BOOKS ON INDIA, AN ANALYSIS: It needs more than love to write about India!

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IANS / ibnlive.in.com / Posted on Aug 18, 2011 at 03:28pm IST.

New Delhi: Stepping into the soul of India is not easy for a foreign writer; the journey needs more than mere love for the country. The process requires an identification with history, facts at fingertips and an uncanny nose for immediate socio-political contexts, show landmark books written over the years.

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"What is missing in French's book is evidence of a struggle to understand India and one's own place in it. French never gets much beyond the glib assertion in his preface that the new, cool India is the 'world's default setting for the future'," Adiga said.

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William Dalrymple, the author of bestsellers such as "City of Djinns" and "The Last Mughal", is an example of what a foreigner can bring on the table at a time when Indians are also writing non-fiction about their country, Mahajan said. "He has an unabashed eye for exotic details."

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For Geoff Dyer, the author of "Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi", the spiritual nirvana of Varanasi was the anchor of semi-autobiographical Jeff Atman (the protagonist of his book) who comes to the pilgrim town in quest for renunciation.

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US-based Wendy Doniger, the author of "The Hindus: An Alternative History", has been tapping into the wealth of Indian myths and dynamics of the Hindu faith for decades now to cater to a new segment of western and Indian audiences who are still curious about eastern mysticism in a spillover of the flower revolution of the 1960s-70s.

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"India has always been an object of fascination for foreign writers because of its exoticism. Even the earliest of travellers and chroniclers like Ibn Batuta wrote about India extensively but with the specific purpose of cultural understanding," Dipa Chaudhuri, chief editor of Om Books, told IANS.

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The British Raj has been a strategic inspiration for authors such as MM Kaye and EM Forster, whose sustained affairs with India resulted in an amazing collection of unparalleled Anglophone literature.

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A TRIBUTE TO S.R. RANGANTHAN: When books travelled in bullock carts!

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Akila Kannadasan, The Hindu / August 14, 2011.

BOOKS ON WHEELS The mobile library service; S.R.Ranganathan is seen in the left.

Booklovers who came to Vijaya Pathipagam on Friday were in for a pleasant surprise. They were offered coffee, tea and sweets and were greeted by an upbeat M. Velayutham, the founder. In a crisp white shirt and dhoti, the 70-year-old walked about with a spring in his step. “Today is S.R. Ranganathan's birthday,” he explained to curious customers. “He is the father of library science.”

“I don't celebrate even my birthday,” smiled Velayutham. For people like him who live and breathe literature, August 12 was a day to commemorate the contribution made by mathematician Ranganathan to literature. “Ranganathan took books to the common man. He made villagers read. Given that he did so at a time when there were fewer educational institutions and little ability to spend, this is no ordinary feat,” said Velayutham.

“Like U. V. Swaminatha Iyer who travelled in a bullock cart across Tamil Nadu to gather palm-leaf manuscripts of Sangam literature, Ranganathan travelled in a bullock cart from village to village to circulate books,” he said. Tamil Nadu has seen several great men and institutions that championed the cause of reading, said Velayutham.

“Today, I recall the contributions of Dina Thanthi's Adithanar who made villagers read newspapers, of Shakthi Y. Govindan who was the first to bring out Bharathiyar's work in print and of New Century Book House that ushered in the habit of reading.”

Back at the district Central Library, librarians from across the district had gathered to pay their respects to S.R. Ranganathan. “The Central Government announced August 12 as ‘National Library Day,' last year,” said District Library Officer S.P. Manoharan. “Though a professor in mathematics, he took up the post of librarian at the University of Madras in 1924. He spent a year abroad, studying various libraries and their methods of classification. Once in India, he came up with a new system of classification of books in a library — the colon classification. Other countries followed the Dewey Decimal Classification. Ranganathan's method was simpler than that,” he explained.

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BIBLIOPHILE K.S. Padmanabhan: The Book Man bows out!

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BISHWANATH GHOSH / The Hindu / July 7, 2011.

BIBLIOPHILE K.S. Padmanabhan Photo: R. Ravindran.

Bishwanath Ghosh meets K.S. Padmanabhan, who retired last week after a long career in publishing — his company being one of the oldest in the South to bring out literary works in English

How does one introduce K.S. Padmanabhan, considering the variety of hats he has donned? He has worked at a bookshop; run a bookshop; owned a publishing house; been a distributor for other publishers; started the Madras Book Club; and brought out the Indian Review of Books, a highly respected journal, which ran for a decade.

It would be safest — and perhaps most appropriate — to call Padmanabhan, who is now 75, Chennai's own Book Man. Last week, at the Woodlands Hotel in the city, he was given a warm send-off by the staff of the company whose seeds he had planted half-a-century ago and which today stands tall as one of India's top publishing houses — Westland. Even though he had sold the company to the Tata group in 2006, he had been playing the father-figure in the capacity of a consulting editor. But on June 30, he formally retired.

“This is just my first week in retirement,” says Padmanabhan, when asked how it felt to be leading a retired life, “I hope Gautam (his son, who is the CEO of Westland) will still give me manuscripts to look at. I will be reading more books, and I will be spending more time with my grandchild.”

Fortunately for Padmanabhan, he has had company while retiring. His wife Chandra, who has been his partner in the book business ever since they got married in 1965, retired along with him. But while the mild-mannered Padmanabhan is looking forward to play with his grandchild, the indomitable Chandra, who is an award-winning food writer, says it is going to be life as usual for her. “I am going to write more cookbooks,” says Chandra, 68, who has already authored three.

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Action-packed years

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