The Pleasures of Reading in
2024
by Vandana Singh
2024 was a challenging
year for me, so I didn’t get as much reading done as I normally would. Conspicuously and unusually absent were books
from my own beloved genre of science fiction and fantasy. I did read a number of mostly forgettable
detective fiction when I needed to step out of the real world. But what I want to highlight are some
remarkable nonfiction books I read, and one book of poetry. Below is a personal reflection on each,
rather than a review.
What prehistory can teach us about ourselves – and the future
The Dawn of
Everything: A New History of Humanity https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374157357/thedawnofeverything/ by Daniel Graeber and Daniel
Wengrow. This massive, sprawling tome
written by an anthropologist and an archeologist upends a multitude of myths
about prehistory. It has been reviewed
far better by more sophisticated reviewers who actually may have a background
in the field, so I will mostly comment on what stood out to me as a writer of
speculative fiction and a physicist-transdisciplinary scholar of climate
change.
First, the
popular conception of history as a straight line of ‘progress’ from our origins
in a state of nature to current modern humans staring zombie-like at computer
screens in industrialized society is simply and wonderfully not true. The archaeological evidence, as well as
written records when there were written records suggest that human social
arrangements were complex, varied, and often deliberate choices among
alternatives, even back in the day.
There were societies that – despite the adoption of agriculture by their
neighbors – chose to stick to hunter-gathering and forest gardens. There were groups in which there was gender
equity and other groups in which men dominated.
There were hierarchies and considerably flatter social relations. Some of the revelations (at least for me) in
the book included:
-
The
much-touted European enlightenment owes its egalitarian ethos to the encounter
between European colonizers and American Indigenous philosophers like
Kondiaronk. Indigenous philosophers were appalled at the brutal class
inequalities of European society. Egalitarianism
provoked a backlash in Europe that engendered the racist concept of white
supremacy.
-
There
were societies in pre-conquest America that did not see a dichotomy between
individual autonomy and social responsibility.
What the West might designate as a leader was often a person given
certain limited ceremonial responsibilities, and any self-aggrandizement or
attempt to dominate another was openly laughed at and squashed. The notion that
a person of high status could rule over the will of another was foreign to
these cultures, yet social relationships and responsibilities were
central.
-
There
was no such thing as an agricultural revolution. The transition to settled agriculture took
thousands of years, with some social groups choosing with great deliberation to
follow a different path.
-
The
development of the city or city-state did not necessarily imply social
hierarchy, as evidenced by what we know of the Indus valley civilization that
lasted for nearly 1000 years.
-
There
were far more ancient civilizations than I’d heard about: I knew about the
Indus Valley, the Sumerians, Mayans, Greeks and Egyptians and (through the
chance discovery of a book in graduate school) the Hittites, but there were
also other ancient civilizations in, for example, present day Turkey and
Ukraine. What we don’t know about
prehistory is a much vaster space than the space of what we know.
Among the things I really liked in the book was the spirit of
critical inquiry, the presentation of lines of evidence, the questioning of the
authors’ own ideas, and the story-telling style. It was truly unputdownable. There is far more to this tome than I am able
to describe here, but for me as a writer and scholar, one thing stands
out.
The book is, first and foremost, a marvelous antidote to the
poverty of the imagination that afflicts and traps us – writers included – in
our grim present. There have been in
history so many possible social arrangements, so many different ways to think about
our relationship with each other and with nonhuman animals and the
environment. And yet, we writers (for
the most part) generate relatively timid versions of our current
socio-political arrangements when we speculate.
This is also relevant in the context of the polycrisis we face, where
climate change is a crucial and frightening accelerator of other crises, from
mass extinction of species to war, conflict, and growing inequality. When we are caught in such situations, when
the powers-that-be constrain our literal and imaginative space, it is hard to
think about possible alternative viable futures. By giving us a glimpse into the diversity of
possibilities in the deep past, this book helps us break out of the imagination
trap of our dire present and open up the horizon of the future.
Civil resistance: what we need to know in an Age of Tyrants
This is an Uprising: How nonviolent revolt is shaping the 21st
century by Marc Engler and Paul Engler.
