New life into old narratives

With a post-graduate degree in Materials Science from Pennsylvania State University, Prateek Dasgupta took it upon himself to pull ancient history out from the conventional narrative loaded with myths and legends. Not only does ancient past connect forgotten chapters with archaeological evidence, from the Ice Age to the Middle Ages, but celebrate the underappreciated lives of ancient people. It helps conclude that the story of human history in not linear but in reality, is much more complex. 

The common perception that hunter-gatherers began agriculture and started settled habitation, after the Ice Age some 12,000 years, may have been put to rest. Because the earliest known human settlers were called Gravettians who lived in Europe some 57,000 years ago. The term comes from the La Gravette archaeological site in France, that was the systematic production center for stone blades with sharp and blunted edges. This remarkable invention helped those people hunt megafauna, a game changer in human evolution. However, it leaves with more questions than answers. How did humans struggling for survival during the Ice Age excelled in inventing such excellent tools?

Forgotten Footprints is unlike a history book; in four sections it stitches together multi-disciplinary stories that ignite interest and spark curiosity. The stories are independent, allowing readers to dip in where their interest lies. However, the beauty of archaeology is that it helps in rewriting history, and to smoothen the narrative. Written history may have ignored many voices from the past, but the civilizations uncovered in this book provide new insights into humanity’s past, and offer conflicting theories about the why and how did it actually happen? 

Else, it would not have been known that pyramids were first built in Peru. To date, archaeologists have unearthed some 30 sites belonging to the Caral-Supa civilization in the arid region between the Peruvian coast and the Andean foothills. Even pyramids older than Egypt’s 2,670 BCE pyramids have been found in Aspero. Though one may not get to see imposing structures, archaeological evidence does confirm the structure to be located in the center of Caral, allowing society’s elite to monitor the city’s functioning. 

Dasgupta has breathed new life into these ancient histories. History had captivated him since childhood, notable being the headless statue of King Kanishka who ruled much of Central Asia and Northern India from the first to the third century BCE. Although Kanishka is a popular name in India, little is known about this mysterious ruler. The author draws attention on many lesser-known civilizations to understand what political, environmental, and socioeconomic risks these faced. The rise and fall of civilizations remind us of the fragility of modern society, and many of the problems continue to plague even today.

Written in an engaging style, Forgotten Footprints takes the reader across different time zones around the globe. In each of those seventeen chapters in the book, there are interesting human-interest stories worth building and enriching. The author might want some of the chapters to be developed into independent books, to recreate history of ancient civilizations in detail. Liberal use of pictures and graphics gives visual relief to a fascinating subject.     

Forgotten Footprints
by Prateek Dasgupta
Hachette, New Delhi
Extent: 429, Price: Rs. 699.

First published in The Hindu on Dec 21, 2025.

Is ignorance a bliss?

If ignorance is indeed bliss, as Thomas Gray said in Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1742), a will to ignorance is as strong as any interest in knowledge. Our own experience confirms Aristotle pronouncement that all human beings want to know. However, we seem to be passing through a historical period when the denial of knowledge is acceptable even desired. Centuries after the quest for enlightenment, we now seem to have turned toward the search for ignorance. It’s no wonder then that mesmerized crowds follow preposterous prophets, irrational rumors trigger fanatical acts, and magical thinking crowds our common sense. In Ignorance and Bliss, historian Mark Lilla offers an intellectual travelogue of the human will not to know.   

A professor of humanities at Columbia University, Lilla’s arguments in favor of ignorance are compelling and insightful. Indeed, he offers an amazing insight into our incorrigible attachment to ignorance. It seems after spending epochs in the search of knowledge, humans are now taking a holiday from reality. No wonder, the resistance to knowledge is now being backed by supportive ideologies. In the face of such developments, those devoted to reasoning have now started to feel like refugees.

Knowledge is power, it is true, but who has as yet acknowledged the power of ignorance that is increasing by the day? Is ignorance without power? Some people are naturally curious about learning why; others, however, are indifferent to it. There are reasons to avoid knowing about particular things, and many of those reasons not to know are perfectly justified. And then there are those who have developed a disinterest in gaining such knowledge simply because they believe that what they already know is the truth.

Lilla provokes his readers to dwell on the subject. The most obvious resistance to knowing is rooted in fear. People often resist any questioning of their morality and religiosity because they fear being exposed. By questioning firm and widely held beliefs, people run the risk of upsetting the ideas that they have built their lives around. This is especially frightening when there is guarantee of any satisfactory replacement. However, if ever questions have to be raised without any chance of them being resisted, it can only happen in a state of total ignorance. So, yes, there are reasons to value ignorance.    

Ignorance and Bliss is all about how ignorance ought to be viewed and how it should be valued. It views ignorance independent of bliss, and for good reasons. In this era when politics is beset by lies and fake news, it is worth asking if the root cause of the problem lies with the public. It would seem that the general public has accepted lies and fake news and its effects too. There is no escape from such a trap. This book then is about the will not to know as well as the desire to remain ignorant.

