The Cooking of Books Review: Ramachandra Guha’s striking memoir of a long-distance relationship between a writer and his editor

Author Ramachandra Guha (left), his long-time editor Rukun Advani, and the story of the writer-editor relationship in Guha's new memoir 'The Cooking of Books'.

One wouldn’t be off the mark if one had thought that the art of letter writing was dead, it remains relegated to an old shoebox. However, there’s some comfort to be had: Ramachandra Guha has written a whole book as a tribute to it. A well-known television personality, newspaper columnist, essayist and, as historian and biographer, a prolific non-fiction author (The Unquiet Woods, A Corner of a Foreign Field, This Fissured Land, Makers of Modern India, India After Gandhi) Guha’s latest work is a memoir. Titled The Cooking of Books, it chronicles the four decades-long relationship between the writer and Rukun Advani, his first editor.

Says Guha in the Preface, ‘I am a creature of habit, from the way I structure my day’s work to the manner in which I organise my year’s travel.’ The COVID-19 pandemic, which left him ‘marooned in South India,’ was the reason why he turned to the vast cache of letters in his personal archive. These letters form the core of a unique narrative. Unique because an uninterrupted long-term association between a writer and his editor is uncommon; secondly, the relationship is conducted primarily through post and, later, through emails.

‘Nehruvian Indians’

As Guha takes pains to explain in the early chapters, he and Advani were contemporaries at Delhi University’s St Stephen’s College in the early 1970s, though Advani was the senior by a couple of years. ‘He was the first student in years to get a first class in English,’ ‘phenomenally well read,’ with a cultivated taste in music; he was also ‘famously antisocial.’ Guha describes himself as ‘boisterous and badly dressed,’ ‘highly gregarious’ and a ‘sports type’ who had joined the college mainly to play cricket while earning a degree in Economics on the side. These  differences  apart, Guha also emphasises the commonality of being ‘Nehruvian Indians’ who ‘were unreconstructed modernists, placing great faith in the powers of science and technology to transform India and make it ‘a developed nation’. We did not disparage religion or ritual but rarely practiced it ourselves.’ The dissimilarities, however, meant that despite having friends in common, the two never actually met in their college years.

On the same page

That meeting came years later, through pure chance, when Advani, after a PhD from Cambridge, returned to India to work as an editor at the Indian division of the academic publisher, Oxford University Press. (OUP’s most well-known authors then were Jim Corbett, the ornithologist Dr Salim Ali and the anthropologist Verrier Elwin.) Meanwhile, Guha, inspired by the writings of Elwin, had been carrying out research for his PhD dissertation on the struggles of the peasants in Uttarakhand Himalayas. The discovery that their interests had finally begun to coincide, led to the beginning of a correspondence in the course of which Advani offered to publish Guha’s thesis.

While this book, The Unquiet Woods, was still under the publishing process, Guha pitched an idea for a second book, on Western Environmentalism. Seeing him as someone who was ‘full of ideas,’ Advani’s reply was encouraging if somewhat cautious. Before long Guha had come up with yet another idea for a series of monographs ‘on different aspects of environmental degradation and resource use and management, empirical studies that would also contribute to theoretical debates in human ecology.’ To which Advani responded, ‘We’d prefer not to plan grandly and end, as happens all too often, with whimpers.’

Candid Account

In a world where all our sentiments, jokes and judgments are up on the various social media platforms for mass consumption, a peek into good old-fashioned, one-to-one letter writing is a welcome thing. Guha uses the correspondence with Advani to weave a nuanced narrative that offers insights into the world of academic publishing: the commissioning process, the writing and rewriting of several drafts, the rigorous editing, the discussions over book titles and cover designs, and above all, the balancing of the personal and the professional in a long term author-editor relationship. As in any autobiographical writing, a spirit of self-scrutiny remains, visible in the author’s anxieties. Indeed, a hallmark of Guha’s writing is the self-deprecating frankness with which he shares the details of his development as a writer in the hands of his editor. ‘When it came to improving a piece of prose — any piece of prose — it was always Rukun I turned to first.’ That included ‘newspaper articles, petitions to politicians, personal letters’.

In response to the draft of a tribute to the historian EP Thompson whom Guha had known slightly, Advani wrote: ‘This is an enjoyable memoir but I’d have enjoyed it even more if you didn’t keep calling him ‘Edward.’ The use of his first name by you seems to flaunt your friendly relationship with him… Would [Eric ] Hobsbawm or  [Christopher] Hill, when writing about Thompson keep name-dropping him with regular ‘Edwards’? I doubt it. They’d probably call him Thompson, and I think that’s a sophisticated, discursive modesty which you should think of adopting.’

About the editing of another of his books, Guha notes, ‘As a self-described scholar, with a relatively recent PhD to boot, I had used my footnotes not only to indicate sources but to add some remarks of my own. After noting several examples of this practice, Rukun exploded in exasperation: Ram, you have an irritating academic tendency to put emotionally valuable insights into brackets or footnotes. WHY? A biography must be more novel than monograph.’

Though the memoir chronicles Guha’s personal journey as a writer, excerpts, such as the ones above, that touch upon different aspects of writing, make it a rich mine for budding writers. For others, it’s a retrospective into a vanished world, a pre-internet age in which old boy networks and personal recommendations played a part, but the rigour in academic publishing was aimed at a limited and discerning readership. A world, indeed, where books were celebrated more than their authors.