#
Before you listen to this episode of The Scene in the Unseen, I have a recommendation for
#
Do check out Pulya Baazi hosted by Saurabh Chandra and Pranay Kottaswane, two really
#
good friends of mine, Kick-Ass Podcast in Hindi.
#
In 1684, a 12-year-old Maratha boy became the ruler of Tamil Tanjore.
#
His name was Shahuji Bhosle and he remained in power till 1712.
#
In that time, he distinguished himself not as a warrior like his half-uncle Shivaji but
#
as a poet and playwright, and a controversial playwright that too.
#
One of the plays attributed to him is called Sati Daana Suramu, translated as Take My Wife,
#
and I wonder how people would react to it today.
#
The play begins at the Vishnu temple in Mannargudi and the main protagonist is a Brahmin named
#
Moro Bhatlu who arrives there with his disciple for a festival.
#
Then he suddenly falls in love, or falls in lust, which might well be the same thing for
#
some men, with an untouchable woman.
#
He goes nuts with longing.
#
His disciple, alarmed at this visible attraction, tells him that females are demons.
#
Moro Bhatlu responds, and I can just imagine his voice quivering, She's no demon, she's
#
His disciple tells him that he must focus on the Vedas, which will bring him eternal
#
bliss, but Moro Bhatlu says that he has no use for insipid eternal bliss.
#
Then Moro Bhatlu the Brahmin approaches the untouchable woman.
#
She is not interested in this random, lustful uncle, and tells him, We eat beef, we drink
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liquor, don't talk to me, but Moro Bhatlu cannot be stopped.
#
We drink cow's milk, he says, but you eat the whole cow, you must be more pure.
#
The startled lady now starts lecturing him on dharma and the impermanence of desire,
#
but Moro Bhatlu the Brahmin brushes her aside.
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We Brahmins have made up all the rules and invented religion, he says.
#
There is no better dharma than satisfying a Brahmin's need.
#
Then he tells her, Give me your loins, it is like offering land to a Brahmin.
#
Now her husband appears, and this young Dalit man also starts advising the Brahmin lech
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about the need to be free from earthly desires, but Moro Bhatlu will have none of it.
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He says, When a ravishing young woman is free from her clothes, that's freedom for me.
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The Dalit gentleman finally agrees to give his wife to the Brahmin, as if she is a thing
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and offering to be made.
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But then Lord Shiva himself arrives and saves the situation.
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But the question asked at the end of the play is an apt one.
#
The playwright Shauji Bhosle asks the audience, you who have seen this play, decide for yourselves
#
and tell us, who among these four is the best?
#
Indian history is endlessly rich and fascinating and nothing illustrates that better than
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the story I narrated a few moments ago, which is from Manu Pillai's marvelous book, The
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Totizan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin.
#
I recorded an episode with Manu a few months ago called The Deccan before Shivaji, which
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will be linked from the show notes.
#
We spoke in that episode about his book Rebel Sultans, which is a wild and wonderful chronicle
#
that is more gripping than Lord of the Rings, more magical than Harry Potter, more blood
#
splattered than Game of Thrones.
#
And it was all real, full of stuff that actually happened.
#
History is wild and exciting and Indians are a crazy people with a mad, tumultuous, horny
#
Manu's latest book, The Totizan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahmin, has 61 essays on Indian
#
history and is filled with some amazing stories, which I will discuss with him today.
#
But first, let's take a quick commercial break.
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This episode of The Scene in the Unseen is brought to you by Storytel.
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Storytel is an audiobook platform which you can listen to on your Android or iOS app.
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They have thousands of audiobooks that you can listen to on your mobile, including hundreds
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And you can also get a 30-day free trial if you hop on over to Storytel.com slash IBM.
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I actually use Storytel myself regularly, so as long as I sponsor this show, I'm going
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to recommend one book a week that I love.
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The book I want to recommend today is a book called Dear Life by Alice Munro.
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Alice Munro is my favorite living writer.
#
She's a short story writer based in Canada.
#
She's got the Booker International Prize as well as the Nobel Prize for Literature.
#
And although most of her work is in the form of short stories, she has a unique ability
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to compress so much depth into each short story that you feel like it's a novelistic
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Of all her books, the one that is available on Storytel and I recommend you read is a
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collection called Dear Life.
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And remember, you get a 30-day free trial only at Storytel.com slash IBM.
#
Manu, welcome back to the Seenandian scene.
#
It's great to be here again.
#
So we had, you know, I put it out on Twitter that you were recording with me and solicited
#
And when I last checked, there weren't too many of them.
#
But one of the questions was, you know, how do you manage to write so much history?
#
So you know, what's your normal day like?
#
How do you find things to read?
#
How do you kind of go from...
#
I'm actually quite glad that this is a podcast and not a video because people could see me
#
They'll be able to see the dark circles and the horrible hair and all of that.
#
That's, you know, it's one of those things, which is that there's a lot of reading, yet
#
When I'm in one of my research cycles, it's 12 hours, 11 hours, 12 hours of research work
#
where you go to the library say at nine in the morning and you only get up by 8.30 when
#
the library really shuts.
#
And all that time you're sitting at a desk, not uttering a word, and everyone around you
#
And then, you know, you just plop through all the books that you need to gather information
#
But then writing, that phase is also equally taxing because what happens is then again,
#
you know, it's sitting down and getting the first draft done means weeks and weeks and
#
weeks of not moving from a desk, locking myself up in a room, surviving on chocolates and
#
sweets because that gives you energy highs, which is...
#
Yeah, but it's useful at certain times.
#
It's one of those phases.
#
And then, you know, after that, of course, comes the fun because once the book is done,
#
once this whole cycle of writing, the research, the writing, the editing, the actual publishing
#
happens, then you have the lit fest and the events and things like that, which is fun
#
because finally you can go back to being an extrovert, you can go back to talking to people,
#
seeing people, having fun, having your glass of champagne and things like that.
#
So it's really very compartmentalized.
#
Are you kind of naturally an extrovert who likes to be social and you have to force yourself
#
Yeah, I mean, I don't think sitting in a library for 12 hours a day is easy for me.
#
It wasn't earlier, at least.
#
But with my first book, I got six years of practice.
#
And then now things have become a little easier because I've picked up speed.
#
And the Ivory Throne, of course, is 700 pages.
#
No, this is 383, I think.
#
After that, it's the appendix.
#
I always have lots of pages devoted to notes.
#
Yeah, which are great and most readable.
#
So this book is really a collection of your columns in an expanded version plus additional
#
And I'm just wondering, since you write a weekly column for Mint, how difficult does
#
that make it in terms of the research?
#
Because typically, I'd imagine when you research a book, it's one subject.
#
You get 50 books on that one subject and you dive right in.
#
But each of your columns is about something completely separate, different periods.
#
How do you manage that?
#
So one of the things is, for the last several years, I've made it a habit that every time
#
I read something, I make notes.
#
Whatever book it is, no matter where it comes from, I end up making notes.
#
So for example, I did a column once on Jinnah because I had 12,000 words of notes on him.
#
Even though I never really intended to do anything on Jinnah, it just happens that I
#
have that much in notes sitting in a Word document in my computer.
#
So every week when I have to do my column, I just open up my archives if I can't think
#
of anything and then pull out something from there and use that to come up with a new topic.
#
That's the usual process every week.
#
Because it's history, it does require a certain amount of integrity, a certain amount of focus
#
Because it's a time when lots of people can write where you lose history.
#
You can do your Google and your Google Books at most and think that you've got everything,
#
but it takes a little bit more.
#
So even in this collection, for example, there's one of the essays on Savarkar.
#
It's archival material.
#
It's all based on material I found in the British archives quite randomly.
#
Other stuff, for example, is from secondary material.
#
There may be a few books that I've read.
#
A lot of it is from JSTOR and sources like that where they have academic journals.
#
And my job then is to cull all of this and not simplify it, but make it more appealing,
#
make it more engaging, try and tell it like a story so that people are interested.
#
But even then it's a two-step process because what happens is usually a column ends up being
#
written in about 2,000 words, 1,500 to 2,000, then I have to keep pulling it down to 1,000,
#
which is my word limit for Mint because it's a print newspaper, right?
#
So there's a fixed space allocated for it.
#
And you know, in the first six months, it used to be a challenge because I'd fight with
#
them saying, give me 200 words extra, give me this, you know, 50 words extra.
#
And even now I occasionally get emails saying, can you chop off 30 words here or 20 words
#
Because it's all, yeah.
#
So the original versions were filed away quietly.
#
And then when two or three publishers started showing interest in the columns themselves,
#
I said, well, you know, there are longer versions, might as well use that.
#
And what's the process of reading?
#
Like, like imagine on one hand, if you're sort of researching, you're doing deep reading,
#
you're reading really carefully, taking notes, but on the other hand, you have a lot of material
#
to get through, especially if this historical material, there's a temptation to just skim
#
How do you manage that?
#
I mean, as I said, the first six years, because my first book required me to sort of sit in
#
the archives in the library for hours and hours and hours and devote the first half
#
of my twenties to that whole process, I've picked up a degree of speed in the sense that,
#
you know, I can get through say one book in two days or a day and a half because I'm not
#
reading it for pleasure.
#
I know exactly what I'm looking for.
#
I know when I see a fact, whether or not I use it, I don't know, but I know that fact
#
is interesting, so I know how to take it out and put it into my notes.
#
So most of the time it's quotes.
#
I just lift quotes out of any book that I read and put them in a word doc, and then
#
I can go back to them because I've got the words as they are.
#
So mechanically, you can type up a good chunk of the book and keep it there, and then whenever
#
you revisit it, you can actually properly digest it.
#
Process it out of that.
#
How many books do you read in a month?
#
Now this I can't say because I never counted, but I do remember when I did one of my, when
#
I was 23, I did this BBC project called Incarnations, I was a researcher for Sunil Khilnan and all
#
I think at that time I'd read for that whole project about 450 books because, you know.
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I don't know, about eight months or something like that, so it was something.
#
So yeah, there are lots of books.
#
My next book, you know, I've already got an archive of some 400 odd books.
#
And how do you get these books from?
#
So you know, when I was in London, the British Library is a huge archive, the School of Oriental
#
and African Studies, they have a lot of India related material.
#
The LSE library has stuff.
#
In India, there's, you know, the Mandarkar Institute exists, there's the Gokhale Institute.
#
A lot of it is now available online.
#
For example, Gokhale Institute's library is digitizing most of their stuff.
#
So a lot of old books in Marathi, Hindi, they're all available online.
#
So you know, you can therefore access them wherever you are.
#
But say if you're a kid sitting in, if you're a kid sitting in Patna or Madurai or something
#
and you want to be a historian and you'll have some kind of access to all of this stuff.
#
Yeah, I think it would be wiser then to seek an institution which would then support you
#
and give you institutional access.
#
Being part of a university or part of some sort of bigger institution helps.
#
It opens doors more easily than otherwise, because otherwise a lot of libraries, you
#
know, they're also resource crunched.
#
So unless you look serious, they may not think that you're worth giving that sort of attention
#
So you know, one of the sort of interesting things that struck me as I started reading
#
your book in one of your early essays is called a Marathi Princess Morality Play from which
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I took this story at the start of the episode.
#
And just reading it, it struck me in how richly diverse not just India is, but how regions
#
For example, when you talk about this 12 year old Maratha boy who is a ruler of Tamil Tanjavur,
#
you also mentioned quote, the event was emblematic of India in this bustling age with Tamil Nadu
#
alone attracting Afghan horsemen, Bundela Rajputs, Telugu warriors and other varieties
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of adventurers, stop quote.
#
And this is kind of a theme going through all your books, right?
#
Yeah, in fact, since you mentioned this Maratha prince, what's interesting is now he's a Maratha,
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his Shivaji's nephew, which is, you know, it's a fairly glamorous uncle to have.
#
And he's established power in Tanjavur where the people speak Tamil.
#
But what's his quote language is Telugu because the Marathas continue patronizing Telugu,
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which had great prestige attached to it.
#
So it's a multicultural quote, you know, that existed in the 18th century.
#
And what's even more striking is that, you know, you in your introduction, you read out
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this bit about where this lady, where the man, the Brahmin says that, you know, we drink
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cow's milk, you eat the entire cow, so you must be more pure.
#
This is the kind of statement you can't say anymore.
#
Imagine if a playwright said that today, there'd be a lot of scandal and chaos around it because
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it's insulting and people are waiting to take offence and this and that.
#
But this is Shivaji's nephew saying it in the early 18th century.
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A man who was born, you know, in the late 17th century, he's the one saying this.
#
And you know, clearly we had more of a sense of humor then.
#
And yeah, the world was a much more diverse place.
#
The South India was much more diverse and it wasn't surprising in South India because
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Peninsulars tend to have people who come from various places.
#
So the idea of a foreigner is not such a scandalous concept in the South.
#
Maybe in the North, which is landlocked, these things may be different.
#
But in the South, and even in the North, you know, you find all these big imperial cities,
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You will end up having Ottoman artillerymen.
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You'll end up having, you know, all kinds of mercenaries from all kinds of places.
#
One of the essays in this book is about Begum Samru.
#
You know, this is a narch girl of Kashmiri descent, married first to a German, then to
#
a Frenchman, in the military has an affair with an Irishman.
#
What were these foreigners doing here?
#
They were all mercenaries.
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They were all military men who served Indian Maharajas.
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The Sindhyas of Gwalior had, I think, a German under, serving under them.
#
The Maharaja of Travanko in Kerala had a Dutchman who came and sort of modernized his army.
#
So everywhere you look, you know, there is this sort of foreign presence.
#
So it's not just Indians moving about within the country, elite Indians, to be fair.
#
We're not talking about lower class or lower caste groups.
#
This is people with access to power and mobility.
#
You not only have them moving around different areas, but you also have lots of foreigners
#
coming in from overseas and becoming pretty much part of this society.
#
And it also seemed to me that, you know, without a constitution that protects free speech,
#
there was actually a lot of fearless parodying and, you know, satire happening.
#
For example, at one point you talk about Niyandev creating this buffalo that produces Vedic
#
sounds or sounds that sound like Vedic.
#
And you have stuff like that coming out.
#
So is it sort of a selective reading to look at all of this great satire and say that,
#
hey, it was easy to kind of stand up against or is it selection bias?
#
I think, yeah, I think you can't say it was easy because it was always challenging.
#
It always took a degree of courage, especially when it came to caste.
#
Now you find the funny thing is that, you know, there's this time in the 19th century
#
when Jyotiba Fule says that, you know, the Brahmins claim that they came out of the creator,
#
the cosmic creator's head, whereas the Shudras came from the feet and so on.
#
So does that mean the cosmic creator also menstruates from the mouth?
#
He actually asked that in the 19th century.
#
What's interesting is that when Kabir was there a few centuries before, he said, you
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know, the Brahmins claim they came from, they come from the head.
#
So does that mean there was a special birth canal through the creator's ear?
#
You know, he said that.
#
Basava in the 12th century said something very similar.
#
And he also famously said that, you know, loaded with the weight of their Vedas, the
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Brahmin is a veritable donkey.
#
Now these are things you can say, but you also need a degree of clout and privilege
#
He was persecuted, Fule, of course, didn't get very popular with Brahmins in Maharashtra,
#
especially, you know, the powerful ones like Tilak, for example, they had more of a hold
#
But there was space for polemics, there was space to think and stand up and object.
#
And people who managed to do that when the caste system was at its most rigid and powerful,
#
I think there's something really magical that they managed to pull off because they said
#
that then we are now able to sit and have this conversation in a time where this is
#
now, you know, you're not supposed to say these things and so on.
#
But we can always say, look, I'm not saying it.
#
These people said that before me.
#
So I'm being part of a tradition that is much longer, whereas much as this Brahminical order
#
or the caste systems exist, there's been that much of a resistance also throughout the last
#
It's always been there.
#
Every now and then there's a spokesperson standing up and saying this is bad, which
#
means the challenge is always there.
#
There's an article recently that said, you know, and this is this notion that caste is
#
The British in some ways solidified and rigidized it some more.
#
They sort of established in paper as though this is the final version of the caste system
#
and created their own trouble in that system.
#
But that doesn't mean the caste system didn't exist before that.
#
Caste existed before that.
#
Some castes sometimes became richer or poorer and that sort of thing.
#
And you could sometimes change your Varna status, you know, like a lot of kings go up
#
from being Shudras to Kshatriyas by performing certain rituals, but that doesn't make caste
#
You know, you look at the corpus of Bhakti literature, it's all about standing up to
#
caste and ritualism and social order that's based on discrimination.
#
And that's in fact one of the great revelations of this book how through various parts of
#
it, you realize that long before Western modernity came to India, long before the influences
#
of the Enlightenment came to India, there were free thinkers and rationalists who were
#
challenging existing structures fairly bravely.
#
You know, reading your book, like because there are 61 discrete chapters, 61 stories,
#
the way I read it was I started making notes with each chapter and trying to figure out
#
which themes run across it.
#
And two of the strong themes that sort of run through your book, which I'll probably
#
use to as a means of convenience to structure this episode are caste and gender.
#
And I'm sure you did not set out looking for any of these.
#
It's just that when you tell these stories, they are just there.
#
And it's impossible not to notice their impact.
#
And in many cases, the protagonists of the stories themselves are sort of unaware of
#
And in some cases, they are manipulating it.
#
For example, your book begins with this story of the gentleman named Roberto Danubili.
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Is that the right pronunciation?
#
The Italian who comes to South India to convert people and quickly realizes that he has to
#
take the angle of caste into consideration to become an effective converter.
#
Tell me a little bit more about it.
#
It's quite fascinating because this guy is born in Italy into this aristocratic, you
#
He's got a Holy Roman Emperor in his family tree.
#
There's a Pope in his family tree, a good Catholic, as his parents wanted to continue
#
But he decides he wants to become a missionary.
#
Now he runs away from home, becomes a priest and then eventually ends up coming to Goa
#
from where he comes down to Madurai.
#
Now that's a very strange location because Madurai, there's been a mission set up by
#
this much older man a few years before, but they managed to convert barely anybody.
#
And this man comes and realizes that one of the reasons is that now the previous Jesuit
#
who was there was eating beef, he was a Parangi, a foreigner, so you know, the Brahmins and
#
the elite sort of kept a distance.
#
Whereas this man said that I'm going to use, I'm going to become somewhat more Sanskritic
#
So he starts wearing the Poonul or the sacred thread or the Janeo, which is now, you know,
#
you had Raoul Gandhi flaunting it recently.
#
He starts wearing the saffron robes of a sannyasi.
#
He starts eating out of a plantain leaf rather than a plate because a plate is too European,
#
a plantain leaf is local.
#
He starts learning Telugu and Tamil and starts debating Brahmins in their own language.
#
He starts, I mean, he doesn't appreciate the Vedas, but he learns the Vedas, he tries
#
to get a basic sense of it.
#
So he makes a lot of effort to understand what the society is and then finally decides
#
to start converting Brahmins.
#
So he converts a Brahm, a series of Brahmins, he converts a prince, one of these local
#
Nayaka chieftains, brothers.
#
He converts a number of high class people and in his church, what he does is he again
#
So the poor are all standing by the door, the more, you know, upper class converts are
#
all sitting inside and he creates a caste system within his new sort of Tamilized Catholicism
#
And the funny thing is the influence still exists in Catholic societies, communities
#
You know, if you go to Chennai, there's that hour lady of, not Veilankanni, there's a
#
Virgin Mary there, but they dress her up in a sari and there is a chariot festival and
#
all of that, which essentially is a lot like Hindu goddess temples and you know, their
#
chariot processions and all of that happens.
#
In Kerala also you find that, you know, the Christians there, the old Syrian Christians
#
have a lot of Hindu customs that exist within their Christian everyday ritualistic practices.
