Books and Authors

"As a child I lived in a hostel away from my parents and I was always scared so my parents told me to recite the Hanuman Chalisa. That's how the text entered my life. Recently,  I met a delegation from Trinidad and Tobago who said that the one thing they desperately needed was a singable translation of Indian spiritual texts as they can no longer read the original Awadhi or Hindi. So then I decided to do a translation that was not only literary but could also be sung with music. The Hanuman Chalisa teaches us ultimate humility; to a...

"When we write about music history, we are mostly talking about artists. There are also fewer biographies, autobiographies and memoirs by instrumentalists. But can the instrument itself become the protagonist to tell us our story? This has been one of my concerns as a practitioner. The ghatam is present in music across the country. It is an instrument with personality and has a central role in folk music. But, in classical music, it takes a back seat. My quest was to foreground a lot of things that are not spoken about in writing about music. This is an attempt...

"Generally in India, the moment you see deviant behaviour, you immediately label the person 'mad'. But at least now, in some circles, the attitude towards seeking psychological help is changing. Some of these stories show how women with mental health issues become especially vulnerable. We see this so often in news articles. So these stories are right out of the society we live in." - Nabanita Sengupta and Nishi Pulugurtha, editors, Bandaged Moments; Stories of Mental Health by Women Writers from Indian Languages, talk to Manjula Narayan about putting together this collection of 26 stories from 17 Indian languages, what's lost a...

"I feel India's politics is the revenge of the poor; it's why things are the way they are. They might not look at it as a violent act but it emerges from some kind of violence against us, the middle class. Whatever politicians do, usually there is local support. So it's a peep into human nature. We were always paying a price to escape India. Now, it costs a lot of money to fully escape. Now, it seems even if you pay 200 crores for a flat, you can't escape the air! We look much poorer than we are while m...

"People know about what sometimes happens to girls growing up in the kotha; but no one knows what happens to boys. Nobody's written about it as such so I thought I might as well do it. A kotha for tawaifs is not a place for sex work. There aren't really any pimps. If they turn up at the gates in the evening it's to usher in patrons for the song and dance, the entertainment, not for soliciting sex. The kotha is run entirely by women. As they know the world outside, they know how to protect their young ones. I...

"In India, in the Philippines, and in the Caribbean, in places where the mango grows, it's viewed with universal adoration. We Americans are good at thinking that we have the best of everything; but not mangoes! We get these mangoes that look really good but they're more like an apple! It was a real aha! moment when we realised that we don't have the best mangoes!"

Constance L Kirker and Mary Newman, authors, Mango; A Global History talk to Manjula Narayan about everything from Harappan mango curry and the fantastically expensive Miyazaki mangoes of Japan to the...

"If you look at primordial deities, they are serpents, eggs, the sun and the moon - early humans associated divinity with these things that they could see. So, serpent worship existed everywhere across the world. In India, you see a common pattern whether it's in the south, or in Uttarakhand and Kashmir and even further north in Tibet - there are elements and iconography that's similar. Scholars believe serpent worship was the original form of worship, that it was pre-Dravidian, and that the Nagas themselves were pre Aryan and pre Dravidian people. We can only speculate. Perhaps what it t...

"Music connects us with something deeper. We know there's stuff around us that science cannot explain. Consciousness, for example, is hard to explain through science alone. Music seems to connect you somehow with what this other thing is. The emotional impact that music has and how it connects people together is also very profound. Music was absolutely central to Einstein too and if he got stuck in something when he was theorising, he would go away and play his violin and that would transport him into a different world and give him ideas. He likened music to science and...

Pastoral and indigenous communities in Nagarhole, Arunachal Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Himachal, and the Van Gujjars in Uttarakhand are the ones who are protecting forests. They have a relationship with it. It's a sense of ecology that has to be looked at for solutions to the many big questions that we are grappling with at the moment. Since colonialism, the agenda has been to keep these people from being the righful owners of the land or to have a voice. Much of urban India is not in touch with the reality of the country. But people like the Van Gujjars and Tau...

"Being able to experience the love of a grandparent is one of the most special things I've had in my life. It's the only selfless love you'll ever experience. Food was my Ammi's love language and my family formed a special relationship with food because of her. My grandmother passed away in her 90s in 2019 and one of my biggest regrets is not releasing this book in her lifetime - because she deserved that. The recipes in this book are our family recipes that we still cook to this day. We've put in the most popular dishes and the ones...

