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This episode of The Seen and the Unseen is brought to you by Intel.
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In many ways, that's a more interesting question than what is.
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Yes, we want to know the state of the world, but we also want to know how we got here.
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We are wired to tell stories that explain the world to us.
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Because the world is complex, these explanations are always simplistic, but often useful.
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Now, to what extent does the usefulness of a narrative about the world depend on how
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Some narratives are false but useful.
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Religion is a perfect example.
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How else could we deal with the thought of our mortality?
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Other narratives are false and they harm us by creating divisions in society and driving
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And hey, even true narratives can do this, which is why we should view history not as
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something we should take revenge for, but as a cautionary tale.
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We should look back and learn what not to do.
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And sometimes, be inspired by people who in much worse circumstances than ours have held
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firm and transcended their lives.
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Now the thing with the stories that we tell about the world is that simple stories are
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often the most attractive and the least true.
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Everything can be black and white, there are heroes, there are villains.
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The more of the truth that you capture, the more muddy things become, with shades of grey
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That is why it is a big deal when someone who communicates good history, good in terms
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of getting as close to the truth as possible, is also a fine storyteller.
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History comes alive and can deepen our understanding of the world when it is entertaining, not
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In this world full of drama, we are all like jaded teenage Nirvana fans, screaming, here
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we are now, entertain us.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Amit Shandilya, a self-taught polymath who became a Twitter sensation a
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couple of years ago with his long threads on history.
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I'll link some of them from the show notes.
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He has since gone on to write an ongoing show for storytelling.
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Now I'm no slouch when it comes to reading history, but I've so often been surprised
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by some of Amit's threads, thinking to myself, wow, I didn't know that.
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He's given me more dots to join in my desire to paint an accurate picture of the world.
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He's self-taught when it comes to both history and storytelling, and the phrase he uses to
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describe himself is history communicator.
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That's a damn good description, and he's damn good at it.
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I think you'll agree after listening to this episode that not all Amits are evil.
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Akar Patel, please note, before we get to this conversation though, let's take a quick
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Let me put it like this.
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Back in the day, you had two big questions to answer.
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The answer to that second question, how do I do this, is technology.
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And the easier that how becomes, the more you can actually stretch yourself and get
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things done without friction.
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The best technology, in fact, should be so invisible that you don't even notice it is
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An unseen force in making this happen is the sponsor of this episode, Intel.
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Now everyone knows that Intel plays a key role in the architecture at the heart of the
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internet, but it also drives the technology at the edges where users like you and me do
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Whether you're a radiologist or an engineer or a filmmaker or even a humble podcaster,
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chances are that whenever you do something wonderful, Intel is helping make it happen.
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Where there's an intelligent edge, there's Intel.
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Amit, welcome to the Scene and the Unseen.
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This is, I think, the first time I've had another Amit on the show, though I have had
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I've been following you on Twitter.
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I've obviously loved your great history threads and so on and so forth.
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But I don't know you otherwise.
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This is actually the first time we are meeting.
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And I'm curious to know a little bit more about sort of your background.
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How did you come to this?
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Were you always a lover of history?
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Were you always someone who read a lot of books?
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Tell me a little bit about the Amit Shandilya before you became Amit Shandilya, like before
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you became who you are, who were you?
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OK, I was just Amit Shandilya.
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Nothing to do with history.
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And my interest in history is not something new.
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As a teenager, I remember when I was about 13 or 14, I read one book called Nina's Journey.
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Yeah, it's a very it's a it's a ridiculously rare book.
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And I had a copy at my place.
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And first of all, there was a there was a book excerpt I had in one of the Reader's
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Digest that used to come out.
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And that excerpt triggered me into reading the full book.
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And I come from a place where these things are not very easily accessible and from a
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time when these things were not very accessible.
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But years later, I think three or four years later, I was in Calcutta and I found a copy
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of the book at one of the used book sellers down the street.
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I was about 14 at that time.
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And that's a book about that's an autobiography about a woman called Nina Markovna.
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And she gave her story of how her dad during Stalin's Russia, how her dad was killed and
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then how she managed to make her way to America and her adventures.
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She landed up in Germany and she initially thought that she was finally emancipated because
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she could have good food and good clothes.
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And then very soon she learned that Germany was not that safe space that she had thought
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And then she experienced both Stalin's Russia and Hitler's Germany towards the end of the
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And that story stays with me till today.
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And like I'm in my 40s now and all these years.
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And it changed something in me at that time, because from school history, you just learn
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You're bad, but the Allies good, Mussolini bad, Bolsheviks good, Tsars bad, that kind
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Then this book gave me a new perspective that not just like even within evil, there are
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different kinds of evil.
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They can be evil to each other and they still can come together to ruin the society at large.
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So I then started seeing nuance in history and then I came to Bombay later on and got
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busy with life and things just went on the back burner.
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I never thought of doing anything with it, because here we are talking about early 2000s.
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Couldn't do much like you just learn and you feel that wow moment and move on with life.
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Then I have to really thank the right wing surge since 2014 for a fresh interest in how
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things work on the history side.
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Now what happened is after 2014, we all must have noticed there was a lot of surge in a
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very fresh, sometimes mischievous kind of interest in history, like either to rewrite
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history or to interpret it in the way that fits one narrative or the other.
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There was a fresh interest and for better or for worse, it worked for me because it
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gave me an interest because a lot of new things started coming up, which I had never known
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Things like there were some very cliched things like Taj Mahal used to be a Hindu temple.
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Those kind of things have been around since 2004, 2005 and we used to joke about them
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and never take them seriously.
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But from 2014 onwards, something very different happened.
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A lot of things acquired a whole new nuance in a way that would seem believable to even
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the sanest amongst us, like things about Mahatma Gandhi, things about the Indian independence
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movement not giving due credit to Subhash Chandra Bose, while we grew up reading a lot
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about Subhash Chandra Bose.
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I made it a point that I would read first.
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I have been reading a lot of stories, not just Indian, but world history and short stories
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about the world wars, things before the world war and obviously I absorbed a lot of new
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Then I came on Twitter.
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Twitter happened I think 2019, towards the end of 2019 and I did a short thread on Sadguru,
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So there was some crazy thing Jaggi Vasudev had put out where he said things like how
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shivling is, like pouring milk on shivling has a scientific rationale behind it and it
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absorbs radiation and all that nonsense.
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So I did a very short 7 to 8, that was the first thread of my Twitter life.
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So I gave out a thread on how it's not scientific, like a very neutral perspective, like nothing
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to do with, because I didn't know Sadguru before that.
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So I said this doesn't sound right, you can't kill radiation with milk and there cannot
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be any special kind of radiation in a piece of rock or in a shivling, even if it's considered
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divine because I consider it divine, the radiation doesn't.
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So those kind of things, I did one.
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Then a friend of mine told me that this thread has taken off, you should do something on
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the Indus Valley, you know, because there is a new narrative doing the rounds of WhatsApp
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groups that the Aryans emerged like 10, 12, 20,000 years ago in India and then they spread
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all over the world and the whole world is Aryan.
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And I'm like that's rubbish, no sane person would take that seriously, she's like no,
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you're wrong, it's becoming the mainstream dominant piece of history on at least social
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I'm like okay fine, let me do something.
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So I just gathered bits and pieces of whatever I could find on Indus Valley, the latest research,
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I wanted to be as objective as possible and I did a thread, that thread took off and then
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I realized, I mean I got a lot of, you know, a lot of abusive responses to that.
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I got threats because, you know, of course.
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So that was my first interface with the cancel culture and then it gave me a germ that history
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has to be communicated, there is something very wrong, very terribly wrong with history,
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the way history is being taught and it has to be communicated and then I assumed the
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position of a communicator and I started doing threads on a more regular basis like at least
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once every week or once, you know, once every two weeks I started doing threads, initially
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I would just put out the story and then I realized okay no, people, they are controversial
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things, I need to put out some kind of an evidence or some reference for whatever I'm
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So then, you know, the research grew over time, a lot of nuance, I mean there are threads
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from 2019, I might not enjoy reading myself today, so it's grown over time.
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Then at some point in time, last year, 2020, I got a text from Storytel saying, would you
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be interested in doing a series for us and I agreed, first of all, I was like flabbergasted,
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that was the first time somebody asked me to do something professional, seriously do
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these things happen, you just do Twitter threads and people take you that seriously that they
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ask you to do professional work, I was like, yeah, fine, why not, so that was my first
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break into doing something to do with history on a professional level, I did that and that's
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a running gig, I continue doing it today and then there was a tweet series I did on the
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locust plague, if you remember, that happened last year, I got a call from Times of Mumbai
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Mirror, they asked me to do an article for their paper and I did that, so yeah, the more
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opportunities I got, the more it became a serious part of my day-to-day life.
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I feel firstly you're being too harsh on yourself when you say that you might not like some
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of your older threads from 2019, like from whenever I've been reading you, I've absolutely
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loved your threads and they're very different from other history threads in A, the amount
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of detail that is there and B, most startlingly, the storytelling, like you really know how
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to kind of build a story up and take it to a particular place and make it work, like
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most spectacularly, the one that I remembered as memorable for me is the one on Martin Luther
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King where you have this massive kind of narrative happening and then that beautiful way in which
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it ends, which I won't give a spoiler, I'll just link it from the show notes, but it's
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almost like you couldn't help but be moved and affected and just blown away at the end
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of it, just in the way that you told the story and obviously all the facts of the story matter,
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the facts of history matter, but the storytelling makes it stand out.
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Now couple of questions here, like how much conscious effort has there been on your part
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to work on the craft of storytelling?
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Because a craft is outstanding, it's obviously something that you know, thought about and
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worked at over a period of time, so what is the kind of effort that you put into it and
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also who are the kind of storytellers then in a historical or even out of history context,
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who impressed you, who you know, made you think that yeah, that's the way to do it?
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To answer your first question, yes, storytelling as a craft, like yes, there is a certain structure
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which you have noticed, a lot of other people have noticed that it's a three part thing,
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if you will, where there's a buildup and then there is a climax and then there is a cliffhanger
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kind of thing, so no, I wouldn't say it's a very natural thing, it just happened, no,
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there's a very deliberate effort involved there, it doesn't happen.
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Now why I did that, there's a reason for that, because it's not that there is any shortage
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of historical accounts all around us, with or without me, the stories are all around
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us, but still why history has over the years, over the past few decades, history has taken
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a assumed, for the lack of a better word, a status of something very boring and mundane
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and not you want to proudly tell anyone about being into, you know, you say you're into
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science, you're into quantum physics, you're into medicine, engineering, but nobody says
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I want to do a major in history, and at least in India, so why history became a, it's become
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a running trope, right, history is such a boring subject at schools, you have to memorize
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so many dates, so many names, so yes, it is boring and then I realized that part of the
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reason, a big part of the reason is that the way history has been taught to us and recounted
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in historical accounts, in history books, is very linear, you know, when Babak came
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in and he ruled for so many years, then Humayun took over, Humayun was beaten, he went to
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Afghanistan in exile, and then came back and, not Afghanistan, sorry, Persia, and then he
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came back and then he ruled for a certain number of years, Akbar and Aurangzeb and so
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on and so forth, it doesn't trigger any interest, it doesn't trigger any sense of awe, that
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wow, I didn't know this, you know, so my idea was to, okay, I am not creating any new story,
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I am just, you know, repackaging the same story, but I have to do it differently just
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to create that interest, and you cannot create interest without making people go, wow, I
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didn't know that, that has to be the dominant emotion when they're reading your story.
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Of course, research is involved, a lot of research is involved, but my primary focus
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was on communication, I have to be, I am not a historian, right, I am, I prefer to say
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I am a history communicator, my job is to communicate, so I have two approaches to whatever
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I write, be it my threads or with story tell, anyway, either the story has to have at least
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something that you didn't have earlier, before the story you didn't know something, right,
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so that has to be one criteria, another criteria is, it's the same story, but there is yet
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another story that seems very unrelated, you know, and somehow, I want to show that story
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A, which seems very unrelated to story B, had an impact on story B, you know, B wouldn't
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have happened if A didn't, and then you realize, wow, really, these two are like, these two
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happened in such different times and spaces, that it was impossible that anyone would have
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imagined, the popular term for this is butterfly effect, so butterfly effect is a very big
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part of my conscious effort of telling a story, for example, this thread I did on Aksai Chen,
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yeah, fine, there is a dispute between India and China and Aksai Chen has been going on
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for the past, now, everyone knows what the dispute is all about, and why, and yes, they
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went into China war and everything, but then I wanted to show people that this dispute
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was, you know, seeded long before there was a China as we know it today, or an India as
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we know it today, and the original actors in the game were not even India and China,
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they were France and Russia, Alexander I, Nicholas's great grandfather, and Napoleon
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Bonaparte, and that's a more famous name, everyone knows, so these two struck a deal
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in, somewhere in today's Poland, and they decided to, you know, help each other against,
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like, France would help Russia against the Ottomans, and Russia would help France against
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the British, because, you know, France and Britain, they have a very long story going
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back thousands of years, so that was the treaty sometime in the early 19th century, 1807 if
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I'm not wrong, and then that treaty triggered Russian interest in the Afghanistan region,
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Afghanistan-Kashmir region, that if they had Kashmir or Afghanistan, they could build a
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good buffer against the British, because India was British, right, so that's when the great
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game began, and that's how Afghanistan ended up being, you know, the epicenter of all kinds
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of political nonsense that we see till date, so nobody would have connected Napoleon Bonaparte
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with the Aksai Chin issue, but that was the whole approach I took, because at the end
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of the story, people have to appreciate that things that might seem very unrelated, both
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geographically and temporarily, can be related, one thing can lead to, you know, it's a rabbit
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hole, history is just a network of rabbit holes, if you read, so that is a very conscious
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And I feel that there is a lesson in this kind of approach to history, like I have the
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same approach, but I haven't done the kind of work you have with that kind of rigor,
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but an approach in the sense that I'm always entering into rabbit holes and going off in
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all kinds of directions, but the lesson here is this, and the lesson is that the world
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is complex and we have to accept it in all its complexity, like I think there is one
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danger when a natural tendency we have, and we hardwired to do this, that we build simple
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narratives to explain the world, and also everything that has already happened, it seems
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inevitable, because it has already happened, it's a hindsight bias, though at a particular
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point in time, a million things can happen and then one thing does, and a lot of it is
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luck and chance and accident, but you know, it is what it is, we don't think in probabilistic
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ways, so we assume that whatever happened was inevitable, and equally we assume a directionality
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to it, a teleological thing, you know, there is this thing that even within our culture
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we will say everything happens for a reason, though typically we say this to someone when
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something bad has happened to them, but everything happens for a reason, and we almost have this
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sense about history that everything is linear, everything is leading on to what it appears
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to lead on to, and so on and so forth, and we look at certain characters in black and
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white rather than shades of grey, and of course as has become a cliché on my show to say
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everybody contains multitudes, especially our great figures like Gandhi onwards, they
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are deeply complex people with many kind of shades to them, and I guess what your work
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shows or what any historian who is embracing this complexity, what they realize and what
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they bring out for the readers, is that no, shit is not simple, that you know, everything
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is deeply complex, we are shaped by history of course, but in ways that we possibly cannot
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even fully understand, and we have to transcend it, and all of those things.
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Do you feel that A, while going deep into these rabbit holes, while following these
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butterfly effects yourself, do you feel that you also changed as a person in the way that
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you kind of view nuance, or the way that you sort of view the world, and do you feel that
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the study of history in this way is therefore important for that reason?
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Of course, every story I do, every thread I have finished has, okay fine, it has taught
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me something new about certain part of history, I had not touched before that, it is as much
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a learning experience for me as it is for anyone reading the thread, but yes, it does
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create a lot of change in myself, because you discover things about a person on whom,
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you know, a historical character, or an entity, or a group of people, you learn something
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about that entity, that changes how you viewed them so far, and we all start reading history
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with some of the other prejudice, let's face it, it is not just a right wing, left wing
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thing, we all have our prejudices, like when you talk about Indian independence movement,
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you know, British Raj, and we all, it is a very established prejudice, British evil,
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you know, Indian victims, and goes on in every sphere of history, like you know, with the
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Mughals also, but then my view is, every time I do a thread, I learn that, yes, there are
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evil people, there are victims, there are perpetrators, but there is a whole lot more
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of grey than, you know, good or bad, history cannot be monochromatic, history cannot be,
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and history is far more interesting than, you know, the good prevailing over the bad.
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Now, that is one thing.
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Another thing is, I don't even know how you can change the curriculum to involve so much
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of nuance, when you're talking about history as an academic rigor, when you're talking
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about history at the school level, I don't think you can teach this.
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It has to be, I mean, from just my perspective as it stands today, I don't see a solution
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You have to teach them history, the way the textbooks are written, but then eventually,
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if you have some kind of an interest, because in India, first of all, there is no interest
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in history, and there is no interest in history, because there is no prospects, there is a
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future, there is no future, like if you, say, do a major in history, what are your options
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in terms of livelihood?
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Until those things are fixed, people are not going to have any interest, and like I came
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out of the same schooling system, right, and I developed an interest.
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So interest is a very personal thing you can develop.
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What people like me can do is, the role I am playing is a very casual approach to, you
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know, acquainting you with the parts that are missing in whatever you read so far.
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The nuances of maybe you know the story, but you didn't know it could be, it could be seen
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So for example, like I did a video with Storytel, and it was very controversial about the Jallianwala
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Bagh thing, about Dyer.
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Now we know Dyer came, he shot, he opened fire, and a lot of people died.
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I think there were some accounts, say, up to 10,000 people, I don't know what exactly
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the true number was, would have been, but hardly anyone knows Dyer's story.
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Now the moment you say, you utter the phrase, Dyer's story, I am not saying Dyer's side
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of the story, I am saying Dyer's story, it triggers, it, you know, it brings back memory,
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like historical memory, okay, he was a villain, how can we talk about his story?
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We don't need to know who he was.
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Now the fact is when Dyer came, showed up on the scene, you have to understand that
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India was a British colony for almost a century and a half, right?
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So Dyer was born in India.
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His parents had been living in India for, I think, 10, 20, 30 years.
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So he was, at least to himself, he was as much an Indian as anyone else, like as an
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American who would have been involved with the American War of Independence, George Washington,
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he considered himself American, but those people were not technically American, right?
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They were, they were all migrants from UK, but they, they became patriotic about America
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and they fought the War of Independence, but then at the same time, you, it's very common
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knowledge what people like Thomas Jefferson did to the natives in America, right?
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So, but we don't question their patriotism because they felt they were patriot and that's
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a dominant theme there.
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Now in India, it was the same emotion Dyer came with, that he considered himself Indian
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and the natives, let's say sub-Indian, if not non-Indian or non-entities, but to him,
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he was serving India by wiping out the natives and clearing the space, and so much so that
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when he went to Ireland for his higher studies, he carried, he spoke fluent Hindi, he carried
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his Hindi books to ensure that he keeps practicing Hindi, not to forget the language, it was
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his mother tongue, that's a language he spoke in his household and he was bullied in Ireland.