This 2016 book has been lying in my bookshelf for about four years now,
but late this winter I pulled it out and began to read it. It is yet another unputdownable read. For anyone terrified by the growing power of
the right-wing, this book provides a wonderful dose of fact-informed,
research-based, realistic optimism. It
analyses different kinds of efforts for social change, broadly categorizing
them into structure-based community organizing that works within current
socio-political structures for specific gains, and movement-based organizing
that threatens those very structures.
Discussing the pros and cons of each, along with the advantages of
combining the two, it brings multiple real-world examples to our
attention. This includes those I am
familiar with, such as Gandhi’s non-cooperation movement in India. The Salt Satyagraha, in which my then-teenage
grandmother participated – is part of my family history. I still recall my grandfather telling me how
he had initially felt dismissive about Gandhi’s idea of walking through the
country to the coast to make salt in violation of the British tax law – as a
junior officer in the British government at the time, he had felt this to be a
pointless exercise until the news starting coming in that at every village and
town where the Mahatma stopped, more and more people joined him, until
thousands gathered on the shores of the Arabian sea to make salt
illegally. But what the book explains is
that although the salt satyagraha’s immediate aftermath – Gandhi’s negotiation
with Irwin, resulting in the Irwin Act – was too modest an advance to be
considered a victory, the symbolic aspect of it – a British lord being forced
to negotiate rather than issuing an order -
and the awakening of the masses, were significant events in the long arc
toward independence from British rule.
Similarly, the book presents a fascinating analysis of Martin Luther
King’s Birmingham’s agitation. But it
also delves deep into struggles about which I was ignorant or less informed:
the student uprising that deposed Milosevic in Serbia, the Arab Spring in
Egypt, the United Auto Workers’ fight against General Motors, the Occupy
movement, the shifts in the environmental philosophy of Earth First! that led
to the saving of the redwoods. The
concept of ‘pillars of support’ that shore up tyrants is an important one as
well, because social movements can effect change by undermining these pillars.
In its last chapter the book talks about another kind of resistance,
prefigurative politics in which communities experiment with living in ways that
are alternatives to the mainstream. I
wish the authors had known about the Vikalp Sangam project in India, that seeks
to network such experiments, many of them performed at the grassroots level by
marginalized communities.
As a physical scientist, learning about social movements – much less
analyzing them to discern what made some succeed and others not, and what
success can mean in the long term versus the short term – was not part of my
formal education. I wish it had been. Now, more than ever, scientists – especially
climate scientists engaged with collaborative work with climate-vulnerable
communities – need to know how, when, how, and in what ways social movements
have brought lasting change to human society. And as we face escalating tyrannies, large and
small, around the world, ‘ordinary’ citizens need to arm ourselves with the
knowledge of the art and science of resistance.
Open Veins of Mother Earth: Two autobiographies
This year I also was able to read two autobiographies, not my usual bill
of fare, but both connected to my modest yet profound experiences with
environmental issues in India. The first
is Gentle Resistance: The Autobiography of Chandi Prasad Bhatt https://www.permanentblack.com/product-page/gentle-resistance-the-autobiography-of-chandi-prasad-bhatt, translated from Hindi by Samir
Banerjee. Chandi Prasad Bhatt is one of
the leaders of the Chipko movement https://earth.org/50-years-on-the-legacy-of-the-chipko-movement/ in the Uttarakhand region of the
Himalayas. Its representations outside
its context – in the popular press and academia - are often narrower than the
reality: more than an environmental or even an ecofeminist movement, it was a
movement for food and water sovereignty and community forest rights. Its flashpoint was in 1974, when a young
woman called Gaura Devi, from the remote village of Reni in the high Himalayas,
led a group of women to protect their forest from loggers by hugging the trees
(‘Chipko’ means ‘to stick to’ in Hindi).
Women were the backbone of the movement, but among the emerging leaders
was a young man called Chandi Prasad Bhatt.
