Speaking Volumes: A quartet of poets

(Published in the Business Standard, June 20, 2011; one of the last mainstream papers left in India where you can send in an 800-word column on poetry and not be told to go write about Chetan Bhagat.)




No one could claim that poetry is dead in India; the closest we can come is the lament of the (English language) publisher who says that poetry doesn’t sell. We still think in rhyme and stanza, from the advertising jingles on TV to the slogans painted by the Border Roads Organisation on twisting mountain paths to the ancient mantra on trucks: “Bure nazar waala, tera muh kala.” This is what Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, poet, critic, a living, walking library, calls “a listenership”.

The “listenership” for Kabir and Lal Ded has stayed constant over the centuries; the words of these mystics of the 15th and 13th centuries have been internalised to the point where their dohas and vakhs form part of our subconscious grammar. To have fresh and definitive translations of two of the great mystics, by two of India’s most linguistically acute poets, is a major literary event. Ranjit Hoskote’s translation, I, Lalla: The Poems of Lal Ded (Penguin Classics) came out within a month of the release of Arvind Krishna Mehrotra’s Songs of Kabir (NYRB/ Hachette India).

Both mystics left behind patchwork biographies; in their times, as in ours, chronicling the lives of saints and of poets came a distant second to chronicling the lives of rulers and warriors. But Mr Mehrotra and Mr Hoskote have a similar understanding of what is important, and what is unessential: “An authentic Kabir poem, in the thousands attributed to him, may never be found, nor does it matter,” Mr Mehrotra writes in his introduction. “If you catch the spirit, anyone can write an authentic Kabir poem. Innumerable anonymous poets have done so in the past and continue to do so even today, adding their voices to his.”

And Mr Hoskote, acknowledging the many gaps in the popular rendering of the life of Lalla, explains: “Lalla, to me, is not the person who composed these vakhs; rather, she is the person who emerges from these vakhs.”





These books stand testimony to the argument that only poets should translate poets. Mr Mehrotra, translating Kabir’s Chewing Slowly, begins with an epigraph from the late poet Arun Kolatkar. Chewing Slowly describes how the seeker finally finds the beloved, only after cutting the cord with family, in-laws and the town’s inhabitants. The epigraph Mr Mehrotra chooses is from Kolatkar’s translation of the 14th century Marathi poet Janabai: “god my darling/ do me a favour and kill my mother-in-law.” There they are, speaking to each other across the ages; two translators who are also poets, placing in conversation with each other two poets who are also mystics. Mr Mehrotra’s translations are superb, true to the ear, true to the line; soaring with Kabir’s own images and Mr Mehrotra’s occasional contemporarisations. “Kabir knows everything,” he writes, “including a Jamaican sect and the name of a London publishing house.”

If you pressed either poet, Mr Mehrotra or Mr Hoskote, they might not be able to tell you with exactitude when one starts a translation. Mr Mehrotra’s translations of Kabir may have begun, technically, just a few years ago; but as he references Cavafy and Kolatkar and Rasta poets, what comes through in these precise, richly shaped lines is a lifetime’s understanding of poetry. Mr Hoskote writes, “I began this translation of Lal Ded’s poems in February 1991, a month short of twenty-two; I am nearly forty-two as I come to the end of the process.”

Living with Lalla’s words for years and decades shaped him; he had begun to translate her vakhs because she provided a connection to his own Kashmiri past, a lost heritage. But as he continued, he moved slowly to an engagement with faith, his life as a poet following the arc of the poet he was trying to translate and understand: the very different experience of “a religious seeker, a social rebel, a woman”. “The translator is always humbled, broken and remade in the act of translation.”

There is no room to write about the meaning of their lives and work, the four poets who are inexorably twinned twice over in these two books. And perhaps this column is not the right place in which to explore the kind of faith – so sharply opposed to the unassailable, mean-spirited dogma that passes often as faith these days – that Kabir and Lalla had to offer. That exploration should be done by one better versed in religious studies and in poetry than this columnist.

But these two mystics shared a similar path, a similar way of thinking. This verse, written by Lalla, could have been spoken by Kabir: “First the washerman pounded me on his washing stone,/ scrubbed me with clay and soap./ Then the tailor measured me, piece by piece/ with his scissors. Only then could I, Lalla, find the road to heaven.”

