Shunya's Notes

A Response to Harish Trivedi

(I think unfavorable reviews of books are at least of two kinds: (1) Unfavorable for the right reasons, which can be humbling and provide opportunities for reflection to the author; (2) Unfavorable for the wrong reasons, rooted in the reviewer’s misreading, willful ignorance or prejudices. Given how propagandized popular history has become in the age of Hindutva, I expect many reviews of the second kind, which are usually best disregarded. However, a recent mixed review in Biblio includes critiques of the second kind from Harish Trivedi, a scholar of postcolonialism. It bugged me enough to compel the response below, to also appear in the next issue of Biblio.)

Harish Trivedi  (image source)

As readers, we expect book reviewers to draw out the major arguments in new books. But often, reviewers end up revealing much about themselves, as does Harish Trivedi, a scholar of postcolonialism and translation studies, in his recent review of my book, Indians: A Brief History of a Civilization. Appearing in Biblio (January–March 2021, p. 9), his review reveals troubling intellectual positions and attitudes, manifest in his misreading, falsification and clouding of my arguments. So I feel compelled to respond.

Trivedi complains that ‘Few books which are mainly about pre-Muslim India (for the Great Mughals too are largely absent here) have Hinduism struggling so hard for space and representation as in this one.’ This nearly made me fall out of my chair. How had he failed to notice that besides a chapter on the Harappans, and three mostly about Buddhism, the remaining seven are mostly about Hinduism and Hindus (as these terms are now understood)? I wondered: What lay behind his anxiety about my apparently inadequate coverage of Hinduism?

Upheaval and Migration

[The ninth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

—Change. Resilience. Where do we start? I’ve got no idea. What happens after this? Listen! The answer is here!—

These words, splashed on posters, jumped out at me from images sent by a friend. The posters were part of an exhibition called We Need To Talk About Fire, hosted at an artists’ gallery along the Nowra River, about halfway between Sydney and Canberra. The Nowra River region had been hard-hit by the catastrophic Australian bushfires of 2019–20, following an unprecedented drought. Fire season in Australia is worsening as the planet warms, just as it is in the western United States, the Amazon, and Siberia. And the 2019–20 Australian season was particularly horrific, igniting a follow-on spate of depression and suicides in the area. What struck me about these posters was the raw simplicity of their messages, which ranged from forceful platitudes to agonized queries.

In their talk about these bushfires of extraordinary fury, worsened by climate change, there’s no mention of technical solutions. No demand for new wind farms or lowered carbon intensity. Instead, the posters surface what so often gets buried beneath the statistics, acronyms, and cost-benefit analyses common in our dialogs on climate and environment. They voice the thoughts of people who narrowly escaped the flames as the sky burned. People who lost pieces of their lives in an incomprehensible inferno—loved ones or homes or a quietude of mind. For me, the posters recalled the millions more, elsewhere, who might also be expressing similar feelings: Survivors of entire towns leveled by fire in the western United States, from Paradise, California in 2018, to the several communities of Detroit, Blue River, Vida, Phoenix, and Talent, Oregon in 2020. Survivors of back-to-back typhoons Kenneth and Idai, the two most powerfulcyclones ever to strike Mozambique, which hit within six weeks of one another, in March and April of 2019, fueled by rising sea surface temperatures. Survivors of typhoon Goni, the strongest recorded cyclone ever to make landfall anywhere, which hit the Philippines just days after typhoon Molave had hammered the same region, during the Covid-19 pandemic in October and November of 2020. Others too, for whom the damages and dangers of our rapidly changing planet must already feel immediate, existential, and relentless, eclipsing hopes for a return to “normalcy.”