HT Picks; New Reads
On the reading list this week is a book that explains what is happening on the India China border, another that celebrates the work of one of the most underrated film-makers in Hindi cinema, and the first of a two-volume biography that traces Ambedkar’s life journey
The threat of war in the high Himalayas
In the summer of 2020, China and India came close to war. The nuclear-armed adversaries both amassed troops and equipment along their disputed border in eastern Ladakh. The two sides slugged it out with fists, stones and clubs next to a fast-flowing Himalayan stream, resulting in dozens of deaths and injuries, many from hypothermia.
The entire 4,000-kilometre Sino-Indian boundary is disputed. In 1962, the two countries fought a short and vicious war that went badly for India, and from which Nehru never recovered. The border, called the Line of Actual Control, is not marked on any map agreed upon by the two sides; it runs through the largely unpopulated and inhospitable high mountains of the Himalayas. From the 1990s, as Beijing and New Delhi sought to resolve their seemingly intractable border dispute, an elaborate system of agreements kept the situation akin to a kettle on a slow boil.
{{/usCountry}}The entire 4,000-kilometre Sino-Indian boundary is disputed. In 1962, the two countries fought a short and vicious war that went badly for India, and from which Nehru never recovered. The border, called the Line of Actual Control, is not marked on any map agreed upon by the two sides; it runs through the largely unpopulated and inhospitable high mountains of the Himalayas. From the 1990s, as Beijing and New Delhi sought to resolve their seemingly intractable border dispute, an elaborate system of agreements kept the situation akin to a kettle on a slow boil.
{{/usCountry}}But the kettle is now boiling over. The two rising Asian giants, both led by strongly nationalistic regimes, neither of which wishes to blink first, are seeking geopolitical and strategic advantage. This timely book explains what is happening on “the roof of the world”.*
{{/usCountry}}But the kettle is now boiling over. The two rising Asian giants, both led by strongly nationalistic regimes, neither of which wishes to blink first, are seeking geopolitical and strategic advantage. This timely book explains what is happening on “the roof of the world”.*
{{/usCountry}}An auteur of the common man
This is the enigma of Basu Chatterji. His films did not have the box-office ingredients that could make them a distributor’s hot pick, nor were they art house cinema that needed unravelling over many cups of tea. He was the quintessential “middle-of-the-road” film-maker, a genre that he founded in Bollywood. His films, whether it be Chhoti Si Baat or Rajnigandha or Chitchor, were about common people and common problems, such as employment and love, social and economic inequalities, and joint family conflicts. Like fellow cartoonist RK Laxman, who created the “common man”, Chatterji too was an auteur of the common man, whose journey he portrayed with charm, delicate warmth and humour.
As a person, Basu was much like his common man: mild, unobtrusive and media-shy. He preferred not to scout for stars and mostly made his films with rookies, giving them respectability as artists. And today, names like Amol Palekar, Vidya Sinha, Pearl Padamsee, Zarina Wahab, Nandita Thakur, Girish Karnad, Rakesh Pandey, Bindiya Goswami and Ranjit Chowdhry have become central to the history of Indian cinema, thanks to Basu.
Basu Chatterji: And Middle-of-the-Road Cinema, anecdotal in nature, goes behind the scenes of his films. It places Basu’s cinema and television work in the context of the changing times, like the emergence of Rajesh Khanna, Kishore Kumar and Amitabh Bachchan, the Emergency, the return of Sarat Chandra’s stories, the introduction of disco and the decadent phase of Hindi cinema in the 1980s. The book celebrates the work of one of the most underrated, yet successful, film-makers in Hindi cinema.*
The man behind the legend
There are many intellectual biographies of BR Ambedkar, but until now none has sought to reveal the personality of the man. They will tell you what he thought or what he wrote, but remain silent about who he actually was, his inner struggles, how he felt. They give information about Ambedkar, but do not talk about his interior life, his personal growth or how he came to be the man who left such an indelible mark on modern India’s constitutional, political, social and religious landscapes.
The first of an ambitious two-volume biography, Becoming Babasaheb traces Ambedkar’s life journey, from his birth in 1891 to the transformative Mahad Satyagraha in 1929. It takes a completely fresh look at Ambedkar’s lived experiences and teases out the nature and character of the man behind the legend. It offers an extensive, personality-driven narrative covering Ambedkar’s life, along with salient aspects of his contemporary legacy, unfolding as a tale of remarkable tenacity, which it chronicles in all its rich vitality.
All of Ambedkar’s books and speeches are publicly available, so large volumes will forever appear interpreting his writings and presenting his ideas. Meanwhile, old myths and inaccurate “facts” about his thought and life events, even his relationships, persist. Becoming Babasaheb has been written on the basis of entirely original archival research to set the historical record straight. A vivid portrait of the man in his times, both volumes of this biography will present readers with a new Ambedkar, the true Ambedkar.*
*All copy from book flap.
