HT Picks; New Reads
This week’s pick of interesting reads includes a collection of accounts of urban women navigating severe mental health conditions, a volume on the material and social processes through which Hindi came to be written down, and a book that explores a woman’s life even as it captures the trajectories of a new nation
Challenging the label of ‘brokenness’
This evocative collection weaves together lived experiences of women in urban India who have been navigating severe mental health conditions, from schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, complex PTSD, suicide loss and suicidality to trauma, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, OCD and ADHD. Emerging from spaces that are not always safe or supportive, they challenge the label of ‘brokenness’ and help reshape prevailing perspectives on the idea of wholeness. They also have the capacity to inform and inspire change in how families, communities, workplaces and even mental health professionals understand and respond to mental health conditions.
Each woman’s account holds up a mirror to society’s discomfort with mental illness-questioning biases, unlearning stereotypes and naming invisible strengths that often go unnamed. Collectively, they create a tapestry of vulnerability and resilience, inspiring others to walk the path of pain to purpose.
Beyond tokenism, this book opens up possibilities, and an opportunity to truly embrace and internalise these learnings in the context of other lives; and the courage and validation needed for us to go into our own dark corners and heal those invisible parts of ourselves that we may have left behind.*
A new approach to the history of languages
How do writing and literacy reshape the ways a language and its literature are imagined? Combining close readings of literary and scholarly works with the study of hundreds of handwritten books from the precolonial era, If All the World Were Paper explores this question in the context of Hindi, the most widely spoken language in India and the fourth most widely spoken language in the world today. The material and social processes through which Hindi came to be written down, and the particular forms these texts took — from illustrated storybooks of Sufi romances to loose-leaf textbooks used by Bhakti singers; from personal notebooks to cloth-wrapped scriptures — played a critical role in establishing it as a language capable of transmitting poetry, erudition, and even revelation. Emerging onto the literary scene of the subcontinent in the mid-fourteenth century, through humble and ornate literary objects alike, the vernacular of Hindi quickly came to acquire a place alongside ‘classical’ languages like Sanskrit and Persian as a medium of literature and scholarship, shaping its growth for centuries to come. Demonstrating how the life of books — the way they were inscribed, organized, and handled — can tell us as much about their meaning and significance as the words within, Tyler W Williams forcefully argues for a new approach to the history of languages. This book is both a history of Hindi’s literary formation and an urgent call to engage differently with the fragile multilingual archives of South Asia, before time and neglect erase them.*
A housewife’s quest for intellectual growth
In this intimate, yet simultaneously anthropological, exploration of the life of her maternal grandmother Pankajam (1911–2007), Kalpana Karunakaran achieves the remarkable: capturing the singularity of an exceptional woman, even as it situates her in a social universe shaped by the conventions of Tamil Brahmin orthodoxy. Karunakaran conveys with clarity how the ‘utterly ordinary’ life of a ‘woman of no consequence’ (as Pankajam writes of herself), lived out largely within the confines of family and kin, was quite far from ordinary.
The book draws extensively upon letters, glimpses of Pankajam’s life narrated through her thinly-disguised semi-autobiographical short stories that allowed her to ‘say the unsayable’ about love, intimacy and conjugality, and her autobiography, which she began writing in 1949 and kept writing till her last piece in 1995. What comes together is a riveting portrait of heartbreak and violence, yearning and delight, a housewife’s quest for intellectual growth and her talent for friendships across cultures and continents.
In the final reckoning, A Woman of No Consequence is about the chequered trajectories of a newly-born nation as seen through the lens of its daughters — restless women forcing home and nation to reckon with their stubborn striving for self-actualisation.*
*All copy from book flap.
