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The Leaflet

The year that was–10 | 2024 in books: Love, hope and resistance—Part 1 | The Leaflet

Year-end Special 2024 Book Review Opinion Leaflet Specials

The year that was–10 | 2024 in books: Love, hope and resistance—Part 1

Arvind Narrain presents a list of books read in 2024 so that ‘truth may dazzle gradually’.

Arvind Narrain

Published on: 3 January 2025, 05:07 am

The year that was–10 | 2024 in books: Love, hope and resistance—Part 1

READING books is about enlarging the imagination and opening out possibilities that one may not have considered or about affirming ideas that seem a bit out of place.

Doing a review of books of the year is about cultivating a reflective space from which to think of the tumultuous world we live in from a space which is a bit removed from the din of the contemporary world.

This act of reading or list-making is, however, about the world we live in.

As Emily Dickinson put it:

Tell all the truth but tell it slant—

Success in Circuit lies

…

The Truth must dazzle gradually

Or every man be blind—

One of the interstices in the Apartheid system for resistance was the space of the law. This was because the Apartheid State had an “obsessive adherence to a legitimising semblance of the legal form”.

Thomas Grant, The Mandela Brief

The year that was–10 | 2024 in books: Love, hope and resistance—Part 1

The Mandela Brief: Sydney Kentridge and the Trials of Apartheid is an account of the work of Sydney Kentridge, a lawyer who for a large part of his career resisted apartheid using the framework of the law. Apartheid South Africa had created a “vast and comprehensive legislative apparatus for the segregation of the population in every aspect of life according to a theory of race, together with the absolute privileging and supremacy of the minority deemed to belong to one of those supposed races”.

Under such conditions what did the struggle for justice mean?

One of the interstices in the Apartheid system for resistance was the space of the law. This was because the Apartheid State had an “obsessive adherence to a legitimising semblance of the legal form”.

Kentridge made the most effective use of this form of the law in his defence of Nelson Mandela, Winnie Mandela and many other anti-Apartheid activists who faced the wrath of the Apartheid State.

Bride in the Hills is Vanamala Viswanatha’s brilliant translation of Malegallali Madumagalu, which is considered one of the greatest novels of Kannada literature, by one of Karnataka’s best-loved writers, Kuvempu.

This evocative translation by Vanamala Vishwanatha reintroduces Kuvempu to a wider English-speaking audience and will hopefully enable a larger conversation about the importance of Kuvempu in both the national and the global contexts.

An important strand of the complex and multilayered narrative of the novel appears in the three love stories, one between Gutthi and Thimmi from the Holeya caste, another between Aita and Pinchalu from the Halepaika caste or community, and Chinnamma and Mukundaya from the Gowda caste.

These three love stories, set as they are in the breathtakingly beautiful, though deeply feudal Malnad region, dramatise the barriers love has to cross (social, feudal, psychological and patriarchal) before the couples are united.

There is a rich interior life to each of the characters and the author seamlessly moves between the evocative passages on the forest as a pulsating being to the description of the love between Aita and Pinchalu and the repartee between Gutthi and Thimmi. As the novel’s epigraph notes, “Here, no one is important; no one is unimportant. Nothing is insignificant.”

Even as you are lulled into a sense of wonderment at the beauty of the Malnad region with its thick forests and majestic mountains, the characters embark on their own interior reflections which plumb the depths of the relations between human beings, bounded as they are by caste and gender. The many nuanced registers in which caste manifests itself in this novel, offer us a novelist’s insight into the nature of caste.

The sense of being trapped in an eternal unchanging social order sanctified by religion and tradition is disrupted through the lovers who challenge the structures of feudalism, caste and patriarchy. This challenge takes the form of the love of Gutthi and Thimmi, who flout the limits imposed by feudalism and caste as well as the love of Mukundayya and Chinnamma who transgress the structures of caste and patriarchy in their community.

Book review: In Defense of Flogging

The theme of desire erasing the lines of caste recurs at various points in the novel. In one memorable scene, when Mukundaya, Pinchalu and Aita, companions, albeit across lines of caste, class and gender, go crab hunting, Kuvempu describes Mukundayya (who is a Gowda) gazing intently upon the newly married couple Aita and Pinchalu.

To him, they appear no more “lower caste serfs who work for him, but rather embodiments of Rathi and Manmatha”. The beauty of Pinchalu quite overwhelms Mukundayya. When he sends Aita back to get a gun to hunt a boar, Mukundaya is left alone with Pinchalu.

In Kuvempu’s description, from the point of view of Pinchalu, even if something of a sexual nature had occurred, she would not have seen it as a betrayal of a marriage but rather the extension of a friendship. Mukundayya’s arresting perception of Pinchalu as Rathi indicates the direction his mind traverses.

However, the moment passes and what could have easily happened between them does not happen. Yet the invocation of an uncovenanted possibility is rich with the potential of a transgressive future where desire erases the lines of caste.

Throughout the novel, there is the lurking possibility of violence as a crucial armature of caste power. This hidden subtext of lawless violence emerges to the surface in the chilling incident of the lynching of Sanna Bira for the offence of his sister, Thimmi eloping with Gutthi, against the will of the master.

Thimmi’s elopement is punished by the Gowda masters, with a savage lynching, referred to as the ‘Honnali Hoddate’ (Honnali thrashing.) Sanna Bira is tied up by Ijira Saba. In Kuvempu’s gut-wrenching description, “As soon as Ijara Saba gestures grimly, a quivering Sanna Bira obeys him, his tongue dead in his mouth, like a mute animal, like an ox that is used to following the cartman’s orders when he calls out, obediently lowering his neck for the yoke to be placed.”

Rightly, one cannot begin a book on Ambedkar, even one on Ambedkar’s relationship to socialism, without referencing caste.