By Devender Singh Aswal
‘The Cooking of Books – A Literary Memoir’ by Ramachandra Guha – the very riveting nomenclature and the interplay of words and colour of the title page caught my attention at the book stall of the departure lounge of IGI Airport, New Delhi, recently. The cover leaf of the book claims that it is ‘built around letters and e-mails between an outgoing and occasionally combative scholar, and a reclusive editor, prone to private outbursts of savage sarcasm…’ Besides, the thin volume of the book impelled me to buy it for gainfully engaging myself during travel. I was able to finish the book during my long flight to Cochin and back to Delhi. It’s an engaging and instructive cooking, so to say, which refers glowingly to the combative scholar, that is, Ramachandra Guha, and his reclusive editor friend – Rukun Advani. It is replete with erudite and pragmatic advice from Rukun Avdani, which he invariably gave to his author friend, Ramachandra Guha, which were, confessedly, well taken by the latter, making him revise, and in some cases, completely restructure his books in the making. It’s a lively documentation of an unusual enduring and fractious friendship between Ramachandra Guha, the famously outspoken author and Rukun Advani, the reticent, reclusive scholar editor, who now lives in the remote town of Ranikhet far from the madding crowds to escape unwanted intrusion.
The book traces engagingly the journey of the author and his editor from their days in St Stephen’s College in 1974. Rukun Advani, the editor of the Oxford University Press (OUP), India, who later setup his own print – The Permanent Black, was two years senior to Guha.
According to Guha, Adani was, ‘the first student in years to get a first class in English, a subject where the Delhi University examiners were parsimonious with marks. He was phenomenally well read and had a cultivated taste in music’. He was a batchmate of the affable Shashi Tharoor who was reading history and one year senior to now celebrated author, Amitav Ghosh. There are references to other contemporary Stephanians who have made a distinct mark in their own fields and professions.
Rukun Advani, Sindhi by lineage but born in Lucknow, is described by Guha as ‘a product of the syncretic culture of Ganga-Jumni Tehzeeb’. There are purple passages alluding to the impressive architecture of Lucknow, it’s multi-cultural ethos, diversity and aesthetic charm, quality eating joints and fine paan and chat shops. There are interesting anecdotes. One such is the flight of young Ram Advani, father of Rukun Advani, after partition from Rawalpindi to Lucknow, opening of a bookshop by him in the rented premises of the handsome Mayfair Building, in the heart of Lucknow’s famed central district Hazratganj, which was frequented by civil servants, lawyers, teachers and students. It is here that his courtship started with a ‘pretty girl of Isabella Thoburn College who occasionally visited his bookstore with her friends’, culminating in wedlock and the birth of Rukun Advani. It is said that Ram Advani
welcomed scholars and teachers and generously allowed college students to take books on loan or to pay for them in instalments. In the words of Ira Pande, quoted by Guha, ‘Ram Advani’s was always a cosy, intimate open space with mellow teak bookshelves that exuded the delightful aroma of printed paper and a respectful hush, the hall mark of every good bookshop. It never felt like a shop because Ram Adani presided over it as if he was sitting in his home’.
It was ‘widely accepted that no research scholar or writer of the city could afford to ignore it… There was nothing about the city’s history, sociology or anthropology that he did not know’.
Guha describes the very ethos of St Stephen’s of the 1970s, not yet co-educational, which attracted the brightest English-speaking boys from all over India who did not wish to do medicine or engineering. For Stephanians, while exam results counted, extracurricular achievements mattered even more. There were debating societies and study circles of students always competing to excel.
Rukun Advani did not join any of these clubs and societies but always came first in the college, which made him an adorable star. He was offered a job on the English faculty by his college, a privilege reserved for its best students.
But, soon, he got a scholarship to do his PhD at Cambridge.
Yet, he was fascinated with St Stephen’s, about which he wrote in the college magazine. ‘There were many appealing features which contributed to a generally humane atmosphere, such for instance, the absence of communal feeling, the obvious physical beauty of the place, the roughly equal status of staff and students, the freedom to wake up after the Assembly was over’. His essay in the centenary issue of The Stephanians describes the linguistic charm of his times thus – ‘to conserve verbal energy by abbreviating sentences into epigrams, epigraphs into phrases, phrases into monosyllables and monosyllables into gestures. This made it a wonderfully Swiftian world in which complex ideas could be conveyed by curling the lip, raising the thumb, tossing the head, tapping the leg and gyrating the body’. Guha refers, fleetingly, to his birth in the staff quarters of the Forest Research Institute, Dehradun, in a progressive milieu where people of different faiths lived together in harmony without ‘disparaging any religion or ritual’. Guha, a Tamil by blood, was raised in Dehradun, because his father and maternal grandfather were both scientists in the FRI, Dehradun, which, according to Guha, ‘was more representative of the diversity of India than the city of Lucknow’.
The book traces the role of OUP India in publishing the seminal books of Indian authors by one RE Hawkins, an Oxford graduate who came to India to teach English in a Delhi School which was closed during the Civil Disobedience that followed Gandhi’s Salt March. Hawkins was appointed General Manager of OUP in 1912 leading to publication of ‘Essentials of Psychology’ by Dr S Radhakrishnan, works of the ornithologist Salim Ali, anthropologist Verrier Elvin and the hunter turned-conservationist Jim Corbett, the writer of ‘Man-Eaters of Kumaon’ and the ‘Man-eating Leopard of Rudraprayag’. Later, OUP was joined by two gifted Indians who both had studied at Oxford, namely, Girish Karnad and Ravi Dayal. After seven years, he left OUP. The former earned fame in films as a dramatist and author. Ravi Dayal served OUP for long and persuaded eminent authors like MN Srinivas, Andre Beteille, Sarvapalli Gopal, Romila Thapar, Sukhmony Chakravarty, Ashis Nandy and others to publish in India under OUP rather than publishing from Cambridge, Chicago, and ther overseas cities. They recognised that there were now ‘more Indians than foreign readers of their books and it was impossible to refuse Ravi Dayal’.
There are enriching references throughout the book how Guha used assiduous research material for his various now famous books by visiting the libraries and archives of FRI, National Archives and Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, rechristened now as PM Memorial Museum and Library. The book is full of interesting details which go to shape a writer and mould his world view. Guha is a fearless writer and a scholar of impeccable integrity. His style is marked by great lucidity and urbanity, devoid of verbosity.
Its’s a mentally stimulating and instructive read, blending biography and autobiography adeptly, giving exceedingly copious space to the contribution of his scholar-editor friend Adani, conceding candidly the enriching contribution and impact he made on the writings of Guha, despite their often fractious friendship, which continues to endure. ‘The Cooking of Books’ is a distinct but delightful genre of writing that captures the interest of the reader till the finish.
(The writer is ex-Additional Secretary, Lok Sabha, and a Delhi based advocate.)
