📚 Southasia Review of Books - November 2023
The Southasia Review of Books is a monthly newsletter that threads together our latest reviews and literary essays, curated reading suggestions on all things books-related from Himal’s extensive archive, as well as interviews with select writers and their reading recommendations.
You’ll receive installments of this newsletter on the last Sunday of each month. If you would like to manage your Himal newsletter preferences, please click here.
Hello reader,
Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books!
This month, Anuradha Sharma looks at a wave of new books that have shattered the fear-induced silence surrounding the 1986 movement for a separate Gorkha state in India. The writers’ proximity to the Gorkhaland issue makes a huge difference in how they portray Chhyasi (’86) – the Nepali term for the agitation.
In the Indian-American writer Kiran Desai’s acclaimed 2006 novel The Inheritance of Loss, the Gorkhaland agitation is only a backdrop; with the recent books, Gorkhaland is the main story. Anuradha writes that the post-Chhyasi generation of writers – like Chuden Kabimo, author of Song of the Soil (Fatsung), and Lekhnath Chhetri, author of Fruits of a Barren Tree (Phoolange) – have taken advantage of their temporal distance from the agitation to take a more objective view of it. In some ways, Anuradha writes, these authors are carrying forward the work that Desai had left incomplete in 2006 by providing insiders’ perspectives on the movement. They are not only fighting against the erasure of the truths of an important historical event, but also setting the record straight.
In another essay in Himal’s pages this month, Dhanuka Bandara reviews Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives, edited by the curator Shayari de Silva, exploring the rift between the celebrated architect’s vision for nation-building in Sri Lanka and the country’s present reality.
Bawa’s work – from the Sri Lankan Parliament Complex and the Lunuganga estate to his proposals for the development of the Galle Face Green, a beloved public space in Colombo now associated with last year’s mass movement for political accountability – enables Sri Lanka to be imagined as a utopian space with a balance between culture and nature. But the city planners of today have moved very far away from this vision. Colombo, aesthetically, is hardly different from any other developed city in the Southasian region. The city is now dotted with exclusive skyscrapers built at enormous costs and beautification projects have replaced public spaces with consumerist spaces.
As Sri Lanka embraces this neoliberal architectural aesthetic of skyscrapers and towers, Dhanuka writes, there is still much to be learnt from Bawa’s legacy and regionalist vision for the country.
Take a look below for a special interview with Dhanuka, plus his recommendations for further reading.
Interview with Dhanuka Bandara on the limited genius of Geoffrey Bawa
Shwetha Srikanthan: In the review essay, you note that much of the writing on Bawa’s life and architecture is either laudatory or modestly critical. What can you tell us about Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives in relation to other books on his life and work?
Dhanuka Bandara: Geoffrey Bawa: Drawing from the Archives belongs to the “modestly critical” category. However, compared to most work on Bawa – which typically belongs to the “Coffee Table Book” category, and as such is not really meant to be read but looked at – the essays in Drawing from the Archives have greater analytical depth and academic rigour. This is particularly significant given that the work is not necessarily an “academic” publication and is meant for a general readership. Yet, like most work on Bawa, it shies away from a sustained critique of Bawa’s work and sidesteps the fraught issue of his sexuality, which in my view is crucial to understanding Bawa’s artistic vision.
SS: The review tells us that Bawa thought of his estate, Lunuganga, as a “garden within a garden” – and of Sri Lanka as an extended garden and, as such, a paradisiacal and utopian space. In a previous essay for Himal Southasian, you write about how the concept of agrarian utopianism helps to explain Sri Lanka’s past and could offer a more inclusive vision for the future. Could you tell us more about this?
DB: Only a few seem to understand that “nation-building” is a utopian project. Anupama Mohan’s Utopia and the Village in South Asian Literatures is a good work on this subject. While the Sri Lankan liberal academic often scoffs at the idea of idealised villages as a model for the nation, and the motif – often to be found in literary works about Sri Lanka – of the “lost paradise,” this utopian ideology still offers a paradigm that helps us imagine a transformative and radically different future. I think the first point to be understood is that “utopianism” as an ideology predates nationalism and is rooted in cosmopolitanism. Cosmopolitanism in its deepest philosophical sense strives towards the historical moment when the city and cosmos become one.
