HT Picks; New Reads
This week’s pick of interesting reads includes a poignant childhood memoir, a tribute to Subhas Chandra Bose first published in 1946, and a collection of poems on Indian cities
Invisible in an unequal society
A village barber’s son who migrated with his family from erstwhile East Pakistan to India in 1967 revisits his childhood in the lost land. When his father set up a hair salon in the local weekly market near their new home, it fell to the little boy to seek out customers and bring them to the shop for a haircut or a shave.
But the father was keenly aware that only an education could offer his boy a way out of the penury that had been their lot. Disappointed in his older sons who had both dropped out of school, he now pinned all his hopes on the youngest son. But school was brutal on the young boy who was always shown his ‘place’, the last bench, where he sat alone, with his cracked slate and a wet rag to wipe it clean.
His only refuge was his ailing mother, with whom he sometimes forayed into the woods and up to the outskirts of the village. They saw the world through each other’s eyes. And after her passing, he found another constant companion: Bhombol, the dog that followed him like a shadow.
The Last Bench is a poignant childhood memoir about what it means to be invisible in an unequal society, about the exchanges between man and nature, and most of all, what it means to lose those whose absence changes everything.*
Memoir of one of the Red Fort Three
Born on 24 January 1914, in the village of Matore in Kahuta, Rawalpindi district (now in Pakistan), Khan was the son of Captain Sardar Tikka Khan, a high-ranking official in the British Indian Army. Like his father, Khan joined the British Army and received his military education at the Prince of Wales Royal Indian Military College in Dehradun and was commissioned into the 14th Punjab Regiment.
During the Second World War, he was captured by the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in 1942. Khan was deeply influenced by Subhas Chandra Bose and decided to join the INA in 1943. He rose to the rank of Major General and played a crucial role in leading the army into North-Eastern India, seizing Kohima and Imphal, briefly held by the INA under Japanese authority.
It was after the Declaration of War by Bose in 1945 and its aftermath, that Khan along Captain Prem Kumar Sahgal and Lieutenant Gurbaksh Singh Dhillon, was tried for treason in the famous Red Fort trials. The widespread public support and nationalist sympathies led to the commutation of their sentences. This trial significantly contributed to the growing discontent against British rule in India.
My Memories of INA & Its Netaji, first published in 1946 was written as a tribute and celebration of the life and courage of Subhas Chandra Bose.*
A lyrical exploration of India’s urban landscape
From Ghalib’s Delhi and Nissim Ezekiel’s Bombay to Agha Shahid Ali’s Srinagar and Kamala Das’s Calcutta, from Sarojini Naidu’s Hyderabad to Arundhathi Subramaniam’s Madras to Kynpham Sing Nongkynrih’s Shillong; The Penguin Book of Poems on the Indian City takes you on a spectacular poetic journey across 37 cities in India.
This anthology contains 375 poems, those written in English and those translated from nearly 20 languages. From the classical voices of Valmiki and the Sangam poets to the Bhakti and Sufi strains of Surdas, Kabir and Amir Khusrau, and the early modern figures like Mir Taqi Mir, Narmad, Rudyard Kipling and Rabindranath Tagore, this collection offers an immersive lyrical exploration of India’s urban landscape.
Contemporary poets such as Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, Vikram Seth, Eunice de Souza, Arun Kolatkar, Amrita Pritam, Amit Chaudhuri and Gulzar carry this tradition into the present. Together, they take the reader through depictions of cities as imperial capitals, colonial outposts and dynamic, ever-evolving spaces that serve as the backdrop for postmodern life. At its core, this collection portrays the Indian city as a complex organism and living embodiment of the collective conscience of its many, many residents. A collection for not just those who live in the cities featured in this book but for anyone who is familiar with the chaotic, paradoxical and magical tableau that constitutes life in a city in this part of the world.*
*All copy from book flap.
