Written by Pratik Kanjilal, Amrita Dutta, Pooja Pillai |Updated: December 29, 2018 12:48:50 am
The year in stories
A rich bounty of non-fiction narratives explains a rapidly changing world; the best of fiction mines the human heart
Non-fiction
In 2015, the hitherto unknown Oxford research fellow Peter Frankopan published The Silk Roads: A New History of the World, an engaging report of the history of the crossroads of the Old World, stretching from the account of Ibn Fadlan to the 20th century effects of superpower rivalry. It offered a picture of the past based on mass movement and connections, rather than the traditional picture of settled civilisation. In 2018, Frankopan follows on with The New Silk Roads: The Present and the Future of the World (Bloomsbury). Leaving history behind, he explores the new axis of the world, where all roads lead to Beijing rather than Rome. Like the past, the present is a story of new journeys, and the migrant is one of the defining images of the era that Frankopan investigates.
Frankopan’s predecessor at Oxford, Yuval Noah Harari, is also done with explaining the yesterdays and tomorrows of humanity, and has focused on the present in 21 Lessons for the 20th Century (Jonathan Cape), ranging from fake news that’s lasted seven centuries (the demonisation of Jewry) to the market prospects of terrorism in a world that is relentlessly getting safer. Historians who follow the tides of history seem to have cottoned on to a new trend: riding the wavefront of a rapidly changing world is more exhilarating than speculating about the future. Tomorrow’s world is relatively tame, and can be left to the attentions of the sci-fi mags.
Structural biologist Venki Ramakrishnan, president of the Royal Society and winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, published the extraordinary story of the hunt for the structure of the ribosome, one of the oldest quests in the life sciences. Structurally, there isn’t much to hang the tale on — the pursuit of a single molecule, with the aid of one weapon, X-ray crystallography. But Gene Machine: The Race to Decipher the Secrets of the Ribosome (HarperCollins) is a thrilling chase, and all the players are given their due. Ramakrishnan lists all the people who helped him find the grail of the ribosome’s structure, and provides brief sketches of their lives. In a non-academic work, that’s very unusual.
Srinath Raghavan’s The Most Dangerous Place: A History of the United States in South Asia (Penguin Allen Lane) looks back on the time after World War II, when the Great Game ended and superpower rivalry in Asia took its place. The celebrated “foreign hand” has cast a long shadow across Indian politics, starting from the operation that had the Indian Committee for Cultural Freedom, with national political leaders on board, being nudged in the 1950s into organising events that put across the American viewpoint on democracy and rights. Raghavan recalls the reasonable caution of the founding fathers about the postwar turmoil, but they could not anticipate that the projection of soft power — through Mickey Mouse and Duke Ellington — would prove to be more powerful than M16s and Phantoms.
That same anxiety about postwar turmoil is the linchpin of Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Penguin Viking). Prakash corrects the widespread perception that under Indira Gandhi, the democratic system turned rogue. On the contrary, the Emergency was a legal suspension of the law, made possible by powers vested in the Constitution itself. It derived from the uncertainties of the founding fathers, who had created a strong Centre that could hold an emerging nation together. But in insecure hands, its strength could also be wielded arbitrarily.
That same anxiety about postwar turmoil is the linchpin of Gyan Prakash’s Emergency Chronicles: Indira Gandhi and Democracy’s Turning Point (Penguin Viking). Prakash corrects the widespread perception that under Indira Gandhi, the democratic system turned rogue. On the contrary, the Emergency was a legal suspension of the law, made possible by powers vested in the Constitution itself. It derived from the uncertainties of the founding fathers, who had created a strong Centre that could hold an emerging nation together. But in insecure hands, its strength could also be wielded arbitrarily.
The Spy Chronicles: RAW, ISI and the Illusion of Peace (HarperCollins) broke the mould in security literature, bringing together former R&AW chief AS Dulat and retired ISI head Lt Gen Asad Durrani in a cross-border dialogue, moderated by journalist Aditya Sinha. In the end, though, it’s not clear which is the more successful agency, as each chief is prepared to politely cede to the other.
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