To read these translations is to rediscover what you already know and love, but also to have the well-known, cherished dohas and vakhs of Kabir and Lalla made new. Both Mr Hoskote and Mr Mehrotra ask an uncomfortable but thought-provoking question: what kind of reception would a Kabir or a Lalla be given today?

Would they be ignored, would they be invited to the literary festivals of the hour, would their words invite bans for offending religious sentiments, or would they, perhaps, still have an audience? I don’t have answers, but it’s an interesting questi

Book review: River of Smoke, by Amitav Ghosh

(Published in the Business Standard, June 17, 2011.)


River of Smoke
Amitav Ghosh
Viking/ Penguin India
533 pages, Rs 699

And yet, it is also so familiar: Everywhere you look there are khidmatgars, daftardars, khansamas, chuprassies, peons, durwans, khazanadars, khalasis and lascars.”
Letter to Paulette from Robin Chinnery.

In 1917, the Bengali writer Sharat Chandra released the first part of an epic, overstuffed and energetic novel that would become a classic of its times. Srikanta would keep its readers engaged – and waiting – till 1933, when the last instalment was published. Amitav Ghosh is kinder to his readers; it’s taken just three-and-a-half years for the second volume in the Ibis trilogy.

For those who were drawn in by the zest and exuberance of the first volume, Sea of Poppies, and were familiar with Srikanta, there may have been echoes of Sharat Chandra’s classic novel. Like Sharat Chandra, Mr Ghosh possesses an inexhaustible curiosity about voyages, migration and travellers; like Sharat Chandra, he is fascinated by the largely overlooked story of the East’s discovery of the East. In Srikanta, there’s a telling passage where the narrator boards ship for Rangoon, literally propelled into the unknown by his co-passengers: “The mighty stream of Punjabis, Bengalis, Madrasis, Gujaratis, Marathas, Afghans, Chinese, Marwaris and Biharis gushed into the cavern with the force and turbulence of a mountain cataract.”

In Sea of Poppies, Mr Ghosh served notice as we set sail on the Ibis along with him that he was intent on using the stereotypes of the past to draw an entirely new fictional landscape. The opium den so beloved of a certain generation of Western travel writers transformed into the opium factory seen from the point of view of the workers; the sati that shows up as an exotic, barbaric ritual worthy of horrified fascination in Jules Verne’s Around The World In Sixty Days is reimagined from the point of view of Deeti, a young woman who narrowly escapes her intended pyre. As Mr Ghosh marshaled his massive cast of characters and reimagined the Opium Wars (the view from the Orient, if you like), he often used his historian’s eye for detail to explode or explore what lay behind the clichés.

River of Smoke is as exuberant and as crammed with characters, set-pieces, wordplay, historical footnotes, history lessons, colourful dialogue and epistolary pyrotechnics as its predecessor. The Ibis, with its crew of girmitiyas destined for lives of indentured labour, has been caught in a cyclone, and in the first few chapters, Mr Ghosh pours something of that ferocious energy into a breathless updating of plotlines as the action shifts from the Indian Ocean to Canton’s 19th century waterways. Paulette, the orphaned amateur botanist who can pass for Bengali, stays largely offstage, as does Deeti, whose future serenity in the face of considerable odds is, however, hinted at.

Much of the story is carried by Bahram, the Parsi opium trader from Bombay, who provides the necessary view into the politics of the opium trade. Another perspective is offered by Robin Chinnery’s letters to Paulette, but while the letters have the verve and accuracy you might expect from an author who has attended closely to the Chinese Repository and the Canton Register, they feel like a clever and very artificial plot device — an easy way of giving the reader the potted history of Canton and the Opium Wars. It’s a clunky way to take you to Fanqui-town.

