Emergency Chronicles + Early Indians + RIP Mary Oliver
January isn’t even over yet and here I am in your inbox, with my first update of the year. Move over Hercules. I'm feeling particularly heroic because a project that I've been working on with my friend and general genius Supriya Nair is almost ready. Basically, we've been working on a books podcast and it's almost ready, thanks to an amazing team of producers that we were very lucky to find. From literature festivals to the Ramayana, we've got it all in this podcast and it's been so much fun putting it together. I have a feeling that you'll get a sense of that when you hear it — which will, hopefully, be soon. Watch this space (and wish us luck).
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The year began with us losing Mary Oliver on January 17. For those of us who live in concrete jungles, Oliver with her poetry was like a shaman connecting us to the forests. She literally walked in forests, notebook in hand, writing poetry; and that sense of communion with the nature around her radiates from her writing.
Oliver didn’t give too many interviews, which makes this one from 2015 special. It’s a wonderful introduction to Oliver and her work. She’s candid and unforgiving and funny, reminding us that creativity needs to be nurtured and worked upon. She talks about throwing out poems, how poetry is closer to singing than prose, setting schedules, writing and rewriting — emphasising the hard work involved poet and how much the reader or “convivial listening” adds to a work.
One of Oliver’s most famous poems is “Wild Geese” and it seems to speak to everyone who reads it (you can hear her reading it out in the interview).
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
Guess what? This epiphany of a poem began as a writing exercise to show the definitive quality of end-stopped lines (a line of poetry that ends with a full stop or similarly definite punctuation mark).
Seriously, do listen to the interview and at the end of the recording, take a moment to say a prayer and goodbye when Oliver delightedly squeals, “I’m free!”
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On the prose front, 2019 has begun with some excellent non-fiction. First up: Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point.
You know a book is written by a history professor when it tells you that to understand an incident from the past, you have to look even further back in history. Fortunately, Prakash’s look back in anger isn’t an indulgence. By rewinding all the way to the years when the Constitution of India was being framed, Emergency Chronicles shows why the founding fathers of the country felt the need to invest power in the Executive, rather than trust the idea of democracy. It was this privileging of the Centre in the Constitution that Indira Gandhi took advantage of when she declared Emergency.
For most of us, what we know of the Emergency are the stories we’ve been told by others. It’s good to have a book that tells you the stories, but also has verifiable and verified facts. Especially if you are someone who doesn’t like dynastic politics and/ or Indira Gandhi, Emergency Chronicles is a good book for you because it will give you facts and reasons to back your dislike. There’s also a possibility that you’ll find yourself noticing some remarkable resemblances between Emergency-era India’s political scenario and the present – press dedicating its pages to pro-government news, attacks on those considered who criticised the government, the ragtag union of Opposition parties who had nothing but anti-Indira sentiment holding them together. Replace Sanjay Gandhi and his gang running rampage with RSS and gaurakshaks, and history really does seem to repeat itself.
Perhaps it’s because we’re in election year in India, but there’s one detail from Emergency Chronicles that keeps circling back to me – the Intelligence Bureau submitting a report in which it assured Gandhi that she would be re-elected. As Prakash points out, the remarkable detail isn’t that the IB couldn’t gauge the mood of the nation (Gandhi was resoundingly defeated in the polls), but that the internal intelligence agency was tasked with drawing up a report on the prime minister’s poll prospects. As terrible that period of history was, the outrage it evoked and the commission that was set up to probe the Emergency led to a credible record of how institutions were manipulated and civil liberties were violated. Fifty years later, I wonder how faithful and accurate our public record would be to our present-day reality.
Coming back to the book, Emergency Chronicles flits between time periods; it weaves individual, personal narratives with a more macro perspective. Prakash also looks at how cinema and literature treated the Emergency (as someone with next to no knowledge of Hindi literature, the detailed descriptions of Rahi Masoom Raza’s Katra bi Aarzoo were a treasure. In it, Raza lashed out at how the politicians had crushed the average Indian). It's like the history professor is working overtime to make sure his class doesn't get bored, and it works.
A troubling aspect of Congress governments has been an unwillingness to let the Gandhi family’s actions be analysed. As Prakash points out, we have a lot of Nehru’s writings – autobiographical and otherwise – because they were published, but practically none of Indira Gandhi’s papers are in the public domain. What we do have are either blinkered, adulatory odes or unhinged attacks. Neither are helpful in terms of understanding what her decisions and government meant for India’s modern identity. Emergency Chronicles is one of the few books to offer an analysis of how the Emergency was made possible, the way it violated civil liberties and the rot that it allowed into Indian politics.
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Back in 2017, journalist Tony Joseph had written two articles that looked at what DNA research was revealing about the origins of people in South Asia. The first one earned him many trolls because he said genetic research proved that there had been an influx of people the steppes, or an Aryan invasion, which meant the roots of Sanskrit and potentially Vedic Hinduism were not indigenous to India. The second one looked at the genetic study of human skeletons found in a village in Haryana, which may have been a bustling city in the Indus civilisation.
