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What is a teacup? When I look at a teacup, I see a cup in which I drink tea, but others
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might see more in it. Looking at a teacup, they might see all the forces of history that
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shape it, the habits of society in a moment in time, all the different cultural influences
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around that give it the shape and weight and texture that we take for granted. A teacup
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contains so much information that it might even be talking to you, and all you have to
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do is listen. Now, at one level, I think this might be overthinking it. But at another level,
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it is true that all the inanimate things around us have rich histories and are full of meaning,
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if only we choose to look for them. I often say we should never take people for granted.
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Well, maybe we shouldn't take things for granted as well.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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science. Please welcome your host, Amit Varma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen. My guest today is Annapurna Garimella, a designer,
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curator and art historian. She was one of my fellow judges for the JCB Prize for Literature
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earlier this year, just like the author Sarah Rai, who features in episode 255 of the show.
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Annapurna comes from a different imaginative world and sensibility than mine. And I loved
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our brief conversation so much that I figured I had to get her on this show and have a longer
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chat. We finally made it happen. She shared her rich memories of growing up in a world
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that was partly rural and partly urban. I was struck by the richness and detail in her
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memories and felt that a world had opened up to me. We spoke about remembering and reflecting,
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academia and scholarship, art and access, the different ways in which we see the world.
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We also argued a bit. She's wary of markets, while I love markets and technology because
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of empowered and liberated individual creators like me and freed me from the whims of elite
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gatekeepers. Some of our conversation was transcendental and some was combative. I'm
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sure you'll find lots to think about. You'll also never look at teacups in quite the same
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Do you want to read more? I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading
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habit. This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and
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she says there's a world of knowledge available through the internet. But the problem we all
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face is how do we navigate this knowledge? How do we know what to read? How do we put
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the right incentives in place? Well, I discovered one way. A couple of friends of mine run this
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awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com, which aims to help people up level themselves
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by reading more. A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called the Daily
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Reader. Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read. The subjects
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I discovered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading. At the end of every day, I understood the world
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a little better than I did before. So if you want to build your reading habit, head on
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over to CTQCompounds and check out their Daily Reader. New batches start every month. They
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also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up to date with ideas,
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skills, and mental models that will help you stay relevant in the future. Future Stack
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batches start every Saturday. What's more, you get a discount of a whopping Rs. 2,500
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if you use the discount code Unseen. So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com
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and use the code Unseen. Uplevel yourself. Anapuna, welcome to the scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you for having me. It's very gracious of you. So I'm really looking forward to our
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conversation in an odd way because I feel like I know very little about you. Most of
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my guests are people whose books I might have read or whose work I have followed and all
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of that. And we've, of course, you and I have interacted during these Zoom jury meetings
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of the JCB Prize and all of that. So in a sense, I feel like I know you, but I also
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feel like I don't know more about you. I have a sense of who you are, but not really knowledge
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of what makes you who you are or what makes you what you are and so on and so forth, which
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is sort of an interesting place to be in. So I want to really start right at the beginning.
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Tell me about where you were born, where you grew up, the texture of your life, of the
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young Anapurna's life when you were a kid. Because I think another interesting facet
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that I often explore during the show is talking to guests who are my age or older or from
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decades past as it were, and talking about their lives because the texture of life was
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so different then. One of my friends once said that kids growing up today will never
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know what it is to be lost, physically lost because you have maps. They might even never
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know what it is to be bored in that sense of having nothing to do. They can be bored
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in different ways, but they can be immersed in a smartphone while I think back in the
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day I could just be immersed in a book. Sarah, our mutual friend once, when I recorded with
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her a few days back, she said this very interesting thing where she said that she was a deep reader
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from a very early age because of the dullness of life. There was nothing else. And I asked
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her about her observation skills, which as you would have realized are incredibly acute.
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And she said that I noticed things so well because there was nothing else to do. You
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had to look at things. And I don't buy that explanation because many other people lived
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in those times and her powers of observation are extraordinary. So give me a sense of what
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the texture of your young years were wherever you were born. What was that like?
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So I was born in 1966 in June in my grandparents' house in rural Andhra Pradesh in East Godavari
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district. So this area is called Kona Seema. People who are aware of Indian language will
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understand that this is a delta. Kona is for tri, for delta and the Seema is the boundary
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area. So this is an agrarian landscape that's today one of the richest agrarian regions
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in India. But it really became that rich because of the construction of the Buckingham Canal,
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which comes from Orissa all the way down to Pondicherry. And Mr. Cotton, who has a museum
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dedicated to him in Rajamundri, created innumerable canals that flow through this delta village
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to village and inundated the landscape. The rivers that were flowing out of the Godavari,
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the Krishna into the Bay of Bengal were directed before they flowed out into the landscape.
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So the time I came to this landscape, it looked like it had been rich and fertile forever,
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but in fact was probably only that fertile for about a hundred, hundred fifty years.
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So I'm named Annapurna because on my paternal side, somebody went to Varanasi where she's
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the goddess of the city. And she is a very important goddess for Telugu speaking people.
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Telugu speaking priests are the priests at the temple of Annapurna. And he came back,
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he did a padhyatra and he came back safe and sound. So he took a vow that the first child
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of every family in his lineage would be named after her. So I am named Annapurna after this.
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So these kinds of things completely shape you. So both my grandmothers are Annapurna
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and my grandfather adored me. I am one of 30 children of his surviving 10 children. There
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were many pregnancies. He adored my grandmother, I think. And therefore there were a lot of
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children. They produce children and we are 30. And they're primarily all boys. We're
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only nine girls out of this. And I'm the second oldest girl and the girl that spent the most
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time with everyone else for various reasons, which I can explain if you'd like. And because
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I spent so much of my time between my grandparents' village and also Bhopal where my father worked
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as a junior engineer at BHEL, I had these two things of India, which I think are the
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things of India that people think of post-independence as a dynamic that had to be negotiated. Rurality
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and industrial development. Rural development and industrial development. So my grandfather
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was very interesting. I come from an upper caste Brahmin family. And of course there
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are things that are mythologized by me and by all of us, but he was a very kind man.
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And the atmosphere that he permeated everywhere was of a person who was an only child and
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had many children, many sisters. The father was not alive, so he had to take care of all
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those sisters. So in my grandparents' house, his six daughters, his wife, and his four
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or five sisters, they're all having babies at the same time. So I had that world and
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the world of being in Bhopal, living in the quarters, the ground level quarters. So there
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was a garden and I was there by myself. And I was an only child for 10 years. So it was
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this really interesting dichotomy between being surrounded in the village with lots
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of people and being in Bhopal with very few people in the household except my parents.
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And I think that because it was so dichotomous, it prompted me to constantly adjust. And if
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you're constantly adjusting, you start reflecting on what you're adjusting. And then the reflection
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on what you're adjusting begins to make you think about adjusting itself, or it did to
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me. This is over time. It's not like it popped into my head at age four or something. But
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also what it does is, growing up that way for me anyway, my grandfather made it perfectly
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okay. He was a very modern man in his own way. So he wanted a Chevrolet. He practiced
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the rituals of Brahmanical masculinity to satisfy my grandmother to some extent, like doing
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things like Sandhya Vardhana. But outside of the house, he didn't really practice
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caste untouchability at all. So I went with him to the fields whenever I was there. And
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we would sit all day in the field, which he would do, I think, basically to enjoy that
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time. And our best friends were the people who worked in the fields, I think. And of
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course, there was total complex hierarchy, but he also felt an enormous responsibility.
