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The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once said, No man ever steps in the same river twice,
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for it's not the same river, and it's not the same man.
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I sometimes sing back to the person I was in my early twenties, and wonder how anyone
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who knew me then can still be friends with me.
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We all change with time and become different.
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But what is this difference?
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To me, it has to do with how we see the world.
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We come into this world and grow into this world with a certain vision of it, a way of
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This could be shaped by our geography, our circumstances, our upbringing, and all sorts
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And as we go through life, this way of seeing changes.
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Layers of blindness that once stopped us from seeing certain facets of the world are stripped
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And sometimes, we add layers because we want to see the world in a certain way.
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Some people can go through life as blind at 80, as ever at 20, and maybe that's one road
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But if you keep your eyes open, chances are that you will see more, and what you see will
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And there are certain callings which require seeing.
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If you are a writer, or an artist, or a filmmaker, or a journalist, your most important faculty
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And that means not just looking at things, but seeing them.
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As my guest on today's show says, going beyond the facts and searching for the truth.
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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Our weekly podcast on economics, politics, and behavioral science.
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Please welcome your host, Amit Barma.
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Welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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My guest today is Annie Zaidi, a blogger, journalist, playwright, filmmaker, and I guess
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she'd just be happy calling herself a writer.
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Annie's written widely about so many subjects that I wasn't sure what I would speak to her
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In fact, that's why I haven't invited her on the show before.
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I couldn't pin down any one thing that an episode could be about.
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But I knew that I could have a great conversation with her, rambling from one subject to another.
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I've done discursive episodes like that before which have turned out to be wonderful, with
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the likes of Pratap Bhanumaita, Paramita Vohra, Russ Roberts, Deepak Shinoi, Rukmini S, and
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just last week, Raghu Sanjilal Jaitley.
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So I finally stopped procrastinating and invited Annie to the seen and the unseen.
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This turned out to be such a stimulating conversation.
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And it isn't even such a ramble.
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We spoke about many things, yes, language to politics, to religion, to art, but without
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my planning it that way, one larger theme ran through all of this.
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How if you combine curiosity with humility, you can see the world so much more clearly.
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And the fact that Annie has been so prolific with her fiction, her non-fiction, with plays
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and short films, means that we get to see what she sees and expand our view of the world.
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If you want to discover her work, I suggest starting with her recent memoir, Bread, Sim
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and Cactus, but first, conversation.
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Before we get there though, let's take a quick commercial break.
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One of the things I've worked on in recent years is on getting my reading habit together.
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This involves making time to read books, but it also means reading long form articles and
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the big question we all
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face is how do we navigate this knowledge?
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Who will be our guide to all the awesome writing out there?
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Well, a couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com,
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which aims to help people up-level themselves constantly to stay relevant for the future.
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called the Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models to even marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I had before.
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Many listeners of the seen and the unseen ask me, hey, how can I build my reading habit?
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How can I up-level my brain?
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Well, I have an answer for you.
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Head on over to CTQCompounds and check out their Daily Reader as well as their other
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activities which will help you up-level your future self.
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Their next batch starts on Saturday, March 13th, and they have already done 15 batches
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping rupees 2,500, 2,500 if you use the discount
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This is for both the Daily Reader and Future Stack, another exciting program they have.
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code unseen.
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Annie, welcome to the seen and the unseen.
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Thank you so much for having me, Amit.
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I've been wanting to invite you for a long time, but what kind of baffled me was that
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Not because there's nothing to talk about, but because there's so much to talk about
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in terms of how prolific you have been with the kind of writing that you do, the kind
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of art that you do, plays as well, films and all of that.
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But eventually I thought that no, you know, you should just call Annie on the show and
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just try to have a good conversation about anything and everything.
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But first, let's sort of talk about, you know, your early days before you came into journalism.
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Like I absolutely loved your book, Bread, Sim and Cactus.
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And in the first chapter there, you sort of talk about, you know, growing up in the town
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Tell me a little bit about that.
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And we are broadly the same age and you know, one thread that's kind of been unraveling
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through a few episodes when I've had guests of again around my age is just sort of talking
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about how back in those days, a lot of the things that we take for granted simply weren't
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there in terms of the Internet and access to all the information in the world and all
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the knowledge in the world and all of that.
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So all of us sort of, you know, we consumed the outside world in very piecemeal and random
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ways and those piecemeal and random ways could shape us.
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And otherwise we were kind of shaped only by our immediate sort of geographical location.
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So you know, tell me a bit about your childhood.
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What kind of kid were you?
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What did you want to be?
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So reading is the one thing I think that I have always done.
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And I think I also did a kind of pre reading.
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I was talking to my mother last week and she told me this quite recently.
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I still remember some nursery rhymes from my childhood, particularly Hindi nursery rhymes.
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I had them by heart and everybody in the family used to kind of tease me about me going on,
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you know, walking around the house, reciting nursery rhymes, etc.
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These were not nursery rhymes that were from my own books.
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These were from my older brother's books.
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He's three or four years ahead in the academic way.
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And when I was two years old, maybe two or two and a half, I hadn't quite learned to
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But my mother tells me that I had the rhymes by heart and I wasn't yet going to school,
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And there was this book, this book of Hindi rhymes, and every time he left the house with
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it, she says I used to look really anxious.
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Not so much that he's leaving, but that the book is leaving and is this book going to
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So I think the word and particularly the written word and literature in some form has been
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there in my life from the beginning.
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This is the one thing that hasn't changed at all.
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That aside, I think the other thing in our household was that because my grandfather
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was a writer and he invested quite heavily in education and literature and culture for
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his children, he couldn't afford a lot.
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The one thing he would not compromise on was education.
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So to the extent that he was able, he sent them to whatever was considered the best schools.
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And he did not stint on books.
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So for example, when once in his life, I think all his children were grown up by that time.
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My mother was already married by that time.
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But once in his life, he got a chance to go to the United States and he traveled widely
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and came back and he didn't come back with clothes.
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He came back with a trunk full of books.
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And I remember reading those books and seeing those books and they're like the maroon leather
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And I think that was the kind of family and household I was growing up in.
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And there was no question of you being denied things to read as long as people could afford
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When we moved to JK Puram, though, it was slightly different.
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This is a way out place, as I describe in my memoir.
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My mother was looking for jobs and the kind of best job that she could find at the time
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was in an industrial township.
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Anyone in India who's grown up in an industrial township kind of knows that there's a template
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You know, they're called, quote unquote, colony.
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And it is usually near some kind of natural resource.
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So in our case, it was near limestone deposits in the hills with other factories.
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It is something else, you know, coal deposits, you know, for steel plants and things like
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For us, it was the Aravali Range in Rajasthan and Rajasthan is one of those states that
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has the most number of cement factories because that's where the limestone is.
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So we moved there and there was a little school there because there were so few facilities.
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I think I believe there was some kind of primary school, a government school in the village
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But otherwise, for employees, there was nowhere else they could go.
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So there's an attempt to set up a private school, which was by the company and for the
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employees, exclusively for the employees of that company, the factory.
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So that's where from the first onwards, I had been to kindergarten and other places,
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but I think from the first standard to the 11th standard, that's where I went.
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My mother worked in that school, initially as vice principal, then as principal.
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She didn't really teach me, though.
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She taught my brother a little bit, but not me.
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She had administrative duties, etc., and she was very, in some ways, a very lenient parent,
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but also a very, how should I say, for instance, she was concerned about academics because
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That was a job, you know, but for everyone in the family, she couldn't be concerned
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So she wouldn't teach just me.
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And this just almost never changed.
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It was only once when I was failing quite badly in math because we couldn't find appropriate
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math tutors in that little place.
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And she wasn't a math tutor herself, so she had to read math and then try and teach me
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whatever she could understand.
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But except for, I think, that one month in my entire 11 years, she did not teach me at
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She did not teach me English literature.
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She did not teach me the social sciences.
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She kind of left it that, you know, OK, this is the school I run and she will learn what
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everyone else reads and learns.
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But I read a lot and I read everything I could lay my hands on, which wasn't a lot because
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this place where I was growing up, it had one ration ki tukkan, one sabzi ki tukkan,
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one kind of, I think, very small little things where you could get pins and socks and just
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You couldn't, one halwai shop, that I remember, it had one halwai shop and nothing else.
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You couldn't buy books there.
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You couldn't buy birthday cakes there.
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You certainly couldn't buy anything that you wanted to read for pleasure.
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So my earliest memories of reading for pleasure are when we used to go for the summer holiday.
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We would go and there was this railway station and you had to kind of sign a requisition
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form, requisition a cab and then that cab would take you to the station.
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And while we were waiting for the trains, there was a wheeler stall there and we were
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allowed for a journey, we were allowed one book each.
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So that was such an exciting thing, one, to see the stall, to just see this bandar of
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books, which I was just completely obsessed by the fact that there were books and you
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could buy them and that I could choose one.
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So a lot of time was just spent choosing things.
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My brother was allowed one, I was allowed one.
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And I obviously read too fast and the journey was much longer, so the book would be done
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in maybe three or four hours and my brother and I would exchange books and then that would
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And the rest of the journey I would just be staring at my mom and you know, mom I'm bored,
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mom I'm bored, mom I'm bored.
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This was my refrain through all journeys for as I think for the longest time, but I was
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never allowed more than one book or one magazine in all those years.
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However, my mom was responsible for stocking the library.
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So once a year, she would go out and buy 30 books, 50 books, whatever she was allowed,
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she was given a budget and that was my reading growing up and I would borrow what I could
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from other people, uncles, aunties, friends, whatever I could borrow.
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Otherwise, it was a very small life, a very limited life because the kind of place that
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it was and because there was no public transport and we didn't have our own transport, we didn't
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have a car and I certainly didn't know how to drive and there was no way to go.
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I mean, even now I have revisited the place, I went back and some old teachers are still
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there, some of the older teachers and some of the schoolmates and there's no way to go.
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You can drive out in either direction for maybe 15, 20 minutes.
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You might come upon a dhaba, you can eat there, but there's nothing else to do.
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There are no clubs, there are no, except for the school itself, there are no libraries,
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there are no cinemas within that little place.
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So that was the kind of upbringing where books were your only entertainment and escape into
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And you mentioned that your grandfather, of course, had written this memoir called Gubari
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Did you read that when you were a kid or did you read that later?
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What impression did it make on you?
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Much later, much later.
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I knew nothing of my grandfather's work.
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Plus, it was in Urdu and it hasn't been translated and I came to Urdu very late in my life.
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When I began to research this question of identity and belonging and a little bit of
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whatever I remembered from what my grandfather told me, I grew interested and then I dug
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up this memoir and I began to read it then.
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Even then I really struggled, I needed help to transcribe it because the lettering is
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I mean, now with Urdu, if you have modern fonts, which are a little more clear, but
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if things were handwritten and typeset in the old way, it's really confusing.
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So I always need to cross-check with someone who knows the language better to kind of send
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them snapshots and say, am I reading this correct?
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I knew very little about my grandfather.
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My grandfather was a very busy man.
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He worked, of course, and even after retirement, he took up a post-retirement position and
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he had his own writing and things.
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So he used to get up at maybe five in the morning and write for about three hours before
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he went to work, before he went to office.
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And then he used to come back and used to have a cup of tea and maybe a little bit of
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conversation, and then he used to write again for three hours in the evening.
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And then it was dinner and bedtime.
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So the kind of, I mean, I regret not having those conversations with him while I could,
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the long, lengthy conversations about where we're from, his ideas about politics, but
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I could never have that because he was busy creating the literature, I suppose.
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And was that aspirational to you in some way, having someone like that in your family who
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was a learned man of letters, who was writing?
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At that point in time, did you think of the world in terms of, look, I like to read, I'd
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also like to write, or is that something that really happened much later?
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How did you see yourself in those days?
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I don't think I grew up with any sense of wanting to be a writer.
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I didn't know what I wanted to be.
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I would keep changing my answer when people asked, I mean, I hated it when people asked,
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what do you want to be when you grow up?
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I suppose, like all kids, I cast around for what other people were saying.
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So if somebody said doctor, I would also say doctor, no intention ever of actually being
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Then for a while, I figured out, okay, science is not my thing.
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Then I would say, I want to be an IAS officer and everybody would be mighty pleased.
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Ah, that's what she'd be.
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But I had no intention of being an IAS officer either.
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I was very confused about what I wanted to do for the longest time.
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By the time I was in my ninth or tenth, though, I think one thing was clear to me, so that
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I wanted to do something around literature, English literature, I knew I wanted to study
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I still continued to study science rather than literature in my higher secondary.
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Mostly I think circumstances, that's how it was.
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But I think I knew my family also knew that my main strength lay in letters and words.
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I was very confused about what to do, like for a career.
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I remember in my, was it tenth or twelfth, one of these times, I was sent off to, maybe
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my twelfth, I think, after my twelfth, I was sent off to live with my grandparents for
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the summer vacation for maybe a month or two months.
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And I remember going to Lucknow, it was just me and the two of them.
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And my grandfather would be busy reading, writing, as was his thing.
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I didn't know what to do with myself.
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And there was this question of what will you do later?
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And with literature, I knew that there's one thing you can do, which is teaching.
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And apart from teaching, you have no options in life and I did not want to be a teacher.
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So what else could I do?
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I began to sit down and make lists of, okay, what are my skills?
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And I realized I have no actual skills.
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So my grandfather had an old typewriter and I thought, okay, let me learn to type, I can
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be a typist or a secretary, at least.
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So I taught myself to type then on that old typewriter and used to copy some of his letters
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and poems just for practice and things, I remember doing that.
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But even then, no sense of writing originally.
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I was just copying stuff, I was not writing.
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I did write essays for school, et cetera, but more as an extracurricular activity, not
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as something I felt I was committed to.
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In college too, I had no sense until I think the end of my first year when I discovered
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that maybe I could write a little poetry.
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You enter these little competitions, I entered one of these impromptu competitions.
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And then for the first time, I wrote something original.
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And I think just by fluke, I think I won a prize because it was just girls of my age.
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It's not like you're competing against, and all of us are just starting out.
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But when that happened, I also discovered that, okay, there is self-expression here
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and that I can do this, that this is something that taps into some part of me.
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Not as a career, I wasn't even thinking of that.
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I was just thinking that, okay, this is something I have a certain affinity for, I read and
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And then I started writing poems and short stories, et cetera.
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Again, not thinking of it as a career, just thinking of it as, okay, let's try this sort
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I remained confused about being a writer, I think, until after I graduated and I started
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studying journalism, at which point I think finally I then understood that, okay, writing
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And so a dual question, one is that in those teenagers, so to say, or as a child, or who
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were the writers of the books that you really liked, that you really enjoyed?
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And secondly, I think in the life of a writer, there comes a point where, because they get
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so involved with writing and language, they become mindful of the writing of others, the
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tricks that others are using, what they are doing with the language, the rhythms they
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are creating, so on and so forth.
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And what was that shift like for you?
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Was it a very gradual process or was there a, like Arundhati Roy, when she wrote God
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or Small Things, said that it was when she started writing the book that her quality
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of her reading just went up, which is a phrase that struck with me, the quality of reading.
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So what was that shift like and then who were the kind of writers you began to look up to?
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Not just for what they wrote about in thematic terms, but also the craft and how they did
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I think actually I started thinking about craft very late, like very late, given that
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I used to read so much.
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But I think part of the reason was that I used to read at breakneck speed.
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I used to reread when I ran out of reading material.
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So over the holidays, I would read in these intense bursts, like I would finish 30 books
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in two months, 40 books in two months, and then that space, I mean, how much time do
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you have to pick up craft, right?
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So I'd read, I remember, however, I did start paying attention to themes, I think, when
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I was in around high school.
