Eshan Sharma's Blog

The Brass Notebook: A Memoir by Devaki Jain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The Brass Notebook : A Memoir by Prof. Devaki Jain
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Price: Rs. 599

Prof. Jain is an icon and inspiration to millions of young people. She led an exemplary and remarkable life. I met Prof. Devaki Jain last year during a book launch at Nehru Memorial Library and we had a good conversation which was an opportunity of a lifetime for me. She has been a Gandhian and a leading thinker of our times. The title of the book is inspired by Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. Though a forward by Nobel laureate Amartya Sen has said a lot about the amazing accomplishments of Padma Bhushan Prof. Jain, this memoir is a collection of anecdotes from her life. In India, unfortunately, women are considered as the weaker sex and are often discouraged to achieve more in life, in the truest sense, Devaki Jain broke that glass ceiling. She met and worked with people who are global icons like Nelson Mandela, Julius Nyerere, and Desmond Tutu and it was amazing to see images in the book itself. She as a Professor at Miranda House and as a global leader has done pioneering work in giving shape to the women’s movement in India.

During my conversation with Devaki Jain last year, we talked about the state of the Indian economy and how the Gandhian economy might come to the rescue and she also mentioned her meetings with the then Prime Minister Lal Bahadur Shastri. She is as she mentions, the before midnight’s children who were born in the 1930s and were young adults in the 1950s, the formative years of the Indian republic. Married to a Gandhian activist and writer LC Jain, Devaki’s 200-page long memoir tells us the story of how a South Indian feminist traveled across the globe and worked closely at the grassroots levels. An interesting anecdote from Jain’s childhood is the Conversation her father had with Gandhiji, a day before Gandhiji was assassinated. This memoir is undoubted, an enjoyable read, and an inspiring one about an icon who achieved a lot in her remarkable life and made her own space in a patriarchal society. I will always cherish my conversation with Prof. Devaki Jain, as well as this beautiful memoir.




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Turmeric Nation: A Passage Through India’s Tastes by Shylashri Shankar

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


Book: Turmeric Nation: A Passage Through India’s Tastes
Author: Shylashri Shankar
Publisher: Speaking Tiger
Price: Rs. 499

There is a popular saying in India, the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. We love food, and jokingly so, some of us ‘live to eat’. To validate this point, author Shylashri Shankar writes in the book, “Evelyn Waugh said that his favorite bedtime reading was Elizabeth David’s cookbooks. Mine used to be Emily Post’s Etiquette.”

Soothing to the eye, the cover of this book provides a deep insight into the voyage of food in India. The question of defining ‘Indian food’ is not as simple as it may sound, what is Indian in the food we eat is an age-old question for us. Is it even possible to categorize Indian food in shorter categories like South Indian, North Indian, Veg/Non-Veg, ‘Mughalai’? Does food have a religion? This book is a collection of essays by Shylashri Shankar that tries to answer these big questions. As it is in itself an ambitious project, the narrative suffers its own challenges, the wideness of the topic. The book starts with explaining the Aryan Question in brief and talks about what Novel Harari says to be History’s biggest fraud, the advent of Agriculture. Defining the food and spice profile or the nation in a compact book is rather a daunting task, various cookbooks have been written, this book tries to be an exception. There is always a question that how much of what we eat is ‘truly Indian’ and how we have come a long in culinary history; from what our ancestors used to eat to today’s veganism and the era of fast or processed foods.

Shylashri tries to answer a rather important question of identity being associated with food, which increasingly so is becoming a point to debate. Keeping aside the one challenge that the narration suffers that is the depth of the question that it seeks to answer, Overall, this book provides an intriguing, compelling narrative of the making of culture, habits, taboos, identity around food in India through the ages.




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