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So finding their children's marriages and education, none of them are field hands anymore.
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They've moved on and my family doesn't have that house anymore. So they still have the
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roots there. So these are all interesting things. But my grandfather swam and he believed,
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I think, caste doesn't matter because water is flowing and water is washing everyone.
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So he had these ideas, I think. I don't know if we ever talked about it. We never talked
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about it. But sometimes if you're observing people and you see the way they carry themselves,
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he was a big man. The way he carried himself, you understood that his shoulders were not
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scared of the touch. He wasn't scrunching himself. He was wide open for his shoulders
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to rub against other kinds of shoulders, those kinds of things. At home in our house, we
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were a very wealthy family. So Burma teak granaries, seven of them, were filled with
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rice. They were the size of the height of this building that we're in right now, one
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one granary. That kind of wealth was there. So my childhood was spent playing in the granaries,
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playing with tamarind seeds, making palm leaf dolls. Because I spent so much time with them,
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there was this ritual of the door being opened in the morning and then it would stay open
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all day long till night when we went to sleep. And this was a huge ceremonial teak door.
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And it was a house that was built about more than, now it still exists, it's more than
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150 years old. So architecture, which is one of the things I study very deeply, formed
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in my head. And relationships, like the side passages in which lower caste or women who
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had their periods or people who had to perform some kind of service, they came or foods that
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were not allowed to be cooked inside the main kitchen, all these things were designated,
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they were spaces for them. His mother lived there, my great grandmother lived there. She
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decided to have her own kitchen to have a different relationship with her daughter-in-law.
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And these granaries were, there was a big teak box, I would say it was about three feet
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or four feet deep and about five to six feet wide, which was filled with grain. And in
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the morning in this door, which was never closed, people would come and they say,
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dehi bhikshan dehi maata anna purne shri. And my grandfather and my aunt and uncle,
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they would tell me to go give it. And later on, my partner gave me the insight that perhaps
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it was an interesting way for a small hand to give small quantity in ritual, that you're
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giving something but that you didn't get into the discourse with the child about is this enough,
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is this not enough, all these sort of things. But that kind of programs you,
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like what is your identity is programmed when you're named after the food goddess,
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when your task in your grandparents house is to give the food. There's so much cooking in
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our household and preparations of vadis and pickles and aunt has very rich in mangoes
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of various kinds, very famous for its pickles. So lots of pickles and poppers were made on
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lungis in the summers. And going to the film theater, as you may know, many film theaters
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and the architecture of them is based on rice mills. The person who talks about them is SV
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Srinivas. And we would go to theaters. This was a big thing. My aunt and I would go in a horse
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and horse cart. I can't believe I have this life. We would go in a horse cart at night and we would
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sit in the theater and watch movies. They call this the Gandhi class. And then there was other
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classes in this theater. It's very odd because there are many places I understood about caste
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and class and gender. But I also understood that there were always people who were transgressing
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those boundaries. And that's very important to me to hold those two things in my head
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because I focus on this, I forget this. And if I focus on this, I forget this.
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So I keep that in practice, whether it's in my work or in the way that I understand the politics
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of the spaces I live in, the country that I live in, or the places I've lived in. So that was my
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childhood in my village. In Bhopal, it was very different. In any case, my grandfather was very
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interested in me being very independent from the beginning. And he was very tender with me. So
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getting my nose pierced is his thing, getting my ears pierced is his thing. And he did all sorts
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of wrong things. He told the jeweler who would be sitting opposite me, pierce her ears and pierce
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her nose. That was at a later point. In Andha, women get their nose pierced on the right side,
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but he told him to do it on the right. He didn't specify to the jeweler from his right, so my right,
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not his. So he pierced me on the wrong side. And of course, my grandmother and my mother,
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everybody scolded my grandfather intensely for doing the ritually wrong thing.
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In a way, I feel like he made it okay to be not fitting in or something like that.
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And then when we lived in Bhopal, I was very much an independent person. So Bhopal, that colony,
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Be'achil colony, was relatively far out of the city. At three and four, I would just walk out
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and walk onto the national highway. And then my father's friend would pick me up and bring me back
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home. And this was like a real problem for my parents, my sense of sovereignty maybe or autonomy
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or a sense that maybe it's not even sovereign. Maybe it's a sense that the universe is good with
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me and I can live in it with some fearlessness. And I think I was a very hard child for my parents.
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I think that's also very important for me to state since you asked this question.
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I love my mother very much. I have some memories of my father taking me every Sunday when he went
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vegetable shopping to the old city of Bhopal and me standing in front of his Vespa scooter.
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And my hands would be on the handlebar and I would see that I had two, three glass bangles
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and I'd come back and I'd see my hands and they'd be full of glass bangles. So this is a weekly
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ritual. These are very nice memories. My father was a very deep listener of classical music,
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Carnatic music. And as a junior engineer, he already purchased a reel-to-reel tape machine
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in the 1960s in Bhopal. It's a very expensive thing to purchase, have. So from a very young age,
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I have a practice of sitting and listening to music continuously for two to three hours.
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Doesn't mean that I wasn't irritated sometimes, but nobody asked me to do it,
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but it's just something that entered me. At that time, BHGL employees, engineers would go
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to England because the connection to England was still very strong, industrial England. So
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my uncle, who happened to be an engineer at BHGL also, so this is also we must remember that the
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reason why so many South Indian Brahmins have advanced is because of the fact that my uncle
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is because the family connections allowed them to develop these kinds of economic ladders between
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families and for each other. So he asked my father to come and work there and I had a very severe
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illness when I was young and they thought I would die. So my uncle had gone to Liverpool
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and for training and he brought back for me cod liver oil tablets and those tiny little record
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players for short small records. And what did he bring back for me? They were the Beatles records
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and they were rainbow coloured. So there was a guava tree in my parents garden and my grandmother
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had given me a small tiny bell metal pot for cooking, for play cooking. And there was this
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little record player and I would make these little bridges between the trees for water and I put this
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thing on and I would listen to, I think it was Strawberry Fields and a couple of other records
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over and over again and cook. I think when I say I love places, when I think of myself and I say I
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love places, I think it's the idea of making a place began there and making a place and knowing
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places like the garden or my grandparents house, they're very profound experiences. So Bhopal was
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really, really also beautiful place to know people from all over India because these quarters,
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that these early days of these mega industries had people, there's a Marashan auntie and uncle
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upstairs. There were other cast Andhra people working, Telugu speaking people, Punjabi people.
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And the great thing that marked my life as a child was that these industries gave leave travel
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allowance to their employees. So what many engineers and families did, they rented a bus
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and then they would drive from Bhopal to various places. We would stay in Gurudwaras.
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We would have langar because obviously there wasn't that much money. In this process, I saw
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so much of the Gangetic belt of Rajasthan, Gujarat, all the way to Varanasi. And I think my first sense
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that architecture and archeology were going to be deeply profound things for me. Well, I remember
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there are like three, four moments that are so crystal clear in my head. One is like when we went
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to Abu and Girnar and Shatrunjaya, the sense of spaciousness and being on top of mountains
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and these white temples, very, very powerful. And then another really big moment was, as I mentioned
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to you in our conversation, Jaipur and being in Jaipur and the Jori Bazaar and like the way that
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the textures of beads and stuff were really important to me. But I think the two places
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that really impacted me were Khajuraho and Varanasi. Khajuraho, my parents were not
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the most, I don't think anybody was in those days, but my parents did not hover too much over me.