"I wanted to make the case that here is a system that we all created together that allows for our exploitation through the prism of services that we actually do get some benefit from. Everybody involved in the system gets some benefit from it - the CEOs of these companies and also us as users. I wanted to investigate that complicity" - Vauhini Vara, author, Searches: Selfhood in the Digital Age talks to Manjula Narayan about her book that uses her Google searches dating back to the early aughts, Amazon reviews, long conversations with AI, memories of her sister who...

"Our food has completely changed in the last 30 years. This has totally changed our gut physiology, our gut microbiome, and has caused silent inflammation in the gut. Issues like reflux and bloating are caused by a gut that isn't functioning well. Also, if you don't eat the right type of food, your body is incapable of making the neurological chemicals called neurotransmitters that are required for stable mental health. That correlation is not discussed in modern medicine though it is the cause, many times, of these mental health issues. Adding a drug is just symptomatically managing it. Instead of just...

"One thing that's become abundantly clear from the ancient DNA revolution of the last 10 years is how important migration has been in the history of our species. So, of course, there has been hybridisation, cultural, genetic, linguistic. There is no such thing as a pure people, pure culture, pure language. Genes, culture and language do not map neatly onto each other. This book was a huge amount of work because the only way you can tell the story of Proto Indo European [the ancestor of Latin and Sanskrit and their daughter languages including English, German, Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi and many...

"Food is not just for nutrition but also for the soul" - @neelakaushik and Shibani Sethi, editors, 'Flavours of India talk to @utterflea abt the 40k strong Gurgaon Moms community that's contributed the family memories and recipes in this book

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"In Raj Khosla's films, songs were storytelling devices. They didn't just push the narrative forward; they were also narratives by themselves. They had a beginning, a middle and an end, and the way they were shot, the way relationships were portrayed, and the way situations were brought in... It is an art that Guru Dutt taught Raj Khosla and which he then brought out in a way that really connected with the crowd." - Amborish Roychoudhury, author, 'Raj Khosla; The Authorized Biography' talks to Manjula Narayan about the life and art of the maker of such commercially successful and va...

"All materials come with an environmental impact but plastics are worth singling out as they have turbocharged our desire to consume and our reliance on disposability. Consumer goods companies are the ones we should be looking at. They make decisions about what we see on supermarket shelves, what we see in our homes. I hope this book makes people feel that we do have the power to change things because these companies want us to like them. They are very sensitive to how their reputations play out among consumers. Scientists have been sharing concerns that endocrine disrupting chemicals found in...

"I'd never attempted a memoir. For me, writing something so personal and putting it out there for the world to see was difficult because I was reliving those days. But that's when I realised, I don't want to forget those days. A lot of people want to move past grief. You want things to be normal. But there is no normal after this. This is the new normal and I have to learn to live with it. My husband and my mother in law became statistics of the COVID wave but they were so much more. Like love, grief i...

"Every part of India has shamans; you could say its part of folk culture. They call Himachal Dev Bhoomi because every village is home to several deities. Every village also has its main deity and a shaman, who is the medium of that deity. He can communicate with that deity when he goes into a divine possession trance that is ritually invoked. The villagers communicate with their devis and devtas for everything and in pooch sessions, the shaman or goor will answer questions as the deity. To a westernised mindset, this sounds like superstition. But you cannot ignore the...

"Any place where a guru goes and spends time becomes a dera; it gets a sacred connotation. Deras are reflective of our larger tradition of argumentation, philosophy and contestation. In India, there is nothing singular about our world; everything is very plural. So, any sort of broad brushing or monolithic thinking about deras is unhelpful. All deras are not Dalit. But I was surprised to see Gail Omvedt's Seeking Begumpura at one. Some are doing very much for Ambedkarite thought. They have a lot of Ambedkar in their libraries and their sanctum sanctorums too have big portraits of Ambedkar alo...

"To earlier academics, it seemed like Company Painting was not really to be taken seriously. The Modernists didn't look at it because it's too early and the Court Painting specialists didn't look at it because it was too late. It just sort of fell in the gap. Perhaps people were less inclined to rescue it from that gap because they had difficulty in coming to terms with its hybrid colonial status. You cannot get away from it being a product of Empire. But rather than telling the story of the patrons' perspective, you have to look at how Indian a...