But there’s no need to get into a spudder. The glee with which Mr Ghosh ransacks Hobson-Jobson, lascar’s dictionaries, pidgins, creoles, patois and odd dialects might have the unwary reader’s head going gidigidi, but if you no-savvy a particular line, the next paragraph will probably have a sufficient cumshaw to make your labours worthwhile. At its worst, when several dictionaries collide on the same page, the linguistic foreplay brings to mind Edward Lear’s immortal poem, The Cummerbund: “She sate upon her Dobie, – / She heard the Nimmak hum, – / When all at once a cry arose, – / 'The Cummerbund is come!” At its best, this gleeful reinvention of the English language is too muchi good inside.

If River of Smoke doesn’t make the same impact as Sea of Poppies, that’s inevitable — the second volume of most trilogies is where you enter the broad, placid mid-river stretch, and where there’s more explication than action. Some readers will miss the characters they’d grown attached to in Sea of Poppies, and despite a judicious rash of hangings, gunboat raids and the fear over the fate of Fanqui-town as the Chinese clash with the Europeans, River of Smoke is sometimes becalmed, sometimes sagging under its own weight.

What it does offer is a deepening, alternate view of history — specifically the Opium War, but in a broader sense, of the history of the East. The multiple characters and his love for the rapid digression give Mr Ghosh a way of representing the 19th century trade wars via a rainbow coalition — this is history seen, as in almost all of his novels, from the perspective of the ordinary, overlooked bystander.

The motley crew whose competing stories are pulled together in River of Smoke are offering more than just entertainment. Over a century ago, G A Henty wrote swashbuckling stories of adventure and skullduggery where the natives were always the villains, the white men always the heroes. Mr Ghosh’s crammed-to-the-gills cabinet of wonders presents the view from the other side. When this also includes plausibly presented origin stories for the game of cricket or for chai-garam and other clever bits of bandobast, it makes for a splendid tamasha.

Speaking Volumes: Some notes on Sir Vidia's spleen

(Published in the Business Standard, June 7, 2011)

1. The fact that I possess a womb should disqualify me from commenting on V S Naipaul’s latest broadside. A writer who believes that no woman is his equal as a writer, that women suffer from a “sentimentality, a narrow vision of the world” and that women writers are “quite different” is not going to take the criticism of women readers seriously.

2. Which isn’t going to stop me or other owners of wombs anyway.

3. Not that Mr Naipaul’s criticisms should shock anyone, after all these years. A list of Sir Vidia’s targets over the decades includes Africans, Muslim invaders in India, infies (inferior people) of all colours and races, Indian women writers, his wives, his lovers, his friends, his editors, including the nonagenarian Diana Athill, the issuers of worthless degrees (Oxbridge), foolish people, people who do not serve him his vegetables in separate dishes, people who have not read his writings, people who have read but not understood his writings, people who have read and understood his writings but have also read writers he disapproves of, which is most writers, regardless of whether they own wombs or not.

4. So the best way to approach this fracas is to repeat the apocryphal line Ved Mehta is supposed to have said after Mr Naipaul had a spat with the German ambassador’s wife in Neemrana: “You’ll never guess what that terrible old man has gone and done now.” The spat, now forgotten, was over Mr Naipaul’s dismissal of a certain woman intellectual, to which the German ambassador’s wife is supposed to have said: “We all know what your views on women are, Sir Vidia, we don’t have to take them seriously,” which put the Nobel laureate in a towering rage.

5. There’s a very old pattern at work here; the wide, and widening, gap between Mr Naipaul the public figure and Naipaul the writer. The bulk of the pronouncements made by Mr Naipaul the public figure are rubbish — cantankerous, peevish statements meant to provoke anger and irritation. Some commentators suggested that this was a version of the West Indian tradition of picong — the swift trading of insults and banter as a kind of conversational game — but the truth is that it’s just spleen. The few interviews given by Mr Naipaul the writer, most notably his Paris Review interview, in 1998, are illuminated with insight and wisdom, despite all the bigotry and the petulance of the public man.

6. Read this sentence by Mr Naipaul: “I think the world is what you enter when you think – when you become educated, when you question – because you can be in the big world and be utterly provincial.” And then this sentence by Jane Austen, whom he slammed for her “sentimental ambitions”: “The literary world is inspiring, but it is not all there is. I let my daily life be my raw material, even if paintings, fiction and sonatas are the fire in my forge.” They led such different lives; Mr Naipaul wrested for himself the freedom to travel, to learn and to explore. Ms Austen, trammelled by the twin lack of independence and income, wrote her novels from the observation of the limited world around here, but she shares with Mr Naipaul several things: the sense of humour, the detached accuracy and the lack of sentimentality. They had a similar, excoriating wit, though Ms Austen’s was caustic, Mr Naipaul’s splenetic.