#
So this man does something like that and he says that I'm going to become a Hindu to save
#
the Hindus and make them Christians.
#
So, you know, it provokes this big debate on whether or not when you convert, you should
#
convert completely, not just in terms of what God you believe in, but in terms of your outer
#
expression of who you are and what clothes you wear and so on.
#
And this continues even to the 19th century, you know, I've got other, it's not in this
#
book, but as part of my research, I have, even in the late 19th century, you know, there
#
were converts in Maharashtra, in Tamil Nadu, in Chennai and so on, who were converting
#
but they were still holding on to their sacred thread because they said we're converting
#
but this is a social mark, our sacred thread evokes the image of our original caste position
#
So, you know, they didn't see any reason why converting to Christianity would cause them
#
to give up their punud.
#
But, you know, such as that was what this Roboto started off and ended up, you know,
#
he was this Italian Brahmin pretending that the Bible was this lost Veda and he was part
#
of this Brahminical tradition himself.
#
And to a great extent he succeeded because by the end of his career, there were about
#
4000-5000 converts that he had managed to make where earlier there were only a few dozens
#
and he was thrown into prison, he did have some difficulties, but he somehow managed
#
to push through and he also got the Pope at the time to acknowledge and support his methods.
#
Of course, by the next century after his death, another Pope revoked that permission and these
#
Malabar rites, as they were called, were banned, but it left its impact and, you know, even
#
now the right wing hates him because they think he came here as some sort of sinister
#
agent with the desire to sort of penetrate society and, you know, convert people like
#
Of course, that's what he did, but I don't think he came here with such grand plans,
#
it's just that he decided that he was going to live here and die here, so he might as
#
well become Indian in many ways.
#
In fact, while reading it, I thought that the right wing today should love him because
#
he, you know, he spoke about how the Bible was a lost Veda, which kind of reminded me
#
of what the right wing says about, you know, Christianity originating as Krishnanithi and
#
One of the sort of meta themes that also seems to run through your book is narrative manipulation.
#
For example, here he's figuring out that he's got to use a caste as a tactic and sort of,
#
and therefore he creates this narrative where Christianity kind of fits into that.
#
And throughout the book, you have characters who are recasting themselves, of course, one
#
constant form of narrative manipulation is what is done to women, how they are recast
#
into sort of more conventional and acceptable avatars as it were.
#
And you know, you have Shivaji recasting himself through the thing, you have, you know, all
#
the different narratives around Kabir's birth, where he's born a Hindu, born a Muslim.
#
And nobody is quite, I mean, everyone wants to claim him.
#
Everyone wants to claim him.
#
Getting back to caste, another fascinating chapter was called a Dalit at the temple door,
#
which is about a gentleman named Chokmela in Pandharpur, who is a bhakti saint, basically.
#
The first mahar bhakti saint, the first male mahar bhakti saint.
#
And you quote him at one point as, you know, complaining to the Brahmin gatekeepers of
#
the temple where he isn't allowed in.
#
And he says, the cane is crooked, but its juice isn't crooked.
#
Chokha is ugly, but his feelings aren't ugly.
#
Why be fooled by outward appearance?
#
Tell me a little bit about Chokmela and how he sort of became one of the big bhakti saints.
#
He, I mean, what's interesting is that he doesn't quite challenge the status quo in
#
the way, say, Atukaram does or, you know, some of the other bhakti saints do, because
#
at the end of the day, they still had relative social position and privilege.
#
So you know, even Atukaram, even though he was, you know, from, his family were grossers
#
and they were shudras, but they were not atishudras, as Phule would put it later.
#
They were not absolute dalits, a mahar means he's a menial worker.
#
That's his job, you know, dragging away dead cows and their carcasses and things like that.
#
And in one of his stories, it's funny that, you know, God appears to lend him a hand to
#
drag away this dead cow.
#
So he therefore doesn't have the privilege to quite say things that are too direct and
#
too blunt because his position is already very weak.
#
So anything he says, he can be knocked off quite easily as opposed to others who have
#
So as a result of that, there's a little bit of fatalism in his message, which is that,
#
you know, this is, I must be born in this position because of my past karma and things
#
His son, Karmamela is not so forgiving.
#
Karmamela is much more direct saying, you know, what kind of God are you?
#
If this is the fate you've sort of, you know, compared us or forced us into, whereas Chokhamela
#
is a little more accepting.
#
He believes that in his past life he's done something wrong.
#
That's why this is happening.
#
But at the end of the day, the closest he can get to his God is to the temple door.
#
He's not allowed anywhere beyond that.
#
And the story is that, you know, he was finally asked to go and do some work and there was
#
an accident there and he was buried alive and he pulled his body out and even his bones
#
were chanting God's name.
#
So they finally got his remains and buried it.
#
They said, you can't bury it inside the temple because it's impure.
#
So we'll bury it at the door.
#
And that's why even today there is a shrine to Chokhamela.
#
The funny thing is by the 18th century, this is where Dalits used to gather and worship
#
And that's when the Peshwas say, no, no, you can't stand near the entrance because all
#
the Brahmins going in, you know, your sweat and your bodies are touching them.
#
So you guys have got to move from here.
#
So at the end of the day, Chokhamela all his life, all he wanted was a glimpse of the deity
#
And although the deity often came out and met him in miraculous situations, sometimes
#
sitting with him, sometimes, you know, helping him with his work and so on, even the deity
#
doesn't tell him, okay, break the law, you know, enter the temple, let's see what happens.
#
Because at the end of the day, you know, I think Chokhamela was a little paranoid about
#
making anything, taking a step that was too dramatic.
#
Because you know, this is what caste does, you assume that it was some sort of flexible
#
He didn't have the privilege.
#
He couldn't have said what he wanted to say.
#
As I said, a Basavanna earlier could in the 12th century say, call a Brahmin a veritable
#
donkey loaded with his Vedas because he was a Brahmin himself.
#
So he could get away with saying it because he was protected by that much privilege.
#
Chokhamela never could say something like that because he would probably have been lynched.
#
Things in this country obviously never change.
#
And what happened to Chokhamela's son?
#
Because the thing is, because his message has a little more punch, he isn't sung that
#
much during these Varkari processions and so on.
#
He's not a very major figure.
#
So it's Chokhamela, on the other hand, people like because he doesn't, you know, his devotion
#
overtakes any hint of radicalism that may have been there.
#
There are occasional times like the quote that you read out, there are occasional times
#
where Chokhamela seems to question the social order, but broadly, he's, you know, not going
#
So he's a little more popular because the powers that be could come to terms with him,
#
but his son is a little too blunt.
#
So his son is slightly less, let's say, recalled.
#
And like you said, Basava being a Brahmin himself could then, you know, say things like
#
quote, false, utterly false are the stories of divine birth.
#
The higher type of man is a man who knows himself, stop quote.
#
And at another point he says, quote, on the same earth stands the outcasts Havel and the
#
deity's temple, whether for ritual or rinsing is not the water same, stop quote.
#
And like you said, it's purely because of his Brahmin birth that he could do this.
#
I mean, otherwise, you know, he would have been lynched.
#
And his people also, they were finally attacked and they had to sort of flee when they arranged
#
an intercast marriage where they got a Brahmin's daughter married to an untouchable son.
#
That is not only intercast.
#
I mean, if it was a man marrying an untouchable woman, I suppose some people would have still
#
But a Brahmin woman might being given to an untouchable man.
#
This is in the 12th century.
#
Imagine, you know, even today in this country, there was a news report a few days ago for
#
17 or 18 year old boy killing his 21 year old sister, shooting her in the head or something
#
because she'd married someone below caste.
#
And that's happening now in 2019.
#
And in Basava's time in the 12th century also, when a Brahmin woman married an untouchable,
#
this was the kind of reaction his entire community was uprooted and there was violence and a
#
massacre and they all had to run away and he died the next year.
#
And they had to essentially live underground and be very quiet and unobtrusive for many
#
centuries before the Lingayats could again start asserting their identity.
#
So even when he finally transgressed that marriage aspect or the mingling of castes,
#
inter dining, all of that, there were repercussions, but he could say a lot more.
#
His message could be a little more powerful because he was a minister in a local rulers
#
How did he become a minister?
#
Because he was a Brahmin, because he had access to education.
#
He was protected by a lot of social privilege, which gave him more of a more space to really
#
articulate a more radical thought.
#
But others didn't always have that space.
#
And there's a lovely, I mean, your book is of course full of lovely sentences because
#
you know, there's such a entertaining sense of the, there's such wheat that you bring
#
So I'll read the sentence out about what happened to the parents of the intercaste couple of
#
Quote, the monarch and the establishment were apoplectic.
#
The respective fathers, it is said, had their eyes gorged out after which they were thrown
#
under elephants to painfully meet their maker, castless in death.
#
And this is a common theme through the middle ages that people getting thrown under elephants.
#
I'm thinking of some sort of favorite theme.
#
Even in the early 19th century, when I was doing my research on my first book, there's
#
a celebrated figure in Kerala history called Velu Thambi Dalawa.
#
He's the man who stood up to the British in 1809.
#
And what's interesting is one of his favorite formats of punishment for rebels and people
#
who were criminals, et cetera, was to tie one leg to one elephant, the other to another
#
elephant and then drive them in opposite directions.
#
So the person will be torn to bits by these two elephants.
#
So the elephants, yeah, they were clearly a very, and also gorging the eyes out.
#
Like it's, it's also common, especially among the Mughals that if you want to get rid of
#
arrival, you don't have to kill him, just blind him.
#
Because under Islamic law, blinding makes you ineligible to rule.
#
So you know, if you don't want to kill your brother, which is also an option, by the way,
#
you can always kill everybody, but if you don't, then you can simply blind them and
#
feel a little less guilty.
#
It's more empathetic to blind your enemies.
#
And another quote from Basava, which I kind of like, which again is about conservative
#
Brahmanical hypocrisy, as you put it.
#
And the quote is, they say, pour, pour the milk when they see a snake image in stone,
#
but they cry kill, kill when they meet a snake for real, stop quote.
#
And Basava was also very enlightened in terms of, for example, gender.
#
Like you also write about, you know, if you want to test the sincerity of those who are
#
trying to bring about reform, that is again, one of the little stress by which you can
#
Like what have they done for gender?
#
And out of the 200 saints associated with him, as many as 35 were female, 14 of them
#
You know, one of them naked.
#
One of them, she didn't wear clothes and she was originally married to a royal person and
#
she eventually walks out of there.
#
And this is the man who gives a refuge when her, her nakedness becomes a matter of controversy
#
He's the one who rises to defend her.
#
Similarly, you know, this is the funny thing.
#
There are lots of reformers who are anti caste, but the basic caste system around the world
#
has been between man and woman.
#
There's always that caste system, which are, which fewer people are willing to take on.
#
So Basava has this, had this interesting thing where usually even in the more enlightened
#
communities or liberated communities or whatever, menstruating women were still considered impure.
#
But for Linga, it's Basava's, as per his philosophy, there's nothing impure about it.
#
Menstruation is a perfectly natural function.
#
You can still hold your Ishtalinga, which is their totem, which is a portable Shiva Linga.
#
And that was, that was the only thing.
#
They don't go to temples.
#
Very different customs.
#
But, you know, menstruating women were not sin.
#
Women had an almost equal position within his own order.
#
So in terms of numbers, they were not an equal half, 35 out of a little over 200 is a fairly
#
large number if you look at the other, you know, saints, et cetera, and how many women
#
Even Kabir sometimes could say very sexist things, you know, calling women sin and things
#
Of course, the thing with saints is they also say very contradictory things.
#
So in one poem they'll say sin, the other poem they'll say something else.
#
So the context is important in which something is being said.
#
But Basava was unusual for this reason also, that women to him, you know, that caste system
#
also he wanted to smash it was and that may perhaps explain why he was getting a Brahmin's
#
daughter married to an untouchable son, because it was several things that he was trying to
#
shift and change at the same time.
#
And in some regards, perhaps he was trying to do too much too quickly, because then obviously
#
the backlash is also very intense.
#
And there's also a very interesting sort of interesting theme of gender fluidity which
#
comes out like one of his vachanas goes, look here, dear fellow, I wear these men's clothes
#
Sometimes I am man, sometimes I am woman, stop code, which given the times is pretty
#
quite a lot of bhakti actually, bhakti literature, it's often even men, they often take female
#
So, you know, Shaitraya, who's this big bhakti poet, a lot of Telugu work, you often have
#
God presented as a customer on his way to his favorite courtesan.
#
And you have poems where the courtesan turns around saying, why have you come to my door?
#
I saw you at that other Radha's door the other day, you know, go back to her and things like
#
And this is often of this woman who's a little annoyed with God.
#
Otherwise, it's a lovelorn, you know, Viraha sort of expression where she's pining for
#
her beloved and the man, you know, essentially feminizes his voice because God is the masculine,
#
he is the one who's missing God.
#
But here again, you have the naked Saint Mahadevi, you know, she says that, you know, while Basava
#
says that she says, no, I'm masculine, she identifies with the masculine, she sees herself
#
as the masculine principle and so on.
#
So yeah, it's interesting how much fluidity in that sense there was, at least in terms
#
of articulating your thought, there was no gender didn't stand in the way, you could
#
easily switch voices, depending on what was comfortable for your sense of expression.
#
And the Lingayats when they formed seemed to be something that was kind of outside caste
#
rebellion against an orthodox Hinduism, but eventually they sort of got assimilated into
#
the mainstream and are now considered just another caste.
#
Yeah, I mean, they want to break out of the Hindu fold, there was that whole thing a couple
#
But you know, the thing, the way caste functions is that this is what it does, you know, initially
#
even rebels are eventually made to fit into the system, caste doesn't break, caste just
#
absorbs them into a new caste.
#
You see this among Kerala Christians also, technically Christianity is not supposed to
#
have caste, but there is a sense of aristocracy among the old Syrian Christian families who
#
are seen as higher caste Christians.
#
And you know, you need them to come and touch the oil and ghee that goes into a temple only
#
In my own ancestral house, every time the ghee etc came from the market, it was kept
#
outside the kitchen building, a Christian had to be found to touch it to purify it before
#
And it had to be a Syrian Christian.
#
It couldn't be a low caste convert, it couldn't be from the LMS or the CMS or one of the later
#
It couldn't be, you know, anybody else except a Syrian Christian who was considered the
#
most superior kind of Christian.
#
And within them, they had these systems, you know.
#
Markets for everything.
#
So I guess there's a market there for Syrian Christians, did they actually dip their finger
#
in the ghee or the ghee?
#
No, I think I'm not entirely sure because nobody now remembers whether there was a dipping
#
or not, but you're supposed to touch the container at least.
#
And it's very interesting, you know, a little earlier you were chatting about the common
#
notion that the British created or at least solidified the caste system.
#
But through your book, there are also indications on how colonialism may have been something
#
that helped fight the caste system.
#
For example, you write about, you have a great chapter about what if the British Raj had
#
never been there and there you point out, quote, Ironically, it was British rule that
#
allowed low caste voices to emerge at last.
#
It was a missionary education and access to Western texts, for instance, that galvanized
#
Jyotiba Phule in his program of reform.
#
And a little later in the context of Macaulay, you say, quote, nativists resented Macaulay,
#
but there were others who embraced this policy.
#
After all, the likes of Jyotira Phule, son of a gardener, could never enter Sanskrit
#
schools, but were welcome in English institutions.
#
They felt no shame in being painted Macaulay putras when the alternative was demeaning
#
drudgery in service of the upper caste, who only appeared less haughty than Englishmen
#
because they were brown and looked more familiar.
#
Yeah, in fact, this reminds me of the opening section of Zarir Masani's book on Macaulay.
#
And apparently, even now, there are communities of Dalits who celebrate Macaulay's birthday
#
as some sort of Jayanti, because for them, Macaulay is a little bit of a liberator.
#
He's a man who finally gives them access to the English language.
#
And Jyotira Phule, this is a man who dedicates one of his books, Gulaangiri, to the people
#
He reads Thomas Paine's Right of Rights of Man, because that's what inspires him.
#
And he reads it in English.
#
Yeah, and he reads it in English.
#
And he's very acutely aware that in the old schools, he has no place.
#
He's made to feel like a Mali green rosa son.
#
That's what his caste is.
#
And his grandfather was a gardener, his father was a green rosa.
#
So he's made to feel that.
#
But then English liberates him.
#
This is again why Ambedkar wore a suit, because it was easy for Gandhi to renounce the suit
#
and dress in khadi and all of that, because he had the privilege.
#
For an Ambedkar, wearing that suit was a sense of identity, was a sense of, look, my ancestors
#
couldn't wear what they wanted.
#
They were only allowed a loincloth.
#
You, Gandhiji, can now discard the suit for the loincloth, because he can.
#
My ancestors could only wear the loincloth.
#
So now we're going to wear suits.
#
Now we're going to hold those bags.
#
Mayavati is going to hold her little leather purse, because it's a larger principle that
#
they're trying to project.
#
So yeah, a lot of this British thing, one of the complications in this whole British
#
equal to bad, Indians equal to good, is that lower caste Indians did find British rule
#
fairly generous towards them.
#
It created spaces for them.
#
It created, at least officially, it created a legal system where they could get their
#
A lot of times, a lot of Indian castes would not work in the British army, but a lot of
#
So they contributed that way.
#
There's that famous incident of the battle outside Pune, where the Mahars even now celebrate
#
it as a good thing, because that's where the British won over the Peshwas people.
#
And they see it as a good thing, because for them, the Peshwas are Brahmin.
#
The Peshwas are the ones who insist Mahars should walk around with a broom tied to their
#
waist and a pot around their neck so that the spit falls into the pot and the broom
#
wipes off their footsteps and things like that.
#
And these are the people, they supported the British and they defeated the Peshwas people.
#
So for them, that's a mark of identity, it's a mark of self-respect.
#
And just thinking aloud then is that one of the reasons that many traditionalists look
#
suspiciously at Western modernity and so on, because in a sense, it might bring economic
#
progress, but it threatens their social standing as well.
#
So Periyar has said it, Ambedkar said it, which is that this whole, I mean, I'm not
#
agreeing with what they said as fully, but their argument was that the whole nationalistic
#
movement was about Indian elites wanting to take over from British rulers.
#
So they just wanted to slip into the seat that the British had kept warm for them.
#
They didn't want to reform anything within the system.
#
They didn't want social upheaval.
#
Gandhi definitely didn't want any social upheaval.
#
He wanted peace socially, agitation politically.
#
So whereas the low-caste leaders all said, you can never have full freedom if you're
#
not willing to uproot an unjust social order.
#
But unfortunately, you know, that sort of message is never romantic and Ambedkar at
#
the end of the day, you need to be really serious to understand his message.
#
He was perhaps the most towering intellectual of his generation, far superior to Gandhi
#
But the thing is his message can't be romanticized.
#
It can't be turned into this grand narrative that people find appealing.
#
It's a very serious affair.
#
And because of that, the kind of attraction it has for large masses is lower because only
#
a certain type of person will prefer that over this grand notion of the Indian nation
#
and the romance of nationalism and all of that.
#
But the romance of nationalism conceals a lot of social injustice.
#
It conceals a lot of let's preserve the status quo.
#
And that is what the low-caste leaders stood up to.
#
And Ambedkar, even on the eve of independence, say about seven years before 1940s, early
#
40s, was saying things like the British don't distinguish between the departure of one tyrant
#
and the right of another tyrant to start oppressing the people below them.
#
So there's, you know, that sort of messaging in that as well, which is why even now, at
#
the end of the day, Dalit agitation is particularly scary for majoritarian groups because for
#
them that creates or that highlights and holds up a mirror to divisions within, which they
#
would rather avoid and create a pan-Indian Hindu identity.
