Kapil Komireddi's Reading List

"I chose this book because of my own experience of reading it. It upended the way I looked at things. It challenged so many things I took for granted about India. I read it relatively late in life. No book had challenged me the way this book did. Literature was a sort of parlor game, ‘What have you read? What have I read?’ I compared notes with friends. This is the first book I ever read that really crawled under my skin, it disturbed me in a way I never thought it possible. I would go to sleep and be thinking about this book. And it was so forceful that I would have to put the book down. It’s a very short book, it’s just over 280 pages in paperback. And I realized that the power to disturb me came from the book’s honesty. It just didn’t sugarcoat anything. I don’t think anybody had written about India with such honesty as VS Naipaul did. And everything he wrote, almost every observation of his, was freighted with truth. There were moments when I felt angry with him, there were moments when I thought, ‘You can’t talk about India this way!’ And, yet, I had to submit to the force, the power of his observation. All our fortifications against scrutiny, all the fortifications Indians have built up against foreign scrutiny, his vision could penetrate them. He was just so honest—about caste, about the comforting lies Indians tell themselves about poverty, about lies Indians tell themselves about India’s own history. They don’t discuss the medieval history in which Islamic invaders arrive. This is an argument Naipaul develops in a second book, India: A Wounded Civilization . But you see the beginnings of it in this book. It’s also the single best examination of the British in India. There have been volumes written about it, but it takes ten pages for VS Naipaul to detail the futility, the wastefulness of the British in India. He describes them as poseurs, people at play in India. “I don’t think anybody had written about India with such honesty as VS Naipaul did” Of course a lot of people see Naipaul as a reactionary. He said many provocative things in his interviews, and so many people say that he hates India, even that he’s a racist. But this book struck me as the work of a man who sympathized with ordinary Indians. He was the spokesman of the underdog. There’s a passage in which he’s traveling from southern India to Bengal, accompanied by Indian Army officers. India is then at war with China. He writes, “I did not want India to sink; the mere thought was painful.” That, I think, is the only time in the book where he becomes lyrical in his description of India and you can feel his affection for India leaping off the page in that passage. There’s also one passage that has always stayed with me. After leaving India and landing in Europe, he says, “How could I explain, how could I admit as reasonable, even to myself, my distaste, my sense of the insubstantiality and wrongness of the new world to which I had been so swiftly transported? This life confirmed that other death; yet that death rendered this fraudulent.” He looks at Europe and its fashions and its sophistication and its progress and he just cannot comprehend that all this can exist in a world that contains the distress he has experienced in India. He feels the mere existence of this is wrong after everything he’s seen. He is the spokesman, he is the champion of the Indian underdog, he has this fellow-feeling throughout for India’s poor. He is appalled and disgusted by the caste system. Most of all, he’s appalled by India’s Anglophone ruling elites, and thinks they are perpetuating a fraud against Indians. And there’s a warning for them. He says that if they do not openly deal with India’s wounded past, they will be overthrown. And he also warns Indians that the past must be seen to be dead, otherwise the past will kill. He wants them to deal sincerely and honestly with India’s experience of Islamic invasions. India’s Anglophile elites obviously hated Naipaul and, in the beginning at least, dismissed him. The secular state they boasted about has now gone, overthrown by the very furies Naipaul warned them against. And I don’t think there’s ever been a writer, since Gandhi , who looked at India with such sharpness and such clarity. And I’ve never read another that has moved me so viscerally. I think anyone who wants to understand India today should read this book."