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You know the relation between England and Ireland and that, those times, it was at the
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lowest point and the Irish kids would bully him and saying, you're not even white, you're
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He was white, but he was seen more as Indian amongst his peers than British.
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So these are nuances, what to do with that nuance, I don't know, is it meant to justify
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But it happened and this is a piece of history you just can't wish away.
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So it might be uncomfortable, but it's there.
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When you study history, you have to be passionate about the story and not the characters.
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Yeah, you know, you said earlier that Indians haven't had an interest in history and that
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of course is true and that's partly down to, as you mentioned, the way that it's taught,
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it's all rote learning, your mugging up dates and all of that, and also you mentioned that
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there are no career prospects and from that point of view, yeah, there won't be many Indians
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who are interested in taking it up in a professional way unless they're kind of going to a foreign
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university and they can make a career there.
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But in a different context, I would say that there's enormous interest in history, like
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we were mentioning before this while having lunch, that of all my episodes, the history
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episodes do really well.
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You know, some of my most popular episodes are with people like Manu Pillay and Srinath
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Raghavan, for example, which are episodes that I myself learnt a lot from and which
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sent me down various kind of rabbit holes.
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And I think here's the thing, that history as a calling and a vocation is one thing,
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that might depend on things like the incentives around you and the career prospects and all
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But history is a hobby, history is something everyone wants to delve into, is an entirely
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I mean, as humans, we are always in search of drama.
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That's why we watch sport.
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We watch sport for the individual drama, right?
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We would not watch, say, like a chess game between two AI bots would be really boring
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to us, but when it's people and we know their stories and their stories brings it alive.
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And for exactly that reason, I feel that there is a huge hunger there for history because
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history has drama, history has stories.
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When I did my first episode with Manu on his book on the Deccan, and I happened to remark
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that there was more violence in that book and more crazy characters and more action
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and drama than in Game of Thrones.
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And there is, because there's kind of so much happening there.
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And this whole thing about humanizing these people is also really interesting to me, like
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even in the case of Dire.
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See, that's a point, unfortunately, in the times that we live in, even with what you
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said just now, those type of people, the vocal minorities, I don't think have the intellectual
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capacity to listen to podcasts for too long, so they probably haven't gotten here.
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But there are people, if you said that on Twitter, who would obviously misinterpret
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that as a defense of General Dire.
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I was heavily trolled for that.
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You can't troll history.
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But does history matter?
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I mean, in the sense that where we live today is in a world full of competing narratives,
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History has already happened and in that sense is gone.
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And you can say that history lives on in terms of its consequences and what it has shaped.
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But equally, there is a lot that, you know, there are false narratives that have consequences
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and that shape people around us, which is the other thing that I worry about that, on
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the one hand, I am really happy that there are popular historians like Manu and Srinath
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and, you know, hopefully you as we go along, who at least play a part in popularizing stories
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of history and making people become more open to it.
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But then the point is, do the facts matter?
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We are all following narratives.
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Like I was watching this video, one of you, I think your only video on YouTube, which
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you did for Storytel at their launch.
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And at some point, you mentioned the phrase when the Aryans came to India.
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And on the comments, people jumped on you because they're saying the invasion theory
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And the fact is, we know it's not bunkum, you know, you've referred to a book by David
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Reich, I've had Tony Joseph on my podcast, he's got a great book, early Indians about
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There's enough evidence by now from different fields, including genetics that tells us that,
#
you know, there was an Aryan migration.
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And you know, even language, I had an episode with Peggy Mohan where she places the sort
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of, yeah, and a lovely, lovely book, Wanderer's King's Merchants, where she traces, she does
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a forensic study of how our languages have evolved and you can make out so much of history
#
And the thing is, that the evidence doesn't matter.
#
This is never going to be settled.
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It's never going to be settled because one set of people want to believe something and
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another set of people want to believe something else.
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Yeah, the problem, I mean, either say it's a good thing about history or a problem, but
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you can prove whatever you want.
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That's the thing with the amount of resources we have all around us and the amount of, you
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know, you have all kinds of resources, right?
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Now today, I write a book with a certain agenda and that book gets a decent publisher.
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Four years down the line, that book becomes a resource for someone to refer to, right?
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And then you can carry on with the same agenda and you can quote me and you have a credible
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Now, but was I credible in the first place or did I come from a place of, you know, colored
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So today, it's the same thing happening with history that you want to prove Aryans came
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into India, you have resources, you can quote.
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You want to prove Aryans originated in India 20,000 years ago and they spread to America,
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you have resources to prove that also.
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I mean, as far as just textual resources go, because they might be a bunkum at the heart
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Like end of the day, if you have a long bibliography or if you have screenshots of, you know, yellowish
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pages with underlines and, you know, marker highlights, that's all people are going to
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Oh, wow, that's a very, he is quoting sources.
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Now, with the Aryan migration theory for that matter, it's okay, it's still a work in progress.
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People are still studying the Aryans.
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It's not that everything is settled.
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But so far, there are common sense evidences, pieces of evidence like Ramayan and Mahabharata,
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these epics, they were written during the Vedic period, during the post-Vedic period
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by the Aryan authors, and they have very clear mentions of wheels for that matter, raths,
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Now, these chariots are supposed to be drawn by horses and those chariots are supposed
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to have wheels with spokes in them.
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In fact, spoke is such a prominent feature of those chariots that there is a story, there
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is a part in Ramayana where I think one of Dashratha's wives, she does something, there
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is a battle in which one of the spokes of Dashratha's chariot breaks down and then
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she just puts in her hand to make the rath stable and something like that happens and
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that's how she got to have an upper hand when it came to sending Ram out of the court.
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Now, so the spokes are supposed to be there, the horses are supposed to be there and till
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date in none of the excavations, none of the sites, be it Sanoli or Mehragarh or whatever
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sites we have till date, spoke chariots have not been found.
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You have found pottery, you have found animals, you have found animal bones and fossils and
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everything, you have not found horses, there are no horses in Sanoli.
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So if the Aryans were that old, like older than Indus Valley Civilization and they were
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native to India and Sanoli is as old as Indus Valley Civilization, there should be at least
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one horse fossil, till date none.
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Tomorrow if we do find one, then yes, the theory might develop into something else,
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but so far there is simply no evidence.
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So yeah, just because it doesn't suit one's narrative, facts don't change and then of
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course, like Peggy Murn says, there are linguistic evidences, why there are retroflex consonants
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in the Indian language, if Aryans went from India to other countries, why is retroflex
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just exclusive to Indian languages?
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There is no retroflex in European languages, not even in languages that are very linguistically
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similar to Indian languages like Russian and stuff.
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So there are many, and then of course genetics, you can fight with everything, you can't fight
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Yeah, just to sort of elaborate for those listeners who may not have read Peggy's book,
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I heard my episode with her, what this whole thing about retroflex sounds is, take the
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words daant, you can now pronounce it daat to mean teeth or you can pronounce it daat
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And when you're pronouncing it daat, the der and the ter, they are retroflex, the tongue
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is hitting the back of your mouth.
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And those kinds of sounds do not exist in any of the other languages which have descended
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from the whole Aryan family, Proto-Indo-European as it were, from which Sanskrit came.
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So the thing is as those languages, as those people made their way down over here, those
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retroflex sounds got into the language and that is kind of unique and that also tells
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you that it is not that European languages evolved from Sanskrit as some people might
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claim, but that Sanskrit was this incredibly rich offshoot of those languages which also
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incorporated elements of the local languages such as these retroflex sounds.
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And Peggy's book has just a lot more really rich dope on this and all of that.
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And for those of my listeners who want to understand what do I mean by genetic evidence
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for something that happened in history, please listen to my episode with Tony Joseph or even
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better read his book, which I think Early Indians is out in this new edition, right?
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Which has been updated.
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I'll link to the new edition as well.
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So it's remarkable how far the science progresses.
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And regarding these contestations, this contestation you can say, thousands of years old, how do
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There's no writing from that period or anything.
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So you can dispute this.
#
But even recent historical events, it seems to me, are disputed with the same kind of
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For example, the Babri-Malchat demolition.
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Now I did an episode with Vinay Sitapati, who wrote that excellent book on the BJP before
#
Modi, and his case was that Vajpayee Advani, they were all taken unaware by it.
#
One criticism of the book is that his sources for that were people who were already amenable
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Now I have heard different points of view with different sets of evidences, which are
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So I can basically believe whatever I want and there will be evidence for that.
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Similarly, in the 2002 riots, was Modi culpable or was he merely incompetent?
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He didn't know he was blindsided by them.
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I have heard really convincing arguments with apparently convincing evidence from both sides.
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You know, now the thing is that if you are a neutral, if you're not a historian, if you
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haven't really gone deep into these issues, what the hell do you do?
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If you've already chosen your political side, you will obviously believe that version.
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And if you haven't chosen your political side, you will just shrug your shoulder and say,
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Yeah, it's not always necessary.
#
That's the first thing I always tell everyone and everyone I know and I talk to.
#
And that's something even I follow.
#
We don't always need to have an opinion.
#
Like if you approach history from a place of opinion, there are two ways you can study
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A, to learn and B, to validate.
#
So if you approach history as a search for validation, then you're not getting anywhere.
#
You will just get the validation you need, but you will not be getting anywhere close
#
to what exactly happened.
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Now, if you're looking for facts, if you're being coming from a place of genuine curiosity,
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you may or may not discover what you're looking for.
#
I'm saying this right off the bat because like you said, they are very convincing evidences
#
on both sides of the argument and not just about, you know, contentious topics like Modi
#
and 2002 N. Babri Masjid, but everything, everything, even world history, like history
#
is even right now, there are books written to exonerate Modi on how he handled COVID.
#
There are books written.
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There is a book, I believe, on how Muslims triggered the Delhi riots of last year.
#
And then there are, of course, books on how Delhi riots were a state-sponsored program
#
So 30 years down the line, people are going to get both the books and they will have no
#
choice but to pick sides, whatever you want to believe.
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Now, what I believe is I don't need to have an opinion on everything.
#
First thing, follow Occam's razor, Occam's razor is, you know, where the simplest thing,
#
the most likely thing is likely the truth.
#
Now, in the case of 2002, okay, fine, I don't know, Modi did get a clean check, right?
#
So I don't know if he was culpable.
#
But at the same time, Modi has a history of Islamophobic activities, or at least utterances,
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Forget about what he did until 2002, but after 2002, after 2014, he has been as Islamophobic
#
as it gets, his entire ecosystem.
#
So based on that, is it likely, sometimes things are so fuzzy, you have to just go with
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Is it likely that Modi was culpable?
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I would not be sure because I don't have concrete evidence of that.
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The only thing I can rely on is the Supreme Court for better or for worse.
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And the Supreme Court did, not Supreme Court, sorry, the legal system in general.
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And the legal system gave him a clean check, which is what I have to go by because if I
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start doubting that, then there is a whole lot of judgments that are in, you know, in
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my ideology's favor, so to say.
#
And I'll have to doubt them also, right?
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For me, the thing is, 2002 shouldn't have happened.
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And we should ensure that these kind of confusions do not flare up into situations where hundreds
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of people have to lose their lives and livelihood.
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That's a lesson 2002 gives us.
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Now, whether you want to feel proud of it or ashamed of it, it's up to you.
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I don't feel either of the emotions from that.
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Yeah, I mean, that's a good tangential point that this whole notion of pride just kind
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of baffles me that if someone wins an Olympic gold for India, for example, I'm supposed
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to feel proud or I'm supposed to feel ashamed if something really reprehensible happens
#
And my sense of it is that one, I don't think I'll feel either proud or ashamed unless it
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has something to do with my personal actions.
#
And even there, so much of what I do is just not as much in my control as I think it is,
#
that I don't even know if those emotions are appropriate there.
#
But certainly this whole sort of notion of national pride and all that is a little bizarre.
#
The other sort of aspect is that certain historical narratives, they become almost in a sense
#
tied to an ideology in such a way that if you revisit the history, you are automatically
#
questioning the ideology.
#
And that then becomes a political question in a sense.
#
Part of it is, of course, what Kapil Komaredi in a past episode with me and Manu Pillai
#
in his recent episode also alluded to it, is some of the whitewashing by our historians
#
after independence of stuff that had happened under the Mughals and all of that because
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they didn't want communal violence to flare up in modern India.
#
So for perhaps well-intentioned reasons, they did an eliding of certain aspects of history,
#
which according to Kapil Kapil's thesis was that you can't do this, that it will eventually
#
catch up with you, that people will resent it if you're sort of whitewashing this.
#
But that notion of Akbar, great enlightened emperor, that is almost liberal dogma now.
#
And equally, it is almost a dogma of the right wing that Aurangzeb was all bad.
#
And obviously, all of them contain multitudes and all these things are true.
#
You know, Aurangzeb did do a lot of ghastly things and Akbar was a very interesting guy
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who tried some pretty funky experiments.
#
Like, I was reminded of this recently when, you know, in the last few years, there is
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this narrative going on about how Churchill was responsible for the Bengal famine of 42
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or 43 or whatever, started with a book Madhru Sri Mukherjee wrote.
#
So I read the book and I'm like, my God, Churchill was such a monster.
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You know, that's my default thing.
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And I said, I have to find out more.
#
And then I dug deeper, including in some of these cabinet papers that she mentioned.
#
And I actually went into some of her sources, read other biographies of the period.
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And at the end of it, I realized that what she had essentially done was she had cherry
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picked evidence that not only was Churchill not responsible for the Bengal famine, in
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my view, I mean, this can be argued forever, you know, Amartya Sen also disputed Madhushri
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Mukherjee on another aspect of what she wrote in that particular book.
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And you know, if I find, I vaguely remember a couple of other scholarly pieces that looked
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But this narrative that Churchill was evil and caused the Bengal famine has almost become
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a matter of dogma in the sense that I mentioned to somebody the other day that I think she
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cherry picked her evidence in terms of the letters that he wrote.
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She didn't quote from other letters where he's saying something completely different.
#
In fact, Andrew Roberts wrote a million word biography of Churchill, a magisterial book
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where he looks at, you know, Watson or all his shades of gray, where he even kind of
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makes a case that if Churchill wasn't there, more people might have died.
#
You know, and there's just so many nuances that, you know, you're blaming him for not
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sending ships with food grains or whatever, when the point is that, you know, his ships
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were getting sunk, I think, at a crazy rate within the ocean, there was a danger of losing
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the war, there were all these other considerations that came into play, which is not to say again,
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less people misinterpreted it as a defense of Churchill.
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It's not to say that he wasn't racist.
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Of course he was racist.
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Of course he hated Indians.
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Of course he held us brown skinned natives in contempt.
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And of course he was also a great man and perhaps saved the Western world with the kind
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And these multitudes exist.
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Yeah, and I just thought of that as an example of where something that should be open to
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dispute, that did this happen or not, somehow is politically not open to dispute.
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You become evil if you question it, because it is part of the dogma that Churchill killed
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And I'm half Bengali, by the way.
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When I first read the book, I thought, he's killing my people, bastard.
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But actually not so, if you dig a little deeper.
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Of course we admit that nobody can be entirely evil or entirely bad, unless you're talking
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about somebody like Hitler.
#
By the way, even somebody like Hitler has his grace, but that's a separate conversation.
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It's a kind of thing where, okay, fine, so what if he beats his wife, he files his taxes
#
You've heard that joke, right?
#
So Hitler was the first person to introduce animal cruelty laws in all of Europe.
#
Hitler is the first person who ended human zoos.
#
There used to be this idea, this absolutely atrocious idea of putting people in theme
#
park like situations where you have these Negroes from America brought in, slave girls
#
and kids and guys, and they are put in pens, pig pens, and white visitors come and see
#
And it was more like an anthropological exercise.
#
You see how tribals live in Africa and what they look like and how they talk, how they
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So these were human zoos and Hitler was the first person.
#
Hitler, as racist as he was, he's the person who abolished human zoos.
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What was his thinking behind that?
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We can't get into his mind, but we know he did that.
#
Then, of course, the animal cruelty laws.
#
He's the first person who introduced the idea of paid vacations in Germany because he wanted
#
all the German working class people to have some quality of life and so that they're more
#
Of course, he had his reasons.
#
He wanted loyalty of the people to the Reich and he started the policy of having compulsory
#
annual vacation for German workers, gave them radios so that they're aware of what's happening.
#
Again, he had his own agenda there because through the radios, he literally had a propaganda
#
So you can imagine why he would distribute free radios.
#
But there are things he did which cannot be called evil.
#
And again, this is not just a way.
#
We have to continuously keep captioning ourselves.
#
This is not a justification of Churchill or justification for Hitler.
#
But these things happen.
#
You can't wish them away.
#
You cannot pin this on one political ideology or the other.
#
It's just how the world has shaped over the past.
#
And this is not a seven year or 10 years thing.
#
This has been in the buildup is more than half a century old.
#
It's been in the works since independence.
#
Things have been whitewashed.
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Things have been history has been colored with agenda ever since independence.
#
The Mughal history has been tampered with.
#
And sooner or later, yes, it has to come out the way the world is opening up with every
#
kind of opinion and resources and things are being things are becoming approachable to
#
everyone, regardless of where they stand in the society or educational hierarchy.
#
So people know people would find out maybe back in the 90s back in the back in the 50s
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Nobody would have seen nobody would have seen this coming.
#
Now, they would come a time where everything will be exposed.
#
They might have come from a good place, like, okay, like you said, to maintain communal
#
That was the priority of the time.
#
But eventually, it's you're just postponing the problems.
#
You're not fixing them.
#
You're postponing them because the communal disharmony that would have happened in the
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50s had you opened up the atrocities of the Mughals that did not happen then.
#
It's happening now in 2021.
#
Now nobody from that time is alive now to see the consequences of what they wrote.
#
And this happens when you are emotional about characters.
#
This whole thing is because one side is emotional about the Mughals and the other side is emotional
#
about, say, the Sikhs and the Hindus and like everybody is beholden to their favorite characters.
#
You have to understand that the people you are emotional about are real people.
#
There's not a lot of the rings or Harry Potter.
#
They were who they were.
#
They cannot be changed.
#
Aurangzeb did what he did.
#
Tipu Sultan did what he did.
#
You can't change it just because you feel nice for them, just because you identify with
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And why you identify with them because he was Muslim and I am also Muslim or maybe I
#
am a liberal and I feel for Muslims, which is good.
#
You should feel for everyone.
#
But this association, this identification by association, is what's ruining history
#
for everyone, both left and right.
#
For all you know, right, whatever is happening, the WhatsApp forwards and the right wing rewriting
#
Why can't I call this a reprisal of sorts, you know, like they have been the voices have
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been suppressed for far too long.
#
There were intellectual barriers.
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Now those barriers are gone.
#
Now a Pani Puriwala can have an opinion and it can be broadcast.
#
And it's fascinating and a bunch of tangential thoughts you mentioned about how humans use
#
And I remember this post I wrote in 2007, which I've just dug out, which has a thought
#
which, you know, might be relevant to what's happening around us.
#
And the post began with something that a blogger had written about this guy called Otabenga.