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And I'm probably not the kind of person that people can hover over. And they left me on the
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plinth of one of the big temples. I think it was Kandariya Mahadeva or the Lakshmana temple. And
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even then, this was the early days when the flights from Delhi to Varanasi had a stopover
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in Khajuraho, so the triangle that they call like it was beginning to happen. And I watched
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lots of people looking at the erotic sculpture and looking at all of this. And I just had this
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feeling of mere saare room khade ho gaye. I can even remember that moment now of my hairs on my
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arms just standing up with the energy of this place, this structure. And I don't know if I had
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the sense to say, oh, this is beautiful or not beautiful. I knew it was powerful. And not in a
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scary way, but it was powerful because somebody had designed it to be intricate and full of stories
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and put lots of challenging things on it, like erotic sculpture. Even then, we all know by that
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age, this is the thing that you're supposed to know and not know about, right? And then the
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other place that's really important to me is Varanasi because my mother went into, I think it
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was the Sankat Mochan temple, and the Mahant there gave her a gendaful mala and he put it on my neck
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and my mother took me out onto the ghats. Maybe it was busy or something. And she said, you stand
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here. As I mentioned, they weren't really hovery kind of parents. And this cow came there and
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started eating the gendaful on my mala and I might have been four or five at the most at this. And
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there was no fear inside of me. And then I thought if I look back, and of course, memory is very
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funny and I'm not interested in analyzing the truth of memory or not. You get what you get and
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you live with that, right? So what the memory tells me, and even at that moment, the memory that I
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have of my feeling is that this place is so old and expansive that nothing can hurt me, not even
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this cow who's chewing these flowers. And then of course, people started shouting and then my
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mother heard or something happened and then she came and something happened. I don't remember the
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rest, but I remember this moment very deeply. So this is my childhood in India. When I was eight,
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I went to, eight and a half, we moved to the United States. I was also a brief period in
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Sikandarabad where I went to the Kindri Vidyalaya. I went to school in my grandparents' village for
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a little while because my father was already itching to go somewhere else where he could fund his
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music obsession. He was interested in Carnatic music primarily. And the school in my grandparents'
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village had cow dung on the floor. So every morning we had to put cow dung on the floors and
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Dwaranguli, Mugu as we call it. And then Kindri Vidyalaya was really nice because it was in
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Pickett or someplace near there. There's many Kindri Vidyalaya. Now I'm a little hazy. I was
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little at that moment, but it was Sikandarabad and there were still fields in the middle of the city
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because it hadn't grown so much. So you could see rice growing and that really deep green of rice.
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And it was very nice. My entire childhood was filled with Hindi. Hindi, Telugu, of course,
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very beautiful Telugu, but lots of Hindi because my mother and my father watched a hell of a lot of
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Hindi movies. And my father would play people like Talat Mahmood and Soraya. Begum Soraya? Oh,
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I forget her name. It'll come back to me. All these records. Talat Mahmood's very vivid. KL
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Saigal. I love KL Saigal. And lots of music from there. So I don't remember not having
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Carnatic music, the Beatles and Hindi film songs very close to me all my life when I was growing
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up. And when I was eight and a half, I moved to the US. So, so fascinating. One of the themes
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that I sort of love to explore and which I sort of will ask you about is the nature of memory,
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not in the sense you said you don't want to talk about, you know, truth and memory and all,
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but just the nature of memory itself, because a couple of thoughts. One is that when you're
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actually living and I'm really talking about, in a sense, looking back on how I have sort of lived
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and how I remember things that while living, sometimes you are not mindful. Things happen
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and you're not mindful of them in that moment, but later you remember them. And in your memory,
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you fill those things out. And I did this episode I really loved with Aanchal Malhotra, who wrote
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that fabulous book on, you know, partition survivors, their memories through the things
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that they got with them. And one of the things we discussed there was how we now know that how
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memory functions is when you remember something for the first time, you remember it, what actually
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happened. But the next time you remember it, you remember the remembering and so on down the line.
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It's almost like Chinese whispers inside your head, which is why, you know, something could
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happen to say you and your sister at exactly the same time, but you could have a completely
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different memories of it. And that leads me to the sort of thought that at one level, it's
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completely true that we are shaped by what happens to us, but it is also true in the other direction
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that what we remember of what happens to us is shaped by who we are. And therefore the question,
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like, all these beautiful details you came up with, the teak door playing in the granaries,
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the tiny bell metal pot, all of these details, you know, and these are the things you remember.
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Any of your siblings or cousins growing up with you would perhaps remember different things,
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and they are different people. And you've kind of hinted at being like a rebellious kid who would,
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you know, you can't hover over Annapurna is the kind of sense that I already get from that.
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And it's not just that you are shaped by everything happening to you,
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because it's also happening to others. So where do you begin to get a sense of the person you
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become? If that is something you can possibly nail down, like, you know, where do you begin
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to get the sense of, I like these things. I like this kind of art. Oh, I like architecture
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and no one else does. And by the way, anyone listening to the episode so far would find you
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wonderfully sanskari, because your two seminal moments, as you described them, involve a temple
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and a cow. So well done with that. But I'm kidding. That's why I always think about,
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as I mentioned to you earlier, like, how does it feel to be on the other side of this and
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this side of this? It's always there. I'll tell you a story and I'll answer that question.
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So I love my grandmother. She's dead now. Of course, I'm 55, so she has to be dead.
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She's not going to be alive. So they make pickles in Andhra, and pickles get old.
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And every year you make pickles. And then they cook lots of rice, because in a household full
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of this many people, you have to cook a large quantity of rice. So leftover rice is kept in a
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terracotta pot outside the door because you can't touch it after you have, when you are cooking,
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because you have to be muddy. Muddy is this idea that you're ritually pure for cooking and for
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puja. But people would come and she was, in her own way, attentive to their hunger. But in a way
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that I find taught me so many things about cruelty. So they would take the rice out of that pot.
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These are people who worked in the fields or around the house. And there would be that old
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pickle. And she would have a jar of that old pickle. She would pull out the old pickle. They
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would stand outside of the kitchen in the open area. And I happened to be standing somewhere
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between my grandmother and this person I loved very much. I don't remember who that person is.
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It was a man. And she pulled out the old pickle, not this year's pickle, but the previous year.
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And she flicked it into his plate because she can't touch his plate, that rice, him.
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And at that moment, I remember very, very deeply thinking about,
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am I him? Am I her? Or am I that pickle? I don't think I invented that way of looking. I think
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this comes back to what your question or your comment. I think some things are given to you
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and you don't have choices. So I am a person who was given this facility to notice things from a
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very early age. I don't remember never being a person who didn't notice. And I notice people's
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emotions and feelings, things they're doing. Not everything. I just notice, notice, notice.
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So if you're noticing all the time, even if you don't notice everything, it's too much.
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There's no respite from noticing. So I've always been the person that's taken breaks.
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And when I take a break, what do I do? I think about what I noticed.
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So there is this capacity that developed in, I think, people who are like us.
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That first time is the remembering, but the reflection on that process becomes that.
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Now, this is not the experience of many people who've not grown up in large families like I have,
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but I grew up in a very large family. And we're a family that likes to remember for each other.