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The question of themes, I think, came first and craft later.
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Craft I think I began to notice only in my late 20s.
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Because I think even in my own writing, I started to be a little bit ambitious about
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writing, like in a creative way in my early 20s.
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And wanting to be published and all of that wasn't happening.
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Not that quickly, which was good for me, actually, I think.
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Because now I think back, I thought I was ready to be published in my early 20s.
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I tried to pull together a manuscript and met a few publishers.
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There were very few publishers at the time, and obviously made no headway.
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I kept writing and kept sort of practicing in a sense.
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And when I think back, I was writing extremely mediocre stuff, and if that had got published,
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I think I would not have grown much as a writer.
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But at some point in my mid 20s, I was working as a journalist full time, but I joined, and
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I also joined and formed, set up two peer review groups for writers, for aspiring writers.
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And what we used to do is we used to meet and read out our work to each other, and give
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feedback and things like that.
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I think that is when a little bit of attention to craft started to happen.
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At least the mistakes I was making with my own craft.
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You could call them mistakes, or you can just say how other people were responding to that.
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I became more conscious of that.
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And along with that, I think when I started to read something, and something would really
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So, for example, I remember reading Paul Astor's New York, and just the craft of that, it's
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It's unavoidable, right?
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When you first read Murakami, it's like that, okay, what's he doing here?
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Why is this working, even though it should not work, you know, in a conventional sense.
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That I think happened in my mid to late 20s, when I began to, perhaps I think maybe because
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I was also writing and paying attention to what was working and what wasn't.
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And when you sort of think about writing and craft, how much of a difference does it make
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that you're actually imbibing culture in different languages?
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So it's not just English, it's Urdu, it's Hindustani, as it were, as, you know, we'll
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discuss the languages later in this episode.
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But how much did all of that influence your writing?
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Because it strikes me that all of these languages, in terms of values, in terms of what they
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sort of, you know, privilege in the way they are structured, are very different from each
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Something that works in Urdu may not work in English and vice versa.
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Murakami is interesting that you named him because he's such a rhythmic musical writer.
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But at the same time, like so many other Japanese writers, there's also this, you know, a sparseness
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to his prose, a simplicity to his prose, which might have something to do with the Japanese
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language itself, that it doesn't say value or give space for expressionism in the same
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way that Urdu or Bengali might.
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So all of them kind of bring different things to the table, and that's just language, like
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even in terms of storytelling, the sort of traditions that you get, you know, the tradition
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of the American short story is so different from how Indian writers would kind of approach
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You know, so what was that process of figuring out all these influences?
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At what point do you start consciously thinking about them and all of that?
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So I think that because Urdu, I was more or less cut off from Urdu literature.
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There was, it was in the air in the way that spoken Urdu always is.
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I think, especially in North India, it's just there around you.
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Hindi a little bit from literature, but I also think that what happened with Hindi was
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that after primary school, very quickly I stopped enjoying the kind of texts that were
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prescribed were, I suppose, literary from the point of view of the people who make syllabi,
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but it was very difficult.
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The kind of language used was heavily Sanskritized, that version of Hindi, and I completely lost
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We still studied it and analyzed it and passed the exams, I suppose.
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But I think in secondary school, I do not have a memory of enjoying it much.
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I do have a very sharp memory of this poem.
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I've never forgotten it, partly because of its simplicity, partly because it was just
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so different from the Sanskritized kind of literature, both in its intent and the kind
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of morality that Hindi literature seemed to be imbued with, a kind of punitive morality,
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It was very refreshing, this poem called Radha Sondarya.
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It was prescribed on our school syllabus, but it is not in what is called Shuddh Hindi.
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So the lines go something like this.
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It compares the beauty of Radha to various things and various animals, particularly.
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And it was so striking, the imagery, because one, the imagery itself, it comes from, I
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think, a pre-contemporary era.
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Which means the waste, the lion.
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She has stolen her waste from the lion.
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And gaj ko churaya chaal, which is hati se churaya chaal, and it says,
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kahe kavi beni beni bayal ki churai lini, which is that she has stolen a hare from the
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And that imagery was striking, the language was striking.
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I didn't understand much of this, and I didn't understand much of that.
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But I remember very sharply enjoying it and understanding that this is the kind of thing
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that I enjoy reading, and I wish that there was more of it.
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And the playfulness of it, you know, the last line is,
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Ab to Kanhaiya ji ka chit hi churaya lina, chhurtiya chhurtiya gurtiya heer ki.
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And similarly with English, I remember there was this poem prescribed, not for me, but
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for my brother, because I was always reading three years ahead.
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When his books arrived for his sessions, I would first finish reading my books, then
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I would finish reading his books for both English and Hindi.
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And then, of course, the year would proceed and you'd have to be taught the same text.
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So I think I did have a fairly solid grounding in that way, in at least two languages.
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Urdu, I think I got more from Hindi films.
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Hindi films were a huge influence on me, even though we didn't have a television for the
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But I think at some point, we used to, you know, there used to be these people who used
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to travel through with projectors, they would set up this white sheet and they would project
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the film onto it and you would just sit there on a dhari or on a chair, like a folding chair.
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People would carry out their folding chairs and sit and watch the film.
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So that's how I watched some of my earliest cinema, Hindi films, and I remember them very
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If I wanted to memorize the songs, I would, I had a little notebook in which I would memorize
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the Hindi film songs and I would write them down.
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And so I knew that I still know them by heart.
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All those songs of the 70s and 80s that I saw growing up.
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You know, there was this cassette, like this magnetic tape cassette that we had, which
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was old Lata songs, like really old ones.
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There's this one that I really like, which is Thandi Hawaien Laira Ke Aaye, Tum Ho Kahaan,
#
something like that, which I knew all of that by heart also.
#
And also Lata Ke Dardh Bhare Geet and all of those.
#
I think the poetry there, and I absorbed it without it being taught to me.
#
And that was very good for me, I think, because I learned to then enjoy it without being tested
#
But that was my only literary influence as far as Urdu was concerned.
#
The mixed inheritance was more, I would say, Hindi rather than English.
#
I mean, Hindi and English.
#
You know, I'll quote a paragraph from you, from your book, where you've sort of described
#
this very eloquently, where you say, quote,
#
Hindustani, a colloquial Hindi which was nearer Urdu, was indeed my possession.
#
The Sanskrit-infused version of Hindi taught in school was a burden I bore reluctantly.
#
It was as if the syllabus had been designed to test how far the envelope of comprehension
#
The Hindi of movies, songs, friends, of contemporary poetry and fiction was like a cozy room with
#
Colloquial Hindi was like sitting on a stone floor on cold winter nights.
#
And I kind of loved that.
#
And a lot of this, a lot of, you know, how what was essentially one language, whether
#
you call it Hindustani or you call it something else, was, you know, went in these different
#
directions because of politics is so tragic.
#
And you see the sort of contrived effect of that on, you know, the worst of Shudh Hindi
#
as it were, and as indeed it would probably have been taught in the schools.
#
I mean, even I remember some pretty dreary Hindi back in the day, though my listeners
#
will be amused to know, by the way, and aside that in both the 10th and the 12th, I got
#
more marks in Hindi than in English.
#
So there you go, power of memorizing big words.
#
Do not try this in any other language.
#
But tell me a little bit about all of that, the sort of politics behind language, which
#
has affected not only language, but, you know, all of us essentially.
#
I started thinking about the politics of language only in recent years, partly because it has
#
been, I think, perhaps on purpose politicized to this extent.
#
I didn't think much about not being taught Urdu, for example.
#
I just didn't think very much about it when I was growing up.
#
You took it for granted.
#
I regretted it though, because as I grew more interested in poetry, particularly Urdu poetry,
#
I wanted to know more, and my grandfather was an Urdu poet.
#
So I would ask my mom to read out some of his poems, you know, whatever books we had.
#
I would ask her to read them out, and then we would copy them down in Hindi.
#
And then we would write letters to him to say, explain this, explain this word, explain
#
And that was my actually earliest Urdu lessons in school.
#
And I was really interested, but there was no way to do it.
#
I think I began to think about the politics, particularly because it became a physical
#
There's this report in the media a few years ago about people were kind of being facing
#
hostile reactions in metros and buses if they were seen carrying Urdu literature or any
#
Urdu literature being equated with, you know, as something foreign and therefore worthy
#
And this kind of started to upset me, it really upset me, of course, because not only is obviously
#
I have a personal inheritance of Urdu from my family, but that apart, if any language
#
can be called authentically Indian, it is most definitely Urdu.
#
It was created in the heart of India, somewhere between from Punjab down up to the Deccan.
#
That's where it was made, and it's absolutely ridiculous that people know this, you know,
#
everybody studied that much in school and everybody knows this.
#
So this otherization, the designation of a language as not being from here or just because
#
other people who are now foreign, just because different people who live in different countries
#
also own that language that you should start to treat it with hostility at home, was something
#
that I found quite shocking, actually.
#
But once I started thinking about that, I also began to think about language and power.
#
And then that took me back to Jaikapura and the where I was growing up, where I was growing
#
up, a small place, obviously.
#
As I've said, everybody who moved to that colony was from somewhere, everybody, everybody
#
I knew had come from, say, Gujarat, from Rajasthan, from other parts of India, wherever.
#
There were Malayali students, there were Gujarati students.
#
We had at some point a third language requirement.
#
I think something about CBSE rules having changed or something.
#
And then the question of what language, what third language can be taught to us?
#
In addition to English in the and Sanskrit, Sanskrit was of course compulsory.
#
But in addition to that, we needed one more language.
#
So we thought about it, and I think it was decided because Rajasthan's official language
#
It was decided that we should learn Gujarati because Gujarat is the nearest other state.
#
So for two years, I did learn Gujarati.
#
But the fact is that Rajasthan does have two or three other languages.
#
It doesn't have necessarily its own distinct script.
#
So Mewari, Marwari, we were surrounded by villagers with whom we could not communicate.
#
Villagers would come in, they would go, they would talk in their own language.
#
It did not strike anyone because these were not, quote unquote, board languages.
#
We were never going to give our official exams in Mewari or Marwari.
#
It was just a question of picking up another language.
#
But the school and the CBSE system did not see fit to then say, OK, why not a local language,
#
which is perhaps not designated amongst the, you know, whatever, the 16 or 20 or 25, whatever
#
languages there were in the constitutional list.
#
Why not one more of those?
#
And it effectively, what language and its politicization does is that it seals people
#
This is one of the things that official discourse around languages does.
#
It ensures that you actually cannot communicate with people who do not know your language.
#
That's fundamental, right?
#
If you want to communicate with someone, you must learn their language.
#
So what you're saying is that people who are schooled in Hindi or whose mother tongue is
#
Hindi ought not to then communicate with people whose mother tongue is not Hindi or alternatively
#
that people whose mother tongue is not Hindi, if they want to communicate at all, either
#
with other citizens or with the state, you know, which they must, they don't have an
#
option but to communicate with the state, must then quit on their own language and develop
#
a certain facility with another language.
#
These were things I began to think of, especially as a journalist, because as I traveled, I
#
found that, you know, there is this kind of general thing which is told to us.
#
And I never questioned either that, you know, Hindi is the most widely spoken language.
#
Everybody in India speaks Hindi, except for the South and maybe the Northeast.
#
Everybody understands Hindi, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
#
Everybody understands Hindi to the extent that if you speak in in very simple ways,
#
they may kind of understand what you're saying, doesn't mean they can talk back to you in
#
that language or that they can express the nuances of what they want to convey that language.
#
I was covering at one point various North Indian states, so Punjab for sure, but also
#
Himachal and I traveled a lot to Madhya Pradesh.
#
And honestly speaking, if I was not accompanied by one other person, and I usually was, it
#
could be an NGO worker, could be sometimes it was a government person, sometimes it was,
#
or it was just somebody from the panchayat whose Hindi was slightly better than the rest
#
If I did not have help, I could not have reported at all.
#
And I think that even so, knowing all this, my reportage was most definitely restricted
#
and not as good as it should be, because what you're basically saying is that one, if you're
#
communicating, for example, if I'm going into a community and I need the help of say the
#
Sarpanj or say the two people who are well educated in Hindi, well educated enough to
#
communicate with me and take me to the homes of the people, whoever I want to speak to.
#
And if there is somebody who is very marginalized in that community, who say does not get along
#
with the Sarpanj or who will not even know that there's a journalist and she wants to
#
talk to you unless other people tell that person and bring that person out to talk to
#
me and interpret for me.
#
If that does not happen, then who am I reporting?
#
I'm automatically reporting from the lens and the perspective of the most privileged
#
people in that community.
#
And I became aware of that increasingly, like I found myself increasingly uncomfortable
#
because I found that I am not able to speak with the most powerless people wherever I
#
And this is something that if I cannot, the state most certainly cannot or does not even
#
How does this work in a diverse country where not everyone speaks the same language?
#
Yeah, no, one of the sort of the revelations for me in your book was how language can form
#
almost a layer of social hierarchy, which is, you know, which is like caste, which is
#
And those are the things we talk about, but language does a similar thing.
#
And of course, at a basic level, we all know that because of our postcolonial baggage and
#
all of that, English has become a marker of class and has a place of privilege.
#
But you know, what your incredible chapter on language kind of brought home to me was
#
how it plays across so many of these different languages.
#
Like I'll quote from another part of your book where you speak about how it becomes
#
difficult to even interface with the state if your first language is something else.
#
And you write quote, it is bewildering, even scary to get a notice from the government
#
or the municipality and not be able to fully comprehend it.
#
These are matters of life and death being asked for proof of citizenship, procurement
#
of land, tax areas, warnings to not venture into the forest or into the sea, information
#
about free health care, supplementary diets, court summons.
#
Whoever controls language, controls everything, stop quote.
#
And elsewhere in the book, you also wrote about, you know, how your grandmother I think would
#
be scared of going to the bank because she wasn't familiar with the language in the form.
#
She might be, you know, incredibly natural and at ease in her own language, but that's
#
been given an inferior status.
#
So she's fumbling with this form and people are telling her to hurry up and it just becomes
#
And the other learning was that when Urdu was adopted as the national language of Pakistan,
#
it was actually not a language spoken there.
#
I mean, the first language in all of the Pakistani states were different.
#
Like in Punjab, it was Punjabi and whatever.
#
And Urdu on the other hand, not only originated in India, in fact, the only foreign part of
#
its origin might be the Sanskrit influence because Sanskrit came from where Syria is
#
But you know, there were riots in Bihar, you pointed out when it was once officially announced
#
as the second language there and all of that.
#
And it's just also incredibly political.
#
You've also written elsewhere about how once you were wearing a tabiiz with Urdu on it
#
and you realized while you were interviewing someone in a village that, you know, oh shit,
#
this tabiiz is visible and you hid it and you know, which was quite striking to me.
#
So is this sort of when you start noticing this stuff, because one of the things that
#
struck me about your book and we'll discuss many different aspects of it is that while
#
you know, it's structured as a sort of a memoir, what you're doing is when you're revisiting
#
all of these places, you're also seeing them with a new lens, you know, looking at language
#
with a new lens or when, you know, talking about JK Puram, where you examine how apt
#
it is that is called a colony, because what happened there is essentially colonization,
#
you know, though many may not think of it that way, and we'll delve into that as well.
#
So did these lenses shift gradually over time or when you decided to write for it, was that
#
moment of examination a part of when you begin to look at things in a new way?
#
I think one of the things with me is that I think through writing, that I very rarely
#
have clear ideas about anything until I get into the writing.
#
So with regard to this book in particular, I had been thinking about some of these things
#
I've been thinking about questions of belonging, identity, place for a very long time.
