This is good-bye.
This blog began one year ago, on the 14th of August 2015, with an excerpt from my grandfather's book on partition and the freedom movement. I wanted to end with another excerpt from his other book, "Fight For Freedom In Sylhet", but unfortunately that did not materialize for several reasons.
There were 3 main reasons I wanted to create a book-excerpt based blog of this nature.
1. It would be a challenge to post a fresh excerpt for 365 days from 365 different books.
2. I wanted to create interest amongst readers so that they may want to buy the book. A try-before-you-buy scheme, so to say.
3. And perhaps to generate debate, discourse, and to demarcate a group of people interested in discussion.
Observations and Outcome on the above:
1. It was truly a challenge. I believed that it would be easy. But after the first 60 posts, it became much more difficult. And the reason was point number 2.
2. To generate interest I had to search for the right portion from each book- that would excite the reader, or, otherwise, be representative of the entire book and act as an introduction to the subject. This meant that I had to spend sufficient time on each book to select the appropriate section to reproduce.
3. On the third count there has not been success in numbers- but I have no regrets. Initially I did try promoting the blog on G+ and Twitter. But results were disappointing. The blog did not go beyond a very small group of interested readers, although Blogger's own statistics lie. The supra-26,000 pageviews it claims is largely due to crawling bots. Google Analytics gives a completely different picture, and is more likely to be the truth. A total of 2800+ pageviews, with 30% returning visitors. Most were from India(31%), but US, UK, Russia, Singapore, Australia, Pakistan also feature amongst top 10 visiting countries.
There are many wonderful books which I could not include in this one year of daily posts. Some because they were difficult to scan without damaging, some because they would not fit neatly into the genre of "non-fiction", and some simply because I ran out of days.
The scanning-to-blog process itself involves 5 distinct processes, and since I'm a believer in "open-source" everything- here is my work-flow:
Stage 1. Scanning:
I use Epson L200 series Printer-scanner. My operating system (on most days) is OpenSuse 13.2. I use the scanner application to scan in TIF images.
Stage 2. Cleaning Image:
I use the ScanTailor application to straighten (de-skew) the scanned images, clean up, split pages and prep them for OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
Stage 3. Converting to text:
I use Tesseract OCR to convert the images into text. It is a command line program, and for bulk work this is suitable, since it allows iterating through thousands of pages. Moreover, Tesseract is robust, and very accurate.
Stage 4. Cleaning text and posting:
The resulting text has to be checked for errors, and separate pages concatenated (joined) for each post. Errors mainly occur due to super-scripts, subscripts, and non-standard characters. I use Aspell to check spellings on a first run. I use Sed (Stream Editor) to remove hyphens and newline characters at the end of each line, to format. I use a string of = signs to demarcate paragraphs, and in my formatting script for Sed, I use the = signs as a splitter. After the machine-formatting, I do a visual (human-read) check to clean up any discrepancies. Then it goes into a digest text file from which I post.
Stage 5. Posting
I copy-paste text into Blogger's interface, and add tags (keywords). I do a Google search for the book cover image, download it and upload to the Blogger interface. I create scheduled entries that fire at 9 pm every evening. (Earlier they were triggered at 8:30 pm every evening).
That's a brief description of the process unless I copy paste from ebooks. There is a sizable number of ebooks I have used. But even these require formatting and cleaning up.
Excerpts from some excellent books could not be posted, because the scanning process would inevitably damage the books. I shall mention only a very few of these books.
The Ivory Throne, by Manu Pillai.
This is a mammoth book printed in small font, and deeply researched. It is the tale of the "House of Travancore", anchored around Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, the last and unfortunately, forgotten queen. The drama includes a host of other characters- many of them scheming, politicking, promiscuous, wife-swapping courtiers and relatives who fight tooth and nail in this tale of dynastic feud- in short hot and intriguing stories about sordid characters, including Raja Ravi Verma and his temperamental wife. With 105 pages of footnotes, this volume remains to be completed.
