This piece was published in Hindustan Times

I had grown up thinking Luddite was a bad word — someone afraid of or resistant to new technologies. Brian Merchant’s Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech helped me dispel my ignorance.

As the Industrial Revolution gained hold, textile workers in England in the early 19th century broke looms in protest and threatened factory owners. However, their fight was not against technology. Rather, it was against the mill owners who used mechanisation to wrest a greater share of profits, leaving labourers with less pay even as their workload increased and working conditions worsened.

So, instead of the irrational, violent people they are made out to be, they were crusaders for a fairer world. They fought with whatever means they had, but the political and economic system was stacked against them. The government sided with factory owners, ruthlessly crushing dissent and punishing machine-breaking with death.

The Luddites might have ostensibly failed, but their legacy lives on. Subsequent labour movements have won us rights we take for granted today: two-day weekends, 8-hour workdays, and annual vacations. Yet, the misrepresentation of Luddites has endured for more than two centuries in popular culture. Scholars, such as Eric Hobsbawm, have done more justice to their legacy. Merchant goes a step further with his book by showing how workers today face the same threats the Luddites did in 19th-century England. Again, the problem is not technology, but how those with power and wealth are using it.

The tech world touts automation and artificial intelligence as miracle workers that will usher in a gleaming new world. They add that millions might lose jobs in the process, but that is the nature of progress — you win some, you lose some. However, this widespread unemployment was the utopia that the economist Robert Maynard Keynes once dreamt of. A century ago, he speculated that by 2030, people would only have to work 15 hours a week due to rapid technological advancements.

And yet, working hours have increased for most despite mechanisation and dramatic productivity gains. Billionaires champion 70-hour workweeks, even though research shows that four-day weeks could be equally, if not more, efficient.

So, the problem is not that an AI will take our jobs, but that the person who supposedly owns it will pocket our wages. I use the term supposedly because the artists whose works are fodder for generative AI, the data workers who train machines, and the communities whose water and electricity run data centres are its unacknowledged co-creators.

Technology is not an inevitability that unfolds independently of society. We can decide what to create and how to use it. Merchant’s book brilliantly shows why we should all be Luddites to build a better world.

An edited version of this review was published in Hindustan Times

Super, a 2010 Kannada film, imagines a strange but apt utopia. In its make-believe world, India has become a superpower in 2030. Indians are prosperous and have “White servants”, while the latter do all the menial jobs and beg on the streets. Its imagination is so limited that it cannot even imagine a utopia without poverty and discrimination. Today, as blundering billionaires seek to establish utopias on Mars, one can only wonder what dystopia it would entail for the rest of us.  

Rivers Solomon imagines one such world built on the back of a dystopia in An Unkindness of Ghosts. In the novel, humanity — or what is left of it — has been hurtling through space in the ship Matilda for over 300 years. They had to leave their former abode, the Great Lifehouse, after an unexplained catastrophe, but their purported destination, the Promised Land, seems increasingly elusive. 

Matilda holds tens of thousands of people organised in alphabetical decks. The lighter-skinned live in the upper decks, where they luxuriate in wildlife sanctuaries, lakes, beaches, and sports fields. The darker-skinned underclass in the lower decks have to bear constant abuse, violence, and surveillance by guards. There are nightly headcounts, missing which leads to dire punishments. 

The protagonist, Aster, is a resident of Q deck and thus, low in the pecking order. Her mother, Lune, mysteriously disappeared when she was young. The journals, notes, and sketches she left behind seem like “eccentric ramblings” to Aster, who suspects she might have had early-onset dementia. Her friend and bunkmate, Giselle, however, has a different explanation. 

Aster assists Theo, the ship’s Surgeon General, who has trained her in medicine. For many in the lower decks, Aster’s is the only medical care they can access. Her services include abortions for those in the lower decks who become pregnant after rapes by upper-deck men. She also has a secret garden and laboratory, where she cultivates plants and synthesises medicines. 

The worldbuilding in the novel focuses more on social relations rather than technological advancements. Solomon’s stratified society has many analogues with slavery in the United States. There are occasional forays into scientific curiosities and unfamiliar technologies, but the author glosses over them quickly. There are no elaborate explanations for how a spaceship with tens of thousands of people has functioned for centuries, why life on the Great Lifehouse collapsed, or where exactly they are headed. It seems as ad hoc as our era’s billionaire space race and dreams of colonising Mars. 

Instead, cruelty and oppression — and the resistance against it, the compassion despite it — animate Matilda’s make-believe world. By focusing on the misfits in it, Solomon further lays bare its stratified and regimented nature that everyone is subject to. 