#
But the point is, you know, when you say Hindu, that includes so many categories and you're
#
not willing to completely give up your sense of privilege within.
#
No, I actually agree with Ambedkar and Periyar on this.
#
And even outside the context of caste, I would hold that it is true that what we did in 1947
#
was replaced a set of colonial rulers with a set of brown-skinned rulers.
#
And this is true in context well beyond caste.
#
And I sort of, you know, I had Ram Guha on my show a few months ago talking about Gandhi.
#
We had a couple of episodes on this and in the second of those, which I'll link from
#
the show notes, we spoke about the whole Ambedkar versus Gandhi debates.
#
And I just there feel strongly on the side of Ambedkar because I think while Gandhi paid
#
lip service to caste upliftment, he also said things like this sentence, which you quote
#
in your book, a bhangi does for society what a mother does for a baby.
#
When you speak about how Gandhi, who was so patronizing on this subject, used to talk
#
about the beauty of compromise and social dynamics between the low who had answers to
#
seek and the high who had so much to lose.
#
And you know, and let's talk about Periyar a bit because the chapter was very fascinating
#
and it made me, I haven't read enough about Periyar, you know, so I instantly skipped
#
to the notes and I to figure out what books I should read.
#
And there's another great quote by Periyar on this where he says, if you have to choose
#
between killing a Brahmin or a snake, spare the snake.
#
And Periyar was the anti-Gandhi in ways other than just caste.
#
And I found him to be a really fascinating character.
#
Tell me a bit about him.
#
He was, you know, he could be very polemical, obviously, you know, this is a man who smashed
#
He used to garland, you know, images of Rama and all with chappals.
#
That was the kind of thing he did again if Periyar lived 50 years later, he'd probably
#
So when Gandhi renounced sex in his 30s, Periyar got married to a 30 year old in his 70s.
#
Gandhi wore white, Periyar wore black.
#
Gandhi said, you know, Ramaraja and things like that, Periyar said, no, atheism.
#
And when and most importantly, you know, Gandhi was all about preserving family and, you know,
#
women in their position.
#
He was a little conservative in that regard, whereas Periyar always said, women don't look
#
to men to liberate you because, you know, when have men ever liberated women?
#
Just like you can't expect a fox or something.
#
I'll read the quote out, you've got it in your book, which is, have cats ever feed rats?
#
Have foxes ever liberated goats or chickens?
#
Have whites ever enriched Indians?
#
Have Brahmins ever given non-Brahmins justice?
#
We can be confident that women will never be emancipated by men.
#
So, you know, the thing is he's polemical, but the thing is you need people like that.
#
It's a little bit like, you know, if you read Arundhati Roy today, you don't have to agree
#
with everything she does, but she does a service in the broader sense, which is that by holding
#
up these very uncomfortable positions, by using her influence to say certain things
#
which are not always agreeable, but it holds up a mirror, it makes us acknowledge that
#
we've got ugly sides to us that we have to recognize and acknowledge.
#
This is, to some extent, that's why I find Periyar fascinating, not because you agree
#
with everything he says, but because he asks a lot of uncomfortable questions.
#
At a time when it was very easy to blame the British, saying you are the villains and we
#
are these victims and we must all rally together, he kept saying, hold on, you're not all victims.
#
You know, some of you are privileged, some of you are pretty much in cahoots with the
#
There are other people who are the real victims here and you're not even acknowledging that.
#
So asking awkward questions really fascinates me because this is a time when the whole momentum
#
is with Gandhiji, the whole momentum is with the freedom struggle and all that.
#
And here's a man essentially being a little bit of a party pooper, but it was important
#
that he did it at that time because for a lot of people, you know, that clarified thought
#
that makes us realize that the battle is only half won, throwing out the British is only
#
one part of the beginning of a much larger battle and we haven't won those larger biobattles
#
And to that extent, Periyar has value.
#
So even though he's polemical and a little too, you know, he can be a rabble rouser even
#
And I wouldn't say, you know, you should go around putting chapals on people's idols.
#
His right to do it is his right, but you know, that's sort of, it's a little too blunt and
#
there was a lot of victimization of Brahmins as a result of that, which is also not entirely
#
But as I said, holding up a mirror is not always easy.
#
So for having done that, he deserves a certain amount of interest and acknowledgement.
#
And in fact, speaking of books, you know, Venkata Chalapati has been working for years
#
and years and years on Periyar and everyone's waiting for that book to come out because
#
he's, I think, the foremost Periyar scholar.
#
And once he finishes his book, I think we'll have a really good solid volume on Periyar.
#
Just reading it, I was just thinking, you know, looking back at what happened to guys
#
like Dabholkar and Pansri, and I was just thinking that, you know, Periyar would be
#
in a bit of actual trouble today.
#
Like there's this great quote with which you start the book, with which I fully agree,
#
quote, there is no God, there is no God at all.
#
He who created God is a fool.
#
He who propagates God is a scoundrel.
#
He who worships God is a barbarian.
#
And you know, the fact that he could actually say this, he started every public meeting
#
saying that, you know, where you have Gandhiji starting with bhajans and things like that.
#
This is what Periyar started his public meetings with.
#
So imagine, you know, these two towering figures of the time, they're essentially, you know,
#
pretty much contemporaries.
#
And you have one Gandhi in the north and one anti-Gandhi in the south.
#
And you see in the south, that's why even today, if you look at the south, in the south,
#
the freedom struggle was not so anti-British, it was also anti-caste, it was for social
#
Whether it's Kerala, Tamil Nadu, these were also part of the, of that struggle.
#
It wasn't merely about pushing the British out, which you can see that the reflections
#
of that in South Indian society, even today, you know, women are better off, you know,
#
the caste system exists, there is still caste violence and so on, but it's not as intense
#
as parts of northern India, because these issues were not completely neglected in the
#
So how central was Periyar to this?
#
Because like you said, the south is a peninsula, so it would automatically therefore because
#
The thing is Periyar, I think at sound level was handicapped by language, which is that
#
Tamil was his main medium of disseminating his message.
#
So his influence was largely in that area, but he did come to Kerala.
#
He's the one who, you know, took a proactive role in the Vaikam Satyagraha that ended up
#
throwing open roads around temples to Dalits.
#
So he did come like that, but, and famously said that when the Maharaja of Travancore
#
refused to allow it, he said, these roads are not the Maharaja's grandfather's property.
#
And this is Kerala at that time, the Maharaja of Travancore is the semi-divine figure, nobody
#
says anything against him.
#
And Periyar comes and says something like that in a place like Kerala, which was called
#
by Vivekananda lunatic asylum of caste, because it's so rigid and so orthodox.
#
So you get some influence elsewhere, but I think broadly in the Tamil space.
#
So for Amits like me who may not be very aware, tell me a little bit more about his influence
#
in Tamil culture and Tamil politics.
#
One is this whole rationalist influence, which is that, you know, this anti Brahminical Hinduism,
#
it wasn't, and you know, the highlighting of Dravidian culture, etc.
#
Now the funny thing is there again, missionaries have a role, they are the ones who first promoted
#
this Dravidian identity as very separate notion, and that was picked up into a political concept
#
by people like Periyar, where there was a sense of identity and they didn't see why
#
they had to merge with or become subsumed by Hindi nationalism or Hindu nationalism
#
They were proud to be Tamils, they were not very interested in some of these other messages
#
coming from further up north.
#
Then as I said, his rationalism is very interesting.
#
It obviously hasn't lasted in the sense that, you know, people are still devout in temples,
#
But if you look at all the Tamil political parties, whether it's a DMK or the AI DMK,
#
you know, they always pay lip service to this one man because his influence over local society
#
is so vast that you have to, he's essentially the local Gandhi, you know, you can't…
#
Do they pay lip service to him because he's like a Tamil icon or do they pay lip service
#
to him because of his ideas?
#
I think icon, it's a little bit like Gandhi's, you know, like his ideas, the moment he died,
#
all his ideas were put away in a basket and framed and put up in museums.
#
Many of them were quite dubious.
#
Yeah, they were pretty dubious and, you know, I have this essay saying what if Gandhi had
#
And the whole point is that if he had actually lived, he would have become a headache for
#
Nehru, most likely, and all the other people in power because suddenly you're in power.
#
It's very easy to say things when you're not in power.
#
So, you know, you can have romantic notions of the nation, freedom and all of that when
#
When you're in power, there's something called a budget.
#
There's the economy, there are social rival competing claims that need to be balanced.
#
There's industrialists on one side, labor on the other side, which means there's going
#
At that time, Gandhi ji, with his pious principles sitting above this whole edifice, you know,
#
saying things would have been an inconvenience, I suspect, for Nehru.
#
So, you know, it's a little bit like that, where Periyar also, some of the things he
#
did, they would never repeat today.
#
It would be impossible.
#
But, you know, you pay lip service, you always say that he's a great Tamil icon and therefore,
#
for that reason, give Periyar a certain amount of respect.
#
I was reading the chapter on him with great jealousy because you cite the title of one
#
of his op-eds, which is Honeymoon in the Hindu Zoo.
#
And, you know, I write a column for the Times of India and, man, if I suggested that as
#
a headline, there is no way to pass.
#
Today, it wouldn't fly.
#
Today, it simply wouldn't fly from this very serious subject of caste.
#
And while staying on the serious subject of caste, let's also go to some blood and violence.
#
You've got this great chapter.
#
I was actually half afraid by this time in the conversation, people would assume the
#
entire book is only about caste.
#
Yeah, which it isn't at all.
#
It's just one of the themes that I picked up on, but it's quite incidental.
#
There's nothing sort of polemical in your, your stories are basically bloodshed and violence
#
when I say that in a good way.
#
So there's this great chapter you have called the Bloody Monsoon of Vellore and caste creeps
#
Tell me a little bit about the Bloody Monsoon of Vellore.
#
So this is in the early 19th century, you know, there's this quest in India always to
#
find the first war against the British or the first war of independence.
#
I mean, the further back you go, there's always someone or the other fighting the British
#
somewhere or the other.
#
So there are different, each state has one version of when the first agitation against
#
the British took place.
#
In Vellore, we're in the early 19th century where Tipu's family is imprisoned in Vellore
#
There's the British who are there as the local garrison.
#
And well before 1857, about 45 years before 1857, what they do is they introduce new uniforms.
#
So they tell the men that you're all British soldiers, your moustaches need to be standardized,
#
your beards need to be standardized, your turban is going to be standardized, all of
#
Which in India, I mean, it's very convenient to look at this as a matter of costume.
#
But in India, costume signifies custom, it signifies caste.
#
One of the things about why clothes were regulated so much was because back in the day, how do
#
you tell a person's caste?
#
You should be able to tell at one glance what ornaments they're wearing, what their hairstyle
#
You know, in Kerala, for example, the mund or the variant of the lungi that we wear,
#
if it's above the knee, your lower caste, below the knee is higher caste.
#
So you can tell based simply on that much of an indicator.
#
Certain castes were out, certain kinds of jewelry, certain castes were not.
#
So in Wellor also, when different soldiers from different castes suddenly told that they
#
should have the same moustache and they should have the same hat and things like that, they
#
were a little upset because for them, it looked like they were being Christianized, they were
#
being secretly converted without realizing, and they were lampooned by a lot of people.
#
And the funny thing is the British thought the whole rebellion or the mutiny was provoked
#
Some of Tipu's family's attendants used to, you know, sort of giggle at these people saying
#
you're all essentially British, behaving like British chelas, topiwalas, and you're losing
#
your caste identity and your original identity.
#
But beyond that, they were not very, very, you know, involved in it.
#
But the British were so embarrassed that it was something as silly as costume and moustaches
#
that caused this mutiny that they eventually determined that it had to be Tipu's family.
#
And you know, Tipu's family was penalized and they were all sent off to Calcutta and
#
But it wasn't actually them.
#
It was simply the fact that they were trying to meddle with caste.
#
And it's quite funny the way the British reacted and the way they were initially like, there's
#
a great quote by here on where an officer later said that they couldn't believe what
#
happened because, quote, the natives of Hindustan are meek and submissive beyond any other example
#
in national characters, stop quote.
#
This is a uniform in the rebellion.
#
This I think is from a parliamentary committee report that inquired into this afterwards.
#
And remember, this is also in those days, communication is very slow, right?
#
So by the time the rebellions happened and it happened, ended everything, it's only months
#
later that London hears the news.
#
Then London, of course, is in a panic because they don't know what's happened since and
#
they know six months have passed, but they have no idea whether the rebellions, you know,
#
been put down, what's happening, et cetera.
#
So there's lots of like, you know, miscommunication and all of that also happening.
#
But yeah, it's quite funny that the British, even changing, you know, uniforms and changing
#
people's facial hair could provoke such violence because people took these things very seriously.
#
And I love this line also, quote, retribution was swift.
#
This is when the British retake the fort, quote, retribution was swift of the 1500 Indian
#
troops present, about 400 were killed immediately.
#
Some of them blown out of cannons, presumably to transmit the message far and wide.
#
How do you blow someone out of a cannon?
#
You hit it with the gunpowder, whatever, tie them on it and then, you know, that's how
#
It's also supposed to be very painless because they don't really feel it.
#
But how do you know they don't feel it?
#
No, I mean, it was considered a merciful way of execution as late as the 1870s.
#
They were still doing it.
#
So, you know, this was considered a merciful way of execution because for the person, it
#
was quick before they knew it, they were dead.
#
But for the people witnessing, it was such horror that it, you know, made the message
#
The body gets blown into pieces.
#
Like imagine, you know, people's flesh landing on different, you know, parts of that, that
#
It was just disgusting.
#
Like if you want to make a web series, kindly incorporate this scene.
#
And for countries which debate, like which have capital punishment and which debate the
#
most painless way to go, if this is as painless as we say it is.
#
I know, 200 years ago our ancestors were still in this phase.
#
So, you know, we've come a long way, but it's also very easy to slip back.
#
And now we shall take a quick commercial break.
#
And when we come back, we'll talk less about caste and more about gender.
#
Welcome to another great week on the IBM Podcast Network.
#
If you're not following us on social media, please make sure you do.
#
We're IBM Podcasts on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
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On our social media, one of the things we do is if you send us a screenshot of what
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you're listening to, we will repost it on our social networks so that people can see
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that what people are listening to, put us some comments and we'll respond to them.
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Also want to let people know that we're still hiring, we're looking for producers, content
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creators, audio engineers, developers, designers and business roles and basically all kinds
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Go to the careers page on IBM Podcast dot com or send us an email at careers at indusvox.com.
#
Wanted to announce two new shows that we are starting Tech Careers in the New and Agla
#
Tech Careers in the New is a brand new podcast presented by Accenture is hosted by our very
#
own Sheelan Ditya Mukhopadhyay, my co-host on Junior One.
#
On this show, he's talking to Accenture leaders about the latest and greatest in the world
#
of technology and gives exclusive tips on technology careers, how to grab opportunities
#
Watch out for fortnightly episodes on Wednesdays starting July 3rd.
#
The other new show that we're launching this week is an exciting show called Agla Station
#
Adulthood, where best friends Ritasha Rathore and Ayushi Amin ride through the various stations
#
Whether you're in your mid-twenties, just entering them or about to cross into the next
#
decade, tune into this fun show.
#
On Cyrus Says, bestselling author Amit Shrapart, he talks to Cyrus about the shared universe
#
of all his books, the rich and inclusive history of ancient India and his new book in the Ramchandra
#
series, Raavan, Enemy of Aryavarta.
#
On Equity Saiye, Shrey Lunkar, senior VP at Motilal Oswal AMC, talks to Anupam about the
#
pharma sector in India.
#
On Advertising is Dead, Varun Duggirala is in conversation with the founders of Pocket
#
Aces, Ashwin Suresh and Aniruddh Pandit.
#
They discuss the growth and potential of the Indian digital content market.
#
On Mr. and Mrs. Binge Watch, Janice and Aniruddh recommend shows that are easy to watch.
#
Join them as they talk about the TV shows Love, Crashing and Lovesick.
#
On the 25th episode of Golgappa, Tripti is joined by film director Vikram Farnes.
#
He talks about how he started his journey from being a fashion designer to becoming
#
a movie director and his upcoming Marathi movie Smile Please.
#
Also, our host Tripti plays an important part in this movie.
#
On Not Just Dansaar, Parzen talks to Chef Viraf Patel about Parsi fusion food.
#
They discuss innovation versus traditional food in the Parsi food circles.
#
On Puliyabazi, Pranayam Saurabh talks with investor and trader Harsh Vohra to better
#
understand the tussle between the Reserve Bank of India and the Indian government.
#
And with that, let's continue with your show.
#
Welcome back to the Seen on the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with the historian Manu Pillay about his book The Courtesan, The Mahatma and
#
And one of your early stories is very fascinating.
#
It's titled The Tale of Two Shakuntalas, but they weren't actually two Shakuntalas.
#
There was one and at the same time there were kind of two, tell me a little bit about that.
#
So you know, there is, what is our general knowledge of Shakuntala?
#
She's this woman, there's this king, he departs, you know, they have this wonderful union and
#
they're in love or whatever.
#
Then he departs giving her a ring, saying this, you know, it's a token that he's given
#
And then, you know, one day Sage comes and she's a little distracted because she's lost
#
her heads in the clouds and all of that.
#
So Sage curses her saying that the man who you're thinking about, he will forget you.
#
But then everyone runs to the Sage and says, oh my God, you know, poor girl, whatever,
#
So he says, okay, fine.
#
When you present the ring, he will remember you.
#
Now on the way to the king's court later and she's pregnant, the ring gets lost.
#
And then when she gets there, the king doesn't recognize her and she feels insulted and she
#
And later a fish, it turns out, has swallowed the ring and the fish is brought, the ring
#
is then finally, it ends up in court.
#
And that's when the king realizes and all of that and he goes on a quest and finds Shakuntala
#
again and finds his son and all of that years later.
#
So son's already grown up by then.
#
But the funny thing is this is Kalidasa Shakuntala.
#
This is the popular Shakuntala that the British also popularized.
#
William Jones, for example, translated this Shakuntala into his play Shakuntala, The Fatal
#
You know, and this is the one that was staged in Europe and all of that.
#
So this is the one that we've largely consumed over the last few generations because people
#
think this is the original story.
#
But the interesting thing is that the original Shakuntala story appears in the epics in the
#
Mahabharata, but it's very different.
#
Dushyanta comes, he's in the middle of a hunt, lands in this hermitage and he says, who's
#
And there's no servant.
#
Shakuntala comes out and introduces herself and starts talking and he says, oh, who's
#
this woman with the wonderful thighs and wonderful, this buxom lady and all of that.
#
And he says, horny Brahmins is one of the themes of yours.
#
This is Kshatriya King, by the way, but this man essentially says, lie with me, oh, beautiful
#
And she, you know, first she says, oh, well, should I, should I not?
#
Then she finally says, okay, why not?
#
And there's this convenient form of marriage called Gandharva Vivaha where, you know, it
#
makes up for lack of ritual and patience because you can simply go ahead and do what you want
#
and pretend that it was done and that the marriage is ready.
#
So she says, fine, but the son born from this should be King.
#
So she, to begin with, imposes a condition.
#
So she's not a completely innocent, you know, helpless woman who won't even talk, she's
#
such a shy, docile woman, whereas this Shakuntala is pretty straightforward.
#
So she says, my son must be ruler.
#
They consummate the thing.
#
Now, the funny thing is in this Shakuntala, her pregnancy lasts 36 months, pregnant for
#
And finally she's had the son and she takes him to court and there she, you know, says,
#
look, as keep your word now, I've brought your son to you.
#
This must be your heir.
#
And the funny thing is here, there's no ring.
