In the preface of his book The Cooking of Books, the story of his relationship with his reticent editor Rukun Advani, Ramachandra Guha writes that he presumes readers will interpret it in different ways.

 This could be as “a memoir of friendship, as an elegy to a lost word, as a partisan account of publishing in India, as a self-indulgent celebration of elite male privilege” or, as he sees it, “an author’s tribute to the remarkable...editor who made his books possible”.

It is tiresome when a writer uses the exact words a reviewer would choose because to me, The Cooking of Books is precisely what Guha lays down in his preface. Though bested by Guha, I will attempt to find poorer words to explain.

The Cooking of Books arrived in my house via my partner, who had bought a copy from Eureka Bookstore in Delhi. He bought it for his mother who, while publishing her own book, had a lively correspondence with Advani many decades ago. As a dyed-in-the-wool Kindle reader, I had little interest in its hardcover proportions, so it languished on a windowsill until I read an excerpt published in Scroll.

Reader, I was hooked.

The attraction was entirely self-indulgent. As an editor for 15-odd years, I was charmed by the idea of a book that seemed to be an ode to an editor. A quote by Norman Podhoretz correctly notes that editors combine both arrogance and selflessness, working behind the scenes to make copy shine while also convinced they’re always right. An editor is almost like an anaesthesiologist – crucial to the process while the star is always the surgeon.

And Guha explains this.

The Cooking of Books chronicles the 40-year friendship between Guha and Advani. They first meet at St Stephen’s College in Delhi where scholarly antisocial Advani is unmoved by gregarious sportsman Guha who is, in his own words, a “sports type” – a far cry from his present-day persona of historian and towering intellectual. 

Guha writes about their backgrounds, ambitions and the educational journeys they embark on. Advani briefly teaches at St Stephen’s before heading off to Cambridge for a PhD and then joining Oxford University Press in Delhi. Guha, “consumed by cricket”, seems more relatably clueless in what he wants to do. He sets off to study tribal workers in Odisha’s Koraput while pursuing a master’s degree, takes a ‘gap year’, and then commences a doctoral degree at IIM Calcutta.

Their paths cross at the wedding of a mutual acquaintance. They discuss the potential of OUP publishing Guha’s dissertation as part of a journal. And thus a correspondence begins. 

The book spans Advani’s internal battles at OUP, with fascinating insight into politics of management. It covers his departure and setting up of his own publishing house, and finally Guha’s own writing and publishing.

The story is partly told through copies of their letters and emails over the years, an epistolary narrative that is quaint and charming in times of WhatsApp chats and voice notes. The construction of the story around these letters is particularly engaging since Advani and Guha seem so much at odds in terms of their personalities. 

“We shared enough to get along,” Guha writes, “and we differed enough to get along even better.”

For instance, when Advani leaves OUP, it is a “release”. He moves to Ranikhet with his wife, novelist Anuradha Roy, where he can “publish authors without even meeting them”. “In between reading and correcting their scripts, he could walk his dogs in the woods and listen to his beloved Beethoven.”

Guha is more capricious, flitting from idea to idea, “bombarding” Advani with ambitious proposals for future books, often “wildly optimistic” in his timelines. It can’t be easy to be his editor and Advani minces no words in cutting him down to size. 

Advani writes of one proposal that he’s “unsure that you’re temperamentally cut out for that sort of venture” since Guha is “a restless fellow with an excessively fertile mind which causes you to go in all sorts of directions”. And if a venture didn’t seem worthwhile and Guha decided to chase something that seemed “more worthwhile”, it “would put your publisher in a slightly embarrassing position”.

Yet Guha is often despairing in the early days, writing to Advani that he is “increasingly coming round to the opinion that the only thing I can do well (as distinct from competently) is write about cricket”. This is particularly interesting for a reader who, with the gift of time, knows Guha will go on to write books like India After Gandhi and Gandhi Before India. 

It’s also fascinating to get insight on the great Rukun Advani as an editor. Guha writes that Rukun is “not just the editor of my books, but of every little scrap I wrote”, including but not contained to newspaper articles, petitions to politicians, and personal letters. Their emails include specific commentary and advice, including this gem from Advani that applies to so much academic writing today:

“Quieter, straighter, unbroken sentences are generally a lot more attractive. The need to sound authoritative is an academic ailment which should be replaced by the subtler desire to sound tentatively certain.”

Their differences extend to other spheres too. Guha’s tendencies towards centrism are well-known especially on reading of India After Gandhi, where he painstakingly balances warnings about Hindu extremism with worries about the “Red” influence in India. He seems to clash fervently and frequently with Advani on questions of politics. It’s particularly interesting to read since there’s a kerfuffle nowadays on whether or not politics should influence friendships.

In the chapter “Patriot and Sceptic”, there are no prizes for guessing who the patriot is in this relationship. Advani retains “a healthy scepticism of the claims of nation and nationality” while Guha hopes for the renewal and redemption of the “original idea of India, as embodied in the Constitution”.

During one exchange of letters, Advani describes Guha thusly: “Maybe this is the irony that lies at the core of the liberal heart – the ability to see the radical’s point of view and even to be able to persuade people of the validity of the radical point of view, and yet never to convert to radicalism despite that ability – all on account of a cussed meliorist belief that there surely must be ways of making authoritarianism less authoritarian.”

It’s an almost flawless piece of writing, reminiscent of the ideas contained in Phil Ochs’s Love Me, I’m A Liberal. It’s fun to imagine Guha’s indignation, and then to read the flurry of letters that follow.

Yet the best part of this book is their understated friendship. Their letters, like so many men who are part of old-boy networks, are filled with in-jokes and literary references, with a number of famous personalities getting walk-on parts.

Advani’s description of Shashi Tharoor, his batchmate at St Stephen’s, might be my favourite. At the time, Prime Minister Manmohan Singh had just asked Tharoor to resign as minister of external affairs after Tharoor’s alleged involvement in the Kochi IPL cricket franchise bid.

“I feel a bit sorry for him,” Advani writes. “So much ambition, and successful all the way till the failed attempt to become UN chief. And now the first big political victim of something as silly as a Tweet…But I fear something worse is going to befall us now: he will inflict his third-rate narcissistic journalism on us once again. We should plead with Nirmala Lakshman [editor of the Hindu Sunday Magazine, where Tharoor had a column before he joined politics] to run for her life before he starts badgering her.”

It’s this delicious lampooning that makes so much of The Cooking of Books work. It’s a luscious look at the privileged Indian world from the 1970s onward, covering literature, history, publishing, politics and academia. It’s funny and self-deprecating and yes – it is a love letter to editors, that peculiar group of people who take on thankless tasks with very little recognition.

And so I steal Guha’s own words because, over everything else, it’s absolutely a memoir of friendship.

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