Aster takes things too literally and consequently, has trouble understanding what people want to say. She is also queer: “a boy and a girl and a witch all wrapped into one very strange, flimsy, indecisive body”. 

Her friends, Theo and Giselle, also do not conform to the ship’s strict codes. Aster describes Theo as an “otherling” and “gender malcontent”. He is part of the upper decks and close to the Sovereign (“the Heavens’ chosen ruler”) despite his questionable background. However, his sympathies lie with Aster and her ilk. The powerful in Matilda use religion to justify the worst abuses, but Theo is deeply religious and we often find him praying. 

Giselle frequently disappears and breaks the rules, suffering brutal punishments. She is unable to come to terms with the world around her and becomes increasingly disturbed. It is these characters and their interpersonal relationships that make the novel compelling. 

Solomon plunges the reader into this unfamiliar world; there is little by way of explanation. As a result, I felt adrift in the beginning. However, I was soon immersed in the joy of discovery. The reader gradually learns about Matilda as the novel’s protagonists uncover its secrets.

We see the characters at a time when blackouts have become common on the ship, leaving lower-deck residents to contend with frigid temperatures. Some even suffer from frostbite-induced gangrene, requiring amputations. Lune used to work as a mechanic on the ‘miniature star’ that provided power to Matilda. Aster feels that the blackouts’ timing aligns too neatly with a mysterious illness for it to be a mere coincidence.  

Towards the end though, the narrative changes its cadence. Many momentous things happen in quick succession and the intricate plotting gives way to abrupt resolutions. It also relies on the trope of a heroic individual almost single-handedly changing things. As a result, the ending feels a bit contrived, though satisfying nonetheless. It is heartening to see a character one has been rooting for realise the unimaginable in a world skewed against her.

I have rarely encountered characters like Aster in fiction. Her neurodivergence is not a plot point, but an intrinsic part of who she is. In fact, the novel does not even use the term to describe her — rather, the author makes it evident from plentiful clues tossed into the narrative. We see the world through Aster’s lens and as Solomon puts it, she sees the world “sideways”.

However, not all characters are as deftly delineated. The new Sovereign’s hate for Aster seems irrational at times. There are clues though: the Sovereign, obsessed with Theo, is jealous of the close relationship he shares with Aster. He also cannot stand her defiance. While these do not seem motivation enough for someone as powerful as him, one could argue that there are multiple real-life instances of autocrats obsessing over trifling matters.  

Today, across countries, despots are making arbitrary decisions with far-reaching ramifications for people who have no stake in them. An Unkindness of Ghosts shows how resistance against their unbridled power can take many forms — sometimes bloody, sometimes with heartbreaking consequences, but also, often joyful.

An edited version of this article was published in Hindustan Times

John Keay, a correspondent in Kashmir in the 1960s, has written extensively on the Himalaya and exploration. His book The Great Arc: The Dramatic Tale of How India was Mapped and Everest was Named is an illuminating account of the longest measurement ever of the earth’s surface that stretched 1,600 miles and took over 40 years to complete. Considering his prolific oeuvre, I was curious about what more he had to say about the world’s highest mountain range in his latest book, Himalaya: Exploring the Roof of the World.

But the work is hard to pin down. It is neither history nor biography, though it incorporates elements of both. It begins with the British expedition to Tibet that culminated in 1904, followed by two chapters on how the Himalaya came to be, and another on the fossils it harbours. Next is an investigation into the ancestry of Tibetans. I was not sure where the author was leading to, but then chapter after chapter dwelled on the exploits of people trying to “conquer” the mountain range.

In the prologue, Keay hints at the meandering structure: ‘…this book may seem as disjointed as the Himalayan skyline…To provide a thread of continuity, I have instead focused on the human component in Himalayan studies, the personalities and their adventures, and I have sometimes taken liberties with the chronology.’

While the randomness is vexing, I eventually got used to it. The problem, however, is that along with the chronology, he has also taken liberties with the ‘human component’—unless, by humans, he means dead white men (and one woman). The author’s focus is so disproportionately on European explorers that Himalaya’s habitants seem incidental to the narrative. Keay’s account treats them as objects rather than subjects, let alone as communities with rich cultures and lives. Tibetans, for instance, come across as people to be killed or hired as guides, when they are not shrouded in ‘mystery’, that is.