#
The ring, as it happens, is inspired by a Buddhist story that's completely different
#
and Kalidasa borrows from there and a bunch of others also borrow from there.
#
In the original story, there's no ring.
#
Tushant has deliberately lied because what he says is, you know, there are birds that
#
lay their eggs and other birds nests.
#
So if I, in my court, if I openly accept the strange woman coming here with a child that
#
this is my child, what would my people think of me?
#
So he says, you know, no, no, no, you know, he starts insulting her, but again, she doesn't
#
She says, you know, my birth is higher than yours.
#
And whether or not you acknowledge, you know, you rule the earth, I fly in disguise.
#
And whether or not you acknowledge your son, he's going to be an even greater king than
#
That's when there's a divine voice that says, oh no, she is speaking the truth.
#
And then the king says, yes, yes, yes, you are speaking the truth.
#
I was just testing you and things like that.
#
So it's funny that, you know, there's still that patriarchal angle to it.
#
But this Shakuntala is definitely not a shy Shakuntala.
#
She has no issues speaking to men.
#
She doesn't need her maids in attendance to talk for her.
#
There's no curse that takes the story outside human action into divine or, you know, fate,
#
It's about humans, human beings and their choices and their actions.
#
And Dushyanta deliberately lies and Shakuntala deliberately stands up for herself.
#
That's the difference between the two stories.
#
And conveniently, we've forgotten the original Shakuntala.
#
And we've popularized this other Shakuntala, who's now this ideal of womanhood and Indian
#
wifely conduct and all of that, where she's sweet and doesn't say anything and, you know,
#
And this kind of recasting of strong independent women into how you would like to see them
#
Like you have many chapters on women in your book.
#
You talk about how Meenakshi, for example, was recast from a warrior queen to a loving
#
goddess because that's more palatable, I suppose.
#
In a patriarchal society, you also talk about Meera Bhai, who was recast as, you know, an
#
icon of feminine, God-loving devotion.
#
Meera has become this big Krishna Bhakta, but we forget the fact that she stood up to
#
what Rajput notions of Bido's honor was.
#
She said, no, you know, I'm going to meet men.
#
I'm going to meet these other devotees.
#
I have no issues interacting with other men.
#
So long as I'm clear within my mind what my interest is, which is God, I don't see why
#
you should have issues with who I meet and what sages I'm hanging out with and all of
#
So, but then we conveniently forget that aspect, we conveniently forget the way she stands
#
She stands up to her brother-in-law who's trying to sort of, you know, make her live this typical
#
life of a widow, the prescribed life that is meant for a widow who's not committed
#
And that is all forgotten.
#
Instead, she's usually presented as this Krishna Bhakta.
#
Her devotion to God is one thing because you want that in your wives and daughters, but
#
you don't want your wives and daughters to question you, to question patriarchal institutions,
#
to have the freedom to meet who they want, to articulate ideas that they like and to
#
So that, you know, we always pick and choose very cleverly, even these inconvenient women,
#
we end up choosing something that is relatively less inconvenient and making that the main
#
When in reality, they had so many other layers and so much more texture to their personalities.
#
And in your chapter on Meera Bhai, you in fact contrast her with Padmavati, the possibly
#
fictional Padmavati, who is, you know, who fits that notion of a woman who will, you
#
know, commit sati rather than whatever and who doesn't really have a voice of her own
#
That's interesting, right, like Meera Bhai existed and a Padmavati is, as you said, very
#
likely fictional, but they had to create that Padmavati to hold up that ideal of womanhood.
#
And even Meera Bhai, you have to recast her to, you know, be comfortable with sort of
#
Another really fascinating chapter in your book, a pithy short chapter, is called The
#
Lost Begum of Amadnagar, which is about this remarkable woman called Khunza Humayun.
#
And she's really extraordinary and in a sense, you know, her daughter, Chand Bibi is remembered
#
Chand Bibi also makes an appearance in Rebel Sultan's, your earlier book, which we discussed.
#
I think we discussed in the last episode.
#
But people don't speak so often of Khunza Humayun and you do, of course, in your great
#
Tell me a bit about it.
#
So the funny thing is, you know, Khunza was a footnote.
#
Initially, there was a paragraph dedicated to her in my second book and my editor said,
#
look, this is a little out of the way, so can we, you know, get rid of this bit?
#
So she ends up being mentioned in passing in a footnote.
#
She's not mentioned by name in the main text, but she appears in the footnote.
#
But I always thought, you know, there's so much more to this lady because she, you know,
#
we have this habit of glorifying women if they're either masculine in the way they go
#
For example, Rani Lakshmi Bhai of Jhansi, she, you know, she dies fighting, therefore
#
there's some valor attached to her.
#
Or they have to be big bhakti people and therefore there's another kind of virtue attached to
#
Or you have to die with Sati or something.
#
Something dramatically, you know, tragic has to happen with you for you to be respected.
#
Because on the other hand, she has naked ambition, you know, this is a woman whose husband is
#
deeply in love with her.
#
He, you know, he and she, she clearly was advising him in matters of state, et cetera.
#
When he dies in 1565, soon after defeating Vijayanagara and, you know, breaking that
#
empire for good, she becomes regent for their son, but she's very interested in power herself.
#
So the thing is there are several attempts by noblemen to get rid of this, this woman
#
because they find her meddlesome and problematic, but she won't give up that easily.
#
But finally they succeed and they go and get her son to push her out.
#
And the funny thing is because she doesn't go down fighting valorously like her daughter
#
Chand Bibi, who dies, you know, in the midst of the Mughal siege and so on.
#
She rots away in jail and her son is so hateful of her ambition and her general interest in
#
governing and administration that not only does he wipe her out of records, he even paints
#
her out of miniature paintings.
#
Paintings that showed her with her late husband, the boy's father, you know, in his lab sitting
#
next to him, et cetera, you can see these miniature paintings where the Nizam Shah of
#
Ahmed Nagar, the husband is still intact and there are maids and servants, et cetera, in
#
But next to him, you'll see this blob.
#
The blob is what used to be Khunza Humayun, but which her son had painted over because
#
he's completely unhappy with this lady.
#
And because as I said, she didn't die at the end of a sword.
#
There's nobody to even sing her songs of romantic songs about her.
#
She was a woman who, you know, represented ambition as a man would have it.
#
So there was no, no glory for her, no poets for her.
#
And there's a little interesting nugget in your chapter on her, on how she may have been
#
sort of a cause of the war against Vijayanagar, you know, because her husband gets offended
#
when there's an inflammatory letter sent from the Raya of Vijayanagar, where besides demanding
#
tribute, he also demands along with diamonds and rubies, the anklets of the begum.
#
This is obviously stirs as patriarchal.
#
This is based on one account and which is a sort of poetic account.
#
It may not really have happened that way.
#
But the thing is, what's interesting is if you read one of Sanjay Rishabramanian's essays
#
and it's a chapter in one of his books also, there's a thing called Kotle insults, because
#
even kings when they exchanged insults, it was done with a, with great style.
#
So Vijayanagar, you know, sends this message saying, send me so many rubies and send me
#
so many diamonds, et cetera, but they also want the begum's anklets because they're making
#
And, you know, it's not like the Deccan sultans were any less, even they used to know how
#
There was this time in my second book where, you know, one of the Bahmani sultans, there's
#
this beautiful goldsmith's daughter in, in Rai Chur and the Rai of Vijayanagar wants
#
her and he comes and sort of seizes her and this man says, no, no, you can't have her.
#
And then he goes and there's a big war.
#
He not only, you know, he, he not only defeats Vijayanagar, that poor girl ends up becoming
#
married to the sultan's son, who, as we were discussing earlier, gets blinded and, you
#
know, spends the rest of his life in oblivion.
#
So there's a lot of this Kotle insult, a tradition also going back and forth.
#
And this was one of those instances where Kunza Humayun's anklets became one of the
#
things that riled up her husband.
#
But for all, you know, it was just an excuse to, to go to war.
#
The war was anyway coming up regardless of whether or not the Begum's anklets were involved.
#
And I wonder how these guys would have done in the time of Twitter.
#
Another great chapter in your book, which I really enjoyed as a woman who had no reason
#
Tell me a bit about Muddupalani.
#
Is that the correct translation?
#
This is, you know, one of those 18th century courtesans.
#
And one of the things is, you know, one of the titles, the title is Courtesan, the Mahatma
#
and the Italian Brahmin.
#
The Italian Brahmin, there's only one, which is, which we've already discussed.
#
The Mahatma, you would think it's Mahatma Gandhi, but Fule was also a Mahatma.
#
You know, it's open to interpretation, which Mahatma you're talking about.
#
But the courtesan, there are several courtesans.
#
There's, you know, the so-called Bhagmati, after whom Hyderabad is named, but she for
#
all, you know, never existed and was always a figment of somebody's imagination.
#
There's Begum Samru, who in the late 18th century, early 19th century was equally ally
#
of the British and protector of the Mughal emperor, which is, she began as a dancing
#
girl and was married to all these foreigners.
#
There's Muddupalani in the 18th century, who wrote erotica and famously this, this work
#
called Radhika Santonam, where, you know, what's interesting is there is, I referred
#
to Shetraya earlier, where, you know, God is treated as a customer on his way to his
#
And there is a lot of eroticism.
#
One of the Nayaka rulers in, during the Nayaka period in Tamil Nadu, one of his wives, you
#
know, she talks about, there's a lot of sexual energy that's, that's, being a king meant
#
you had to have a lot of sexual energy.
#
Even one of the Nayakas, when he was praised by his son, you know, in a work the son composed,
#
he talks about how many women his father had around him and seduced and he made love to
#
an astonishing number of women and things like that, because that was part of manly
#
But what's interesting with Muddupalani is, here it's a woman's sexual desire that becomes
#
The theme is that, you know, Radha is getting her niece Ila married to Krishna, and she's
#
going to prepare her and she's telling her, you know, we must bear his cloying and this
#
is how love, this is how you make love to somebody and all of that.
#
And then she takes Ila to the bedchamber and delivers her there.
#
And then once Radha comes back to her own room, she's completely consumed by jealousy
#
because she thinks, oh, this woman with a body as soft as bananas is going to sort of
#
replace me in Krishna's mind and heart.
#
And the rest of the thing is about how Krishna appeases her.
#
But it's not just that Radha is jealous about the new woman.
#
She also demands and extracts from Krishna physical satisfaction.
#
So there's this one time where, you know, Krishna complains that, you know, even if
#
I tell her I'm not in a mood, she jumps on bed and starts the game of love.
#
And he's almost frustrated by it because he can't quite satisfy the lady because she's
#
quite determined in that sense.
#
So what's central is this woman's desire, her right to desire, her right to affection
#
And that is something that scandalized a lot of people later in the 19th century.
#
So much so that the first person to try and translate her and resurrect Muddupalani again
#
in the late 19th century changed her name to Muddupalani because, you know, if you pretend
#
it's a man writing about these things, it's still a little acceptable in society to pretend
#
that a woman wrote this, a woman is talking openly about sex and desire in the 18th century,
#
that people would have found completely scandalizing.
#
There was this critic who said that, you know, her Sanskrit is great, you know, there is
#
charm in her verses and so on.
#
But essentially he ended up saying that she's a whore.
#
You can't take her words too seriously, you know, what is she talking?
#
And the content is horrible, even if the language and the sentences are beautiful and what she's
#
expressing is scandalous.
#
Critics have always been assholes.
#
Critics are not very pleasant people.
#
And you know, it's a Devdasi who finally resurrects her.
#
And even then the book is banned and there's, you know, all of that happening.
#
It takes laughter independence for the story to be, to again come back into the mainstream.
#
Even then it's only in the 80s where two lady scholars were writing this huge collection
#
of Indian women and their place in literature and they're trying to resurrect her and they
#
also run into lots of barriers where people are embarrassed or ashamed to talk about her
#
But clearly Mudaparni, at the time she was a gem.
#
She was respected by the by the Maratha king.
#
She was a very prominent figure in this court and she in her own preamble before the work
#
talks about how famous and how celebrated she is as a courtesan as well as as a creative
#
But clearly in one century things can change.
#
And is it unusual in itself that a woman was writing Sanskrit verses like back in the day?
#
Like it wasn't too, this wasn't in Sanskrit.
#
But even Telugu had great prestige.
#
Now you're talking about a literary tradition with a thousand years behind it.
#
But Devdasis, it's not unusual because Devdasis were literate.
#
They were well-educated.
#
They had creative tastes and that was promoted at one time.
#
It was only by the late Victor and Ibrahim, even Viceroy's, et cetera, you know, there's
#
the story of how one of these Viceroy's came to inaugurate a bridge or something and he
#
was treated to this natch performance and all of that.
#
And one of the performers was MS Subbulakshmi's grandmother or great-grandmother or one of
#
Because even in the British period, they used to have natch performances.
#
They used to have Dasis coming and dancing.
#
But by the late 19th century, early 20th century, there was this taboo attached to it.
#
And you have the whole Rukmini Arendale phenomenon where Bharatanatyam, for example, which is
#
called Sardar, you invent this word Bharatanatyam or you find it from some obscure corner because
#
it suddenly sounds more Sanskritic.
#
You remove all the sensuous elements from the dance.
#
You completely make it de-sensuous, de-sensuousize it or whatever, I don't know what the word
#
And, you know, make it a chaste Brahminical art form because then Brahminical daughters
#
So the Devadasi becomes a prostitute.
#
It was true that a lot of them were, you know, also selling their bodies due to various reasons.
#
It was true that their notions of sexual propriety were very different, but it was a change in
#
morality that eventually made the Devadasi tradition fade.
#
And it was also that same phenomenon that caused a muddu palani to suddenly become some sort
#
of receptacle of sin rather than a creative figure who actually achieved something in
#
And is there somewhere where we can actually, like, does the original non-de-sexualized
#
version of Bharatanatyam still exist?
#
I think, you know, Balasaraswati, who comes from a Devadasi tradition, she continued that.
#
In Bangalore a few days ago at dinner, I met a lady whose family, she learned Bharatanatyam
#
from one of these old families that had nato earners and they still teach that old tradition.
#
But real influence, what you learn in the big cities often is the Arendale school or
#
the de-sexualized, de-sensualized version of Bharatanatyam.
#
Let's kind of move on now to the courtesan who I assumed was the subject of your title
#
because she is just spectacular.
#
Your chapter is called The Courtesan Who Became a Princess and this obviously is Begum Sumru.
#
And I'll just quote this incredible line from your first paragraph on her.
#
She had launched her career as a dancing girl, not only rising to become the begum of sardana,
#
but also to win the affection of the Mughal emperor who styled her zebun nissa, jewel
#
among women, Farzand-e-Azizi, beloved daughter, and even Umdat-al-Arakin, pillar of the state.
#
She had spent her youth by the side of a much older German lover, inheriting his fortune
#
and lands, and later joined a Frenchman in a doomed marriage, stop quote.
#
And like you said at the start of the episode, there was also an Irishman somewhere in there.
#
I mean, she married her Frenchman, her troops didn't like it very much, so they tied her
#
to a gun and left her out for days in the sun, and this is peak summer in North India,
#
So, you know, it wasn't easy at all, even the old armies and all of that, when you're
#
a woman, these men have expectations.
#
I mean, one of the reasons was she didn't marry the right officer.
#
It wasn't that she'd married a Frenchman, it was that he wasn't liked very much.
#
He was a very unpopular character who had showed up somewhere in the middle, and when
#
she married him, they didn't quite approve of it.
#
And they killed him, right?
#
Some say she had a role in it, that it was all, you know, she'd conspired for it to
#
But yeah, he ended up dying quite badly.
#
And, you know, just reading about her adventures, I mean, I thought this is like an 18th century
#
Bonnie and Clyde kind of situation.
#
Her husband was most wanted by the British, you know, till he died.
#
In fact, they were very upset when he died quietly because they always wanted to capture
#
him because he'd massacred a number of Englishmen earlier in the 18th century, in the mid 18th
#
Yeah, he, a massacre, as you describe it, of dozens of Englishmen in Patna.
#
The prisoners were invited to dinner and after his guests were in full security, protected
#
as they imagined by the laws of hospitality, he ordered his men to fall upon them and cut
#
their throats, stop quote, which almost seems a sort of a banal way of killing someone just
#
I haven't watched Game of Thrones, but there's this thing called the Red Wedding where this
#
happens to one of the characters.
#
This is what it reminded me of where everyone's sitting at dinner and then suddenly they're
#
I haven't seen Game of Thrones shock shock, but you know, why do I need to when I'm surrounded
#
In fact, Game of Thrones ended with great disappointment.
#
Indian history luckily never disappoints.
#
Let's move on now to a woman who also kind of appeals to the libertarian in me.
#
This chapter is called the woman with no breasts and it's about Nangeli.
#
Tell me a bit about Nangeli and how the traditional image of the traditional narrative about Nangeli
#
isn't all that there is to it.
#
Nangeli is actually very controversial now because there's a whole set of people on especially
#
right-wing Twitter warriors who say that Nangeli never existed because they said where is the
#
Where is the documentation that she existed?
#
This is actually, it actually opens up a very interesting question about history itself,
#
which is that this whole privileging of documents is again connected to class and caste.
#
Now if you want documents to exist to be of the right caste and the right class, only
#
literate people have documents.
#
You know, where are the lower caste people going to keep documents when you're not even
#
allowed to learn the alphabet?
#
Where are you going to write your documents and records?
#
The characters exist in folklore and you know, traditions and song.
#
That's where you find the stories.
#
Now the point is a lot of it, it's like, it could be like a Padmavati where this is an
#
invented character, but it's also likely equally that given she's such a strong presence that
#
such a person may have existed and at some point embellishments were made to the story
#
or whatever, but there is some kernel of truth to it.
#
There's definitely a tribal story that was recorded, very similar outline in the early
#
20th century in one of these gazetteers or whatever, the British, but this is not a tribal
#
She's a lower caste woman in Kerala and people often think, the general story that's out
#
there is that, you know, in Kerala you had to pay taxes to cover your breasts if you
#
So one day they came to collect this tax from her called the breast tax and she just cut
#
off her breasts and gave it to them and collapse.
#
Now the funny thing is this had actually nothing to do with breasts, breasts covering breasts
#
in Kerala was not done.
#
In fact, it was considered indecent to cover yourself because the only people who covered
#
themselves were Muslims, for example.
#
So why would an upper caste person wear that sort of thing?
#
The first Brahmin woman to wear a blouse in the 1920s was excommunicated because she was
#
considered as though she was flouting all norms that existed.
#
Brahmin men were not allowed to wear shirts.
#
It was considered rebellious when they sat down to meals with their shirts on.
#
You know, so there was a lot of this notion that covering breasts is what this was about
#
Covering breasts was, there's this funny anecdote and I always repeat this wherever I get a
#
Aubrey Menon, who's this novelist, who's one of his books was the first to be banned in
#
His mother was Irish and his father was a Malayali, a Menon.
#
And this Irish woman had been married and brought by her father, by the husband to India
#
and he was going to introduce her to his mother.
#
So the mother-in-law sends a maid or someone to sort of summon her new daughter-in-law
#
from wherever she was and the maid comes running back saying that, oh no, no, but she's sitting
#
there with her breasts covered and the mother-in-law says if she's covering herself like that,
#
she must be preparing for adultery because no dignified woman would feel the need to
#
You know, there's another anecdote I remember, someone in Trivandrum told me how under pressure
#
from the British resident and missionaries, the Maharaja of Trivandrum said that all the
#
women working in the palace must now start wearing blouses.
#
And they all obeyed because it's the Maharaja's command, but every time they exited the gate
#
of the palace, they'd get rid of the blouses because they didn't want people outside to
#
see them wearing the clothes of a harlot because you had to be a slut if you were wearing blouses.