Besieged: 1857, Voices from Delhi
Mahmood Farooqui has compiled and translated documents from within the walled city of Delhi, covering the period it was under siege during the mutiny of 1857. It is a compilation of little scraps- complaints to kotwals, notices from the authorities, complaints from courtesans, and so on. This is the "other" view of life. A life lived on despite a war that rages. This is also accounts of 'individuals', and therefore, the opposite of a mob or army psychology.
In one of his lectures, Professor Dipesh Chakraborty mentions how Ranajit Guha (in his seminal work "Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency") refuses to individuate a crowd such as a mob- which uses modes such as rumor, kinship, and so on to mobilize the collective. The mob psychology, which works in say a mutiny or war, an insurgents' consciousness, does not behave in the same manner as an individual's consciousness. The statist contract between the state and the citizen, on the other hand, allows assigning culpability to the individual. That is the the job of the police, to assign responsibility to the individual for a "crime" committed. This, he says, is because the police is a progeny of the Inquisition.
This compilation however takes the "individuation" approach, reconstructing from records a history amalgamated from mutiny records about individuals.
Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars is an academic work by C. A. Bayly.
In the dimly lit town I call hometown life existed in the temple and the surrounding bazaar. Outside it lay the lantern-lit shanties by the river bank- the dark matter of the universe held together by the gravity of the glow in the center. For me India was always defined by the bazaar, the "haat", the "mela". This was how life and civilization and culture bubbled. Those were my reasons for buying the book. But Bayly's work is not romantic.
This book talks about how North Indian society developed from 1770 to 1870, while the British were in expansion mode. In his 2012 Introduction to the third edition, the author notes that it was an attempt to understand the commercial classes and their origins, and set the merchant families' roles in the context of the wider urban and political settings. It is again, a very detailed and deeply researched volume, relying often even on personal records of merchant families. He notes that many of the wealthiest of the nation (currently) are descendants of the merchants of yore- or at least come from the same communities that started accumulating wealth at that time.
Now the second category- the unlikely in-betweens that refused to fall neatly into either genre- fiction, or non-fiction.
Unbound: 2000 years of Indian Women's Writing, curated and edited by Annie Zaidi is indeed non-fiction in the sense that it is archival material, categorised into sections such as Spiritual Love, Secular Love, Marriage, Food, Journeys, Ends. Yet most of the extracts are pieces of fiction. When I tried to wrangle a suitable portion, I could not find a piece that would not be out of place amongst the other posts. Unbound is otherwise highly recommended as a sampler of women's writing in India, down the ages. From Lal Ded to Easterine Kire, it covers a wide canvas.
In these closing notes I quote a very small excerpt from Annie's Introduction:
"Contemporary Authors have faced abuse and threats after having written about bodies, sex, and religious institutions. Tamil poets like Salma and Kutti Revathi were accused of 'obscenity' and threatened with violence. Criticism was often accompanied by sexual abuse and this was painfully evident while I was looking for essays by historian Romila Thapar. I came upon a website discussing her work and one comment described her thus: 'That BIYATCH Romila thapar is nothing but a whore of the commies'. It was both amusing and sad to realize that more money, better education and exposure (mainly to American culture, judging from the language used) has not rid our civilization of men who, unable to disprove a woman's scholarship, start to abuse her sexuality."
Damon Galgut wrote "Arctic Summer" based on the unrequited love between E. M. Forster and his Indian friend Syed Ross Masood. The title is taken from an unfinished novel by Forster, which he began writing in 1910, and never finished. Syed Ross Masood is the real-life character upon whom possibly Forster based his character Dr.Aziz in Passage to India- at least it was a doppelganger of Syed. A Passage to India too was something that gave Forster trouble- he started writing it in 1913, but took 11 years to complete. For 9 of those years, he was completely stuck and could not continue till he went back to India, as secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas. Damon Galgut takes from Forster's life, and Forster's written material as the basis of this fictionalized account.
The book can perhaps be categorized as "literary historical fiction" or "fictional biography". This made it difficult to include in a pure non-fiction blog.