"South Korea is strategizing its soft power through K-Drama, K-Beauty, K-Pop and now K-Cuisine. There was a conscious strategy from the government of the country and the private sector. So the craze for Korea that we see today is no accident."

"How to keep kids engaged through the book is the most important job of the illustrator. Every page was approached through that angle. That's why I've included as many dynamic poses of dogs as possible — running, jumping out of the page almost!" says Chandrima Chatterjee, illustrator, 'The Little Book of Indian Dogs'. 

"I've always been aware of Indian dog breeds but I wanted to introduce my daughter to them and there was absolutely nothing out there that one could read out to a toddler. So I thought let's do it. I wrote it and then I found Chan...

"I thought it would be interesting to write about early Americans in India because, at that time, there were no border controls, no surveillance, no way of monitoring people who crossed borders. The Americans were not conscious state actors unlike the British, French, Dutch or even the Danes, who were all supported by their respective governments. I was interested in these brave individuals from a faraway land who just marched into a new life. My curiosity about them got me going. And because these people were outsiders and did not come with institutional backing, apart from the missionaries, they...

"The system of policing in India has so many constraints that unless the person has a special kind of inner motivation to pursue something, it's going to be very hard to get results. Inspector Prashant Kumar has that. He is an amalgamation of a real person and some fictional tropes. I've had the desire to write crime fiction for a very long time and as a journalist, I got to hang out with a lot of Delhi cops over a period of about two years. The police have miserable lives, most of them. Their work involves constantly seeing the...

"I've shot almost 10,000 pictures of dogs across the world over the last four years. But the pictures in this book were all shot on the beaches of Goa in the monsoon. I began shooting them during the pandemic. A deep grey sky is like a photographer's ideal studio. The atmosphere and the subdued palette came because of the season. The whole intent of this book was to create awareness about dogs in an oblique way. Somebody like me who's spent his life bullying people to do his bidding, whether it's the PM or Jeff Bezos, was now suddenly confronted...

There are stories in every nook and cranny of Delhi and rightly so because this is the 11th or 12th city built one on top of the other; sometimes cannibalizing one city to make the other. So, there are stories of the city's multiple pasts and of the people who have lived here. Heterogenous in every sense of the word, it is a melting pot. So many places in the city have witnessed history in the making. The title brings together multiple strands about the city': Basti' means 'habitation' and this has been a continuously inhabited city for centuries...

The span of the book is so wide that we had to leave out some great people. The book gives you a sampling of some of the best writing. My favourite is the first story, Rebati by Fakir Mohan Senapati, translated by KK Mohapatra. In the stories written in English, Ruskin Bond's The Prospect of Flowers is so poignant. It has been difficult to get good translations from languages like Nepali, Dogri, Bodo and Santhali. Also, in certain languages there are no real translators into English. When it comes to translations, any translator who is capable and confident is...

"When you look at history across the world and across centuries, there are some things that are well remembered and there are many things that are forgotten. In some way, it's interesting to ask, 'What is remembered and why?' and then maybe take that further and ask, 'by whom?' It's really interesting for me as a historian to ask why is it that this particular event, this particular escape and the camp itself and the thousands of Indians who were there... Why has it been pretty much forgotten until now? It's fascinating that these guys were so...

In terms of photography, this is not a book about Banaras or the Himalayas or very specific things; a name-place-animal-thing kind of book. In terms of narrative, of visuals that follow the structure of a novel or something in that space, we are yet to broaden our reach and scope, especially in India" - Ritesh Uttamchandani, author, 'Where Are You', talks to Manjula Narayan about his photobook of pictures clicked in Manchester, UK, that touches on everything from ways of being in public to Partition, memory, othering, family and love.

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"You find fasting in every culture, across the millennia. We carry within us the ability to hold back. Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism and Judeaism vary in specifics about fasting but the idea is the same. You step back from something that you normally enjoy - it doesn't have to be a luxury - and then you hold off partaking of it. That holding back is, for me, at the heart of fasting. It is such a powerful realization that this power of absence is real, that we can shape our world by stepping back, by refraining from doing...

"On the one hand we are proud of the fact that India has one of the lowest rates of divorce, globally. It's about 1.1 percent annually. However, UN reports indicate that the number of divorces has multiplied twofold since the advent of the millennium. Why is this happening? The answers are many and this was the premise for writing this book. 