#
Another very colorful story is of this social reformer in Trissur, apparently, who said
#
he was going to reform Naya women in Kerala and take out a procession of women wearing
#
blouses and these women all wore blouses and they were going to go out in a procession
#
except they didn't realize there was such a large gathering to look at the sight of
#
women wearing blouses that they got embarrassed and very self-conscious and in public removed
#
their blouses and ran away from there.
#
So there are these fascinating stories about how covering the breast in Kerala till the
#
1940s was not a big deal.
#
Nobody covered their breasts.
#
It was very slowly that the blouse became normal.
#
In Nangeli's case, although the tax is called breast tax, it had nothing to do with the
#
Every low-caste person had to pay the poll tax.
#
For men, it was called talakaram or head tax.
#
For women to distinguish them, it was called molakaram or breast tax.
#
So when these taxmen came to her place, they were asking for a regular poll tax and this
#
is a woman who is impoverished.
#
She doesn't have anything to eat.
#
She's pushed to the wall completely and that's when she decides, okay, it's called molakaram
#
I'm just going to cut my breast, put it in a plantain leaf and give it to them and she
#
And there's a place where it's called moluchi paramba or the spot where the woman cut her
#
breasts off and died and bled to death.
#
Her husband also dies tragically apparently, although that may be a little bit of a stretch
#
that he jumped into the flames where she was burning and all of that.
#
As I said, it could have been embellished over time, but Nangeli was essentially standing
#
up to a caste thing where lower caste people had to pay a special tax because they were
#
She was not standing up to cover her breast because covering her breasts was this Victorian
#
thing that came much later.
#
But people later picked up the story to make it about breast covering, to promote breast
#
In fact, she was a virtuous woman who wanted to cover her breasts and she sacrificed for
#
the cause of virtue, which is not true.
#
She was fighting caste, not trying to impose or introduce patriarchal virtue into Kerala.
#
In fact, you've called it a siren call against caste and the rotting feudalism that victimized
#
those in a Sunday belly stop quote.
#
But I'd also say that it's in a sense beyond that also in a broader sense, it's a protest
#
against oppression as represented by bad taxes and the predatory state and all that, which
#
is why this was a state where even the kind of mustache you wore depended on how much
#
So the one you twirl up, for example, you'll be charged for it.
#
You're not supposed to do that.
#
So Shikhar Dhawan would have had to pay a heavy tax and also in the course of telling
#
me about Nangeli, it also strikes me as interesting how colonialism also made us a more prudish
#
society in some ways, not just in the covering up of breasts, but so many of our values kind
#
There's a chapter on the Kama Sutra here about how it was published anonymously with a fictitious
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
This is one of those funny stories where this man, this Englishman wants to publish this,
#
but obviously there are all these laws about obscenity and what you can publish and can't.
#
So he creates this fake organization called the Hindu Kama Shastra Society, which never
#
existed, doesn't put his name on the publication, goes ahead and translates and to get past
#
lots of Victorian laws, he uses Sanskrit words which don't actually exist in the original,
#
for example, you know, there's Yoni, for example, et cetera, is something he's decided to use
#
And it's not in the Sanskrit.
#
And it's not actually there because he's trying to sort of bypass certain words he doesn't
#
He doesn't want to use words like vagina, penis or whatever and therefore he'll say
#
So the funny thing is that Kama Sutra is not about bedroom gymnastics.
#
It's not merely about sex.
#
That's merely, you know, one component of it.
#
A lot of it is about grooming.
#
It's a text that recommends that men every 10 days should wax themselves because that's
#
what a cultured man does.
#
You should go and get rid of all the hair on your body because that is what, you know,
#
is good behavior for men also.
#
It tells you how to woo your sweetheart and apparently the way to a woman's heart is by
#
recruiting her wet nurse's daughter and her best friend to your side.
#
You know, so it gives you a lot of Arthashastra type, you know, cunning shrewd recommendations
#
on how you can get your way around, you know, inconvenient romances and so on.
#
And some of the advices like toxic masculinity, for example, at one place it says that, you
#
know, you can't marry a woman without her consent.
#
And another place it says that one form of marriage is to basically sedate the lady and
#
And then it's not even making sense to others.
#
To get the lady drunk and take her maiden head, seduction by sexual assault.
#
But the larger sort of point here is that the British brought with them also this Victorian
#
morality and that spread itself through Indian society as well.
#
In fact, a lot of what we think is, you know, timeless Indian tradition is actually Victorian.
#
It's all been created in the last 150 years.
#
If you actually start looking at the kind of material we have in our history, you know,
#
today if I were to say, you know, paint God as a customer on his way to his favorite courtesan's
#
room where she now yells at him saying that, why did I saw you with that other courtesan?
#
Why are you coming here?
#
People would not accept it.
#
Whereas that is the kind of thing we did.
#
In the 18th century, a Maratha prince, you know, parodying the caste system.
#
That is the kind of Indian history that actually existed.
#
But we think all our ancestors were always, their spines were erect and they always sat
#
with great dignity and they were supremely boring people who only sang bhajans all day.
#
They were made of flesh and blood.
#
They were human beings, you know, they had strengths and weaknesses.
#
They had a sense of humor.
#
They were, you know, they were complicated people like us.
#
I always say that, you know, this notion of a golden age, etc.
#
We call it a golden age.
#
They didn't wake up in the morning thinking this is a golden age.
#
That's not how they went about their business.
#
And you know, we should remember that.
#
The first thing we should realize is historical figures are not gods sitting on a pedestal.
#
By doing that to them, that reveals our insecurities that we want them to be gods on a pedestal.
#
Whereas in reality, they were much more mixed and much more pretty much as screwed up as
#
we are as human beings even today.
#
And they had to negotiate various realities in their life and they were able to do it
#
with greater confidence.
#
You know, if a Shahu in the 18th century could have such a sense of humor with this Dalit
#
woman talking Artha, Shastra, Dharma and all of that, and a Brahmin saying, well, you eat
#
the cow so you must be pure, you know, he was much more culturally secure and confident.
#
He didn't need any sort of approval from anywhere else.
#
Whereas we now, we've been so, colonization wasn't merely colonization of territories,
#
We were made to feel guilty about everything.
#
In Kerala, you know, toplessness was one thing, so the British were very aghast that even
#
the queens are walking around topless.
#
The other thing was the marriage system among the Nayas, there was polyandry existed.
#
There's something called sambandham where all you give is a cloth and the marriage is
#
done and when you want, you can divorce.
#
My great great grandmother had, you know, she first married a Brahmin, then they had
#
a stillbirth, which was a girl, and in the matrilineal system, having a dead girl is
#
So when he came home to collect her, her mother stopped him at the threshold saying, go away,
#
we don't want to see you again.
#
You know, that was the end of the marriage in the 1880s, whereas, you know, by, in that
#
same place, by the early 20th century, people said, no, no, wives must be devoted lifelong
#
A woman's job is not managing property.
#
A woman's job is to take care of the kids, let men handle economic matters.
#
So the matrilineal system gives way to a patriarchal system.
#
The irony being the matrilineal system is abolished by a maharani who became maharani
#
because of the matrilineal system.
#
Her, she was considered a great reformer because in the Travancore royal family, the maharani's
#
husband is only the consort.
#
The consort can't sit in the presence of his wife.
#
He can't call his royal wife by name.
#
He has to call her your highness.
#
At feasts in the palace, the maharani served four varieties of dessert.
#
Her husband is served two varieties of dessert.
#
She has a 21 gun salute.
#
He has a rifle salute of say one or two guns, like that's all.
#
So his status is very low.
#
But the British are very pleased because, you know, for example, the rule is that when
#
she goes out and drives, her husband is not supposed to sit in the same car because he's
#
So when she starts driving in the same car with him, they're like, ah, wow, wow, wow.
#
She's, you know, giving her husband status.
#
Similarly, when she starts consulting him on state matters, not his business at all.
#
They're very pleased because they say, ah, you know, her husband has status.
#
So there is this shift in cultural values that happens and that Victorian, if you go
#
today to Kerala, marriage rituals include the sindoor, the sindoor is a North Indian
#
When you have polyandry, when you have, say, three husbands potentially for one woman in
#
certain cases, how much sindoor are you going to buy?
#
About three different lines of sindoor?
#
There was no such concept of sindoor.
#
So there's no concept of widowhood.
#
And now people say, oh, I'm a widowa or my, you know, a widowa is coming for the wedding
#
We don't have the concept of a widowa.
#
This came from somewhere else.
#
This came through a mix of Victorian morality and North Indian Brahminical traditions, which
#
have been absorbed to now people think that this always existed.
#
These things are tradition.
#
If they actually had a sense of what tradition were, you know, in the Sabarimala instance
#
where they were all fighting about women wanting to enter the temple and they said, this is
#
Well, going back to tradition would then mean that all the women of Kerala must walk about
#
It would mean that they should be again allowed to have more than one husband.
#
So that tradition you've conveniently forgotten.
#
This tradition you want to hold on to because it's all political at the end of the day.
#
And why did these, why did this Victorian morality and these Brahminical customs then
#
Because you'd imagine that you already, like you've got a great chapter called the Amarchis
#
of Travancore, which is all about this matrilineal sort of customs and then why does that change?
#
Why do these sort of, in some cases, even toxic attitudes become part of the culture?
#
I think it was a response to the British in the sense that they came and they had this
#
holier than thou situation where they said, we're going to civilize your country.
#
And they came with a new set of values and they were in power.
#
So they were in a position to impose those values and make it look like those values
#
are what brought them to power.
#
So suddenly we were on the defensive and then they'd say, Oh look, you need to be civilized
#
because your women don't even wear blouses.
#
You need to be civilized because your women are marrying three, three husbands.
#
You need to be civilized because you're burning your women.
#
You know, you, they found multiple reasons to civilize Indians in courts and Indians
#
therefore got this cultural insecurity.
#
We thought that we would become strong by imitating them, but we were also a little,
#
you know, we didn't want to say that we were imitating them.
#
So we wanted to find roots for all of this in Indian texts and Indian traditions.
#
So you highlight those traditions that match what the Victorians expect of you and use
#
that to promote your new sense of identity.
#
So we were essentially put on the defensive by the British as a consequence of which we
#
absorbed a lot of Victorian stuff into an Indian vocabulary and started believing that
#
This is our identity, whereas these identities are a very recent vintage.
#
And there's a very poignant line in your chapter on the Amachis, which sort of indicates how
#
for a woman to be given a place in history, there has to be some connection to a man,
#
which is quote, history has erased the Amachis from memory on account of the fact that their
#
sons never succeeded to power, stop quote, which despite the fact that the women themselves
#
were so powerful, it was a matrilineal society.
#
In one case you describe how the consort of a Maharani when he was dying, he had to be
#
shifted out of the palace because they were not allowed to die in the palace.
#
Palaces were only for members of the royal family to die in.
#
The husband at the end of the day, he may have fathered the next Maharaja and the next
#
crop of princes and princesses, but he had no business dying in the palace and his own
#
wife and kids wouldn't even attend the funeral because he was still their subject.
#
He and his dead body belonged to his family, but his sister's kids would do the rituals,
#
They were royal and he was not.
#
It's very poignant in the sense that, you know, you have these love stories, which,
#
you know, are sort of also held back by these sort of.
#
Yeah, because, you know, the Maharajas, for example, their wives, they're the Amachis,
#
so they're not called Maharani's.
#
The Amachis in the English translation means mother of His Highness's children.
#
She's only the mother of the king's children and the children themselves are not sure.
#
So the king will not go for the wedding of his own daughter.
#
He'll go in advance, give some presents, take part in meeting the people there, but he'll
#
then leave for the actual ceremony.
#
He won't be there because technically his daughter is a private citizen.
#
She is not a member of his family.
#
His responsibility is to the nieces, the matrilineal people of his family, they're the royal ones.
#
But at the same time, they were actually very close.
#
So there's this story of this one king who's hosting this Grand Darbar because of a letter
#
that Queen Victoria sent him and everything goes off very well.
#
Their processions, elephants, trumpets, you know, soldiers, whatever at the end of it,
#
So he rushes to her bedside and she passes away the same night.
#
But again, she has no legal recognition.
#
Another time, this is Maharaja who loses his, he marries his uncle's adopted daughter.
#
And you know, and she's about 14 or whatever, at 16, 17, she dies in childbirth.
#
And then he doesn't marry for nearly 18 years because he's so devoted to this, the memory
#
But technically she doesn't, if you look at his official record of his career in the Trivand
#
Co. state manual, there's no mention of his wife because she doesn't matter.
#
And are people sort of memorizing this with novels and plays and all that?
#
So how did you come across all of this?
#
I was interested precisely because of this, to find out, you know, what happened to the
#
men, what happened to their kids, you know, where did they go?
#
In North India, to be a Maharaja's son meant you were the next Maharaja.
#
In Trivand Co., the Maharaja's title was His Highness Shri Padmanabhadas Sivanchi Pallas
#
Shri Balarama Varma Kula Shekharagiri Tapati Mani Sultan Maharaja Ramaraja Bahadur Shamsher
#
Now this is the Maharaja who rules from, exclude the Bala, I could make a TikTok video out
#
This is the Maharaja who rules from 1885 to 1924.
#
His son's name is Mr. Velayudhan Thambi.
#
He's a Mr. Velayudhan Thambi.
#
So, you know, that, that status is so different.
#
So his niece's kids are also royal.
#
His niece's kids are the ones who are royal.
#
This reminds me of like this, there's a nice anecdote in your chapter on VK Krishnaman
#
and where you point out that he had a fight with his niece's husband because he insisted
#
And this is in the 1950s and 1960s.
#
He said, I am the maternal uncle.
#
He's the head of the family therefore.
#
And when a child is born, he gets to decide what the name of the child will be because
#
the father has no place.
#
In fact, you know, even in my family, for example, back in the day, if your father passes
#
away, you don't do the rituals, you don't do the funeral rituals.
#
His sister's son will come into the funeral rituals.
#
You know, you have this period of pollution where you're not supposed to enter temples,
#
go for functions that doesn't exist for the widow and kids because technically the husband
#
was nobody as far as family ties went.
#
He was a partner who came father, children, but that's it.
#
How did this originate?
#
There are different theories.
#
Some say it was, you know, originally tribal.
#
It was always the case.
#
Others say the Brahmins, now the Brahmin side is very convenient.
#
It says that the Parashurama brought all the Brahmins here.
#
Then he brought Deva, Gandharva and Asura women and said, you are here for the pleasure
#
of Brahmins and your kids will belong to the mother's caste, which is of course just, you
#
That's not really what happened.
#
Another theory is that there was a major bloodshed and a lot of these Naya men used to start
#
training from the age of eight mortality rates were high, people died in battle or whatever.
#
So forming a connection to a husband could be somewhat tricky because you never knew
#
whether he was, you never knew whether he was going to come back from battle.
#
So what happened is the women stayed in their natal homes, the homes in which they were
#
The brothers would go out for battle or whatever, but it was the women who held their own in
#
the houses where they were born.
#
So whether or not the husband came, died, there could always be another husband they
#
The kids were raised by them because they had the economic resources to raise those
#
The husband was not their central figure.
#
The husband was not an economic supporter.
#
The women had economic resources of their own and their older uncles, whoever was the
#
head of the family, he could manage those resources with them.
#
And you know, that's how, that's how it eventually became an established form.
#
And it was very convenient in gelling upper castes together because for Kerala Nambudri
#
Brahmins the rule was if there are three brothers, for example, only the eldest is allowed to
#
The other two brothers have to find wives in the matrilineal communities.
#
So look at it this way, the oldest brother marries a Brahmin, produces a Brahmin son.
#
The second will marry the Maharani or a local princess, produce a kingly type.
#
And the third will marry a Nair general or a Nair minister or sister and produce a Nair.
#
So by the next generation you have one cousin who's a Brahmin, one cousin who's a prince
#
and one cousin who's the minister or the military man or whatever.
#
And this brings the upper castes together in strong economic and social bonds closely
#
And that's how they preserve that social system as well.
#
Another of the themes running through your book which is very interesting is that there
#
are a lot of these sort of minor characters who might otherwise be considered lost to
#
history and you kind of bring them to life in very sort of human ways.
#
Like one character I had never heard of before is this lady called Malekakishwar.
#
Tell me a bit about Malekakishwar.
#
That was actually a personal story, I read about her.
#
She's the mother of the last Nawab of Awadh, last king in North India.
#
And he's deposed and he accepts the British pension and goes off to Calcutta where of
#
course you know he lives for many decades and discards wives and one day I think he
#
tries to discard some two dozen wives and the British said you can't just shed wives
#
Why did you marry them in the first place?
#
They're the wives of a king, you know, deserve some dignity.
#
I'll interrupt you with this great line from your chapter on Vajadalisha which I underline
#
because it's quote, in the next two decades he divorced 50 of his remaining wives but
#
in 1878 when he tried to get rid of 27 more in a single shot, the British responded with
#
He could not simply shed begums, he was informed.
#
The man responded with exasperation, but the women are old and ugly, stop quote.
#
And then he said when the British said what is to be done with them, he said the British
#
government should pay them, take care of them, they were just flabbergasted.
#
But his mother was this remarkable woman, so one of his wives who doesn't leave Lucknow,
#
she then stays and she fights in the 1857 rebellion and all that.
#
His mother on the other hand decides to go all the way to England because she says Victoria
#
is also like a mother like me.
#
She doesn't understand that Victoria is a constitutional monarch, Victoria actually
#
doesn't have any power.
#
So she assumes that like a mother, I will speak to her as another mother and ask for
#
the return of my family's property.
#
Firstly, they're being fleeced by all these local agents who realize that these begums
#
come with heaps of money.
#
So she's losing money also very quickly.
#
Then she's very clearly told, then when she tries to submit a petition to parliament,
#
they reject the petition on very technical grounds because they say oh she should have
#
said I pray something or the other and they say she shouldn't use that word properly
#
or something and on very flimsy technical grounds her petition to parliament is rejected.
#
Then she tries to meet Victoria where the only thing they end up talking about is the
#
weather and architecture and so on because they're not allowed to talk about anything
#
So she finally realizes that there's no point with this so she decides to go back to India.
#
And she comes to Paris first and there, unfortunately the weather is bad, her health is already
#
So nearly a year or maybe over a year in London, the exact dates are in there and she dies
#
in Paris and she's buried in Paris in a cemetery where I've given a list of the celebrities
#
And the funny thing is if you go there now to the cemetery in Paris, there are all these
#
pilgrims who come with flowers for all the famous people who are buried there, scientists,
#
musicians, jazz musicians, pop musicians, whatever you want, they're all there and nobody
#
knows where this woman is.
#
Now I believe they finally put up a board there that says this is the tomb of Malika
#
Kishore, the last begum of Awadh.
#
But when I went early winter of 2017-18, when I went there, there was nothing.
#
So we passed the square plinth several times on right on top of the hill and people were
#
sitting there smoking cigarettes, et cetera, et cetera, but we couldn't find it.
#
Finally I whipped up this old drawing that someone had done in the 19th century and based
#
on that I figured out that hold on this plinth that we've been passing three or four times,
#
It's overgrown with weeds, but that's where the last queen of Awadh is buried in Paris
#
So it wasn't marked, but you looked at an old drawing and you figured out where it was.
#
Where you can see the church in the background, you can see the shape of the thing, you figure
#
out that hold on, this is the spot.
#
The historian is detective.
#
She had a granddaughter, one of her sons who went with her, he had a Rajput wife.
#
So the Shia prince of Awadh and his Rajput wife, they have a child in London.
#
In London, there's something called the Kilburn Cemetery.
#
And there there's a tomb for this little baby princess called, her name is Umdatul, but
#
in the English one it's called Omdutel.
