August nonfiction: These six new books celebrate the long history of India and being an Indian

All information sourced from publishers’s blurbs.

The Big Book of Indian Art: An Illustrated History of Indian Art from Its Origins to the Present Day, Bina Sarkar Ellias

The Big Book of Indian Art: An Illustrated History of Indian Art from Its Origins to the Present Day traces the history of Indian art from its origins to the present day, and features the work of more than 300 Indian artists – painters, sculptors, illustrators, printmakers, multi-media artists, lithographers, and muralists. It is divided into eight sections – “The Bengal School”, “The Bombay School”, “The Calcutta Group”, “The Progressive Painters’ Association in Chennai and the Cholamandal Artists’ Village”, “The Progressive Artists Group of Bombay”, “The Baroda Group”, “Artistic Footprints: Indian Icons”, and “The Art Landscape Post Independence”. Each section deals with a landmark art movement or school of Indian art.

The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian, Neha Dixit

What does the life of an ordinary working-class Indian look and feel like? Journalist Neha Dixit traces the story of one such faceless Indian woman, from the early 1990s to the present day. What emerges is a picture of a life lived under constant corrosive tension. Syeda X left Banaras for Delhi with her young family in the aftermath of riots triggered by the demolition of the Babri Masjid. In Delhi, she settled into the life of a poor migrant, juggling multiple jobs a day – from trimming the loose threads of jeans to cooking namkeen, and from shelling almonds to making tea strainers. Syeda has done over fifty different types of work, earning paltry sums in the process. And if she ever took a day off, her job would be lost to another faceless migrant.

Researched for close to a decade, in this book, we meet an unforgettable cast of characters: a rickshaw driver in Chandni Chowk who ends up tragically dead in a terrorist blast; a doctor who gets arrested for pre-natal sex determination; a gau rakshak whose sister elopes with Syeda’s son; and policemen who delight in beating young Muslim men.

In the end, things come to a grotesque full circle for Syeda. Her life is upturned for the umpteenth time during the Delhi riots of 2020. But displacement, tragedy and hardships are the things she is used to – being poor and Muslim and a woman. This is the story of untold millions and a searing account of urban life in New India.

Indian Millennials: Who Are They, Really?, AM Gautam

There are 440 million Millennials (born between 1980 and 1996) in India today. They constitute 34 per cent of the country’s population and 46 per cent of the workforce. They are the chief wage earners in most households. They are the first generation to grow up in a non-socialist economy. Consumerism permeates every single aspect of their lives. The food they eat, the workout regimes they follow, the language they speak, their professed ideological and political beliefs – all these are dictated by capitalism. Great bodies and English-speaking skills are crucial social aspirations – not only to boost their self-worth but also to make them stand out in the fledgling world of Indian dating. They are the first generation tasked with navigating a post-truth world where all assertions are double-faced, elastic, and subject to wilful misinterpretation. All these facets of the Millennial generation are speculated about but poorly understood.

So, who are Indian Millennials, really? What are the attitudes and lifestyle choices that define their views on politics; gender and sexuality; work and income; caste and class; love, marriage, and family; mental health and well-being, and much, much more? Author AM Gautam (a Millennial himself ) travels across the country, meeting Millennials in small towns and big cities, to provide a fascinating account of one of the most distinctive generations of our time.

Asides, Tirades, Meditations: Selected Essays, Kiran Nagarkar

Not only was Kiran Nagarkar an excellent novelist, he was also an astute critic – eclectic in taste and literary in perspective. Asides, Tirades, Meditations is a selection of writings that spans decades of his work and covers a range of themes that most preoccupied him: from Bollywood and cinema to Bombay’s colonial and postcolonial histories; from commentary on Indian and international politics to world religions.

Nagarkar writes about other writers and books that influenced him and also provides deeply retrospective commentary on his own writing. Many of these themes can be further broken down to cover an evolving Bombay, questions of personal and collective memory, the role of the artist in today's world, and ruminations on culture, world history, and Nagarkar’s own childhood, life and work.

The Fifteen: The Lives and Times of the Women in India’s Constituent Assembly, Angellica Aribam and Akash Satyawali

In 1946, the Indian Constituent Assembly was tasked with formulating the document that would soon govern the largest democracy in the world. Among its 299 members, were 15 women.
These women were vastly different from each other – from members of royal families and the political elite to those from marginalized Dalit and Latin Christian communities; staunch Gandhians to revolutionaries; grassroots social workers to leaders of the global social order.

Authors Angellica Aribam and Akash Satyawali chronicle the lives of these trailblazing women – recounting the influences that shaped them, the norms they defied, and the convictions they stood for. Guided by their own life experiences, these women contributed to debates on the idea of India that resonate even today – from drafting progressive personal laws to the need for a uniform civil code, from the rights of detainees to their varied and evolving opinions on reservations.

Hum Dono: The Dev and Goldie Story, Tanuja Chaturvedi

Vijay and Dev were brothers. From Vijay’s debut, they were inextricably wound in each film’s creative process. They trusted each other implicitly, though they did have their own share of creative conflicts too. In one instance, Goldie’s unease about a certain decision was echoed by Dev instinctively, in others they never saw eye to eye.

Hum Dono explores what ticked for Goldie and Dev. How were creative differences resolved? How did the changing India reflect in their films? Was being brothers an advantage or a disadvantage for them? And finally, what was the unknown, the “X-factor” so to speak, which collided and coalesced between these two extraordinary people?