Book Review by Bhaskar Parichha
Title: Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Books
Author: Shanta Gokhale
Publisher: Speaking Tiger Books
Shanta Gokhale’s Of Ancestors and Friends: A Life with Books is an unusual kind of literary memoir. It is neither a conventional autobiography nor a conventional work of criticism. Instead, it occupies an intimate space between the two, tracing a life’s intellectual and emotional history through books. For Gokhale, reading is not merely a habit or a professional necessity; it is a way of living, thinking, and making sense of the world. The result is a book that is at once personal, erudite, playful and deeply reflective.
Gokhale begins with a simple but revealing confession: reading has been the strongest and longest thread running through her eighty-five years. She began reading at seven, reading seriously at twelve, and over the decades discovered, as she puts it, “ancestors and friends”. The distinction is important.
Some books become intellectual ancestors, shaping how we think and see; others become friends, returning at different stages of life and revealing something new each time. The Covid lockdown, which provided her with the time and solitude to reread many of these works, becomes the immediate occasion for this literary journey.
Gokhale brings together criticism and memory. She writes about writers as diverse as Jean-Paul Sartre, Jane Austen, Naguib Mahfouz, Salman Rushdie and Kazuo Ishiguro, alongside major Indian writers such as Shri Na. Pendse, Kiran Nagarkar, U.R. Ananthamurthy and Alka Saraogi. Yet these are not detached academic exercises. Gokhale approaches literature as a living experience. She asks what these books mean to her now, what they meant when she first encountered them, and what they reveal about society, politics, human relationships and the changing world.
Her perspective as an Indian reader gives the discussions an additional dimension. Familiar works are viewed from a location that is neither wholly Western nor narrowly Indian. This enables her to make connections across cultures and literary traditions without reducing one to the other. Her reading is comparative, but never mechanical. The books are allowed to speak in their own voices while being placed within the larger questions of history and contemporary life.
Translation and the craft of writing form another important strand of the memoir. Gokhale’s reflections on the translator’s responsibility demonstrate her sensitivity to language, context, and cultural nuance. Translation, in her understanding, is not simply the transfer of words from one language to another. It involves interpretation, empathy and difficult choices about voice and meaning. Her experience as a writer, critic and translator gives these observations the authority of practice rather than theory.
What makes Of Ancestors and Friends particularly engaging is its refusal to behave like a conventional critical book. Gokhale deliberately calls it a “ramble”. She announces that she does not want to hear the “sound of those shackles” of deadlines, word counts and imposed structures that have accompanied her sixty years of writing. She wants to digress, follow anecdotes, abandon order when necessary and write simply for the pleasure of writing. That freedom becomes part of the book’s charm.
The anecdotes about her reading life are among its most delightful passages. The excitement of finding a long-sought book in a dusty second-hand bookstore, the mystery contained in inscriptions in old books, and the affectionate possessiveness of a true bibliophile are described with wit and warmth.
Her encounters with writers and playwrights from Maharashtra bring another personal dimension to the narrative. These episodes prevent the book from becoming overly cerebral and remind us that literature is ultimately connected with people, places, friendships and lived experience.
There is also an implicit philosophy of reading here. Gokhale demonstrates that rereading is not repetition. We change, and therefore the books change with us. A novel encountered in youth may acquire an entirely different significance in old age. Characters once admired may become troubling; passages once overlooked may suddenly appear profound. In this sense, it is as much about the changing reader as it is about the books being read.
The book’s intellectual richness never entirely overwhelms its humaneness. Gokhale writes with the confidence of a seasoned literary practitioner but also with the curiosity of someone who has never lost the pleasure of discovering a book. Her prose combines critical sharpness with humour, anecdote with analysis, and scholarship with accessibility.
The book, in a nutshell, is a celebration of the life of the mind—and of the enduring companionship that books can offer. It reminds us that reading is not an escape from life but one of the ways in which life becomes more intelligible. Gokhale’s literary ancestors have shaped her, her fictional friends have accompanied her, and rereading has allowed her to meet them again. In sharing those encounters, she invites readers to look back at their own bookshelves and remember the books that, in one way or another, made them who they are.
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Bhaskar Parichha is a journalist and author of Cyclones in Odisha: Landfall, Wreckage and Resilience, Unbiased, No Strings Attached: Writings on Odisha and Biju Patnaik – A Political Biography. He lives in Bhubaneswar and writes bilingually. Besides writing for newspapers, he also reviews books on various media platforms.
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