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So if you have a memory and you share it with them and they not only remember,
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so your memory is confirmed when you have that many people who are with you because you're not
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many people who are with you because you're not the individual that's the capitalist individual or
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whatever you want to call it, like the neoliberal individual or whatever, but you are this individual
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of a certain moment of joint family modernity, right? And they remember. So for example,
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my Masi, who I adore and is now 70, told me the other day that one day she saw this blue thing
#
in the doorway in my grandparents' house. And it was coming from the well where clothes were washed
#
and bags were taken. And what was it? I was maybe three. I had taken all of that robin blue and
#
applied it all over myself, every part that I could reach. Another time we have this tradition
#
of painting yellow and turmeric, it should be turmeric and kumkum, but it's yellow and red paint.
#
I was so fascinated by the yellow paint that I applied it all over myself as a little person.
#
I am to this day deeply, deeply, deeply interested in color. So when somebody in criticizing
#
me or challenges me about something, I have to say, okay, I was formed this way because of this
#
background, but I also know that some things just were there. Like for example, there's color
#
exoticism about India, constant fetishization of India through its colors. But as a child,
#
I don't remember a moment not being particularly interested in the density of looking at a color,
#
the blackness of kajal, which we made at home, or the depth of the blue in that packet, or
#
the yellow color that it's being painted. My grandmother also pounded haldi sticks with
#
lime to make it into kumkum in my grandparents' house, mortar and pestle. So the transformation
#
of the yellow of haldi and the white of the lime into this kumkum, there's this constant sort of
#
thing. So memory, I think, works differently for people who come from different time periods
#
and different social experiences. So in my understanding, memory for me is inseparable
#
from having a huge number of people reiterate a memory, an event, a set of emotions,
#
not the same emotions as mine, but some emotions. And in a way, sometimes I think about this,
#
I know I'm an individual and I'm such a very much a person in myself. But there are moments
#
where you feel like, where do I begin in this story and where do they begin? Where do they end?
#
And I don't have any anxiety about that. I think that subjectivity doesn't always need to be in a
#
subject solely. It can be dispersed and crystallized at a certain moment when a story is told,
#
when a event is recounted. Oh, Purnah is always like this. I'm called Purnah Bhavani at home.
#
So she's always like this. She loves color and whatever. So these are things, I think,
#
things could also work where you could have the remembering the first time you remember,
#
then the remembering the remembering, but then the other people around you. And this is the beauty
#
of having some sort of continuity in social structures. And it could also be the terror
#
of them. Maybe people need to forget many things in order to evolve better. And I have chosen to
#
forget things too. I have chosen to rebel. So in a society, in a world in which forgetting was
#
instrumental and remembering was both instrumental and affectionate or a sense of insult, this is all
#
there. But this is the world I was given. So I have to learn to be fond of it and to have some
#
distance from it and all those sort of things. So I think that it can also be the first time it
#
happens, then the remembering of that remembering, and then also this understanding that there's a
#
lot of people around you at certain moments who was around you to remember. I had a very similar
#
experience at grad school in Columbia when my beloved friends from grad school, we all sat down
#
together. There's some crystal clear memories for us, and we keep ourselves attached to the freshness
#
of that moment of coming to Columbia University as graduate students by recounting certain stories
#
like my best friend, Debra Diamond, and I were in Sanskrit class together. And we happened to be
#
joking about Sanskrit, making Sanskrit jokes. It's part of being a geek. And she would say things
#
like, boga, boga, boga, like when you were really into eating whatever you're eating or whatever.
#
Or we would have these funny ideas of we were reading some Puranic stuff and of having swimming
#
toys where you would have Ananta as the floating swimming toy, and then you would be Lakshmi or
#
Vishnu floating on it, and it would be in the middle of a swimming pool. All these weird jokes,
#
which probably aren't funny to anybody else, but the memory of us making these jokes in front of,
#
I think it was near the Frick Library and the museum in Manhattan. It's so...
#
I think things work like that sometimes.
#
Yeah, and one of the memories from what you're recounting, you speak about forgetting as being
#
instrumental sometimes and important sometimes, and you need to do it. And you speak about
#
remembering being instrumental and also affectionate, like your college memories, for example.
#
And this interesting memory of the pickle being flicked across seems to me to be in the
#
category of the sort of memory you maybe want to forget. But you remember, you were in college,
#
and maybe you want to forget, but you remember it is clearly vivid for you.
#
I mean, you notice stuff, right? But the next step after noticing is at some point in time,
#
you look back and you begin to make sense of it. Like initially, I get that instinctive revulsion
#
that someone you love is being treated like this by someone you love. And you may not at that point,
#
if you're a little child, understand any more of it than that. But later on, you kind of,
#
I suppose, begin to sort it out. I mean, your grandfather having broad shoulders in the way
#
that he did is a formulation that would have come upon you later. So tell me a little bit about how
#
beyond this whole visceral taking in of everything that is happening and the instinctive
#
responses to that, you know, how do you start thinking about this stuff? How do you start
#
making sense of the world? Like, one of the dangers for many young people is that they find
#
a particular way to look at the world, whether it's an ideology or points of views or whatever.
#
And all of these simple narratives or ways of looking at the world can be so seductive
#
that you just give in to them. And because, you know, it just works, they're also instrumental
#
in a sense. Give me a sense of, you know, what was your journey like in that sense? Like,
#
what were your years in America like? You know, is there a moment where the stark difference
#
between where you are and where you came from kind of makes you think and starts, you know,
#
starts shaping your memories even? Well, you know, I actually think that
#
children have a deep sense of justice, deep, deep sense of justice. And if you're growing up
#
in a family like I did, other children will develop it in a different way. You're constantly
#
thinking about, for example, I'm fair skinned. There are many fair skinned people in my family.
#
I'm sure there was some deep cross-pollination that they have conveniently forgotten,
#
instrumentally forgotten. Much fairer people than I. And my grandmother favored me for that. Also,
#
I was the second oldest girl. I was always like just smiling and happy kind of child
#
with them, at least. And so in her kitchen, she would set out all the plates. Like we were
#
before by 1975, there were 15 of us already born. So any meal would have a minimum of 15 people
#
that she would have to cook for and serve. So you don't have to go elsewhere to understand
#
injustice, inequality, the dynamics of human preference and uncivility and kindness. So these
#
15 plates would be here. There are many boys. She also had some favorites in her boys. There's no
#
way you can love 15 people all the same. That's not possible. So she made this unbelievably
#
delicious coconut chutney, freshly ground in the mortar and pestle. Those coconuts,
#
because there's so many people, the coconuts were cracked by somebody else. They were chipped into
#
smaller pieces. They were put into the mortar pestle and then she would grind it with tamarind
#
and all the delicious spices. We all loved it. So she would come by bent. She wouldn't haunch it.
#
She would bend and she would serve each of us in the plate. Definitely, I got more.
#
Definitely some of the boys that she liked got more. Then there were the girls, the other girls
#
who were not as fair skin, also not as interested in her, didn't get. Now, whether they were
#
uninterested because she didn't extend herself to them or that in 15 people it's not possible for
#
everybody to be. I began to understand that I got a lot of favor because of, at a very young age,
#
you don't need to articulate it. I feel like you don't need to articulate. There's some sense of
#
justice that comes around from the fight. Like, why did you give so much to someone else? That
#
fight is there. Or I would tell my male cousins, so they would drag me, you know, they would say,
#
I would tell my male cousins, so they would drag me, you know, they wouldn't even put their damn
#
coffee cup back in the sink. I would say, I would feel that resentment, boiling resentment. Like,
#
why do they get to leave their cups there? This is at their house, not at my grandparents' house.