7. There is little need to address Mr Naipaul’s central grouse, with its implication that women cannot write, or that women writers are by definition sentimental. It displays his lack of reading — could anyone who had read Hilary Mantel, Lionel Shriver, Marilyne Robinson, Margaret Atwood, Mary Shelley, Susan Sontag and company actually believe this? You could, of course, if you were a fossil, a relic from another age.

8. I could go back to Mr Naipaul’s work — not the disappointing late novels that show the waning vigour and drooping powers of a played-out novelist, or the feeble African travelogue, but the humour and sharp acuity that marked books like A House for Mr Biswas, or The Mimic Men, or A Bend in the River. Books from the time when Mr Naipaul’s ability to see things clearly had not been overtaken by his arrogance and his choler. But instead, I find myself reaching for Pride and Prejudice. The novel’s comedy is restorative, and nothing could be more appropriate to the present situation than the title.

Speaking Volumes: Tahmima Anam's The Good Muslim

(Published in the Business Standard, May 31, 2011)

Writing in the shadow of the attacks on the Twin Towers in 2001, Salman Rushdie commented: “The fundamentalist seeks to bring down a great deal more than buildings. Such people are against, to offer just a brief list, freedom of speech, a multi-party political system, universal adult suffrage, accountable government, Jews, homosexuals, women’s rights, pluralism, secularism, short skirts, dancing, beardlessness, evolution theory, sex.”

There’s a reason why most literary attempts to enter into the mind of the fundamentalist fail. Writers live by their ability to imagine their way into the lives, minds and souls of strangers; to be a writer is to admit at least a curiosity about ways of thinking different from your own. It is hard to imagine what the closed mind of a fundamentalist might be like, and for most writers, this is truly alien territory. Most literary portraits of the true believer are either risible – John Updike’s cartoon terrorist – or not entirely convincing, as with Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist, where so much of the book is spent trying to persuade us that the narrator’s shift into fundamentalist thinking is plausible.

This may be Tahmima Anam’s great achievement; to create a fundamentalist who is entirely plausible because she makes him so empathetic. Her second novel, The Good Muslim, is set in Bangladesh — a “broken wishbone of a country”, which in 13 years has seen war, cannibalised its ancient forests and murdered two presidents. “A fast-acting country: quick to anger, quick to self-destruct.”The Good Muslim is a sequel to The Golden Age, Ms Anam’s first novel, which followed the life of the widowed Rehana Haque, in the wake of the 1971 war. The protagonists are Rehana’s children, Maya and Sohail, who both carry deep scars from 1971.

Maya, a doctor, has worked with the “birangonas”, the women who were dubbed heroines and left to survive the abuse, violence and rape of the war; Sohail has his own memories of his revolutionary days and his time in the army. His transformation into the good Muslim of the title, a preacher whose growing faith in religion elbows out all else – his family, his old friends, his son – is gradual and inexorable. He had been, his sister thinks at one point, the opposite of a religious man. “He had laughed and joked about it, and he had been angry at a religion that could be so easily turned to cruelty.”

Ms Anam’s deft retelling of history, as she moves between the 1970s and the 1980s, is based on a threefold understanding: she draws on her own memories as a child born after the ’71 War whose family was unmistakably marked by it, by her skills as a researcher and the years she spent listening to the testimony of survivors, and she draws on her writer’s ability to slip inside the skin of her characters. She explains just as much of Bangladesh’s history as required, producing almost a journalistic account of a country’s slow slipping into religious fundamentalism through Maya and Sohail’s story.

For Maya, watching her brother pick up the mantle of a respected preacher who will use his powers as a man and a religious leader in disastrous ways, the shift in Sohail leaves her helpless. “The future was suddenly clear: he was going somewhere, somewhere remote and out of reach, somewhere that had nothing to do with her, and that even if he didn’t disappear altogether, she would, from now on, be left behind.” The Good Muslim is one of the most engaging and disquieting novels to come out of Bangladesh in years, in either English or Bengali.

