Books from My Shelves
By Pramod Pant
I am thankful for being invited to write about 10 books I have read and would recommend to the readers. I am doing this with substantial pleasure in the hope that at least some readers would find it worth their while in selecting books they plan to read in future or would like to revisit their past loves (books, primarily) for further inspiration and taste. And I am particularly eager about the young readers who would be setting their intellectual tastes for the coming decades and generations.
I started reading early in childhood out of curiosity and developed a taste for the written word. That propensity grew into a networking with great minds across time and geography, and finally developed into an examination of Life – Universal as well as Personal. That permits us to have a reasonably ordered weltanschauung in an otherwise maddening anarchy that surrounds us and is also seated within us. That was thus the journey, very delightful for me. In my listing of books, I have avoided mentioning books that are hard-reads for those who are not professors in a technical subject, or professorial in their approach to literature. In that, I am assuming that this newsletter is for the general reader.
- The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky:
In the beginning itself, in spite of my promise to the contrary, I have come out with a favourite of the professors. But my only defence is that this is also a favourite of the general, though serious, readers. On the surface, it is an interesting and highly complex murder mystery. In deeper recesses, it is an exploration of the human mind and its machinations, our search for meaning, justice, and ultimately God.
It is considered by many to be the greatest Novel ever written. My first translation from Russian into English was rendered by Julius Katzer, bought from MK Universal bookshop (an old shop on Rajpur Road that no longer exists) in Dehradun when I was a young lad. It is a smooth translation but the Katzer translation may not be easily available in the market. He, for some reasons unfathomed by me, fell out of favour in the world and mechanisms of publishers. The latest queen on the ramp walk is the translation by the duo of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky of Paris. They are a husband-wife team.
The Brothers Karamazov is a deeply layered book. At one level it can be considered as representative of evil in the patriarch of Karamazov family; his three sons, separately, embodying earthy passions, intellect, and Christian piety. The story is an interplay of these elements.
If you like this one, there are many other immortal works by Dostoevsky. The Idiot, Crime and Punishment, The Daemons (The Possessed and The Devils are other names for the same book in different translations), etc., are monumental in their importance in the history of world literature. You may also like to confer with the book on Dostoevsky by Joseph Frank, an authoritative work on him.
- The Spirit of Laws: Jurisprudence by Monstesquieue:
A wonderful, very thoughtful, and deep work on Jurisprudence by a luminary of the century of Voltaire and Rousseau in France. He precedes the Western stars on the firmament of jurisprudence like Jeremy Bentham, Austen, Bodenheimer, Dias, Professor Roscoe Pound, Hart, and John Rawls (of the ‘veil of ignorance’ fame). These men have brooded much and deeply. High quality stuff, all!
The history of ordering society by Laws in their written form goes back around four thousand years in Mesopotamia; the other two major legal streams being: a cultural one in the form of Dharma in India, and the Chinese one on the punitive and moral/ethical authority from heaven conferred on the ruler of the Chinese peoples. Historically, the occidental and oriental traditions are un-connected, but our present legal system in India draws heavily on the ‘common law’ traditions.
- And Quiet Flows The Don, by Mikhail Sholokhov:
This book is quite like War and Peace of Tolstoy in its size and depiction of graphic violence. Swords are still being used for chilling and ghastly word imageries. ‘Very’, as Mr. Jingle would quip in the Pickwick Papers of Charles Dickens.
The book is also wonderful in its depictions of nature. Sholokhov serves up the sublime in nature with the violence of our species. Beauty with the grotesque! But his greatest achievement in this novel is the portrayal of elemental and volcanic love, with all its physical and spiritual attributes between Grigory Melekhov and Aksinya Astakhova. Theirs was an illicit but immortal, and ultimately tragic, love! Like that of Anna Karenina and her lover, but with greater earthiness that Tolstoy couldn’t muster due to his prudery (actually, his extreme distaste for sexuality as manifested in his later writings like his novellas, Kreutzer Sonata and Hadji Murad, in which he derides the sexuality and nakedness of Russian women of upper social crusts). Tolstoy was a mad fellow, as many geniuses are. Shakespeare warned us about them in his Hamlet (Act 3, Scene 1: “madness in great ones must not unwatched go”).
Sholokhov got the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he richly deserved it.
- The Dhammapada:
Of the Theravaad Buddhism, called Heenyaan derisively by Mahayan fellows, this is a beautiful book. I have two translations in my personal library – the one published by Penguin and other a translation by Glenn Wallis. It’s very simple and very good as many simple things turn out to be. I have enjoyed Glenn Wallis. Both the books are available on Amazon.
