Ayya's Accounts

Pandian and Mariappan underscore how provincial India, which once represented the past, can also ultimately become the telos of the future.

* American Book Review *

Overall, this is a beautifully written, deeply engaging book. Theory – such as it is present at all – is worn lightly, insights emerging gently through an engagement with Ayya's stories, rather than imposed to make sense of the whole.

-- James Staples * Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute *

Ayya's Accounts is at once a mesmerising memoir of an ordinary man's life and an anthropologist's revealing examination of the astounding changes experienced by persons and families over a century of tremendous hope and upheaval in modern India. . . . Ayya tells his tale to his first-born grandson, an anthropology professor in the USA, Anand Pandian. Pandian beautifully re-crafts the tale, while interlacing it with pithy interludes of anthropological insight. The result is an inventive text impossible to put down.

-- Sarah Lamb * South Asia *

Ayya's Accounts is a gem of a book: fluid, accessible, moving, instructive, compact. It is a book with the word 'hope' in its title and this means a lot. Ayya's Accounts shows readers a globalized world that is not dehumanized. If I were teaching 'Introduction to Anthropology,' I would assign this book right at the beginning.

-- Ann Grodzins Gold * Journal of Anthropological Research *

Written elegantly, translated eloquently, Ayya's Accounts is an absorbing read. Pandian's conviction that the history of modern India might be read through an individual is proven through this book: following Ayya, his times and his extended family we learn of many vital issues in South Asian history, culture and diaspora. This promises to also be a good book for classroom adoption, appealing to the imaginations of students at all levels and grounding larger abstractions in vividly lived, emotionally resonant particulars.

-- Kirin Narayan * Postcolonial Studies *

Pandian's Ayya makes it possible to believe that the common can be uncommon. In the hands of this gifted writer, the eyes of this careful observer, and the ears of this persistent listener, an uncommon ordinariness itself becomes extraordinary. Indeed, Anand Pandian's loving dialogue with his Ayya is inspiration to all of us to listen, observe, and take note of our family histories. The little stories of our parents and grandparents are very much a part of the grand narrative of tradition and modernity.

* India Currents *

The book is an unusually evocative cross-generational memoir, a wonderful read. Pandian's own elegant and sparse prose shows how a focus on one life can illuminate India's development and interaction with a rapidly modernizing world.

-- Karen Leonard * H-Asia H-Net *

Ayya's youth in an impoverished family in rural Tamil Nadu in the 1920s becomes not just the story of an individual in Pandian's hands, but rather a window onto an entire historical tapestry.

* Los Angeles Review of Books *

I found the story of M. P. Mariappan's life completely engrossing, and found it reflected a bit of my own family's history from a completely different part of the globe.

-- Sheilah Kast * WYPR *

Ayya's Accounts makes for pretty gripping reading, even for people who have never read this kind of first-person anthropology before.

* The Aerogram *

The . . . work, accessible rather than academic, is only deceptively simple—because, in sketching an ordinary man's passage over a lifetime, from tradition to modernity, it also charts a country's century-long journey. This is where the anthropologist's skill comes in handy. Pandian, who spent a lot of time in India, has been able to absorb Ayya's experiences and make them seem universal.

* Khabar *

I suspect they'll never make a movie about M.P. Mariappan, but no one deemed a superhero by the movies has had a more interesting life with such extraordinary sweep. He was born in 1919 in British Colonial India . . . He drank milk from mud pots. He fled for his life during World War II, walking a treacherous 1,700 mile route from Burma to southern India. He sold fruit. He suffered the death of a daughter. He survived both an old world illness, the plague, and a new world one, prostate cancer. And now many of his grandchildren have grown up to be teachers, engineers and other professionals living in the U.S. as well as India.

-- Scott Simon * NPR Weekend Edition *

Spanning India, Burma (Myanmar), and America, this is an absorbing exploration of one man's life.

* Library Journal *

Pandian is to be lauded for bringing to light the significance of a life in ways [that]... reveal what it is like to be human, an anthropological project of much value in our fast-changing and turbulent world

* American Ethnologi