In 1980, just six years later, a group of teenagers from Delhi who were
interested in things environmental were invited to the Himalayas of Uttarakhand
by Sundarlal Bahuguna, a Gandhian activist involved in the Chipko
movement. I was one of them. At the age of 17, with no idea at all of what
life was like for people outside the urban middle class, I had experiences that
were so revelatory and so formative to the person I am now, that it took years
to make sense of them (I have written about these elsewhere http://strangehorizons.com/non-fiction/columns/diffractions-soil-water-and-pure-air/).
Among the people we met was Chandi Prasad Bhatt, a gentle, soft-spoken
man. I knew nothing about him before our
meeting, and not too much after, but reading his autobiography enriched my
understanding of him as a person and an activist. His birth in an impoverished Brahmin family
in 1934, his father’s early death, his devotion to his older sister, the hard-scrabble
life of working in the fields, his gradual realization of the roots of the
problems of the mountain people, and of the evils of the caste system – and the
experiments that led him to become a driving force and voice of the Chipko
movement – are all described in the book with luminous clarity, modesty and
simplicity. In 1956 he met the Gandhian
activist Jayaprakash Narayan (JP), which meeting inspired his activism (this is
another intersection point with my family history, as my grandfather was an
ally of JP in the 1970s when JP opposed Indira Gandhi’s authoritarianism and
called for ‘total revolution.’) As
environmental degradation worsened in the Himalayas, like many men of the
mountain villages, Chandi Prasad Bhatt had to go down to the plains to find
work. He started as a booking clerk in a
bus company. He became a grassroots
organizer, organizing the first protests of villagers against commercial
forestry. The book is filled with his
passionate love for the landscape and peoples of the Himalayas. He describes with honesty and empathy how his
activism made difficulties in his family life.
The impression I had of him after that brief meeting decades ago remains
after reading this book – a man of courage, compassion and integrity. According to what I’ve read in the news, he
continues to live a simple life in a Himalayan village with his wife.
This autobiography comes at a time when the legacy of the Chipko movement
– initially undermined by fortress conservation (that excludes local
communities from their ecosystems) and then by the loot and plunder that
followed economic liberalization in India in the 1990s – is under threat via
the aggressive neoliberal, right-wing policies of the current powers https://ramachandraguha.in/archives/chipko50-a-legace-scorned-the-telegraph.html.
I never met the famous Indian ecologist Madhav Gadgil, but threads of his
life are resonant with aspects of my own, which is one of many reasons I
greatly enjoyed reading A Walk up the Hill: Living with People and Nature https://www.penguin.co.in/book/a-walk-up-the-hill/. Gadgil is not a ‘normal’ scientist – he is a
field scientist, a scientist with a poet’s appreciation for the natural world,
with a fierce respect for so-called ordinary people. A recipient of the Champions of Earth award
from the UN, he is well known as an architect of India’s Biological Diversity
act of 2022, and for creating People’s Biodiversity Registers to record folk
and local knowledge of biodiversity and to open up ways of promoting
decentralized community conservation.
His work on sacred groves – an Indigenous conservation practice once
widespread in India https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sacred-groves-an-ancient-tradition-of-nature-conservation/ has been pathbreaking. The book is remarkable for its lucid style
and a fascinating account of his life and learnings. It begins with his growing up in a house full
of books as a precocious reader (imagine reading a Marathi translation of
Plato’s Republic at the age of ten!) and becoming a birdwatcher as a child. Later he met India’s famous birdman, Salim
Ali (which brought me back to my own childhood and teen years as a birdwatcher
and my first copy of Salim Ali’s The Book of Indian Birds – a revelatory
account that for the first time helped me make sense of the variegated avian
population of Delhi’s trees and gardens).
