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Book Box | Stories from India’s margins
Five books that unveil India's borderlands and their hidden tales. From arid deserts to lush coasts, here's a rich tapestry of cultures and human resilience.
Dear Reader,
I am in the Hindustani Prachar Sabha Library in Mumbai. It is a rainy afternoon, and I am browsing through a quaint collection of books. Inside carefully stored in glass-enclosed bookshelves, is a treasure trove of old manuscripts – some from the 1500s, translations of the Upanishads, beautiful folios of calligraphic art with gold paint.
But what takes my breath away, are the newspapers – sepia-coloured newsprint sheets bound in volumes. They have political columns and advertisements that exhort Indians to give up using imported cloth and use swadeshi instead. Everywhere is a fierce patriotism ablaze with the fire of idealism.
It is evening by the time I emerge from the library, with a bittersweet hangover of history hobbling my head.
I decide to turn to geography to mark the celebrations of India's 77th Independence Day next week, scouring my collection of recent reads to pick up five books. Each of these five traverses India's margin lands, telling little-known stories of India's borders and of the forgotten lands in between.
Book 1 of 5
National Geographic explorer, environmental photographer & writer Arati Kumar- Rao spent ten years writing Marginlands. She travels from the drought-ridden sands of the Thar Desert to the flood-prone plains of the Farakka Barrage area in West Bengal, the heights of Ladakh and the coast of Kerala and the Tigerlands of the Sunderbans tiger, telling stories of lands and people. Her prose flows, it’s richly reflective and no-nonsense, all at the same time. Marginlands is a work of art with beautiful black and white sketches that accompany the copy - Totally recommended.
Book 2 of 5
Midnights Borders is journalist Suchitra Vijayan’s 9000 km journey along India’s borders. Reading this book brought home to me, how little I know about our country and especially its margins. The book is full of little anecdotes, with the history of people along these borders and the author records their many miseries and frustrations. It feels sad, yet it also feels like a book that is important for us to read.
Book 3 of 5
"In a way, Kohima was what I had expected, as taut with violence, anger and bitterness as everyone had said it would be. Two parallel governments held sway there" says the newspaperman narrator, in Siddhartha Deb’s Surface, set in the tumultuous and insurgency-struck Northeast areas of Manipur and Nagaland. This novel is the story of a reporter’s search for a young woman, accused of being a pornstar and captured by militants. I found this book mesmerizing; Deb has been a journalist, he knows the terrain well and his writing is evocative, invoking both the surface and all the layers beneath the surface. It is written in 2005 but feels like it could be today.
Book 4 of 5
The Far Field is a fast-paced and immersive story of a young girl who has a difficult relationship with her mother and then must travel to Kashmir to resolve this. Here she comes face to face with militancy and the Indian Army and realises how little she knows about this emotionally charged situation. She meets Kashmiri people living under constant military scrutiny, even as she searches for meaning in her own life. I couldn’t put the book down, it grappled with real issues even though it did feel primarily crafted for a Western audience.
Book 5 of 5
Pia, a young Indian American, travels to the Sunderbans, where a beleaguered people brave man-eating tigers and crocodiles to eke out a meagre living. Pia dives into this maze of mangrove islands to study river dolphins, taking along with a fisherman and a translator. But the trio gets drawn unawares into powerful political undercurrents in this haunting story of The Hungry Tide.
That’s all for this week. And if you are taking time off, and travelling over the Independence Day holidays, and looking for more reading, here are five fast-paced books for your airplane reads.
Until next week, Happy Reading.
Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com
The views expressed are personal