- Mayamata:
While I was reading Ten Books of Architecture by the Roman architect Vitruvius (Leonardo da Vinci had created his Vitruvian Man, based on him), I wondered if our ancestors had also written books on architecture, as they had created very sophisticated buildings. It turns out that they did. One book, to my surprise was the Matsya Purana. I was surprised as, till then, I had considered Puranas to be unbridled gossip. They are not. Another book is Manasaara. The third, Mayamat, I bought.
It is a wonderful treatise of the Chola period in South India. It deals comprehensively with creation of dwellings for humans and gods both, including site selection and preparation of the land. This treatise falls into the category of Vastushashtra. I have the translation by Bruno Dagens which is highly regarded.
Manasara, that I have mentioned earlier, seems to be an older book of perhaps sixth century AD or of similar antiquity.
- Brihadaranyaka Upanishada:
This oldest of our Upanishads goes back into antiquity about three thousand years. And it is also the greatest of the Upanishads. I would not be going into the concepts of Atman and Brahman it deals with. For me, the most important part of the Upanishad are morals that are both simple and profound – like ‘asato ma sadgamay, tamaso ma jyotirgamay, mrityor ma amritorgamaya…’ (usher me from falsehood unto truth, from darkness unto light, from transience unto permanence…). Another example is ‘Damayati, Dattam, Dayadhwam’ which found a place in the famed ‘The Wasteland’, a poem by TS Eliot.
- Mahabharata as abridged by John D Smith:
Having read the vaulted Greek epics of Iliad and Odyssey, I do consider our Mahabharata to be better than both, by far. Under the god filled skies, our ancient ancestors narrated the games of living and dying, of moral and immoral living, of certainties and doubts; informing their children who followed them in this land over vast stretches of Bharat over Millennia. Our Nation and Civilization is suffused to its very depths with this monumental Epic. The present book by John Smith is abridged but good. The Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute had started a project to filter in an original Mahabharata in the first half of the twentieth century. They collected 1259 versions of Mahabharata in Sanskrit from across the Nation and created a version that was ‘original’ and this is now considered the standard Mahabharata. It was a tremendous feat of scholarship, initially led by Shri Suktankar till his sudden death in 1943. The work continued, however, for another couple of decades, and Dr S Radhakrishnan, the philosopher President of India, saw the culmination of the quest for the finished Mahabharata in 1963 AD.
- We Are Our Brains by Dick Swab:
Dick Swab is a world class neuroscientist from Netherlands, and his book is about the inevitability of what our brains do in spite of us. It is basically a negation of our ‘free will’. That is an unfortunate but valid conclusion. Ego-shattering, surely! But that is frequently the nature of the mechanism of ‘Evolution’ in a deeper sense. A similar story is told by another scientist called Robert Sapolsky in his book ‘Determined’. Both of them are talking about the inevitability of the decision making power of our neurons. Pessimism has never seen darker depths of desperation, and human egotism has never been negated so decisively. It is good reading as a corrective to our common human vanity.
- Gray’s Anatomy, Small:
I always think that we should examine the neighbourhood of our beings to understand ourselves, and our body is closest to us. Gray’s anatomy deals with human anatomy in great detail and is a magnificent effort by Dr Henry Gray who wrote the book in the mid-nineteenth century. Incidentally, a similar, but decidedly more hazardous, enterprise was undertaken by Andreas Vesalius in sixteenth century Europe by digging up graves to extract dead bodies for studying them. His painters were students of the great Titian, the Venetian master. Those were days of the fury and brutal violence of inquisition. People who have read Middlemarch by George Eliot may recall that Dr Tertius Lydgate, the fictional doctor in the novel, talks about this real life doctor called Andreas Vesalius.
The smaller version of Gray’s anatomy is better handled if you like reading in a reclining position as I do. The larger book may present difficulties in such serpentine postures. As anatomy is a part of the story, I keep companion books, of the same size, on medical physiology (by Guyton and Hall) and pathology (by Robinson). The smaller fellows are more easily approached, even as reference books. All these are available on Amazon.
- The Epic of Gilgamesh:
This is considered the first book of humanity as it is the first written one found in the tablets, between Tigris and Euphrates, about five thousand years back. But, its level of sophistication makes me feel that it was part of a story telling tradition which goes further back in time and is lost to us.
As has frequently happened with us: power, mortality; and the juxtaposition between the twain has played a major role in defining the core concerns for us in life, as shown starkly and with great narrative skill in this book.
Interestingly, and hilariously, there is a character called ‘Utnapishtim, the Faraway’ who successfully preceded the quest of a human to become immortal, as Gilgamesh was trying to do and failed in his endeavour. ‘Utnapishtim, the Faraway’ is called thus, evocatively, as an out-of-reach fellow for rest of the mortals to be envious of – till eternity!
(Pramod Pant is a retired officer of the Indian Forest Service and a resident of Dehradun.)
