Book Box | In Azerbaijan, finding India again
A Book Club digs deeper under geopolitical tensions to discover ancient connections through songs, stories, and the pages of Ali and Nino
It is lunchtime in Baku. We are sitting outdoors at a long table in the shadow of the Walled City’s sandstone walls, sipping a tall glass of blood-red pomegranate juice.
It feels both foreign and familiar.
The political maps tell us we are in a country that leans away from our own. But the crispy gutab naans stuffed with pumpkin and lamb tell a different story. The food and drink at our table speak of an ancient route that connected our ancestors, an offshoot of the Silk Route that ignored the borders we draw today.
And at this long table, in the dappled sun and shade of the mulberry trees, yet another older truth comes to life. This is in the form of our lunchtime companion — the famous Azerbaijani singer Bilal Aliyev, a man whose broken English and warm laughter connect us in an instant. A friend of a friend, Bilal came to India 40 years ago as part of an India–Soviet Union cultural exchange, travelling across India with a troupe of artists, ballerinas, musicians and circus performers. The world has changed since those days — and yet, so much remains the same.
Miles from home, we find signs of our common roots everywhere. We see them in the ancient petroglyphs of Gobustan, where stone carvings of swastikas echo symbols from our own history. We hear it in the aggressive demands of taxi drivers at the mud volcanoes. “Baksheesh, baksheesh,” they badger, as we dip our fingers into grey, bubbling sludge. We smear our faces with the mineral-rich clay — this multani mitti of the Caspian — and laugh at our reflections. For a moment, we are pilgrims of the earth, returning with glowing skin.
Baku is a city of stark, beautiful contrasts. Two hundred metres away from our lunch table lies the ancient Maiden Tower — a Rapunzel-tower like structure in yellow sandstone and now a UNESCO World Heritage site. Driving in from the airport, we are struck by the fluid, rolling sand-dune-like curves of a concert centre designed by the award-winning architect Zaha Hadid. The centre is named after former President Heydar Aliyev, father of the current President Ilham Aliyev.
And then there is the Baku of oil politics and pipelines and of geopolitical machinations, the Baku that lies beneath all of these. You read about this shadowy underland in books like Azerbaijan Diary: A Rogue Reporters Diary by Thomas Goltz and in the Mark Sava spy novels by Dan Mayland. At the Nizami metro station, mosaics of lovers from Persian and Turkic legends — Layla and Majnun, Shirin and Khosrow — shimmer in a thousand colours, their stories frozen in tiles.
In Lahic, a village in the countryside, we stumble upon a kitabkhana. We find books by Leo Tolstoy and Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. The librarian smiles at our enthusiasm - it is the first book club visiting from India, she says. She brings us books of Rabindranath Tagore translated into Azerbaijani.
And then, in a mall overlooking the Caspian Sea, we see the Ali and Nino Kitabkhana, a bookstore named after the beloved Azerbaijani classic. Inside, the shelves are mostly in Azerbaijani, but we find a little red pomegranate pendant on a silver chain — a symbol of the city. It comes in a bag printed on both sides: one with the opening chapter of Ali and Nino in English, the other in Azerbaijani. The bag feels like our own Rosetta Stone, an object that carries translation, connection, and history all at once.
After lunch, our group — a small book club from Mumbai - sits with Bilal and Alexander, another Azerbaijani friend. The table fills with tea glasses, Azerbaijani tea, and laughter. Bilal sings for us: love songs and laments of his land. In return, we offer up our own tributes — a Russian propaganda song one of our members learned from her father, who once trained in the USSR. Finally, everyone joins in a chorus that needs no translation — the old Raj Kapoor refrain that somehow everyone in this part of the world still knows: “Asmaan ka tara hoon... awaara hoon...” (“I’m a star in the sky, I am a vagabond.”)
I look around at the faces — Indian and Azerbaijani, smiling, swaying, united by a song from a black-and-white film. The words rise above language, politics, and place. Somewhere between Baku and Bombay, between the Silk Route and the sea, something ancient stirs — a memory of kinship, of stories that travelled long before we did.
In that moment, as we sit in this oil-rich country, we feel the shadow of the ancient Russian and Persian empires. Yet Bilal’s voice lingers. And I realise: wars and borders may divide nations, but songs and stories still remember the way home.
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(Sonya Dutta Choudhury is a Mumbai-based journalist and the founder of Sonya’s Book Box, a bespoke book service. Each week, she brings you specially curated books to give you an immersive understanding of people and places. If you have any reading recommendations or suggestions, write to her at sonyasbookbox@gmail.com. The views expressed are personal.)
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