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.
No comments:
Post a Comment