Now that these articles have led to him writing Early Indians: The Story of Our Ancestors and Where We Came From, the trolls must be frothing around the mouth. (This should be good news for Joseph's Amazon rankings because the more activity his book page has, the more it gets seen by those visiting the website.)
The trolling is all sorts of bunkum and deserves to be either ignored or used as fodder for a drinking game, but I do think there are critical observations to be made about the theories that Joseph puts forward. Unfortunately, I’m not the one qualified to do this, but I will point out one niggling detail: Genetic research is fascinating and revealing, but it’s one part of the picture. For all the information gleaned from DNA analysis, we’re as much in the dark about who the bearded gent of the sculpture titled “Priest-King” is and whether Dancing Girl of Mohenjo-Daro really is in fact meant to be a dancing girl. Especially since Early Indians is such a slim book, I’d have loved a couple of chapters that looked at what the archaeological research has revealed about the early Indians. As it stands, Early Indians the archaeological research is treated like a sideshow.
Still, Joseph does do a remarkable job of organising the genetic research into comprehensible chapters. Early Indians is divided into four chapters: “The First Indians”, “The First Farmers”, “The First Urbanites: The Harappans” and “The Last Migrants: The ‘Aryans’”. As it turns out, the truly indigenous Indian is one who is usually othered in contemporary India while the group that tends to explode with racial/ caste pride at being sons of the Indian soil can be traced back to the last migrants.
The most explosive detail in Early Indians actually had nothing to do with the research or the findings, but concerned the way that research was projected. Quoting from David Reich’s Who We Are And How We Got Here (which is very much on my to-read list now), Joseph tells us that Indian researchers were so spooked by “the cultural resonances" of their findings that they refused to let the information gathered from research be released. Ultimately, Reich said “we groped towards a formulation that would be scientifically accurate as well as sensitive to these concerns.” Joseph writes,
“In essence, instead of stating that today’s Indians are descendants of both the First Indians and West Eurasian-related populations as research itself suggested, the published paper ended up creating two new artificial population groupings… This was perhaps a scientifically defendable framework to understand the population structure of South Asia and to avoid a political controversy, but the cost of compromise was that it made it easier to misinterpret the study.”
Yes, the Indian scientists got the heebie-jeebies at the thought of publishing a paper that would state that the roots of Sanskrit are not in indigenous communities of South Asia. Remember this the next time someone starts lecturing you about the rationality and objectivity and fearlessness of science.
Genetic research tells us, among other things, that 70-90% of all Indian women can trace their maternal line back to an original Out of Africa female migrant who reached India about 65,000 years ago while 10-40% of men can trace their paternal line back to an original Out of Africa male migrant. The Out of Africa migrants are groups of homo sapiens who left Africa around 70,000 years ago, looking for new prospects. DNA also give us a good idea of the routes the Out of Africa groups may have taken. In terms of DNA, these are the modern humans and they would have been entering lands that were often home to species of archaic humans (like Neanderthals).
Also, between 45,000 and 20,000 years ago, the region that is India today was where most of humanity lived, which basically goes to show that crowded is basically a way of life for us in South Asia.
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There's a short story by Haruki Murakami out in the New Yorker this week. Maybe I'm just growing up, but it seems alarmingly comprehensible and coherent. That said, I've no idea what is a circle with many centres though I feel like I may have seen a pattern that sort of fits that description drawn into the sand of a zen garden.
I loved reading this essay on the kind of food (or the lack thereof) in science fiction. Lizzy Saxe looks back at how the genre’s writers included food in their writing and notes that while in the present, food scarcity is a running theme in science fiction, this wasn’t always the case. It’s true – the most fantastic of fantasies have their roots in reality.
Strictly speaking, I’m cheating when I put this article about a Hindu pilgrimage spot in Pakistan in the newsletter because truly, more than the writing, it’s the photography that is breathtaking. Legend has it that the body of Sati, who would later be reincarnated as Parvati, was sliced into 51 pieces by Vishnu’s sudarshan chakra while a griefstruck Shiva danced the tandav holding Sati’s body aloft. Her head is believed to have fallen on Hinglaj, in present-day Balochistan.
Jaipur Literature Festival is on this weekend, which basically means by this time next week, fresh literary scandals and general gossip will be doing the rounds. I will, in all probability, be entirely out of the loop since I'll be at home, curled up with a book. However, hopefully the Twitter account JLF Insider will suffer on our behalf and deliver the pithiest summaries of sessions and controversies.
On the personal front, I wrote about Roma — which has scored a bunch of Oscars nominations — and Mary Poppins Returns. There are some fabulous art exhibitions showing in Mumbai and I wrote about three of them here and here.
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And that’s all I have for you this time. Hope January is treating you well and 2019 treats you even better. Thank you for reading and Dear Reader will be back soon.