"It’s an extraordinarily powerful memoir, again, with a force to disturb, describing a world I thought I knew, but from the perspective of somebody who felt degraded, who was exposed to the roughest edges of the progressive Indian state and the upper castes. There’s one instance where she talks about her family just automatically bending whenever an upper caste person passed them. It’s almost as if this deference was embedded in their genetic makeup. Generations of servitude had made them just kowtow reflexively whenever an upper caste person appeared before them. Gidla is from Andhra. Her uncle was a revolutionary leader who joined the Naxalites, the Maoist guerrillas who have been waging an armed campaign to overthrow the Indian state. She herself attended some of India’s finest institutes of higher learning and moved to America. Her brother, her sister and herself now live in North America. She worked for a bank there, and now works in public transport as a conductor on the New York City Subway. She considers Indian history from a very Marxist perspective. Nehru is, to her, an agent of caste oppression. I couldn’t agree with that. I don’t believe Nehru was motivated or animated by any prejudice for the lower castes. I don’t think he quite appreciated the intensity of it. Reading Sujatha Gidla’s book can really make you appreciate the power, the viciousness of the Hindu caste system, and how absolutely degrading it is. It also takes the blush off what many Hindus will say about Hinduism, that it’s the most beautiful, peace-loving religion. The most beautiful, peace-loving religion does not devise the most sophisticated system of degrading human beings on the basis of their birth. Gidla is a hugely gifted writer. It is difficult to read her writing in this book and claim sincerely that India is a progressive, sophisticated country, the light of the world. Anyone who wants to understand the horror show that is the Hindu caste system ought to read it. I just want to add that Gidla’s uncle, the great Maoist revolutionary, quit the Naxalites because he found that, even within the Maoist guerrilla groups, there was caste prejudice against him. At the same time, what goes unacknowledged and yet is visible in the book is the contrast between the uncle and Gidla’s mother. Gidla’s uncle picked up arms and went into the forests of India to wage a violent campaign. He believed in violent revolution, but in the large scheme of things was a failed man. His entire struggle was a failure. Gidla’s mother, who endured brutality on account of being a woman as well as being an untouchable, made different choices. I thought her mother really came across as a hero of the story. Gidla was tortured by authorities in southern India. Despite that background, she went to some of the best institutes of higher learning in India and moved to America. Her mother is the unsung hero who found opportunities for her children in this morass of hopelessness. She saw to it that her children were not lost to the causes that had taken away other members of her family."

"There have been so many Indian novels in English. This, I think, is perhaps the best. This is the story of a man called Agastya Sen, who is a civil servant. He’s a member of the elite Indian Administrative Service. When you become an IAS officer, you’re basically the king of a district in India, you have all the accoutrements of power that the British created and enjoyed. There are retinues of staff at your disposal. Upamanyu Chatterjee finds the comedy in this. He doesn’t spare anyone. He considers the English-speaking Indians who turn up in villages to perform experiments with the ideas they have absorbed from other places. He considers the inequalities of India, the cruelties of rural India and the pettiness of the officials sent to govern rural India. All these high officials are obsessed with protocols. There are hilarious descriptions of government guest houses, with all the horrors of post-colonial India’s socialist aesthetics, hideous bungalows and even more hideous wallpapers, and a frog in Agastya’s bathroom. Chatterjee describes this world so vividly. “Nobody, understandably, wishes to be hounded, harassed, and harried by this administration” Agastya Sen’s friends call him August. His father is the governor of West Bengal. There’s no real plot. It’s just August waking up every day. He smokes pot. He listens to Chopin on his stereo. He’s a mythomaniac, he just lies all the time. One of his officers asks him, ‘Where did you go to university?’ He says, ‘I was at Cambridge.’ And the officer says, ‘Oh, I was at Cambridge, when were you there?’ And Agastya says, ‘Oh, I meant Cambridge, Massachusetts. I was at Harvard.’ Then he meets people in rural India who’ve been brutalized by the state. He has a real social conscience, but he’s also lost. Nehru once said, “I have become a queer mixture of the East and the West, out of place everywhere, at home nowhere.” Agastya is a figure like that. He’s thrown into this village life where nothing’s happening, and he tries to retain his sanity. I’d say it’s the most comically brilliant English novel to come out of India in the past 70 years. The bureaucratic maze Chatterjee describes is very much intact. Those obsessions with protocols are very much alive. I was in small town India just a year-and-a-half ago and those guest houses are still there, the aesthetic is still there. The pettiness of the officials is still there. The deference of the villagers is still there. What has changed is that there are fewer people like Agastya now. There’s greater diversity among the IAS officers, and so many of them are doing work that deserves applause, but there are still others who have imbibed and inherited the pettiness of their predecessors. The bureaucratic maze remains just as maddening. If you read this novel, you will appreciate why the government machinery of India is so dysfunctional and why it moves so slowly."