Agrarian utopianism, as we have it in Sri Lanka today and in many other places, also derives from this classical ideal. It signifies a pastoral lost golden age that we are constantly striving towards recreating. Particularly in the case of Sri Lanka, I think that this idea has enormous potential as it lays a great deal of stress on production – something that we sorely lack in this country.
SS: What can Bawa’s work, both the built structures and his unrealised visions for Colombo, tell us about the city’s past and future, and how does this fit within Sri Lanka’s broader postcolonial and ethnonational social and political currents?
DB: This is a wonderful question. I think we can categorise the existing structures in Colombo as colonial, postcolonial and neoliberal. There are colonial structures such as the Old Parliament, Maradana Railway Station, etcetera; postcolonial works such as Independence Square, the National Art Gallery and, of course, Bawa’s Parliament Complex. The skyscrapers that keep springing up along Galle Road and elsewhere belong to the neoliberal phase. Bawa’s work attempted to create a regional, perhaps even a “national” architectural diction. As I have argued in my essay, the Parliament Complex, in its original grand conceptualisation, was an attempt at creating a “garden city”, thus going back to the “lost paradise” motif. The neoliberal turn seems to suggest that Sri Lanka, along with much of the world, has moved away from a nationalist, native or local conceptualisation of utopia and embraced a neoliberal one. Hence, today, instead of public spaces where people can engage in debate and discussions in their emerging democratic postcolonial nation – the way Bawa and the much-neglected architect Shirley de Alwis imagined it – Colombo has become cluttered with monstrous shopping malls and high-end hotels where Sri Lankans can spend borrowed money.
SS: You also write about Minnette de Silva, the pioneering Sri Lankan modernist architect whose work we know influenced Bawa. De Silva authored a memoir of her life – The Life and Work of an Asian Woman Architect – which was published a few weeks before her death in 1998. Could you tell us about the book?
DB: This is a fascinating piece of work. It includes many photos, with Minnette’s commentaries, of many of her works which unfortunately do not stand anymore – such as the Karunaratne House (her first commission). This memoir is a rare insight not only into the scintillating and legendary figure that is Minnette, but also into a world that has disappeared. In the book, there are photos of Minnette dancing with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh in Sri Lanka and socialising with Pablo Picasso and Mulk Raj Anand somewhere in Europe. When talking about Minnette, and her architectural work, it is impossible not to be charmed by her glamorous lifestyle. Yet in many ways Minnette was a tragic figure too. She, as it is now known, died in, as Ulrik Plesner says, “the charity wing of the Kandy hospital.” Minnette is not merely someone who created art, but someone who turned herself into art. This is what we can learn from her memoir.
Dhanuka Bandara’s reading recommendations on modern Sri Lankan architecture or culture
I find In Situ: An Architectural Memoir From Sri Lanka by Ulrik Plesner (2012) both entertaining and troubling. This memoir records the Danish architect Ulrik Plesner’s years in Sri Lanka. Plesner has a witty style, and the book reveals details about his relationships with figures such as Minnette de Silva and Geoffrey Bawa. It also provides insights into the architectural projects that he undertook, especially with the latter. There are also certain revelations that would amount to sexual exploitation, at least. Plesner’s relationship with Minnette sounds like pure fantasy. Yet, who knows?
The Gardens of Taprobane by Count de Mauny (1937) is a pretty rare book. Consider yourself lucky if you can find a copy of this. The self-styled Count de Mauny bought a small island off the coast of Weligama and turned it into a “mini-Eden”. The Gardens of Taprobane is the record of this endeavour. Along with Count de Mauny’s romantic and grandiose ruminations, he does also offer good gardening tips. It is from him that I learnt that if you tie up Bougainvillea branches, they tend to flower more!
Full disclosure, I haven’t read Plastic Emotions by Shiromi Pinto (2019) yet. It has been looking accusatory on a bookshelf in my study for a while now. The book, from what I know, imagines the relationship between the rumoured lovers, Le Corbusier and Minnette. I hear good things about this book. I may or may not like it once I read it, but I do think it’s well worth recommending.
