On Second Thoughts: Penguin India Sampler
Penguin India does publish somewhat indiscriminately - there are some books it has brought out that makes one wonder a bit about editorial and publishing criteria. But one supposes that is the price for becoming a publishing behemoth. As genres and authors, manuscripts, and writing multiplies, as market calculations come to the fore, as accountants negotiate with editors, a shift begins to takes place - and every fool knows that in this day and age it is the self-help bestseller (or titles like Ten Best Erotic Massage Techniques, or Fusion Cooking in the Wild!) that makes possible a line of poetry volumes. Even then, even then, I groaned out loud when I saw this book: Penguin India's The Best Books Ever Written: Free Sample Chapters. Was Penguin bent on joining the Guinness Book of Records for the dumbest publication in South Asia? And that title, The Best Books Ever Written, who was kidding who? But, ah, there is a thing called Second Thoughts. As I thumbed through it, I began to revise my initial impression. There is logic to this thing. If you are a publisher of books, and you face a waning readership and a younger generation, seduced by television, the internet and video games and indifferent to the printed page, how do you fight back? And nowadays - never mind the younger generation - even the older traditional reading generation is fast disappearing in the age of Blackberries and downloaded movies. The time and effort necessary for a book to cast its slow-weaving spell over a reader is disappearing into some black hole. Then again, there are so many choices in the book market for the would-be customer, who can at times simply bewildered by the sheer number of hardbacks and paperbacks and things in-between in a bookstore (all of them suitably backlit with neon quotes from the same critic mill!), that the rational choice can seem to be to wander the shelves and actually not buy anything… Penguin India's answer to the dilemma is a sampler, a collection of excerpts from classics in the various Indian languages, ranging from ancient texts to modern times. Read a chapter from one of them, see if it whets your appetite for the real deal, and then buy, or give it a pass. Of course, Penguin should have named this book The Best Books Ever Written by South Asians, which would have been more accurate. It would also have been more truthful to add that the selections are only from Penguin's own classics. Still, the formula works. It contains excerpts from 16 classic texts from Indian literature in English translation, beginning with The Ramayana (the superb effort by Dr Arshia Sattar, who studied under A K Ramanujan at Chicago University) to the Pali Jatakas, the Tamil Cilapattikaram: The Tale of an Anklet, Kautilya's Arthassastra, Ramanujan's own translations from Kannada of bhakti poems, Kalidas, Kabir, down to Rabindranath, Sharatchandra (a perennial favourite in translations in the other 'regional' languages of India) Premchand, and some Hindi, Malayalam and Urdu texts. The translations are first-rate, and Penguin has gone to some trouble to lay out the samples in modernized contexts. The extract from Kautilya's Arthasastra's, for example, is titled 'Consumer Protection' and the brief introduction to it spells out why. While this ancient text is widely known to be a treatise on statecraft, few will be familiar with the fact that it deals in equally measured tones with artha (wealth), and the responsibility and role of the state in regulating markets, and thereby ensuring consumer protection. With Brahmanical rigour it lists through 'Methods of Stealing', and in the subheading, 'Merchants' (what we call 'the business community' today), and comments pithily on how consumers were shortchanged almost 2000 years back, and how, in astonishingly the same way, things seem unchanged today: "Fraud in weights and measures," "Fraud in articles sold by counting," "False description in selling or pledging for credit," "Charging at a higher price," "Higher profit margins," "Adulteration," "Cartelisation," "Brokers and middlemen," "Employees of merchants," and "Visiting merchants." This last category is explicated as "host merchants shall report if a visitor sells goods at an auauthorized time or place or sells articles of which they are not full owners." One has to doubt whether the learned economists of the Center for Policy Dialogue can, after a gap of nearly two thousand years, do any better on why Bangladesh's consumers are perpetually in the grip of middlemen, business cartels, state-business collusion and inefficiency, and artificial price hikes. My mind is made up. My bookshelves need Arshia Sattar's Ramayana, The Arthashastra (translated by L N Rangarajan), Kalidasa's Loom of Time (the one translated by Chandra Rajan) - I do have A K Ramanujan's Speaking of Siva - and the noted Indo-Anglian poet Vinay Dharwadker's translation of Kabir's The Weaver's Songs (one of which is reproduced below).
Sapling and Seed
When learned priestsforget their stuff,
they read the good old Vedas--
without their books,
they don't have a clue
to the secret of things. When they see
someone's suffering
they pounce on it
with worlds like karma,
they apply their theories
of the four ashramas. They've taught the four ages
the gayatri mantra--
go ask them
whom it has set free. Whenever they touch someone
they bathe
to purify themselves--
tell them who's really
the inferior one. They take great pride
in their many good qualities,
but so much vanity
doesn't make them any good. Only the One
who's the Destroyer of Pride
can deal with their arrogance. Give up the thought
of being proud of your birth,
look for the text
of nirvana. You'll find
the eternal bodiless
resting place
only when the sapling
has spoilt the seed.
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