Book Excerpt: Of Ancestors and Friends- A Life in Books by Shanta Gokhale

An exclusive excerpt from Of Ancestors and Friends- A Life in Books by Shanta Gokhale (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

A Bibliofest

When rearranging my library a couple of years ago, which meant less arranging and more browsing and re-reading, I found, on the shelf that held the books I had inherited from my father, some twenty-odd volumes that have endured over time. He had evidently been a more accurate predictor of literary longevity in the 1950s and 60s when he bought those books than the readers of the Manchester Guardian had been in 1929. For among them were George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four, read and re-read by millions when the predicted year came around; Plato’s The Trial and Death of Socrates, which still stands as a powerful statement on truth and justice; John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, which, although it is about one displaced family in one country at one point of time, is equally about us today, in the age of displacement; Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye once read by adults but still alive as a book that young men (and perhaps women) relate to; and practically the whole of Fyodor Dostoevsky, most of whose novels have become reference points for some of our finest writers. James Baldwin thought Dostoevsky ‘had something to tell me’. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, Franz Kafka, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Haruki Murakami have all found he had something to tell them.

I read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov when I was fourteen, during a month-long holiday in Pune. The holiday was dedicated to learning swimming in the mornings and reading in the afternoons and evenings. Father had filled an aluminium trunk with an incredible assortment of books—theatre, fiction, politics, history and philosophy. He and I sat in two chairs in our ground floor room in Modern Guest House and read.

Modern Guest House, owned and run by a Mr and Mrs Kulkarni whose first names remained a secret to me, was a just-about-basic ‘lodging and boarding’ place on the way to Parvati hill that suited Father’s pocket. Their kitchen supplied wholesome food but their departing guests left bedbugs in the mattresses. Mother always carried bed linen from home when we went to Pune; but four mattresses in the boot of father’s second-hand Hillman was an idea only a cartoonist could use on an off-day. Consequently, Mother spent the afternoon of our arrival dragging the mattresses off the iron cots and out into the blistering May sun, spraying them with a variety of insecticides and leaving them to bake till sunset. Grey-haired, serene-faced, attractively plump Mrs Kulkarni watched the proceedings sympathetically, arms folded over ample bosom, clucking occasionally with ‘Where do they bring them from!’ By ‘they’ she meant guests; by ‘them’ she meant bedbugs. Come sundown, the bedbugs, poor mites, would have given up hope of survival and fled to other more welcoming beds. Thus, after swimming and reading and wholesome dinners, we slept unbitten.

In the large aluminium trunk, lay Father’s considerable collection of European plays. The concept of time in J.B. Priestley’s Dangerous Corner, Time and the Conways and I Have Been Here Before excited me. Nobody in Marathi theatre, which I was growing to know, had attempted anything like it. While Marathi theatre had shown no interest in Priestley’s Time Plays, it had been fascinated by his seventh play, An Inspector Calls which also I read in Pune. Its Marathi adaptation had become very popular as had Amaldar, the adaptation of Nikolai Gogol’s The Inspector-General. The adaptor was P.L. Deshpande whose name was, and still is, regularly followed by the cachet ‘Maharashtra’s most beloved personality’. Amaldar was enjoying a good run that very year.

In the trunk also lay Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh which I did not understand and had much trouble getting through; also Mourning Becomes Electra which I not only understood but was deeply moved by. Cheek by jowl with the plays were Irving Stone’s Lust for Life, Thor Heyerdahl’s The Kon-Tiki Expedition, Albert Camus’ The Outsider, Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit, and George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Nineteen Eight-Four was relatively fresh from the oven then, but the year it concerned itself with was too distant to be relevant to me in 1952. When the year did come around, we in India, had already been through a period of two years when Big Brother had watched, except, in our case, it was Big Sister. Some of us had found nothing wrong with Big Sister declaring an Emergency. She had ensured that trains ran on time, strikes did not happen and ‘anti-social elements’ did not hold protest marches that stopped good people from going to work. Fortunately, many more of us were outraged at her unconstitutional repression of freedoms and human rights. Most importantly, the press was angered by the censorship.

Excerpted with permission from the author and the publisher of Of Ancestors and Friends- A Life in Books by Shanta Gokhale (Speaking Tiger, 2026)

About the Book

A thoughtful and deeply analytical reading of world literature by an acclaimed Indian writer, critic, and translator.

Shanta Gokhale, lifelong reader and bibliophile, looks back at her reading life and examines books and writers she has loved and re-read, returning to them time and again at different points in her life. In these personal essays, she analyses them with a discerning eye and through the prism of a modern Indian reader.

Her critical descriptions of the works of Shri Na Pendse, Kiran Nagarkar, U.R. Ananthamurthy, Alka Saraogi, along with Jean Paul Sartre, Jane Austen, Naguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie, Kazuo Ishiguro, among many others, are rich with literary analysis. At the same time, she examines what it is to read these works as living texts, and draws inferences about life, society and the arts through them. Whether she is dissecting the translator’s role, or understanding how literature can be a tool to speak truth to power, each essay resonates with incisive observations and a lively curiosity.

Shanta also recounts delightful anecdotes from her reading life—finding longed-for books in dusty bookstores, being intrigued by inscriptions in second-hand books, or wryly wondering if a true booklover is allowed to ‘borrow’ books without asking. Especially enjoyable are her descriptions of her encounters with writers and playwrights from her home state of Maharashtra.

An unusual and rewarding memoir about a life spent loving books and living with them—and finding the meaning that classic works and authors hold in contemporary times—Of Ancestors and Friends sparkles with wit and intellect in every line.

About the Author

Shanta Gokhale has worked as a lecturer in English at Elphinstone College and H.R. College of Commerce, as a sub-editor with Femina, as a P.R. Executive with Glaxo Laboratories and as arts editor with the Times of India. Gokhale has written three novels in Marathi, two of which have won the Maharashtra State Award for the best novel of the year. Her memoir One Foot on the Ground was published by Speaking Tiger in 2019. She has translated novels, non-fiction and plays.

She was awarded the Lifetime Achievement Award at Tata Literature Live in 2019, and the Vani Prakashan Award in 2025.