#
And Otabenga was a pygmy from the Belgian Congo.
#
And he was taken to the US and he was displayed at the Bronx Zoo in a cage which he shared
#
And it was meant to show the different stages of evolution.
#
So you have orangutan and you have an African pygmy.
#
And here teeth, which was slightly odd because it was a particular tradition of cosmetic
#
dentistry that his tribe followed.
#
But the narrative that his captors built was that this is a sign of cannibalism.
#
So to spread that narrative among the people who came to the zoo, they scattered bones
#
Now, thinking of it today, we are utterly aghast.
#
But back in the day, obviously, this was considered normal because people went to the zoo, like
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we might go to the zoo today and say, let's go and look at some panthers and giraffes
#
In a similar sense, let's go look at some pygmies.
#
And I had used this example in the post to talk about something called the expanding
#
The expanding circle is a concept created by the philosopher W. E. H. Leckie, coined
#
by the philosopher in his book, A History of European Morals.
#
And I think it's still relevant to how we think about the world today in the sense that
#
Leckie's point was that we are wired to have a circle of people we consider our people
#
and everybody outside that is the other.
#
So for all practical purposes, everybody outside that circle of people, they can die.
#
We can do unspeakable things to them.
#
They are like animals are to us today.
#
It doesn't matter whatever happens.
#
So and initially his point was that our circle is small.
#
It's our tribe and so on.
#
And the great thing about human civilization is that the circle expands so that the people
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who are worthy of our moral consideration, they expand from our tribe to perhaps our
#
region to our nation state as it were, till it eventually engulfs all of humanity or should
#
engulf all of humanity.
#
And in fact, the philosopher, the utilitarian philosopher, Peter Singer wrote a book about
#
I was about to say recent book till I realized it's in the 70s, but it feels recent to me
#
given my vintage, I'm also in my 40s like you, where he wrote a book called The Expanding
#
Circle and Singer's argument, Singer used to fight for animal liberation as it were.
#
That's the title of another book of his.
#
And Singer's argument was that this circle will expand to include animals.
#
So in the same way that you and I can be aghast today thinking about the African black man
#
who was exhibited in a cage somewhere, 150 years down the line, people could be aghast
#
that we killed animals to eat them.
#
And my therefore, musing therefore is that in a sense, all the cruelty that we commit
#
on each other, not all the cruelty, but a lot of the cruelty we commit on each other
#
is because our circle hasn't actually expanded that much.
#
That there are people who are outside our circle.
#
And if we do something to them, we don't consider them human.
#
We consider them subhuman.
#
They're not worthy of a moral consideration.
#
So for example, you know, a Brahmin who, for example, will slaughter a Dalit for drinking
#
from his well, or a bunch of Hindus who will slaughter some Muslims they see who they feel
#
might be transporting beef or, you know, we are recording this a couple of days after
#
the Singhu death where this guy's hand was chopped off by the Nihang Sikhs and he was
#
apparently a Dalit Sikh and he was accused of, you know, desecrating the holy book.
#
But whatever his hand was chopped off, he was basically tortured to death and his body
#
was hung up and they continued defending it to the people who killed him.
#
They continued defending it as if he wasn't human.
#
And this is kind of what worries me that those of us who are more who are English speaking
#
elites who might have the influence of the enlightenment on them, for example, or who
#
have this Western liberal sort of way of looking at things might assume that everyone's circle
#
And therefore, everyone should be horrified at such murders or lynching or whatever.
#
But the truth is that there are so many intersecting circles all around us and it's not really
#
I believe the number of circles have increased.
#
I mean, once upon a time, but then, yeah, all said and done, I would still preamble
#
all of this, whatever I'm going to say with one very clear thought, unambiguous, not to
#
contest that we are living in far better times.
#
And ever before in history.
#
So that is unassailable.
#
Now that having said that, the circles are certainly expanding.
#
There's no two ways about it.
#
I mean, that's how we are living in better times than before.
#
But the number of circles is increasing as well.
#
Like earlier, it was just my race and then nation state and then, you know, my species
#
and those kind of things.
#
Now we are creating a new circle every day, every month, like, you know, we have circles
#
based on orientation, we have circles based on gender, we have circles based on socioeconomic
#
parameters, we have circles based on every conceivable box a person can be put in, right?
#
You can call me a CIS head, upper class Hindu, earlier it used to be upper caste Hindu, you
#
are a lower caste, you are a Dalit, you are an upper caste.
#
Now you have upper class.
#
Okay, I didn't realize that.
#
I thought CIS head Savarna is pretty much the worst insult that you can get.
#
There is all, I mean, there are so many circles, so many tags, so many names that it's become
#
I mean, at one point, you just give up.
#
You give up trying to figure out what the hierarchy looks like.
#
Because there is no hierarchy.
#
There's so many intersections, like in the Singhu border thing.
#
Now what do you do, like I was telling you during lunch, before lunch, how do you pick
#
Like if you have to pick sides based on ideological boxes that you subscribe to, then the victim
#
is a Dalit and the perpetrator is, I don't know if Nihangs are upper caste or what, but
#
whatever, Nihang, now, but then at the same time, so you feel bad for the victim, but
#
then at the same time, you realize the perpetrator is a minority in India.
#
And minority, not just minority, but an oppressed minority because the Sikhs right now, because
#
of the farmer protests and everything, the Sikhs are an oppressed minority.
#
So how do you pick sides?
#
So that's the peril of getting into identities and these circles.
#
So we are inventing circles.
#
Why we are doing that is for a philosopher or a think tank to come up with.
#
But I can only wager a guess that it's because as more and more people are getting a platform,
#
a bullhorn to air their opinions, of course, everyone wants their own share of attention
#
and even if it's a five minute limelight, so at some point it becomes fashionable to
#
So if the prevailing thought is that this is bad, this shouldn't have happened, then
#
okay, fine, to justify the person who did it, that becomes a contrarian view.
#
It makes me some kind of a superstar for maybe five minutes.
#
Oh, wow, this person is not just, I don't want to be the sheep kind of mentality.
#
So in that flow, I end up creating a new circle.
#
I subscribe to XYZ ideology.
#
This ideology didn't exist till now.
#
You mentioned this thing called turf some time back.
#
So I never heard of this until a few weeks ago.
#
Now tomorrow you'll hear some other acronym, a new acronym is coming up every day.
#
I believe the last time I checked LGBTQ had some more than 15, 20 letters and then a plus
#
sign because then even they got tired.
#
We are creating new circles and that's the whole reason of conflicts because people don't
#
People just see, okay, we are different circles.
#
I would really say that the only part of this I would disagree with is the fact that people
#
don't want to be sheep.
#
I think on the contrary, everybody does want to be a sheep in the sense that I think social
#
media has exacerbated this tendency where we come online, we find an ideological tribe
#
and once we are within that ideological tribe, we feel validated and the way to get approval
#
and more and more validation from that tribe is to keep signaling our virtue more and more
#
loudly which inevitably is a drive to the extremes because then you keep shitting on
#
the other side instead of engaging with them respectfully as you should and treating them
#
as people but instead you never engage with arguments, you attack people and you do purity
#
tests for your own side where again a drive to the extremes and one of the things and
#
what we were kind of discussing during lunch and which I find very distressing and which
#
goes against everything that we discussed about loving history means embracing complexity
#
is that all these tribal instincts have led to the creation of these new ideological tribes
#
or even cults which are reductive, which are based on identity, which are reductive.
#
So whatever identity is assigned to you by the interlocutor, that's what you are.
#
You are reduced to that.
#
You are nothing more than that.
#
So if someone calls me a cishet savanna for example and therefore I can't, you know,
#
I am by default evil and I should feel tremendous guilt for other cishet savannas in the past
#
I have done, that reduces me to just that and it reduces me also not just to an identity
#
that I was born into but into whatever the misdeeds of, you know, my ancestors might
#
have been which I have no control over and this also reduces people to ideologies, to
#
identities of victimhood.
#
John McWhorter has written this excellent book called Vogue Racism which is just out.
#
So there is an interview of his I will link to where he speaks about how he finds it so
#
condescending that black people are treated as victims all the time, that things happen
#
to them, that they can't actually take their destiny into their own hands and that's exactly
#
as it should be and I think just thinking in terms of identity, reducing a person to
#
a category, it's a trap not only like I don't care what you call me or you know I can take
#
those pejoratives but it's a trap even for those people who might be Dalit or who might
#
be black or who might be whatever category it is but you don't want to reduce them to
#
the victimhood, they are more than that, what has happened in their lives is more than oppression,
#
they contain multitudes and to reduce them to that, to reduce their narrative to that
#
is I think to do pretty much the same thing as WhatsApp historians do, when they'll take
#
a particular strand of history and they'll say this is all there is and everything is
#
because of this and this is what it inevitably leads to and of course right now I just went
#
on a sort of rant against the Vokes but it's the same with the Bhakts, you know the Vokes
#
and the Bhakts are literally identical except that they other a different kind of person
#
and they adopt different kinds of identities but otherwise you know you are put in a category
#
if you are a Muslim, you are a Muslim by definition, there's you know India doesn't matter, other
#
identities don't matter and you are also supposed to be you know responsible for what happened
#
Not past, you are supposed to be responsible for what happens in Afghanistan today right
#
So you might have never been out of India, you might not have ever been out of your say
#
city, you don't, you can't place Afghanistan on the map, you have to take responsibility
#
for that, that's the dominant narrative and the same way you have to, you as a CIS head
#
Savarna or whatever, you have to take responsibility for something, for all you know maybe your
#
forefathers didn't even do that, I mean it's not necessary that everyone's forefathers
#
were Zamindars and nobility right, so for you know you might have a very humble beginning
#
but it doesn't matter, you have a certain surname and that's all that matters, same
#
way like Muslims have a certain name that matters, it's very reductive and very destructive
#
And also there's the assumption like why should people assume I'm either CIS head or
#
Savarna, you know you have no way of knowing that, one it shouldn't matter but two you
#
have no way of knowing that, so this kind of reductionism is something that kind of
#
So let's kind of come back to your personal history that after 2014 you discover this
#
new love of you know reading history again, you want to counter these narratives that
#
are kind of floating around like you have once mentioned about how you know you try
#
to get into the heart of why this whole, this crazy rumour about Taj Mahal once being Tejo
#
Mahalaya originated from and while going into that rabbit hole to try and find the origin
#
of the rumour, which I think was just something PN Oak made up is what I'm assuming, but you
#
happen to discover that, you happen to discover that one of the great monuments in Agra is
#
actually the first church built in India which was built by a Mughal emperor.
#
So tell me a bit about that story and also after that tell me a bit about how you enter
#
So to begin with the first time I was working those days some place in mind space and I
#
was sitting at work and yes it was against company policies but I was googling, randomly
#
googling that day I didn't have much workload and I discovered this nonsense, those days
#
there was no SMS forwards or stuff like that, so it was on Google and I read about PN Oak's
#
story about Taj Mahal being a Shiva temple, Tejo Mahalaya and stuff, we laughed at it,
#
I showed it to a bunch of my friends at work and we all laughed, there were Hindus, there
#
were upper caste, lower caste, what caste everything and we all laughed together, there was absolutely
#
no colour to the laughter.
#
This guy is bonkers, how can you question Taj Mahal, that was a narrative.
#
I had absolutely no idea that this thought could forget about being entertained, this
#
could become a dominant narrative and some people would really a major chunk of the population
#
or at least the major chunk of vocal population could actually take this seriously in all
#
I had absolutely no, I mean if you had told me this I would have laughed at you, how can
#
anyone take this seriously, but it happened right, after 2011 there were people who, I
#
have met people, I have met people, I have unfortunately I have people in my own extended
#
family who take that as the gospel truth, you know like yeah history has been tampered
#
with and we have been kept away from the real truth and Nehru had a conspiracy and all that
#
So that's when I realised this is getting out of hand and of course I can't do anything
#
about it, but at least for my own sanity I have to find out when, no matter how bonkers
#
a narrative be, but when you are not aware of, I am talking about 2013-14 when these
#
things were not so dominant, but then everyone around you is talking about Taj Mahal being
#
Tejo Mallya, you would start doubting your own sanity, is it possible this might just
#
be true, there could be just you know 1% chance this could be, let me research and then there
#
were several occasions I tried to research and then gave up, then I did, then I gave
#
up and after a few years I finally dived into it, of course this never came out to be true
#
but then because I was reading about monuments in Agra and stuff like that, then this thing
#
showed up, the temple, the Agra temple, I forgot the name, our lady of something but
#
The church you mean, yeah.
#
Yeah, the church and then I found out that okay this thing was built by Akbar and I was
#
like if Akbar built a church, why would he do that?
#
Because look, let's face it Akbar was a Muslim king ruling a Hindu majority India,
#
so I can understand if he built temples because he did adopt a lot of Hindu practices, he
#
would drink only Ganga gel and yeah that's a fact, he would fast on, he was mostly vegetarian,
#
in fact towards the later part of his life he turned fully vegetarian and he had water
#
from the Ganges brought all the way from Haridwar because he would not drink any other water,
#
he would consider that medicinal and pure and pious and what not and he used to listen
#
to pundits who recited Bhagavad Gita and stuff, so he did a lot of, how much of it was because
#
of his wife, I don't know but then yes you do have a Hindu wife but that alone cannot
#
be the reason for you going so much out of the way, you are an emperor, you are not even
#
a minor petty king, you are an emperor, so the only justification I can think of is he
#
had to rule a Hindu majority subcontinent which was impossible if he became a religious
#
fanatic, he had to be tactful, so this could have all been a part of his tact, the Akbar
#
the great thing which is fine but then to build a church that didn't sit well with me,
#
why would you need to build a church in Agra where there is absolutely no Christian population,
#
at that time yes there were Christians in India, there have been Christians in India
#
since the time of John the Apostle but those were in pockets in Goa and Goa was under the
#
Portuguese at that time but then people travelling between Goa and Agra at a time when there
#
was no proper road transport, you only had horses and bullocks and stuff like that, so
#
I just could not jive with the idea why he would have to do that, then I started reading
#
and then two very interesting things came out, one was that he did build a church and
#
no it was not part of his politics but the man was genuinely into you know he wanted
#
to study and frankly I can't think of another Mughal emperor or Mughal ruler even or a Rajput
#
ruler or any other from that period who was this genuinely curious, he invited Armenian
#
Christians because Silk Road was still kind of on its deathbed but a lot of exchange was
#
still happening through that route, so he started inviting Armenian Christians to settle
#
in Agra because he wanted to study and learn about Christianity, he had no necessity, he
#
did not have any Christians there and then at one point he even invited two, he asked
#
whoever was the guy in Goa, ruling Goa for the Portuguese, I forgot his name, the Viceroy,
#
so he actually sent an emissary to the Viceroy and asked him to send him representatives
#
who could teach him about the Roman Catholic Church, so two brothers were sent like the
#
church brothers, so he had these kind of activities happening in Agra and that time Agra was the
#
Mughal capital, so he did that and when a lot of Armenian, there was an entire settlement
#
of Armenian Christians, so they needed a graveyard eventually and they also needed a place to
#
worship and Akbar said okay fine yeah you have to, okay it was not a proactive thing,
#
they requested him that we need a place of worship and then he just sanctioned it, okay
#
fine you can have a church, that was the first Roman Catholic Church in, that was the first
#
Christian Church in India and that's the church where a woman was baptized and married and
#
that woman happened to be, her name was Begum Samru, now Begum Samru happened to be the,
#
she was the Queen of Sardana, Sardana is a place somewhere in the Doab region, so she
#
became the first Muslim woman, woman Muslim monarch in the Indian subcontinent, that was
#
a first, nobody knows about it, I mean I didn't until that point, I can bet a lot of people
#
would have never heard of who the hell Begum Samru is, you know we know Jhassi by, Lakshmi
#
Bhai of Jhassi, we know so many others, we know so many mythological characters, we don't
#
know this very real and present character who is not more than 400 years old and that
#
lady had what a journey, she started in old Delhi as a dancing girl because those days
#
you used to have this culture of you know a girl would dance and it was not prostitution
#
like how the most people view it, it was not prostitution, it was just a part of the culture,
#
it was an art form, a girl would dance and there would be patrons who would pay her to
#
keep her you know, put meal on her table and there was a good decent livelihood and she
#
was one dance girl because she had to escape, her mother had to escape to Delhi because
#
her dad was very abusive, there was a lot of domestic violence so and she was basically
#
from Sardana, so her mom escaped when she was like a 9 year old or 10 year old and she
#
escaped to Shah Jahanabad, Shah Jahanabad was old Delhi and there she began, her mom
#
died later on, then this girl began her career as a dance girl, notch girl as we say and
#
there she came across a patron from France, he had a French name but then popularly he
#
was called Summers, so he was again a very shady kind of character, he was a mercenary,
#
he would do missions on his own and those days it was a very customary thing for independent
#
you know like bounty hunters, you are not loyal to a country or a government or a king
#
or an empire, you just, you are available up for hire, whoever hires you and you just
#
participate in a mission, you have a band of men and you participate in a war and you
#
win the war for them, you get paid and then you move on, so he joined the, he joined,
#
somehow landed in India, he joined the British and imagine being a French man, he joins the
#
British and comes to India and he had a brief stint in Gwalior and then he moved to Agra,
#
moved to Delhi, there he met this girl and then moved to Agra and that girl they got
#
married in that church and to get married she had to convert to Christianity and that's
#
how she and because that guy's surname was Summers and she converted, she also assumed,
#
acquired that surname and that's how the locals started calling her Begum Samru and she became
#
the first Indian monarch who was a female and originally a Muslim then converted to
#
Christianity in the first church ever built in North India and built by a Mughal emperor,
#
like how fascinating the journey is and these are two very disjoint stories, like nobody
#
would relate Akbar with a church with a dancing girl and they all come together in this one
#
marriage and a lot of other episodes happened between the marriage and her eventual death
#
but that's one of the stories on my story tell series.
#
Yeah, so you know you mentioned dancing girls and I got reminded of this episode I did on
#
Tawaif with Saba Deva and she wrote a wonderful book on the subject and it's really interesting
#
that in the way the word is used today, you think of Tawaif as prostitute, that's kind
#
of become the popular notion of the word but like you said there's a lot more than that,
#
there were carriers of a certain kind of culture, of music, of entertainment and they weren't
#
necessarily all prostitutes either, there's nothing wrong with sex work in any case but
#
that's not what it was necessarily and I wonder if there's a certain kind of bigotry that
#
has seen them kind of treated in the popular culture like that.
