Deepa Bhasthi’s essay from the Book The East was Read is an emotional journey into the library of her grandfather, a communist intellectual, which was filled with Soviet books that she encountered after his passing. You can almost smell the old Soviet books in her prose.
My grandfather, Dr. B.K. Nanjundeshwara, or Thamnaiah as the family called him, was a staunch card-holding Communist in the years after India’s independence. He had participated in the freedom movement and had spent several years in prison. He was an Ayurvedic doctor who brewed his own medicines and had an enigmatic healing touch—some two decades after he died, our landline telephone had screamed once, deep in the night, and someone had asked for the doctor who they knew had the medicine that would make them feel better. His clinic, conveniently set in the town square, was the adda, the meeting place for friends to talk politics. They also came to borrow money, to pass time, and sometimes to get treated.
Sometimes, grandma, the carrier of stories of my childhood, adolescence and early youth, used to look at me in a quiet moment, as if she were seeing me anew, and say that I had grandpa’s forehead. The rage of my teen years was attributed to his very quick temper that made his children turn off the radio the moment they heard him coming, for he did not tolerate the noise a large household of many children would make. Granny saw me—the child born about six months to the day her husband passed away—as the mirror of my grandpa. It was an inevitable necessity that she would find parallels between him and I—perhaps to cope with the loss, perhaps to redirect misplaced, belated anger at him. Unmindful of her reasons, I used to be secretly thrilled, for there used to be nothing more I aspired to than to be like my grandfather, to be him in another profession, another age of dissent from the family. Though I did not understand any nuances then, I wanted to read his books and get into his head, to understand that era when he lived in great appreciation of the Soviet Union. It was this appreciation that turned him into the ideological black sheep of the family and of the community, both of whom remained stubbornly right-wing. It used to sound great fun to be someone like that. It still does.
Our Soviet Books
I have no idea how grandpa began to start building his Russian literature collection. Some books have his name and address in beautiful calligraphy; I cannot say for sure if it was his penmanship or, more likely, one of his children’s. That apart, there isn’t any hint of where he might have bought these books. He studied medicine in Mysuru and might have visited (what was then) Madras a few times. He would go to Bengaluru once some of his children got married and moved there, so I assume he found these books in those cities. As to his special interest in Soviet books, that was easy to understand.
Every time I picked out a book, the first of which was at about age ten, I would imagine where he might have read it. Did he take a Tolstoy to finish a few pages of at the clinic, between patients and visiting comrades? Was the slim volume of Pushkin’s poetry for a late evening read, just before bed? Between a busy medical practice, the demands of a joint family, managing coffee estates and practising a political ideology so at crossheads with what was prevalent in the rest of my district then as well as now, I wonder if literature was where he went, to be. I like to continue imagining this to be so.
Several generations of readers all over India would have grown up being familiar with Raduga, Mir, Progress and books from other publishing houses of the USSR . The hallmark of every title that was published during a period that began sometime around the 1930s and lasted until the collapse of the Soviet Union was that the books were usually illustrated, available in a series of Indian languages apart from English and were sold at incredibly low prices. The latter was surely the chief reason why these books became as popular as they did. That, and the fact that the distribution networks chosen were so good as to reach even small towns and some villages across the country. But, of course, the books themselves spoke to people.
In Karnataka, these books were distributed mainly by Navakarnataka Publications who stocked them in their stores and sold them at their travelling exhibitions that were arranged in every district. That is how I began to add to the collection that existed at home, for Madikeri did not have a bookstore when I was growing up. It still doesn’t have one, save for a newspaper vendor who sells a few pulp fiction titles alongside the news. The potent combination of being an only child and a voracious reader ensured that I went through all the books for my age that we had at home. Annual trips to a big city, many hours away, where I could refill from a reading list would still be months away. The Navakarnataka exhibitions were of great help, and I would look for a book that looked both interesting and was fat as well—for it would last longer then. Thus, Anna Karenina trumped a slimmer collection of Pushkin’s prose works. It also greatly helped that the thickest of books were priced at Rs. 10, Rs. 15, Rs. 25, at most Rs. 50, a steal even back then, some twenty years ago.
That was how it came to be that at about age ten, I brought down from the shelves Maxim Gorky’s Mother. Of the two editions in the library, the one I remember choosing was a hardbound copy with a cream cover. It had an illustration of a babushka in a long skirt, a coat and a thick scarf holding on to a box suitcase and looking out of the cover. Into the purportedly promising future of the USSR perhaps, I would think, years later. It was a free fall into all the titans after that. I would flirt with more age-appropriate books over the next few years—Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, Mills and Boons aplenty, even an embarrassing phase of Sidney Sheldon, Jackie Collins and suchlike—but the Soviet books would always pull me back.