As an aside, there are 3 related books that I could have included, had I had access to these. These are now on my wish-list:
Gay Writers In Search Of The Divine: Hinduism And Homosexuality In The Lives And Writings Of Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, And Christopher Isherwood
The definitive biography of E. M. Forster, by P. N. Furbank. "E. M. Forster: A Life", is used by all researchers as the basic starting material. Furbank was appointed by E.M. Forster himself as his biographer, and reviews show that Furbank did a remarkable job, with great restraint, exposing the sexual obstacles Forster had to cope with all his life.
One other biography by Wendy Moffat, “A Great Unrecorded History,” gets a good review by none other than literary giant Colm Toibin.
Moving on to topics closer to home,
Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India: Hala's Sattasai, is a collection of Seven Hundred Love Poems written originally in Prakrit, and collected by the Satavahana king Hala in the first century AD. But it is after all poetry. And that too would not fit in. So here I take the liberty of quoting 2 short poems:
1.
He was embarrassed
But I laughed and gave him a hug
When he groped for the knot
Of my skirt and found it
Already undone.
2.
Like a bird in a cage
Moving from one gap to the next,
With trembling eye
She peeps through the fence
As you walk past.
What is she to do
If, wobbling on tiptoe
And squeezing her breasts against the fence,
She still can’t see you?
A few books that could not be included because I ran out of days:
Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta by Sumanta Banerjee (Rating: 5 Stars)
This book has something interesting on every page. One such observation by the author goes thus: with the industrial revolution there came a demand for skill-sets and with it came new class distinctions and hierarchies. The "Shidhel-chor" (thief who breaks into houses with special tools) had utter contempt for the "chichke-chor" - the common thief who would not stop to even con a passerby of his hen. If you are a Calcuttan, there is especially no excuse for not reading this extremely detailed history of crime and punishment in the city. Although my hopes for finding some reference to "Nata Shaheb" (Is it true?- first Chinese opium seller in Calcutta- or was BonBon pulling my leg?) were not fulfilled.
Creative Pasts: By Prachi Deshpande
This book explores how Maratha history and Nationalism was created as historical memory from Bakhars- these are historical records- or rather narratives similar to family records such as Assam Buranjis. The author says that this was the mode of pre-colonial history-writing in the region, and as such, deserves to be studied in the context of historiography. There are differing opinions about whether the bakhar form originated with intelligence gathering of a Perso-Arabic variety (akhbar) or in Puranic forms of literary story-telling (akhyayika) of a Sanskrit lineage. However, especially in an Indian context literary and historical narratives cannot be considered mutually exclusive forms of textualities.
Caravans: Indian Merchants on the Silk Road
This book comes from a new series edited/curated by Gurcharan Das, called "The Story of Indian Business". This particular volume is about the Multani and Shikarpuri merchants. What intrigued me more (after starting to read the book) is that this is not the BC time period I expected- when we think Silk Road we tend to think Dunhuang and the ancient trade route. But this volume comes right into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Multani and Shikarpuri merchants operated a commercial system connecting Central Asia to India. In fact, the two regions have always been connected commercially, with the Bukharan Khanate and Mughal Empire especially encouraging trade and commerce between the regions.
Two more books I shall only mention, without describing: (the list would become uncontrollably long)
Sources of Indian traditions. Volume 2, Modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Rating: 5 Stars)
Land Of Seven Rivers : A Brief History of India’s Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal
A fourth category of books are decidedly low in number, although not missing altogether. This is a subconscious choice- one I should have done well to overcome. These are books that I do not agree with. The idea of debate is to give voice to the opposite view, and perhaps, the "contra" view is weak in contrapunkt. One prime candidate would be "Invading The Sacred"- especially since Wendy Doniger has been posted.
In the last few days I wanted to post from books signed by authors, and indeed a few of the books are signed copies. But nothing gives me more pleasure, more honour, than to end with "Waters Close Over Us" by Hartosh Singh Bal.
His writing is 'aspirational'- it is what I wish my writing could be like. The perfect balance between fact and narrative, woven together into a seamless tapestry, full of rhythm, colour, melancholia and hope. Out of the 365 books this is indeed the appropriate "closing" book.
Cheers, all. Keep reading.
This blog began one year ago, on the 14th of August 2015, with an excerpt from my grandfather's book on partition and the freedom movement. I wanted to end with another excerpt from his other book, "Fight For Freedom In Sylhet", but unfortunately that did not materialize for several reasons.