#
I also have done a bunch of episodes on the Mughals like on Jahangir with Parvati Sharma
#
with Ira Mukhoti and I did an episode on the 7 cities of Delhi with Rana Safi and the Mughals
#
are incredibly fascinating and like in fact my episode with Parvati on Jahangir was titled
#
Jahangir the Curious because he was such a curious guy, he was always trying all kinds
#
of crazy experiments with animals and all of that because you know you're not surrounded
#
by books, there's no knowledge around you, you know for the smallest thing you can't
#
google it, you've got to figure it out yourself and you're doing these crazy things and now
#
I don't remember which episode it was with which guest because my memory is so horrible
#
but I remember there was one Mughal emperor I don't remember who and either his wife or
#
his daughters had gone out of town I think back to Afghanistan which was their base for
#
a while and then come back to Delhi and yeah I think it was probably Humayun and Hamidah
#
Banu Begum but whatever this person is coming back and typically protocol is she should
#
come to the emperor but he gets so excited he runs out barefoot because he's so keen
#
to see her and otherwise an emperor who is otherwise chopping heads off all over the
#
place and all that so these different dimensions these kind of human dimensions of history
#
are sort of incredibly interesting to me so tell me something when you kind of look back
#
into history right you begin researching something and at the point that you begin researching
#
it there are a bunch of popular facts about that person in the domain and those are limited
#
facts and in a sense that person is a caricature like every time you are kind of looking into
#
historical figure before you really get deep into it you have a caricatured view of what
#
that person is supposed to be that Baba did this Akbar did this Aurangzeb did this Begum
#
Samru whatever you might have a few lines of a legend about her but that's it but then
#
through the course of your research at some point they start becoming human and is there
#
then a point where you begin to understand their dilemmas you know one it is like for
#
me it is very hard to imagine life as an emperor in the 15th century leave alone a common
#
person because there is no air conditioning you know what do I have for breakfast I have
#
no idea what they ate back then there is no toaster you know there is no frying pan where
#
I can just whip up a fried egg for myself just understanding that what we get in our
#
typical textbook history is we get details of conquests and this and that and horses
#
versus infantry and all that shit we get but do you also get a sense of their daily mundane
#
life how do they spend their time what do they do for fun and at what point do they
#
start becoming human to you like have there been moments where you have gone so deep into
#
a character that you just feel like you know that person it happens in some stories not
#
all frankly because in every story you just don't have the kind of information that would
#
move you into really you know stepping into their shoes in terms of personalizing with
#
them but some stories do like in the Begum Samru story when I when I read about I did
#
not even plan to research on her I didn't know she existed so my idea was to just research
#
about Agra and you know Taj Mahal and stuff then she just came up she popped up in one
#
of the rabbit holes as you say and then when I started reading her story then it totally
#
became about her and not Akbar Akbar vanished in the background and it was all Begum Samru
#
now when I read about her origin story how her mother had to run away because the husband
#
was very abusive and he almost wanted to kill her he poisoned her once and stuff like that
#
then she had to run away to Shah Jahanabad that's one moment I can vividly remember
#
I actually pictured a girl Shah Jahanabad was a very brand new city at that time it
#
was not too old so the fort walls and stuff and there are bazaars right outside the outside
#
the walls and there is this nine-year-old girl whose mom had died by the way on the
#
way mother couldn't come so this girl is like an orphan the only girl in town in a city
#
like okay fine Delhi has come a long way today Delhi is a big bustling metropolis with millions
#
of people but even back then for its time on that scale Delhi was not just any other
#
random city it was it was a capital of the Mughal freaking empire so for Begum for this
#
girl nine-year-old girl to be alone in a capital in the capital of an empire right outside
#
the fort walls where people are so hostile hostile in the sense not because they'll kill
#
you but then they could you never know because you're a girl you're nine-year-old that's
#
a very ripe age for you know all kinds of men doing the rounds outside the fort walls
#
and so what must be going through her head you know and then how she navigates her way
#
through the by lanes of Shah Jahanabad today's Purani Delhi how she makes her way and lands
#
up in some you know in a place what do you call there's a there's a particular name
#
for for the place where these dancing girl activities happen so she landed up in one
#
of those places and she gets hired and you know you're first groomed on how to it's not
#
just about dancing you're groomed on how to behave with the guests how to how to serve
#
them food how to serve them wine and stuff like that and she's just nine and ten-year-old
#
and every morning she wakes up and while she's on her rooftop she can see the ramparts of
#
the of the fort of the Red Fort and she at that age now what do you imagine a kid of
#
that age would think generally and they would think okay fine I want to play today and her
#
imagination is and again literally neither of us could have gone into her head this just
#
from accounts on her and there are accounts that she would actually dream of someday entering
#
those walls or being on the other side of the wall which means it's a it's a figurative
#
way of saying someday she would want to rule the country like a mogul although that never
#
happened but then she continued working on it and eventually ended up being landed gentry
#
but the point is this journey was so relatable how because I came to Bombay once I'm not
#
saying I am that ambitious or I would get anywhere anywhere even close to what she could
#
achieve but the the approach the mindset the the the situations I've been in when I came
#
to Bombay as a as a very young person and not just me there are millions and millions
#
of kids who are orphaned who land up in cities like not just Delhi and Bombay but even in
#
big cities of the world like London and New York and they eventually do go on to build
#
something out of their lives so it's fascinating and yes you could relate I could literally
#
in my head I could hear the sounds of the hawkers and people cat calling her and those
#
kind of things you can I mean I get goosebumps when I talk about it it happens but it doesn't
#
happen all the time it happens very rarely only certain characters you know captivate
#
Yeah I hope you're the showrunner for a web series on one of these stories once that would
#
be great you know one story that gives me goosebumps and a similar kind of story to
#
this is I don't know if you heard my episode with Kavita Rao she'd written a book on Lady
#
Doctors so one of the lady doctors in her story is this girl called Hemabati Sen she's
#
born in 1866 in Khulna which is today I think in Bangladesh but then a small village in
#
eastern Bengal so 1866 she's born when she's nine years old she's married off to a 45
#
year old widower and she's obviously raped every night she's a kid of nine she's raped
#
every night during the day she's playing with this her husband's previous children who are
#
her age and at night she's paralyzed with fear and she wakes up naked and she's unable
#
to process what happened in between and then when she's 12 this man dies and then her mother
#
dies and then her father dies and the rest of her family abandons her so she's 12 years
#
old she's a widow she's an orphan she's in this village called Khulna in East Bengal
#
and it's 1866 so the assumption is that this person's life is over this person goes on
#
to become one of India's first lady doctors you know manages to get through life educates
#
herself becomes a lady doctor you know she even fights for equal pay for female doctors
#
later on 30 40 years down the line she becomes a prominent social figure she writes a book
#
which is her autobiography and when she dies in 1933 she keeps that book inside a trunk
#
and that trunk is not opened for let me see 80 years that trunk is not that trunk is opened
#
in the 21st century and they find that manuscript and the story of her life and then they can
#
put all the pieces together how she got from being that 12 year old widow orphan abandoned
#
by family no money nothing to eat you have that point in time where she has nothing to
#
eat everyone's abandoned her she's a widow and an orphan in a village in East Bengal
#
and Khulna and she makes it this far and you know when I read something like this it is
#
fine it's like what the fuck how dare people like me or you complain about anything in
#
their lives you know and and people talk about achievement like this is fucking achievement
#
like when you talk about Begum Sumru for example it's not an identical situation but she she's
#
also a kid she also doesn't have male protectors in the same way she's also navigating this
#
world that is incredibly hostile and that you would expect that this world will eat
#
her up and spit her out I mean even today it's very unlikely for a guy or a girl anyone
#
I am not even confining into a gender but for anyone to come out of a situation half
#
as bad and do something out of life like how many would have committed suicide let's be
#
honest I mean suicide rates are going up any which way right so people commit suicide for
#
again I'm not belittling anyone's suicide I'm just saying it's it's like one in a million
#
maybe who who could live that life and turn things around within in the space of one lifetime
#
in the space of probably a decade most likely because back then life spans were not that
#
long so people like Sumru for that matter she she turned herself around in less than
#
a decade now who who would have imagined like today you are let's say at Andheri station
#
you don't have food to eat you have ragged clothes and imagine if you're a girl then
#
people are you know giving you all kinds of looks at fall you know maybe we don't know
#
but it's very likely she might have been raped a number of a number of times and then from
#
there to get to become a legitimate queen at a time when queens are not women are not
#
taken seriously at all even at the lower levels of the Empire and to become a queen who has
#
the blessing not exactly the Mughal Queen but with the blessing of the Mughal Emperor
#
himself it's a big deal and in a space of nine years ten years it's beyond our comprehension
#
to turn things around that drastically that dramatically so history is full of dramas
#
like that and that's a drama that unfortunately doesn't come out I mean what's the reason
#
this story should not be told in schools yeah and also you know like one thing of course
#
there is selection bias at play that this is a one person who made it and clearly an
#
outlier and most people in her of course situation would not have made it but equally I fear
#
that for example if a film was to be made in her life every aspect of it would be simplified
#
there would be some people you would see in shades of black only and there are some people
#
who would be you know noble benefactors who you know lift her or inspire her or whatever
#
and everything would be black and white and that struggled at nuance I mean I don't know
#
maybe in the age of the web series one hopes that there would be space for nagal for that
#
kind of to bring out that struggle to bring out that nuance and the human stories and
#
all that but I just find these so moving though you said you related with Begum Samru while
#
in the case of Hemapati Sen I couldn't relate it is so much outside my reality to imagine
#
that 12 year old girl and that religion being girl that it's just kind of mind boggling.
#
I could relate in the sense that it's a it might not be my own reality but it's a reality
#
we face on a daily basis around us the moment you step out of your car you'll see some kids
#
selling something Begum Samru might have been in that situation as a 9 year old kid outside
#
the walls of the red fort and with absolutely not even not imagine can you imagine the guy
#
the kid selling you flags at the signal having aspirations of becoming a chief minister of
#
Maharashtra someday that's like unimaginable right why would a kid like that thing even
#
know of chief minister no but she would look at the fort walls every day and imagine have
#
ambitions of ruling India someday although she could not rule India but she did get somewhere
#
even that somewhere is beyond your and my comprehension so no we I definitely could
#
not relate to that the only part I could which is why I sympathized with her was because
#
I was new to a city as an outsider someday at some point in time in the past and my life
#
was not easy although not not nearly as hard as hers because am a guy being a guy a lot
#
of things get easier for you that's that's a fact and things are easier today than you
#
know the 16th century 17th century things are much easier today but you can imagine
#
and I hope they don't make films on her I hope they don't make a series on her because
#
they'll absolutely ruin her because you so far whatever I have told you you Begum Samru
#
is a hero to you and that's fine but then you don't know what happened later later
#
her own people turned against her because she became despotic and very whimsical and
#
she got a lot of people killed and you know beheaded for very simplistic reasons or you
#
know sometimes not even for a reason just because this person is a threat to my rule
#
so I get him beheaded so this became the norm and you know people take a lot of umbrage
#
over a woman ruler doing the same thing which a male ruler might get a pass for but then
#
regardless of the gender she did do bad things later in her life as a queen because you know
#
once power gets in your head so that's another lesson from history that history is not good
#
versus evil it's not black and white you have good people doing bad things bad people doing
#
good things it's like all over the place so Begum Samru had a very difficult life she's
#
a story of courage and everything but later in her life she is a story of extreme despotism
#
and you know much worse than what many people view of Modi as you know so these both sides
#
exist in the same person and the interesting thing is just sinking allowed is that one
#
of the problems with history is that we make historical figures larger than life so the
#
good they do gets amplified in our minds the bad they do gets amplified in our minds and
#
when we want to take a position that their good or bad we obviously ignore the one and
#
focus on the other but it strikes me that you know the human emotions that she must
#
have gone through any historical figure goes through you know there is the frustration
#
there is suffering anger there is then resentment some of that resentment might play out later
#
when she is beheading people who were earlier among the people who oppressed her and so
#
on and so forth and all of these emotions are in play and the only difference between
#
us and them is those specific circumstances that led to them doing whatever they are doing
#
you know like I look at Gandhi's life for example and Gandhi is really fascinating to
#
me because he is such a deeply flawed figure who happened to do great things who in some
#
ways you can admire him a lot in some ways you just go like you know what the fuck is
#
that even especially his treatment of women and the stuff he did in the later years of
#
his life cast for that matter where and I always think that initially he is trying to
#
kind of play it safe when he defends a Varna system and all that but later when he claims
#
to be against caste I think he is just virtue signaling and which Ambedkar correctly saw
#
which really irritated Ambedkar because he is like what the fuck you are virtue signaling
#
though not in so many words but you know in the twitter of those days that's exactly
#
what he was doing and Ambedkar you know could see through him and in a sense in this particular
#
debate Savarkar was in a sense on Ambedkar's side in the caste debate which people don't
#
appreciate and we look at things like Gandhi's racism against blacks in South Africa and
#
he changes his mind on that later and at every point you know you come with your biases you
#
respond to incentives you change with times you even look at Savarkar's mercy petitions
#
for example I don't even see why they are a big deal the guy is dead we should only
#
you know debating his ideas is enough his book Hindutva is like disgusting I had to
#
read it once for an episode I did with Akar Patel it's a horrendously bad book and those
#
ideas can be criticized on their own you don't need a reference to his life but the point
#
is I don't blame him for writing those mercy petitions because he was not being kept in
#
a five-star house like Nehru and Gandhi were when they were imprisoned or when they were
#
detained by the British he was literally tortured you read the prison diaries of the people
#
in Andamas in those days it's kind of terrible I don't know why it's become such a polarizing
#
thing I would write a letter like that just to actually maybe I wouldn't but whatever
#
it would be understandable if someone was to do that in that particular circumstance
#
and that has absolutely no bearing on his ideas you know his ideas and his actions can
#
be judged by themselves and what the person did in all the very complex things that happened
#
to him is really difficult to paint in either black or white because hey we feel those same
#
emotions and do different crazy things at different times of our lives I mean the kind
#
of times we are living in everyone we discussed that right that it's it's there is incentive
#
in having opinions yeah good or bad whatever it's a fear of missing out on a bus we have
#
to have an opinion before the issue dies out right and you give an opinion you will get
#
a certain number of likes and retweets and you will be validated you will feel like a
#
hero and fine then let the issue died today in India the the conflict is not of ideologies
#
that's what I believe the conflict is of attention who is getting the lion's share of attention
#
so if by bringing out Savarkar's mercy petition I can get the attention fine I'll do it if
#
bringing up Savarkar being a good guy and stuff you know Gandhi having a hand in whatever
#
flaws you find in Savarkar Gandhi having a hand in that if bringing that out gets me
#
a book deal and gets me you know in a it's a Hindutva nation right now for all practical
#
purposes it's a saffron nation and in a saffron nation if that narrative works and gets me
#
a book deal and gets me a lot of popularity why not and so everyone is about their own
#
personal agenda not even ideological agenda it's a personal agenda and and this is not
#
pointing finger at anyone at in particular now my only question is if I would I talk
#
about Savarkar and call out his mercy petition as a desperate move will I criticize it but
#
then before I do that I would like to put myself in those shoes and imagine today I
#
can't step out in the sun without an Uber because I can't I can't take the sun right
#
now do I have the gumption to go through the rigors of a jail on an island where you have
#
malaria you have people having to lick literal boot licking happening and you're being whipped
#
and lashed and what not unspeakable things happening to you will I have the gumption
#
to go through all that take it all and not do whatever I have at my disposal to get out
#
of that situation ideologies be damned no I don't think so I might if I know if I've
#
been told that okay if you write a letter you might get a way out I will I will not
#
think about at that point in time I will not think whether India will get freedom or not
#
whether you know my future generations will like me for this or not I'll just think I
#
want to escape this pain so I don't floor him for the mercy petitions I just floor him
#
for his ideas and I think that's like you said rightly that's more than enough he gives
#
you more than enough fodder to criticize him and then again you have to also recognize
#
that I keep saying there's a running motive and all kinds of historical accounts all kinds
#
of historical characters that everyone has grace then again if you take him as a Hindutva
#
icon he spoke very vocally against cow vigilantism he he was like if Savarkar would have said
#
even one statement of that kind today he would have been lynched or at least cancelled out
#
by the right on Twitter and he was extremely anti caste he was extremely anti caste and
#
frankly Hindutva is also anti caste we both know that there is statistics to establish
#
that all the caste issue that I see that's a very left wing kind of thing but then that's
#
a separate discussion altogether then Nathuram Gotse was a very anti caste figure because
#
that time their ideology was we have to unite Hindus against a common enemy and you cannot
#
do that in a country where only 5% is upper caste or 3% definitely not more than 5% so
#
in a country with less than 5% upper caste you cannot antagonize lower caste because
#
you are lower you can't do that so they were very practical in that sense now deep within
#
in their heads were they casteist I wouldn't know you wouldn't know but then for political
#
reasons they at least made sure they did a very good job of showing that they were for
#
all Hindus no and the thing to remember is that as we were discussing during lunch right
#
more you know there are people online who will claim to speak for Dalits while being
#
Savarna themselves see even I'm throwing a label around who will claim to speak for
#
Dalits but my point is the Dalits can speak for themselves and we know how they have spoken
#
in both 2014 and 2019 more Dalits voted for the BJP than any other party this is something
#
even Jignesh Mewani sort of lamented after he saw the results in Gujarat and how the
#
Dalits there voted right that they seem to prefer the BJP and the reason they seem to
#
prefer the BJP is because they don't want to be reduced to that identity of being a
#
Dalit and a victim and they see themselves as part of the larger Hindu vote now in a
#
sense for me that larger identity is also toxic because you're othering the Muslims
#
and it's all completely messed up but the point is that you can't simply put people
#
in boxes and there yeah I mean I agree that both the Savarkar and the RSS I mean if you
#
look at the RSS as an organization there's a clear caste bias and the office bearers
#
but in terms of how they have approached their social work or in terms of how the BJP you
#
know under Amit Shah for example in 2014 the way they reconfigured the caste politics of
#
UP where they got the non-Jatav Dalits on their side playing to politics of resentment
#
where they got the non-Yadav OBCs on their side again playing to politics of resentment
#
masterfully political and another kind of false narrative that somehow that particular
#
party is for the caste system they are against Muslims yes they are against women also I
#
would say not in so many words but it's Israeli and anti-woman party and they're scared of
#
women and you can see that but it's not casteist.
#
It's not and they have not been casteist since at least the beginning of 20th century they
#
have not been because and forget about elections look at things happening as recently as last
#
year the Delhi riots yes there is a Mishra saying Goli Maro and Gadaro and all that but
#
who's the one actually doing carrying out those instructions on the ground they are
#
not Brahmins Brahmins would not go out burning homes instead of yes there would be some there
#
would be some but the an overwhelming bulk of the foot soldiers they happen to come from
#
a very well known well understood well recognized community and that community is you know now
#
you could argue that you know unemployment has a very big role to play in this and but
#
then I believe it goes far beyond unemployment I think it's it's more of a question of validation
#
they do find validation under a common Hindu umbrella they feel empowered okay fine I have
#
something I mean there is someone who is okay we have been oppressed for a very long time
#
we have been under the Brahmins and at the bottom of the totem pole now there is something
#
else that's even below me as a Hindu I can claim dominance over that something and that
#
something is Muslim that's what they have been shown and it kind of appeals to their
#
sense of you know supremacy which has never been entertained before so it works out yes
#
you have to say it's a it's a master stroke but that's not something new in the Hindutva
#
circles yeah and I should also clarify that I think I can speak both on our behalf when
#
I say that when we say Hindutva hasn't been casteist we don't mean that Hindu society
#
is not casteist Hindu society is deeply deeply casteist it's perhaps our biggest problem
#
but this is you know one thing that people often say is that Hindutva and Hinduism is
#
different and I agree with that and Hindutva is far worse but in this particular aspect
#
this is one of those big flaws in all of the traditions that encompass Hinduism you know
#
which is otherwise there are so many diverse traditions within that and many of them are
#
good things and many of them are not.