#
And we, again, a friend of mine was there from America, we went looking for this.
#
We spent an hour and a half in the cemetery trying to find it.
#
We were finally leaving and then right by the path that skirts the whole cemetery, I
#
see one more final slab on the floor, flat, there's no upright structure there.
#
And I said, well, might as well go look and we find it and this was one time I actually
#
jumped three times in the air because we'd spent in the cold, our lips were chapped,
#
it was super cold and we finally found it.
#
And I ended up, you know, very, it was very undignified, but I ended up taking a selfie
#
with the, with the grave because it was such excitement.
#
Few people behave with such joy in cemeteries.
#
I know, I know, it wasn't very dignified.
#
Another character who's actually oddly quite poignant in a different sort of way is someone
#
you just mentioned in connection with Malika and I think who Malika described as being
#
surprised at her circular dress, as you point out, which is the Queen Victoria herself and
#
you have a chapter on her.
#
And that's also kind of poignant because the way from this distance, you'd look at a Queen
#
as a royal figure and what could be more privileged and more lucky, but it's, it's like, she wasn't
#
exactly living a life of satisfaction.
#
In fact, because she was just a sort of a nominal monarch, you're right, that denied
#
a political role at home by constitutional convention.
#
She found it instead in her Indian dominion.
#
So she started taking a much greater interest in India because she was helpless in England.
#
In fact, foreign policy, the British government also allowed her some influence because at
#
least they used to consult her, send her the files, et cetera, because that is the one
#
space where it didn't, she couldn't directly trample on their rights and she also found
#
India for her gave her a relevance that was far superior to what otherwise she would have
#
And the funny thing is Indians also took to her, so, you know, her 1858 proclamation guaranteeing
#
freedom of religion, et cetera, et cetera.
#
People use that proclamation for decades.
#
Gandhiji used it in the 1906 or something, the other by Naroji used it to make a point
#
At some point when the British introduced income tax, people held up Queen Victoria's
#
proclamation saying income taxes against the guarantees given in this.
#
And for her, you know, she, her daughter started marrying into all these royal families, you
#
know, one went to the German emperor's family and she realized that her kids are all going
#
to end up becoming emperors and all of that, and she's going to be merely queen.
#
So she's determined that she can't be outranked by her own children.
#
So then she finally forces the government to sort of declare her empress of India, something
#
her own son doesn't like, most of parliament doesn't like.
#
It's passed through with a very narrow majority, whereas in India, we've always learned if
#
you read textbooks that, you know, Queen Victoria declared herself or the British declared Queen
#
Victoria empress of India in succession to the Mughals or whatever.
#
But there's a backstory, the amount of negotiation it took and the British, because by then constitutional
#
democracy was becoming fairly entrenched there and strong and Republican sentiment was always
#
alive throughout Victoria's reign.
#
They were not happy with this claim to imperial status.
#
They thought it was vulgar.
#
They said she should just be the queen.
#
She shouldn't be imperial anything.
#
So the compromise was that she would never be called imperial highness.
#
She'd never be called empress of the UK or anything.
#
She'd be empress of India.
#
The Indian title could have her in an imperial avatar, her original title at home would continue
#
to be exactly what it was.
#
That was the compromise.
#
And she was petitioned.
#
It was quite funny because people would petition her on all kinds of things, court cases, property
#
They'd send her files to London and the India office finally had to come up with a system
#
to send it back before she saw it, because if she saw it, she would take an interest
#
And it's quite remarkable how, you know, the same thing has so many back end tales and
#
so many dynamics attached to it.
#
And another woman's story, which is also poignant and who also sort of has, you know, there
#
are moments of sadness and loneliness there is a woman called Janki.
#
And you mentioned her in your great chapter called The Seamstress and the Mathematician.
#
Tell me a little bit about Janki from Triplican.
#
Yeah, that's, you know, Ramanujan's wife.
#
He of course is well known as a mathematician, et cetera.
#
And they got married when he was 20 and she was 10.
#
Yeah, she was a child and you know, the marriage wasn't consummated for many years, partly
#
also because the mother was a little nasty and she would make the girls stupid.
#
The thing is that he became an asset very quickly.
#
As soon as they realized he was a little bit of a genius.
#
This is a man who was petrified of exams.
#
This was a man who wasn't very successful in the formal sense, but he was a genius when
#
it came to mathematics.
#
And to such an extent that, you know, even when they asked him to develop proper proofs
#
for how he reached a certain principle, he had no way of explaining it.
#
He thought God had, you know, given him the answer and he couldn't quite work out that
#
that Western style of explaining each step as he had and how he arrived at his final
#
Similarly, he was very orthodox.
#
You know, he moved out of a house called Krainent because he thought it was inauspicious because
#
And he moved into a house called Gomitra because it sounds like go cow, you know, so he was
#
And Gomitra also sounds like something else.
#
I know, I know, but I'm not going there.
#
And he marries this little Brahmin girl and you know, he goes off to London and he's in,
#
I mean, very, very, very lonely over there.
#
At one time he tries to kill himself, etc.
#
And his mother-in-law doesn't allow his wife to go to him.
#
And his mother doesn't allow this girl to go because the thing is, if he's leaving the
#
mother's control, he doesn't want this girl to gain any, she doesn't want this girl to
#
gain any kind of ascendance over him.
#
So she's now saddled with this mother-in-law who hates her and clearly they don't get along.
#
He's lonely over there.
#
And when he finally comes back, by that time the girl is left, she's going and living with
#
She finds out from the newspapers that her husband's come back to town.
#
So finally she's reunited and for the final chapter of his life, they're together and
#
he puts his foot down, tells his mother to back off a little bit, but the mother still
#
doesn't forgive the girl when he dies, you know, an untimely death because she blames
#
it on this Janaki stars and her horoscope and all of that.
#
And they have just like a year of happiness together.
#
And he was ill for most of it.
#
So she was essentially his nurse in that final stage, but there was a bond and you know,
#
he did feel that if she had gone with him, perhaps he would have enjoyed Britain a little
#
But then too late, you know, by the time she's, she's still pretty much just out of her teens
#
when she's widowed and this is a Tamil Brahmin woman.
#
There's no question of marrying again.
#
She goes off to Bombay, learns a little English, becomes a seamstress, adopts a little boy
#
and starts raising him, lives entirely, you know, on her own resources, working.
#
She could easily have lived off royalties based on his notebooks.
#
Notebooks would have been very valuable, but she gave it away, you know, without asking
#
And, you know, occasionally visitors would show up to go through her trunk and all of
#
that to try and find something, unearth more of Ramanujan's, you know, work and so on.
#
And she was just this aloof figure who was there and who remembered him, you know, as
#
in a different way, in a different context, in a very personal setting.
#
But at the end of the day, lived so many decades after him, largely forgotten.
#
Every now and then, you know, people would have a function and she'd be invited, but
#
she was just a seamstress who was living in Triplicane and doing what she did.
#
And another woman who's sort of not been forgotten and who has perhaps now become more larger
#
than life is of course Manubai or Manikannika or the Rani of Jhansi.
#
And the myths about her aren't quite true.
#
Tell me a little bit more about her.
#
Again, you know, there's this romance, there's an awful movie that came out and I made the
#
mistake of watching it and my God, it's like she woke up in the morning and everything
#
was noble and glorious and valiant and all of that, which human being lives like this
#
Now, her story is obviously more textured, more layered.
#
When the rebellion started, she didn't immediately run off and join the rebels.
#
For nearly a year, she was in negotiations with the British.
#
She called the rebels, she had very negative opinions of the rebels initially.
#
She was pretty happy to cooperate with the British initially and talk to them and essentially
#
It's only when they still wouldn't recognize her claims over Jhansi and her adopted son's
#
claims over Jhansi that she finally said, look, if you're going to be completely unyielding,
#
And that's when she finally went off and joined the rebels.
#
It wasn't a case where, I don't know, like a lot of these kings didn't fight the British
#
because they were fighting for the motherland.
#
They were fighting to preserve their positions of power and influence.
#
That is often the case, you know, no matter which period you're looking at and which enemy
#
And this is a little bit like that, she tried to negotiate, she tried to come to a consensus
#
and compromise, didn't work.
#
That's when she picked up the gun and the sword and she was valiant.
#
She was definitely brave to lead, she trained women, she led armies and all of that.
#
And she clearly had a mind that was, that was very, it had a certain vitality.
#
The way she, you know, even when she was negotiating with the British, they were quite fascinated
#
by her, by every missive that came from her because it was argued very well, it was very
#
Her arguments were clear and she had a sense she could speak like a lawyer, which meant
#
she was a very intelligent woman.
#
And we, by reducing this intelligent woman with so many layers who could hire an English
#
attorney to sort of, you know, do her work, who could hold her own, who could ride a horse,
#
all of this, we turn her into this one monochromatic, glorious lady and we were actually doing her
#
historical memory a disservice.
#
We're reducing her into a unidimensional figure when she actually had, you know, so much more
#
flavor and texture and character, really.
#
In fact, you have this fabulous story from her youth, which I really loved.
#
And again, I'll quote from it, quote, once a Peshwa's adopted son, she used to play with
#
them when she was a kid.
#
Once the Peshwa's adopted son refused to take her along on his elephant.
#
Years later, when she was granted three wishes at her wedding, she expended one of them to
#
courier to this old friend, the present of a particularly mighty elephant.
#
Yeah, I'm making a statement.
#
I said, she's a punk, she had, you know, personality and you know, to make it all about one thing,
#
You know, this is a woman who was more than that one thing.
#
But we've decided that the pedestal in which we are going to put her is nationalism.
#
We're going to put her on this pedestal of being anti-British.
#
But no, power is negotiated in very many ways.
#
You know, fighting the British, there's this essay on the Jaipur Maharaja.
#
He sided with the British.
#
He in 1857 helped the British.
#
He prevented rebellion from breaking out in Jaipur.
#
And in that sense, he would be anti-national.
#
He would be a bad figure in history.
#
But he's also equally interesting if you look at the rest of his story.
#
He becomes a photographer, has a great interest in photography.
#
And he's the first man who photographs the women of his harem, the women of the Zenana.
#
And the British have created this image of women in the Zenana as sensuous creatures
#
protected by eunuchs and plotting.
#
And the Zenana of the harem is this very evil, sinister, dark, grimy place.
#
Whereas here, if you look at his photographs, these women are strong looking, very independent
#
looking, rather interesting women.
#
Their gaze is very powerful.
#
And he's the one who brings that light into the Zenana.
#
He's the one who modernizes Jaipur, builds roads, you know, introduces gas lights, builds
#
a library, builds a school for girls.
#
All of that is done by this one man.
#
So when you gauge his contribution to India's story, because he sided with the British,
#
does that mean he's bad?
#
Or, you know, if you're classifying people into good and bad, Lakshmi Bhai equal to good
#
because she fought the British, Ram Singh of Jaipur equal to bad because he supported
#
But Ram Singh also made lots of other contributions which have value.
#
He may have supported the British, and that's certainly a part of his personality, but that
#
doesn't take away from the fact that by collaborating, he's still within Jaipur managed to do something
#
Managed to introduce a number of reforms and make that state vastly better for its people
#
than British territories.
#
And also those judgments are hindsight judgments.
#
Now that we know where we landed up and we look back at the British as colonizers and
#
we look at independent India as something, you know, as something that defines identity.
#
But back then there is no independent India.
#
There is no sense of, you know, the idea of India is not there back in the day.
#
You know, the British are the people who are ruling you just in the same way as, you know,
#
Delhi is ruling us today.
#
And one of the interesting things about Savai Ram Singh is his name, Savai Ram Singh of
#
Jaipur, which you pointed out was that he was a man for the selfie age.
#
Like some of his photographs of courtesans actually show him in coitus with them.
#
I mean, I don't know if some.
#
The thing is that initially there's a friend of mine called Deepthi Shashidhar and she
#
works in museums and archives and all of that.
#
She's the one who showed me a photograph where it's not just the harem women he's photographed.
#
He's also photographed certain acts he's performing with these harem women.
#
And the one I saw was quite hilarious because it's a woman with her goonga torn and still
#
on her head and the torso is all perfectly covered.
#
The bangles ornaments are all intact.
#
And she's smiling at the camera because it's almost like she's telling the camera that
#
what is this man doing?
#
And you know, he's all like focused on his task in that particular image and this woman
#
is completely, you know.
#
And he's getting the job done.
#
I think all my male listeners have right now just parked up their laptops and they're like
#
They won't find this online.
#
This picture doesn't show this online.
#
I knew you'll send me a copy.
#
Another Christian woman whom I hadn't heard of before, again, partly because I'm an Amit.
#
But is this lady called Bala Mani?
#
You know, you've got this great chapter called The Resurrection of Bala Mani and you talk
#
about how she is also she's got a she's fortress among a thousand anecdotes, quote unquote,
#
as you as you say, she's got some incredible narratives around her.
#
Tell me a little bit about her.
#
It almost sounds fictional.
#
Bala Mani was again a devadasi from Gumbakonam.
#
And she's the first woman in South India to establish a company of her own.
#
And she gives priority to destitute women, women of the devadasi community who are now
#
being penalized for being devadasis.
#
The state is taking away their traditional sources of patronage, etc.
#
So she creates this Bala Mani company.
#
And it's a drama company.
#
And she becomes such a celebrated actress.
#
She introduces gaslights, introduces the modern stage, new forms of seating, all of that.
#
And she creates a new system in which she's going to enact her plays.
#
She even I think does at one point a love scene that, you know, creates quite a stir
#
with a little screen, etc.
#
And she's quite a remarkable woman and travels a fair deal.
#
There's this famous story about how trains that went through Gumbakonam used to stop
#
for a couple of hours so people could quickly run up, catch a show and come back and then
#
They were called, you know, Bala Mani specials.
#
And again, sadly, though, a little bit like all these devadasis of that time, her style
#
of living finally, you know, gets beyond her sources of income because as she ages, you
#
know, obviously, the source of income start dwindling.
#
You're not young anymore, so you can't do the things you did earlier.
#
And by the end of her life, she's pretty much a nobody for a woman who lived in a massive
#
mansion where the grounds had all kinds of exotic animals and all of that, who had thousands
#
of rupees to spare to marry, you know, abandoned girls to suitable boys and things like that.
#
She did a lot of charity, but never had kids of her own.
#
She gave shelter to a lot of women, resettled all those women, but finally when she died,
#
there wasn't enough money to even do her, to perform her final rites.
#
So an old loyal attendant has to, had to sort of gather up a few old supporters and that's
#
how he funded her final funeral, you know, expenses and so on.
#
It's a tragic story, but even then, she accomplished a fair bit to set up a company in the 19th
#
century and, you know, modern stage and all of that, you know, she borrowed European techniques
#
of how to perform on stage and then she was good at it.
#
I mean, I'm almost surprised at the, I mean, are there films on her, nothing at all?
#
She was, she was, so Vijay Sai wrote a book called drama queens about a lot of these devdasis
#
and performers and tavayifs of that era.
#
That's where she was recently given a good, you know, place of importance, but she appears
#
For example, if there's a story, Ravi Varma's biography by Rupika Chawla, you know, there's
#
a time when she wants a portrait done by Ravi Varma and Ravi Varma's brother says, no, you
#
know, she's got a reputation.
#
She's supposed to be the Maharaja's mistress.
#
So even though she has the money, he will not paint her and that's interesting, right?
#
Because he's painting everybody else, but he's also a classist in that sense.
#
Bala money is not suitable in terms of class.
#
So even if she has money, even if she has fame, he will not paint Bala money because
#
She's only an actress and there's, you know, another story of how there's this newspaper
#
man in Kerala who's usually seen as this big icon for press freedom.
#
But he was also not a big feminist or anything because once after a performance that Bala
#
money had in Trivandrum, when the Divan of the Maharaja of Trivandrum go garlands her,
#
this man makes a big fuss saying, you know, you are a Divan, you're a man of such esteem
#
How could you garland the courtesan in public like that?
#
And I mean, this is what you do for artists even today, right?
#
You garland them at the end of a performance, you give them a bouquet or something that's
#
perfectly normal, but it has made a big thing because this is an independent woman and unmarried
#
courtesan whose sexuality is always a threat.
#
Men are always threatened by independent women who are not married and who don't have a
#
mangalsutra like a chain around their necks because, you know, that's threatening.
#
There's another great chapter shortly after this called a Brahmin woman of scandal.
#
And where you sort of, you speak about the Nambu theories and the Nambu theories in Kerala
#
are, as you say, they are a prominent sort of people, one of the seeds of orthodoxy in
#
But the women among the Nambu theories are not quite so fortunate to quote a sentence
#
from your chapter, quote, as one of them put it, the Antarjanam, literally indoor person
#
She was born crying, lives a life in tears and dies weeping.
#
It was not an exaggeration.
#
So, you know, when the Nambu theories themselves are so prominent, why were the women in indoor
#
The Nambu theories are very different from other South Indian Brahmins, other South Indian
#
Look at Ayers, Ayyengars, you know, Tanjavur Brahmins, Maratha Brahmins, Maharashtrian Brahmins,
#
There's lots of mobility.
#
After the British came, it was often these communities, Tamil Brahmins, Tanjavur, Maratha
#
Brahmins, etc. who occupied higher bureaucratic positions within the British system.
#
The Nambu theories were never interested in jobs.
#
They lived in huge landed estates.
#
They had lots of property.
#
Even poorer Nambu theories would be supported by bigger Nambu theories.
#
So they never had to go out and work for kings.
#
All the Kerala kings, their Brahmins servants were all Tamil Brahmins.
#
They were not Malali Brahmins.
#
Nambu theories were never, you know, interested in work.
#
So they were a very exclusive elite class, a very small set of the population.
#
And as I said earlier, to maintain property intact, they knew that their strength came
#
from economic power, from control of resources.
#
To maintain those resources and keep them intact, only the eldest son could marry a
#
Brahmin woman because only then there'd only be one.
#
So all the other brothers would marry from matrilineal castes, which meant that their
#
kids would belong to the matrilineal families.
#
Their wives' families would take care of the kids.
#
Those kids would make no claim on the patrimony.
#
So their economic resources stayed intact.
#
The family and the caste stayed exclusive, didn't swell into some sort of big, unwieldy
#
community and therefore didn't have to succumb to general pressures of getting jobs and
#
So they were a very exclusive class.
#
And they policed their women very, very strongly.
#
So technically, a Nambudri woman was not allowed to go out.
#
If she went out, she had to cover herself with a huge umbrella.
#
And again, these women also didn't wear blouses, by the way.
#
They just wore a general shawl.
#
And they were not supposed to be seen.
#
They were called antarjanams, which means indoor people.
#
They were not allowed to wear, in the most aristocratic Nambudri families, they were
#
not allowed to wear gold ornaments.
#
They wore brass and things like that.
#
They were denied lots of things.
#
There are these, you know, one of the memoirs talks about how after pregnancy, you've just
#
given birth, but one of the first things you have to do is go and take a dip in the pond
#
too so you're purified.
#
Because you've been touched by a lower caste midwife.
#
The rules were extremely stringent.
#
And sexual rules were also very complicated.
#
Because as I said, the men, most of them are marrying matrilineal women.
#
So the number of men available for marriage is very small.
#
That being the case, most Nambudri women would therefore be spinsters.
#
And because it's sin to die as spinsters, sometimes on the corpse you'd find a lower
#
Tamil Brahmin or someone to come and tie a mangalsutra to pretend that the lady had married.
#
But often what would happen is exchange offers.
#
So a 70 year old Nambudri would marry a 15 year old girl and in return he would give
#
his sisters to that girl's brother or father or whatever.
#
They'd be exchanged like cattle, really, so that each one was taken off the man's hands.
