Book Box:Why Those in Power Fear Your Bookshelf
From Mumbai’s Crowds to Irawati Karve’s Legacy— why stories are your best defence
Dear Reader,
I come down from the mountains to a crammed calendar. The very first day is a get-together with school friends. My roommate from school is visiting Mumbai, and we gather to spend an evening with her — five friends who go back thirty years to our days at DPS R.K. Puram.
“I don’t like crowds,” she says in the way of NRI Indians who have lived in suburban America for too long. I wince and think of the wisdom of crowds, the energy and buzz of crowds in my home city of Mumbai. And feel like retorting in a fiery fashion. But then the talk turns back to school days, the moment passes, and we are all friends again.
“There were celebrations in your houses,” she tells the boys, “but there was mourning in mine.” The boys and she had cleared the IIT entrance exam — the boys’ families were happy, and her family was in shock. “They didn’t want me to go to IIT Delhi; my grandparents said, ‘How can you let a girl be an engineer?’ I cried and cried.” But she is a fighter, and her mother had her back, so go she did.
The next morning, I pick up Iru — the story of Irawati Karve. I’ve known Karve as the Sahitya Akademi Award-winning author of a book of essays on the Mahabharata called Yuganta. It’s fantastic in how it analyzes the characters in the Mahabharata and examines their motivations, compulsions, and separate realities — pick it up if you can.
In Iru, her granddaughter Urmila Deshpande and the Brazilian scholar Thiago Pinto Barbosa get together to write Karve’s story. Reading the book, I discover the author was really an anthropologist, that her Ph.D. in Berlin required her to prove that European skulls were larger on the right than the skulls of other races because Europeans were considered more intelligent, possessing superior logic and reason. Karve examined the data and disagreed with these assumptions, knowing it might cost her the Ph.D. degree.
Even before she began her Ph.D., Irawati had to fight the disapproval of her father-in-law, who was ironically known as a champion of women’s education. “When she packed her bags for Germany and set off on that long and lonely journey, it was without the blessings of the great personage who was her father-in-law, Annah Karve, and she felt this privation keenly. The other women of the Karve family, but by no means only the women, disliked Irawati and what they perceived as her unfair privilege”, say the authors of Iru. The synchronicity of this book with last night’s conversation feels startling.
Later that day, I read a news item — the Taliban is forbidding women from studying midwifery and nursing. Forbidding people to study is nothing new in the history of humankind. Read this year’s best selling James to rediscover the poignancy of this. In this retelling of the American classic Huckleberry Finn, the slave James has taught himself to read — he has keen intelligence and a snarky sense of humour. But if James is to survive, he realizes he must hide all of this. He must talk in pidgin patois and pretend to be an ignorant, inferior slave. The tension between these two personas is what powers the action of the story, as James flees for his life down the river Mississippi.
Today, as these stories of forbidden learning swirl around me, I am grateful for all the books we are surrounded by, for our book clubs, our book whatsapp groups, and for the gatherings where we tell each other our personal stories. I am grateful for the crowded city.
I hope that we may keep reading, that we may keep telling each other our personal stories, as we perceive and push back against power patterns— each pushback beginning with a story.
What about you dear Reader - have you ever fought to read or to learn ? And what books have inspired you?
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