#
You couldn't do that there. But you would, you know, this sort of thing. In my case, I violated
#
a lot of the boundaries they set. And I think children do this all the time. I would touch
#
my grandmother when she was muddy. I would go hug all the people that I loved and loved and loved
#
and hugged them. I would use really the worst curse words against my grandfather when he took
#
me around on his shoulders in the village. And he never stopped me. So if I look back,
#
I also understand this, this way, that yes, it's a deeply unfair world. But challenging it doesn't
#
mean that the people that are being challenged will necessarily react violently to a child.
#
Now, they might have reacted differently to another kind of person, but to a child, I feel like
#
children have a enormous capacity to challenge systems because they're just so
#
unmade still. They're so much in the process. So gradually, my grandmother shed most of these
#
things over her own lifetime. My grandfather, of course, operated in a different way. Many
#
things took decades to change. But you know, it's not like I didn't suffer. These families
#
are really hard because there's also sexual abuse. There's also having you sit outside
#
every time you have period. Your first four days, you have your periods. There's enormous
#
labor extracted both from the boys and the girls in different shades because these are huge
#
families. But it depends also a lot. In my case, I thought about all these things. I never feel
#
victimized by any of these experiences. Now I think of it in one way, but over my lifetime,
#
they've just felt like things that make me cry sometimes, but things that also teach me
#
much more than they make me cry. So I'll tell you about America in a second. I didn't see
#
the system in America being vastly fair. But I think like today, I think about all this
#
that has happened as material, like clay material. You have material to work with. Every day,
#
it's an aesthetic commitment to work with that material. It is an ethical commitment to work
#
with that material, and that material accrues more material. Like this is more material.
#
I'm going to reflect on this a lot when I leave this studio. And we have some sort of
#
responsibility to make ourselves agentive in relationship to the material that life gives
#
you. And we become agentive in one way or another, no matter where we come from. Now,
#
there are always socially, politically made ways to rob you of that sense of agency. And
#
that's a responsibility, collective responsibility, that we have to each other, to foster a sense of
#
agency doesn't mean rights, rights, rights. It doesn't mean responsibilities. It's a sense
#
of consciousness. It's a sense of capacity, right? When I moved to the United States,
#
when I moved to the United States, it was in 1975, the civil rights movement had ended.
#
The hippie movement, the 1968 struggle at Berkeley had also finished. The Vietnam War
#
had come to an end. Richard Nixon had resigned. Gerald Ford had become the interim prime president
#
of the United States. And I arrived there on, I think somewhere close to January 26th, maybe
#
January 26th, which is odd, on 1975. And I remember coming from the airport JFK to
#
New Jersey, to Elizabeth, New Jersey, where my parents were living at that time.
#
Elizabeth, New Jersey is a industrial town. The Anhauser Bush factory is there and many other,
#
it's a port. So it's stinky. So on the way you see a lot of lights on the highway,
#
and I would see these signs like wash-a-rama, something-rama. And I thought, oh, this place
#
won't be so bad. They like our God. And this is, the Rama of my childhood is a story book Rama.
#
He's not so much a God Rama. He's the story book Rama. He's the stories that we read in
#
Amarchitra Katha or Chandamama or my parents, or my parents weren't very into storytelling,
#
but somebody would be telling some story. Or there would be in films. That was primarily where
#
Auntie Rama was acting as Rama. So I thought this place won't be so bad. I did not want to leave
#
my grandparents. I adored my life in India, loved it. And we go there and I said, okay,
#
this won't be so bad. Later on, like 30 years later, my friend in graduate school told me,
#
that's because Panorama was so interesting and new then. That's why people started naming
#
Oh Rama to all these non-cinematic things. Like the way that.com became the name after a point
#
for so many. And I really think that, and then we went to school. The next day my father put me
#
in school and they changed my name from Annapurna to Anna, because those were the years of
#
assimilation. And they were not being unkind. This was the way they thought they were being gracious.
#
My father, we would go to the city regularly, because you have to remember these were the years
#
when the great concerts were happening at Carnegie Hall with MSO, Blakshmi or whoever,
#
all these great people are coming. So we would drive from New Jersey and go. And if you park,
#
you have to park on the street there. And this was the deep bad years of New York City,
#
when it was crime-ridden and people were scared of the city and lots of drugs and whatnot.
#
And he would see an African-American man walking and he would park the car somewhere else.
#
And I'm sitting in the backseat looking at all this happening. I'm nine years old.
#
And I'm thinking, he doesn't look that different from us in terms of skin color.
#
And why is Nana doing this? My dad was fair skinned, but not in any way that was so hugely
#
different from many African-American people who are actually at least 33%, according to statistics,
#
the last time I read them, European origin descent. So also, if you grow up, because anyway,
#
I was an only child when I went there, my company was the radio. And I'm very grateful to be on a
#
podcast because I love, I think my love of listening comes from being such a radio person.
#
I listened to the great music of American soul, right? Like soul music, like people like Arisa
#
Franklin and the guy who sang, sitting in the morning sun, Marvin Gaye, sitting in the morning
#
sun, Marvin Gaye, sitting in the... Yeah, anyway, all these beautiful, beautiful music, Donna Summer,
#
the disco period and all these people. And I didn't really identify so much with white culture.
#
Now I'm not saying anything against it or for it. I just didn't identify with it because you have
#
to remember in my school in New Jersey, no kid had more than, nobody wore anything but jeans and
#
a t-shirt to school. We might've had three t-shirts and two pairs of jeans, one running shoe and one
#
regular shoe. Everybody wore sneakers. My best friend was Gina Conti, whose father was a pizza
#
maker, Italian descent pizza maker. I really think that the class divisions that exacerbated
#
the differences across race that we experienced more fully and it's not that they didn't exist
#
then, but there was this little bit of flatness of social stratification. The stratification wasn't
#
so big in my school because it was largely poor and working class. And not poor, I wouldn't say
#
working class. I wouldn't call that poor. I would call it working class. And then when we moved from
#
there to Edison, New Jersey, which is now a little bit climbing up the NRI ladder,
#
then things changed again. There my close friends were Korean migrant family, a girl from a Korean
#
migrant family and a Jewish girl who was very, very, very Sherry Cantor and Yan He Park, very
#
nice people. And it depends on which American, I didn't have any friends in school who were South
#
Asian. So I had to make friends, not that I would have necessarily not made friends with these
#
people because I'm generally a person who flows towards what I like, doesn't matter what it is.
#
I think these things really taught me a lot. So if I imagine like I have one grandfather who was a
#
Gandhian and he wove Kadi all his life, my grandfather of a certain kind of social praxis of
#
doing something at home to satisfy certain ancestral responsibilities and familial
#
responsibilities and then the way that he was outside. I also have another very rich, rich,
#
rich, rich family who was Brahmo partly in near Rajamundry. And then you come to the United States
#
and my father funded our arrival in the United States by, he's a Brahmin. I working as a butcher
#
and at the nighttime as an engineer during the daytime and as a butcher in Pathmark or some
#
large grocery chain at supermarket, ANP, I don't remember which one.
#
And I was very aware of all these things, not in any ideological way, but just aware that this is
#
the material of my life. And my father didn't have, wasn't anti beef. He took me to Burger King and
#
had me eat a burger and I couldn't eat it because it was too rich for me and I couldn't stomach it.
