Sumantra Bose is Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the LSE with a specialty in ethnic and national conflicts. Here he discusses the book that inspired his early interest in politics and also about the contemporary works of fiction and non-fiction he most admires for capturing humanity amidst war

Bose, Sumantra

English

LSE Research Online

blogs.lse.ac.ukhttp://blogs.lse.ac.uk/lsereviewofbooks/2012/08/05/the-books-that-inspired-sumantra-bose/Amherst College Chapel and Dormitories(Courtesy of  Amherst College Archive,Flickr.com)The books that inspired Sumantra Bose:“Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth touched achord with both my national and personalbackground”  Aug  5  2012 Sumantra Bose is Professor of International and Comparative Politics at the LSEwith a specialty in ethnic and national conflicts. Here he discusses the book thatinspired his early interest in politics and also about the contemporary works of fictionand non-fiction he most admires for capturing humanity amidst war.It  was Autumn 1988 and I had just  arrived in a pret ty university town in New England,90 miles west of  Boston. I had come from my home cityCalcutta (Kolkata) in India, where for twelve years Iat tended a Jesuit  school. I enrolled as a f reshman atAmherst  College. Thousand-page reading assignmentswere frequent, and students were expected topart icipate act ively in seminars. I felt  like a noviceswimmer thrown of f  the deep end of  a pool. But soonthe excitement of  learning – not just  learning newthings but  more important, a new way of  learning –gripped me totally.I had thought of  majoring in economics. But the mostinterest ing course I took that f irst  semester –Introduct ion to Polit ical Science (Poli Sci 11) – proved to be the beginning of  a dif ferent path,which also later led me to reject  as too dry and boring other post-graduat ion possibilit ies such aslaw school or investment banking.My Poli Sci 11 seminar teacher was an eminent ‘Sovietologist ,’ William Taubman. Bill was a f ineteacher and scholar (his books include a monumental biography of  Nikita Khrushchev which won aPulitzer Prize in 2004). A few weeks into the semester we read Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of theEarth, f irst  published in French in 1961 just  before Fanon’s death f rom cancer aged thirty-six. Iknew about this book – which f if ty years later remains the classic work on colonialism and ant i-colonialism – but had not read it  carefully unt il then. Combining raw power and deep ref lect ion, apolit ical t ract  derived from Fanon’s personal experiences as a black cit izen of  France and hisprofessional life as a psychiatrist  in Algeria during its war of  liberat ion, the book touched a chordwith both my nat ional and personal background (my father’s family, including my father, wereprominent in India’s struggle for f reedom).I wrote an excited essay on the book. Bill gave it  a B+. He told methat he understood my perspect ive ent irely and found the essaywell-writ ten, but felt  that  I should crit ically interrogate even thosewriters – and perhaps especially those – I found powerful andpersuasive. He also cited his own view, derived from his career as ascholar of  the Soviet  Union (Russia in part icular) that  ideologisedand rousing movements for collect ive emancipat ion of ten lead totyrannical outcomes. It  was sound advice.In recent years I have been impressed by two books that representauthent ic and compelling accounts of  places and peoples I haveworked on: Kashmir and the former Yugoslavia. One is BasharatPeer’s Curfewed Night: A Frontline Memoir of Life, Love and War inKashmir. Peer was born in January 1977 in a village in the KashmirValley–known as jannat (paradise) for its beauty – where he spenthis childhood and early adolescence. The idyll collapsed in January 1990 as insurgency andcounter-insurgency engulfed the Valley (that ‘war’ has since killed about 50,000 people). Peer’sbook consists in part  of  autobiographical reminiscence of  Kashmir in the 1980s and early 1990s.He stayed in his village through 1992, af ter which he was sent to complete school in northern India,part ly because his family feared he would join the insurgency. After a decade away, Peer returnedto the Valley as an adult  to record the consequences of  protracted armed conf lict  for hishomeland and its people. This narrat ive–centered on the survivors of  massacre, rape and tortureand told in a (decept ively) measured style–comprises the second part  of  his book.The other book is Made in Yugoslavia: A Novel, writ ten by Vladimir Jokanovic and published byPicador in 2000, which I bought years ago in a Sarajevo bookshop. I read it  very recent ly, though,as a distract ion (I thought) f rom intensive writ ing I have been doing of  late on a book of  my own. Itdid provide distract ion, of  a rivet ing kind.Jokanovic was born in 1971 in Osijek, a sizable town in eastern Croat ia where he lived unt il 1991.The novel is set  in Osijek and its region through the summer and autumn of 1991, when civil warengulfed that region and several other parts of  Croat ia. It  tells the story of  a society upended anddestroyed by civil war f rom the perspect ive of  young people in their twent