#
Even in my first book, for example, my first nonfiction book, I have this chapter on questions
#
And when I wrote that, I was much younger, maybe 15 years ago, and it used to really
#
trouble me how in India people are so kind of unhesitating when it comes to asking you
#
to define yourself and define yourself via either region or caste or religion.
#
So just right out there, what's your caste?
#
I mean, I was so shocked when that started to happen when I was out in my home.
#
And I would say I'm a journalist and they would be like, no, what are you?
#
And they mean your religion and your caste, of course.
#
And I used to dodge that question initially just because it made me so uncomfortable.
#
And then just out of a kind of zid, just obstinacy that I will not answer that.
#
What are you going to do?
#
I remember in a long conversation in a railway waiting room with this other woman, young
#
woman, she kept asking me, what are you?
#
And I kept saying, I don't know.
#
And she said, how can you not know?
#
And I said, my parents never told me.
#
And she said, but how is that even possible?
#
So this was the sort of thing that I used to get into these conversations early, is
#
to resist the idea of identity set in stone.
#
But over the years, I became more curious about what shapes them, what shapes my identity
#
If I actually had to give an answer, say, how would I try and answer that?
#
And I found myself leaning more towards language and more towards regional affiliation.
#
And by regional, I don't necessarily mean linguistic.
#
I mean, for example, when I say regional, I don't just mean UP, I mean Eastern UP.
#
I feel no affiliation for Western UP.
#
And then where does this affiliation from Eastern UP come from?
#
It comes from inheritance.
#
It comes from stories I've been told about where my family comes from, et cetera, narratives.
#
A lot of affiliation comes from narrative.
#
And I grew interested in that.
#
So I think that in the course of writing, in the course of researching things, I was
#
just blundering upon these different ideas.
#
And the more I struggled with these ideas, the more certain answers presented themselves,
#
or at least one way of interpreting those answers.
#
And things sort of, once you start opening up the chapter on women, for example, was
#
not something I was conceiving of at all.
#
I did not want to think of, I most definitely identify as a woman, whether or not I identify
#
There's no escaping that I am a woman, and that's not likely to change.
#
But I hadn't thought of womanhood itself as being a dislocated or very malleable identity
#
in regional terms, or even linguistic and cultural terms.
#
I hadn't thought of it until I began the writing, when I sat down and started talking to people.
#
Then I figured out that, OK, other women feel differently from me.
#
That's because they're married.
#
Or because their family backgrounds are different from mine, they don't have the choices that
#
So I think that for me, particularly, that moment comes when I'm in the moment, when
#
I've already kind of put myself out there into the question, and I'm casting about for
#
answers and looking to see what I can gather.
#
Sometimes these more contentious and difficult kind of ways of thinking about a particular
#
topic suggest themselves at that time.
#
I very rarely plan how I will approach a certain question or answer.
#
You've written very eloquently at different parts of the book about both identity and
#
sort of the notion of home.
#
And I'll again quote from something that you say in one of your later chapters, where you
#
write quote, that I grew into womanhood with the feeling of dispossession that I could
#
not articulate is not surprising after all.
#
My body, my city, even my culture was not my own to inhabit obstinate and argumentative.
#
I was the opposite of most feminine virtues advertised in the matrimonial columns of the
#
Worse, I was afraid that I might actually be persuaded, seduced, scolded into inhabiting
#
those values and surrendering my selfhood.
#
How much did you know, and what you said about, you know, sort of discovering what you think
#
through writing is, again, resonant Joan Didion once said, I don't know what I think until
#
And you know, when I kind of teach my writing course, I also talk about how it's a two way
#
It's not that you know something and then you write it.
#
Sometimes writing is a way of knowing and finding out and as much about the self as
#
Now, what I've kind of noticed about, say, our notions of the self is that a lot of it
#
is about peeling away layers that stop us from seeing things like you made a short film
#
about the color red, about seeing red everywhere.
#
And I remember you spoke about that in an interview where you spoke about how you imagined
#
that Mumbai was a city of grays.
#
But then you went around shooting red and you realized that they were just red everywhere.
#
And what happened, what happened is that your previous lens was a particular kind of lens
#
and you added a layer to it or you took away that layer which sort of didn't allow you
#
to see red and you're seeing red everywhere.
#
And that struck me as a beautiful metaphor for how we evolve as people as well.
#
Like I think, for example, for a lot of men, there's one layer that never kind of goes
#
away where they don't sort of realize the experience of women in the sense that, you
#
know, if I get into a crowded lift with five men, I don't feel anything.
#
But obviously when a woman does, there is that added layer of self awareness.
#
If you I can go out for a walk at night without thinking twice about it.
#
But even in a safe city like Bombay, I would imagine that there is that layer of alertness
#
Then there can be kind of layers of caste which you peel away, layers of privilege you
#
don't realize whether they are your class, layers of language where just being able to
#
speak in English with a, you know, a Sarkari person automatically kind of in a sense you're
#
saying that, hey, you know, you know, I could be someone who could have influence and get
#
you into trouble or whatever.
#
And over time and most people don't become aware of these layers.
#
And I would imagine that as a writer, you know, you are more likely to sort of especially
#
if you're doing the kind of writing that you're doing, which goes into the territory of personal
#
essays and fiction and all of that, that you're more likely to kind of peel those away.
#
So when you when you look at, say, the young Annie, the 20 year old Annie, as it were,
#
and, you know, you today, what do you think are those sort of big moments, those big learnings,
#
the layers that are gone?
#
God, I was so clueless at 20, just I cannot imagine a more clueless person at 20.
#
See, one thing about me was that I did not grow up in big cities.
#
I did not even grow up in small cities.
#
I grew up in this little way out place and then when I did go to college, I went to a
#
town, a small town, which made but I went to a girl's hostel and it was very, very strict.
#
You were not allowed out except once or twice a month and that was for maybe two or three
#
And if you stepped out at all, even on those once or twice a month occasions, you need
#
to have a legitimate excuse.
#
So you needed to say why you were going out.
#
It wasn't enough to say, I want to go out.
#
You needed to say, I'm going to visit my local garden, I'm going to visit a doctor, I'm,
#
you know, I need to buy some essentials, you know, I need to buy books, I need to, whatever
#
You needed to have a good excuse to do that.
#
And because of that, my experience of urban life is extremely limited, like even what
#
I knew of Ijmer was next to nothing, really.
#
I knew Lucknow because from family visits and holidays, but you obviously are not allowed
#
to go out on your own then you don't have your own money, you don't know how to negotiate
#
So, you know, that that experience is completely different.
#
I think when I moved finally to Bombay, Mumbai, as it was by that time, when I moved back
#
here, I, the city itself was a very shocking experience, for one, you know, just the scale
#
of it, the crowds, the having to negotiate everything, you know, like, it wasn't just
#
that you were negotiating an income, you were negotiating every single thing, negotiating
#
the buses, negotiating the trains, negotiating the platforms, negotiating the stack cases.
#
And I think that for the first couple of years, all my experience is kind of jammed into,
#
I cannot separate one strand of experience from the other.
#
I do have this one very clear memory, and this is from when I was younger, actually.
#
I mentioned one of these experiences in the book where when I used to wear shalwar kumis,
#
typically in the north when you wear shalwar kumis, you also wear a dupatta.
#
And it is not necessarily for the sake of modesty, it's often just decorative.
#
But you know, I used to wear it around my neck.
#
And I, in Bombay's local women's compartment, the pattas of the dupatta, the loose ends
#
of the dupatta had got trapped between other women.
#
And I was trying to get off, and there were women getting on, and I was almost strangled
#
because there was one group of women pushing me out, there was this, there came an actual
#
And then I started noticing that nobody wears dupattas.
#
The women here don't wear things around their neck.
#
And then I started to pay close attention, and I saw that when women get onto the trains,
#
get off the trains, they often take a scarf or dupatta out of their handbags, and then
#
Once they're done with the crowds, once they're sitting in cabs, once they're entering the
#
offices, that's when they do it.
#
And for me, that was a revelation that, oh, okay, this is how it works.
#
These are working women in the fullest sense, that, you know, they're not just women who,
#
you know, can have their home lives, but also their external feminine selves, and they occupy
#
That was how it worked, that, you know, whatever that you dressed in, in a feminine manner,
#
whatever that femininity was, and you occupied it very fully, but it wasn't like that in
#
You constantly negotiated even that because it could become something dangerous.
#
And these were the little ways in which I began to understand that whatever I am, whatever
#
I have learned as a child, as a young girl, as a teenager, will have to slowly be, if
#
not completely given up, will have to constantly be tested for context.
#
So the problem is not the dupatta, the problem is the context, a crowded train is the context.
#
And similarly, I found that everything else about my life became more and more contextual,
#
growing up as an Indian middle class child, I should say, not just women, particularly
#
a girl, but, you know, I mean, I think this applies to men too.
#
Your ideas of morality are so set, so fixed.
#
Going to a police station was considered a bad thing because who hangs around in courts
#
and police stations, you know, people who've done wrong things or people who are in trouble.
#
And you definitely don't want to be somebody who's in trouble.
#
So but when I was a journalist, once I became a journalist and that was my job, I had to
#
I had to do the rounds of the police stations and the courts and understand that life is
#
It is so hard and I had no idea it was this hard and I come from a not very privileged
#
I mean, I was more or less single parented.
#
My mother didn't have much money.
#
We grew up in these tiny places.
#
We didn't have our own vehicles, all of that.
#
It wasn't that I was working just for fun, needed the job.
#
But I had no idea that life was this hard for so many people.
#
I think journalism taught me that.
#
And I think that introduced me first to whatever little privilege I had.
#
It was very like we just were barely surviving in the city.
#
And I thought that was hard.
#
But then you go out there, then you see that my god, life is hard for others.
#
You go to public hospitals and you see the conditions of those hospitals.
#
And I think many of my ideas about not only about what makes people do the things they
#
do in either a moral sense or just in a social sense, those things started to fall away.
#
I had grown up with a slight suspicion, which I think a lot of kids grow up with, a slight
#
suspicion of leftist politics.
#
Even though my grandfather had been, at least in his youth for a few years, he was socialist
#
and that's in his memoir, et cetera.
#
But in general, around me, all conversations were like, oh, he's a socialist, he's a communist.
#
So the suspicion of ways of thinking which were on the left was even without my knowledge.
#
And I had no idea if you'd asked me as a 21-year-old, what is your politics, like, I don't know.
#
I don't know what left is.
#
I don't know what right is.
#
But once I actually went out there, I began to become aware not only firstly about the
#
awareness of being political, that you have to be political, you cannot completely cut
#
yourself off from everything around you and say that, oh, I'm apolitical.
#
That was the preserve of the extremely privileged.
#
I understood that very quickly.
#
I also understood very quickly that when people say things like, you know, oh, those people,
#
like I keep slipping back into Hindi because that's the conversation around me.
#
But people say things like, you know, amongst those people, these things happen.
#
It's actually OK to slip into Hindi, I think my listeners will get it, like, OK, all right.
#
Like, you know, the poor don't want to study, they don't want to get ahead in life.
#
And those are the kind of things which you absorb without, you don't really question
#
And then when I actually went out there and I saw how hard people work to just get a chance
#
at education, there are women holding down three or four or eight different jobs to be
#
able to put their kids to school and they trust that that will somehow lift them out
#
of poverty, save them from the worst things that they're out there.
#
There were a lot of things out there.
#
I remember when I was one of my assignments, I was sent off to cover a raid on a brothel
#
and I was working in midday at the time.
#
It was just one of those things where I mean, one, I didn't even tell my family that I'm
#
going to do it because what do you tell them?
#
And I think I would have been sucked into the kind of confrontation I could not afford
#
But even from my own point of view, of course, it was extremely frightening, extremely frightening.
#
Just the idea of even when you're going with the police, accompanying a police team, I
#
wasn't going on my own.
#
But the idea of being a woman going into a space, which I understood instinctively to
#
be hostile to women, I mean, these were sex workers, yes, and some of them may be voluntary
#
sex workers, but I understood it to be intrinsically hostile to the women.
#
And I was very frightened.
#
And I remember thinking that this was a, quote unquote, not nice thing I'm doing, you know,
#
like nice girls, even for their work, they don't go to brothels, like, what is this?
#
What am I doing here in the middle of the night with these cops and who hangs out with
#
And I remember having all these questions in my mind, but I'd actually never seen an
#
actual sex worker in my life before.
#
And this is true of, I think, women in particular, men might notice or men might even enter into
#
a conversation with a sex worker because that is the nature of the transaction.
#
But for women, particularly, quote unquote, nice, you know, or respectable, whatever that
#
means, the idea of respectability was something I had not challenged as a 2021, just to get
#
for granted that, yeah, I'm respectable and you have to hold on to this idea of your respectability.
#
But I did know quite certainly that respectability is constantly under attack, that even if you
#
are somebody from a, quote unquote, respectable family, your respectability is constantly
#
It is constantly being threatened.
#
Premarital sex can threaten it, photos of you, nude photos of you can threaten it.
#
Anybody makes a random comment about you, that can threaten it.
#
Somebody goes to your parents and says, oh, we saw this girl sitting so and so at that
#
time with a boy, and then that threatens it.
#
If you've seen smoking, then that threatens your idea of whether or not you're respectable.
#
All these things I knew, and I knew that you have to at all times guard against any, the
#
smallest assault upon your respectability because then your life could be ruined, etc.,
#
And then here I was then doing this thing, attending a raid where you were looking for
#
And that one night, I have to say that so much just fell away.
#
Lost my ideas about, because these were just things I'd seen in movies, you know, never
#
But then I go in and I see that there are all these girls, they're dressed up and they're
#
being picked out by somebody who's pretending to be a client, but is actually a cop.
#
And then I saw the cops beating up some of the men who were possibly workers, pimps or
#
whoever they were, procurers.
#
And then I sat down with some of those girls while the raid was underway because what else
#
I had nowhere else to go.
#
My job was just to sit and watch what was happening.
#
I'm sitting with those girls and I was clearly upset.
#
I don't think I was like bawling or anything, but I was upset enough that even the cops
#
And they turned around and somebody said that, you know, somebody take this girl away because
#
she's going to start crying any minute now.
#
And then some of these girls, the sex workers took me away.
#
They took me to another room and they allowed the raid to progress as it was progressing.
#
And they thought for some reason, I don't know why, maybe they picked up on my fear
#
They sat me down, they held my hands and they said didi koi baat nahi.
#
And it was just so ridiculous because they were the ones who were suffering the raid.
#
The cops were going to, I mean, nothing was going to happen to me.
#
I was going to go back home at the end of that night.
#
And even as a 21, 22, maybe a year old, I was aware of this irony that this is absolutely
#
Why are these girls holding my hand and telling me ki didi, you know, you don't worry.
#
I mean, I should be the one telling them that didi, you don't worry.
#
They were younger to me.
#
They were 17 years old, 18 years old.
#
Many of them were minors.
#
They ended up doing the tests and finding that these 16, 15 year old girls.
#
I think a lot of my bias has crumbled immediately.
#
In that moment, every bias I had held about what kind of woman deserves to be treated
#
in what way that in that one night that collapsed completely.
#
I also remember thinking that about the nature of policing for the first time, because it
#
was the first time I had seen anyone hit a grown man.
#
You know, when you come from families where you don't, I mean, I had seen violence, like
#
in school, I had seen violence, kids getting beaten up.
#
I'd never seen a grown man be beaten up.
#
I saw that that randomly cops just seeing a man and one top and he could be a client
#
or he could be one of the people who procures women, whoever he was.
#
It was a very big shock.
#
But I also remember thinking that the cops aren't supposed to do this.
#
This is not how policing is supposed to work.