#
I'm not used to, I wasn't used to it. But I had subways sometimes, which were heroes, like they're
#
called sub submarine sandwiches or heroes, and they had meat in it. All these things are like,
#
what I find I think is the deepest problem is there's a kind of dogma to how you're something
#
now. Like if you are vegetarian, you must be dogmatic about your vegetarianism. A friend of
#
mine's grandmother, another Brahmin family, said, by the time you're dead, said to her, by the time
#
you're dead, you'll have eaten at least the elephant size, elephant head size of non-vegetarian
#
because every grain in India will have some bug in it.
#
Wow. That's a great way of putting it.
#
It's a great way of putting it because if you look at a rice grain, we all are consuming this,
#
we all are consuming this, but it's an orientation of how you structure your cooking and your eating
#
and then it can be just that. It can be, for example, sometimes I'm really troubled by
#
industrialized chicken farming. I just can't handle it. So I stopped buying those eggs.
#
I eat eggs from another source. I think answering the question in some way that you've asked,
#
which is I think what I learned from that time in America, and it was also you have to remember
#
the hippie culture had its... America lost the Vietnam War and it had a terribly beautiful moral
#
self-examination over the Vietnam War. I was witness to that. I understood that a society
#
could collectively do something really wrong and also could collectively negotiate the wrongdoing
#
to understand something about it. I still don't agree with the way the major American
#
media and pop culture and whatnot portray its relationships either to internal communities
#
or to other countries, but I did see this. I did see the end of the Watergate and I did see
#
this and I wrote to Gerald Ford when I was nine saying I'd like to thank you from school. I wrote
#
to it, but actually I wrote to Jimmy Carter saying, may I come and work for your campaign?
#
Because he was a peanut farmer and I was quite charmed by... Farming felt familiar, of course.
#
So there was these kind... I think there are things like that. I feel like one of the big
#
rich things of my life is my parents were so neglectful that no one ever told me think this,
#
think that, do this, do that. And if my grandmother said, don't touch me, I'm muddy now,
#
and I touched her, she would just go take another bath. There was no severe retribution from them.
#
I faced a lot of... I don't want to talk about it too much because it's boring, but abuse from
#
my parents. So I understood that you just have to be aware to your own life and have it available
#
to you. I think that's really important. It's your life, not in yours only. It's the life that the
#
universe has given you and you have to be aware and present to it. It's giving you that same thing.
#
You don't need to go have 20 million new experiences to learn. Every time I reflect
#
on somebody talking to me, making that eye to me, oh, you're not ordering anything
#
non-vegetarian. You're ticking off the choice vegetarian when you have to select.
#
Sometimes I get that reaction and I'm sure I'm not the only one. And I think to myself,
#
well, you'll find out more about me. I won't give the situation the power
#
to limit the horizons of how I'm to be known by someone. But that's something that I think
#
if you've lived in a very diverse way that I feel like I have, you understand
#
something like that, maybe. That's what I've understood.
#
So, you know, before I go on to my next question, a couple of observations. And the first one is
#
a disagreement. And the possible reason for this disagreement might be that you're a good person
#
and I'm not such a good person. But I disagreed with what you said about kids having an
#
inherent sense of fairness. I think of kids much more in a lot of the fly's way. And you
#
know, you look at the child armies of East Timor or Sierra Leone and whatever what's going on and
#
what has happened in West Africa. You look at how kids can often act in incredibly brutal ways
#
that are inexplicable. Like even in the Nirbhaya rape case, for example, the most brutal of them
#
was really a kid. And Robert Sapolsky, the biologist has written eloquently about how,
#
especially with boys, the brain stops, completes its development, not stops, completes its
#
development when men reach 25. Because that's when they get fully socialized, which is why there is
#
so much violence among, you know, teenagers and young men and all of that. But anyway, that aside,
#
I'd like to say something to that. Yeah, please do. Yeah. I do believe children have an inherent
#
sense of justice. They also are deeply unjust. They are deeply unjust.
#
So they understand what is, it's unjust, but they do it anyway. So they're sociopaths.
#
No, I don't know about that. My thinking isn't so far along, but I do know that in my own life and
#
what I've observed, children can be very unjust. And that puts an enormous collective responsibility
#
on having life, not telling how to be just, but showing how to be just. So may I give you some
#
examples? Please, please. So my uncle who brought me the record player and the cod liver oil tablets,
#
he also bought me a doll from England and it was white. And I took it with me. It was a tall doll.
#
And he took it, I took it with me to my village. My grandfather saw this doll. Now, if you say,
#
is my grandfather like a deep anti-colonial person or something? No. But he looked at that doll and
#
he said to me, understand that I'm maybe four at this point, maybe three or four. He said to me,
#
maybe three or four. He said to me, looking at this doll every day will make you think poorly
#
of yourself. Something like that will make you self-conscious because it was a white doll.
#
And he threw it into the attic. I'm sure it's still there in that building.
#
The way that he thought about money, he earned a lot of money, but he gave away vast amounts of
#
money to the point that it was penury at the end of his life. Though two districts shut down
#
when he died for two days, there was no money left. So everything had to be sold because he
#
gave away money to so many people. And he was fascinated by modernity. So he gave his daughter
#
his education. He bought a Chevrolet. He swam. He had these kinds of things. He also finally decided
#
to fight in elections. And this was not a smart thing for him to do. There was no way to win
#
elections because the tides were turning of the demographics of who could win elections
#
in that area. And I think back and I think like, I watched people like this.
#
When my mother was deeply abusive towards me, my mother and my father, my aunt stepped in
#
and took over the role of being a mother. At school, you would observe, like I went to a
#
Carmelite convent in Bhopal, and Carmelites can be very stern and they have a lot of physical
#
punishment like scales on the knuckles and all these kinds of things. I think children in that
#
space were deeply aware. They were mean, but they were also aware that this was unfair. Now, how does
#
this all get settled into something like being a good person and something like being a sociopath?
#
I think it takes a lot more than that. But I do think children have both a sense of justice
#
as well as fairness and a sense of cruelty. Both exist. They're fully human people. They have all
#
their emotions. I think that it does take a lot. Like when I was in New Jersey, my school, Mrs.
#
Maresky, who was just the most delightful, wonderful teacher in third grade, we had cooking
#
class. We made cook two days a week in class and we fed each other. This was just simple things.
#
Made popcorn and boiled something, I don't know, something. I was always good at school, so I
#
finished school, finished my work in class, and I would help others. So she told me a couple of
#
times to sit back. But then she put it in my report card that Anna is very smart and she works
#
hard, but she should learn to not help other people and sit in her chair when her work is done.
#
I feel like these are really beautiful things what she taught about me is that don't make people
#
dependent on you. It took me decades to learn that fully. Decades. I don't talk nearly the way
#
I used to talk before. I've found real plenitude in silence. But in those years, I was like an
#
electrical plug that could plug into many different sockets. And I think these things,
#
there's a responsibility. People like those children, child soldiers don't become cruel
#
just like that. And it's just because they're children doesn't mean that they don't have that
#
cup. That's why we have to be so good to children. We have an enormous responsibility to be good to
#
them. Not good like pampering them with silly chocolates and games and stuff, but take their
#
moral, emotional, sensual, aesthetic, intellectual needs seriously. Commit to them. Otherwise,
#
you have delinquents. You have sad, depressed people. And again, these things can also be
#
biological. Some things just come. My father is like a totally bad person. I know that. I'm
#
not sure I'm supposed to say stuff like that in a podcast, but everything that we know about him
#
from all our families is that he had tremendous capacity for cruelty in a family that doesn't
#
have that kind of thing. But he also had some really beautiful qualities. Once I asked a friend
#
of mine who loves to listen to music, classical music, someone I knew, not a friend, someone I
#
knew well at one point, how is it that people who listen to such beautiful music can be so cruel?