Brought up to question authority, including a healthy disrespect for
such social institutions as caste and religious hierarchies, he went on to
Harvard as a PhD student in the 1960s. His
wife accompanied him to Harvard as a graduate student in applied mathematics. One
of the things that stands out in his account is his respect for his wife as an
equal and an intellectual – it is rare enough in any generation, but rarer,
perhaps, for somebody born in 1942. (Sulochana
Gadgil is a noted meteorologist, an expert on monsoons, who helped set up the
Center for Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the Indian Institute of Science
in Bengaluru). At Harvard he learned
from such luminaries as E. O. Wilson, and reveled in the intellectual freedom
that allowed him to follow his interests and explore the issues of the times -
the Vietnam war protests were ongoing, as were debates and concerns over
environmental pollution. Gadgil and his
wife returned to India in 1971 and began their professional lives. But unlike the standard-issue scientists of
the day, Gadgil made his own path. In
his efforts to save his beloved Western Ghats, a richly forested mountain range
across India’s western coastline, and through his subsequent wanderings around
the country following wild elephants and other denizens, he came to a deep
understanding of the importance of local and Adivasi (Indigenous) people in
conserving biodiversity. This model of
community conservation, of the socially responsible scientist working
collaboratively with local peoples, stands as a stark contrast to the fortress
conservation that is a hallmark of Western models of wildlife
preservation. We can see this not only
in the history of American National Parks, which were set up through the
eviction and dispossession of Native Americans, but in many other places around
the world, including India. Reading this
book gave me a historical context to my own modest and peripheral involvement
with environmental issues growing up in India.
In 1980, after returning from our Chipko visit, some twelve or fifteen
young people including myself formed a unique, non-hierarchical,
consensus-based group called Kalpavriksh that is still active today https://kalpavriksh.org/aboutus/. Thanks to the Chipko experience, we already
knew that local people who had lived for millennia with their ecosystems and
depended on them for food, water, fodder and medicines, were vital to the
continued existence of those ecosystems.
I learned from this experience that environmental destruction and social
injustice were not only intimately connected but were two aspects of the same
problem: a hierarchical, exploitative socio-economic system. Over the years – during my time with
Kalpavriksh and then later, as a graduate student in the US - I heard from time
to time about Madhav Gadgil as one of India’s leading voices for biodiversity
and conservation, but never had a sense of the breadth and depth of his work
until I read his autobiography. There is
no false modesty in this book, but no self-obsession either. What emerges through the lens of his life are
events, ideas, influences, people, landscapes and the nonhumans. The book’s style has the same peripatetic
liveliness as the author himself. Again,
like Chandi Prasad Bhatt’s autobiography, this book brings urgent messages for
our fraught present.
Dust-storms of the heart: Translation of Ghalib’s Temple Lamp
How is it, Ghalib, that your grief,
resurrected in pieces,
has found its way to this room from
your dark home in Delhi?
When they read this poem of mine,
they are translators.
Every existence speaks a language of
its own.
The above lines are written by American poet Adrienne Rich
(Ghazals: Homage to Ghalib) about the poet Ghalib (1797 – 1869) who inhabited a
very different space and time in far-away Delhi. As Rich indicates, Ghalib can be thought of
as a poet of lamentation. Being born and
raised in Delhi, I grew up with Ghalib’s couplets resonating in the air around
me, through music and poetry on the radio at home or in the marketplace, and in
phrases of speech. Ghalib wrote his best-known
work in Urdu, a hybrid language on the spectrum spanned by Hindi and Farsi
(Persian) but retaining much of Hindi basic vocabulary and grammatical structure. (Ancient Farsi and Sanskrit are intimately
related and derive from a common Indo-European tongue, a fact that likely
enabled the modern-day development of Urdu, which has its roots in the 12th
century). I’m not a literary scholar or
much of a poet, but here’s a rough translation by me of a couplet of his:
Love is not easy; understand this:
It is a river of fire; we drown as we
go.
This totally misses the rhythm and ethos of the original
(hence also the relevance of the second couplet in Rich’s poem) but one can see
why Ghalib is a poet of pain. His life
reflected this: to consider just one aspect, he and his wife had seven
children, and not one of them survived to adulthood. He lived in a time of great ferment, when
what remained of the Mughal empire was being displaced by British rule, and by
any account his life was not easy. He
expressed some of his best work in a form known as ghazal, celebrated all the way from Turkey to South Asia. (To get a sense of what a ghazal sounds like
when it is sung, here is Ghalib’s Dil Hi To Hai from the TV series Mirza Ghalib
(1998) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWx2kUeM9AY). Rich’s poem is an attempt to
render an approximation of the ghazal form in English.