#
You know, maybe they've done something wrong.
#
Arrest them, take down their statements, et cetera, et cetera.
#
I think my ideas about how the police functions also changed that day.
#
I began to understand that that things don't happen the way they're supposed to and that
#
the things I've seen and read in movies and read in books are not the way real life is.
#
It's introduced to real life, so to speak.
#
And once you start questioning the things you've inherited, the respectability bias
#
that you've inherited, then you start questioning everything else.
#
I think for me, that one night I will never forget.
#
And actually, there's a talk on YouTube where you also spoke about that one night and it's
#
very cinematic, actually, that image of you sitting on a bed being consoled by the girls.
#
Your theme, the context in which you brought this up, was again something that I'd like
#
you to elaborate on because it's very interesting to me about a journey that journalists should
#
take but some may not, which is discovering the difference between facts and the truth.
#
That when you are a journalist, you're reporting, you're going out, you're getting facts, you're
#
taking quotes, this happened, so and so said this, so and so said that.
#
But there's a layer behind it that is the truth.
#
And I presume you mentioned this story because, you know, some of the facts fall away and
#
some of the truth comes out and you see those layers.
#
Now, I would imagine that then, like, once this happens, a switch has gone off.
#
It's never going back again.
#
You're never only going to look at facts again, you're going to look for truth.
#
And your notion of what the truth is will then evolve with time and the kind of stories
#
that you do, the kind of work that you do will be predicated on that, on, you know,
#
that evolving kind of frame of the world.
#
So tell me a bit about, one, the different directions of your thought as all of this
#
happens and two, how you start thinking about the kind of work that you want to do, because
#
very soon you go beyond journalism.
#
You of course were one of the early bloggers like me back in the day.
#
Is that something that freed you in different ways and helped you explore subjects you would
#
otherwise not be able to write about?
#
And then on to fiction, drama, all of that.
#
What was that kind of journey like and that distinction between facts and truth?
#
How hard it is to even define what truth is, because I think what most of us do is the
#
world is too complex to figure out every aspect of it, right?
#
So you adopt a lens and you look at it and it could be a gray lens and Bombay looks gray
#
and suddenly you take away the filter that hides the red and how you see the red also.
#
So what is that process like?
#
Do you keep examining your biases and your lenses and your frames?
#
And I think my early journalistic training had a lot to do with it.
#
I think I got really lucky, especially that one and a half year that I spent at midday.
#
I think I just gave the example of the raid, but I did a bunch of things like that.
#
My editor at the time was Akar Patel and he was a big one for just go out there and check
#
Just see what happened like that.
#
So for example, I'll give you another example.
#
This was one of the major stories I did where somebody wanted something done about the rights
#
of the disabled, right?
#
People who are differently abled or disabled in the city.
#
Now how do you write about that?
#
One way of saying is just to say that, okay, you know, the city doesn't do enough and leave
#
But he said, okay, go put yourself in a wheelchair and figure out what it's like.
#
So I spent the day traveling around the city as a disabled person.
#
One of the first things that happens is obviously my own filters come crashing down, right?
#
Because I had never thought about what it's like for people who are in a wheelchair.
#
Because you are abled, you just take it for granted that the city is fine, right?
#
What's wrong with the set of staircases?
#
And even if you do know that, okay, so people in wheelchairs can't go here, so then you
#
say, well, if they can't, they can't, and you shrug it off and you don't think more.
#
Once I did that, I started to see so many things in so many different ways.
#
Not just that you can't climb a flight of stairs, so okay, maybe you can't get from
#
platform number one to platform number five.
#
Then you find that even if you get to platform number five, the gap between the train and
#
the platform is too big, and you can't actually, you know, the train doesn't stop long enough
#
for you to get off the wheelchair, fold up the wheelchair, put the wheelchair on, even
#
if you have people helping you, that won't happen.
#
Then you see you can't enter cinemas, then you see you can't enter eating spaces, then
#
you see that something else, even if you need to go to a doctor in a taxi, the taxis aren't
#
big enough mostly to hold a wheelchair.
#
So I had the photographer with me who was playing along, pretending that I was actually
#
in a wheelchair, and he was having to pick me up and carry me and put me in the cab and
#
then fold my wheelchair, and the taxi driver is very concerned because once you fold up
#
the wheelchair, it doesn't fit into the back of the taxi.
#
All the different ways in which the city is not meant, it is not designed for people who
#
are different from the norm, and then also to become aware that that person could be
#
I am able today, but I could be disabled tomorrow, something could happen.
#
It could be temporary or it could be permanent.
#
The city is not designed for the elderly, and most cities aren't.
#
So in all these different ways, I think I was constantly being pushed, right, to see
#
that, okay, how long does this happen, when you call the police station, how long, how
#
many rings before somebody picks up.
#
These were all the different ways in which I was being exposed.
#
I think for me also, it was a lot of exposure, intense exposure of somebody who had been
#
so underexposed, like within two years, this much exposure was a bit much also.
#
And I think that those two or three, four years of early journalism really did shape
#
and unshape me quite a bit.
#
After that, I think, but however, this creative urge was there within me.
#
I think even when I quit my first reporting job, I quit it thinking that this is too intense.
#
I want to sit at home and write poetry.
#
And of course, within a month, I learned my lesson because writing poetry does not pay
#
And I had to go back, of course, and find a job.
#
But this creative urge also was there.
#
And that one month when I did sit home and write poetry, all the new things I had learned,
#
the things that I did not have time for the course of a regular reporting life, the ways
#
in which my poetry was changing, the ways in which I was changing and learning to see
#
the world in a different way, that I had time to process and sit down and maybe write a
#
couple of new poems and then go back and then write in different ways.
#
So I was always doing that, I think.
#
And I kept quitting and kept going back because I didn't have much of an option.
#
But I think by the time I was around 20s for Jennifer, it was clear to me that I also want
#
more, that I don't want just journalism, I want to do more.
#
I want to tell other stories, stories that I cannot tell as a journalist.
#
By the time I started blogging, it was around, I think, end of 2004, 2005, I knew journalism
#
enough to know that most things that I'm thinking and feeling are not going to make it into
#
Even if you're writing for a magazine and say you've got more words, you don't have
#
to stop at 300 words, you can write, say, 2000 words, but you're still not going to
#
be able to write the truth as I experience it and see it and the many layers of truth.
#
So for example, something as simple as, I'll give you an example of what Delhi feels like
#
after it's rained in the morning, right?
#
I was in Delhi, I'd moved to Delhi by that time.
#
Now if I'm a reporter, say a normal, regular city reporter, I can just say unseasonal rain
#
at Delhi in so and so time, whatever, or traffic stopped, or if traffic doesn't stop, and if
#
it's not unseasonal, then why will you write about it raining, right?
#
What does that convey to the reader?
#
Does it convey anything of beauty?
#
Does it convey that particular way in which you're learning to see the city?
#
The air is just a little crisper, a little cleaner, and there's dew everywhere, or all
#
surfaces are wet, and the quality and texture, I became interested in capturing that too,
#
because that is also a different kind of truth, a different kind of experience, reality.
#
And I found that blogging gave me that freedom.
#
There was nowhere else I could do it.
#
Even for free, there was no other space out there.
#
There were no other lit journals that would just publish me talking about how I'm thinking
#
or feeling about a certain morning, a certain moment in time.
#
And blogging allowed me to do that.
#
It also allowed me to talk about the story behind the story.
#
So I write the story for the magazine, but also then I get to write about what the train
#
journey was like, that I couldn't get reservation, and this is what it felt like, or the kind
#
of conversations you overhear in budget hotels, and I found that interesting, and I wanted
#
And so I think blogging then became the next way I started to be formed as a writer, as
#
a writer of prose particularly, that it was crucial to me learning how to put experience
#
and words together and capture different kinds of truths and try and make sense of the world
#
And then Rama, I think, came after one more leap.
#
I had done some more journalism, particularly in rural areas for, I think, three, three
#
and a half years, and I had just started to write my first nonfiction book, my collection
#
of essays, and around then I thought that, okay, it's time for another break, so I'm
#
going to sweep up all my savings, whatever little saving I have.
#
I'm going to withdraw all my PF, and I decided to give myself one year in which I'm going
#
to just write, that, you know, just don't worry about paying the bills for one year.
#
Give yourself 12 months of not worrying about paying the bills.
#
And so then I moved back into my mother's home, and for one year I just wrote.
#
And one of the things that I was doing at this time was I was trying to make sense of
#
a kind of social politics or the politics of ordinary people around me in ways that
#
I couldn't through journalism or even through prose, you know.
#
These were things that I sensed but could not say.
#
I can't point a finger or I can't take a photo of these things, right?
#
So for example, one of the first plays I wrote was just, I was just thinking about certain
#
One of them was about domestic staff.
#
In India, most middle class people have domestic staff, not always live in staff, but almost
#
everybody employs maids if they can afford it.
#
And labor is cheap, so many more people employ maids.
#
And we grew up without too much interaction with domestic staff, but it was very limited.
#
But in my friends' homes or wherever I was, you know, ultimately I also began to hire
#
people when I became a worker.
#
And in my friends' homes, particularly those who had live-in staff, slightly more privileged
#
people, they could afford to have someone stay constantly, I began to notice the ways
#
in which, and these were mostly often young girls, young women, to look at their lives
#
and think about their lives and what are their lives like and what are their options and
#
the ways in which living in someone else's house, where you also work, but there's no
#
separation of workspace and home space, what happens then in that environment to those
#
So I started to think about this, and I knew that I didn't want to do this as an essay
#
or as a report, that there's something else I'm getting at, but I didn't know what.
#
But I had a lot of conversations in my mind, like things I'd overheard, dialogues, bits
#
So I began by just writing that down, that OK, I remember this exchange between two people.
#
Now what happens if I take these two dialogues and I take these two characters and I open
#
Will some other thing reveal itself?
#
It turned into another thing because as you keep writing, those characters take on life
#
and then they start doing things that you have not seen, that you move beyond the reality
#
that you see into an imagined world, where you also capture a certain reality.
#
And where that reality comes from, you don't know, but it's there.
#
And you kind of know that, yes, this is true, but I cannot present it as fiction, as nonfiction.
#
I cannot say that this is the truth.
#
So I call it fiction, but I know deep down that this is truth.
#
A quick aside before I go to my next question, and the aside is that story you did sitting
#
on a wheelchair, mind blowing idea.
#
And you know, Aakar did things like that, I remember back in the day, so credit to him
#
I think people have forgotten that editor side of him.
#
You know, I did a workshop with him for my writing students.
#
And if I remember correctly, he mentioned in it how he no longer wants to be an editor
#
that is in the past and all of that, which I think is a little bit of a loss because
#
he would be able to mentor so many young people so well.
#
But the aside really is that this is, you know, I had Krish Shok a few weeks back on
#
my show, talking about the book he's written on food science.
#
And we were talking about how we experience podcasts and he listens to my show at 3x,
#
that's three times the speed.
#
And he mentioned that he started listening at higher speeds because a friend of his who
#
was visually disabled, who was blind, would listen at 6x.
#
So I tried to take it up to 6x and I couldn't make anything out.
#
And then if you just close your eyes and listen at 6x, you get a sense of what that experience
#
is like that how they have had to develop this facility.
#
Because that other part of theirs, which we take for granted, which is sight is simply
#
And there was recently something that Netflix did, which people mocked.
#
You can now watch something on Netflix at either half speed or double speeds and all
#
And you know, people like us and our first instinct is that why are you want to watch
#
But the reason they did that is because the blind people, they watch Netflix in a sense
#
by listening to a visual description of what's going on and because the brain can take in,
#
you know, up to 500 words a minute while we speak at 150, they want the higher speeds.
#
And the people who want the lower speeds are, you know, those who can't hear.
#
So they are looking at the subtitles and therefore they needed to be slower because the reading
#
So it's such a what at first seems unnecessary to people like us who take all of this for
#
granted, take our experiences for granted, brilliant move on the part of Netflix, I think.
#
Now what I also wanted to sort of look at and I've been thinking about it a bit is about,
#
you know, back in the day, even we bloggers didn't think of blogging as something that
#
is incredibly serious or will change who we are.
#
But the more I think about it, one, I think that what blogging does is that one, of course,
#
as you mentioned, it gives you the freedom that you're not bound by form or house style
#
You can go in different directions.
#
You can write one para, you can write 50 paras.
#
But the other thing it does is that not only do you go off in all these different directions
#
because you are not self conscious because what you're writing is only a blog and you
#
give yourself the freedom to experiment.
#
You iterate a lot like I did, you know, when I was active, I did more than 8000 posts.
#
I think whatever the quality of those might have been, it's only constant iteration that
#
And therefore, and my other sort of speculation there is I wrote a post on this recently that
#
the form in which whatever your artistic form is or your form of creativity is the form
#
shapes the content and the content shapes you.
#
So if I did a five minute conversation with you, for example, I would not need to read
#
your book or know anything about you.
#
I could just ask, you know, four snappy questions and the whole thing would be very shallow.
#
If I do something much longer, I have to read everything you've written, I have to really
#
work at it, whatever the subject is, enforcing myself to do that, to bring about the content
#
that suits the form, I am also changing as a person.
#
So now when I look at your journey, and you've of course been much braver than me in the
#
sense you haven't held back, you just got into drama and filmmaking and stories and
#
you just did everything, which I can't tell you how much I admire because I think a lot
#
of factors hold people back from doing that, such as confidence to begin with.
#
But did exploring all these different forms, did they start changing you and the kind of
#
explorations you made and the kind of writer you eventually became?
#
I mean, starting with blogging, of course, but all of these other things.
#
The phrase fools rushing comes to my mind, you know, I am a bit of a fool in that sense
#
that I do tend to rush into certain things.
#
I think one of the things about me is also that I constantly like to test and learn.
#
So I have this great thirst for novelty.
#
I like new things and I've never been, for example, I never read in one particular genre
#
or format, even reading wise.
#
I never read all the works of one writer.
#
And I think it is mainly that, that once I've done something and I see something new, there's
#
this great desire to see that, can I do this too?
#
I might fail, but let me try.
#
So I always want to do it.
#
I mean, like a couple of years ago, I even wrote a chatbot script and I'm in principle,
#
like I dislike chatbots in general, but well, it was a project and they said, can you do
#
So if I can do scripts, I can do this too.
#
So I think that for me, it is one of the things is that I do really like being tested in that
#
I don't like being judged necessarily, but I do like being tested in that fashion.
#
I'll try most things once, you know, to see that, okay, what's the worst that could happen?
#
I'll fail and that's fine.
#
So from a creative viewpoint, I'm not afraid of failure.
#
This has helped me in many ways, because even within something like poetry, for example,
#
at one point we were doing this Napo-Rymo things, which is the National Poetry Writing
#
Month, it's national for the US, not for us, but we just kind of appropriated that.
#
So the challenge is to write 30 poems in 30 days and at one point we also began to, as
#
a collective, we were doing that, as a writer's collective, through Gafferati.
#
At one point I also started setting exercises and that included myself, set myself exercises
#
and say that today write a Villanelle, today write a sonnet, today write a Sestina.
#
These are difficult things to do, you know, but you try and you do it and mostly it turns
#
Like if you've written 30 poems, chances are there'll be three good ones, maybe two mediocre
#
ones and the rest will be just absolute rubbish.
#
And you have to be prepared to just toss them out and say, so I wrote 20 bad poems, so what?
#
But like you were saying about iteration, writing those 20 bad poems enables you to
#
write the two good ones.
#
And I was learning that.
#
And I think one of the other things I've noticed is because I'm also kind of, I've always had
#
one foot in journalism and then one foot out and then one foot back in and one foot out.
