By Chander Gupta
I am associated with a writers’ forum comprising of 30-odd members. The forum holds monthly meetings which are hosted on rotational basis by individual members. The host member proposes a literary topic for discussion in which all the ‘writer’ members participate by way of offering their comments and opinions.
The topic is announced in the WhatsApp group well in advance so that members come well-prepared. The topic for the July 2026 meeting chosen by the host member was “Transformative Power of Literature”.
For all the meetings held previously, I would just let the theme of the topic sink in. After that churning in the mind till the day of the meeting would go on leading to my thoughts and views on the topic being crystallised. For the month of July 2026 also, I followed the same practice. I did not do any serious thinking or do any research but just gathered the thoughts which came to the fore in my mind on the topic off and on.
I had never before thought about whether any books read by me had had any transformative impact on me. Therefore, this topic gave me an opportunity to mull over the matter.
Besides having done post-graduation in English Literature, I have been a voracious reader of all genres of books. By the time of the meeting, I was clear as to what books had profoundly influenced me. So, I was tentatively ready to speak in the meeting. I paraphrase hereunder what I eventually spoke in the July 2026 meeting on the topic of “Transformative Power of Literature”.
I agree that literature wields transformative power from my own experience. The very first book that I read outside the curriculum, when I was barely 19 years old, was the biography of Swami Dayanand written by Suraj Bhan, former Vice Chancellor of Panjab University.
It was a slim volume which I found lying at the residence of my uncle whom I was visiting at Chandigarh for exploring admission in the Department of English of the Panjab University at Chandigarh. I had recently completed my graduation from my hometown Kaithal. I had enough idle time to read the biography which I found absorbing from the word go. The reading of the very first book, outside the syllabus, made a life-long impact on me. At a very young age of my life, I was freed for life from of all superstitions, dogmas, and ritualism.
The second literary text that left an indelible impact on my thinking was Bertrand Russell’s essays, which were incidentally prescribed in my syllabus for M.A. (English) course.
The essays caution the readers about the parochial aspects of ersatz nationalism. People are generally befooled in the name of nationalism which for most of us is a nebulous concept.
Even before I was 21 years old, my thinking about religion and nationalism had been shaped by the biography of Swami Dayanand written by Suraj Bhan and by the essays of Bertrand Russell, respectively. These two books succeeded in freeing me from the shackles of bigotry, dogma, and parochialism.
I have been fortunate not to have been affected by superstition and ritualism.
The spirit of humanism transcends the religious dogmas and the parochial ‘nationalism’. True adherents of real religion and real nationalism love and respect fellow human beings; are compassionate, truthful, and helpful; and do not deceive and hurt others.
Other than the above-mentioned books, I will mention four more books which impressed me the most: i) Discovery of India by Jawaharlal Nehru, ii) Freedom at Midnight by Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre, iii) Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie, and iv) God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy.
The writer is a retired banker.