HT Picks; New Reads
On the reading list this week is a collection of unsettling stories that offer a searing critique of society, an extensive history of Pakistan, and a volume that covers the legal and economic history of India over 250 years
Forcing you out of your comfort zone
Among the most uncompromising of modern Hindi prose writers, Swadesh Deepak’s unsettling stories have a profound ability to offer a searing critique of society, of bureaucracy, but also to upend the usual masculine stereotypes found in much literature of our time.
The little boy in Hunger who scrounges for leftovers by the station is pleasantly confused by the godown guards’ generosity one day when his sister tags along. The Prime Minister’s imminent visit to their small town, in No News of Untoward Events, is too disruptive for the residents to cause much excitement. In Name a Tree, Any Tree, the headstrong Maya Bakhshi can’t make sense of her family’s kindness towards Major Ajay Singh, until she does, and the ground slips beneath her feet. Sunila, in Horsemen, falls in love with the unnervingly quiet Sukant, who runs mad whenever it snows. There’s an unspoken tension between Naveen and Nimmi in Dead End, but the generous hosts at the hotel they’ve come to during this unusual time of the year could never guess why. And in The Child God, the Pandit and his family find out just how depraved they can be.
“Hindi literature, Swadesh Deepak maintained, had to be forced out of its comfort zone,” writes Jerry Pinto in his Introduction. “The reader here is treated no less savagely.” The stories in this volume will challenge and shake readers and hold them in their grip for a very long time.*
The promises and challenges of Pakistan
This vast and important book takes us on a sweeping journey through the ebbs and flows of Pakistan’s history, from the “Baluchi village cultures” preceding the Indus Valley Civilization, to contemporary times. It uncovers influences from Turkey, Persia, Arabia and Britain that shaped Pakistan, as well as showcasing the region’s diverse and rich ancient tapestry of peoples, and its multicultural society. The book also describes the post-1947 shift — following the partition of India, after decades of Muslim nationalism, and the eventual establishment of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan — as the country became more religiously conservative and autocratic, intensifying sectarian and ethnic divisions.The bulk of the book comprises rigorously researched and compellingly narrated chapters on the promise, challenges, successes and failures of the Pakistani state — from the brief period of Jinnah as the supreme leader, and through the tenures of dictators and populists like Ayub Khan, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, Zia-ul-Haq, Benazir Bhutto and Imran Khan, to the dubious coalition that assumed power in 2024.As it narrates the history of Pakistan, this book also examines with extraordinary candour and clarity the challenges for democracy in a ‘nation state embedded in religious ideology’ and controlled, for most of its modern history, by a landed feudal elite and a “civil-military oligarchy”.Tahir Kamran’s magisterial book tells the story of Pakistan as few other books have ever done.*
250 years in a single narrative
Law matters for economic development, but where does it come from? And through what mechanisms does it affect different parts of the economy? In this insightful volume Tirthankar Roy and Anand V Swamy start in the late eighteenth century, tracing the evolution of the British-Indian legal system as it emerged in the service of a cautious and self-serving colonial regime. They show that British-Indian law was designed to facilitate tax collection, permit international trade, and, above all, keep the regime in place. Since independence the Indian state has been much more confident and ambitious, seeking economic growth, equity, and poverty reduction. Therefore, it has also been far more interventionist, in policy and in law. Roy and Swamy have put together this entire 250-year legal and economic history in a single narrative, for the first time, offering a unique perspective on the challenges of today.*
*All copy from book flap.