2021: A Year in Reading
In another difficult year of the pandemic, many of us leaned deeper into the contemplation of literature. From Rijula Das and Josy Joseph, to Amitava Kumar and Shrayana Bhattacharya, Saurabh Sharma presents his twenty favourite Indian books of the year.
Like every relationship, my liaison with reading has evolved since the breakout of the pandemic, too. At first, reading was more a form of escapism; nowadays, I see myself developing into a more contemplative, reflective reader—one who turns to words to help render meaning to the strands of life that otherwise seemed incomprehensible.
Many of us continue to struggle, and new fears loom on the horizon as the pandemic takes another turn with the spread of a new variant. I understand that it is, after all, a privilege to discuss and do literature, to indulge in conversations about books, writings, and writers—these arbiters of human experiences—as if that’s the need of the hour.
The novel lays bare the functionating of intertwined and mutually benefiting systems that plague our society. Das’s work, through fiction, argues how with the ever-evolving technology, there’s an increasing risk to human life, making human trafficking one of the brutal forms of modern-day slavery.
But, at the same time, to do literature—in its many forms—is to document, create a record of things both said and unsaid that should be collectivised, to be shared and passed onto the generations for them to make sense of what has happened, and figure out what lies ahead. Though this may appear too philosophical and puritan a way to engage with the art form, in which ‘bearing the witness’ seems to be the only function of books, one can also turn to them for pleasure. When such an array of experiences lay in front of me, it was difficult to curate a list of ‘the best’ of 2021.
Browsing through the hordes of excellent work published in India this year, I could feel that literature is shifting in more ways than one, that conventional understanding is being cornered, and experimental works are being adopted with enthusiasm. Mental health was a major theme, featuring in many more pertinent works post-COVID as compared to the past year.
There was also a great mass of ‘lockdown literature’, which was often not only uninteresting, but also marred by the knee-jerk reaction to one of the most brutal pandemics of all time. However, it was heartening to see that publishers realised that jargon-filled medical literature can be easily replaced by popular science titles to engage laypersons, which resulted in a decent collection of such works. Amidst all this, I must say, this year witnessed some fantastic works of fiction, too.
I was overwhelmed at first by the weight that words like ‘best’ and ‘top-most’ carried. Idiosyncratic viewpoints, ‘risky’ works, and eclectic storytelling, mean a lot to me. The publishing of marginalised voices and interests is particularly rewarding to me, both as a reader and as a writer. Thus, I summarily rejected a claim to present a best of 2021, for such a language is not only at ‘best’ (pun-intended) partisan, but also assumes the role of the curator as a know-it-all literary messiah. However, this is not to discount the assessment that has gone into curating this list. It’s not nonapplication of mind, for if literary award committees can devise ways to select the best book using certain metrics and parameters, then an indicative list, in this regard, was far easier to prepare because from them I didn’t have to choose the very ‘best’.
Hence, this list remains sorely subjective, and at best my list of favourites across all genres of books published in India (barring one) in 2021.
Two and a Half Rivers (Olive Turtle, an imprint of Niyogi Books) by Anirudh Kala is a deeply disturbing and literary rich tale of the Punjab of the insurgency period. Kala, a psychiatrist himself, tells the story of one who is going through a phase of marital separation and seeking help from another psychiatrist. His depression and troubled interiority mimic the horrific political (mis)happenings occurring in the world outside. Punjab, now with only two and a half rivers, has been caught between the maddening pursuit of power amidst the rise of religious fanaticism, which interacts with social structures of caste and patriarchy to form something immensely ugly. In a short, dense novel, Kala achieves mastery in telling the tale of one of the darkest phases of Indian democracy, letting you experience a quietude, deep within which is hidden violence and unrest. Reading this reminded me of Gurvinder Singh’s feature films, such as Chauthi Koot (2015) or Anhe Gorhe Da Daan (2011), which invoke a similar response.
