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Books at Fabmall.com, new and old

Towards Ananda

Rethinking Indian Art and

Aesthetics

Shakti Maira

Penguin, Rs. 395

A curious collection of essays, Towards Ananda attempts to rethink Indian art and aesthetics without using the glorious past angle, but by applying the old rules to contemporary work. What gives these essays a tang is Maira's insider status — he's himself a practising artist.

I particularly enjoyed reading the sections called Temples and Tangents and Practice and Punditry. The former examines how and why Indians lose sight of their everyday sense of beauty, why we seem to show no signs of visual memory, opting for the "loud, vulgar and ugly" as soon as we step out of the beauty that remains in traditional arts and crafts. The second essay has some caustic and funny observations about installation art, especially in the West (we could use a similar voice to comment on the squares of dung and the curtains of voile that our city has had to accept as high art).

Though Maira's writing is sometimes, naïve and simplistic, sometimes verging on boring, it is filled with a palpable sense of involvement and excitement and the issue he raises is one that we are confronted with every day — why is our daily world filled with so much ugliness?

Street Fighting Years

Tariq Ali

Seagull Books

Rs. 525

Tariq Ali's Street Fighting Years, an "autobiography" of the 1960s, first came out in 1987, and has been out of print for over a decade now. This reprint by Seagull Books, Calcutta, has a new introduction as well as some textual changes: the 1971 conversation between himself, Robin Blackburn, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, as well as an exchange between Lennon and John Hoyland.

The book is full of interesting people: Che Guevara, of course, the Beatles, Mick Jagger, Malcolm X and interesting places: Vietnam, Bolivia, Paris, Berlin, in interesting times. There is a section of pictures as well. For Che fans, there is a moving piece called The Last Year in the Life of `Che' Guevara: 1967.

Very readable.

Writing Social History

Sumit Sarkar

Oxford University Press

Rs. 275

This is that interesting collection from the '90s, which has some significant essays including "The Decline of the Subaltern", "Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti" and "Vidyasagar and Brahminical Society".

These essays are absorbing, and one of the most thought provoking of these is "Kaliyuga, Chakri and Bhakti", which looks at the relationship between Ramakrishna Paramahamsa and that section of the Calcutta bhadralok engaged in `chakri' or clerical jobs. This essay also looks at the connection between the dystopia of Kaliyuga, and how in the teaching of Sri Ramakrishna it was connected with the woman-gold dyad in the lives of the clerks who made up large numbers of his disciples. Interesting contrasts are also drawn between Sri Ramakrishna and his famous disciple Swami Vivekananda to show how the latter became a leading light of the masculinisation of Hinduism into its current Hindutva colours.

Absorbing reading.

Recasting Women

Ed. Kumkum Sangari

and Sudesh Vaid

Zubaan

Rs. 295

This collection of essays explores different aspects of what makes up a reconstitution of patriarchy in colonial India, looking at the inter-relation of patriarchies with law, religion, political economy and culture. It attempts also to suggest a different history of reform movements, and of class and gender relations.

Though the reading is tough, some of the essays are worth the effort: the one on the Telengana land struggle and the one that looks at the slow asphyxiation of women's popular culture in the form of music and song, are two that I like.

Books like this are too often confined to academia, because the lay reader feels unwelcome perhaps, but what the latter can bring to such work is very different from what the academician does, and the loss is double. It's one of those problems that don't have a solution, I guess.

KALA KRISHNAN RAMESH

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