"It began as a long piece Amitav Ghosh , one of India’s greatest novelists, wrote in The New Yorker in 1998, after India exploded its first nuclear bomb and announced itself as a nuclear power. Amitav Ghosh set about traveling in India. He went to the site of the nuclear blast, he went to Pakistan, which also exploded a nuclear device after India did. He went to the highest battle zone in the world. He met Indian soldiers there. He trailed the Indian defence minister, George Fernandes, who began his career as a socialist firebrand against Mrs. Indira Gandhi’s government and ended his career as India’s defence minister in a government led by Hindu nationalists. Quite a fascinating career, a trade unionist becoming an apologist for the most jingoistic policies. Part of the reason I picked this book is because the delusions that led India to pursue a nuclear policy have not vanished. If anything, they’ve been reinforced by the events of the past seven years. Modi said, not long ago, that we haven’t got nuclear weapons just for show. He was effectively saying that, if pushed, we will use them. And Amitav Ghosh gives the most vivid description of what will happen if nuclear weapons are exploded in India: “On detonation a nuclear weapon releases a burst of high-energy x-rays. These cause the temperature in the immediate vicinity to rise very suddenly to tens of millions of degrees. The rise in temperature causes a fireball to form which shoots outward in every direction, cooling as it expands. By the time it reaches the facades of North Block and South Block,” which are two government buildings in Delhi, “it will probably have cooled to about 300,000 degrees—enough to kill every living thing within several 100 feet of the point of explosion. Those caught on open ground will evaporate; those shielded by the buildings’ thick walls will be incinerated.” This is what will happen if a nuclear device were to explode in Delhi. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . I’ve often thought that this book should be part of the Indian syllabus. Every school goer should read it because we tend, in India, to take pride in being a nuclear power. There’s another book by Amitav Ghosh called In an Antique Land. As a DPhil student at Oxford, he goes to Egypt to do his field research and Egyptians think he comes from a very underdeveloped, poor country where they worship cows. And Amitav Ghosh says, ‘No, I come from a very powerful country, we have one of the most sophisticated armies in the world.’ That stayed with me because people can end up taking pride in these things. But the cost of that, as Amitav Ghosh goes on to explain in this book, can be the eradication of organised human life. This book really deserves a very wide audience. People outside of India should read it to understand the vanities that have led India to pursue a nuclear policy. Some of the arguments Indian thinkers have made over the years are valid. They said that the nuclear regime that the United States insists upon is quite discriminatory, because the US gets to keep its bombs, France gets to keep bombs, Britain gets to keep bombs, but India and other countries shouldn’t have them. The answer to that, I suppose, is to campaign for the elimination of those weapons—rather than multiplying nuclear states around the world. That’s the point. Anyone who reads Countdown will come away wondering, ‘What is the point of these weapons?’ I’m not a peacenik. I believe that India is surrounded by genuine adversaries. But every time I read something that makes an argument for an expanded armed force I think about this book. It’s really sobering."

"David Shulman is an Israeli academic, perhaps one of the most interesting human beings alive. He teaches at Hebrew University. He read Tamil at SOAS and then went to Wisconsin and studied Telugu, the two classical languages in southern India. Linguists say that speakers of these two languages emit more syllables per minute than any other language, and Shulman mastered both languages. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter This is his diary of living in a place called Rajahmundry, which is on the banks of the Godavari River. He reminisces about poets who flourished in this part of the world 500-600 years ago. The reason I picked this book is because it demonstrates the depths of India’s learning, its cultural sophistication at that time. According to Hindu nationalists, this was a period when India was being enslaved by Muslims. This place had suffered a lot of the ravages of armies coming from the north and devastating the settled kingdoms there. And yet, this kind of poetry flourished. In the worst of times, the most benighted of times, and the darkest of periods, there were Indians who produced some of the most sublime and beautiful writing. And nobody, I think, does greater justice to them in the English language than David Shulman. The beauty of his writing is hypnotic. Anyone who wants to give up on India should read this book. They’ll realize that India survives because of the genius of its people. VS Naipaul wrote about how India, “producing too much life, denied the value of life” and yet, he acknowledged, India also “produced so many people of grace and beauty, ruled by elaborate courtesy”. This is a book full of such people. They have always existed, and they are a reason for hope in this dark period."