There were 3 main reasons I wanted to create a book-excerpt based blog of this nature.
1. It would be a challenge to post a fresh excerpt for 365 days from 365 different books.
2. I wanted to create interest amongst readers so that they may want to buy the book. A try-before-you-buy scheme, so to say.
3. And perhaps to generate debate, discourse, and to demarcate a group of people interested in discussion.
Observations and Outcome on the above:
1. It was truly a challenge. I believed that it would be easy. But after the first 60 posts, it became much more difficult. And the reason was point number 2.
2. To generate interest I had to search for the right portion from each book- that would excite the reader, or, otherwise, be representative of the entire book and act as an introduction to the subject. This meant that I had to spend sufficient time on each book to select the appropriate section to reproduce.
3. On the third count there has not been success in numbers- but I have no regrets. Initially I did try promoting the blog on G+ and Twitter. But results were disappointing. The blog did not go beyond a very small group of interested readers, although Blogger's own statistics lie. The supra-26,000 pageviews it claims is largely due to crawling bots. Google Analytics gives a completely different picture, and is more likely to be the truth. A total of 2800+ pageviews, with 30% returning visitors. Most were from India(31%), but US, UK, Russia, Singapore, Australia, Pakistan also feature amongst top 10 visiting countries.
There are many wonderful books which I could not include in this one year of daily posts. Some because they were difficult to scan without damaging, some because they would not fit neatly into the genre of "non-fiction", and some simply because I ran out of days.
The scanning-to-blog process itself involves 5 distinct processes, and since I'm a believer in "open-source" everything- here is my work-flow:
Stage 1. Scanning:
I use Epson L200 series Printer-scanner. My operating system (on most days) is OpenSuse 13.2. I use the scanner application to scan in TIF images.
Stage 2. Cleaning Image:
I use the ScanTailor application to straighten (de-skew) the scanned images, clean up, split pages and prep them for OCR (Optical Character Recognition).
Stage 3. Converting to text:
I use Tesseract OCR to convert the images into text. It is a command line program, and for bulk work this is suitable, since it allows iterating through thousands of pages. Moreover, Tesseract is robust, and very accurate.
Stage 4. Cleaning text and posting:
The resulting text has to be checked for errors, and separate pages concatenated (joined) for each post. Errors mainly occur due to super-scripts, subscripts, and non-standard characters. I use Aspell to check spellings on a first run. I use Sed (Stream Editor) to remove hyphens and newline characters at the end of each line, to format. I use a string of = signs to demarcate paragraphs, and in my formatting script for Sed, I use the = signs as a splitter. After the machine-formatting, I do a visual (human-read) check to clean up any discrepancies. Then it goes into a digest text file from which I post.
Stage 5. Posting
I copy-paste text into Blogger's interface, and add tags (keywords). I do a Google search for the book cover image, download it and upload to the Blogger interface. I create scheduled entries that fire at 9 pm every evening. (Earlier they were triggered at 8:30 pm every evening).
That's a brief description of the process unless I copy paste from ebooks. There is a sizable number of ebooks I have used. But even these require formatting and cleaning up.
Excerpts from some excellent books could not be posted, because the scanning process would inevitably damage the books. I shall mention only a very few of these books.
The Ivory Throne, by Manu Pillai.
This is a mammoth book printed in small font, and deeply researched. It is the tale of the "House of Travancore", anchored around Sethu Lakshmi Bayi, the last and unfortunately, forgotten queen. The drama includes a host of other characters- many of them scheming, politicking, promiscuous, wife-swapping courtiers and relatives who fight tooth and nail in this tale of dynastic feud- in short hot and intriguing stories about sordid characters, including Raja Ravi Verma and his temperamental wife. With 105 pages of footnotes, this volume remains to be completed.
Besieged: 1857, Voices from Delhi
Mahmood Farooqui has compiled and translated documents from within the walled city of Delhi, covering the period it was under siege during the mutiny of 1857. It is a compilation of little scraps- complaints to kotwals, notices from the authorities, complaints from courtesans, and so on. This is the "other" view of life. A life lived on despite a war that rages. This is also accounts of 'individuals', and therefore, the opposite of a mob or army psychology.