Keay frequently quotes Orientalist excerpts from writings by colonial explorers, accepting them at face value without a trace of scholarly interrogation. Once or twice, he does call out imperialist conceit, but for the most part, it seems as if he has internalised their biases in his writing. His perspective is evident in his frequent use of words like ‘virgin’, ‘exotic’, ‘savage’, and ‘esoteric’. The book blurb terms the mountain range ‘confounding’. While I can understand why European authors writing a century or two ago would employ these descriptors, Keay using them today is infinitely more confounding than he makes the Himalaya to be.

It gets worse though. In the chapter Gold Dust and Yak Tails, he writes: ‘…infected from within by Nepali migration, Sikkim now exists in little more than name and nostalgic remembrance.’ There are so many ways to formulate this sentence that do not involve comparing a social group to an infection. In the chapter Pilgrims’ Progress, he writes about the ‘ethnic frontier between the trouserless tribals and the better-clad Tibetans’. While this formulation is quintessential of Keay, I wonder how editors and proofreaders let a phrasing like ‘trouserless tribals’ go to print.

Besides, if Keay’s focus was solely on explorers, it is befuddling that he did not bother to delve into the adventures of Indian voyagers, such as Pundit Nain Singh and Kishen Singh, whom he mentions several times in passing. Pundit was the term for Indian surveyors the British trained and employed to furtively map Tibet and other territories beyond the empire’s frontiers. Europeans were not allowed in these regions and the pundits disguised themselves as traders and pilgrims to garner information on the topography, politics, and culture.

While Keay glosses over the pundits, he does dwell at length on some non-Europeans, such as Zorawar Singh, who invaded Tibet, and Kintup, an explorer from Sikkim. Though why he chooses to focus on them and not other equally pivotal figures is anyone’s guess.

One could say that Himalaya’s structural anarchy is the only uniting thread between its wildly diverging narratives. The authorial decisions seem to draw from whimsy rather than logical or structural considerations. Keay skittishly jumps from one subject to another, often multiple times within a chapter. For example, in the chapter Sublime Deliverance, he bounces from Alexandra David-Néel, a ‘one-time opera singer turned Buddhist scholar’, to Colonel Leonard Francis Clark of the US army, Swiss geologist August Gansser, and Naro Bun Chon, a lama (For brevity’s sake, I have only mentioned a few of the many names that randomly pop up in this section). It is a roller coaster of a narrative that left me disoriented. The book does not offer any clues to these seemingly impulsive choices, making it a frustrating read.

Occasionally, Himalaya does get interesting. In the chapter The Karakoram Anomaly, Keay writes about the Hunzakut in the Karakoram mountains differentiating between ‘male’ and ‘female’ glaciers, and how they use the ‘artificial insemination’ of ‘amorous glaciers’ to fulfill their water needs. But for the most part, it seems as if the author does not know how to extricate the grain from the chaff, leaving the reader bumbling through a bog of information.

Even where Keay manages to be coherent, his dry writing left me parched. Even as a treatise on the adventures of colonial explorers, it fails. Himalaya reads as a catalogue of events, without a smidgen of storytelling. The excitement and passion that writers like Robert Macfarlane and Bill Bryson bring to nature or historical writing are sorely missing. This is most evident when Keay quotes other authors. The liveliness of those excerpts shines in stark contrast to his plodding prose.

Himalaya begins with the line, ‘History has not been kind to Himalaya’. Unfortunately, neither has Keay in his book. At its best, it has interesting trivia every 50 pages or so. At its worst, it serves as a guide on how not to write a book.

An edited version of this article was published in Hindustan Times in August 2020.

“Bound together by vine-like arms in sexual union, their exertion makes the unctuous sandal on their bodies gather with the steaming perspiration.” With its unabashedly sexual opening, the medieval Sanskrit comedy Hasyarnava-Prahasanam (The Ocean of Mirth) sets the tone for a riotous satire. Its outlandish humour punctures social norms, undermines hierarchies and lampoons religious strictures.

Commentators of Sanskrit literature tend to divine mystical unions with god even in the most lurid of texts. The dalliances of Radha and Krishna in the 12th-century Gita Govinda, for instance, are explained away as the merging of the individual soul with the universal consciousness. Same is the case with Urdu and Persian literature — scholars often subsume sex into the metaphysical.

Where sexuality is acknowledged, carnal descriptions are often cloaked in the garb of ‘eroticism’ to make it seem more literary. In his introduction to the anthology Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, R Parthasarathy writes, “These poems reflect a culture that celebrates the pleasures of the flesh without any inhibition in a language that never gives offence, that never crosses the line but always observes the canons of good taste.” While such works indeed exist, there is also the crass, the offensive, which crosses the line with utter disregard for good taste and thus, does not find a spot in the literary canon. While we hear about Kalidasa and Banabhatta’s masterpieces, texts like Hasyarnava-Prahasanam remain obscure.

