The act of reading reminds us that other worlds exist besides our own—that we are not the centre of the universe.
Last week I read two remarkable books: Things in Nature Merely Grow by Yiyun Li and Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ. The first is a meditation on pain by a writer and mother trying to make sense of the suicides of her two gifted sons. The second is an ingenious metafiction presented as the rediscovered travel memoir of a young Japanese woman writer touring colonial Taiwan in the 1930s. Accompanied by a brilliant Taiwanese interpreter with whom she falls in love, the narrator imagines herself sophisticated, worldly and free of prejudice, as do most liberals. Yet the journey slowly reveals that her affection and generosity are entangled with the assumptions of imperial power. What begins as a travelogue becomes an exploration of language, desire and colonial blindness, showing how easily we mistake our image of ourselves for who we really are.
If the general level of our politicians is any indication, the last thing they read was their party newspaper praising them. The new Kerala chief minister, V D Satheesan, is an exception. In 2025 alone, Satheesan is on record saying he completed sixty books. His predecessor, Pinarayi Vijayan, also reads, but I suspect it is mostly his own speeches.
The relationship between books and politics has a long and distinguished history. During the long years of imprisonment by the British, Jawaharlal Nehru transformed confinement into a company of the great. From his prison cell he read history, philosophy, science and literature, producing works such as The Discovery of India and Glimpses of World History.
On Robben Island, books became a means of preserving freedom for Nelson Mandela in conditions designed to destroy it. Mandela drew strength from Shakespeare and from political and literary traditions that helped him imagine the impossible: a democratic South Africa while still behind bars.
B R Ambedkar represents a different kind of struggle. His unfreedom was the caste-reinforced prison of existence itself. He is a man whom both the conservative BJP and the liberal Congress vie to revere, but whose intellectual arrogance and rebellious nature neither party would tolerate if he were alive. Ambedkar used books like an ax to hack colonialism of the intellect.
What links Nehru, Mandela and Ambedkar is not simply that they read. It is that reading enlarged their political imagination to include the world of the deprived. The other as us. Books taught these leaders to connect individual experience to larger historical forces and to understand societies as complex organisms rather than collections of partisan loyalties.
A deliberate mistake Vijayan made in Kerala was to tribalise administrative politics. From within the Marxist bubble, all dissent was seen as reactionary. A genuine grievance was often treated as provocation. Vijayan could not see from another's point of view.
This is where Satheesan belongs to a valuable, if increasingly neglected, tradition. His reading ranges from The Nutmeg’s Curse to The Menopause Brain (last week he announced that students undergoing menstruation would be granted three days’ leave), from contemporary Malayalam literature to global fiction and history.
Genuine political representation requires the capacity to imagine lives one has not lived, struggles one has not endured and realities one has not personally experienced. Without that difficult imaginative leap, politics often collapses into tribalism and performative antics. Hannah Arendt described democracy as requiring what she called “representative thinking”—the ability to consider questions from the standpoint of others before reaching judgement.
There is also a broader cultural lesson in Satheesan’s example. By publicly discussing books, he treats literacy not as a private accomplishment but as a civic good. This, of course, has a flip side. In a state like Kerala, where almost everybody is a writer (by one informal count there are two lakh poets alone), the CM's enthusiasm may encourage the mushrooming of even more literary festivals than is good for public health.
Democracies depend not merely on voters but on citizens capable of reflection. A society that reads widely is generally harder to manipulate because readers are accustomed to complexity, ambiguity and competing interpretations.
Even so, even a highly literate CM can fall into the performative trap. Last fortnight, Satheesan announced free travel for women on the perennially loss-making Kerala State Road Transport Corporation buses. Why? There are lakhs of women earning good money in Kerala. If the measure was intended to help the poor, why not unemployed men as well?
Democracy depends not only on institutions but on imagination. The reason Bollywood, the country's greatest culture factory, is struggling is that almost nobody there reads. Everybody is into narration, out of which emerges mostly air flavoured with a kind of flatulent patriotism.
As Satheesan turns another page amid the noise and urgency of political life, he reminds us of an older truth that leaders from Nehru to Mandela understood well: reading is not a retreat from public life. It is preparation for it. And in a democracy, the discipline of reading may be one of the disciplines of freedom itself. The reason free speech is such a persistent problem in India is that leaders do not read—let alone write.
C P Surendran | Author whose latest volume of poetry is Window with a Train Attached
(Views are personal)
(cpsurendran@gmail.com)