#
Hinduism is like a Russian doll you know those Madrasa dolls like you can make as many divisions
#
as you want and you'll never be done like first yeah there's lower caste upper caste
#
OBC and whatnot then even within the upper caste there is Kshatriyas and Brahmins you
#
think okay Brahmins are on top of the food chain no within Brahmins there is Brahmin
#
A, Brahmin B, there's Gaur Brahmin there is you know Maithil Brahmin and all kinds of
#
Brahmins then they also discriminate within each other you know a Mishra for example would
#
not would kind of look down upon a Tiwari and Tiwari would look down upon something
#
else so there's a whole lot of subdivisions which we might not even be aware of and that
#
subdivision you cannot just wish them away you can't what you can do is for example
#
even in the West you can't wish away the Jews and the Christians and the you know and the
#
blacks and the whites they are there what's needed in my books is the recognition that
#
yes we are of different castes which in a way is what Gandhi tried to say but then again
#
he was more on the side of virtue signaling so it's very hard to say how much of it he
#
actually meant but you have to recognize that we are two different but we both have the
#
same rights like a Dalit and a Brahmin can Dalit can continue being Dalit a Brahmin can
#
continue being Brahmin but at the same time instead of treating them as Dalit below Brahmin
#
Dalit and Brahmin on the same on the same page well you know I would think that for
#
example I still don't know what my caste is right and people will of course say correctly
#
that it is a sign of my privilege that I don't know my caste and that's correct and I completely
#
buy that but why is it a sign of my privilege that I don't know my caste because I was fortunate
#
enough to grow up in a prosperous family which had done well for itself economically and
#
our incentives were aligned with treating everybody with equal respect so the point
#
is if the economy grows if society prospers to that level which none of which are a magic
#
bullet but I would imagine that things like urbanization and a growing economy change
#
your incentives to the point where you can't afford to discriminate anymore you want to
#
be part of larger economic networks so which is why you know villages and rural India's
#
caste is far more pervasive there than in cities which is not to say they don't exist
#
in cities caste is everywhere in India but it's kind of a little less so ideally what
#
I would like is you are born what you are born but that caste consciousness is not there
#
when you meet someone yeah if I meet you at a party and somebody says hey Amit meet Amit
#
I'm not going to ask you your surname to try and figure out what your caste must be exactly
#
that's what we want to remove because you know that is the thing you can't like no
#
matter how much you wish for a utopia it's just not happening no I it isn't happening
#
now but I think with urbanization prosperity they become less and less your incentive change
#
will definitely become diluted diluted to the extent I mean frankly speaking before
#
the this whole Hindutva and you know the virtue signaling the vokism and the saffronism everything
#
going extreme in different directions before this phase I had actually come to believe
#
that caste doesn't exist in Bombay at least anywhere else I don't know but at least in
#
Mumbai it doesn't exist because over the years that I have been working we used to eat together
#
we used to I still can't tell somebody's caste from their surname yeah maybe if somebody
#
says I'm a Mishra then I would know okay Mishra means you're a Brahmin but when you live in
#
a city like Bombay it's so cosmopolitan you on a daily basis you come across some hundred
#
different surnames you wouldn't have known every single one of them you don't have a
#
database of surnames so you can't map and it didn't bother it didn't bother me and it
#
didn't bother people around me you can say okay fine I am coming from a place of privilege
#
but is everyone being privileged there like if I am working somewhere I'm pretty sure
#
there must be some people from the from the underprivileged class or caste or any such
#
background but nobody seemed to bother I can't eat with you I can't share table with you
#
because you're XYZ caste no it's again exacerbating I think because of whatever political reasons
#
yeah so here's a question and it begins with sort of a philosophical observation and then
#
goes on to a historical observation and then goes on to your personal experience of studying
#
history and the philosophical observation is that increasingly the more I think about
#
it I begin to conclude that there is no such thing as free will in the sense the thinking
#
behind this is that look if you know the state of every atom in the universe at a given point
#
in time and their state in terms of where they are moving and what's happening and
#
all that you can predict the next moment and so on and so forth down the line the reason
#
we can't predict the next moment is lack of knowledge which is why we need probabilistic
#
thinking to make sense of you know with the very limited information we have what can
#
we tell about what's going to happen but if there was complete knowledge you would
#
realize that you know there is no such thing as free will though the illusion of free will
#
is necessary so that we can assign responsibility now I don't know if you've thought about
#
philosophy so I won't ask you for your opinion on this but the historical observation is
#
this and let's go back to Savarkar because it's very interesting that it seems to me
#
that people are shaped by their circumstances in greater ways than we realize like in a
#
sense Gandhi's career as a social reformer started because as a lawyer instead of getting
#
the job in Bombay which he wanted he didn't get that he got a gig in South Africa he went
#
there and you know there a certain set of people were his clients and he entered all
#
of those different kind of struggles and he got kicked out of a train and generally a
#
series of accidents just took him in a particular direction which made him what he was similarly
#
with Savarkar you know an observation that I remember making a long time back about him
#
and then later Manu Pillay also made it in something he wrote is that if Savarkar died
#
in 2010 we would think of him as we think of Bhagat Singh today he was a violent revolutionary
#
I think in 1910 rather I think when he in 1909 I think he met Gandhi in London and they
#
were both very impressed by each other and in that in a sense in terms of values his
#
values were identical to Gandhi except in one sense at that time except in one sense
#
which is that Savarkar believed in violent methods he was part of the infamous India
#
house in London and he used to hang around with Shyamji Krishna Verma and all of those
#
guys and you know a lot of shit used to go down there and he was arrested for those violent
#
activities and at that time he's given speeches where he's talking about he was always anti-caste
#
but at that time pre-1910 all his speeches he's talking about Hindus and Muslims both
#
have to stand together we are the same people blah blah blah then what happens in the Andaman's
#
period is one he's tortured brutally two it's not the British jailers who torture him directly
#
they have like a subclass of Muslim sub-jailers who are Pathan's and all of these people who
#
carry out the torture now I don't want to talk about the torture on this show you can
#
read either wherever Forander is called Vikram Sampat's book or just go to the not just
#
to Savarkar's Andaman diaries but the Andaman's diaries of the people who were imprisoned
#
there with him it's horrifying it's brutal right and over a decade long period of torture
#
because it's all these Muslims torturing him he comes to hate Muslims right so when
#
he goes into prison he's like India belongs to Hindus and Muslims he comes out of prisons
#
he's like Muslims are the other India belongs to Hindus and this whole thing in his book
#
Hindutva the argument that he makes seems like a rationalization for this hatred that
#
he has come to have where he says that India is only a country of those religions which
#
also have their holy land here and so Hindus are okay Buddhists are okay Jains are okay
#
Sikhs are okay but Muslims are not and it seems to me that this silly argument is just
#
sort of a rationale for the way that he already feels and resentment and he feels that resentment
#
because of what has happened to him and everything is kind of circumstances and you look at his
#
whole life you put in counterfactual somewhere you change some of the circumstances you change
#
some of that formula and everything is different if he dies in 1910 he's a hero today to us
#
right and everybody's trying to claim him like they're trying to claim Bhagat Singh
#
or if he isn't sent to the Andamans let's say he's sent somewhere else something else
#
happens you really never know so my question to you leading up from this philosophical
#
observation about free will and this historical observation about Gandhi and Savarkar is that
#
as you read history do you also then get this sense that these circumstances are everything
#
that what we are in a sense is contingent on the accidents that happened to us we absolutely
#
are and everything has to be is has been contingent to what your incentives are for every step
#
you take and what detriments you have to face a whole lot of them might not even be aware
#
might not even be known to us we might never get to know everything we might never get
#
to know all that Savarkar had to go through to either justify or colour his actions in
#
much worse light either way we don't know now there is one very favourite saying from
#
Greece that I love that for situations like this it's called Athena's owl flies only
#
at dusk so Athena is this Greek goddess of wisdom like Saraswati of the Greeks and actually
#
it's Minerva but Athena is the Roman equivalent so she has an owl and I mean surprisingly
#
because Saraswati also has an owl and that owl is said to fly only at dusk because typically
#
owls fly at dusk all day because they can't see in daylight so what this actually means
#
is that wisdom only comes in hindsight so today we can Athena's owl is a metaphor for
#
wisdom so wisdom only flies in at dusk so all day what happened at night you can sit
#
and reflect and you can argue with yourself I could have done that I should have done
#
this when I had a fight with somebody in the morning and then in the evening I might sit
#
and say I could have told him this this would have been such a wonderful retort but then
#
in the heat of the moment I might not come up with such ideas I might not have the time
#
or incentive or even the wisdom to think those things so I believe it's the same with historical
#
characters A they are contingent on what's happening around them and B it's also contingent
#
on their idea of good and bad because like we discussed about human zoos what's good
#
and what's moral rather and what's immoral it's a very fuzzy definition and the definition
#
changes every decade I won't even say century every decade what was considered moral ten
#
years ago might be immoral today there are so many new words that we grew up saying today
#
we can't say those things because at least not in polite circles right within my lifetime
#
ass has come to mean a body part while earlier it used to be an animal and the same thing
#
with so many other words so I remember when I was a kid we could say I have read in academic
#
books the word negro today you say that word and no you can't you just can't you'll be
#
ostracized so things evolve now one example is George Washington we know him as the great
#
freedom fighter one of the founding fathers of America and a great patriot above all now
#
what he did to other races it's not very much in public domain he had slaves and slaves
#
of course didn't have blacks didn't have much of a voting right back then or any other rights
#
but George Washington himself having slaves of his own he inherited some he bought some
#
and did some horrible things to them including that one time where he knew he lost a bunch
#
of his teeth and he had tooth taken out of one of his slaves to be transplanted into
#
his own gums so those kind of things and of course you being a slave you can't you can't
#
say no there is just no scope so somebody like George Washington he thought that was
#
okay because they're slaves his circle hadn't expanded to include them exactly slaves are
#
they genuinely believed he was not a bad person he genuinely believed slaves are not fully
#
human blacks are not fully human so now we see in hindsight we can say oh George Washington
#
was a horrible person or Thomas Jefferson was a horrible person he drove out the natives
#
and all that because back then there was a dominant notion natives are barbarians we
#
are Christians we are the good ones they are evil they are Satan worshippers they are pagans
#
they have to be driven out that's the right thing to do if you're genuinely believing
#
that you can't be said to be moral or immoral because you're not being mischievous there
#
so and then of course today the definition of morality has changed so much depends on
#
your circumstances a lot also depends on the time you live in what's the dominant definition
#
of morality back then so today we might feel Hindus and Muslims are equal and they both
#
have equal rights I don't know I have no way to say that in Savarkar's time at the at the
#
turn of the 19th century 20th century Muslims might not have been considered alien in amongst
#
a vast majority of Hindus it's very much possible today they are very much part of India today
#
India is a country in its own right and we see everyone as citizens that's the right
#
thing to believe but how do we know at the turn of the century what the dominant notion
#
was yes there were some Muslim freedom fighters but then remember they just came out of monarchy
#
the Mughal Empire had collapsed there was already a lot of resentment 1857 and then
#
barely half a century down the line you have 1900s so there must be a lot of people whose
#
grandfathers would have served under the Mughals so the dominant notion could have been that
#
Muslim means rulers oppressors so if the British are oppressors Muslims cannot be our equals
#
that could have been the dominant notion wrong yes but there are circumstances to everything
#
I'm not justifying such notions I'm just saying understanding something is not defending it
#
like the dominant notion of our time today for example certainly among you and me because
#
we had lunch today though I won't mention what specific meats we ate but the dominant
#
notion today is it's okay to kill animals and eat them it might seem completely barbaric
#
two centuries later the same way it seems barbaric today that Jefferson had slaves oh
#
look you know but and that's also a good point that how do you define morality that the morality
#
of the current day might not be the perfect prism because if it wasn't the morality of
#
that time and a person is you know acting with good intent within the boundaries of
#
his beliefs then you know what are we to say like in the George Washington example you
#
just pointed out of taking teeth from a slave wow okay so you know just the notion of how
#
you came to know that while I have read a little bit about the American founders but
#
I didn't know this I'm going to ask you a bunch of questions about your research methods
#
and reading methods and how you kind of organize your knowledge but before that let's take
#
a quick commercial break do you want to read more I've put in a lot of work in recent
#
years in building a reading habit this means that I read more books but I also read more
#
long-form articles and essays there's a world of knowledge available through the internet
#
but the problem we all face is how do we navigate this knowledge how do we know what to read
#
how do we put the right incentives in place well I discovered one way a couple of friends
#
of mine run this awesome company called CTQ compounds at CTQ compounds.com which aims
#
to help people up level themselves by reading more a few months ago I signed up for one
#
of their programs called the daily reader every day for six months they sent me a long
#
form article to read the subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to
#
mental models and marmalade this helped me build a habit of reading at the end of every
#
day I understood the world a little better than I did before so if you want to build
#
your reading habit head on over to CTQ compounds and check out their daily reader new batches
#
start every month they also have a great program called future stack which helps you stay up
#
to date with ideas skills and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future
#
future stack batches start every Saturday also check out their social capital compound
#
which helps you master social media what's more you get a discount of a whopping 2500
#
rupees 2500 if you use the discount code unseen so head on over to CTQ compounds at CTQ compounds.com
#
and use the code unseen up level yourself welcome back to the scene in the unseen I'm
#
chatting with Amit Shandilya about the study of history the love of history and at this
#
point what I'm really curious about is how you research the things that you do because
#
I've read a fair bit of history but even in subjects about which I think I know a thing
#
or two when you write a thread on it it always surprises me because it goes into these directions
#
that I hadn't discovered or tells me things that I hadn't known before so what are sort
#
of your ways of researching whatever subject you decide to research like for example can
#
you take me through one particular thing where you kind of thought of an idea and then you
#
set out to research it and how did you go about finding books finding research material
#
finding all of that which you know beyond the regular stuff that everybody would have
#
Okay there is no secret sauce here I always my starting point is always Wikipedia I start
#
with because it's a fantastic repository if you know how to use it and I visit Wikipedia
#
very regularly with no subject on mind I use it as you know I just say surprise me Wikipedia
#
and pick out something read about it and of course then you have to Wikipedia is just
#
to get your develop an interest in something like first of all it's important to know what
#
you want to research then you go about researching it so Wikipedia gives me that you know first
#
spark so I get the spark and then I religiously scroll down to the see also section where
#
you have some related subjects which you can also click through and that's Wikipedia's
#
way of taking you down the rabbit hole so and that's a that throws up a lot of interesting
#
stories in the end which you can weave together because when I talk about butterfly effects
#
so that's one way of figuring out how one unrelated seemingly unrelated event influenced
#
another and there is something similar about first world war also and then there is something
#
for second world war so this is how I develop a story you know the very raw form of story
#
okay so this is what happened then comes the part about validating everything if it's even
#
true because I can't just put it out there right so then again I check sources as whatever
#
sources Wikipedia gives I would check that but then again that's just the first step
#
and then I would check those sources within those sources I would look for where they
#
have you know sort the information from what they reference they have in notes and footnotes
#
and bibliography then you go into those books and to whatever extent possible I try although
#
I am not always successful but I always try to try my level best to go as deep down as
#
possible to the primary source you know like this is the furthest you can go you can't
#
go beyond this like if I'm talking about Akbar and if I you know read someone's account from
#
2010 then I read okay that person has referenced a book from 2000 and that person from somebody
#
who wrote something in 1920 and so on and so forth but then if I find an account that
#
is a direct translation of say something like Aini Akbari so that would be the closest I
#
can get to a primary source that's like from Akbar's time and assuming the translation
#
is correct so that's my modus operandi to go as far as possible to a source that just
#
cannot be refuted end of the day you can refute any source you can again also say Aini Akbari
#
might have some very flattering things about Akbar so you have to take everything with
#
a pinch of salt grain of salt or whatnot but then again it depends on what common sense
#
tells you if someone says no Akbar raised 2,000 temples does it sound right would it
#
have been in his best of interest to raise down 2,000 temples no right or somebody says
#
Mughals killed 10 million Hindus would it be in their best political interest to kill
#
10 million Hindus if they really intended to rule India it doesn't sound likely so
#
then you have to also apply common sense because sources can all have their own biases you
#
have to take that but so far as possible I stick to primary sources wherever primary
#
sources are not possible I stick to whatever middleman I can get my hands on so as for
#
where to find them archive.org is my very trusted friend because you just cannot get
#
all the books most of the books that I refer to are unfortunately out of print because
#
most of them are from the from the 19th century early 20th century and they are no longer
#
in circulation so I do that sometimes there was a time I was a regular member of the British
#
Library down in Churchgate so I used to visit there very often but then British Library
#
of Bombay is not very well appointed it doesn't have a whole lot of books from before a certain
#
era most of the books are from the 90s and beyond so that didn't help much but archive.org
#
Google Books again because for a lot of books a major chunk you can read directly in Google
#
Books without even you know buying having to buy the book so that is a good resource
#
so these two and then of course you can buy ebooks for whatever recent books you can find
#
in circulation so that's how I do my research and then there are websites where you can
#
find you know alternative ideas and if they have any any sources they can.
#
If I'm really passionate about a certain story and if that story is really contentious then
#
I would even go as deep into referring to sources of both sides of the argument if somebody
#
is saying Gandhi was a bad guy then on what basis where are they referring their material
#
from then I would go into those materials they also might be just of the same vintage
#
from early 1900s or late 1800s so it's the same rigor and then you have to play the you
#
know you have to use our own judgment which one to believe which one makes sense to you.
#
Yeah and for those of the listeners who might be shocked that Amit mentioned Wikipedia the
#
truth is the idea there is that you go into the sources that you know Wikipedia will give
#
you and will let you know about various interesting possible stories or entry points but finally
#
you have to enter the rabbit holes yourself and you do that just by looking at the citations
#
you know citation please as it were and going into those books and typically when I read
#
a book of history what I end up doing is I'll you know go to the footnotes a lot if something
#
seems really interesting dig out another book from there and so on and so forth down the
#
road though as much as archive.org I'll also you know use libgen and other pirates like
#
that because if I can get a book in a legit way on Amazon if I can buy it for a reasonable
#
price that's what I'm gonna do but when I can't do that it's perfectly fine in the quest
#
of knowledge I think to get the book just about any way you can.
#
Now my next question is this that and sorry just to interrupt I totally forgot one very
#
very important source that generally people overlook there is an entire world of reference
#
material available if you want to go beyond books like there is a JSTOR there are so many
#
scholarly research research gate then many of them are gated as in you have to you know
#
become a paid member and but many are unpaid also like JSTOR gives you up to hundred articles
#
you can read a month without being a paid member and that's a humongous store of research
#
papers because everything is not out there in books there are a lot of things which are
#
out there in the form of research papers by some really really eminent people in the academics.
