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Literary Review
Bookwatch
ANITA JOSHUA
The South Asian 'beat'
Foreign Correspondent: Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia, edited by John Elliott, Bernard Imhasly, Simon Denyer, Penguin, p.424, Rs. 695.
The editors of Foreign Correspondent: Fifty Years of Reporting South Asia offer this anthology of reportage, analysis and writings from the sub-continent as a “draft report” of the region. While it does double up as a chronicle of Independent India — albeit with several notable misses including the assassination of Indira Gandhi and the subsequent blood-letting — the best bits of this book are the asides which mirror the sub-continent.
Particularly, delightful are the few personal accounts of Gerry Priestland of the BBC and Selig S. Harrison of The Washington Post. Writing about “The Delhi Scene” in 1954-58, Priestland notes how the pregnancy rate among the wives of resident foreign correspondents was high because nursemaids were easy to get and everyone was taking advantage of the opportunity while they were in India.
In similar vein is Harrison’s “Servants, Servants Everywhere and Not a Leisure Moment”; an American’s encounter with butlers and the entire retinue of domestic help trained under the “pukka sahibs” who, much to the scribe’s dismay, persuaded his children — “chotta sahib” and “missy sahib” — that it is immoral to pick up and carry anything bigger than a marble with their own hands!!!
Not particularly hemmed in by the strict contours of reporting, many of the foreign correspondents posted here wove in anecdotes and personal experiences into their dispatches; thereby providing them the sub-continental flavour. A case in point being Peter R. Kann’s “Dacca Diary”. Stranded in Dacca during the Bangladesh War, he wrote exasperatedly in his diary: “What are you supposed to do when a war starts and the cable office is closed? Play poker. Go to sleep.” Reprinted in The Wall Street Journal after the end of hostilities as diary notings, it won him a Pulitzer.
Out-of-sight, out-of-mind
Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi, Kalyani Menon-Sen, Gautam Bhan, Yoda Press, Rs. 250.
Eviction being used as a purification ritual by an administration which wants to present a squeaky clean image of the Capital is the sum and substance of Swept off the Map: Surviving Eviction and Resettlement in Delhi. Written with
a feminist perspective, this account of the “cleansing” of the Yamuna Pushta area ahead of the 14th Lok Sabha elections would have served a better purpose if it had not been so one-sided.
No doubt, Kalyani Menon-Sen and Gautam Bhan are speaking for the voiceless multitudes who lived in the Yamuna Pushta slums and similar dwellers elsewhere. But, the tone and tenor of the narrative is such that it is likely to appeal only to the already converted.
Product of a two-year-long research on the price that the hapless residents of Yamuna Pushta had to pay to turn Delhi into a “world class city”, there can be no doubting their plight and this book details their crisis. Questioning the rehabilitation policy, it shows how the resettlement sites are no more than dumping grounds with practically no civic amenities.
Clash of diversities
Rage, Reconciliation and Security: Managing India’s Diversities, B.G. Verghese, Delhi Policy Group and Penguin, p. 276, Rs. 495.
As the current Chair on Non-Traditional Security at the Delhi Policy Group, veteran journalist B.G. Verghese tries to dwell upon some of the million mutinies that Nobel laureate V.S. Naipaul spoke about in his book India: A Million Mutinies Now.
Verghese examines the challenges to the Indian State from within because of age-old prejudices that just refuse to go away and new uncertainties ushered in by rapid changes which a large part of the country is still ill-equipped to deal with.
Six decades after the colonial enemy has been shown the door, the “us and them” divide is emerging ever so frequently in narrower contexts; resulting in the situations that the country is grappling with in the Northeast and Jammu & Kashmir besides Naxalism and the very many powder kegs waiting to happen in the form of caste tensions, religious biases, language differences, population pressures, income disparities….
Taking forward the argument that India must shine for all, Verghese looks at each tinder box in detail; tracing the genesis of the problem, its current status and suggesting an innovative and imaginative — a la think out-of-the-box — approach. Though he has no quick-fix solutions, his submission is that all options ought to be explored.
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