Book Review | Editor's honesty forges unlikely friendship in world of letters

Ramachandra Guha is a versatile writer. He has received international recognition for his writings on environmental issues, his contribution to contemporary Indian history and his books on the game of cricket.

His first book, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, published in India by Oxford University Press in 1989, launched Guha’s literary career. The story of the publication of this book is a key strand of this memoir. We shall return to it later.

Ram Guha continues to write on a wide variety of topics as a columnist and as a public speaker; he is ready to engage in discussions on contemporary issues with fearless honesty. Guha’s range of interest is mind-boggling and his ability to write impeccably researched and eminently readable books makes him a highly bankable author.

The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir tells the story of Ramachandra Guha’s literary career from the very beginning, when he was admitted to St Stephen’s College in Delhi to study for a degree in economics and to fulfil his ambition of playing cricket for the college team, to becoming one of the most respected and successful present-day writers. Guha himself describes the book differently: For him, it is “as an author’s tribute to the remarkable (and remarkably self-effacing) editor who made his books possible and, occasionally, popular and even profitable”. This is how he introduces Rukun Advani, the editor in Oxford University Press, who accepted and edited his typescripts and, as publishers say, saw them through press. In this sense, it is an unusual book, because hardly any book has ever been written about an editor’s (working for a publishing house) contribution to a literary work. Authors sometimes thank the publisher’s editor in prefatory remarks as part of an obligatory mention. Even that was not encouraged in Oxford University Press. And here Rukun Advani is the central character and the memoirist is happily playing second fiddle.

This is also a story of a friendship which has its beginnings in St Stephen’s College. Rukun was two years senior to Ram and much feared for his erudition and his love for Western classical music. Scruffy cricket-loving Ram Guha would not have ventured near Rukun Advani then, and yet in later years, their friendship would endure over four decades. The anecdotal history of their college days and growing years is told with remarkable lightness of touch leading up to their first meeting when Ram Guha came to discuss the possibility of publishing his doctoral thesis with Rukun, then a senior editor in OUP. Rukun describes that first meeting, all those years after their college days, in a telling sentence, “Had his failure to make it to the Indian Test team as a spin bowler bowled him clean out of his mind?” That dissertation would be published by Oxford as The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya, a landmark book in the environmental literature of the sub-continent. How the failed cricketer transformed into a historian and scholar of repute forms a part of the book but not its heart that is reserved for Rukun Advani whose insightful observations could lift a stodgy PhD thesis into an eminently readable book.

Rukun’s comments and observations on Ram’s typescripts have been faithfully preserved by the author; they reveal an extraordinary mind at work. Over a period of 40 years, these two men have interacted with each other mostly by letters and emails. Ram has gone on to publish many more books, some with OUP others elsewhere. Meanwhile Rukun has moved on setting up his own imprint Permanent Black recognised world over as a distinguished academic publisher. Ram Guha does touch upon Rukun’s unfortunate departure from Oxford. It was a huge blow to OUP India’s academic list. But Permanent Black has flourished and Rukun Advani, forever the reticent scholar, has chosen to ply his trade from his quiet cottage in Ranikhet.

All Ram Guha fans will no doubt read this book. This reviewer has enjoyed it immensely and would recommend it to all those who are involved in the making of books.

The Cooking of Books: A Literary Memoir

Ramachandra Guha

Juggernaut

pp. 264; Rs 699