TAILPIECE
Delhi’s close-knit publishing world has gone through a version of a Cabinet reshuffle. Former Penguin Canada CEO David Davidar announced his plans to start a new publishing house, Aleph, in collaboration with Rupa & Co, amid speculation that two – and possibly three – of Penguin India’s key players had quit to join him. Random House’s flamboyant editor, Chiki Sarkar, takes over the chief editor’s mantle from the very capable Ravi Singh at Penguin India; Mr Singh quit a month after Mr Davidar’s return to India.

Mr Davidar, once seen as a front runner for the top job at Penguin USA, quit as CEO, Penguin Canada after his colleague Lisa Rundle filed a sexual harassment suit against him. Mr Davidar maintained the relationship was consensual. In India, everyone’s watching to see if Aleph will allow him to replicate the kind of success he had when he set up Penguin India in 1987.

It’s a crowded field today. With at least seven major players in the English language trade publishing scene in Delhi, the question is whether the market is big enough to support all of them. The numbers, in terms of readership, distribution and market share, suggest that at least two publishing houses will go under in the next five years.

The bigger question for readers is whether any of them, from Aleph to HarperCollins, Hachette, Penguin, Rupa or Westland, has developed a distinct identity. With houses sharing authors, and with editors switching frequently from one house to another, it’s only the independent publishing houses, not the mainstream players, who have much in the way of individuality any more. The challenge for Mr Davidar, Ms Sarkar and the rest won’t be profitability — it will really lie in whether they can create distinctive brands for their respective publishing houses.

Speaking Volumes: Badal Sircar--the conscience keeper

(Published in the Business Standard, May 17, 2011)

What can I write? I am no writer of essays. I am a theatre man. I wrote some plays because I am a man of the theatre, not because I am a writer.” Badal Sircar, letter to The Drama Review, November 1981.

There were few headlines; the death of Badal Sircar this Friday at the age of 86 in Calcutta, as it was called, was tucked away, eclipsed by the toppling of the Left Front. It had been years since homage had been truly paid to the playwright, but it is almost certain that he would not have cared. For Sircar, immersed in writing and reading (one of the last books he was reported to be re-reading was Sukumar Ray’s fantastic gem, Abol Tabol) right up to the end of his days, tributes were unnecessary.

I did wonder, though, whether the office-goers of Calcutta knew what they had lost. So many of them must have remembered the late 1960s and the 1970s, when Badal Sircar, unable to afford the fees of a proper proscenium theatre, began to hold performances in the open air — at Nandan, in the maidans, often timing the shows for the lunch hour, making a ritual of the Saturday performances.

Sircar has often been called the most middle class of playwrights, and he was that; but he was so much more than that. He was a town planner, who became an actor, influenced by his memories of the London stage, in the 1950s. Perhaps that’s where his empathy for the ordinary Calcuttan came from; he wrote of Satabdi, his theatre troupe: “None of the Satabdi members are paid anything. They work in banks, schools, offices, factories: they assemble in evenings exhausted by loveless work and sardine-packed public transport.” They were, in effect, just the same as the audience he attracted when he came up with the idea of the Third Theatre, which eschewed the props and formal paraphernalia of the stage and pulled the audience in as participant.

Sircar’s plays had a way of surviving and moving far beyond the confines of Bengal — college theatre troupes across India have had Evam Indrajit and Michchil in their repertoire for decades, but his reach was greater than that. His plays travelled often to villages, the script sometimes transforming to meet the needs of that set of local players; every street theatre group in India paid homage to either the plays themselves or to Sircar’s stagecraft.

In so many ways, he is still a playwright of our times — especially these times, when the middle class is discovering its conscience at Jantar Mantar, or attempting to make sense of the Maoist insurgency. Evam Indrajit, written in 1963 and first performed in 1965, introduced a writer, a cast of “normal” characters, Amal, Bimal and Kamal, whose lives were sedate, ordinary and not appropriate fodder for theatre — and Indrajit. In an exchange between Indrajit and the writer, Indrajit asks: “Then how shall we live?”