#
Academics might have its own biases but that's a story for another day but those papers do
#
have a lot of credibility and you can cite them you can I cite them left right and center
#
I do that all the time.
#
Yeah and so here's my next question let's say you've got the research material you're
#
going to go through and now you're sitting down and you're going to take notes from it
#
now where I often get conflicted is that I enjoy reading especially if I'm reading a
#
good book however and I also enjoy taking notes in the sense that if I'm reading a book
#
for an episode I'll have my room research open and I'll be taking copious notes I do
#
most of my reading on the Kindle app or on the laptop or a PDF and I'll be taking copious
#
notes copy pasting stuff you know which I want to quote and so on and so forth and there
#
is a sort of a conflict here because on the one hand when I'm enjoying a book I just want
#
to get lost in the book and just read it at one stretch and on the other hand whatever
#
interesting thing I find I want to note it down so it's there for my future reference
#
but the point is that act of noting it down disturbs my flow of readings and it's a cognitive
#
effort because time and again I am like in deep concentration reading something and I
#
have to break away from it take the notes write down any additional thoughts I might
#
have or questions that come to mind for the guest or whatever or that I want to explore
#
myself go back to the narrative and then again two minutes later paste something here so
#
what's your sort of process like of like do you use a note taking app what are your tools
#
for knowledge assimilation and do you find this a problem it is it used to be in the
#
in my initial times when I really didn't have the rigor but then as I matured now I have
#
a system where I it might sound a bit redundant but I do two takes okay first I just read
#
for the sake of reading whatever I want to and you know when something is that interesting
#
worth writing something is worth being a part of the story that you finally want to tell
#
you don't even have to write it down it sticks to your head okay so as I am reading I am
#
also weaving a thread around it okay this happened first and this happened this influenced
#
XYZ event and I do that I build the thread and once I'm done I start with an opening
#
shot like okay this is where the stage is set and then I hit the climax and then I give
#
the closing call after the closing call that's when I go back to whatever I wrote and I see
#
because I don't have to take notes for myself I am already reading it and I know what the
#
story is and I would yes at the most maybe if it's a very long winding thread like the
#
320 part piece I did on Kashmir so in that kind of a situation I might have to take down
#
a few dates here and there and that's another thing I try to avoid dates but I'll come to
#
that later so what I do is I weave the story in my head and wherever very necessary I would
#
take down an occasional note but that'll be very brief like a date or a name or a place
#
or something like that not a full paragraph and then when I am when I then I sit down
#
to write it down actually I write the whole story and as I'm writing that's when I would
#
go back to my reference material okay this sounds very contentious do I have something
#
to back it up where did I read it I read it in this book okay fine let me find the page
#
where I got it and then I would use that becomes the reference for evidence to whatever I am
#
stating here and that's only on the contentious pieces other than that just to build the story
#
in my head I don't need to take down notes and that's what I do now coming back to what
#
I said about dates I know how much you have noticed in my threads I generally avoid putting
#
out exact dates like okay on 30th January 1950 Gandhi died because that date doesn't
#
mean anything to anyone America celebrates Independence Day on 4th of July 1776 but it
#
did not actually become independent until 1783 and that is 18th of 19th of October and
#
I remember that date because it happens to be my birthday so why I don't put down dates
#
is because people are just going to read past that and not remember even if you are reading
#
subconsciously you skip the date part and just move on why would you memorize it so
#
what I do is I just want you to have a feel of the time a perspective of how distant that
#
thing is from now or from a certain event so I would say this happened on this date
#
maybe once for a reference then I would say 10 years down the line this happened or two
#
months after that this happened so you would know okay two months is this kind of a gap
#
you will have things in perspective but then if I say this happened on 1st of January then
#
something else happened on 1st of March you wouldn't bother what 1st of March is so I
#
avoid dates and whenever I put out places I generally again I put out very broad like
#
okay this happened in New York and then you know some half a world away something else
#
happened so you know it's that event took place very far away from wherever the first
#
event was so I always try to use relative terms basically so that takes care of not
#
having to mention exact information makes sense let's since you've come to the craft
#
of the writing and the storytelling let's talk a bit about that you've referred a couple
#
of times to your three act structure for example like for films we are often told that a three
#
act structure works first you set it up which takes about 25 percent of the narrative then
#
50 percent of the narrative is a conflict playing itself out and the last 25 percent
#
you kind of wrap it up broadly that's like the sit field school of thought for screenplays
#
and all of that so what's your three act structure like how did you arrive at it you know are
#
there sort of models that you look at as examples of that how has it evolved and are there other
#
aspects of your craft or your writing discipline that you'd like to share?
#
Well there are two ways I approach a story I am rarely again if you would have noticed
#
in my threads I'm rarely linear it's never this happened then this happened then this
#
happened then this happened it's never in one sequence why I do that is because somehow
#
I feel a linear story bores the reader you you might not remember the first event so
#
what I do is if I know this is the chain of events from January 2010 to let's say December
#
2012 instead of starting at January 2010 I would start with some very important event
#
with something very dramatic that happened in say December 2010 you know somewhere in
#
the middle of that window and I would continue from there and then I would go back to January
#
you know like how in some movies you use this tool called flashback so flashback is someone
#
thinking about something here I'm not thinking I'm just saying this happened not 10 years
#
earlier something else had happened you know there would obviously be a very clear link
#
between the events it will not be just random and then I would come back so there'll be
#
a lot of back and forth hopping then I would go back to January 2010 then I would come
#
back to March 2011 then back to April 2009 you know back and forth this way you there
#
are two things that happen a you are always involved in the story you always know this
#
happened before this and this happened after this and again I'm going to kind of a revision
#
of the whole narrative that is one thing and another thing it makes the story interesting
#
because you never know the next bit is going to be from the future or from the past so
#
it keeps you on your toes while you are reading it so you make a subconscious effort to remember
#
even though you're not supposed to but you're not obligated to sorry but you will make a
#
subconscious effort to remember because otherwise you'll get confused so you can say that it
#
is meant to create a constructive confusion and that is one way of doing things so although
#
I do start with a dramatic event and then I go into how it came to that point and how
#
it proceeded from there so it's like two threads in two different direction and then culminating
#
at one point in future and then towards the end comes a cliffhanger that's what my general
#
guiding principle is that in the end there has to be something that gives you a okay
#
okay yeah this happened oh shit really so that something like this happened with the
#
American War of Independence because story in story tell that is one then another tool
#
writing tool that I use is I pick two different stories and start both of them this is also
#
something I have learned from certain filmmakers where they there are two people living in
#
two different cities and they're completely unrelated to each other they don't even know
#
the other one exists and then and there's a tool I use the one I can remember the one
#
story that was a Jalliawala Bagh thing where you have a general there on one hand who was
#
born in you know in North India and goes to Ireland and does his higher studies comes
#
back he joins the army and serves in Burma and many other places before finally serving
#
in Amritsar where he did what he's most notorious for and at the same time there is another
#
character who is settled whose family came from Iran settled in UP and his name is Hasrat
#
Mohani he doesn't know I mean general diet doesn't have any inkling any way of knowing
#
that there is a character called Hasrat Mohani anywhere in India and Hasrat Mohani may or
#
may not yeah of course Hasrat Mohani knew general diet because this event was you know
#
a very big explosion and it was known all over the world not just in India so Hasrat
#
Mohani might have known him but the two men never met in person they couldn't have now
#
their lives had no way to cross because Hasrat Mohani was a poet he joined the Aligarh Muslim
#
University he was into revolutionary poetry because you have to remember that's when you
#
know the Bolshevik movement just concluded very successfully in Soviet Russia and this
#
triggered a lot of communist outrage all over the world people were finally encouraged and
#
inspired to rise up against the so-called you know the ruling class now ruling class
#
could be British or the local nobility either way that's what Hasrat Mohani got into and
#
then after the Jallianwala Bagh event his direction also turned towards nationalism
#
and you know he became a very vocal nationalist he joined Congress and there was a point where
#
he was a member of both Congress and Muslim League simultaneously because yeah even that
#
happened back in the day so and then at some point he was part of a on the same day he
#
addressed Congress rally as well a Congress meeting as well as a rally of Muslim League
#
in Ahmedabad and that's where he gave the slogan of in club Zindabad for the first time
#
so today everyone knows in club Zindabad very few people know that came from Hasrat Mohani
#
and even fewer know that this wouldn't none of this would have happened had Jallianwala
#
Bagh event not taken place because Hasrat Mohani had absolutely no intention or like
#
do you have any intention of going into politics you may like Modi you may dislike Modi but
#
you don't want to get your hands dirty so that's a kind of life he was living he was
#
a poet and then this happens and in club Zindabad later on went on to become the you know rally
#
call for it for the entire independence movement he's the first person by the way Azadi-e-Kamil
#
that's the that's that's another slogan he gave where he I mean he was he predated Tilak
#
in calls for the Swaraj movement like you know make in India kind of slogan this came
#
from a Muslim guy and again none of this would have happened if the Jallianwala Bagh massacre
#
did not take place yeah that's that's fascinating and it could also be argued that Jallianwala
#
Bagh killed a fine romantic poet because here on rekhta.org I find that these two lines
#
are written by Hasrat Mohani.
#
Chupke chupke raat din aasu bahana yaad hai, humko abtak aashiqui ka wo zamana yaad hai.
#
So you know had Jallianwala Bagh not happened you might have got more shairi in this vein
#
but instead you have in club Zindabad and who's to say that's a bad thing or a good
#
thing it's just how these kind of accidents of history shape us and indeed that's fascinating
#
that you know in different kinds of circumstances who knows what Amit Chandelia would have gone
#
on to do you know either great things or unspeakably evil things okay how can one say here's another
#
interesting thought that I have been having over the last few years and let me see what
#
you think of it and which is that in the times that we grew up in and we're both in our forties
#
grew up in the eighties and nineties and so on we had a notion of what art is like what
#
storytelling is like what literature is like in terms of form right so if you want to be
#
a writer you might want to write a book or if you want to do journalism you might want
#
to write articles and they have certain kinds of conventional lengths and certain conventional
#
forms and all of that now did too if you want to make movies you either make a full feature
#
film which in the west could be 90 minutes in India could be three hours or you make
#
a short film and there are lengths for that and so on and there's no flexibility within
#
these these are the forms given to you for particular reasons and what I find with creators
#
in the modern age is because of technology and the tools we have both the tools of production
#
the tools of dissemination the tools of consumption on the parts of those who consume these that
#
these forms don't matter anymore that you know when I started blogging I realized that
#
like white one one reason it was so liberating and like of course I was freed from gatekeepers
#
freed from the news cycle but the main reason it was liberating is I was freed from constraints
#
of form that a typical newspaper article could be 800 words here I could do 80 or 80,000
#
I find a similar thing happening say with podcasts like I could not do a five-hour interview
#
on radio right but when I managed to do a five-hour conversation on a show like this
#
because of the form it serves up a different kind of content and tangentially it also changes
#
me into a different kind of person because I have to listen that much more I have to
#
kind of delve that much deeper and I am essentially therefore a different person than I would
#
have been if instead of doing a four-hour conversation every week for five years I did
#
a half an hour conversation.
#
You have to probably listen to the same conversation multiple times while you're editing.
#
So my question is that one form that I see that you mastered and here also you've said
#
that it's taken you some time you don't like the stuff you did so much in 2019 but one
#
form that you say that you worked on and I say that you mastered is the Twitter storytelling
#
format where over a Twitter thread breaking it up into many many tweets you're telling
#
this incredibly engrossing story so much so that if someone actually comes across you
#
know one of your tweet threads while you're in the process of composing it there is no
#
option but to sit there and keep refreshing and wait for the story to complete itself
#
right at the same time you were approached by a story tell and who are wonderful people
#
by the way great platform I've also done stuff for them I'll link it from the show notes
#
but at the same time you were approached by them and there it's a different kind of format
#
it's an audio show someone's reading it out you have to kind of write a script for that
#
at some point in the future I hope you'll you will go on to write books as well though
#
again part of the reason if somebody approaches you for a book number one they absolutely
#
should I'd love to read your books but number two again a publisher who comes to you to
#
ask you to write a book would do so with a certain structure and a certain form in mind
#
while the truth is that those don't matter anymore so what is your thinking on structures
#
and forms do you worry that there is a particular form which a story fits and that it might
#
not have the same effect if you try to force fit it into another form or do you think that
#
a great story can be adapted into absolutely any format including web series inshallah
#
someone listening to this will approach you and ask it to be showrunner for one of these
#
any of these incredible stories you've come up with but what are your thoughts on this
#
I believe that you you have to play a balancing act you cannot go all out and say you know
#
this is how I do things and it has to work take it or leave it it doesn't work that way
#
because I'm not the only one doing this there there are hundreds upon thousands of people
#
now the only thing I might set myself apart in actually ironically speaking the only way
#
I can set myself apart is in showing what the a certain level of flexibility and flexibility
#
is something that I have learned a lot of on Twitter because Twitter is a very strange
#
platform it gives you a word count constraint not word count sorry character count constraint
#
which is even more even stricter so with such a constraint it also gives you a lot of independence
#
like you can put out a thread and that thread can be initially my first thread if I'm if
#
I remember well not the Satguru and the first history related thread was in this valley
#
thing and I believe it was 20 or 30 tweets long not very sure but somewhere in between
#
less than 30 so I I put that out with a lot of doubt 30 tweets like Twitter is a platform
#
meant for quick consumption people just want to read a tweet and move on who's gonna read
#
30 tweets and then it did catch fire and I mean catch fire in the sense from considering
#
I had what less than 500 followers at the time and then there are people there are hundreds
#
upon thousands of people who are reading a 20 part thread of yours so I would say it
#
caught fire for me but then later on I realized when so I kept you know upping the ante so
#
to say next tweet was 50 tweet long then then then I did a tweet on on Punjab the 1984 events
#
and funnily I I did not plan it but it came out to be 84 tweet long so that was not the
#
plan but then I realized no matter how long my thread goes people read it people read
#
and people ask for more so it happened so I really you know tested it to the to its
#
limits with the one on Kashmir I had to put it on two parts part one and part two and
#
both were 160 tweets long so a total of 320 tweets so that was like me testing the absolute
#
extent of how far you could push and even that worked so Twitter in a way gives you
#
a constraint but also sets you free because a tweet has to be a certain characters is
#
a number of characters but there can be as many tweets but at the same time what this
#
format taught me is making sure every sentence you write counts because I cannot make even
#
a single tweet boring like you have a hundred tweets in a story so every tweet has to be
#
either a cliffhanger or something close to it every tweet has to have that wow effect
#
so that people are tempted to go over to the next tweet so I have learned to treat every
#
single tweet as a story in itself because that's the only chance and then the next
#
tweet has to again be a story in itself it has to have all those ingredients all those
#
so to speak masalas of a story within those hundred forty or two hundred eighty characters
#
and so on and so forth so this has given me a lot of discipline and that's a reason why
#
when I moved over to the full feature writing format for story tell it did not really bog
#
me down much because I already knew how to write an interesting story where although
#
I wouldn't say I've mastered the craft because two years down the line I'm pretty sure I'm
#
going to look back and say oh what the hell did I write this so hilarious so cringy so
#
it happens but to the best of my extent I've managed to learn one very crucial lesson that
#
if I write for story tell or if I wrote for a book for that matter then every paragraph
#
I will not put fillers let's just put it that way there won't be any fillers there won't
#
be okay word count badhani ke liye likha hai you won't get that feel it'll have something
#
it'll be dense so I wouldn't have been able to put out because I used to sometimes write
#
articles for myself you know I used to write and even before 2014 but those I can clearly
#
tell there were certain paragraphs that I could just take out this isn't necessary it's redundant
#
but today I cannot say the same for even maybe one random line or so but otherwise everything
#
is like okay there is some information in this so this wouldn't be possible without
#
Twitter yeah there's a there's a structural parallel to that which is you know Chuck Palaniuk
#
once wrote about how he structured his books and his thing was that he would just wanted
#
people to keep reading obsessively and turning the pages so he'd have really short chapters
#
a page page and a half and you know you read the page page and a half but the cost of reading
#
the next chapter is so low that you just turn the page and like that you get to the end
#
of the book and obviously you ought to be exciting throughout I did an episode with
#
my friend Sonia Fallero on her book the good girls in January I think tackling a serious
#
subject the two girls who were found hanging from a tree a few years ago in Uttar Pradesh
#
and she went to the village and spent four years writing this book about what exactly
#
happened there and for a really serious subject she actually used the same structure which
#
was really interesting because you had short one and a half page chapter so you're constantly
#
you keep reading but the pace the rhythm isn't fast in that way like you would expect from
#
an action thriller all of that is normal but the way the chapters are structured you kind
#
of just keep reading and keep moving on and and you know what you said about I don't want
#
any tweet to be a filler or any para to be a filler like this goes with an advice I give
#
my writing students that every sentence you write must either go forward or it must go
#
deeper you know if it is not doing one of those two things you gotta cut it out it should
#
serve a purpose so I get that that Twitter is beautiful in that sense that there is an
#
incentive towards brevity in terms of the character limit but there is also that unlimited
#
space where you can really sprawl out as long as you can kind of keep people reading but
#
to me the one pitfall of this seems to be that one you are forced to break up whatever
#
you're writing about into tweet size chunks and the danger there is that you start thinking
#
that way also about the different tweet size chunks that you can you know break it up into
#
and therefore there might be a danger that what the great Javed Akhtar Sahib calls thairav
#
you know those moments of choir introspection those moments in a story where nothing much
#
happens you're just setting something up you know there isn't enough space for those yeah
#
so what are your thoughts in this yeah there are point and there are places where you have
#
to put that thairav but I believe in non-fiction there is that becomes less of an I wouldn't
#
say that's never an issue but in non-fiction it's less of an issue than in literary works
#
like you know if you're writing a novel or someone's biography then it's a different
#
thing altogether but yes it happens at times and that's where the long form storytelling
#
like with story tell that kind of a format helps because yes you can you have some flex
#
of some wiggle room to put out some literary flourish and you know build some ambience
#
to what you're writing another thing that this has taught me in the twitter thing and
#
today experience has taught me is I have now made a it's become a second nature to keep
#
my paragraph short earlier I used to have page long paragraphs but now I don't now I
#
my paragraphs are like okay it's very theme like there was a point when I didn't even
#
know how to break a paragraph like what point do you change I didn't know that then now
#
I've got a fair grip of okay fine this is every paragraph has to have a common theme
#
and then when the theme changes the next paragraph begins and that theme has to be short so the
#
paragraph is short so from paragraph to paragraph the reader can hop on and not feel like I
#
am reading a very long monotonous monologue you know it and there are times where I just
#
put out one not even a sentence not even a full sentence just a phrase as a whole paragraph
#
unto itself I have done that also and and it works it really helps you know build depending
#
on where you use it and how you don't do it very often but if done at the right spots
#
it can help create either a suspenseful environment or they'll give you the anticipation for something
#
big that's yet to come so a sentence also helps these things again it's it's all from
#
Twitter in Twitter sometimes you have where you know just change the paragraph and there
#
is only room for one sentence and then after that sentence you cannot continue the paragraph
#
but you cannot merge it in the previous paragraph because it's a different theme altogether
#
so you have to make sure that that sentence is impactful enough that it has a reason to
#
be otherwise you just move on to the next tweet so when you start one of these threads
#
do you kind of break it up into advance first into what each thread is going to say and
#
if so how do you take care of the character count issue like do you have some kind of
#
app which will help you break it up for Twitter or do you just open a compose or do you just
#
go one tweet at a time and for the longest time I used to do everything on my phone on
#
Twitter directly on Twitter because Twitter has this wonderful feature where you just
#
put out it you write a tweet you don't have to post the tweet there is a plus sign you
#
click on that and then another tweet box opens up yeah it does and then you write it then
#
another box opens up so you can do that for the longest time I did that and it worked
#
fine but it has for some weird reason Twitter has put a constraint of 25 tweets because
#
after 25 there is no plus sign then you have to tweet it all so then I discovered there
#
are many third-party apps and some for free some paid so I found typefully for example
#
and there you just put out a whole thread you can write 1000 tweets at a time and then
#
just press your tweet all and it would just submit in your behalf so and that's how I
#
managed to keep my count like whenever you see my threads you'll have tweet number slash
#
the total number of tweet and a lot of people have asked me how do you know in advance how
#
many tweets it's gonna be so this is how do it because I write all the tweets in advance
#
and then tweet all one shot I don't tweet one tweet at a time because you can't do that
#
nobody's gonna read well that's fascinating because whenever I've done little threads
#
on whatever subjects I've done it's kind of been one at a time and I've done one slash
#
X I have done that too initially I did that too but yeah then I learned you can put it
#
all right in a sense what you're doing is something that would have been frowned upon
#
25 years ago like history is for the historians right who the hell are you to you know you're
#
not a trained historian you're coming in out of nowhere and you're trying to tell and you've
#
described yourself not as a historian but as a historical storyteller I think but you
#
know and even Ram Guha for example who was not a trained historian got a lot of resentment
#
from proper academic historians when he began to kind of do his history obviously the quality
#
of his work and all of that means he's a legend among historians today but back in the day
#
it wasn't quite like that and even his latest Gandhi book I think I read some random reviews
#
by these academic historians and turgid academic language criticizing it for all kinds of irrelevant
#
reasons so there is that resentment and kind of jealousy and there's always been kind of
#
a gulf between academic history writing and popular history writing where academic historians
