 |
| |
WEEKLY
SECTIONS |
 |
|
 |
| The irresistible greed for more books |
|
|
|
Sunday, November 01, 2009
Aakar Patel
Reading books makes us literate, but buying them makes us feel literate. Now that I’m middle-aged, I’ve realised what others have before me: I own more books than I can possibly read before I die, and should now stop buying.
That isn’t going to be possible and it tells us something about the limits of reason. One evening in Lahore, I told the architect-artist Ghazanfar Ali Dada about my many books. Do you read them, he asked. Er, not really, I said. That’s hoarding, he said sternly. True.
Jerry Pinto, a writer in Bombay, wrote his law about buying books: he never bought one he hadn’t already read. It’s brilliant; if it’s true Pinto is a hard man.
Actually what propels my bouts of buying is self-doubt: the realisation that I know little. It could come from reading a piece about the difference between Aristotle and Plato, or listening to a podcast about pre-Cambrian era fossils. The current urge has been driven by Pervez Hoodbhoy’s review of Gordon Fraser’s biography of Abdus Salam (my book website says it’s Rs2,898 so I’ll wait for the Indian edition).
Anybody describing a book, or its author, well triggers my primitive hunting instinct.
And so I have all of Hemingway (bought after Paul Johnson described him as the best writer in Intellectuals), most of Flaubert (after Naipaul wrote in A Writer’s People he was a master craftsman), all of Dostoevsky (when director Kundan Shah said he made everyday life come alive), all of Kapuscinski (after Rushdie’s jacket scribble that he was the greatest reporter), and all of Coetzee. All of Maugham (after Ayaz Amir wrote that Cakes and Ale changed his life) and all of Naipaul (except Finding The Centre).
There are scores of books on single subjects that at some moment had become irresistible: Bordeaux wine, symphonic music, salt, the Royal Ballet, the art of William Blake and the best covers of the National Enquirer.
Then there are puzzling ones: all of Peter Drucker (ordered one day when, doubtless under the influence of Bordeaux, I thought I should understand management theory) and all of J Krishnamurti. All of Woodward, all of Kissinger and all of Elias Canetti. All of Madhur Jaffrey’s cookbooks and all of Nigel Slater’s.
I have a bookseller, Shashikant, who comes by every three weeks with a sackful of used books he thinks I’ll want. Of course, I’ll want.
All six volumes of Proust’s In Search of Lost Time. After I started it, I read somewhere that the most scintillating scene was where Proust’s mother kisses him goodnight and goes down. That appears quite early in the opening volume (Swann’s Way) and I put Proust away after that because I’d already read the best bit.
My shelves are weighed down mostly by desi books. Seventeen volumes of Jinnah Papers that cost Rs35,000. The incomplete six volumes of Maudoodi’s Tafhim al-Quran and lots of his Risalas, some in English. Maudoodi is never boring.
Diwans of Ghalib, Faiz, Zauq, Gorakhpuri, Momeen, Zafar, Gulzar and Ilahabadi. A dozen books on Ghalib and perhaps six on Faiz. Bang-e-Dara, Javednamah, Shikwa and Jawab-e-Shikwa and all the rest of Iqbal (including the staggering Reconstruction of Religious Thought in Islam) plus an impenetrable book on him by Annemarie Schimmel called Gabriel’s Wing. Only 500 copies printed and that’s not surprising.
All the novels of Qurratulain Hyder (Aag ka Darya also in English) and Ahmed Bashir. My proudest moment was translating his grumpy essay ‘Phir Raha Hai Shehr Mein Mullah Khula’. That book also has that glorious reminiscence about Bashir’s first meeting with Chiragh Hasan Hasrat at Imroze. The story of that night: the prostitute singing Raag Des, the garage and talk of Jerome K Jerome was described in part by Khalid Hasan, but the real thing is sublime.
Harivanshrai Bachchan’s Madhushala, novels in Hindi and Gujarati. Autobiographies of Chandrakant Bakshi, Kalelkar, Gandhi, Patel in Gujarati (Gandhi and Patel also in English). Ten biographies of Gandhi, eight of Nehru, seven of Jinnah. Lots of poet-essayist Sheikh Adam Abuwala’s books in Gujarati. He is one of my favourite writers.
Among unopened sets, 10 volumes of Subaltern Studies, four of Cambridge History of Southeast Asia, and four of 1001 Nights.
The Quran translated by A Yusuf Ali and the King James Bible.
A month’s wage went into 10 giant volumes of The Transfer of Power (unopened). Twenty dictionaries, including Greek, Gujarati, Hindi, Urdu, German and Latin. Two volumes on Persian grammar, one on French grammar and one on Arabic.
Collected works of Manto in seven volumes and 10 volumes of Churchill’s The Second World War. One hundred volumes of the Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Rs25 each). Five fat volumes on India’s Constituent Assembly debates.
Ten volumes of Sardar Patel’s papers and 18 volumes of Ambedkar’s Collected Works. Nine volumes of Mahadev Desai’s diary and 38 volumes of Nehru’s Selected Works. Volume 1 was Rs250 and Volume 38 cost Rs800. Updated to July 1957, these are still being edited. Nehru died in 1964 and the China war is still to come. Thirty volumes more are expected to come and Rs25,000 more certain to go.
Nine volumes of Vivekanand’s speeches and writings, and another of his letters (for someone reforming Hindus, he spent a lot of time in Europe). A hand-printed six-volume Mathnawi of Rumi in Persian translated into Urdu by Qazi Sajjad Husain.
Then there is the light reading. Copies of BBC Music, the New York Review of Books, the Guardian’s Review section, copies of the New Yorker, Private Eye and New York magazine, copies of Monocle. I have 250 editions (mint condition) of Life magazine from the 1960s bought for Rs10 each.
Biographies of all the great composers (Beethoven in two volumes by Thayer, but I can only see one — worried), Callas, the letters of Arthur Rubenstein, the Berg-Schoenberg correspondence, the Jinnah-Liaquat correspondence, Nehru’s letters, Golwalkar’s interviews.
Biographies of Rockefeller, Birla, Carnegie, Hearst, Ambani and Soros and many books on Parsi history.
All the tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides. All the comedies by Aristophanes (except one).
Thucydides, Epictetus, Herodotus, all of Plato, all of Aristotle. Many of these books again, this time translated by Robert Fagles. I F Stone’s Trial of Socrates, Learn Ancient Greek, Learn Latin. Dozens of books on philosophy and Greek civilisation, and Black Athena.
The Aeneid, Plutarch, Cicero, Caesar, Seneca and Tacitus. Three volumes of Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Four different versions of Iliad, three of Odyssey. Five translations of Ramayan (including two by C Rajagopalachari and one giant, beautiful Tulsidas version) and three of Mahabharat. Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s History and Culture of the Indian Peoples (11 volumes, which I inherited in a job as editor).
The complete Vedas in Sanskrit, and the Sam Veda in Hindi.
Hundreds of unread books on Indian history and sociology, and dozens on Pakistan but one, Hamid Khan’s Constitutional and Political History of Pakistan, referred-to mainly.
Tuzuk-e-Jahangiri, Maasir-e-Alamgiri, Akbarnama, Ain-e-Akbari, Baburnama (three different translations). Manusmriti (one translated by Olivelle and another by Doniger), Solzhenitsyn and Melville.
Biographies of Franklin, Adams, Lincoln and Jefferson. Six volumes of the Oxford history of Music (Economist said it was the best so it was couriered from America, costing Rs6,000 more and has never been opened). W G Sebald — which Shashikant left behind, appalled that I had not even heard of him. Origin of Species, Desmond Morris and all of Dawkins.
There are five piles of current reading next to my bed, each about 10 books high: A N Wilson’s biography of St Paul, Nagindas Sanghvi’s history of Gujarat, Victor David Hanson and Hofstede.
There are 1,000 books on my office shelves, perhaps another 4,000 in my small flat. And reading this list I realise I must really stop buying.
Actually, a few months ago, I cured my buying itch. When I want another book, I go online and add that book to my ‘cart’, but never actually pay and checkout.
My shopping cart on the book website shows 106 books worth Rs68,600, bought but not paid for. The child in me, who must really be quite infantile, gets his toy, while the adult can pat his wallet and still feel the bulge. This doesn’t work with Shashikant of course. Last Thursday, he brought the memoirs of a legionnaire, biographies of Pushkin, Curzon’s daughters, Lindbergh and Captain Scott; and histories of the battle of Trafalgar, coffee and of the English language (all bought).
The problem is that few books are uninteresting, and apparently none at all that is unable to insert the conviction into my mind that without THIS book my life shall remain forever incomplete.
The writer is director with Hill Road Media in Bombay. Email: aakar @hillroadmedia.com
|
|
|
| Back
| Send
this story to Friend | Print
Version |
|
|
|
ISSN 1563-9479 