In one of his lectures, Professor Dipesh Chakraborty mentions how Ranajit Guha (in his seminal work "Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency") refuses to individuate a crowd such as a mob- which uses modes such as rumor, kinship, and so on to mobilize the collective. The mob psychology, which works in say a mutiny or war, an insurgents' consciousness, does not behave in the same manner as an individual's consciousness. The statist contract between the state and the citizen, on the other hand, allows assigning culpability to the individual. That is the the job of the police, to assign responsibility to the individual for a "crime" committed. This, he says, is because the police is a progeny of the Inquisition.
This compilation however takes the "individuation" approach, reconstructing from records a history amalgamated from mutiny records about individuals.
Rulers, Townsmen and Bazaars is an academic work by C. A. Bayly.
In the dimly lit town I call hometown life existed in the temple and the surrounding bazaar. Outside it lay the lantern-lit shanties by the river bank- the dark matter of the universe held together by the gravity of the glow in the center. For me India was always defined by the bazaar, the "haat", the "mela". This was how life and civilization and culture bubbled. Those were my reasons for buying the book. But Bayly's work is not romantic.
This book talks about how North Indian society developed from 1770 to 1870, while the British were in expansion mode. In his 2012 Introduction to the third edition, the author notes that it was an attempt to understand the commercial classes and their origins, and set the merchant families' roles in the context of the wider urban and political settings. It is again, a very detailed and deeply researched volume, relying often even on personal records of merchant families. He notes that many of the wealthiest of the nation (currently) are descendants of the merchants of yore- or at least come from the same communities that started accumulating wealth at that time.
Now the second category- the unlikely in-betweens that refused to fall neatly into either genre- fiction, or non-fiction.
Unbound: 2000 years of Indian Women's Writing, curated and edited by Annie Zaidi is indeed non-fiction in the sense that it is archival material, categorised into sections such as Spiritual Love, Secular Love, Marriage, Food, Journeys, Ends. Yet most of the extracts are pieces of fiction. When I tried to wrangle a suitable portion, I could not find a piece that would not be out of place amongst the other posts. Unbound is otherwise highly recommended as a sampler of women's writing in India, down the ages. From Lal Ded to Easterine Kire, it covers a wide canvas.
In these closing notes I quote a very small excerpt from Annie's Introduction:
"Contemporary Authors have faced abuse and threats after having written about bodies, sex, and religious institutions. Tamil poets like Salma and Kutti Revathi were accused of 'obscenity' and threatened with violence. Criticism was often accompanied by sexual abuse and this was painfully evident while I was looking for essays by historian Romila Thapar. I came upon a website discussing her work and one comment described her thus: 'That BIYATCH Romila thapar is nothing but a whore of the commies'. It was both amusing and sad to realize that more money, better education and exposure (mainly to American culture, judging from the language used) has not rid our civilization of men who, unable to disprove a woman's scholarship, start to abuse her sexuality."
Damon Galgut wrote "Arctic Summer" based on the unrequited love between E. M. Forster and his Indian friend Syed Ross Masood. The title is taken from an unfinished novel by Forster, which he began writing in 1910, and never finished. Syed Ross Masood is the real-life character upon whom possibly Forster based his character Dr.Aziz in Passage to India- at least it was a doppelganger of Syed. A Passage to India too was something that gave Forster trouble- he started writing it in 1913, but took 11 years to complete. For 9 of those years, he was completely stuck and could not continue till he went back to India, as secretary to the Maharaja of Dewas. Damon Galgut takes from Forster's life, and Forster's written material as the basis of this fictionalized account.
The book can perhaps be categorized as "literary historical fiction" or "fictional biography". This made it difficult to include in a pure non-fiction blog.