#
Even because of the nature of the job, because you're so exposed to so much of the world,
#
to other people's experiences, et cetera.
#
At some point I always want to stop and take a breath and see what was that?
#
How do I think about this?
#
Is it enough to just write what I've written and then leave it at that?
#
And then do I not push further to see what this experience actually means in a creative
#
So I think a lot of that was happening.
#
A lot of what I was learning through research in journalism was then being, after I've done
#
the early work of the report or whatever it is, like a year later, two years later, it's
#
still stewing in my mind.
#
I'm still trying to figure out, or two different ideas suddenly come together.
#
And you see that, okay, you need to write this, but in a new format, that this needs
#
to become a play or this needs to become a poem.
#
For a while, I was doing this thing and I still try and do it, though not very successfully.
#
But for a while I was picking up newspaper headlines.
#
At some point I got really frustrated and I continue to remain frustrated by how much
#
You work in the news, you've been in the media, you're partly responsible for creating this
#
But as much as it is about telling the truth, it's also about not telling the truth.
#
And I became for a while quite obsessed with that, that idea that this newspaper report
#
is not telling the truth at all.
#
It's actually helping me not see the truth rather than see the truth.
#
So I began to write, pick up newspaper headlines, which I felt were either ineffective or concealing
#
something, or just picking up random headlines and then seeing that, okay, how can I twist
#
this around to actually reveal a fuller truth about society in some way?
#
So I took the headline and the headline remained the same, but the rest of my poem was a response
#
to that headline to try and convey what is being hidden.
#
Give me some examples of headlines like that, which sort of hide more than they reveal.
#
I mean, I'm sure all headlines at some level are like that, but...
#
Should I just read you a poem?
#
So I'll give you one headline, which was, two Palestinians shot dead after attacking
#
So I saw this headline, then obviously it is a factual headline, and there's no denying
#
that two in whatever incident it was, I've forgotten the year, maybe four or five years
#
ago, it was a knife attack, and I read the report and I thought that this headline conveys
#
something, it conveys violence, but it also conceals so much violence.
#
And then I wrote this poem in response.
#
Two people armed with knives were killed after they separately rushed towards different groups
#
of Israelis armed with guns.
#
Two people set out from home or whatever remained of that feeling called home.
#
It is unclear if they kissed anyone goodbye, but preliminary imaginings indicate they held
#
It is unclear if their homes had been bombed or if any children died in the shelling.
#
It is unclear whether they rebuilt or relocated, and if they had, whether they were bombed
#
It is clear that they had access to kitchen knives.
#
It is clear they rushed towards wielders of guns.
#
It is clear the guns would be used.
#
The color of their skin is clear, their olive trees, their pets, their throaty mother tongue,
#
their last words were not so clear.
#
Sorry, I actually interrupted you when I asked you to give an example, so why don't you finish
#
your thought and then I'll continue.
#
No, so there's another one which was sillier.
#
There's another one called All Eyes on HSC Results.
#
And then I thought this is such a silly headline.
#
Obviously, all eyes are not on HSC Results, just the eyes of children and parents, maybe.
#
Other eyes are doing other things.
#
So then I wrote a kind of slightly teasing kind of love poem in response, that eyes have
#
other jobs also rather than look at HSC Results.
#
You want to read that out as well?
#
I'll read that one out as well too.
#
So All Eyes on HSC Results is the headline and the poem is, how many eyes are trained
#
on the higher secondary exam results?
#
Hard to say, but eyes are slitted, sleek with yesterday's failing.
#
Eyes follow monkey eyes gibbering through a bazaar, rubbing neon out of the black lids
#
Eyes are fixed upon a street gone grey with too much going away.
#
Lost foundlings blinded by concrete.
#
Eyes wait on the road divider, holding the skeleton of a bunch of red roses that grace
#
the shin of passerby, who looked but saw nothing except a flower pot that he used as a spittoon.
#
Eyes are intent on some assured insurance plans and a new tuffy car bought by a semi-friendly
#
neighbour with good skin.
#
Eyes are careening wildly between Cat, Mat, GRE, TYBSC, UPSC, PMT, PET, NET, yet most days
#
they are fixed upon the luminous face of a Ph.D. guide who won a gold medal for every
#
exam he ever sat and he comes to uni in blue fleece and real leather sandals.
#
But tell me, you are also being unfair to headline writer because how is a headline
#
writer supposed to fit all that in?
#
But, so is it the case, like you've pointed out elsewhere in your book about how language
#
can play a subversive part in how we see the world.
#
For example, you talk about going to this court trial of a gentleman whose daughter
#
had been murdered and it took you a while to figure out that his daughter had been murdered
#
because the lawyers there kept using the term haatsa, ki ye haatsa kab hua, kaise hua,
#
as if you know something had happened to her.
#
And I'm reminded, I'll quote a little bit of something Jackson Cat said a few years
#
ago about how violence against women is reported, where he writes, quote, we talk about how
#
many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women.
#
We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many
#
We talk about how many teenage girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather
#
than how many men and teenage boys got girls pregnant.
#
So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect.
#
It shifts the focus of men and boys and onto girls and women.
#
Even the term violence against women is problematic.
#
It's a passive construction.
#
There is no active agent in the sentence, stop quote.
#
And this is a uniform example, but is it then the case that if one gets a little mindful,
#
you can see similar perversions or similar ways in which language obfuscates what's really
#
happening out there, where it might, like in the two headlines you pointed out, it might
#
be stating a fact, but hiding the truth.
#
And in the case of women and patriarchal language, it is most evident, but in almost every other
#
So for example, one of these, this is one of my pet peeves, this word growth.
#
And the other pet peeve is this word development.
#
I am so annoyed at people who do not challenge this growth in what?
#
Like in real terms, in actual terms, you break down this idea, notion of growth into your
#
I remember once going to do a story in a rural area where people were protesting the impact
#
of a particular plant because of the pollution, right?
#
It was destroying their lives, it was destroying their plants and so on and so forth.
#
Water sources were getting contaminated.
#
And then I went to the factory that was doing the polluting.
#
And there was this man, and I was quite young at the time, and I did have the language and
#
the ideas and the experience with which to frame my thoughts and argue with him.
#
And as a journalist, it wasn't really my place also to argue with him, just to hear him out.
#
But I felt argued with, you know, because he was quite aggressive.
#
And one of the things he said that, madam, what is development?
#
And I said, you tell me what is development.
#
And then he patted this pocket, you know, this front pocket that men's shirts have.
#
And he said that I have 500 rupees in this, this is development, right, that I should
#
always have 500 rupees here.
#
If you don't have it, there is no development.
#
And I remember thinking that there's something wrong about this argument, but I didn't know
#
how to say what is wrong, so I didn't argue at the time.
#
And obviously, if I had just spoken to the people who were protesting in more detail,
#
they would have given me the language, their language, and later I read more about this.
#
I read this, now it is quite famous, actually, this letter that one of the people who were
#
protesting the Narmada, one of the firm leaders, and, you know, he wrote a letter.
#
And he wrote about displacement from this perspective, that he said that, you know,
#
you speak about the gains that somebody will make, whatever, and what will be replaced,
#
you know, you'll be given a piece of land somewhere else in exchange for whatever.
#
But do you know what to have here?
#
And then he listed all the different kinds of foods that he has access to where he is.
#
And that is not seen as, when you speak of money and development, what is money?
#
It's a piece of paper, right?
#
But what it does is it gives you access to other things.
#
So for us in urban areas, it gives you access to, you know, the ability to rent places,
#
And you think of money in those terms because it is enabling that.
#
But for somebody else in another context, they already have land and they can build
#
They don't need you to come and build their houses for them so that you can then buy or
#
So they don't need you.
#
And whatever your idea of this so-called quote unquote development is, right, that can buy
#
We think of, okay, when you develop in life, when you have growth in life, you have so
#
Choice is one of the most expensive things there is, right?
#
The ability to go out there and then choose, do you want to eat this or do you want to
#
You have an option of 15 different things and that is what a good life is.
#
But if somebody already lives in a place where he already has access to 15 things and they're
#
all free or things he can grow himself, he doesn't need you to give him that.
#
And who are you then to say, surrender all this, sign up for some other system where
#
you will have none of this, and then work in the ways we are telling you to work.
#
And then maybe you will have a choice of three different things to eat.
#
It is just absolutely horrific that we allow these terms like development, growth, GDP.
#
What does GDP actually mean?
#
Break it down for the people in ways that it affects them, their lives.
#
If people by and large benefit from X system, whatever that system is, and they want you
#
to sign up for that system, it is because they actually do know something about life
#
that you don't, or you know something about life too, but you're concealing it under these
#
garbage words like development.
#
A number developing means nothing.
#
Numbers of people who are able to live healthy lives longer, maybe that means something.
#
But is your GDP doing that?
#
If it is not able to do that, if the number of malnutrition kids or kids suffering stunting
#
is not going down, but your GDP is still going up, then there's something wrong with the
#
way you measure things or the things to which you attach labels like growth or development.
#
No, that was a lovely rant, and I agree with all of that.
#
I did an episode on GDP with the economist Rajeshwari Sengupta where we both spoke about
#
how incredibly flawed the measure is.
#
It just makes me angry when people, in many different ways, I mean of course it is a metric
#
that can be gamed, but even beyond that, conceptually it's sort of deeply flawed.
#
As far as development is concerned, I think the way Gandhiji would have defined it is
#
the one that I think is most relevant to India, where his understanding of development really
#
was that if you show me a policy, I want to see whether it will help the poorest person,
#
and if it does, then I'm with it, otherwise I'm not.
#
I think there are ways that both you and I can agree upon where that can happen, but
#
unfortunately we've gone in entirely the wrong direction, so we should now I think
#
get to the subject of what the first chapter of your book is about, which is the ongoing
#
colonization that happens in India, but let's take a quick commercial break then, and then
#
we shall return to the subject.
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Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Annie Zaidi about the remarkable sweep of her career, so I don't even know
#
what this episode is about, but it's about many things and there's much in all her work
#
that is thought provoking for me and I hope we can talk about some of that as we go along.
#
Let's talk about, you know, the first chapter of Bread, Cement, Cactus, because it was really
#
interesting to me in the sense that I picked it up.
#
Now I have known you a little bit, we've been kind of acquainted for many, many years since
#
So I thought it's a memoir and let me read it.
#
And you know, one of the things that I loved about the book is that how it's sort of got
#
the skin of a memoir, but you know, you'll talk a little bit about yourself, but then
#
through that you'll talk about something much larger than that and it's very well done.
#
You know, it flows beautifully in a sense and even sort of the memoir aspects of it
#
are more sort of impressionistic rather than a detailed chronology that this happened and
#
then that happened and all of that and it works very well together.
#
Now, as we've discussed in the earlier part of the show, you grew up in this small town
#
called a small colony township, I don't know what word you would give it, but colony is
#
most apt, I guess, called JK Puram.
#
So tell me a little bit, like you've spoken about the hierarchies within JK Puram, of
#
course, that there were ABCD housing for different classes of people and there's this poignant
#
moment where your mom is promoted, so you are moving to a higher housing and one of
#
the E-girls is saying now you'll only hang out with the C-girls.
#
But beyond all of that, outside all of this, there's another much bigger game playing
#
out that can only be described as colonization, making the term colony apt.
#
Tell me a little bit about all of that.
#
So I'm intrigued by the use of this word colony for residential places or industrial places.
#
I mean, even in Delhi, you sometimes say for residential places people use the word colony.
#
In this context, I began to think about it in the context of colonization, particularly,
#
because once I got into the history of it, of what is this place, I got interested in
#
that. How do people just land up in the middle of nowhere and create something new?
#
And more importantly, what was that before? In India, at least, I don't think there is
#
any place where there is nothing before. And in colonial narratives and colonization narratives
#
or rather counter-colonial narratives, we see a lot of this of there was nothing there
#
before. And for example, in the Australian context, I've read this book, I think it is
#
called The Dark River or The Sacred River or something like that, which is about people,
#
mostly convicts who were sent away from England to Australia. And it's a lovely book. It also
#
takes a not unsympathetic view of the people who went, because their lives are very difficult
#
too. And the laws were terrible in England at the time. You could be jailed for, kids
#
were being jailed for stealing bread and things like that. And a lot of people who were sent
#
away to Australia as convicts were just teenagers who'd stolen a hanky or a pot or a chicken
#
or things like that, just food. So these were desperately poor people. And it was a miracle
#
they survived that long journey going to a completely alien place with nothing really.
#
And if you survived, then okay, maybe you could make a new life there. But they show
#
up there. And the thing is, the point of that book really is that there was somebody there
#
and that they knew there was somebody there. They pretended that there was nothing there.
#
They pretended that these people were savages and that they didn't know agriculture and
#
that we went there and we made agriculture. But then the writer says that through this
#
family that has gone there and the protagonist, the man of the family, he sees that there
#
are patches which were already being cultivated. It wasn't the same kind of cultivation that
#
the English were used to, but it was cultivation. They had agriculture. They knew how to make
#
fire. They knew how to hunt kangaroo. They had their own lives, whatever it was. And
#
when they began to take over the lands, there was a lot of land, but when they began to
#
take over these lands, they were aware, the new settlers, that they were taking something
#
over. It wasn't uninhabited land. And I see this within India quite a bit. When something
#
new comes up, it doesn't come out of nothing, that there is something there. And what happens
#
to that something then is the big question. It's not as simple as imperialism, for example,
#
because we are a union, right? What is the meaning of India? It is the union of India.
#
So people are free to live and work and capitalize on the natural resources of the land anywhere
#
in the country. That is part of being what a union means. At the same time, there is
#
a kind of taking over, a kind of effacement of what was there before. In my case, it was
#
very stark because the name of where we lived, it was written up there, painted in limestone
#
on the hills, right? So in a way, it was like you were stamping the landscape itself with
#
the name of an industrial township, right? And that the name of the industrial township
#
is what? The township does not take the name of the places that existed there before. It
#
takes its name from the names of industrialists. So it's effectively the name, what is JK,
#
the initials of the industrialists, the family that owned the place. And this is true of
#
others also. I shouldn't single out one place. It's true of Tata Nagar, for example. It's
#
true of other places, elsewhere, wherever these sort of colonies come up. The assumption
#
is like, for example, Tata Nagar, what was there? There was something there, right? It
#
wasn't that nothing existed. But when an enterprise, a privately owned enterprise enters a space,
#
transforms it, manufactures something there, creates new buildings, et cetera, but effaces
#
what was there before, starting with the name, starting with stamping your own name on the
#
industrial landscape, to then other things, then using the natural resources. Obviously,
#
the land is, of course, used. The mountains are used. The limestone is used. Water is
#
used, groundwater or the river water is used. And all of this goes into doing something,
#
manufacturing cement, right? Now, you can argue that it's for the good of the country
#
because we need cement for construction and so on. But where profit is concerned, the
#
profit does not stay here. The profit is channeled out somewhere. In these respects, I do think
#
it is similar to the process of colonization because when you construct a colony, you come
#
in there. Sometimes you change names, sometimes you don't. You promise the local population
#
something. I mean, even in imperial terms that this was what was done, it was not that
#
the locals had nothing to do with the enterprise. Of course, they did. The armies were Indian
#
by and large. Everything was Indian. But the key thing was that the profits left the place.
#
So in our case, in a large sense, when we speak of colonization, we speak of nations
#
or continents. Whatever South Asia was, we were completely colonized and we had nothing.