ies, part icularly the maincharacter, a happy-go-lucky young man called Luka. It  brought back memories of  t ime I spent in thewar zones of  Croat ia between 1993 and 1995. Full of  black humor, Made in Yugoslavia recountsthe brutal t ragedy of  f riends, neighbors and lovers who were driven by the force of  events to turnon each other. The ending–when Luka, by now a paramilitary f ighter, discovers the body of  hisformer girlf riend, one of  several of  the ‘enemy’ he and his unit  have killed in an intense batt le–isespecially ef fect ive.I could relate to Curfewed Night and Made in Yugoslavia because Ihave int imate knowledge of  these societ ies. But I have been astouched by a novel set  in a country where I have never set  foot :Libya. This is the young (born 1970) Libyan writer Hisham Matar’s Inthe Country of Men. It  is set  in Tripoli in 1979, short ly af ter MuammarGaddaf i consolidated his absolute power, and is told f rom theperspect ive of  Suleiman, a boy aged nine (Matar spent most of  hischildhood in Tripoli, his early adolescence in Cairo, and has lived inLondon since then). It  tells a grim story of  people condemned to liveunder inst itut ionalized terror. Like Made in Yugoslavia and CurfewedNight, In the Country of Men is extraordinarily evocat ive of  its set t ingand except ionally skilled in bringing out the beauty and complexity ofhuman relat ionships. The book revolves around the relat ionshipbetween Suleiman and his t roubled but loving mother, who had him,her only child, when she was f if teen.Matar has produced another brilliant  novel: Anatomy of a Disappearance. The theme is surelyderived from his own life-story–Matar’s father, a former Libyan diplomat, was kidnapped while inexile in Cairo in 1990, taken to Libya, and has never been seen again. There is evidence that hewas incarcerated in Tripoli’s infamous Abu Salim prison and that he survived the mass killing ofsome 1300 prisoners there by Gaddaf i’s regime in 1996. The publicat ion of  Anatomy of aDisappearance coincided with the beginning of  the Libyan uprising of  2011.What might be common to Peer, Jokanovic and Matar? Well, they all write on intensely polit icalthemes, and polit ics is my passion. They are all uncompromising in the philosophy and the style oftheir writ ing (as Frantz Fanon was). There may be a generat ional af f inity–Matar and Jokanovic areof my generat ion, and Peer is younger but not by much.But ult imately, what inspires me about these writers is that  they tell stories of  humanity amidunspeakable brutality — the resilience of  a human spirit  tortured and injured but st ill alive. That iswhat makes these books about part icular places universal in interest  and appeal. I can only hopethat my own work as a polit ical scient ist  is not too dull in comparison.————————————————————————————–Sumantra Bose is Professor of  Internat ional and Comparat ive Polit ics at  the LSE. He was bornand grew up in Calcutta (Kolkata) in India. He graduated summa cum laude f rom Amherst  College in1992, where he was elected to the nat ional academic honor society Phi Beta Kappa. He thenreceived a PhD in polit ical science from Columbia University in New York in 1998, where hespecialized in comparat ive polit ics with secondary concentrat ions in polit ical theory and researchmethodology. He joined the LSE in October 1999, where he has successively been The RalfDahrendorf  Fellow (1999-2001), Lecturer (2001-2003), Reader (2003-2006), and Professor (2006-).Bose’s books include Bosnia after Dayton: Nationalist Partition and InternationalIntervention (Oxford University Press, 2002), Kashmir: Roots of Conflict, Paths to Peace (HarvardUniversity Press, 2003), and Contested Lands: Israel-Palestine, Kashmir, Bosnia, Cyprus, and SriLanka (Harvard University Press, 2007). His next book, Transforming India: The World’s LargestDemocracy in the Early 21st Century, will be published by Harvard University Press in 2013.Related posts:1. The books that inspired Melanie Simms: “The contribut ions of  Sidney and Beatrice Webb associal scient ists cannot be under-est imated”. (5.8)2. The books that inspired Lewis Baston: “In David But ler’s Brit ish General Elect ion series, onecan see the moments where the t ide of  history turned” (5.7)3. The books that inspired Elinor Ostrom: “Lasswell and Kaplan’s Power and Society broadenedmy perspect ive on individual choice and behaviour in a way that was very instrumental”. (5.7)4. The books that inspired Ron Johnston: “I had no intent ion of  becoming an ‘electoralgeographer’, but  David But ler and Donald Stokes’ ‘Polit ical Change in Britain’ grabbed myattent ion” (5.6)5. The books that inspired Simon Grif f iths: “In The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell wants toturn his reader’s head, to refocus their at tent ion on aspects of  the world that they’dpreviously neglected” (5.5)This entry was posted in Academic Inspirat ion, Polit ical scient ists and tagged ethnic conf lict , f rantzfanon, kashmir, Yugoslavia. Bookmark the permalink. Edit

Book review: The books that inspired Sumantra Bose:“Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth touched achord with both my national and personalbackground”

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