The Writer replies: Walk! Be on the road! For us there is only the road. We shall walk. I now have nothing to write about — still I have to write. You have nothing to say — still you have to talk. For us there is only the road — so walk on.”

This exchange, which could have come from Brecht or Beckett, was pure Sircar, written in a clipped, colloquial Bangla few playwrights had mastered before him. His plays, from Michchil to Baki Itihas and Pagla Ghoda were timely and disquieting; the attempt was to stir up the dormant middle-class conscience, and in the maidan crowds of Calcutta, he had the audience he needed.

Bashi Khabar took Sircar’s growing obsession with the Santhal revolt — the unsung war of the tribals against the state — and made it as deathless as Mahasweta Debi’s Birsa Munda would; Michchil, written in 1972 against the background of Naxalism about the state-sponsored disappearance of young men finds just as many echoes today. About Bashi Khabar, which featured a murdered man who wandered silently among the chorus and among the audience, his existence denied by another young male protagonist, Sircar wrote: “Each of us was that young man, trying our best to deny the existence of the ‘killed man’ in our midst and yet not wholly succeeding.”

But of all of Sircar’s plays, the much-performed, the almost-forgotten, the adaptations he did so skillfully from Brecht, the original plays that passed into the alphabet of the country’s theatre performers, what stays with me most are the figures of Kena and Becha (Bought and Sold), the two thieves who appear in Hattamala. This was one of Badal Sircar’s most light-hearted, if most political, plays, and children have been amused for decades by this story of two thieves set down in a land where money and possessions have no meaning.

In Sircar’s world, though, Kena and Becha loomed large; if we didn’t learn how to live, how to speak or write the things that mattered, we would give over our lives to thieves who only understood a world where everything could be bought and sold. Every one of his plays, and his performances, militated for a better world than this.

If we discussed men the same way that we talk about women…

(Thousands of women come out on the streets to protest via SlutWalks, after a Toronto constable suggests that women could protect themselves better by not dressing like sluts.)


“Of course he’s a rapist, did you see the trousers he was wearing? And that vest? Why would a man wear that kind of clothing if he wasn’t out cruising for a victim?”

“The give away is the brand of jeans. If you see a bunch of guys walking down the road wearing Levis or Diesels, it’s all right, they’re not going to rape you. Other brands—well, I’d be careful. Just saying. You never know what a man wearing another kind of brand is thinking.”

“We always suspected he was a rapist. He’d leave the house every day wearing pajama-kurta—it’s obvious now that he didn’t want to waste time undoing buttons and zips.”

“According to police experts, women should be careful around men in tight jeans. Men in tight jeans are showcasing their sexuality and drawing attention to the power of their libido. Women should also be careful around men in loose jeans. Men in loose jeans have something to conceal, and may either be covering up an excess of sexuality or compensating for feelings of inadequacy. Many experts caution that men who wear pajama-kurta, shalwar-kameez, dhotis or lungis are subliminally indicating intent to rape, because these clothes are less restricting than Western wear.
Men in business suits, say some studies, are considered high risk because they are already accustomed to wielding power and carrying out certain forms of corporate violence. And women should stay far away from men in shorts, boxers and swimming trunks, who are sending out signals that rape would be expedient and easy for them. Police experts on rape suggest that in order to avoid becoming rapists, men should stay at home, not venture out after dark and dress in several layers of clothes—four pairs of jeans, six pairs of shorts—to indicate their willingness to support women’s rights and their intent never to rape.”

But these are things we never do. We never look at male behaviour; it's always the women in the spotlight. We never ask questions about what makes men think they have the right to rape, or to harass; we never look at what a man's wearing when he whistles at, or grabs, or attacks, or assaults, a woman; we never demand that men change their behaviour, their attitudes, their habits; we never shame rapists the way we shame the raped.

Speaking Volumes: The Bin Laden bookshelf

(Published in the Business Standard, May 2011)

“We pray that you do not take these statements out of turn or consider them to step outside the bounds of etiquette.” In 1994, the words of the late Osama bin Laden were measured, almost diffident, as he began to articulate his sense that the Muslim world was under siege.