#
At the end of all of these things, railroads were built, but not to our purposes. Things
#
were being made, not things that we needed, things that other people needed. And they
#
decided for us how much we would participate. And they took back the profits of that enterprise
#
to another location. So in this way, I think when someone enters a place, yes, they try
#
to do their bit. They try to give back to the community. They set up schools, hospitals,
#
all of that. No disputing that. But what is the primary purpose here? The primary purpose
#
is that you will enter a space, use the natural resources, take the help of the local people,
#
create something so that you may profit. And that place is not the primary holder of that
#
profit. And you yourself do not live there. You think of something else as home. You set
#
up industry somewhere else. You have your life somewhere else. You're invested in making
#
that place ultimately more habitable than this place, which you know will ultimately
#
run out of deposits. How long can a natural resource last? It's going to come to an end.
#
Maybe not in 10 years, maybe after 50 years. What after that? The money isn't staying in
#
that community. Those were some of the things I was thinking. And these are very complex
#
questions because it brings you back to the question of, so then should we have no development?
#
So who can exploit what and in what way? But I think it's worth having a conversation about
#
how much of the profit and how much of the resources can be taken and how far they can
#
be taken from the place where they are being exploited.
#
That's illuminating. I'll share a couple of thoughts and then I'll come back with sort
#
of a question, which has kind of puzzled me for a while. And, you know, let me see what
#
you think about it. But first, a couple of thoughts. Number one, that when you talk of
#
it as colonization, I would not even put the caveat that you put. I think it is exactly
#
colonization, even if they're not separate countries, partly because, you know, when
#
you look at language, when you look at terminology, you refer to the Union of India. What is the
#
Union of India, right? The Union of India was essentially we kicked the British out
#
and then the way that the princely states came together and all of that. It's not as
#
if there was a consensus. Everybody agreed to join the Union of India and so on. You're
#
just willy-nilly part of it. You know, it's not any more respectful of individual autonomy
#
than necessarily colonialism was. In fact, even that other phrase, you know, cement being
#
for the good of the country. Any argument that I think invokes a collective good is
#
always problematic, because it's pointless to talk about the good of the country or the,
#
you know, we've done a cost benefit analysis, the benefits are better, because in all of
#
those, the cost will be borne by one set of people, the benefits will go to another set
#
of people, which was a point I made even during demonetization. Like, first of all, there
#
were no benefits, as I wrote repeatedly at the time. But even had there been great benefits,
#
the costs are being borne by someone else, and that's not sort of morally acceptable.
#
And on this same sort of strand, you know, earlier you had spoken about how, you know,
#
different contexts in the context of language, about how as a journalist say, you go to a
#
village, you meet the Sarpanch, you're talking to the Sarpanch, but you don't know enough
#
of the language of the marginalized people there to be able to converse with them. So
#
the Sarpanch becomes a sort of a mediator through which you access all of that. This
#
seems similar to me to, you know, how the British developed their notion of what Hinduism
#
is. I had a great episode with Manu Pillay on this, and he's written at length, and so
#
have so many others, where the British come here, their only interlocutors are, you know,
#
the Sarpanchas of the time, as it were, which are the upper-caste Brahmans, who sell them
#
this particular notion of what Hinduism is with the Varna system and the caste and all
#
of that, a very Manusmriti notion, and they extrapolate that, and that becomes part of
#
their notion, and that's how they govern. And suddenly, all of these diverse identities
#
and traditions and customs are subsumed in this larger narrative that develops over time
#
into this monolithic Brahmanical thing, which is not really so great, and which is not really
#
so dominant, rather. And it seems to me that that's also, you know, you quoted Tony Joseph
#
in your book, Tony was on my show as well, and the big revelation of his book is that
#
what we know now from genetic evidence is that we were an inclusive society till about
#
the year zero, or, you know, till sort of the start of, till 180, so to say, and then
#
one Gangetic Plane strand of thought about what Hinduism wins over, and you have endogamy,
#
which is why, you know, David Reich refers to the Indian subcontinent as not a large
#
population like the Han Chinese would be, but as a collection of many small populations
#
because of what endogamy has sort of done. But that's a random rant, but I thought it's
#
interesting because the same thing seems to have happened to these Adivasis, where you
#
are kind of bringing them into your narrative and, you know, as if, and subsuming them.
#
Now, my question here is sort of, what I wondered about is this, I'd done an episode on the
#
right to property with Shruti Rajgopalan ages ago, I think it was episode 26, where we kind
#
of both felt strongly that the right to property, which was diluted massively, should have remained
#
a right, and a lot of the sort of solutions to this kind of situation lies in the proper
#
application of that, because what should obviously happen in these cases is if the Adivasis have
#
occupied the land for centuries, they should own the land, and then they do with it what
#
they do. Now, there are two things that can happen. One is that they don't own the land,
#
and therefore, the state will get together with cronies and they'll do all of this nonsense.
#
Like another scam that is often run is you can't sell agricultural land for non-agricultural
#
purposes, right? So agricultural land, therefore, to the farmer has no value because he can't
#
sell it to anyone. But if you change the land use certificate, it can be worth 40 times
#
as much. So what the state will often do is they'll do land acquisition, they'll say,
#
pay the farmer one rupee, and then they'll change the land use certificate and, you know,
#
give it to the industrialist, or the industrialist changes the land use certificate, allegedly
#
what happened in the Robert Vadra case. The other aspect, which is where I am kind of
#
– where I don't know what to think, is that let's say the Adivasis are given ownership
#
of the land, but then these private parties go to them and they buy it off anyway, individually,
#
one by one, promising this, promising that, giving so much money, and they may not even
#
– you know, they may be asymmetric information, they may not even have all the information
#
to make a good judgment, and it goes away. Is that part of the mix of what happened,
#
that the original people in that land did own some of the land and sell it off without
#
knowing? And if that is to be the case, what would be a solution there? Because I think
#
the other solution that I often hear from activists, that you have collective ownership
#
by the tribe of a particular piece of land, just doesn't seem to work for me because
#
it ignores individual autonomy, and I think it's making the same mistake of thinking
#
in terms of a collective. So, you know, you've been to all of these places and reported from
#
that and your book really didn't have these sort of details, obviously, because you were
#
looking more into the sociological and cultural aspects, which we'll come back to. But what
#
are your thoughts on this?
#
So one of the things, Amit, that is really difficult for me, I don't have a clear position
#
on this, but I think one of the things I struggle with is the question of our notions about
#
what is ownership? Now, a lot of indigenous tribes, including certain Adivasi tribes,
#
not all Adivasis, in this particular place that I wrote about, for example, they did
#
have very clear notions of private ownership. And there were families who owned XYZ and
#
those families did whatever money they were given. And I think that if there had been
#
much more money given, they would do the same thing again. So I don't think that in this
#
particular case that this was a problem. But there are tribes that do not believe in private
#
ownership. They do believe that the earth is holy, or that, you know, nature does not
#
belong to individuals and that it should not belong to individuals. And I see that point
#
of view too. I personally, it is true that if I owned property, I would like to think
#
of that as my property and not think of it as other people's property, that it is true,
#
thinking for myself. But I also get the logic behind people saying, and I also see the limits
#
of private ownership. So when it comes to water, for example, I have forgotten the name
#
of the guy, but some very rich person in the West, whoever he was, said something ridiculous
#
that there's no need for water to be a basic human right and that it should be privatized.
#
If you keep pushing natural resources and land is ultimately a natural resource, you
#
have to understand that property is at the heart of it, it is nature. And within that
#
comes everything else. So minerals under the soil, whatever you can mine, et cetera, et
#
cetera. But land, air and water are also inalienable rights. Right. And there are limits to the
#
transferability of that. If what is next, air then. And we are coming quite close to
#
the point where we might end up bottling and buying air and deciding what part of the planet
#
is habitable and what isn't. And then what do you do? And I think we've actually already
#
painted ourselves as a species, painted ourselves into this corner. We're dangerously close
#
to having to take these awful decisions. But where indigenous tribes are concerned, I think
#
from the land and water perspective, they got there much faster. They're not there yet
#
as far as air is concerned. But if you say that land ownership itself is sacrosanct,
#
then I think that there are limits to that idea that if you make a purchase, obviously
#
in law that purchase will hold. Right. But if you make a purchase and you destroy the
#
land and you can legally because you own it, the impact of that decision is felt by other
#
people who own other land, but not yours. If you poison the groundwater, it doesn't
#
just affect your piece of land. It affects everyone. So which is one of the big problems
#
with this industrial takeover. And like Gurgaon, for example, one of the big flooding problems,
#
who could have imagined Gurgaon is a dry place. It's flooding now. Who could have imagined
#
that that would happen? But it's happening because bad construction, taking too much
#
groundwater, blocking off river access, et cetera. It's happening in all cities now.
#
So the impact of one decision on private property done legally, done the right way, even then
#
I feel that one has to kind of understand that because we live together, the collective
#
idea, whether we like it or not, we are collectively here on the planet. So the collective idea
#
must be taken into account even as we discuss private property. Yeah. My sort of response
#
to that is that I wouldn't say that private property is sacrosanct. I would say it's necessary
#
and it's necessary because there is scarcity. And if there is scarcity of something, then
#
how does the world work? You can't just have people fighting all the time over limited
#
resources, whereas a system of property properly administered works much better. The other
#
way of looking at it is that I think what you point out about what happens if someone
#
poisons groundwater, what happens to everyone, that's much more likely to happen with collective
#
ownership. I mean, the tragedy of the commons always happens in the commons. You're much
#
more likely to not give a damn about the quality of the water or the air or whatever when you
#
don't own a part of it. That's kind of where it comes from. And without private property,
#
I think everything falls apart. We've seen that all through the 20th century, what happened
#
in the Soviet Union and all of that. And inevitably, while it's a very nice concept that we all
#
own everything and we live collectively together, inevitably the powerful will corner everything
#
and the rest of us will be vassals and serfs. But having said that, one is not... I think
#
the problem in this case is that this is not how property should really be administered.
#
I mean, if the Adivasis lived there, that's their property. Then the only question is
#
dealing through, you know, thinking through the naughtier problems that then arise of
#
what if individuals are acting without, you know, adequate information, will they make
#
the wrong decisions? And even there, I would argue that, you know, as far as individuals
#
are concerned, it's sometimes dangerous to sort of condescend to them and say that, oh,
#
they don't know what they are doing. So this collective notion of what is right must sort
#
of prevail. But that said, I entirely agree with everything you said about colonization
#
and actually go further and not put any caveats there. I mean, this is what kind of state
#
coercion sort of leads to. So there, I've stated my disagreement. Please, please go
#
ahead. If I can just add to that. I think one of the problems also with the language
#
of the law, like we were discussing language earlier and the problems with that is that
#
while I agree that things should be properly administered, etc., the question is, which
#
brings us to the question of one, who's doing the administering? And secondly, how we're
#
defining laws, right? So people who can't prove that they've lived now, now lawful functions
#
with proof, right? And this doesn't apply just to Adivasis. We're seeing ridiculous
#
cases like people who are alive having to prove that they're alive, right? And as a
#
legal entity, am I even alive if I can't prove? Am I a citizen if I can prove that I'm a citizen?
#
The law is naughty for those reasons, too, that the burden of proof is always on those
#
who cannot substantiate it. And if you don't have paperwork, let's say we agree that, okay,
#
there must be other ways apart from paperwork. Paperwork can be taken away from you. If there
#
are other ways, then what are those other ways? Those other ways are all administration
#
and power structures. So somebody, the Naib Taisildar, the Serpanch, the local guy, whoever
#
your local clerk is at some local office will then certify or the local cops will certify
#
like they do with passports. They'll come to your house and certify that you actually
#
live where you claim to live. But then that puts you at the mercy of those people, right?
#
We all know how that works. And then the law then gets misused. So it's a never ending
#
I think you gave the example of the Goan tribals, that if they interface with, you know, the
#
state, the state won't interface with them in their language. They won't even recognize
#
their language. So what are the poor guys going to do? Quick aside here, one of my,
#
and this is an outlier, but it's an interesting example of something like this working out.
#
One of my good friends, Barun Mitra, who's also been on the show, worked for many years
#
with I think forest tribals in Gujarat to establish land ownership. And there was a
#
big battle with the state and it took many years. And my bad for forgetting the other
#
activists at the forefront who worked with him there. I've forgotten their names, but
#
there's a documentary called India Awakes, which documents this. And I'll link that from
#
the show notes and how they managed to establish a tribal ownership of the lands they claim
#
to own was a use Google Earth data, historical Google Earth data, going back to all the 15,
#
20 years that they needed to show. And, and they could actually show the houses and the
#
walls and the habitations. And they won that case. The tribals got the land ownership.
#
And here's what is so remarkable that the moment they got the land ownership, guess
#
what is the first thing they did? They all built toilets, you know, which is such a sign
#
of incentives that when it's your own home, then you begin to invest. And there is no
#
longer that fear that we could have to leave any time and all of that. And I find that
#
an incredibly insightful story of, you know, technology solving almost ancient problem
#
and, you know, getting people their rights, though I fear it might be an outlier, especially
#
in our dysfunctional state. But moving away from sort of the unpleasant topic of the state
#
as it were, you've also written at various parts in this book about something that has
#
a lot of resonance with me, which is defining where one is from, what is home. Like you
#
quoted Maya Angelou in one of your chapters where she says, quote, the ache for home lives
#
in all of us, the safe place where we can go as we are and not be questioned. And elsewhere,
#
when, and I found this very evocative, where you spoke about how, you know, you wrestled
#
with the tabis that you were wearing with Urdu on it. And at first you hid it away.
#
And then later at one point, you decided that whenever you wear it, you will not hide it.
#
You'll wear it openly. And at that point, you wrote quote, as much as home is a place
#
of safety, it is also a place where you are visible. Stop quote. So can you expand a little
#
bit on what your sense of sort of home comes from and where it evolves from? Like, you
#
know, of course you spent a bunch of your childhood in JK Puram. That's not so much
#
part of your home. You seem to be much closer to Lucknow. You've spoken about Eastern UP,
#
Azamgarh, Allahabad, all beautiful chapters in your book, which I'll recommend the listeners
#
read. Tell me a bit about the evolving sense of home for you. And because it is something
#
I struggled with myself in the sense that I've never been anywhere long enough to really
#
call it home. If anything, Bombay is home for me, but it is where I live. And when I
#
equally think of the related subject of what is my community, I don't really have one.
#
One can build communities of choices, but otherwise one feels kind of rootless and homeless
#
and all of that. And like me, you're a migrant to this great city or great in terms of big
#
city, though it is great in many ways. Tell me a little bit about, you know, your conceptual
#
sort of journey through understanding what this home could mean and what. I think when
#
I started out with this book, one of the things I had to do was, you know, write an essay
#
and I threw everything I had in my mind into the essay. It was kind of just sort of free
#
floating ideas in my head. And I start with the image of the grave, for example. And then
#
I move into language and safety, notions of safety and alienation and citizenship. So
#
I think safety is key. Certainly. I think that home needs to be a true home, needs to
#
be to feel like a safe space. And of course, lots of homes aren't safe. But I think that
#
those homes then are possibly either houses rather more than homes or they are homes in
#
the sense that you do love the people involved. It could be your parents, could be your siblings,
#
et cetera. But if that space is not safe for you, ultimately, you're not going to feel
#
at home there and you're going to want to leave sooner or later. That's going to happen.
#
And if you're not, then you're effectively trapped in a slave and it's a horrible situation.