#
So this woman called Savithri, or Dathri as she's called locally, she's again a typical
#
case of a young Nambudri girl married to a much older man.
#
And she at one point when she's 23 is discovered to be an adulteress.
#
She's having an affair with somebody.
#
And under Nambudri law, when a woman is found to be unchaste, there's something called smartavicharam,
#
which is a sort of internal trial.
#
There's certain families that are involved in it, there's a proper council that's formed.
#
But the council always usually, the interest is, the focus is usually on the woman.
#
Savithri was very clever because although she was first sexually abused at the age of
#
10, and this was 13 years later, 23, that she was caught, when the trial began she said
#
that I am not the only one who's sinned, there are all these men as well.
#
So then they say, okay, the man also is an adulterer, let's try him also, except she's
#
actually going to name 66 men.
#
Only two men escaped because they're already dead.
#
And she actually has more names in her kitty, but she doesn't name them because the kuchiraja
#
ends the trial because it's caused such a sensation.
#
This trial, smartavicharam had happened before and they would happen after, but this is the
#
first one to be covered by the print press.
#
The media in Kerala, the Malayalam, Manorama, etc. have become big papers, so they're covering
#
And she's so good at what she does, she remembers what warts they had on their genitals, what
#
personal marks they had on their bodies.
#
And like the Malayalam Anuram in her report talks about how she answered like a barrister,
#
like a barrister making her case, you know, she would cross question these men because
#
the men would claim they had not slept with her and they were given a chance to go and
#
And she would remember when she had slept with them on the basis of what festival was
#
going on then, what day of fast it was, etc.
#
Her husband's brother, her husband, I think her father, a number of people across castes.
#
She had an affair with a mahout, then another mahout found out about it, so then he sort
#
of blackmailed her and had sex with her.
#
So it wasn't merely that she was taking revenge against the Nambudri orders, some of it was
#
The very fact that she kept these records means that she knew that she was going to
#
be caught one day and when she was, she was going to take all these men down.
#
So a century before Me Too, there was this woman in Kerala who took down 64 men, all
#
great icons of society, many of them.
#
There was one who was a great star of Kathakali called Kaavangal Shankarapanikar and people
#
still say that his loss, because he was ostracised and excommunicated after that.
#
So his loss was a great blow to Kathakali because he was such a big star at that time.
#
Big Nambudri Brahmins from the greatest families were tarnished because they were all named
#
And it got so bad that the story goes that the Kochi Raja stopped the trial because
#
the next name was going to be his, so he sort of stopped it at the right moment before he
#
was also embroiled in this case of a Nambudri woman with so many, so many lovers.
#
What happened to her eventually?
#
So we can only speculate.
#
Some, some say that she married an Anglo Indian planter and lived the rest of her life in
#
great comfort in some sort of estate somewhere up in the hills.
#
Some there was, there's usually a family of a lower caste person who received a lot
#
of these excommunicated women.
#
And the story goes that if you entered through one gate, you were accepted as his wife.
#
If you entered through another, you became the sister.
#
But it's not known whether she went there.
#
We can only speculate and we can say that because she was 23, it's very likely she married
#
It's very likely she had a family and kids, but nobody knows because once the trial ended,
#
that's where the records end.
#
And it's very interesting how she's cast as someone who was sort of a rebel against orthodoxy
#
and all of these ways exposing the goddess of revenge, but the story is a little more
#
It's not merely revenge.
#
As I said, the first person to touch her was when she was 10 years old, her future brother-in-law,
#
you know, to sexual abuse.
#
And so in many ways, she was a victim.
#
It wasn't like she woke up saying, I'm going to...
#
People like projecting her as a Nambudri woman who decided to stand up to the system.
#
She did, but I don't think she consciously decided that I'm going to be that woman.
#
Circumstances created her in a certain way and that ended up in a way that she would
#
end up standing up to the order.
#
Let's now move on to some of the non-Indian figures in your book, because one of the things
#
that one realizes through your book is that much as we cast our independence struggle
#
in the colonial years as British bad Indians good, it's not quite like that.
#
There are a lot of Indians who are as oppressive and as wild as a British, and there are a
#
lot of British people who come across as very interesting, very humane reformers and thinkers
#
And one of them is William Jones.
#
And William Jones is someone like you point out, quote, to some he was Persian Jones,
#
the translator of the Tariqi Nadiri, while others after he founded the Asiatic Society
#
in today's Kolkata called him predictably Asiatic Jones to one not entirely enraptured
#
crowd he was Republican Jones, what with his quote, seditious, reasonable and diabolical
#
unquote ideas about popular education and universal male suffrage.
#
But as far as India is concerned, it was in his avatar as Oriental Jones that he became
#
one of the sincerest interpreters of this land in the West.
#
Tell me a bit more about this fascinating figure.
#
He was a little bit of a child prodigy, he was born to a very old father and his mother
#
gave him a good education, very gifted with languages, you know, very, very good, a very
#
good translator, had a good, had established himself pretty much in the British setup before
#
It was only, he didn't become a political figure of great importance simply because
#
he had these Republican ideas which made him very unfashionable to certain people and certain
#
very influential quarters.
#
So the best he could do was after several years of applying he was appointed a judge
#
to come to Bengal, to Kolkata and become a judge of the High Court there, Supreme Court
#
sorry as it was called then.
#
And his plan was very simple, he would come to India, work for a few years, earn enough
#
money to go back and resume his studies, which was Persian and you know, general Eastern
#
languages and cultures and so on.
#
But once he came here, William Jones was the first person to connect Sanskrit to Latin,
#
These have all, these ancient languages all have one ancestor and not only did he say
#
that, he was completely enamored of Sanskrit, Sanskrit literature, you know, Sanskrit poetry,
#
the grammatical structures, everything he found about Sanskrit he loved.
#
And the other thing he loved was, you know, Indian culture in general, you know, he created
#
the Asiatic society which is responsible, you know, it created a platform for people
#
to come together who were interested in India.
#
So the resurrection or the rediscovery of Emperor Ashoka, Indians had forgotten Ashoka.
#
It was these orientalists who basically said, hold on, all these inscriptions are from one
#
king and his name is Ashoka, that's how we rediscovered Ashoka who we now celebrate.
#
So William Jones has a contribution there.
#
In studying Sanskrit and finding these gems of Indian literature, William Jones has a
#
contribution there and he opens up the space for these orientalists, where suddenly for
#
many years after that, you know, it's allowed, you can go out, pick up these languages, pick
#
up these texts and start studying India and start really celebrating Indian culture.
#
So although he said that he would never preach democracy to Indians and he would say there
#
was a little bit of racism there, he still wanted that India should be governed on its
#
own terms, by its own laws, by its own customs, etc.
#
So he's not your stereotypical evil British Englishman, he's, you know, he's quite a mixed
#
What's also interesting, however, is that these orientalists, when they were choosing
#
some texts over others, ended up favoring Brahminical texts because they thought Sanskrit
#
Whereas in reality, if you look at Indian history, there's Bhakti tradition, there's
#
Telugu literature, there's that whole Dravidian school of thought, all of that exists, but
#
they end up privileging this one set of things.
#
And they, it's quite ironic that, you know, texts that they found at certain times get
#
a prominence and that prominence still exists in India.
#
Like he translated the Manusmriti into Hindi.
#
The Manusmriti, the idea that this was the Hindu law book.
#
It was never used as a law book as such in most parts of the country.
#
It was meant, it claimed that everything should be organized around it, but nobody actually
#
organized law on the basis of it.
#
Therefore, as we discussed with the Vellore Mutiny, custom, local costume, local traditions,
#
local customs were determined, local formats of justice, no local judge went into the Manusmriti
#
How many people knew Sanskrit?
#
So nobody was actually guided by Manusmriti except perhaps at a few levels like the Peshwas
#
and a few people like that.
#
But by elevating that as the Hindu law book, for the next very many years, British laws
#
in India were shaped on the basis of, you know, court cases were decided on the basis
#
of the Manusmriti, et cetera.
#
He often had suspicions that the Brahmins were not telling him the full truth.
#
And when they were translating things, they were doing it in a way to privilege themselves.
#
But although he learned Sanskrit, the byproduct was that it ended up creating or elevating
#
one school of thought or one set of people even beyond what they legitimately should
#
And I guess what happens is when they're colonizing a deeply complex country like India, it becomes
#
important for them internally to sort of come to grips with what is this country.
#
And therefore they create all these simple narratives and through happenstance, such
#
as access, he has access to these Brahmins who present him these manuscripts, that particular
#
And then the ironic part is that those narratives come back into Indian consciousness.
#
And we think that it's almost like circular, they weren't true to start with.
#
The British said, no, this is what Hinduism is.
#
And somehow the Hindus believed that.
#
And we still, we still believe, you know, what contemporary Hinduism is, that shape
#
is largely from the 19th and late 18th century, based on including what these orientalists
#
Not so much sanskari, but victory.
#
So Vedic Hinduism is not today's Hinduism and it's not Advaita or Shankracharya's era.
#
That Hinduism is not today's Hinduism.
#
Today's Hinduism was hugely influenced by the orientalists and dynamics of the early
#
Because that's when a lot of these ideas were being, you know, people are chewing on them,
#
regurgitating them and figuring out that this is what it means now to be a Hindu.
#
So which is really ironic because that means so much of our national identity today, the
#
national identity of some people today is predicated upon what our colonial masters
#
wanted us, wanted to believe about us.
#
And you made a good point, right, which is that in a ruling over an alien country meant
#
you have to find sources of information to understand that country.
#
So these people, they obviously didn't have the patience to go looking for lower caste
#
people songs and folklore.
#
They didn't have the patience to go into different regional languages.
#
One language they found everywhere in India, even if it was used only by 1% of the population
#
was Sanskrit, whichever corner they went, there was at least one Brahmin who had the
#
same text, the same Vedas, the same language.
#
So they said, hold on, this is one common thread that runs throughout the country.
#
So we're going to use this to understand the country, which meant they created laws, they
#
created manuals, they created books that were built on this.
#
And since then, you know, those today, when you go back, all these census reports, all
#
these British reports, this whole obsession with what to the report say of that time,
#
it all comes from this, from this quest to create a corpus of written material.
#
Because that's by writing it, they were also giving themselves a sense of confidence that
#
they knew what they were doing.
#
And also, you get into any country, you want to become powerful and influential, the first
#
thing you'll do is you'll capture the elites, you'll interact mostly with the elites.
#
And therefore that completely biases how you look at that society.
#
Another really fascinating character to me was a gentleman named Arthur Cotton.
#
And there's this great sentence of his, which, you know, really appealed to the modern libertarian
#
He once argued against the term collector, since it suggested that the sole interest
#
of revenue officials lay in extracting money, when surely they were also responsible for
#
that other thing called development, stop code.
#
And also it I mean, his naivete, of course, is very sort of touching and funny.
#
And tell me a little bit about him.
#
He was a bit of a crusader for all kinds of causes.
#
Arthur Cotton, actually, I have a side, his family, the cottons, one of them, one of the
#
later cottons was resident in Travancore.
#
So I first heard of Arthur Cotton when I went to meet this resident's nephew in London,
#
and he and his wife, Robin and Nicolette Cotton.
#
And over there, they showed me, you know, pictures of this man and this book.
#
And they told me that they'd just been on a cruise and they then stopped somewhere in
#
India and they were brought by the then government of Andhra Pradesh to an event commemorating
#
Arthur Cotton's birth anniversary where they were all garlanded, the husband and wife are
#
garlanded and the big politicians were all present, they were all celebrating Arthur
#
I was like, and this was, you know, several years ago, and I thought, what, there's a
#
state where an Englishman's birthday is still celebrated as this Jayanti, really.
#
And they told me there are thousands of statues to him.
#
And I did some basic Googling at that time, and I did find out there are an estimated
#
3000 statues to Arthur Cotton in the Godavari basin area.
#
And the reason is that this is the man who irrigated that area.
#
He is the man who for the first time suggested connecting all of India's rivers.
#
And the British were making money with this whole railway program, you know, huge investors,
#
big money, a very sexy program, you know, connecting India through railways.
#
He's the one who said, why are you building railways?
#
Connect all the rivers.
#
You'll have canals that's cheaper.
#
And it has the other advantage that it irrigates land.
#
And this is an idea that's still very much being discussed.
#
Like this government also, for example, they're talking about interlinking rivers, environmentalists
#
But economically, people say that it has a certain value.
#
Arthur Cotton is the first person to suggest it.
#
In the Godavari area, he's the one who built all these canals and so on.
#
So farmers, even today, after all these generations are beholden to him, they see him as a sort
#
of savior who made what were barren lands overnight, you know, after by the end of his
#
career, these were all fertile lands where they were finally being able to live well
#
and grow things properly.
#
And he as I said, you know, wasn't very keen on merely it was a good Christian at heart.
#
So he genuinely believed he was here to civilize India.
#
So there's that to be sure.
#
But all the same, he felt that if the British were ruling India, they couldn't simply extract
#
revenues and do what they wanted.
#
They owed it to the people of India to improve their lives also, in his case, economically
#
through canals and that sort of program.
#
And which is why, you know, the common peasant even now remembers him, politicians even to
#
do on his birthday have to garland his busts and statues, because Arthur Cotton left a
#
lasting legacy in a large part of the peninsula in the south.
#
And it's interesting about how as a reformer within the government of the time he ran up
#
against what we would today call the political economy, like there's another great sentence
#
quote, between 1885 and 1887, the railways cost 2.84 million pounds while the irrigation
#
budget stagnated at a measly 6000 pounds.
#
And you know, this is obviously something he protested against and eventually they gave
#
into him a little bit in the sense that the PWD of today, the Public Works Department
#
is sort of named after him, but he was largely despite that a crusader for what at that time
#
And it's interesting again talking about the railways because, you know, like you said,
#
Cotton sort of, of course, felt that the colonialists instead of just extracting need to give something
#
But the railways, much as even Gandhi railed against it in Hind Swaraj, wasn't just a tool
#
of extraction and convenience for the British, like one of the reasons the British I think
#
really wanted to spread railways across India, as you pointed out in your book was after
#
the 1857 revolt, it became a means of getting loyal troops to wherever the revolt had broken
#
So it's a matter of convenience.
#
But even apart from that, the railways did a heck of a lot of good for India.
#
They did a lot of, you know, the funny thing is again, you often find the story of the
#
right wing, you don't understand how much instruments of modernity that came from the
#
West have enabled the right wing.
#
It's happening now, you know, you have technology like Twitter created for one thing, but being
#
marshaled by right wing groups across the world for disinformation, whatever, and polarizing
#
the debate in their favor.
#
The railways did something very interesting, which is that they came, they were initially
#
You know, when the Maharaja of Travancore wanted to bring the railways to Trivandrum
#
in the 1880s, the Brahmins said, no, no, you can't bring this sinful fire carriage into
#
this sacred town where Sri Padmanabhaswami lives in the temple.
#
So he didn't, the railway station was outside town.
#
But what they quickly realized in many parts of India was that suddenly, for example, the
#
distance from Calcutta to Puri was reduced from very many days, a trek of weeks to a
#
railway journey of say a couple of days.
#
So suddenly larger volumes of people started coming.
#
More pilgrim means more money into temple coffers.
#
More money into temple coffers means the priests are happy, there's more to do, temples, more
#
The railway sparked not only movement of troops, it also sparked movement of pilgrims.
#
It also sparked movement of Indians within the country.
#
And there's this, you know, I think his name is Arup Chatterjee, talks about how, you know,
#
Indians who otherwise could not eat beef, etc.
#
So vegetarian looking businessmen could get on the railways and then experiment with whatever
#
they wanted because suddenly it was a space where lots of rules could be flouted.
#
And also a space where diversity could flourish because you had so many people travelling
#
in the trains together that you couldn't perforce be too conscious about who you're necessarily
#
travelling with, something which even our, you know, a function which even our Bombay
#
I mean, there can be no casteism within a Bombay local.
#
And it's interesting that some of the things that the British brought to India for their
#
own purposes eventually worked against them.
#
For example, they got railways so that they could ferry troops around quickly and ferry
#
their goods around quickly and so on and so forth.
#
But it also became a tool for people within our freedom movement to either raise support
#
Every railway platform, wherever his train stopped, all he had to do was look out from
#
the window and give a speech and that became a platform for nationalism.
#
So he hated the railways, but he ended up using it very effectively for his purposes.
#
And you know, that as he talks about how every platform turned into a scene for nationalistic
#
activity, you know, pulling the chain became like a big act of rebellion when civil disobedience
#
So the railways became a very interesting encapsulation of these people trying to civilise
#
India, but Indians picking that up and using it for their own purposes and getting better
#
at, you know, understanding that thing.
#
And just as that happened with railways, it also happened with English.
#
They brought the English here as a common language to govern us.
#
But if you look at all our freedom fighters, if you look at the first time the Congress
#
met, for example, you point out in your book about how all attendees to the first general
#
meeting of the Congress were told that they must be conversant in English because otherwise
#
how would so many diverse people be able to speak to each other?
#
And again, it was in English that a lot of our great early freedom fighters who are actually
#
quintessentially in some ways British liberals like Nauroji and Agarkar, Gokhale, Ranade,
#
all of those guys, so many of their ideas came from reading books which were written
#
I mean, frankly, you don't even need to look at books.
#
Look at the basic people who were involved.
#
Gandhiji grew up in Gujarati, spoke Gujarati.
#
Nehru was a Kashmiri, grew up in Allahabad, probably spoke Hindi.
#
Bose grew up in Bengal, speaking Bengali.
#
Rajagopalachari in Tamil Nadu, speaking Tamil.
#
Tilak was in Maharashtra, speaking Marathi.
#
Now, if these people didn't have English as a common language, they wouldn't have been
#
able to speak to each other.
#
Sanskrit was not possible.
#
I mean, who's going to learn Sanskrit and speak?
#
Different castes had different problems in terms of access to Sanskrit.
#
English was what allowed these people to first come together and formulate a common identity.
#
That Congress meeting you refer to, it's funny that the first circular says that you must
#
be able to speak English to attend the Congress meeting.
#
But there's also a press report from that time which talks about that meeting and how
#
fascinating it looked to the press correspondent there because he said, this is the first time
#
in India that you see Pathans from the North East in their Pathan suits.
#
You see these South Indians who don't even wear shirts and just have a munda and a shawl
#
You have some people who are wearing shoes, some people who don't even wear slippers.
#
You have some people who, and this is racist, but you know, some people dark as coal and
#
some people, you know, who are fair and light-eyed, who've come from the North, et cetera.
#
All these people in one place and that correspondent ends the report saying, the only place you
#
would normally see this so far was a fancy dress ball.
#
And this is for the first time these people have come here for a political purpose.
#
So you can even speculate it's the birth of the idea of India by English.
#
I mean the present day idea of India.
#
I think there was, I mean, people often say the British created the idea of India.
#
They created our political contours.
#
They're the ones who gave us the shape that we have there up in the North Eastern districts
#
could easily have gone to Burma.
#
The British made an administrative decision to keep it in India.
#
That's why it's still pretty much, you know, it became part of the Indian union afterwards.
#
If they had chosen to put it with Burma, it would have gone to Burma.
#
That's just how things happened.
#
And yeah, but I wouldn't say that, you know, they invented India as such.
#
They invented modern India, perhaps they helped galvanize forces that were there.
#
But some sense of civilizational unity seems to have existed.
#
You know, that's something Nehru also talks about, even a Savarkar alludes to it.
#
For example, they all acknowledge that at the end of the day, people knew this subcontinent
#
was one common space, whether or not it was a nation, that English definitely helped.
#
That English and having a common oppressor helped everybody that took away other internal
#
differences and created a common goal to focus on.