From the brutal societal structures of caste and patriarchy, we move to the bhadrolok and chotolok divide in West Bengal with Imaan (Eka Westland, an imprint of Westland), written by Manoranjan Byapari and translated from the Bengali by Arunava Sinha. Imaan is an impeccable and vivid portrayal of life at the margins through wickedly funny characters and deeply moving and reflective conversations between them. The titular character, who has been recently acquitted from jail, faces a dilemma when he is set ‘free’. For someone who saw only prison life, negotiating the world outside it posed an immense threat to him. He’s considering if there’s any way that can help him go back. It’s his journey that Byapari uses to ask crucial questions that we must pose at ourselves to keep in check the widening inequalities in society.
Told with excruciating details, full of powerful imagery, and stuffed with innovative metaphors, the heart-wrenching poems in this book outline what it means to live under an insurgency, and what toll it takes on everyone, oppressors and oppressed alike.
Another tale set in Bengal is the rewarding debut by Rijula Das: A Death in Shonagachhi (Picador India, an imprint of Pan Macmillan). Mohamaya—literal meaning ‘illusion’—has been murdered brutally. In the alleyways of the red-light district, death isn’t a shocking thing; however, it’s undesirable because it impacts the business. But murder is by no means a casual affair. A mystery death unravels, exploring the desires and ambitions of an erotic novelist Tilu Shau amidst a sex workers’ collective’s persistence demand for swift action and protection of prostitutes. The novel lays bare the functioning of intertwined and mutually benefiting systems that plague our society. Das’s work, through fiction, argues how with the ever-evolving technology, there’s an increasing risk to human life, making human trafficking one of the brutal forms of modern-day slavery.
Josy Joseph’s The Silent Coup: A History of India’s Deep State (Context, an imprint of Westland), a nonfiction account, is a reflection of his twenty years of investigative journalism, and was one of the most revealing of books I read this year. Through his objective narrative and skillful storytelling, Joseph informs of an ongoing loss of India’s democratic institutions. The author highlights information gaps while dealing with matters of security threats and inaction while having adequate information, or booking people—mostly minorities—wrongfully. Joseph’s book leaves no doubt that if crony capitalism continues to spread its tentacles in security agencies, or the leaders in such establishments keep toeing a political party’s line, then the consequences shall be calamitous.
An injurious fall proved as an opportunity for Anoop Babani and Savia Viegas to document their cyclist ancestors’ journeys between 1923 and 1942 that made India proud in The Bicycle Diaries: Indian Cyclists and their Incredible Journeys Around the World (Saxtti Books). The authors begin from the beginning, sharing the invention of cycles and their first instance of usages. Then, they document how they were marketed initially before diving deep into the culture that was cultivated by a group of Bombay Boys and their patrons that helped India gain an identity of sorts internationally. Be it the legendary expedition of Jal Bapasola, Rustom Bhumgara, and Adi Hakim which got covered by the The New York Times, or royal encounters of Kaikee Kharas, Rutton Shroff, and Rustom Ghandhi, The Bicycle Diaries is an “exceptional montage of memories and historical account of pre-independence cycling.”
Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau (Speaking Tiger) is an ambitious work of nonfiction by poet and riverwalker Mihir Vatsa. This is perhaps one book in this list that will present itself differently to each one of its readers, as it’s part memoir, part travelogue, part research- and purpose-driven expeditions masquerading as chance encounters. One of the remarkable qualities of Vatsa’s book is that it captures each of its narrator’s moods impeccably well. In Delhi, Vatsa is depressed, signs of slipping into a mundane life are clear, seeing which and confronted by a few trusting friends, Vatsa goes back to his roots: his Hazaribagh—the land of a thousand tigers, the land of a thousand gardens, the land where Vatsa finds his soul tethered to. This is why, in my review, I compare Vatsa to Juljul, a hill known both for its trickster and shape-shifting nature.