#
And this was a reflection on my thinking about him, both him and my father.
#
I think I've read enough of meditations in novels and things about cruelty that sometimes children
#
are so beautiful and for men sometimes women are so, I don't know. People choose to allow themselves
#
to be provoked by certain things for good and for worse. Sometimes they also have no choice
#
about what provokes them. But then once you're provoked, you have a responsibility to reflect
#
on that provocation. How are you going to be managed? Are you going to go and you feel really,
#
like you feel really, really vulnerable? You feel disempowered. How are you going to handle this
#
situation? I remember when I was 10, my mother hadn't had my sister yet. And there was a girl
#
in my apartment complex in Edison, New Jersey. And I had gossiped about her to other children.
#
And her mother called me to their house, working class woman, I think a single mother. And she said,
#
you shouldn't have done that. You shouldn't have spoken about her like that to other people. You
#
made her sad. You hurt her. I cannot believe what a beautiful thing she did for me. There was another
#
girl and her mother was also a single mother. This is another experience I really thank America
#
for is the diversity of people that I encountered there. Same thing I thank India for, but just a
#
different way. And my mother was very hard on me. But Andrea, this woman, she was a single mother
#
young. She was a very nice mother to her daughter who was younger than me. And she happened to be
#
reading Kahlil Gibran, that passage about children and them being arrows you shoot into the air.
#
And she gave me that I borrowed the book from her and I read it to my mother. My mother was
#
so angry with me. I don't remember, but my mother being angry with nearly the same weight as I
#
remember Andrea giving me this book called Kahlil Gibran and introducing me to a person who reflects
#
on such things. Oh, adults do this. Adults have thoughts about what is, they think about having
#
choices about what kind of parent to be. So I think it's very, very important to take children's
#
inner lives, social lives, intellectual lives, very, very seriously. So let's deviate from this
#
so far sort of linear narrative of your life for a moment and I'll digress and just ask a question
#
that comes to mind. One, I agree with you. I think we are all as human beings, hardwired for all
#
kinds of different contradictory things. We are wired for empathy. We are also wired in a sense
#
for selfishness and the cruelty that it leads to. And I love Steven Pinker's quote on this where he
#
says, nature gives you knobs, nurture turns them. And perhaps someone like you might have a bigger
#
empathy knob and you just need to turn it a little and some people have a much smaller knob
#
and so on. And Pinker in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature also makes a point about the
#
importance of literature. Like you spoke about, you used an interesting phrase where you said,
#
it is our responsibility to reflect. And now I'm thinking, how do most people even get the tools
#
to be reflective? And one way of doing so, which is Pinker's point, is that every time you read a
#
novel, you enter someone else's head. You are given one life to live, which is the one you're
#
born into. But you live many lives when you read books, when you enter the lives of others, as it
#
were. And that can kind of build empathy, that can build a sort of both a tear off and an ability to
#
sort of step back and look at the world. Now, on the one hand, you just spoke about how can someone
#
who listens to such grand music be such a monster? And I'm sure many monsters listen to grand music.
#
But do you feel that there is something to that, that the appreciation for art, like especially
#
in India, I think anyone who appreciates in a mindful way our art or our cuisine or anything,
#
even the way we dress, is less likely to be bigoted because you would obviously understand
#
that it comes from everywhere. So I would like to say that
#
this is what I mean when I say spaces to construct spaces to reflect for children. But I think we
#
need to continuously do this all our lives, right? So for me, art, all of life is a space to reflect.
#
One facet of like post-Renaissance, post-Enlightenment ideological formation of
#
human beings is to say that literature is the highest art, because as I mentioned the other day
#
that Norman Rush had said that, you know, after the Bible, it's the novel, that literature is the
#
highest art. But I think all different ways, spaces, all different moments, all different
#
things that cause you to stop and reflect and are designed to make people stop and reflect are
#
important. So when I was younger, I don't feel I'm being linear. For me, all time is always
#
unfolding on each other, right? So this movie called Mamta came out and it has two or three
#
beautiful songs in it. And one of them is Rahe Na Rahe Hum. It's a beautiful, beautiful song.
#
I knew what it meant, that song, for a small child to see that movie. I knew, I saw it not
#
when it was released, but just a few years later, maybe it was eight, nine, one of my Friday nights
#
with my mother watching movies, things. I knew that what he was communicating is what is the
#
responsibility of a man to a woman that has been wronged by society that he loves? And how does one
#
come? And then there's another beautiful song in there, Chhoopalo Del Lodiye Ki Mandir Mein,
#
something like that. It would come to me. I'm a little nervous. Usually I remember all the lyrics.
#
So what is the responsibility? The same question I had when I watched Amar Prem with Rajesh Khanna
#
and Sharmila Thagore. These are popular cinema, but when he goes into Kuch Toh Log Kahenge Logun Ka
#
Kaam Hai Kahna, why can't that be a moment for anyone to sit back and reflect?
#
He says this, you know, and I'm speaking this because I'm a woman. These were the first
#
understandings of myself as a feminist. I am a feminist and I'm very, I think it's one of the
#
most sensuous and intellectually interesting things to be, is how do you look at the world from this
#
calling yourself a feminist? What does it mean to make the world in front of you, inside of you,
#
day in and day out, right? So these are the beginnings of speculating on what is the
#
responsibility for a man who understands, not reviles a woman, but understands a woman.
#
We know about men who revive, but there are also men. I know there are men. I know many of them
#
personally who understand women. And this is a certain, all these novels. One of the biggest
#
things that formed me were biographies. So when I was very little, I was always a very devout
#
reader. So the new books would come to the school library in New Jersey, wherever I went to school.
#
The librarians were my best friends. They would keep the new books before they were cataloged for
#
me on Friday. I would take them home, devour them and bring them back. So the things that I took a
#
lot were among the witchcraft and sorcery books, were biographies of people. So biographies of
#
Clara Barton, Florence Nightingale, Margaret Mead, so many different people. And I really,
#
really think that today, if I say to my daughter, you must learn everything you need to know from
#
a book to reflect, it won't work. That was possible at a moment. When I was 15 and I was
#
staying in my grandparents' house for six months, I discovered in a cabinet, small bound copies of
#
so many Shakespeare plays. I read them continuously, like reading Cornelius Rex
#
continuously. Who does that? But it changes you to do these sort of things. I feel like literature
#
isn't the only thing. I feel like art and literature are very important formalized spaces
#
for such things. But so many people who make really beautiful art are so fucking corrupt
#
and so disdainful of the internal complexities and unfairnesses in their own work.
#
So I feel very strongly that everything in life has to be seen, not in a pressure some way,
#
but as you have to be so open that you are receiving whatever it has to give you. A friend
#
of mine who's from Kerala, and he is my friend, once told me not so long ago, we were talking,
#
this was my first understanding of the reading culture in Kerala and the way that the government
#
press publishes, you know, the Sahitya Academy or whatever, the Kerala Academy publishes so many
#
books and then there's a contract to send them to school libraries and there's a ready-made
#
population to buy books there, institutional purchasing. So I said, oh, that's really
#
interesting. And I hadn't arrived at good yet because I was still absorbing that this thing
#
could happen that way. And he said to me, and then I asked him, do you like to read? And he said,
#
I read, but I don't read so much. And I said, ah. And then he felt like he had to explain himself.
