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Start a fire: the best books about political awakenings

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/12/further-reading-books-political-awakening

From Trotsky by torchlight to freedom fighters in the Philippines, Romesh Gunesekera chooses books to spark new understanding

The journey to an awakening, whether of a fictional character, a reader or a writer, is rarely straightforward. In Suncatcher, my narrator’s political awareness begins as a young boy when he reads Trotsky by torchlight. “The Problems of Life” is a Young Socialist pamphlet he has nicked from his father’s bookshelf. Under a mosquito net, in post-colonial Ceylon, Kairo is drawn in by Trotsky’s impassioned lectures on vodka, housework and the cinema. I discovered it while researching Sri Lanka in the 60s, a time when the Trotskyite party was at its peak. But it could have been in our house all along, tucked among the leftwing books on my father’s shelves – the 1962 edition I found in the British Library had been printed in Colombo, a mile from my childhood home.

A generation earlier, in 1908, Ananda Coomaraswamy, a Ceylonese man of English and Tamil parentage, published Mediaeval Sinhalese Art, printing it on a hand press used by William Morris. Could an innocuous-sounding study of drawings and pottery be political? “Nations,” Coomaraswamy declared, “are created by poets and artists.” The monograph was instrumental in awakening a modern consciousness of artistic identity in South Asia and became an important strand in the national movement for self-rule.

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