There Is No Good Time for Bad News (FutureCycle Press) by Aruni Kashyap is an unforgettable collection of poems by the Assam-born author. It’s the only book in this list to be published internationally. Told with excruciating details, full of powerful imagery, and stuffed with innovative metaphors, the heart-wrenching poems in this book outline what it means to live under an insurgency, and what toll it takes on everyone, oppressors and oppressed alike. The titular poem, in particular, tore me apart, leaving me immobile for some time; I had to put in efforts to move my limbs to continue reading this book. It shall serve as a record of the Indian establishment’s unruliness in handling situations in the northeast and the havoc its laws like AFSPA have wrecked. This collection shall linger in my heart and continue to haunt me for years.
A Time Outside This Time (Aleph) by Amitava Kumar is yet another genre-fluid book in this list, though it is offered as fiction. Satya—literal meaning ‘truth’—is an India-born, US-based professor and writer. He is on a “cushy fellowship” on an island in Italy, working on his #fakenews novel Enemies of the People. In the wake of the pandemic, insulated by his privilege, Satya mentally sifts through the past and recent developments—essentially polarisation and rise in nationalism and jingoism—ever since the election of Trump as President of the US and Modi as the PM of India. During writing this book and reading Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Satya is subliminally trying to understand the role of literature, or fiction as a record. He also revisits and recalls his childhood days and his time reporting the death of a guerrilla leader, all of which reveal the nature of political shifts in the Indian subcontinent and the US. Simultaneously entertaining and revealing, A Time Outside This Time is, unlike what the writer wanted to record, a successful experiment.
Two-time Pushcart Prize-nominated writer, editor, and poet Sophia Naz’s fourth collection of poems Open Zero (Yoda Press) is an extremely rich engagement with language. Playful, serious, and abandoning at the same time, true to its central argument of freeing, helping create a sense of nothingness—a zero-sum total, a void that makes its presence felt only when something meaningful and that which we hold ourselves dear to is absent. The collection begins with a personal essay where she describes how the ever-increasing fires in the California region, a reflection of climate change, one day claimed her home in Glen Ellen, also home to Jack London. As a result, the “material history of a lifetime, books, paintings,” etc. all were gone, but Naz notes that though this loss was unavoidable because she and her family had rendered meanings to these objects, losing them she strangely felt light, a feeling, I suspect, that cuts through each of the poems in this collection that shock and delight.
The most compelling story here is of Farzana, a teenage girl who must face an impending tragedy in the trash township of Deonar in Mumbai—but this book is also a searing tale of corruption, garbage politics, literally, and how the fight for claiming their identities by ragpickers is met with resistance, often leading to ugly fallouts.
Ari Gautier’s The Thinnai (Hachette) reminded me of the communities of my paternal and maternal villages. Like characters in this book who are named Three-Balls Six Faces, Pascal Pig-Tail, and Joseph One-and-a-Half-Eyes, my uncle also told us stories of how his friends were named kallu muteriya and papu tatti (the former peed and the latter shat in his pants). A poignant and vivid tale told through thinnais (loose translation, veranda), which the translator of this book Blake Smith compares with a time machine, The Thinnai, to me, is a story about storytelling. It’s fascinating how each of the parallel narratives—of Gilbert Thaata, of the neighbourhood, for example, of Killer Widow, of Dravidian nationalism, French colonialism, or familial history—in this book are easily tethered to thinnais, an Uttar Pradesh equivalent of which can be called chabutra, chauntra, or pauri (which is essentially inside, but serves the same function) depending on where you are from. Though the translator laments in the introduction that this book is second of the two ‘Pondicherry novels’ genre, which he attributes to Gautier, I believe that this work shall inspire this genre to grow, and more Pondicherry novels can be expected.
The human cost of war, burgeoning desires in the heart of a youth trying to make sense of his connection with his girlfriend, while on a journey to attend the funeral of his grandmother’s caretaker, makes A Passage North (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House) by Anuk Arudpragasam one of the most powerful renditions of stream of consciousness. Set in Colombo, Delhi, Mumbai, and Jharkhand, its sensitive portrayal of life in a post-Civil War Sri Lanka, where time has stopped or perhaps has started moving in the backward direction, informed by several mythologies that percolate the South Asia literature, Arudpragasam’s well-chiselled prose is a delight to read. Shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, this book is worth all the hype.