#
are at hey we've got our methods we have been trained we have the rigor we know how to do
#
this you amateurs kind of stay out of the way as it were and that resentment has been
#
there but at the same time you know just from the outside looking in one can see that academic
#
historians also have their own set of constraints and limitations such as you know the dominant
#
academic ideologies of the day which they presumably have to conform to the different
#
kinds of incentives that they face to come up with new theories and to come up with new
#
jargon as Manu Pillay explained in his recent episode with me and that's also kind of a
#
double-edged sword so what do you feel about this because like is it fair to say that there
#
is now a democratization of history anybody who wants to can do history as it were absolutely
#
and they are anyone can and anyone is any and everyone is and I believe yes there there
#
is a lot of there are a lot of pitfalls in this agreed there is a lot of pitfall with
#
any kind of democratization you democratize art you will have a lot of cringe art you
#
have cringe pop you have you know you have tick-tock tick-tock democratized you know
#
short videos and you know what you are dumped with so and democracy can never be perfect
#
of any kind democracy gave us the government we are living in now but that doesn't mean
#
it's not given us the rewards that we are enjoying today because not everyone has access
#
to at least not in the past not until fairly recently not everyone had the right had access
#
to the right kind of material right kind of it's a very gated community the academic world
#
is very gated and it's an ivory tower in its own right and people like you and I maybe
#
we can but unless you are affiliated to a university you can't access 80% of the work
#
even today for that matter not a whole lot is available unless you pay up and become
#
a member and you know join some kind of an institution you can't so that is one thing
#
so I can understand the resentment but then what the democratization has done is made
#
the space wide open to ideas that would have been just taboo to even discuss you I mean
#
everything should be out for debate there are grays like we just discussed every historical
#
character has his goods and bads and morals and immorals and everything but there are
#
certain characters there in fact most characters who just cannot be touched they are universally
#
considered the villain some are universally considered the hero you can't touch them but
#
this would not this notion could not be challenged by the academicians because a either they
#
don't want to or b they have their own constraints because their funding comes from certain sources
#
the universities run on certain demographies like an American university American universities
#
have a lot of clout all over the world but they receive very few Americans a very tiny
#
percentage of Americans actually go into higher studies beyond the graduate level right so
#
majority bulk of their graduate students happen to be from the third world countries South
#
Asia India and all this so they can't be they have to be very considerate of that fact and
#
then amend the their language and their communication and the way they treat historical accounts
#
to appeal to that demography because that brings in dollars right so that's the reason
#
why some time back until fairly recently it was very common to hear Indian subcontinent
#
when you talk about India Pakistan Bangladesh and Nepal and Sri Lanka it's Indian subcontinent
#
now it's South Asia you never say Indian subcontinent anymore so these are not organic these are
#
very conscious decisions meant with a certain objective meant with a certain agenda and
#
academic historians are always going to be constrained by those encumbrances on the other
#
hand people like you and I we have no such encumbrance we have no baggage and I would
#
not even call myself a historian nor should anyone who doesn't have the right rigor and
#
affiliation no we are not historians what we are is history communicators and there
#
is a very big space for history communicators because history is being butchered history
#
is being misinterpreted left right and center narratives are being built every day historians
#
academics they cannot come and communicate because they are not being read by the masses
#
masses need something bite-sized something simplified you know yes we have our rigor
#
but we have our style also and that style is more accessible a whatsapp uncle in all
#
likelihood is not going to be very keen on reading a research paper by David Reich but
#
he might read me because my language is going to be much simpler and I am going to make
#
it interesting David Reich will be like okay stating facts I will put masala masala by
#
masala I don't mean you know falsities clickbaity masala yeah not that but I mean the same story
#
can be told in an interesting way and in a very boring academic way so yes there is a
#
very fertile ground for people like you and I who can present facts in a more accessible
#
and interesting manner so what you said about the peril of democratization Sturgeon's law
#
speaks to it like Sturgeon's law is it's something created by Theodore Sturgeon who was a science
#
fiction writer who said quote ninety percent of everything is crap stop quote and the thing
#
is yeah it's true ninety percent of everything is crap but the point is that eventually the
#
good finds its way to the surface and you know the people decide as it were the market
#
decides like even tick-tock which you mentioned disparagingly I think you know banning tick-tock
#
in India was just absurd it's a tragedy because it empowered so many people and I saw just
#
such amazing art and creativity on tick-tock and yeah a lot of it was crap but a lot of
#
the stuff I saw was people from small towns and villages who otherwise have no access
#
to any kind of platform you know being able to access entertainment made and art made
#
by people like themselves and then feel emboldened to express themselves in that way and you
#
know just pushing so many envelopes not just in terms of representation or who's doing
#
it but just in terms of art the kind of things that they're doing you know pretty sort of
#
so again yeah ninety percent of everything may be crowd in absolutely any field but is
#
that ten percent or even it's a one percent that rises to the top that makes it worth
#
it that makes it worth it I mean you're not the only person to do Twitter history threads
#
right but you know ultimately people will read the guys who do the compelling stories
#
and then they won't read the others and exactly art democratizes itself you cannot put a gatekeeper
#
perpetually no matter what kind of despotism you put in place eventually expressions will
#
come out that's what I believe in even you know in Europe during the Renaissance it was
#
triggered by a massive amount of tragedy enormous tragedy happened black death and despotic
#
royalties and everything but then art did come out the church was when the church started
#
being very inquisitions were happening the churches church was being very unreasonable
#
very tyrannical no matter the amount of tyranny art will expression will always find a way
#
out it might take time so even if people like you and I did not exist someone else would
#
have done the job if I don't tell the story of you know somebody else would have because
#
that story happened right if an event has happened it will find its expression through
#
me through you through somebody else you know I'll disagree slightly in the sense I won't
#
say that you are definitely not right about that but I'll say it's not necessarily the
#
case I think so many stories happen most of them remain untold some of them people like
#
you tell and I don't think it is a case that if you didn't tell a particular story someone
#
else would have told it not necessarily maybe it would have taken a much longer time maybe
#
a decade two decades because remember we there is billions of us somebody might feel the
#
spark and decide okay this story you know appeals to me I want to put it out there yeah
#
I mean I think there are parallel universes in which these stories never get told there
#
are parallel universes in which you click on a different link in Wikipedia or when you
#
click you know you ask it to throw something random it throws something different so instead
#
of telling story A you tell story B and story A is never discovered by you and never told
#
by anyone else that's entirely possible like I don't want to make the sort of again the
#
teleological mistake of thinking that a story was destined to be told but I get what you're
#
saying not destined but for example imagine again this is a very personal example of butterfly
#
effect I would have never explored Begum Samru or her story to anyone if P and Oak wouldn't
#
have come up with that crazy idea yeah because it's only there that the whole journey started
#
I would have never bothered to look at what monuments Agra has because I have never been
#
to Agra I don't think at least in the near future I have such plans so who would have
#
known it's such lucky happenstance so this is how everything happens so that stroke of
#
luck it just takes one spark somewhere and that I believe can happen anywhere yeah and
#
P and Oak by the way is this right-wing quote unquote historian who not only said that
#
Taj Mahal was originally Tejo Mahalaya but he also at one point if I remember correctly
#
said that Christianity originated in India and it was actually Krishnanithi Krishnanithi
#
and Vatican is Krishna Vatika or something like that yeah phenomenal character so let's
#
move on from here to some of your favorite stories so you know every time I read a thread
#
of yours it's just completely takes me by surprise because there's stuff in it that
#
I didn't know so I'm going to ask you about a couple of your favorite stories which I
#
think my listeners will thoroughly enjoy and one has to do with shampoo so tell me how
#
did you discover this story what is this story so there's this guy in okay back then Bihar
#
and West Bengal and Bangladesh and Orissa everything was just one one province right
#
Bengal province so there's this guy from Patna in Bihar back then it was Bengal so his name
#
is Dean Muhammad Sheikh Dean Muhammad so this very interesting character his dad works for
#
the East India Company and those days you know like today you have aspirations now I
#
want to become an engineer then I want to float a startup want to become a CEO those
#
days aspirations why I want to become an officer in the East India Company there was a general
#
aspiration for ambitious kids in India and I'm talking about 1760s late 60s early 70s
#
so and India was thoroughly British there was absolutely no resentment okay why are
#
the British ruling us and you know it was it was a given a regular accepted daily affair
#
that Britain is the government so this guy he his dad dies during I think it was a Lagaan
#
collection campaign where his dad had gone to some village in Bengal to to Vasula phi
#
Lagaan and the villagers got upset and they lynched him and he died so this guy is an
#
orphan his I don't know if his mom was around at that time or she had already died earlier
#
I don't know but then he joined he did join the Indian the British East India Company
#
and came to Calcutta and he was I believe if somewhere between 15 and 20 so 16 17 something
#
late teens and imagine this kid joins the East India Company as a as a as an attaché
#
to an officer there is an Irish officer in the East India Company and he's working as
#
an assistant bringing him water and you know carrying his food stuff like that and he travels
#
with him all over India that guy travels to Delhi and to out out that is UP today and
#
all those places and he travels everywhere and at that time 1770s and this guy learns
#
English from his master's boss and he writes a travelogue sake I mean he spelled his name
#
as S A K E although it's Sheikh so Sheikh Din Muhammad travels in the Indian subcontinent
#
something like that okay and he wrote this book fascinating book about all the places
#
he visited because he is a small town kid from Bengal he has absolutely no idea what
#
the rest of India looks like and he's traveling with this Englishman and he's learning new
#
things like you go on a euro trip so he's learning everything and he he puts out his
#
experiences that became the first travelogue in India first travel account in English because
#
before that many had written stuff in Persian and stuff so this became the first in English
#
and he fine he didn't find any publisher at that time then he somehow wound up in with
#
the boss okay his name was I think cook something cook so with him he got transferred to back
#
to UK and this guy decided okay I'll tag along with you he went to UK he first moved to Ireland
#
he spent some a few years in Ireland married an Irish girl there this Patna guy he married
#
an Irish girl and lived there with her for a while and that girl was from a very wealthy
#
family and he found acceptance he had learned impeccable English by then he used to dress
#
up like an Englishman and he was often even called the black Englishman so he used to
#
attend parties you know dinner parties tuxedo he used to wear tuxedo and everything he was
#
a proper gentleman and then he decided I have to do something bigger with my life Ireland
#
is very boring he used to live somewhere in the outskirts of Belfast if I'm not wrong
#
then he hopped onto a boat and crossed over into London and London was like the place
#
to be those days the New York of the time so you came people came from all over the
#
world in London to make a fortune and he didn't know what to do but he just landed there with
#
his wife or without with his wife and he started he I think he joined some printer as an apprentice
#
and there that's where he managed to publish his travelogue and eventually how things progressed
#
was that he started he found a patron a very wealthy patron because those days a lot of
#
East India Company employees would come to India and East India Company was like the
#
mothership of corruption it was very corrupt so a lot of East India Company employees would
#
come to India and make a mountain of cash and with corrupt means and go back to UK and
#
build a fortune they would either they would spend the money two ways either build big
#
mansions and you know and live like royals and if they have still cash to spare they
#
would buy a nobility so you could pay some money and become let's say a baron or something
#
and then join the House of Lords and so that was a very big very in thing those days if
#
you are wealthy you have to be a part of the nobility and it gave you a lot of prestige
#
because England at that time was far more classist than even India is today and those
#
were called nabobs n-a-b-o-b and that was just a corruption of nabobs in India so nabob
#
was a very common pejorative in Britain and even in America later on that if you are very
#
wealthy and you're very snobbish and don't know how to spend money you have new money
#
you know in the new worries so that's a nabob so he found one such nabob and first he said
#
he wanted to start a restaurant so he started a restaurant and that became the first Indian
#
restaurant in anywhere in Europe that didn't do well after a while it had to shut down
#
and then he started a bath house so India was very well known in Europe as a very mystical
#
kind of kind of land where you know you have these mysterious herbs and medicinal plants
#
and stuff and you can just rub something in your body or drink something some magic potion
#
and you'll have eternal youth and many such nonsensical ideas so and then not just India
#
the entire east was seen as a very mystical land mystical part of the world and that included
#
Turkey and collectively called the Orient so Turkish baths that's how they became very
#
popular Indian way of washing your hair with there's this plant called Shikakai so in English
#
we call them soap stone so using soap stone to wash your hair back then there was no concept
#
of soap or shampoo or anything in UK oh they didn't use soap either no nothing nothing
#
of that sort you just wash your body with water and you just scrub and that's it and
#
that too once in a maybe a week or a month or so not daily sounds like me in my hostel
#
years all of us yeah so all these nabobs and even this Dean Muhammad guy they when they
#
returned home they brought these ideas okay you know what this is something you can do
#
for hygiene you can you can do a steam bath you can do sauna although sauna was a very
#
has been a very traditional thing in the Scandinavian countries but in UK this became a very new
#
kind of idea bath again Roman baths have existed you can deny you can't say historically Britain
#
didn't know the concept of bath but then they fell out of fashion when the Romans left and
#
then bath along with these herbs and soap stone and so this was a novelty and on top
#
of that Indian massage the the idea of you know chumpy where you put oil on the head
#
and then massage that was very new to the British and they actually took to it they
#
they liked it and he had a good you know line of clients and that business did well then
#
he moved to Dover and there he set up his own salon where he would give chumpy and he
#
had a bath house he would get and then he started this idea of shampooing your hair
#
along with chumpy so he would make his own concoctions and with that he would do chumpy
#
and that became shampoo chumpy became shampoo wow okay so this was such a revolutionary
#
idea he had people from the royalty coming to him he didn't yes he never went to anyone's
#
place except for I think King George or King William which king I don't remember but there
#
was some king and the number was fourth either George fourth Edward fourth or William fourth
#
whoever but some king fourth he became his client and he he would actually go to the
#
palace to serve him he would so imagine having the king of the empire as your client now
#
imagine the kind of fortune you would make but the sad part is eventually his fortunes
#
died and like you know it fell out of fashion people started becoming more racist in the
#
UK towards the end of his life and you know a lot of racist ideas came up that this guy
#
is dark-skinned and we should not go to him he is not good for us and after that king
#
died the successor he was not very keen on you know the idea of chumpy and stuff so he
#
fell out so he didn't die a very wealthy man he died poor he died in poverty his family
#
also I mean there's not much of a record of his but at least his hair smelt nice oh yeah
#
and during his time he wrote two books one travelogue of India like his travels in along
#
the Gangetic Plains then when he was in Ireland and UK he also wrote a travelogue on that
#
was the first travel Indian account of Europe although he wouldn't have been the first Indian
#
ever to have visited there but he's the first Indian you can name earlier you wouldn't
#
know who went who left who stayed and so that became the first travel account of by an Indian
#
foreign Indian of a year because he basically wanted to write what he experienced in UK
#
for Indians so that back home Indian should know okay okay there is a land called Europe
#
and you know like you feel like telling everyone I went to go and this is what we did this
#
what happened and and it's interesting to kind of remember and put it in perspective
#
that there were no maps in those days that there is no you can't go online and look
#
at the world map of a place and have a sense of where everything is not commercially available
#
not to the layman yeah so for the lay person when you hear of Europe it's just a word you
#
there's no picture in your head you can't even picture a map that oh India is over here
#
and Europe is over there and there's nothing it's it's just it's so weird to think of
#
the world in that way right when your knowledge is so sort of and I mean hats off to the explorers
#
who would just take a wooden boat and step out into the sea having no idea where they
#
might end up crashing next when Columbus is a villain today people give him all kinds
#
of name and very soon I am pretty sure you won't have a Columbus day in the US anymore
#
but for all the bad things he did or didn't do he was a very courageous explorer you can't
#
take that away from him people just stepped out yeah he was a Elon Musk of his time exactly
#
and you just Atlantic Ocean is the most violent ocean on the planet and to just take a boat
#
and sail out on a hunch that India might be this way yeah and when you don't know what's
#
on the other side today we know so it seems trivial exactly yeah mind-blowing no you mentioned
#
nabobs and I immediately thought of this one of my favorite phrases in politics which is
#
nattering nabobs of negativism which was used by the vice president Spyro Agnew to
#
describe members of the media so indeed it could be said anywhere by people in government
#
that the media is full of nattering nabobs of negativism is except in India where the
#
media is quite nice to the government these days the pleasing pashas of positivism that's
#
what you could call the media of today yeah I mean that's the first P word that came to
#
mind it is important indeed to alliterate so that's where the story of shampoo that
#
that's where the shampoo the story but there's not just a story of shampoo there's a story
#
of the first time native Europeans tasting what is called Indian food the first Indian
#
restaurant yeah any idea what was the menu like over there that I have no idea but then
#
back then I think the menu wouldn't be very different from what it is today because by
#
that time nearly everything that we eat today had been discovered and mainstreamed because
#
you know all kinds of meat had been mainstreamed by then and potatoes and tomatoes which are
#
all of foreign origin they had all been indianized as early as you know 16th century so I don't
#
I doubt there would be any difference in the the ingredients except for maybe how they
#
cooked it that might be different but then even that shouldn't be all that different
#
that you wouldn't recognize them so that was and it had to be simple because you have to
#
also remember that carrying ingredients from India to Europe was not a very easy task back
#
then you could not do that on a routine basis so you have to use ingredients which are commonly
#
available both sides of the ocean so things like potatoes or rice or maybe wheat those
#
kind of things so it must be a very simple fare but with the Indian spices because Indian
#
spices have been part of European markets for a for at least a thousand years if not
#
longer yeah so some proto chicken tikka masala no doubt I had an episode with Vikram doctor
#
a long time ago on Indian food and I'll link that from the show notes but it's incredible
#
how much of what we consider Indian food actually came from outside and I remember the salty
#
energy this journalist based then in Delhi I think did a very interesting piece and I
#
think there's a video of it somewhere I'll look for it if I can find it where she tried
#
to imagine what an Indus Valley dish might have been like if I remember correctly some
#
prehistoric dish yeah before all of this foreign stuff came in and she concluded if I remember
#
correctly that there was bangan in it but I don't remember any other part of it certainly
#
bangan mustard they were they were making oil out of sesame seeds as early as Indus
#
Valley civilization yeah they were doing that and they were exporting oil they were exporting
#
sesame oil to Sumer and Mesopotamia all those kind of places that so for those people who
#
think hey sesame oil is used in South East Asian cuisine no it isn't we came up with
#
it light shampoo we had sesame oil for at least 5,000 years and we I believe we were
#
eating chicken as early as Indus Valley civilization those were jungle foals and I think the idea
#
of eating chicken started in the Indus Valley civilization either here or in China one of
#
these two places so it either went from India to China or came from China to India I have
#
to I vaguely remember Tony mentioning it in my episode with him on early Indians but I
#
can't remember the specific mention or was it something else but yeah chickens for the
#
win so you know before we end this episode let me ask you to tell another enjoyable story
#
which you know I know you love and I love as well which is about the Indian connection
#
to the American war of independence oh that's a that's a connection on at least two levels
#
if not more because you know the biggest the most crucial connecting thread is the East
#
India Company the East India Company got the Charter sometime around the early 1600s if
#
I am not wrong 1605 or 1609 somewhere in between and about that's about the period where the
#
a couple of other companies also got chartered during Elizabeth the first one was the London
#
Company then there was one the Plymouth Company so these two companies the the idea was East
#
India Company would go east and those two companies London Company and Plymouth Company
#
would go west and by west means the new world so they wanted to just explore both the sides
#
of the world for trade and of course they didn't find any trade opportunity in America
#
because it was all you know native tribals and they would not buy anything from you but
#
they did find you know places where you can build your settlements and start settling
#
people like they settled Australia so they did that the first settlement that came out
#
was Virginia I believe and they named it Virginia after the Virgin Queen so Virginia Georgetown
#
I believe was a city a small settlement in Virginia so the story start nearly simultaneously
#
American story and Indian story and then they progress in their own different directions
#
both are now the only difference is India already had a very thriving culture very prominent
#
and it has too many people right so a big population no matter how many whites come
#
you just cannot wipe out native population this big and not just big we were not exactly
#
tribals before the British came we were kings and queens and you know full politics of our
#
own we had the Mughals and everything so while in India the British had to come and for that
#
matter not just the British whoever came they had to either assimilate or rule as a minority
#
ruler but in places like Australia and the new world what happened was that the native
#
population was so small in number and so weak and so unlike I won't say uncivilized I would
#
say not on the same level of civilization as Europe that they were overwhelmed very
#
easily so that's how America became white and Australia became white but India could
#
not become white right so now what happened is towards I think 1770s so America had this
#
very fine arrangement where tea was discovered in China tea made its way to Europe as early
#
as 1500s and there was another story with an Indian connection because you know the
#
British didn't know tea and there was a marriage Catherine of Braganza from Portugal she married
#
Charles the second and then she brought the tea drinking the the idea of tea and a chest
#
of tea I believe in dowry and that's how Bombay also came to Britain in dowry so that's when
#
Britain tasted tea and tea became very popular and that is a good drink and good beverage
#
and the demand for tea shot up so bad that it overtook coffee in Britain and they had
#
to and the only place they could buy tea from was China and the only way China would sell
#
tea is if you pay them in silver but there was not enough silver there was a point where
#
the Empire the British Empire ran out of silver so badly that they had to figure out alternative
#
ways so they started they learned from Afghanistan that opium can be grown but Afghanistan was
#
not under Britain at that time it was an independent you know under tribal rule there was an emir
#
and all those things so they started growing opium in Bengal and smuggling that opium into
#
China and this is how the first opium war happened.
