April in Books: Chola adventures, Mughal mapmakers and Dalit liberation

Last month was all about truth, justice and why they mean different things to different people. Here’s a rundown of fiction and non-fiction that deserves your attention

Written by Udbhav Seth

The best fiction shatters political binaries, subverts ethical certainties and humanises grave villainy. That’s how it augments facts, so cautiously mediated by governments, corporations and privilege. B Jeyamohan’s The Abyss (Rs 699, Juggernaut), translated from Tamil to English by Suchitra Ramachandran, mingles fact and fiction to produce a holistic truth. Drawn from the author’s own experience of running away from home and living as a beggar at the age of 19, it tells the tale of a begging cartel in Tamil Nadu and its boss, Pothivelu Pandaram. He is a loving husband, a doting father of three and a respected member of the community, whose well-organised trade of deformed beggars and their babies is an unfortunate factor of that stature.

But he does not defend it. According to him, without him, these beggars and their kids (whose births he has forced) wouldn’t have anything. In an interview to The Hindu last month, Jeyamohan referred to charges of exaggerated violence against his 2003 Tamil original Ezhaam Ulagam, saying that the same year Chennai Police found a group of people dismembering children and selling them. “This is an artwork, not a documentary. In fact, I have reduced the morbidity considerably,” he said.

The work has also been adapted into a National Award Winning 2009 film, Naan Kadavul, directed by Bala.

This is a colossus in Tamil fiction’s pantheon. Nandini Krishnan delivers a refreshing and vibrant translation of Kalki’s classic about Chola emperor Rajaraja I in this first of 10 instalments, Ponniyin Selvan (Book 1): The First Flood (Rs 399, Eka). Originally serialised in the 1950s and amounting to a sprawling epic of more than 2000 pages, it acquired a huge cult following and even spawned an adjective — Kalki Tamil — to describe a prose style that marries wit and grace with profanity and punnery.

The First Flood follows Vallavarayan Vandiyadevan, a commander in the Chola army, on a mission to deliver an important message to Aditya Karikalan, crown prince and elder brother of Rajaraja I. The action-packed story is also being adapted into a film, helmed by director Mani Ratnam, with Ponniyin Selvan: I released last year, and Ponniyin Selvan: II released in April.

A crystalline account of growing up as a Dalit in India, finding refuge in art, facing discrimination in schools and workplaces, and making ends meet with back-breaking factory labour, Water in a Broken Pot: A Memoir (Rs 499, Penguin) reads like an exposé on the hypocrisies of Indian institutions. Yogesh Maitreya retraces his steps from a naive childhood to an Ambedkarite adulthood, asserting that his career in letters — founding the Dalit-Bahujan publishing company Panther’s Paw — is an empowering choice made to take back his community’s right to storytelling.

In an introductory note on a Dalit’s dual exploitation by Brahminism and capitalism, he writes, “This may not be the story of victory, but a story [of] struggle. So let me tell you this: this story isn’t about a dream, but its murder. This story isn’t about a hope, but its mutilation. This story isn’t about assertion, but its suppression. This story is not about liberation. It is about conditions that make liberation impossible. If you read it carefully, you will find that this is the story of silence and the violence it carries.”

A decade before British retaliation for the Revolt of 1857 razed it to the ground, Delhi’s Shahjahanabad, the Mughals’ power centre, was scrupulously assessed, explored, mapped, marked, catalogued and celebrated in ink and watercolour by an unknown cartographer. His patron is unknown — historians guess Governor General Thomas Metcalf — but his map survives till date and contains numerous tiny scribblings in Urdu and anecdotes about the city’s mosques, streets and landmarks. It is a vital historical document considering the obliteration that followed, and is now printed and analysed in glorious colour in Shahjahanabad: Mapping a Mughal City (Rs 2495, Roli Books). The book’s text has been written by historian Swapna Liddle and images curated by Pramod Kapoor and Sneha Pamneja.

In a recent talk with Eric Chopra, founder of educational platform Itihasology, Liddle said she has tried to de-romanticise this period of history while accepting that Shahjahanabad has a certain “aura” about it. “It has layers of complex history because it was a cosmopolitan city,” she said. “Using this map, you can locate certain parts of Delhi better than any modern map. That’s amazing.”

The book has been edited by Anita Mani and sketched by Sangeetha Kadur, and comes from Indian Pitta, a new imprint of Juggernaut dedicated exclusively to ornithology.

Courtesy : TIE

Note: This news piece was originally published in theindianexpress.com and used purely for non-profit/non-commercial purposes exclusively for Human Rights