[From the Himal archives, read Priyanka Lindgren’s review essay on Plastic Emotions, exploring whether the fictionalised retelling of Minnette de Silva’s story does justice to her life and work.]
Cultural Encounters and Homoeroticism in Sri Lanka: Sex and Serendipity by Robert Aldrich (2015) is an academic work which is, nevertheless, immensely readable. Aldrich gets into a dimension of Sri Lankan culture which is often overlooked, if not wilfully avoided: that is, the intriguing history of homoeroticism in the Sri Lankan art and architecture scene in the early and mid-twentieth century. The book discusses figures such as Count de Mauny, the photographer Lionel Wendt, the renowned Sri Lankan modern art collective the ’43 Group and the Bawa brothers.
This month in Southasian publishing
Here at Himal’s editing desk, a few new releases especially caught our eye this month.
Yousuf Saeed, the founder of Tasveer Ghar, a digital archive of popular Southasian visual culture, has a new book, Partitioning Bazaar Art: Popular Visual Culture of India and Pakistan around 1947 (November 2023). It offers insight into how print culture and popular imagery influenced nationalism in the decades leading up to and following Partition.
Saeed explores the portrayal of religious minority communities in India’s print culture and the thriving industry of Sufi-saint posters in post-Partition Pakistan.
From the Himal archives, take a look back at Saeed’s article on the mass production of Islamic calendars and poster art as repositories of religious history and how this reflects the changing tastes and cultural alienation of Indian Muslims.
This month also marks the publication of Kunal Purohit’s H-Pop: The Secretive World of Hindutva Pop Stars (November 2023). The book uncovers the world of Hindutva Pop or H-Pop, a brand of popular culture that seeks to normalise hardline Hindu nationalist ideology in India.
Kunal addresses what makes H-Pop so popular, who its popular creators and its audience are, the effort and the resources to produce and broadcast it, and its impact on the BJP and prime minister Narendra Modi's popularity, among other important questions.
Keep an eye on our website and next month’s edition of this newsletter for an excerpt from the book. For more on Hindu nationalist agitprop, read Shubhanga Pandey’s Himal mediafile looking at a pro-Modi propaganda music video made by Pahlaj Nihalani, the former chairperson of India’s Central Board of Film Certification.
Muslim Politics in India (November 2023), a collection of essays edited and translated by the Marathi poet Dilip Chitre, is compiled from a series of interviews he had with Hamid Dalwai, the prominent writer and social worker who advocated for social justice and gender equality among Muslims in India.
Also out this month, Being Muslim in Hindu India: A Critical View by Ziya Us Salam (November 2023) explores the reality of daily stigmatisation, the increasing threats of violence and the constant “othering” of Muslims in India. These two books come as a part of a growing number of texts on the political marginalisation of Indian Muslims. For example, Pratinav Anil’s Another India: The Making of the World's Largest Muslim Minority, 1947–77 (April 2023) reveals how Muslim leaders in the Congress and the community abandoned those they claimed to represent in post-Independence India. Unmasking Indian Secularism: Why We Need a New Hindu-Muslim Deal by Hasan Suroor (May 2022) looks at debates on Indian secularism and calls for “a secular Hindu state which will recognize Hinduism as the official religion but guarantee equal rights to all its citizens, irrespective of their faith: a version of Britain’s secular Christian state.”
The journalist Sangeeta Barooah Pisharoty’s new book The Assamese: A Portrait of a Community (November 2023) provides a deep dive into the diverse cultures and peoples of contemporary Assam, exploring its linguistic heritage, folklore, political history and more. The book is described as “the first major attempt to provide a comprehensive and nuanced portrait of one of India’s oldest and most distinctive communities.”
Also on Assam, Arupjyoti Saikia’s The Quest for Modern Assam: A History, 1942-2000 (August 2023) charts the political instability, social upheaval and economic and cultural processes that have shaped the region since the 1940s.
On the fiction front, Karachi-based journalist Taha Kehar’s recent mystery novel No Funeral for Nazia (November 2023) comments on class divisions and politics in Karachi society. Another recent novel, The Centre by Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi (July 2023), opens up questions of class and privilege in a darkly comic story set in Karachi, New Delhi and London, following a Pakistani translator who attends a mysterious language school.
Until next time, happy reading!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian