The Cooking of Books review: A portrait of friendship and intellectual camaraderie

In college, he was favourable to perhaps three other students, including Mukul Kesavan and Amitav Ghosh. But over 40 years of correspondence and intellectual sparring, Guha and Advani have formed an incredible relationship — which has perhaps never existed and may never exist now, in an age of overexposed (mis)communication and overwhelming (dis)connection between people. Guha’s latest, The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir (Juggernaut), is about this relationship, and perhaps one of the rarest and finest books of its kind.

A Memoir and an Ode

The appeal and charm of The Cooking of Books is indeed that it is Guha’s own memoir only by extension. He writes about his own intellectual developments and engagements, from reading Economics at St. Stephen’s, to writing a thesis on the tribal hinterlands of his hilly hometown in Uttarakhand for his doctorate degree… Which then goes on to become a history of the many books and essays and speeches that he has written. Literature that we return to often in search of answers about the environment, cricket, social and sociological history and forgotten icons like Verrier Elwin.

He writes about the books he read and the writers who reaffirmed his own calling in life, but the beating heart of this fascinating book is the seemingly “surly and snobbish” (as Guha describes him at one point) Rukun Advani. Guha writes with such tender admiration about his editor and close friend that many a time the book moves you in unexpected ways.

Guha always writes about Advani with a certain reverence. Advani was an English Literature postgraduate and a Cambridge doctorate with a record-breaking academic history, whereas Guha continually refers to himself as a cricket/sports types who passed with second classes and changed streams during the course of his shaky early academic career — instantly putting him many rungs lower than Advani in the socio-intellectual hierarchy. As Guha writes about his own intellectual developments and engagements, the book fundamentally puts on display the inspiring personal histories of one of the most enduring and iconic public intellectuals in India today.

But concurrent to this rise is the wind beneath Guha’s wings: the sage, often bitingly sardonic but always profoundly measured, Rukun Advani. The letters that Guha shares in the book reveal the plumbings of a remarkable mind. Advani’s prose is arresting; he writes with a wicked wit and wisdom, and best of all, in his words, one can access the playful possibilities of language.

Advani is a writer who loves the shapes and forms of words, and by that logic, a marvellous editor — a fact that Guha testifies to repeatedly throughout the book, via Advani’s letters. He guides Guha on polishing the Elwin biography; in terms of how it needs to dig deeper into the intimate personality of the man, and not only his public persona. Advani’s intertexts and references to other works reveal his indexed bibliography of a mind. Writers (aspiring and existing) will benefit massively from these letters.

In one of his letters, responding to an essay Guha submitted for Advani’s review, the latter writes: “Ram, Even ‘however’ and ‘so to speak’, placed in the middle of a nicely fluid sentence, can make it sound pontifical… The need to sound authoritative is an academic ailment which should be replaced by the subtler desire to sound tentatively certain.” By turns informative and educational — without ever being didactic — and encouraging and calmly critical, Advani’s letters direct Guha towards honing his voice and words like channels in an irrigation system, directing the flow of water.

A Diss-tory of Indian Publishing

In what is one of the most entertaining sections of the book, Guha and Advani exchange letters on the curious developments in Indian academia in the 1980s, where the “practitioners of Subaltern Studies discovered Derrida and deconstruction.” Both Guha and Advani share a revolted response to this development, but it is Advani’s censure that is the stuff of legends. Advani published a pamphlet called Indian History from Above and Below: Two Academic Parodies, and dedicated it to: “All Bengali intellectuals and others whose dollar salaries have risen with the help of obscurity and jargon…”

This section also goes on to track the deteriorating qualities of Indian publishing at the turn of the century, which interestingly is contiguous with another watershed event in Indian publishing. In the early 2000s, Advani — who had recently married Anuradha Roy, a colleague at Oxford University Press — was ousted from the organisation, citing a farcical policy by his envious Managing Director. A couple could not work together in the organisation as per a new policy. Academics and writers rallied behind Advani and Roy to call out the flippant new rule, (which contradicted precedents), but the OUP had its way. Consequently, Advani and Roy quit OUP. An organisation that Advani facilitated to gain wide recognition on a global level, with a formidable list of authors and books that continue to supply researchers and readers with a wealth of knowledge, even today.

Guha writes that whereas once publishing houses employed people who read books, the change happened as it started employing people who were much better “at reading balance sheets than at reading books.” He describes the contemporary world of cooking of books as a place wherein the “blaring of trumpets” has replaced the “Olympean” process of long-term and endurable publishing. We are arguably seeing a glut of new books, which are pushed vigorously for promotions, but promptly fizzle out as the “marketing cycles” and overworked publishing workers have to move on to the next batch of books. The cooking of books, it seems, has become a task, more than a process.

Together in Solitude

Everyone who knows Advani attests to his deeply embedded aversion to people. But in Guha’s memoir, he is the endearing intellectual who wins one over relentlessly, with his incredible facility with language and sometimes shocking tenderness. But, most of all, with his impossible-to-not-aspire-to candour and wit. When Shashi Tharoor — a contemporary from St. Stephen’s — was asked to resign by the Prime Minister in 2010 after the Indian Premier League debacle, Advani wrote: “I fear something worse is going to befall us now: he will inflict his third-rate narcissistic journalism on us once again.”

Advani lives with his wife, the critically acclaimed novelist Anuradha Roy in Ranikhet, and runs a small press, Permanent Black — with ardent and arduous support from their canine assistants. In Ranikhet, “everyone is laidback and going nowhere and mystified by urgency,” writes Advani in a letter. Obviously, then, this is his natural habitat. Even though Guha suggests that he is no novelist, when he writes about Ranikhet and Advani in Ranikhet, he reveals otherwise.

The Cooking of Books is a timeless reminder that love exists in so many forms, and it can find its way through all differences to enrich and expand our world and worldview — or perhaps because. Guha’s and Advani’s letters, which form the nucleus of the book, attest to this fact. Guha’s warm relationship with Advani continues in long emails. In an email exchange with the writer of this note, Dr. Guha wrote that he plans to “gift the entire correspondence (of which the book provides mere glimpses) to an archive.” The Indian publishing community must hold its breath for this archive to be released. And one hopes it is, very soon.