intolerance, the all-too-human desire to beat back our own uncertainty and mortality and sense of insignificance by subordinating others—were too strong for any democracy to permanently contain. For they seemed to lie in wait everywhere, ready to resurface whenever growth rates stalled or demographics changed or a charismatic leader chose to ride the wave of people's fears and resentments. And as much as I might have wished otherwise, there was no Mahatma Gandhi around to tell me what I might do to hold such impulses back.
Immediately later, the focus shifted elsewhere in the book, triggering a loss of my interest. "It is a good book, no doubt, and I must read it fully, but not today"—I decided.
And that facilitated the entry of Fatima Bhutto's Songs of Blood and Sword on my desk. The autobiographical work portraying the love of a daughter for her father is no less than a political thriller in most places. Being an Indian who is used to look at Pakistan with suspicion, I was glad to read, "India has just launched a moon mission and we [the Pakistanis] can't even light up the streets. We are a nuclear-armed state that cannot run refrigerators." Later, the author writes about Pakistan and India, "the sibling countries were once again [in 1964] pitted against each other by imperial powers, playing ping-pong with the countries' security and edgy foreign relations." I finished the 441-page book in four days, enjoying the roller-coaster ride of emotions throughout. If anything, it turned me hungrier for a real thriller.
The Man from St Petersburg, though claimed as one of the soft and weak novels of Ken Follet, absorbed me for two days that I took to read the book from cover-to-cover. The portrayal of the social-political disparity is true even in the current age, and the heroics of the fictional Feliks Kschessinsky can be very much in demand even today. The book left me exhausted, not willing to pick up another one for some time. Nehru and Obama had bowed down to Fatima and Feliks!
And so had Wendy Doniger. The Hindus—An Alternative History will have to wait for some more time before I resume reading it. I haven't picked up this partly read work since 2014!
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