As an aside, there are 3 related books that I could have included, had I had access to these. These are now on my wish-list:
Gay Writers In Search Of The Divine: Hinduism And Homosexuality In The Lives And Writings Of Edward Carpenter, E.M. Forster, And Christopher Isherwood
The definitive biography of E. M. Forster, by P. N. Furbank. "E. M. Forster: A Life", is used by all researchers as the basic starting material. Furbank was appointed by E.M. Forster himself as his biographer, and reviews show that Furbank did a remarkable job, with great restraint, exposing the sexual obstacles Forster had to cope with all his life.
One other biography by Wendy Moffat, “A Great Unrecorded History,” gets a good review by none other than literary giant Colm Toibin.
Moving on to topics closer to home,
Poems on Life and Love in Ancient India: Hala's Sattasai, is a collection of Seven Hundred Love Poems written originally in Prakrit, and collected by the Satavahana king Hala in the first century AD. But it is after all poetry. And that too would not fit in. So here I take the liberty of quoting 2 short poems:
1.
He was embarrassed
But I laughed and gave him a hug
When he groped for the knot
Of my skirt and found it
Already undone.
2.
Like a bird in a cage
Moving from one gap to the next,
With trembling eye
She peeps through the fence
As you walk past.
What is she to do
If, wobbling on tiptoe
And squeezing her breasts against the fence,
She still can’t see you?
A few books that could not be included because I ran out of days:
Wicked City: Crime and Punishment in Colonial Calcutta by Sumanta Banerjee (Rating: 5 Stars)
This book has something interesting on every page. One such observation by the author goes thus: with the industrial revolution there came a demand for skill-sets and with it came new class distinctions and hierarchies. The "Shidhel-chor" (thief who breaks into houses with special tools) had utter contempt for the "chichke-chor" - the common thief who would not stop to even con a passerby of his hen. If you are a Calcuttan, there is especially no excuse for not reading this extremely detailed history of crime and punishment in the city. Although my hopes for finding some reference to "Nata Shaheb" (Is it true?- first Chinese opium seller in Calcutta- or was BonBon pulling my leg?) were not fulfilled.
Creative Pasts: By Prachi Deshpande
This book explores how Maratha history and Nationalism was created as historical memory from Bakhars- these are historical records- or rather narratives similar to family records such as Assam Buranjis. The author says that this was the mode of pre-colonial history-writing in the region, and as such, deserves to be studied in the context of historiography. There are differing opinions about whether the bakhar form originated with intelligence gathering of a Perso-Arabic variety (akhbar) or in Puranic forms of literary story-telling (akhyayika) of a Sanskrit lineage. However, especially in an Indian context literary and historical narratives cannot be considered mutually exclusive forms of textualities.
Caravans: Indian Merchants on the Silk Road
This book comes from a new series edited/curated by Gurcharan Das, called "The Story of Indian Business". This particular volume is about the Multani and Shikarpuri merchants. What intrigued me more (after starting to read the book) is that this is not the BC time period I expected- when we think Silk Road we tend to think Dunhuang and the ancient trade route. But this volume comes right into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when Multani and Shikarpuri merchants operated a commercial system connecting Central Asia to India. In fact, the two regions have always been connected commercially, with the Bukharan Khanate and Mughal Empire especially encouraging trade and commerce between the regions.
Two more books I shall only mention, without describing: (the list would become uncontrollably long)
Sources of Indian traditions. Volume 2, Modern India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh (Rating: 5 Stars)
Land Of Seven Rivers : A Brief History of India’s Geography by Sanjeev Sanyal
A fourth category of books are decidedly low in number, although not missing altogether. This is a subconscious choice- one I should have done well to overcome. These are books that I do not agree with. The idea of debate is to give voice to the opposite view, and perhaps, the "contra" view is weak in contrapunkt. One prime candidate would be "Invading The Sacred"- especially since Wendy Doniger has been posted.
In the last few days I wanted to post from books signed by authors, and indeed a few of the books are signed copies. But nothing gives me more pleasure, more honour, than to end with "Waters Close Over Us" by Hartosh Singh Bal.
His writing is 'aspirational'- it is what I wish my writing could be like. The perfect balance between fact and narrative, woven together into a seamless tapestry, full of rhythm, colour, melancholia and hope. Out of the 365 books this is indeed the appropriate "closing" book.
Cheers, all. Keep reading.
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