#
And there are fascinating Indian characters in your book also whom I hadn't really heard
#
of, partly because of perhaps North Indian bias, not just mine, but the North Indian
#
bias of historians and so on.
#
But one of them you describe in a chapter called The Champion of Tuticorin is this gentleman
#
named Vio Chidambaram Pillai.
#
Tell me a bit about him.
#
It's a sad story, actually, because his, you know, heyday was very few years when he was
#
He lived for decades, pretty much as a disillusioned man, because what he does is he's a lawyer.
#
He's from a well-off family, not a Brahmin, well-off family in Tamil Nadu, ends up coming
#
to Tuticorin, becomes a lawyer there, but then he starts a shipping company.
#
Now that time, the entire shipping business is monopolized by the British.
#
So for him, Swadeshi meant this, now everywhere in the country, everywhere else, it's about
#
spinning and making textiles and thread and cloth and that sort of thing.
#
But this man is the most ambitious one.
#
He's created a shipping company called Swadeshi, where he's going to ship goods to Ceylon and
#
At one point, the British, you know, coerce the person who's leased him the ship to withdraw.
#
So then he gets a ship from Bombay and flies into the harbor with the flag, et cetera,
#
you know, very glamorously.
#
Vande Mataram flags on the ship.
#
So he was clearly a man with, with personality and spunk.
#
But then, you know, this one time there's a riot.
#
It was to celebrate another Brit, another freedom fighter from Bengal connected to that,
#
there was going to be a public procession, et cetera.
#
This man was preemptively jailed with somebody else, a riot that broke out.
#
He was held morally responsible, et cetera.
#
At the end of it, he was thrown into prison for a few years.
#
It was meant to be a much longer sentence, but he served only about under half a decade
#
But the problem is by then, the shipping company had failed.
#
Most of his friends had disappeared or they were thrown in jail.
#
And by the time he came out, the freedom struggle had also changed.
#
He was close to Tilak, for example, and a different generation of nationalists.
#
By the time he came out and tried to find his feet again, Gandhi was in the picture.
#
And you know, there's a moving episode where he essentially has this exchange with Gandhi
#
about Gandhi promising to send him money.
#
And for months and months, he's like, where's the money?
#
You know, you promise I need the money now because he's in, he's impoverished.
#
And his legal license has been suspended.
#
He ends up giving tuition to college kids, et cetera, to get by and, you know, doing
#
small trades and things like that.
#
And that's how he ends up dying.
#
And we often don't realize that in the freedom struggle, there are these giants and tall
#
figures of the freedom struggle, but they also stand on very many others whose stories
#
collapsed very quickly because, you know, they, they couldn't make it to the end.
#
They tried, they fought, they did their best, but they were also destroyed in the process.
#
It's kind of poignant to talk about how he had his legal license restored by a judge
#
called Wallace and he therefore named his son Wallace.
#
And what kind of struck me about this remarkable figure was you have a sentence
#
there about how, quote, the idea of Swadeshi as popularized by the Congress was limited
#
to such tokenisms as making candles in bangles, stop quote, almost like the online petitioners
#
of today, a lot of posturing and so on.
#
And this was a man who put his money where his mouth is and regretted it, right?
#
Because it's very easy.
#
Nationalism of convenience is very easy.
#
Many people say we are nationalists.
#
Because when the national anthem plays in a movie theater, they stand up very convenient,
#
you know, standing up, sitting down, nationalism over and done.
#
And you can give yourself a certificate that you're a nationalist when it comes to actually
#
doing something that nobody is going to do because that's going to be inconvenient.
#
And that comes with risk.
#
This man took the risk and lived to regret it.
#
He put all his skin in the game.
#
And at one point the British offered to buy his company out for one lakh rupees and he
#
And a decade later, he's begging Mahatma Gandhi, where is my three hundred and forty seven
#
And that's heartbreaking.
#
And did Gandhi not know of his past, by the way?
#
But the thing is, right, you know, when the movement's moving on, right, it's a big thing
#
And no, I'm not saying it was bad on Gandhi's part, bad on the part of other nationalists.
#
But the world was changing.
#
They had to focus on other goals.
#
And there were many who were going to fall by the wayside.
#
You know, even now, you know, then you see this in political parties, how people hustle
#
for positions, for example, you feel it because they genuinely are working hard, etc.
#
But the competition's intense.
#
Even for a party position, there are always dozens and dozens of claimants.
#
Which one wins depends not merely on whether you're good.
#
It depends on your charisma, on your networking skills, things like that.
#
He tried to do something, but in other respects, perhaps he didn't have certain skills.
#
You know, maybe it would have been wise to sell off that company at that time, use the
#
money to become big and secure himself first and then give grand speeches and all of that.
#
That may have secured his position.
#
Which is easy to say in hindsight.
#
But at that time, he made the choice not to do it.
#
And, you know, he wasn't in that sense shrewd about his choices.
#
He was determined and very idealistic and idealism can sometimes be very fatal.
#
After he passed away, etc., after independence and all, they had a ship named after him and
#
I think the portal is now, you know, commemorates him and all of that.
#
And that's hardly a consolation for a man who had to beg for 300 rupees, naked after
#
being one of the richest men in the South.
#
And you write about how he died in Penury in 1937 and right at the end, he was reduced
#
to selling his law books, which is kind of heartbreaking.
#
You know, I used to be a professional poker player and there was someone I used to know
#
who was from this industrial family who was a very bad player and it's a very sad story.
#
He basically lost everything in the last time he got addicted to cocaine along the way and
#
had a heart attack and all of that.
#
And the last I heard of him, he was selling his cutlery.
#
So it's kind of anyway, that is completely unrelated to this.
#
Much as you're used to historical time, I guess, I've, you know, taken almost two and
#
a half hours of your time.
#
So I'll sort of talk about one final chapter, which seems very interesting and relevant
#
to me, which is a chapter called Savarkar's thwarted racial dream.
#
And in that you sort of talk about how at one point Gandhi, who almost like so much
#
about Gandhi is loony, but at one point Gandhi says that the Nizam of Hyderabad should be
#
a future emperor of United India when we get freedom from the British.
#
And to counter that, Vinayak Savarkar, who is of course the founder of Hindutva and so
#
on, comes up with his own vision for India.
#
Tell me a little bit about that.
#
Yeah, I think the story is that some journalists asked Gandhiji something about, you know,
#
keeping India united, etc.
#
And he said, you know, it wouldn't matter, we can have a Muslim emperor, perhaps the
#
Nizam of Hyderabad and that keeps the country together.
#
And Savarkar gets very riled up with this and he said, why should it be the Nizam of
#
It should be the King of Nepal.
#
Now if you look at what's happening in Nepal, you know, the bloodbath and the chaos in that
#
country and the last thing you want is the Nepali royal family coming and becoming emperors
#
of India of all places.
#
But this was something Savarkar was very interested in and actually does have some logic to it.
#
He, for example, tried very hard throughout to link up all these princely states that
#
existed in India, the Hindu princely states, because the thing was the Hindu princely states
#
were not directly ruled by the British.
#
The royal families of Maharajas had plenty of money, so they could patronize a lot of
#
Hindu Mahasabha meetings took place in princely states because there was a constituency there.
#
They were not under direct British oppression and they had that sense of Indian culture,
#
Hindu temples that they were protecting and all of that.
#
So he wanted these Hindu princely states to become sort of laboratories for a future India
#
where these Maharajas would train up little armies and make people virile and strong and
#
all of that and they would all unite.
#
So his big theory was that the King of Nepal would come down with a big army and from across
#
these princely states, a lot of these armies would, these people would rise up and they'd
#
all unite and create this new India.
#
Defenders of the Hindu faith.
#
Defenders of the Hindu faith.
#
I mean, it could have worked in some regards because the Maharajas did try to interact.
#
The Maharaja of Mysore was always desperate for Rajput Brides from Rajputana.
#
Rajput always saw the Maharaja of Mysore, South Indians is lower caste, so they didn't care.
#
But and so he had to, Mysore had to make do with Kathiyawar Gujarati Rajputs rather than
#
the proper Rajputana ones.
#
You know, there were the Padmanabhaswamy temple, the idol is made of Shaligramams that come
#
So, you know, there are links between these states.
#
One could see that there could be a few threads that you could investigate.
#
But sadly, the Maharajas, most of them were not inspiring.
#
They were all hanging about in Europe, they were doing their parties and their champagne
#
and collecting Rolls Royces and falling in love with white nurses and things like that.
#
They were hardly going to rise up to Savarkar's grand vision to unite and sort of create a
#
Hindu empire with the King of Nepal as their emperor.
#
It was not going to happen.
#
So yeah, it was, it was a, it's very interesting.
#
He published this first as a, as an anonymous essay in a newspaper.
#
So after I wrote about this, I got a shorter version of this as a column.
#
And someone on Twitter, somebody said, you know, how do you know that person was Savarkar
#
who wrote this anonymous article in this paper?
#
But the advantage I have is that the same thing Savarkar published again in one of his
#
So you know, you know, it was him who wrote this, so it was a freak idea that he came
#
up with and it's interesting.
#
It could potentially have led to something if the princes were actually invested in creating
#
Sadly, the princes were not.
#
But the dream for a Hindu state seems to remain alive.
#
And this is a sort of one of the themes that you touch upon in your book and in our conversations
#
is about how history is not a clean linear thing.
#
This happens, that happens after that and so on, just a link of cause and effect.
#
Instead it's very messy and complex and there are all kinds of currents simultaneously flowing
#
together, each of them experiencing their own ebb and flows.
#
And you could say that a sort of a certain current dominated in the decades before this
#
and after independence.
#
And you know, there's a lot of happenstance involved there as well.
#
But one current which was under the surface for a long time and you know, has now kind
#
of come back and is almost this roaring wave around us, which is this whole concept of
#
a sort of a Hindu nation and so on and so forth.
#
I mean, like looking back at it historically, do you think that it was inevitable that this
#
would arise again at some point or is there just a lot of dumb luck in everything that
#
I think, you know, a lot of the resentment that is there is real and perhaps even legitimate.
#
What's interesting is that I don't think these people are saying we want a Hindu state.
#
What they're saying is the existing state is not catering to what it promised.
#
You know, at the end of the day, you've created secular institutions, you've created court
#
systems, you've created a constitution.
#
The constitution has wonderful laws against untouchability, for example, but has it gone
#
They're supposed to deliver swift justice, but the courts are jam-packed like this slow
#
nothing moves to get one judgment.
#
You spend about five, six years, 30 years of its property and things like that.
#
Plus, you have an English speaking class that something even Nehru want against, Gandhiji
#
want against, they all want against this new caste system where there's an English speaking
#
elite that replaces the British and there's a large mass there.
#
So secularism is an idea, for example, you can't impose from the top.
#
It has to be cultivated slowly and requires investment, which wasn't made.
#
So it's likely that a lot of a state system is created that's completely in many ways
#
divorced from the realities on the ground.
#
It's a little bit like saying you're taking sexual irreligion and imposing it from the
#
top on a very religious society.
#
So there's bound to be some disappointments, some grievances there.
#
I think the success of the majoritarian right has been in channeling that into their agenda.
#
I don't think the people who are supporting them are entirely wedded to what they're saying.
#
Tomorrow if you give them a better narrative that addresses their grievances, that creates
#
a space for their cultural ideas to also exist, they will easily perhaps change their mind.
#
But that's not been done.
#
That's not been done in a way that is appealing, that works.
#
Are there models for that kind of an alternative narrative in our past?
#
I think the past is a little more flexible.
#
I mean, if you look at past kings, this is the thing.
#
Tradition is never timeless.
#
Tradition always adjusts.
#
It's always making room and responding to political changes.
#
I mean, there's that Gandhi quote, spirit of consensus and compromise, although he uses
#
that in the context of caste, we have to realize that an idea will only have so much value
#
if it's followed, if it actually appeals to the people who are meant to follow it.
#
If you don't, and if you keep insisting on it, no matter how shrill you are, it gets
#
Someone else is going to come and come up with an idea that's probably worse, but sounds
#
better and people will go there.
#
So somewhere there has to be some sort of a consensus and a compromise.
#
And that's why I'm not very enamored of ultra leftist Twitter activists, for example, because
#
that's equally unrealistic.
#
Which world are you living in?
#
It's very easy to say things on social media.
#
My father comes from an impoverished family in Kerala.
#
He grew up as a son of an illiterate farmer.
#
I have cousins who are rickshaw drivers and so on.
#
Their world is very different from mine, right?
#
Every summer we would go there and we would see it.
#
And that world, you can't go there with lofty constitutional values and so on because the
#
concerns are so different.
#
The concerns are so different that none of this addresses that.
#
When it doesn't address that, how are you expecting them to jump on board with your
#
grand imagination for the nation?
#
The idea of India, it has to take Indians along.
#
If some Indians are not feeling wedded to the idea at all, we cannot write many essays
#
as much as we want, but nobody's going to buy it.
#
You and I will buy my book and talk about the idea of India, right?
#
But are the people who matter following or even interested in it?
#
No, because their ideas are different and nobody's bothered to address it except some
#
Look at Kerala, the RSS is not becoming strong there because people are wedded to RSS ideas.
#
It's because every time someone needs a government pension, there'll be an RSS man to take that
#
Even in North India, they'll take them, get that pension, get the paperwork done, all
#
They will help in a way that other people are not doing.
#
They're getting people ahead in some way.
#
I was speaking to someone in Delhi who works in education and I was asking about corruption,
#
whether corruption has dropped UGC in this and that.
#
And he said there was a time when the Congress was in power where it didn't matter what you
#
So long as you delivered the money, you'd get approvals and things like that.
#
Now apparently they'll at least check whether this is real.
#
And there are apparently RSS middlemen who will sort it out for you, but first they'll
#
verify whether you're actually doing what you claim to do.
#
So at the end of the day, you still have to pay the money, but they will make sure that
#
it's not some sort of blanket thing based solely on a price.
#
So the thing is these connections that they've cultivated to the root, look at the Congress
#
party, they've got enough leaders, but where are the grassroots workers?
#
We lost touch with what's happening on the ground.
#
That is the real crisis.
#
When we all sit on Twitter and social media and give sermons about what the right values
#
of the country should be, we've not seen those people.
#
We've not seen the lives they lead.
#
They have no patience for this sort of speech.
#
I mean, you have to understand that it's a push and pull obviously at the end of the
#
At the end of the day, both sides have to give in some way or the other.
#
You have to come to a place where both sides can go along together.
#
Otherwise we'll all live in our little ivory towers really and feel very grand about our
#
superiority intellectually or whatever.
#
But someone else is stealing the show and stealing the game simply because they're doing
#
the heavy lifting and the hard work on the ground.
#
That carries a lot of resonance with me because one of my favorite quotes is by Andrew Breitbart
#
where he says, politics is downstream of culture.
#
And I think a lot of the politics of the opposition today, especially the Congress party is so
#
ineffectual because it has no connect with what's happening in the culture.
#
And the BJP does for good or for bad.
#
And the thing is the culture is deeply complex.
#
So you know, maybe the BJP and the RSS have appealed to certain strands of it, but that
#
doesn't mean that better narratives can't be built.
#
And another thing, thread that I found running through your book and I made notes on it as
#
well is that throughout the book, what we find is that at the political level, you have
#
these simplistic narratives being created, like even Shivaji creates this almost an early
#
Hindutva narrative of, you know, him as a defender of the Hindus and so on.
#
But the fact is that the facts are very different on the ground.
#
The culture is very different.
#
There's so much assimilation happening within the culture, even as those in political power
#
create counter narratives to that.
#
So despite all of Shivaji's narratives, the truth is that when Afzal Khan came to meet
#
him, he had, like you said, bhosles and khopades and so on in his army.
#
And the culture has always been deeper and richer than the politics is.
#
And is that a source for hope?
#
As I said, you know, we shouldn't be despondent that so many people have voted for a certain
#
ideology or whatever, because I don't think they're voting for the ideology, right?
#
New narratives can always be created.
#
New ideas can always be created.
#
But first you have to know the people you're dealing with.
#
You have to know what appeals to them, you have to understand what it is that they want
#
Only then can you come up with a fresh vision.
#
You know, if you're not even going to make the effort to understand who you're addressing,
#
you don't know your audience, what are you going to speak to them?
#
You know, you can sit on stage and speak, people will sit there and clap also perhaps
#
because they're polite.
#
But that's not because they believe in what you're saying.
#
You know, the Congress was genuinely certain that they would actually win a large number
#
of seats, over a hundred at least this time, because everywhere they went, large crowds,
#
People come to see, but people are also intelligent, you know, they also understand these things.
#
I think there's still hope.
#
I think, I mean, obviously there's fake news, there's disinformation, there's this cornering
#
of the media, the media is bending over backwards to please certain people, etc.
#
So even their victory owes a great deal to that.
#
But all the same, another thing they haven't neglected is that staying in touch with, at
#
the end of the day, the people on the ground.
#
That's what Gandhi also did.
#
You know, this is a country, people didn't have radios in those days, communication was
#
weak, people spoke different languages.
#
How did this man manage to unite so much of the country and we have recall value across
#
Simply because he made the effort to go out there and figure out what they wanted.
#
Everything he said, some of it was cuckoo.
#
If you look at it in terms of logic and, you know, basic intelligence, but at that point
#
it needed to be said perhaps and he said it.
#
So he'd bring people on board that way, one way or the other and create a new narrative,
#
a new option, a new vision or something.
#
Right now we don't have somebody to do that.
#
There is one vision that is dominating because it's done a good job of touching the grassroots,
#
conquering the media space, making sure that the mainstream is in their hands.
#
But the other side hasn't quite figured out because they've completely lost touch with
#
everything that matters.
#
And I guess kind of the process of getting back in touch with your own people and understanding
#
your culture doesn't only mean looking around you at the people around you and engaging
#
with them, but also studying the history of your country.
#
And I think a great start for all the listeners of the show would be to buy the courtesan,
#
the Mahatma and the Italian Brahman.
#
Manu, thank you so much for coming.
#
Thank you very much for having me again.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, hop on over to your nearest bookstore and buy
#
Manu Pillai's fantastic book, the courtesan, the Mahatma and the Italian Brahman.
#
And while I am a Kindle evangelist, I would recommend that you buy the hard copies.
#
It comes in two covers, a white and a black one.
#
And the reason I recommend that is that the book is filled with fantastic illustrations
#
And in my opinion is a collector's item for that reason alone.
#
If you want to follow Manu on Twitter, hop on over to at Unam Pillai, that's Manu reversed
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in, thinkpragati.com
#
The Scene and the Unseen is supported by the Takshashila Institution, an independent center
#
for research and education and public policy.
#
Takshashila offers 12-week courses in public policy, technology policy and strategic studies
#
for both full-time students and working professionals.
#
Visit takshashila.org.in for more details.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
India's a massive subcontinent home to truly stunning diversity.
#
Behind the veils of smoke that obscure our thriving cities, our history is still alive,
#
glimmering like sequins waiting to be discovered.
#
And if you, like me, are straining to hear the echoes of our past, this podcast is for
#
I'm Aniruddha Kanissetti, a history and geopolitics researcher and I host Echoes of India, a history
#
podcast about India, by Indians and for Indians.
#
In Echoes, we journey through the complex histories of South Asia and what they can
#
teach us about our globalized world.
#
Tune in every Wednesday on ivmpodcast.com or your favorite podcast app.
#
all sports, all sports, mainly cricket, other sports, in the middle, sandwich.
#
What happened to your language skills?
#
Don't worry, he talks better on the show.
#
It has all things, including cricket and things around sports as well.
#
And some personal life.
#
As you can see, we're a very united podcast and if you want to listen to us, tune in to
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us every Thursday on the IVMPodcast app or ivmpodcast.com Thursday.