Just two years later, in 1996, Osama bin Laden had found his voice, as Steve Coll records in Ghost Wars. In August, he issued his declaration of jihad on America, and accompanied this with a poem to the US Secretary of Defense, William Perry: “O William, tomorrow you will be informed/ As to which young man will face your swaggering brother/ A youngster enters the midst of battle smiling, and/ Retreats with his spearhead stained with blood.”

On Monday, news spread of the assassination of bin Laden in the quiet Pakistani town of Abbottabad. Looking back at the two decades the world’s most wanted man shaped and defined, is it possible now to understand the forces that created and shaped him? The profusion of books on bin Laden included several cut-and-paste biographies, collections of quotes and speeches and other detritus. There were interesting asides—among the books Osama was said to have enjoyed were John Perkins’ Confessions of an Economic Hit Man and Jimmy Carter’s Palestine: Peace not Apartheid, for instance. But these are the books about bin Laden, and the perspectives, that have lasted.

Steve Coll, The Ghost Wars (2004): Ahmed Rashid, no mean expert himself, said of Coll’s magnum opus: “No one else I know of has been able to bring such a broad perspective to bear on the rise of bin Laden; the CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events.” It was Coll’s insider knowledge, both of the workings of the US government and of the Af-Pak area, that made The Ghost Wars so good, as he explained the entwined connections between the CIA, Afghan warlords and Pakistani intelligence, and explored what made the region the perfect headquarters for bin Laden.

Lawrence Wright, The Looming Tower (2006): Wright began his quest to understand Al-Qaeda and bin Laden in 1948, with the journey made by Sayyid Qutb, the man who inspired Al-Qaeda, “Western in so many ways”. And yet, Qutb hated America, seeing Americans as “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money”. Wright tracks the radicalization of bin Laden and attempts to understand his interpretation and version of Islam—perhaps the most definitive book yet on the rise and philosophy of Al-Qaeda.

Ahmed Rashid: Taliban, Descent Into Chaos and Jihad: In November 2010, Rashid wrote a prescient article on the worsening relationship between the US and Pakistan, noting in parantheses that the Pakistan Army had not gone after Al Qaeda in the country since 2006. And in 2006, Rashid had guessed that bin Laden was “probably just a few hours drive away” from Islamabad.

Rashid emerged as an early expert on the Taliban, and then Al-Qaeda as well as the US policy on Afghanistan and Pakistan very early on, drawing from his own experience as a (disillusioned) revolutionary who attempted a failed rebellion against Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan. He has often been criticized by the likes of Tariq Ali for his hawkish stance—Tariq is a strong critic of the US military presence in Afghanistan, and his politics differ sharply from Rashid’s perspective. (It should be noted that Rashid slams the incompetence, incoherence and indifference towards Af-Pak that the US and Europe have demonstrated, in Descent Into Chaos.)

But it is impossible to understand the shifts in contemporary Islam and the global corporate politics that contributed to the rise of the Taliban, or that helped someone like bin Laden spin hatred into terrorism, without reading Rashid. If anyone could have predicted the plot twists in the bin Laden saga, it would have been Rashid; and if anyone understood how the son of a Saudi billionaire came to wage a religious war against the US, it would be Rashid, again.

Michael Scheuer, Osama bin Laden (2011): Scheuer is a former senior CIA operative who followed Osama bin Laden’s life and career for just over two decades, making this one of the most interesting and definitive of the bin Laden biographies. Setting aside Scheuer’s biases, what comes into play is simply the unusual relationship, so to speak, between the spook and his assigned object of obsession.

He makes the case for the late bin Laden being the product of a sophisticated background, an education buttressed by immersion in the Wahhabi culture, which Scheuer marks as aggressive, misogynistic and intolerant in the Saudi Arabia of Osama’s youth.

In his version, Osama bin Laden emerges less as the bogeyman of Western imagination and more as the sophisticated, often urbane and yet unpredictable adversary. This is a surprisingly intimate, if not always convincing, portrait; perhaps no one gets to know a terrorist better than a man whose objective is to bring about his destruction.