#
So safety and freedom are both not only safety, but the freedom also to grow into the kind
#
of person that you feel like you want to grow into, as long as you're not obviously hurting
#
other people. But I think those two things are absolutely key to home. And that applies
#
to both your immediate family home and in a larger sense to the nation itself, that
#
the nation needs to feel like it's a safe place. And you need to be able to, when I
#
use the word visible, I mean, to be seen in the sense that you can be seen to be who you
#
are. Now, in my case, it could have been, I use the example of the Ayatollah Khursi,
#
which I was wearing, but it could be, you know, like there was somebody else who was
#
reading an Urdu book on the metro train and was told to go to Pakistan for those reasons,
#
or it could be something else, like it could be a sexuality, for example. I mean, now we
#
have the ongoing argument about same sex marriage. It could be that it could be a bunch of things
#
really. I mean, these things constantly evolve. Like, for example, when the Khalistan movement
#
was on and there was a lot of killings of Sikhs and young Sikh boys, particularly a
#
lot of people left the country around that time. They sought asylum in other countries
#
or they just migrated any way they could. And one of the reasons was that they were
#
not feeling safe. It wasn't just a question of territory. It was also that as a community,
#
that community stopped feeling that the state was doing right by them. And they weren't
#
sure whether they could trust the state at that particular point of time. So I do think
#
that safety is key, self-expression is key, that it could be marital choices or whatever
#
it is, that it could be language. It could be a bunch of other things that I talk about.
#
But mainly, I think it is that a place where you are not being punished for just harmless
#
things, for being who you are. I think both at the individual level, at the family level
#
and at the national level, wherever you face a certain amount of hostility for being different
#
or just being, I don't know what the opposite of home is, I guess, not quite home or whatever.
#
And it also strikes me, you've written elsewhere about, there's this great quote by you about
#
what your claim to India is, in your words. And of course, your mother is an Indian Muslim,
#
your father was a Hindu who came from Pakistan. And at one point, you write, quote, I don't
#
say it, though I don't want to make any claims upon India through appeals to Hindu ancestry.
#
The stronger claim is that of Muslims who chose not to leave when presented with a choice.
#
Resisting majoritarianism, I genuinely believe, is the highest form of patriotism. Stop, quote.
#
And this is a point in an episode last year, Kapil Komaredi also made, that if you think
#
about who are truly patriotic, it's not the Hindus who stayed by default necessarily
#
because they didn't have to do anything. It's the Muslims who chose to stay. And what
#
you were just saying, thinking aloud, it also strikes me that all the Muslims who left did
#
not, in a sense, leave home. It's just that they suddenly had no home because the notion
#
of safety is tied up with home, with the way you're defining home. And that kind of, you
#
know, went away with them. And in these present times where, you know, we've spoken about
#
all of the politics, you know, coming from language and the way, you know, Urdu is associated
#
with Muslims and suddenly go to Pakistan is, you know, something that is hurled at us so
#
often. You know, I go back to your quote that, you know, as much as home is a place of safety,
#
it is also a place where you are visible. Stop, quote. And the very sad question that
#
struck me then, is it then becoming very hard for Muslims to feel at home in India today,
#
the way it is, because those layers of whatever safety that you had are being stripped away.
#
I mean, it's not necessarily something new. Our culture has been like this forever. You
#
know, things like love, jihad and cow slaughter were issues back in the 1920s as well as Akshay
#
Mukul writes in his excellent book on the Gita Press. It's been there. These are strains.
#
But obviously these strains have come to the surface, you know, and it's gained more than
#
sort of, it's not just part of the culture, it's politically dominant. You've written
#
in your book also about how it's so hard for Muslims to sort of get homes in Bombay, a
#
struggle that, you know, you face being Muslim, woman and single and all of those, all those
#
multiple strikes against you. So what are your evolving feelings on this? Because this
#
is something that to someone like me, it is not visceral. I can think about it at an intellectual
#
level, but it is not visceral because I am not in danger, right? But for someone like
#
you, it's different. So tell me a little bit about how your thinking on this is kind
#
of evolved and where you see hope, if any.
#
Well, I'm always very reluctant to speak for other people. I think this is one of the reasons
#
why I write so many personal essays and memoir and things, because I always resist the urge
#
to speak for, you know, a community or the nation or write the big India book or whatever
#
it is. Speaking for myself, I think certainly there is some degree of insecurity. And I
#
think more than anything else, the reason there were so many people protesting against
#
NRC, CAA, et cetera, was that it was the first time in the language of law, there was some
#
discrimination enshrined. I mean, there was no other problem with, you know, refugees
#
from anywhere being in the country. And they couldn't be easily Hindu refugees from Bangladesh
#
or Pakistan or whatever. But there is no reason to assume that Muslims in Pakistan are not
#
under attack. And they are minorities in Pakistan and not just Hindus, the Christians and the
#
Muslims, the Shias, the Ahmadi, they are also under attack. And this is the first time that
#
specifically implicitly there was a discrimination made in law, which I think made it extremely
#
problematic because once you lose citizenship, you know, this is the beginning of the loss
#
of citizenship, or at least the beginning of discriminatory laws, which will then expose
#
you to a lot of harassment, where you're constantly having to prove, you know, by way of paperwork
#
or some other way that you belong. I think, starting from there, certainly people are
#
very concerned. I won't say that they don't feel at home. I don't know if, because speaking
#
for myself, I can just say that this is what I know, that this is home because it always
#
has been. And I don't know of any other home or any other place where I'd rather be in
#
that sense. And I think all the Muslims that I know, at least even the ones who are very
#
vocal and very critical, one of the reasons they are that vocal and that critical, and
#
a lot of them are relatively privileged, you know, it's not that it is inconceivable for
#
them a life elsewhere. The reason that they criticize is because it matters so much to
#
them that they be here, that their affection not be challenged and that their sense of
#
belonging not be challenged. It matters that much, which is why you're willing to risk
#
everything else that comes with it, the displeasure of the state or whatever it is. But I do think
#
that speaking for myself, I can say this, that the fear was also quite real now. And
#
part of the reason, like I said, is the law, but also that more and more one sees that
#
justice does not actually happen, where you're seeing a certain difference in the way violence
#
and law enforcement unfolds and the ways in which if, for example, a thief comes right
#
now to my door, right, what will I do? I'll call the cops. Right. And I have always all
#
my life believed that the cops are there for me. Right. But if in my mind you plant a seed
#
of doubt because of not necessarily one set of cops, but another set of cops elsewhere,
#
having behaved in discriminatory ways or having said and done things that they shouldn't have,
#
once you plant that doubt in my head that you can't call the cops because of what might
#
happen to you then, or because they don't care, then you have to live your life in different
#
ways. Right. If you stop counting upon the stage to give you what the state owes you,
#
then you have a very serious problem on your hands. That is, I cannot even conceive actually
#
right now what my life might be like if I lose that faith and trust completely. So far
#
it hasn't been lost completely. So far people argue, people critique, people fight because
#
they haven't yet lost hope. Once they lose hope, then there'll be nothing left to talk
#
about. Yeah. And you know, as far as the NRC is concerned, the reason it was such a big
#
deal was, you know, not just kind of the letter of the law where some people defended it by
#
saying that, hey, but you know, all kinds of specious reasonings were given. I had a
#
great episode on this with Srinath Raghavan as well, but also because the intent behind
#
it was explicitly stated. You know, there are videos of Amit Shah stating at election
#
rallies that what would, you know, happen in Assam after the CAA came into operation
#
and all of that. So you could say the CAA was part of his toolkit as it were. But to
#
sort of get back to the subject of all that's, you know, one of the most striking sentences
#
in your book. In fact, the sentence of the book for me, which really struck me was when
#
you wrote, quote, was partition concluded in 1947? Or was it initiated? Stop quote.
#
And almost as an elaboration of that, there is this wonderful quote by Maulana Azad where
#
he wrote at the time, quote, it was being openly said in Congress circles that Hindus
#
and Pakistan's need not have any fears, as it would be four and a half crores of Muslims
#
in India. And if there was any oppression of Hindus in Pakistan, then Muslims in India
#
would have to bear the consequences. Stop quote. And after quoting him, you said, well,
#
they are right. So in a sense, just looking back on history and all your readings of it
#
and sort of what you've seen around you, would you say that in a sense there is a historical
#
inevitability? I mean, nothing is inevitable, of course, but were the currents moving in
#
this really sad direction anyway from back then? Because everything that is playing out
#
now is not something new that has happened, not some, you know, quantum leap of events.
#
This whole movement as historians like Akshay Mukul and Akar himself in his recent book have
#
sort of documented. It's been playing out for a long, long time and it's been coming
#
to this. So one of the things, Amit, is that I am fundamentally against theocracies. I
#
do not believe in theocracies. I do not think they are sustainable over any length of time.
#
And I do not think that any country that defines itself solely on religious lines can hope
#
to be a properly functional country. I mean, it's not like countries haven't defined themselves
#
in religious terms before, you know, but they haven't defined themselves solely in religious
#
terms. And I think it's been very rare in society where partitions have happened, like
#
national partitions, entire countries separating only on the grounds of religion. There are
#
usually some other factors involved. So there have been many kind of separatist movements
#
elsewhere. Sometimes it's about power, political power. Sometimes it's about language and culture.
#
And all of these are different facets of religion. Sometimes religion is used to kind of as a
#
tool to, with which to extend your own political power, like starting from crusades, etc. down,
#
you know, like Turkey and the institution of the caliph, etc., etc. All of these, there
#
was religious power invested in rulers. But there was never a time where any prosperous,
#
good, healthy society chose to define itself in exclusionary terms, that we are this because
#
we are not that. I think the problem began in India, in South Asia, particularly at this
#
time, because the moment you say that, you know, that that you can conceive of a nation
#
or that you can conceive of national boundaries as countries, not in linguistic terms, not
#
in cultural terms, not as geographic entities, that, you know, a solid mass of people who
#
happen to be living together in the same geography, the moment you say that we define ourselves
#
as X as separate from Y, the moment that happened, whether it was one bunch of people doing it
#
or it was another bunch of people doing it, it was the Muslim League, whether it was the
#
early thinkers, some people say the earliest proponents of the two nation theory were also
#
the proponents of modern Hindutva. If you begin to define yourself as that which you
#
are not, you will always have trouble defining who you are. And you will always find the
#
other within the other within the other. Like in Pakistan, soon after partition, that, you
#
know, the problems with the Ahmadi started because you decided that, yes, we are an Islamic
#
country, but they are not Muslims. Let us not, you know, so, of course, there will be
#
some oppression of minorities, but you will also constantly create new minorities. And
#
when the oppression of the old minorities gets boring, then you find new ways to focus
#
on, you know, appropriation or marginalization. And we are seeing that Pakistan is suffering
#
the consequences of, it's not just the minorities that suffer, the country as a whole suffers,
#
right? Because conflict is conflict. Conflict cannot exist as a one way street. That's inevitable.
#
And added to that, there are all the other problems. So it's not like you replace one
#
set of problems with another. I think this is also the problem with India and India would
#
absolutely should have taken its lesson, seeing that, you know, everything that has happened
#
in Pakistan, seeing that this has happened, we should have taken our lesson and course
#
corrected in some fashion and actively stopped trying to define ourselves as we are not Pakistan.
#
That is the entire national identity cannot be reduced to that. Okay, you're not Pakistan,
#
but you're not China either. You're not even Sri Lanka. You're not even Nepal. Come on.
#
So they want to be Nepal. Well, Nepal very strongly feels that it would not like to be
#
India. So I think there's a bit of a problem there. And I do think that it is quite dangerous
#
to press on with this kind of because, you know, if you thought that you could have got
#
rid of the Muslims by creating Pakistan and then later Bangladesh, then you say, okay,
#
there's still a few more left. We'll just get rid of them in other ways, whether it's
#
through, you know, marginalization or, you know, in political trying to find political
#
solutions or then then what? It doesn't take long in Pakistan. It didn't even take it's
#
taken less than 50 years from the focus to shift from the Hindus and the Christians as
#
the other to the Shia, which is a very large minority. You know, it's not a small minority
#
in Pakistan. And they have other problems on their hands. They have the Baloch problem.
#
They have this problem, that problem, poverty, unemployment, all of those problems. I just
#
feel that what happens in situations like this, I haven't read enough historically,
#
but I think what happens is that you ultimately run out of others and you run out of political
#
solutions to try and address the otherization of minorities. And sooner or later someone
#
steps in to take advantage of your inner chaos. It could be an economic advantage. It could
#
be a political advantage. It is inevitable. So India should be on its guard not to allow
#
A couple of great insights, sir, which I'll unpack. One is, of course, the exclusionary
#
aspect of it. Like when I did an episode with Akar on this a couple of years back, in fact,
#
he pointed out that, you know, what is this Hindu nation really all about? All it is exclusionary.
#
It doesn't define itself in positive terms. Like we shall only do this or we shall only
#
do that. But in negative terms, like right down to the language, right down to the movement
#
that we shall, you know, Hindustani isn't good because there are Persian influences.
#
We shall build a Hindu without Persian. Or, you know, love jihad is exclusionary. The
#
laws against cow slaughter, obviously we know where they are targeted. So they are exclusionary.
#
This whole Pakistan thing is exclusionary. So that's a great point. The other sort of
#
great insight, which seems to be the insight of the month on the show, is what you sort
#
of referred to about finding new others. Like last week I had Raghu Sanjalal Jaitley on
#
the show, very fine public intellectual, and that's a pseudonym of course. And Raghu spoke
#
about Karl Schmidt's concept of politics requiring an enemy, where the idea is that you always
#
require an enemy to do politics. And so eventually, even if you manage to, for example, whoever
#
is your core enemy now, if you get rid of them, you will find another enemy from within
#
and you will keep splintering and keep splintering and keep splintering till there is sort of
#
no further to go. And one does sort of see this playing out within the Hindu right wing
#
even now, where there are these internecine little wars developing. So even in a hypothetical
#
thought experiment where you could magically, suddenly all the Muslims of India could be
#
put in Pakistan, even if you could do that, I don't think that would solve anything. It
#
would probably make things much worse, which is anyway a crazy thought experiment. So yeah,
#
so it's, but I don't know where it ends up because I don't think we have enough of a
#
sample size of these situations playing out in history to know where we are going. You
#
know, my earlier sense was that, look, it's going to get better, but it's going to get
#
worse before it gets better. So you have to be patient and wait it out. But when I try
#
to think about scenarios in which it gets better, it's really hard to come up with stuff.
#
Let's move away from religion for a moment and talk about another major fissure within
#
this country as it were. Now, just yesterday or day before there was this ridiculous court
#
judgment I came across on Twitter where a minor girl had been repeatedly raped by someone
#
and the court to ask her rapist, do you agree to be her husband? Right. And this is of course
#
that age old thing of women being looked upon as a property of men, which is enshrined in
#
the Indian laws, by the way, I've had episodes on this as well. And you know, even culturally,
#
like one of the heroes of the Hindu right, right wing is a guy called Karpatri Maharaj.
#
So he wrote this really interesting book called, I forget what it's called, but it's something
#
versus Ramraj. I think it compares communism to Ramraj. And there he says a reason communism
#
can't work is because there is no notion of property. Automatically, every woman therefore
#
does not belong to anyone and she becomes a bucket from which any man can drink more
#
or less, quote unquote, right, which tells you how so many people think of women that
#
they are the property of men. So if a woman has been defiled as property, then the rapist
#
needs to make it good to her by adapting her. Now you've sort of written about this in pretty
#
strong terms yourself in your chapter called Outsiders at Home, where at one point you've
#
written, quote, there was little difference between a wife and a slave in the sense that
#
both were uprooted physically and psychology. A woman's sexual choice was easily overridden.
