HT Picks; New Reads
On the reading list this week is a volume that attempts to elucidate the particular dilemma of the Indian liberal, a book that retells fairy tales to include diverse bodies, minds and voices, and a novel that recreates the love story of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and his Turkish slave Ayaz in contemporary India
The story of a nation through the story of a life
Gurcharan Das has been a lifelong and passionate champion of both economic and political freedom. “For over two centuries,” he writes, “liberal democracies and free markets spread around the world to become the only sensible way to organize public life.” After years of the stifling ‘license raj’, he watched and celebrated India’s long-delayed move towards a liberal order in the 1990s, as market reform and a maturing democratic process began to yield remarkable results, bringing prosperity and dignity to the many millions who had been denied both for decades. He recorded this progress in his classic study, India Unbound. But after three decades, that light seems to be fading. As in the rest of the world, liberalism is in retreat in India as well. Society is hopelessly polarized and populists are on the march. The debate appears to be about economic freedom versus political freedom — as if it is a given that the two cannot coexist. The liberal today is on a lonely road.
In order to elucidate the dilemma of the Indian liberal, Gurcharan Das recounts his own professional and intellectual journey: how and why he became a liberal. While telling his story, he also narrates the story of a nation struggling — still — to become a successful liberal democracy — the late promise and its seeming betrayal, but also the possibility of course correction.
Written with conviction, insight and scholarship — and with immense clarity — this is an urgent and illuminating book. It is a book that every Indian invested in the future of the country should read.*
Classic tales retold
Meet a deaf Snow White, a wheelchair-using Rapunzel, a neurodivergent Ugly Duckling.
In a world where fairy tales usually demonize characters who live with disability, these and other fairy-tale characters challenge our understanding of the people around us. The authors of this collection seek to retell classic stories by weaving in their own everyday experiences-the struggles, joys and frustrations that may not be known to the non-disabled.
And They Lived ... Ever After grew out of a programme organized by Rising Flame, an award-winning non-profit that seeks to build an inclusive world in which diverse bodies, minds and voices thrive with dignity and live free of discrimination, abuse and violence. This book is every bit as enchanting as it is important.*
Following in a sultan’s footsteps
Using the legendary love story of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni and his Turkish slave-cum-lover Ayaz as the backdrop, Mahmud and Ayaz, set in contemporary Mumbai, tells the story of a young, casually radicalized Muslim man, Mahmud Fakhar, who has failed to qualify for the IAS — where he had hoped to make a lot of money, but also to weaken the system from within — and has barely managed a temporary teaching job in a second-rate college. At a loose end after his entire family dies in the 2015 Hajj stampede, he runs into a homeless Hindu lad, the illegitimate son of a tamasha dancer, hires him as his domestic servant, converts him to Islam, re-names him Ayaz, and begins an affair with him.
It is the start of an unusual life together, and a series of journeys. Their travels take them to Somnath in the great Sultan’s footsteps, and then to Kashmir, as they are drawn into a life of petty and not-so-petty crime and, almost, of militancy. After some odd adventures, the wheel comes full circle when their wayward life ends again in Mumbai, in the neighbourhood of Mahmud’s birth, even as AIDS afflicts one of them.
Narrated with irreverent, deadpan humour, R Raj Rao’s new novel is funny, subversive, provocative and wonderfully rude. It is unlike any love story — gay or straight — that Indian readers would expect.*
*All copy from book flap.