This book has taught me that education, class, financial independence and status are not necessarily protection against domination and toxic equations. I have tried not to demonise either of the sexes because men and women are not e...

On the one hand we are proud of the fact that India has one of the lowest rates of divorce, globally. It's about 1.1 percent annually. However, UN reports indicate that the number of divorces has multiplied twofold since the advent of the millennium. Why is this happening? The answers are many and this was the premise for writing this book. 

This book has taught me that education, class, financial independence and status are not necessarily protection against domination and toxic equations. I have tried not to demonise either of the sexes because men and women are not e...

"Because of the wealth of inscriptions that they have left behind, it is really possible to understand the Cholas as political figures. Not only are they masters of media strategy, they are brilliantly charismatic. They are innovators capable of mobilising vaster armies than ever before . They are capable of thinking out of the box about bureaucracy, administration, diplomacy, and logistics in ways that had not been seen in medieval India. But the reason the Cholas were able to strike with such speed at such distance [as they did in their campaign to Bengal and in South East Asia] is because...

"Savarkar was a great rationalist. The surprising thing is how such a rationalist went completely off the rails in regard to other matters. His writing is full of villains and among the villains are the Buddha, all Buddhists, whom he considered hereditary traitors, Ashoka, Akbar, Tipu Sultan, and then Gandhiji. On the question of Godse and Apte there was no doubt that they were his acolytes, they were his worshippers. Sardar Patel said the problem was that once you create an atmosphere then you don't have to tell anybody to go and assassinate; he reads your lips. You just have...

"I do believe that literature is a very important source of knowledge complementary to history, epigraphy and archaeology. It is not easy to read drama at the best of times. It is even more difficult to read Sanskrit drama because it is quite out of the ordinary! But there is a lot of timelessness in these plays, however strange they may seem with their tigers, elephants and tantriks! The human elements are the ones we still completely recognize - love, jealousy and ambition. We haven't changed; we are laughing at the same things that people 2000 years ago were laughing at...

"Somehow, miraculously, Tibetans have managed to preserve their identity. They have actually transplanted the Tibet they left behind and have created a whole new little Tibet in India. This is a huge success story, which should be celebrated. Now we are in the third generation and Tibetan culture is very much alive" - Tsering Namgyal Khortsa, author, 'Little Lhasa; Reflections in Exiled Tibet' talks to Manjula Narayan about the vibrant arts and cultural scene of Dharamsala, which is the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, the pull of Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama to a range of seekers...

Bhang has been mentioned in the Vedas; the use of cannabis as a medicinal boon has been mentioned in a lot of Indian scriptures for thousands of years, and it has been used in Ayurveda. During the British era, the colonisers looked down upon cannabis usage among Indians. They were familiar with alcohol but not with ganja and they considered it beneath them. So, it is the recent history of cannabis in India that has made it taboo. But it is still the most used "illicit" narcotic in the country. In India, with even something that's illegal, if it's culturally...

"I'm a big fan of a very specific genre of crime novels, which is the Golden Age novels, the Agatha Christies and the GK Chestertons, the novels of the 1940s and '50s. I don't get to read those types of books any more, where at the heart of the book is a very classic murder mystery, a whodunnit. You're not really that concerned about realism; it's not very gritty; there's not a lot of murders that are very unpleasant. Someone just drops dead and everyone's concerned about who's done it. I wanted to write a book like that. These...

After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba was seen as the last outpost of communism. China went a different way and is now essentially a capitalist society where the communist party is in power. In Kerala, Cuba was seen by those people who were ideologically committed to communism as something sacred. That kind of ideological affinity might have come down but there is still an attraction to Cuba as a country that has miraculously withstood 64 years of extreme American sanctions" - Ullekh NP, author, 'Mad About Cuba; A Malayali Revisits the Revolution' talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from...

A lot of our ancestors had tattoos and that's quite surprising. People don't really know what the tattoos on their grandparents mean. A number of archivists have come up in India in the last 10 years who have felt the need to document this, question their grandparents, and also to look into their communities' histories through the tattoos that they no longer have. Here is a tradition that we have lost but it's something that we now consider so trendy." Naman P Ahuja, editor, 'Indian Tattoos; Only Skin Deep?' talks to Manjula Narayan about traditional Indian tattoos from communities as...