#
Now what happened sometime in the 1770 monsoon screwed up and Bengal had the biggest famine
#
ever in recorded history the great Bengal famine because of that famine there was a
#
I think upwards of a million deaths in Bengal alone and of course it's not just people dying
#
it's also taking away your revenues as the East India Company you are highly dependent
#
on Lagaan and that Lagaan is not coming anymore so East India Company has to do something
#
and that's when Westminster passed a law that the East India Company to recover its losses
#
it will have the monopoly of selling tea in America and Americans had been receiving 90%
#
of their tea through independent suppliers who were basically smugglers but East India
#
Company now got the monopoly and also they were given tax exemption so this is something
#
Americans found very offensive very and they were like okay fine we have to pay taxes but
#
the East India Company doesn't have to pay taxes and we are living here we are consumers
#
we have to pay a very high price for that tea the same tea that our people used to smuggle
#
in and now they cannot do that because now suddenly they are called smugglers and they
#
were giving us tea for a much lower price less than half the price so why are we suffering
#
so much and at that time I'll give you another threat to this the world war the first world
#
war happened in 1914 and that was because somebody died in Australia now a bigger world
#
war and you can call it a world war but it actually happened only within Europe right
#
so to call it world war seems kind of unfair but then fine that's how the terminology is
#
but in the truest sense of the word a world war happened as early as 1745 and that actually
#
happened all over the world and that also happened because somebody died in Austria
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okay yeah there was this king who the ruler of the Holy Roman Empire although it was not
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Roman but he died and he had a daughter Maria Teresa and she was the only heir to the throne
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and there was a war of whether she should succeed to the throne or not because she's
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a girl girl should not become queen I mean it should not become the monarch there was
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a side that supported her there was a side that didn't support her and you know all that
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happened so this is called the Austrian war of succession in this Britain and France were
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on the opposite ends and this war continued till I believed there was 1745 then 1770s
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it went on into 1770s so what happened is because of this tea business Americans started
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having resentment but tea was not the only thing this war of succession although started
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from Europe but it happened in various theatres one of the theatre was in America another
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theatre was in India in India it's called the first Carnatic war if you have heard the
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name Carnatic war there were three Carnatic wars the first one was fought in Madras and
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the American one was King George's war in this King George's war British soldiers and
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American colonists they fought together and they beat the French and they won Lewisburg
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from French rule French wanted to avenge this so they attacked Madras and Madras they knew
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Madras was a very weakly garrisoned city fort so they attacked Madras and took it then eventually
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in 1745 there was a truce and this truce was in Aachen there is a city in Germany called
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Aachen and Aachen is I believe I have not heard of any other city which has hosted more
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truces and treaties than Aachen like at least 10-15 different kinds of treaties like treaties
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that ended war I've actually been there as a kid but I never knew this yeah yeah it has
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so many like if you just look up treaty of Aachen there's like a whole number of treaties
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like which year you are talking about 1740 1760 1780 1790 so this was in 1745 you said
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no no 1745 is when the Austrian war of succession started yeah no you just said 1745 so I was
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wondering no no there was a different degree I'm just saying Aachen has hosted a lot of
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treaties so this treaty happened at the end of the Carnatic war the first Carnatic war
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in this treaty Britain France and all sides they just signed a deal that okay fine we'll
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just go back to status quo and we'll have we'll have peace for a change and this peace
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although there was peace on paper but they didn't stop being rivals so Lewisburg went
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back to French to the French and British got Madras back but what happened is the Americans
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American settlers in America they did not like the idea that we like we got our men
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killed we spent so much money and we helped the British and won this place and now they
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are giving it back to the French so what our lives don't value much that was first resentment
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then the the tea thing happened that I told you about so there were two things so slowly
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the resentment built up and by 1776 the Americans decided we have had enough now we want a separate
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country and now the the British also could not do much about it because back in Britain
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there was a resentment that we cannot give them we have to tax the Americans because
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we we keep sending them resources we keep sending them ships we keep sending them men
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and because our soldiers go to defend the American colonies but what are we getting
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in return from them so we should tax them heavily and the so the rift could no longer
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be brushed and 1776 they signed the declaration of the dependence and somewhere in the leader
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the Boston Tea Party happens so now there is no return from that point but fourth of
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July 1776 is only the signing of the independence declaration which is something India did on
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26 January 1930 I believe yeah but that's not the independence day independence actually
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happened in 1983 1783 so that's when the war started in the meantime well now America is
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an underdog there Britain has completely overwhelmed the Americans right and France although it
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looks like France would have jumped to help the Americans but they did not initially they
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only came in at a much later stage when the when all the land battles were over the naval
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thing was left when there was a blockade of New York Harbor that's when the French came
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in and by then I am talking about say late 1780s mid 1780s sorry when British East India
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Company was in a war with Heather Ali Tipu Sultan's dad and Heather Ali proved to be
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a very formidable for he was not easy to take down and the same with Tipu Sultan also later
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on but Heather Ali's story Heather Ali became the underdog in India right and of course
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Heather Ali alone couldn't have handled the British he had a lot of backing from the French
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but that became the you know the David and the Goliath story and it spread even back
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in the in the 18th century the news found its way to travel the world and this news
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went to America and Americans were thoroughly inspired if an Indian if a native Indian prince
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can do this we can also take on the Americans we are whites so there was a bit of a racism
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there was you know okay they're inferior but it was also inspirational like if an Indian
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can do it I can also do it and he became a hero and there were poems written on Heather
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Ali they're literally you know those almost like Chalisa kind of poems you know owed to
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the valor of the great Indian King you know who took down took upon took on the British
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and took on the evil empire those kind of poems are being written Heather Ali was being
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toasted in banquets and stuff like that so after the land war was over finally the British
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didn't have much to hold on to so they Lord Cornwallis was leading the thing he blockaded
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the New York Hudson Bay Harbor no matter what the Americans do they cannot do much they
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cannot survive if they have no supply of resources from Europe because America itself doesn't
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have anything so either French supplies or any other country supplies have to reach there
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and the only way to for them to reach is through the harbor and yes Americans really did would
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have been in deep trouble if this would have lasted long so and Americans didn't even have
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a decent Navy forget about decent they didn't have a Navy so they had a bunch of you know
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merchant sloops you know those sailboats kind of thing that's all they could use if they
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could so they contributed they collected funds and with that fund they managed to put together
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a boat and they armed it with whatever the biggest guns they could find and they named
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it Heather Ali A-L-L-Y they spelled it differently but Heather Ali is the name they gave to that
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ship and that's the ship that can you imagine the whole British Navy the Royal Navy and
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this Heather Ali on one side and they surrendered on 19th October 1784 that's when Lord Cornwall
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is formally surrendered to the American forces the American Navy actually what a stunning
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story so Heather Ali made the entire British Navy surrender you know another thing I find
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funny here is Britain and France and the whole rest of the world joining in to fight about
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who the hell will take over the throne in Austria who did I mean this Maria Theresa
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must have become old and died by the time this was settled or so so but what I find
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fascinating in these stories is that the world as we see today I mean when we look back and
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feel okay there was an India there was an America there was a Britain and they would
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have been there was no connectivity there was no telephone there was no mode of transport
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so they would have been but then by their standards they were terribly connected they
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were they were like super connected there was Silk Road like more than a thousand years
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ago and people were travelling all the way from Rome to China to Kashmir to Delhi and
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back and then there were people travelling to America they were by the way there is once
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I found a newspaper clipping the newspaper is called the Virginia Gazette Virginia Gazette
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from I forgot the date but the year is 1776 okay and it has classifieds like how we have
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times classifieds and it's full of runaway slaves notices like okay there is the slave
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that is runaway whoever can return whoever finds a slave and can return it to the master
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will be rewarded with two dollars and five dollars and silver and whatnot so there is
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a mention of a man Indian features from Bombay and and I'm talking about 1776 so can you
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imagine I mean there is no way to even fathom that there could be an Indian for the longest
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time we have believed that Indians at best were indentured labors not slaves but there
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is a mention of at least one slave who came from Bombay and he had been given a most likely
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he was given an American or Christian name his name is given as Victor Victor something
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so because back then it was very customary for masters to give the slaves their own kind
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of name preferred names so so there's this Victor who has run away from his masters in
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Georgetown and whoever finds him will be rewarded with five dollar two dollars something like
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that and it's very clearly mentioned from Bombay so now can you imagine what that Indian
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would have felt like these are points where I go into that zone where I try to imagine
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what his experiences might have been the America of 1776 for an Indian like even for me the
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India of 1776 would be alien yeah yeah so and what is he missing like we can't even
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imagine the India of the Bombay of the time that he would be missing while he's out there
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in slavery like Wadapah wasn't even invented back then anyway that's that's a very arbitrary
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thing to say but you mentioned connectivity and I thought of there's this book that was
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almost at a time a foundational book for journalists called Public Opinion by Walter Lipman and
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the name of the first chapter is a world in our heads in the world as it is and right
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at the start he talks about how when World War One ended for several days across the
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world killing continued because the soldiers on various sides hadn't been given the news
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that the war is over chill out so that they are killing each other when the war is already
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over and it's like yeah you know so much that we kind of take for I think there's a there's
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a story somewhere I found it on YouTube there was a video on a guy on a bunch of soldiers
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who are living in some jungle somewhere in Russia for the past 45 years who were not
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aware that the Second World War was over and they were still living there yeah and I think
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there's some story like this in even in Japan some guy who was on an island and he thought
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the war was still going on so he was defending the island so these are extreme French cases
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but these are metaphors also possible yeah and actually yeah the war is if you think
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about it the conflict has never really ended yeah yeah we are all we've all got these internal
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dramas in our heads which aren't always set in the present time so it's kind of been a
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fascinating almost four hours chatting with you Q2 I won't take up much of your time and
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hopefully we'll have more conversations as time goes on but I'll ask you to end by recommending
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books that you love for my listeners like I know you love history you're enthusiastic
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about it if you had to recommend a bunch of books and say that hey you must read this
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you bloody well must if you don't I will find you and I will kill you so what are the what
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I would definitely definitely recommend the book by Tony Joseph Indians that's that's a given and
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there is a series on Indian history by on prehistory Indian prehistory by Irfan Habib
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and it's a I think it's a series of 30 odd books and very very slim copies but 30 plus
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30 or 32 those they start all the way from you know before the Indus Valley and then yeah come
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all the way to the Guptas and Mauryas that is one very interesting book very informative
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because it has pictures and everything and I always find history books that have pictures
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are far more engaging than none because in history more than any other subject you need
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pictures to break the monotone yeah so it has especially when you're talking about prehistory
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so you know the artifacts and stuff so that's one then I would say Pilgrim Nation by Devdutt
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Patnak Pilgrim Nation is a is a great book then there is a book on history by Bertrand Russell
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history of philosophy yeah it is a history of philosophy but it has a lot of political
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history also I it's a big volume by the way my biggest favorite till date I would say Neenaz
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Journey the first book that I that sparked my interest in but yeah it's it's a very hard
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to find a piece you might find PDFs floating here and there but only if you're lucky of
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which book sorry Neenaz Journey oh okay yeah you mentioned earlier yeah Neenaz Journey
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is about a girl who was born and grew in Soviet Russia under Stalin and somehow escaped persecution
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and landed up in Germany Hitler's Germany got persecuted there and can't catch a break
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can you imagine I mean two extremes within the same lifetime and not even hit 30s yet
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so and then finally found and the when the World War ended she found an American soldier
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you know the typical love story kind of thing and then ended up in except for this thing
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is true so then ended up in New York and raised a family and her family is still around so
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she wrote this autobiography called Neenaz Journey it's by Nina Markovna brilliant book
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brilliant storytelling very simple language no no fussy words nothing and there's again
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a Russian book I'm very much into you know these dissident Russian authors I don't know
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for what reason but I find them very fascinating so there is this one called Gulag Archipelago
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not a very easy read yeah not an easy read but if you can get through it one of my favorite
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books of his is the day in the life of Ivan Denisovich which is much shorter it's a slim
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volume if you've seen it it's a lovely book as well I found Neenaz Journey by the way
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but it's a pirated copy but I'll link it if I don't find a legit copy it's very difficult
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I think it's impossible to find a legit copy I don't know why it's a fantastic it's not
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some ancient book it's from the 1950s if not older yeah I'll look for it but if I don't
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find a legit copy anywhere I will do what I usually don't do I'll link the pirated
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copy and I mean it is what it is then I'm reading Indian summer these days I forgot
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the name of the author Alex Van Tunzelman or something yes yes yes three names yeah
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so Indian summer I find that one good the rise and fall of the third there's just too
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many books and too many books and especially from by European writers I can't name too
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many books by Indian writers except for you know a few names that have come up recently
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like you know Manu Pillai and Tony Joseph and Devdutt Patnaik but then when you talk
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about classic from the 80s and 70s I can't think of Indian writers is there any writer
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who you look at and you say like that's what I want to write like that's my kind of stuff
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Neena's journey well you haven't made that journey but yeah in terms of storytelling
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I guess great so I mean thanks so much for coming on the scene in the unseen this was
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great fun that was a great conversation and look forward to listening to this listening
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to myself no I you know before I end I will just kind
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of point out a brief not an argument exactly but a disagreement that Amit and I have been
#
having where I once you know when I first read his Twitter threads on history I told
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him it reminded me of Dan Collins hardcore history which he hasn't heard by the way so
#
I'll be sending him the link now and I said bro you absolutely have to do a podcast and
#
he said no no I don't have the voice for it and even the stuff he wrote for story tell
#
they wanted him to narrate it but he insisted on getting someone else to do it and I've
#
been trying to sort of persuade him to kind of start something of that sort where you
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can listen to him tell stories in his own voice so if you agree with me please tag him
#
and tell him thank you.
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If you enjoyed listening to this episode head on over to the show notes enter rabbit holes
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at will you can follow Amit on Twitter at chandelier that's at S C H A N D I L L I A
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you can follow me on Twitter at Amit Varma A M I T V A R M A you can browse past episodes
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of the scene and the unseen at scene unseen dot I N thank you for listening.
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