So, on to Maaz Bin Bilal’s masterful translation into English
of a long narrative poem (a masnavi, not a ghazal) of Ghalib’s known as
Chirag-o-Dair (Temple Lamp) https://www.penguin.co.in/book/temple-lamp/. This relatively little-known work is written
in Farsi, and has never been translated into English before. Maaz Bin Bilal is
a scholar and a poet whom I once met at a conference on South Asian literature
I happened to attend in New York many years ago. The translation came out in 2023, and I only
came across the book when I rushed to Delhi early that spring to attend to my
father, who was suffering his last illness in hospital. My father, having eclectic intellectual
interests from science to poetry, and an insatiable appetite for books, had
bought a copy. I found it in his room,
on his bedside, and between hospital visits, managed to read the small
volume. It struck a chord so deeply in
me that I would talk to my father about it as he lay mostly unconscious in the
grim, soulless environs of the hospital.
When I was again in Delhi in early 2024, I re-read the book sitting in
my father’s room. So, for as long as I
live, Ghalib is inextricably entwined with my memory of my father’s last days.
The poem Temple Lamp was inspired by Ghalib’s stopover at the
city of Banaras (restored now to its original name, Varanasi) during a long and
arduous trip in 1827, a 1500 km journey by foot, horseback, cart and boat from
Delhi to Calcutta. Falling sick, he
ended up staying in Banaras for three months.
Ghalib was a Muslim; Banaras is one of the holiest sites of Hinduism; I
have never been there, but seen it from the train during childhood trips across
the country. A Muslim poet writing a paean
to a city using, at various points, Hindu imagery reveals a cosmopolitanism and
a broad and generous cultural outlook that is less evident in his better-known
Urdu poetry. This is Ghalib at his most
ecstatic, eulogizing the delights of Banaras, from its natural beauty – the
river Ganga, the gardens – to its people and temples. Translation into English from any Indian
language is hard for many reasons, not least because in English it can sound
purplish – coming from a culture that is passionately and unashamedly unafraid
of sentiment. But Maaz Bin Bilal does
(in my nonexpert opinion) a rather fine job.
Some extracts:
The (supreme) place of worship for
the conch-blowers
surely, (Banaras) is the Kaaba
of Hindustan.
*
Each fleck of dirt here
in its ecstasy is a temple,
every thorn with its verdure
becomes paradise.
*
I welcome now
a flowering land,
spring settles here
on the horizon of heart
*
There is an urgent modern relevance to these words
and this translation. When India gained
freedom from British rule in 1947, an experiment was launched, a beautiful
experiment in diversity and co-existence, a dream of healing the wounds of
colonialism and of our own oppressive social structures. That experiment has, in recent times, become gravely
endangered, which was a profound source of grief for my father, who had, like
his father, worked all his life in the government inspired by that dream. With a right-wing, Hindu nationalist
government and its allies promoting a narrow, mean, militant brand of Hinduism,
founded on an equally distorted rendering of Indian history, it is ever more
important to remember that syncretic cultural moves, moments, and expressions
have always found ways to exist and keep the experiment alive. The lyrical description of Banaras as a
thriving center of Hindu practices and faith that was welcoming to all,
including a Muslim poet from Delhi tells us something important about who we
were and whom we can yet become. As poet
and film director Gulzar says of this translation, the poem itself is a lamp,
and Maaz Bin Bilal, by bringing it to a wider audience, has kept it from
blowing out despite the winds of hatred blowing through the land. May the poem and its translation illumine the
way to better dreams and better futures.
I end with another extract:
I am the vein of stone,
my writing sparks
I am a fistful of dirt,
I write dust storms (of the heart).
Vandana Singh is the author of Ambiguity Machines and Other Stories (Small Beer Press, 2018), The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet (Zubaan, 2009), numerous fine short stories, and two novellas published by Aqueduct Press in the Conversation Pieces series: Of Love and Other Monsters and Distances,
which won the Carl Brandon Society's Parallax Award and was on the
Tiptree Honor List. She lives near Boston, where she teaches physics.
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