Gaining knowledge is an emotional experience and resisting it is an emotional one too. How to live with such contrasting emotions is this book’s focus, and our present predicament. The intimate struggles with aspects of self-knowledge feature prominently here. Of course, even self-knowledge depends on resisting other kinds of knowledge about the world. The chapter about fantasy explores that power within us that resist acknowledging reality. There lies a human dilemma that continues to grow and expand.  

Lilla explores several human sentiments like innocence, nostalgia, emptiness, and taboo to gain clarity on the knowledge-ignorance dilemma. That clarity is hard to get because the search for an answer often remains subjective. Knowledge and ignorance co-exist; one doesn’t exist without the other. There seems to be a reason for this: the less we know the more we realize the limits of knowledge. On the contrary, the more we know, the more we are challenged to learn still more. And so, it never ends. And the dilemma persists.

Fascinating and challenging, Ignorance and Bliss make the compelling argument that a will to ignorance is as strong within us as any desire for knowledge. Alas, such are the times that wanting not to know is much stronger than wanting to know. And that way madness lies.  

Ignorance and Bliss
by Mark Lilla
Hurst, New York
Extent:216. Price: Rs 1,765

Published in Hindustan Times on Dec 12, 2025.

Anatomy of survival

Flesh is a rags-to-riches story about a young Hungarian named István. Not too much thinking about himself and his life, the youngster lives an impulsive lifestyle through a series of unexpected mental jobs. Eventually the youngster lands a rich married life in London, with some degree of contentment. During the course of time, a virginal fifteen-year-old enters on a relationship with a married forty-two-year woman. A fight with her husband leads him to juvenile detention and a stretch serving in the military, leading to what seems like an experience with resilience. 

To get a credible sense of his craft, one may need to know David better as a writer. David Szalay is known as a restrained realist fiction with a decidedly international flavor, who shot him into fame for his All That Man Is, which was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 2016. Despite the Booker shortlisting, he had published six books but has never quite hit the literary mainstream. Szalay subject matter may look deceptively pedestrian, but he makes it read seemingly big – sex, mortality, money, jobs.

The Booker Prize winner novel by Szalay deals with the nature of István’s pliability, and in a way reveals his naivety. But the protagonist is seemingly alienated from his own bizarre desires and wonders if the character is going through some kind of psychological disorder – marked by clumsy, violating sexual encounters – or has erotic or material desires beyond his control. As the title of the story suggests, Istvan exists in a body that has scars on it and is alive without demanding anything. Thereby, Flesh deals with motion more than emotion. This makes it a difficult narrative that Szalay acknowledges, it wasn’t easy to write as there was immense pressure to cope up with motion-emotion dilemma.

This is an amazing story of a man at odds with himself - estranged from and by the circumstances. However, towards later part of the story the protagonist works as private security and ends up becoming a chauffeur for an elite family in London. As luck would have it, he becomes part of their life, and their exclusive lifestyle. Entering into an affair with the young wife in the household, Istvan ended up marrying her. Life comes full circle with his stepson demanding a life which is under his control.  

Flesh is difficult to read but is a highly engaging and moving book. This is a book about how men may be judged, either for their loneliness or their masculinity. It is an interesting experimentation in style of writing, with its bare-bones prose and the determined turning away from its characters’ inner lives. Neither he nor the novelist tells us that he feels through the many momentous happenings in his life. The narrative gaze in the book is resolutely fixed at the level of the flesh.

At literary level, the ongoing tension between expression and access is clearly evident in the story. The Booker is the ‘leading literary award’, the longlist, shortlist, and the award process have the power to transform writers’ career and the book reach. Nevertheless, questions of diversity, readability, and gatekeeping persist. Larger question remains: when attention spans diminish and people are scrolling, does the award still matter? 

There is something incredibly compelling that the reader returns to this story so often. The story continues to pervade its psychological, social and emotional aspects. Szalay reaffirms that István exists in a body: but lack the courage to articulate his desires verbally. However, István seems most energized during the period of his life he spends at war. When István is asked how it felt to be in the army, to shoot a gun to make people die, he says ‘it's okay’. Does trauma on the battlefield make him realize the immensity of death? 

One could argue that this illustrates the numbing effects of early trauma, or when it is more about the body rather than the mind. It is true that the narrative is at its most vividly analytical when it comes to sex. In the early days of his relationship with his employer’s wife, István notices that the feeling of transgression is intensified but by he doesn’t find her particularly attractive. The writer emphasizes István’s inability to feel. At the end, the reader may feel a little for István, despite all he’d been through.

Flesh is absolutely worth the time – a compelling, unobvious novel by an intriguingly restless writer. This is also a novel about the big question - when the numbing strangeness of being alive is felt and realized.

Flesh 
by David Szalay
Jonathan Cape
Extent: 368, Price: Rs. 899.

First published in Deccan Herald on Dec 7, 2025.