A new translation, however, seeks to fill this literary lacuna. Jyotirmaya Sharma, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hyderabad, has rendered the satire into English and prefaced it with an incisive commentary. Compared to a 1976 translation by Ram Dayal Munda and David Nelson, his version is more successful at conveying what he deems “the original’s sparkling quality and unsettling energy”.

The play transpires in the house of Bandhura (Inclined-Vulva), an ageing prostitute who “keeps count of paramours by counting the wrinkles on her body”. It begins with the king paying her a visit. He confesses he has not been able to keep track of civic matters because he is too busy plotting how to have sex with other men’s wives. As more characters enter the scene, we see the chaos enveloping their world. Ranajambuka (Jackal-of-War), the army chief, proudly shares his exploits of hollowing a bee with his sword, but faints at the sight of blood. Raktakallol (Joy-in-Blood), the barber, prefers cutting his clients’ arteries to their hair and nails. Mahanindaka (Might-Censurer) claims he has composed the Vedas instead of Brahma, whom he decries as silly. Two other brahmins and their pupils are among the many lusting after Bandhura’s daughter, Mrgankalekha (Streak-of-the-Young Moon’s-Crescent).

The play echoes the sexual anarchy of Marquis de Sade (albeit without the violence or cruelty). The society in which it unfolds might come across as plumbing the depths of degeneracy. It, however, is not a moralistic tale highlighting evil and incompetence to warn of their dangers. In its all-encompassing anomie, there is no ethical compass one can seek recourse to. That makes it all the more interesting and open to interpretations.

In his commentary, Sharma draws from various concepts, such as the king-brahmin relationship, in Kautilya’s Arthashastra and notions of dharma from the Mahabharata and Manusmriti among other texts to situate the satire. “It envisions disorder as the precondition for any concept of freedom,” he explains. “In exhibiting defiance, it warns us that a mindless quest for order, efficiency, safety and comfort can only lead to violence, cruelty, inequality and injustice… it offers a messy, fragile and chaotic sense of freedom.” For Sharma, this ungrounding of moral certainty anticipates the post-truth world and makes it a “political satire for all times”.

Hasyarnava-Prahasanam also comes across as a subversive manifesto for egalitarianism. Bandhura is considered well-born because “even an outcaste from the lowest caste does not drink water at her house”. The characters mock each other — even the young Mrgankalekha ridicules the old men and the king is not spared — but the narrative treats them all the same. If anything, it lauds the prostitutes while highlighting the faults of those at the top rungs of society — the king, courtiers and priests. Its mockery of the brahmin characters harks back to the critiques presented by Carvakas, ancient Indian materialists who ridiculed rituals and metaphysical claims. Kalahankura (Tumour-of-Strife) wonders what is the point of studying the Vedas, worshipping the sun, serving his guru and attaining heaven if these do not help him embrace Mrgankalekha’s “urn-like lofty breasts”.

For all its brilliance, little is known about the text or its author Jagadesvara Bhattacharya. While some have dated it to as late as the mid-18th century, Sharma weighs in on the different contentions and pegs its composition to sometime between the 14th and 17th centuries. “The usual signs used as internal evidence to date a text are unavailable. There are no references to Muslims, Jesuits, gunpowder, local gods and goddesses, folk or tribal traditions,” he explains. “Brahmins continued to write poetry and prose in Sanskrit, almost till the 19th century, inhabiting an altogether different temporality, ignoring historical events with benign condescension.”

It is unfortunate that despite the rich heritage of Sanskrit literature spanning millennia, non-scholars know little beyond the epics and ‘the Shakespeare of India’, with an occasional nudge and wink to Kamasutra. Most think of Sanskrit as a repository of religious traditions, but it is also a fount of wit, humour, engaging storytelling and startling insights.

In recent years, translators have rendered some lesser-known Sanskrit works into English. Notable among these are the publications of the Clay Sanskrit Library and the Murty Classical Library of India. While ancient Sanskrit literature from the “Golden Age” is usually foregrounded, former diplomat AND Haksar has translated medieval texts such as Srivara’s Kathakautukam, Vallabhadeva’s Subhashitavali and Kalyan Malla’s Suleiman Charitra. Srivara’s 15th-century play is an adaptation of a Persian love story that incorporates references from the Abrahamic religions and invokes Muhammad along with Shiva.

Hasyarnava-Prahasanam’s milieu might not be as eclectic, but it is an intensely fascinating, thought-provoking work. Sharma’s translation and commentary are invaluable contributions that make this satire accessible to a new generation of readers.