#
She didn't control the fruits of her labor. And just like slaves couldn't leave, it was
#
not for nothing that wives in many cultures referred to husbands as Lord and Master. Stop
#
quote. And of course, you back it up with a whole bunch of statistics like, you know,
#
the Human Development Survey in 2016, which found that 74% of Indian women need permission
#
from parents, husband or in-laws to step out of the house, even just to see a doctor. And
#
only 5% felt they had any real control over who they would get married to, which, you
#
know, seems a very real picture. You know, many of the people listening to this might
#
be in privileged situations where they don't see this around them. But these figures ring
#
real, and you've written a lot about this. Now, you know, just looking at what's been
#
happening over the last few years, one, there has been a sense that people are making more
#
noise about this. You know, you had the Nirbhaya case. You had, you know, Me Too breaking twice
#
here. Not that anything happened to any of those men. But at least in the rhetoric in
#
public, you see this being spoken about more. But are things really changing on the ground?
#
What is your sense of it as someone who's been writing about it and covering it for
#
so long? My sense, Amit, is that they are changing
#
and they aren't changing. So they are changing in the sense that compared to, you need something
#
to compare it to, right? So from everything I've read, and even from what I remember seeing,
#
I look around me in the urban context, and I see that things are different from what
#
they were, say, 20 years ago, or when I was a child, or from what I've read in, you know,
#
literature of the late 19th and early 20th century. So some things have changed just
#
in terms of the education statistics, right? You look at the education statistics since
#
India won independence, and you will see that for both men and women, that education is
#
much more widely available. Literacy is much more widely available. Even from when I wrote
#
my first book, where I was saying that I did the math and said that I must be maybe amongst
#
the top one or two percent, just on the basis that I do have some postgraduate education.
#
Forget my income. Just the fact that I studied that much places me in a position of great
#
privilege. I think even from there, even from 15 years ago, things have changed a lot, significantly.
#
Many more women graduates. The average age of marriage has gone up. It used to be somewhere
#
between 18 and 20. It is now closer to inching towards 22, just above 21. And that is, I
#
think, a very positive sign. And I think if you compare it to 100 years ago, I mean, when
#
there were girls who were being married at eight and nine and 10, and I think at 13 girls
#
were considered too old, too wet. And from there to where we are now, I would say that
#
so much has changed. A lot has not changed when it comes to safety. And the reason it
#
hasn't changed is because I was just having this conversation actually early in the day
#
with another woman, but she refused to talk about feminism in the context of some seminar
#
Women's Day, something. And she says that we have enough feminism, women know what they
#
want, et cetera, et cetera. The problem is that we have no conversations about men and
#
masculinity. We have so many conversations about women and feminism, but we do not. Men
#
are not taught to think differently. They are not to change anything. Women are constantly
#
being taught to change things, to break the ceiling and to shatter that stereotype and
#
so on. So the men are not shattering anything, maybe a very small handful of apologies to
#
you, of course, I'm sure you are. But in general, by and large, and there is so much of a tendency
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to laud men for simply acknowledging women as being fully human beings. And we are so
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busy doing that at the moment. And this is not true only of India, by the way. I read
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a lot of say blogs and conversations in Australia, in the West, in America, in the USA. You have
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these conversations, outrageous conversations where a woman gets raped or whatever, or she
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accuses a man of rape. And the only conversation there is that, oh, he's an athlete and he'll
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lose a year and his life will be ruined. And you can't wrap your mind around that, right?
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That we are in this day and age, even in the so-called, quote unquote, developed countries
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that this conversation is unfolding and that it's real, but it is. I think that one of
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the things is that we haven't started talking about it. And I think we really need to start
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talking about the reasons why we don't talk about it, about the bodily integrity of women,
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the absolute and full autonomy, not just sexual autonomy, but the absolute physical autonomy
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that is due to women. And all conversations kind of come to a halt around this, partly
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because the general fear of any sexual talk. Like in India, the government, and I don't
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think it's just this government, it's all successive and previous governments over the
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last whatever number of years refuse to have sex education in schools. High school students,
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I mean, the age of consent legally is 16. So at 16, you should be able to not only have
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knowledge, but also be able to discuss these things in class, at home. These conversations
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by and large, I think if at all they unfold, they happen maybe for five, maybe not even
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1% of the population, actually, I think. The other thing is that while we give women freedoms,
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the whole idea is give women freedoms, like girls are given more freedom now, language.
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So the whole thing is nobody talks about giving boys freedom. Sometimes you give children
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freedom in general, children again are property in the way that women are still seen as some
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kind of acquisition. The other is that we do not talk about, because women being women
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and the way that your biology works, because you are the one that gives birth to children.
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I think a lot of the conversation dies down when it comes to this question of children,
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where there is this reluctance to acknowledge that the reason why you do not want to give
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full bodily autonomy to women or to consider their consent is because then you will also
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have to consider the fact that what she does with her body, including childbirth, and what
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she does with the children after that is also her decision completely, and that you have
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either a minor role to play or no role to play at all. This is something that no society
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is willing to acknowledge, not just India. I think the West particularly too. They do
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not want to acknowledge the fact that if you allow women full bodily autonomy, then you
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lose control over the children that she will produce. And it's an ancient thing, actually.
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This is the fundamental civilizational question, starting from, I don't know, biblical or
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even before that, whatever that era was before that. It's at the heart of all systems. This
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is where matriarchy shifted to patriarchy, that the control of the children, the fruit
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of the womb, because finally, I read this very interesting thing, that when a woman
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gives birth, they call it labor, right? She labors. It is she who labors. It is the fruit
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of her labors. It is not the fruit of your labors. So who then controls the children?
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Who owns the children, so to speak? I think fundamentally, you cut away everything else,
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it all comes down to that. And all violence targeted at women is ultimately targeted at
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controlling who she will birth and what she will do with those children.
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Fascinating. And what's also ironic here is, you know, we were talking about colonialism
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earlier and a lot of this prudery around sex education and all that is really, you know,
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was given to us by the British with the Victorian morality. And, you know, we weren't all, you
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know, as our ancient cave sculpture show, we weren't always this prudish. But we were
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always pretty misogynist. But, you know, leaving that aside, let's move into, as we reach the
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last part of the show, let me sort of talk about some of the themes that my listeners
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are always interested in, which is, for example, reading. How do we read more? What do we read?
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And I thought it's a particularly pertinent question to ask you, because many years ago
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you put together this anthology called Unbound, which was writings of Indian women through
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the ages. Fantastic anthology. And you mentioned in an interview that when it came to you,
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when the publisher came to you, you said, no, I'm not an expert. I'm not an academic. I don't
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want to do this. But she insisted. And you said, OK, let me give it a go. And then you started
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reading madly and discovered much more than you thought you had. And of course, one of the things
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that struck with me was a story you told about this early 19th century lady called Rasundara Devi,
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who got married at eight, had kids, knew the letters of the alphabet, but wasn't allowed to
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read. And she was in the kitchen all day. And all she wanted to do was read. And she wasn't allowed.
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And then one day she kind of she dreamt about reading. She wanted it so badly.
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And then there was a book which was a series of sort of little slices of wood, a sort of
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proto paper perhaps. And from that book, she would take one page at a time, hide it in a box of atta
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and sort of read when she could. And eventually she wrote this autobiography called Amarji Bon.
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But that's a digression. And I found it a delightful story. So I had to repeat it for my
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listeners. But my question to you is that clearly what you mentioned is that when you were doing
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the reading for this book, it wasn't reading you would ordinarily have done. You did it for
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the purpose of this book. And it expanded your mind in certain ways. And just as you know,
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we were talking earlier about how the form that you write in can shape the content,
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can shape the person. Here the reading you are doing is also kind of shaping you. And in this
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case, it was an assignment which came to you and you chose to do it. But if one is to say to oneself
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that look, I want to expand my knowledge of the world. How do I do this? You know, reading in an
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arbitrary sort of way may not kind of get me there. Do you think that there is then value to
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building a sort of program for yourself, even if you're not, say, putting together an anthology,
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just to educate yourself? And also what is the value of reading to you? Like, you know,
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I always say that if I read different books all my life, I would be a different person completely.
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So what does reading mean to you in that sense? And what advice would you give to people who
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want to read more but don't quite know what or how to go about it?
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I completely agree with you on that last bit. If I had read completely differently, I think I
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would have been a different person too. And thank you for all the nice things you said about that
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anthology. I think for me that doing that book was completely transformative. It came to me as an
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offer to do this and I was very reluctant. I think one of the things with me is also that I don't
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like to do things badly. So once I said yes, I said, OK, now I will not do the lazy thing.
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I'm not going to look at 10 different anthologies and see what other people have done and cherry
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pick, right? Because I was doing a selection. I wasn't doing everything. But I did decide to
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read everything I could find in order to make a proper selection. So it took me ultimately almost
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three and a half years from the start of the project to its publication. I read everything
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I could find written by an Indian woman in English translation. And obviously, not entirely,
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but I would say that I read for three years almost exclusively women. And that for me really was
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transformative. More than anything else, it completely broke down every bias I had about
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what powerful literature was. I had these stereotypes in my own head and I didn't know
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that I had them, that you think that this is interesting or not interesting or this is powerful
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or this is not powerful or that this is political or not political or merely domestic or merely
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romantic. I learned to find the political in everything that women said it did and wrote.
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The act of travel could be a highly political act, a highly act of great performative assertion of
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absolute equality and freedom. I learned all of that. And for me, that opened up lots of windows
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in my own head and gave me restored to me also a sense of history. So I wasn't reading only
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history, I was reading a lot of fiction, a lot of poetry, but even within that there is history.
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And it gave me a sense of where Indian women come from. When we say something today, we say it
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because we've been saying something else for the last hundred years, or we've been saying the same
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thing for the last 2000 years and nobody listens. So I think all those different things for me were
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very transformative. And I think that as advice to people, I think one of the things you can do
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is to undertake challenges of the sort, like people say, feminize your canon or decolonize
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your canon. I think there is some merit to that. I have read, I think after doing the book,
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after about three years, I took a deep breath and I said, okay, I should start reading men again.
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Can't exclusively read women forever. I think I still lean more towards where fiction is concerned.
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I find myself now leaning more. And this is something that has happened now. It wasn't true
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of me before as a reader, but I find that I end up reading a lot more women's fiction and I enjoy it
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in different ways now. Not to say that I don't enjoy men writing fiction, just that I find that
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I think earlier without knowing it, I had this inherent bias against fiction by women. I thought
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of it as more limited. And I think now I'm finally free of that bias. So I reach for it more often.
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Similarly, I think I also decided at some point that I will read much more international literature.
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I'm still working my way sort of around that. I haven't quite succeeded, but there is a certain
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bias in the way we receive literature because we read in English. We end up reading mostly things
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that are written and published in America and England. And a lot of that is written by white
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people. And even if it's not written by white people, it's written from the Western perspective,
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the Western view of the world, which is both limited and limiting in so many ways. Why should
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I, a reader sitting in India, learn to see the way the world looks to an American writer in the
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Midwest or whatever it is? Why should I not learn to see it the way it looks from an Egyptian
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perspective or from a Syrian perspective or from an African Nigerian perspective or a Tunisian
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perspective? Why should I not learn to see the world in these ways? So I think that is something
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I'm still working on. I think it does make sense if you can find the time and energy to read in
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these, to restrict your reading for some time and say that, okay, for one year only women or for
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one month only Japanese writers or for three months only South Asian writers or only books
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about a certain time period. So for example, I've become very interested in the 19th century in India
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and I keep reaching for books about that because I think also you need to deepen your reading.
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You read one book and you feel like you know this. So I think it's important to also resist that and
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read quite widely about a subject that you feel you know or if you feel strongly about something
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to then read 15 other things around it and see that are your passions rooted in something or
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are they simply rooted in a kind of ignorance? These are very wise words and I would add to that
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by telling my listeners that just read one month of Annie Zaidi to start with. That's a good start
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and what you said about history is also very evocative. It reminds me of this quote by Alan
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Bennett where he was talking about how the history of humanity is a history of the inadequacies of
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men and at one point he wrote quote, what is history? History is women following behind with
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the bucket stop quote which indicates a subsidiary role they've been given in history, the fact that
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they've had to clean up the mess and it is true that most of what we read of history is written
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by men about men and often for men. So I'm going to sort of end this therefore with my last question
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that we all need to expand our gaze. We have specific gazes through which we look at the world
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partly determined by our circumstances or whatever our preferences happen to be and all of that
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and sometimes we just really need to shift our gaze and open ourselves up to other kinds of
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writing like you did with you know while reading for Unbound. So for my listeners and for me,
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can you recommend you know as many books as you feel like from one to many that you feel are
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important for expanding that gaze whatever it is not necessarily from male to female or from
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Indian to Japanese or whatever but just in general which can help you see the world in a new way.
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One book that I never get tired of recommending is
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Sultana's Dream and the reason is that it is that it is also just good reading
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and in as a companion to that I would say read Suniti Ram Joshi's Mothers of Mayadeep.
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They're both fantastical, they're both written by feminists, they're both about a place where women
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can run things but one is kind of the kind of tongue-in-cheek kind of just pure dream,
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dream sequence you know which is almost wishful thinking and the other also tells you the limit
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and and the nature of power itself regardless of who holds it whether it is men or women so
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that I would say that read these two together if you can. I would say read Baby Kamle's The
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Prisons We Broke. Baby Kamle is a Dalit writer and so she also writes from the perspective of
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being a woman in the community. She doesn't write from the perspective of being only a Dalit
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individual. She writes as a woman and women's place in the hierarchy even there. I would say
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read her for sure. I would say read, she's quite a contentious figure and lots of people might hate
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me for saying this but I think that she continues to remain relevant so you should read The High
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Cast Hindu Woman by Pandita Ramabai. I think she took decisions in her own life, Pandita Ramabai.
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She took decisions because she had suffered some of that orthodoxy and she wrote it as to revealed
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as an act of speaking up for people who wouldn't and she's talking specifically of Brahmin women
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at this time. So she's talking about women who are quite high up and so when you read Baby Kamle
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it's also important to read what high caste women go through. You read the Dalits and then you read
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what the Brahmin women's lives were like. Read the two together as companion pieces.
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There is this very nice book which is a selection of Sarojini Naidu's speeches and letters,
#
selection of her speeches and letters which I'm not sure it's in print anywhere but if you can
#
find it you should read it because we have always grown up thinking of Sarojini Naidu as a poetess
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you know and it's kind of romantic and I grew up and I read the few of her poems and I was like
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that yeah this is a little too romantic for me but you read her speeches and my god she's a thinker,
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fierce speaker and is able to articulate not only the concerns of women but of a whole country
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really. I mean she was one of the tallest leaders of the freedom movement so read her for sure.
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I'll never get tired of saying this. Please read Gandhiji's My Experiments with Truth.
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It's not by a woman but I do think that one of the remarkable things about Gandhiji was that
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it is actually just that it is an experiment with truth. He does not take for granted that the truth
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is something stable and that it can never be challenged and he challenged it himself in his
#
own life and I think that if he had lived longer maybe he would have challenged it even further
#
whatever his existing beliefs were and it's also just well written
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so you should read it for those reasons too. You should read Ranjith Hoskote's very fine translation
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of Lal Deer which is her poetry. Is that enough? I think that's enough and you know the thing is
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I'm almost feeling apologetic and regretful because we haven't managed to touch upon your fiction
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or your films or your drama or any of that so I'm going to at some point implore you to come back
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on the show after some time has passed and you can you know have a bigger list of books at that time.
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Annie thank you so much for your time and insights today. Thank you Amit. I've really enjoyed this
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conversation. If you enjoyed listening to this conversation head on over to the show notes for
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this episode where I've linked Annie's books and her other work. You can follow Annie on Twitter
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at Annie Zaidi one word. You can follow me at Amit Verma A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A. You can browse past
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episodes of The Seen and the Unseen at www.seenunseen.in. Thank you for listening.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Seen and the Unseen? If so, would you like to support the
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production of this show? You can go over to www.seenunseen.in and contribute any amount you
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