One should be grateful to Saumya Roy for mainstreaming telling tales of waste-pickers through her book Mountain Tales: Love and Loss in the Municipality of Castaway Belongings (Profile Books, Hachette). The most compelling story here is of Farzana, a teenage girl who must face an impending tragedy in the trash township of Deonar in Mumbai—but this book is also a searing tale of corruption, garbage politics—literally—and how the fight for claiming their identities by ragpickers is met with resistance, often leading to ugly fallouts. In this impeccably researched book, Roy convinces the need for empathetic storytelling while reporting on sensitive issues that involve lives, which in the case of waste management is conveniently ignored.
In The Demolition and the Verdict: Ayodhya and the Project to Reconfigure India (Speaking Tiger), veteran journalist Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay—who has been covering the Babri Masjid-Ram Temple issue since the 1980s—adroitly captures the narrative that the Hindu Mahasabha passionately told, making it possible for the BJP to benefit from the current polarised environment—at the helm of which sits the ‘Divider-in-Chief’ Narendra Modi. The book chronicles details starting from the fateful midnight of December 22-23, 1949, when naga vairagi Abhiram Das and his cousins entered the premises of the Mosque to stealthily place the Ram Lalla idol, all the way to the inauguration of the Ayodhya Mandir by the prime minister in the middle of the pandemic last year. Mukhopadhyay leaves no strands of Hindutva project to ‘reconfigure’ India untouched in this unputdownable book.
The banal becomes awe-inspiring and jaw-droppingly interesting by the sheer storytelling of Sonal Kohli in her short-story collection The House Next to the Factory (Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers). The book is not only a masterclass in brevity but also a reminder that in the fleeting moments of life lay extremely rich tales; in the hands of an opportunistic writer like Kohli, no detail goes unnoticed. Set in a Delhi haunted by Partition, these interlinked short stories tell tales of love, loss, belonging, emptiness, and everyday delight and tragedies that we fail to record, hoping for an extraordinary event in which others can partake and validate our joys. In more ways than one, this book resembles Doordarshan’s Gulzar-directed televised series Kirdaar (1993-94).
I have written of the rarity of a book like Radiant Fugitives (Context, an imprint of Westland) by Nawaaz Ahmed. Set largely in the post-9/11 San Francisco Bay Area, Radiant Fugitives is a remarkable spin to stories told from the circularity of life and death. Here, Seema is undergoing a life-threatening pregnancy and meeting her sister Tahera, a staunch Muslim, and her terminally ill mother Nafeesa, after a period of fifteen years. The burden of their past can be felt in the air, so heavy that it can be sliced by the knife. A reconciliation is waiting to happen, but if it’ll or not eventually becomes the suspense that propels this story, which is told by its narrator, a newly-born Ishraaq. Poetry of Keats, ghazals from the Indian subcontinent, and verses from the Holy Quran inform the structure of the book, which never crumbles under their weight; in fact, it champions them.
Invisible Empire: The Natural History of Viruses (Viking, Penguin) by Pranay Lal is an engaging and entertaining account of viruses—those invisible entities that we want to wipe off from the face of the earth. Reading this account, however, the reader realises how human existence is deeply linked to the presence of the viruses—and one without the other isn’t possible. A fantastic and richly illustrated account of past pandemics, how several economies have resulted consequently, and the politics that play out in the adoption of methods of cure, Invisible Empire is a book like no other in its genre. Perhaps one of the appeals of this book is that it reads simple and is free of any medical jargon, making it an accessible read.
SRK, Bhattacharya says, may not be a feminist icon, but is certainly a feminine one. This book is an eclectic record of the female gaze on one of the most iconic film stars of all time.
Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh: India’s Lonely Young Women and the Search for Intimacy and Independence (HarperCollins Publishers) by Shrayana Bhattacharya is perhaps one of the most unique books to have been published this year. Bhattacharya, a Shah Rukh Khan fan herself, takes readers through an unusual lens of studying economics: fandom. In this book, she not only tells the stories of women from across the class-caste divide and other intersections, but also helps establish how the metrics of economic progress can never indicate the hidden costs that punctuate the desires of women who are extremely policed in a patriarchal society like India. Through SRK and his movies, they draw comfort in knowing that there could be men who would help you in the kitchen, love you unabashedly, and may even let you be you. SRK, Bhattacharya says, may not be a feminist icon, but is certainly a feminine one. This book is an eclectic record of the female gaze on one of the most iconic film stars of all time.
How do you tell a story of a mental breakdown? A story that would require articulating the absolute incomprehensible, a recap of seven years of illness and its aftermath: its toll on a family and its members who bore witness, and the journey of a writer who at his peak fell into the abyss of bipolar disorder. I Have Not Seen Mandu: A Fractured Soul-Memoir (Speaking Tiger), written by Swadesh Deepak and translated from Hindi by Jerry Pinto, is a gut-wrenching patchwork that renders language to feelings and experiences that perhaps exist outside of it. Pinto has done a great service by translating this work. It can be easily predicted that it must have been one of the most challenging experiences to do so, as one can sense reading this book that it would be quite a task to weave disconnected yet similar strands of life, of a writer who unabashedly writes about contemporary writers—often rudely—and reflects on his desires as matter-of-fact, reflections not free from misogyny and judgement. One often wonders whether it’s the illness that’s informing the eclecticism of the prose or sometimes is it the writer’s prowess; for, of course, Deepak was the one who wrote Court Martial—it’s this confusion that remains visible in the book and perhaps makes it a unique candidate among its canon of writing.
A Mirror Made of Rain (Fourth Estate, HarperCollins Publishers) by Naheed Phiroze Patel was a story that I drew immense nourishment from. The book takes powerful steps in the description of caste-patriarchy and misogyny, in a society that burdens its women as if they are destined to be caregivers, and as if their mental breakdowns are a trick to absolve oneself from actively engaging in household work. Told with empathy, A Mirror Made of Rain is a searing narrative of Noomi, who navigates herself and her desires, and deals with trauma in a small-town neighbourhood of uber-rich people. Patel deftly articulates how parenthood and inheritance of loss, love, and belonging in a family impact a child, who’s looking for love like Noomi. Patel is a writer whose next work shall be eagerly awaited.
A scholarly work of immense importance, John Lang: Wanderer of Hindoostan, Slanderer in Hindoostanee, Lawyer for the Ranee (Paper Missile, an imprint of Niyogi Books) by Amit Ranjan, is a historical account of one (and many) John Lang(s), the Australian who came to India, worked as a barrister, represented Rani Lakshmi of Jhansi and Lala Jotee Persaud, was critical of the Crown, and ran a newspaper from Meerut, The Mofussilite—before dying in the hills of Mussoorie. It’s interesting that the author Ruskin Bond—the author based near Mussoorie—discovered Lang’s grave in the hills exactly 100 years after his death. Ranjan—who was jokingly named by his friend as ‘Rani-Jhansi-ke-Lawyer-ka-Scholar’—informs readers that Lang also wrote about India for Charles Dickens in his journal Household Words. Other revelations include how Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim borrowed the narrative structure that Lang has employed in his novels, and that Edgar Allan Poe’s popular poem The Raven was adapted from the Persian. Such accounts may disappoint these writers’ fanbases, but will inevitably delight them with the legend of Lang, which is told masterfully by Ranjan.
Of course, the finitude of this list ensures that I have inevitably missed a number of great books. Having said that, I look forward to reading and reviewing works that are expected to be published in 2022—for it is in the magic of words where one can seek hope and desire again.
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Saurabh Sharma is a reader and a writer. He works as a writer in an IT research and advisory firm in Gurgaon. He reviews books and pretends to write on weekends. You can find him on Instagram: @writerly_life and Twitter: @writerly_life.