#
He said, because reading can be corrupting too. And I totally agree with that because I think
#
people think that they're becoming something by being well-read, but that's not true.
#
But that's not true. I have a friend, another friend, Jeevesh Bagchi, who I sit sometimes and
#
talk things over with. He's part of an artist collective. And one day he said that sometimes
#
when he works with young people, he gives them one book and he asked them to read it for like
#
three months or something, really, really well. That's enough. And if we understand book production
#
and marketing itself to be such a corrupt process, which it is, then how can we expect the books to
#
deliver on goodness all the time? I think that an ethical engagement with life means that you have
#
to keep sifting. That's your labor. There's no fixed place you can moor yourself to because
#
the world is so dynamic. You are dynamic. You are part of the world.
#
So it's nice to think that literature will deliver us. It's nice to think that listening
#
to good music will deliver us. It can teach us many, many things, but as far as I can see,
#
most people seem to be satisfied with getting a little bit new, but mostly what they're familiar
#
with. I was struck by your phrase earlier, by the way, which you used to describe your father,
#
but it's also useful in a metaphorical way where you said in America, he was an engineer by day
#
or butcher by night. And I wonder if that applies to other things. Tell me now, sort of going back
#
to your life story. And I also agree with you that, you know, looking at it in a linear way is
#
sometimes a problem because there is just the present moment and all our memories are also in
#
the now and all of that. Tell me about how your sort of sense of self began to form in the sense
#
that, like, I just look back on my own life and many of my guests have also shared this, that
#
I look back on my own life and my sense of self was very flawed. I am a completely different
#
person from what I was at 25, completely different. And it just changed. Right. And over time,
#
you kind of reflect and maybe you're lucky enough to have the opportunity to be able to take a step
#
back and reflect on that stuff and change. How did your sense of self evolve? You know,
#
a lot of this is impressionistic stuff that you are doing a lot of noticing. You notice the flicking
#
of the pickle. You notice, you know, the doll being thrown away into the attic where it still
#
lies, as you pointed out, and such an interesting image of dolls still lying in an attic, still
#
pale after all these years. No, I'm going to say something to you. I know me and I know many people
#
who have a pretty solid sense of self from the time they're born. I figured that. Yes. And I
#
think the whole task of life is getting people out of the way. And that's how I've lived my life.
#
I put people in my way. For example, I worried about my mother incessantly. I worried about
#
people in my life incessantly, worried about their wellbeing. And I thought myself is to be
#
the person that worries for other people and takes care of them. So I could watch a movie and there
#
would be, Ma. And I would say, Oh, I'm also like that, Ma, because I know that feeling inside of
#
me. But that's not all that I am. I'm much more. So, you know, the person that wants to walk on
#
the National Highway at age three and doesn't feel any fear, the person, all these things are
#
there. The person that loves to read is very comfortable being in a room full of people and
#
very comfortable being solitary. This is all the self, no? So then there are people and situations
#
that are going to come and tell along, like, you're a woman, you shouldn't do this. Why?
#
So when I was 25, 27, 25, at various stages in my life, I did something that I'm not supposed to do
#
because not to rebel, I don't think I was rebellious. Just to say, Oh, this feels correct. I need to
#
acknowledge this. So, you know, in my family, they're overly protective of girls in the wrong
#
way. And then, of course, also sexually abusing of girls. They're always those relatives too in
#
a large family. When I was 27, I bought an Indiraal pass. This is in 1993. And I traveled all across
#
India in a train by myself wearing a sari. Because the other thing that people would say is that,
#
how can you wear a sari and do things? I said, well, women are having babies, working in the
#
fields. There's this beautiful photograph of the Sri Lankan architect, Manetta Silva,
#
climbing up a ladder to inspect a construction site in a sari. I said, no, I'm going to wear a
#
sari and I'm going to travel. Of course, I wore some shalwar kameez as well. But I wore a sari.
#
I had a suitcase. I would bathe with the Bisleri bottle or whatever it was that, yes, or some
#
bottle in the bathrooms in the train. I'd fill it up and I would take a bath every six, seven
#
places. I would spend the night at a good place, get laundry done. I would sleep at train stations.
#
This is 1993, just two years after liberalization of the economy.
#
I understood that maybe my family was much more space, was much more dangerous for me
#
than India was, the rest of India was. That's what I understood as a woman.
#
And people were, except for one tiny incident in my life in those years of traveling to Patna
#
and facing something there from men on Diwali night, and a very nice Muslim family group of
#
women just surrounded me and they were wearing burkas. So they surrounded me and just kept those
#
men away. I never faced any issues. I'm not saying people don't face issues. I'm just saying
#
that things, you have to keep working to get to yourself. Again, it's work. You have to do the
#
work. I think I was given something at birth, whatever you want to call it, genes,
#
karma, all these things. And then I have a responsibility and I felt it very sincerely
#
because there was joy in it. Like I'm listening to the Beatles and I said, this feels good to hear.
#
Why? Let me hear it some more because it's making me feel good. These are just simple things,
#
but they're actually really profound things. Like why do so many people, including me at
#
moments, gravitate to things which are bad, which make us feel so bad? I'm not talking about the
#
hard work of like, let's say, lifting a suitcase up the staircase or something like that. I'm
#
talking about things that really make you feel bad. Like, you know, you hate sucking up to people
#
at a party. Why are you sucking up to people then? Why are you doing it? Because what is it that's
#
supposed to do? This is something we have to work at. It is our task. It is our responsibility.
#
So many cinematic images and everything you're saying, like a little child painting herself
#
red, or these women in a burqa just surrounding you. And I can just imagine the camera moving as
#
it should. Someone should make a web series from your memories, perhaps. So what did you want to
#
do then? Let me get to like the mundane concrete question of, you know, rather than go into these
#
abstractions, like sense of self and all of that, which is always a continuously evolving thing,
#
and also a fixed thing, like you pointed out, if you had a strong sense of self from when you were
#
young. But what did you want to do? What were you educated in? And what did you see yourself doing
#
for the rest of your life?
#
I was good at school. And I wasn't a science child or a literature child or a social studies
#
child or whatever. I just was good at school and loved to read. And I loved to read all kinds of
#
things, gravitated towards things which were about people, like novels, or biography for my
#
personal reading. I think somewhere in there, as I mentioned earlier, I read some sort of book about
#
Margaret Mead. I might have seen Coming of Age in Samoa. And there was a radio show for the South
#
Asian community in America. And I was called as a group of young people, and they asked me, what
#
did you want to be? And I think I said very clearly, I'm pretty sure I said very clearly, I
#
wanted to be an anthropologist. So by the time I had, I'm not that far from that now. I'm an art
#
historian. I work on architecture. I work on craft. I work on teaching, pedagogy. These are the
#
areas of research interest. So by the time I was 12, I have a scholarly orientation. I know that.
#
Now I'm very comfortable calling myself that. I always had this like deeply sit down and delve
#
into something mentality. That's the noticing comes from that, sitting down and do the work comes
#
from that, that idea. I know there are many good people who don't think like this, and I love to
#
listen to their ways of doing things. But this is me, I sit down and I do this, or I can stand up
#
and do it. It doesn't have to be sitting down. And there was a moment in my life where my parents
#
wanted to get me married when I was like 16 or 15, arranged marriage. And they tried all kinds of
#
shenanigans and it didn't work. And I went to high school in India, I did my 10th, 11th, and 12th
#
here, PUC as they called it then, in Hyderabad and Vishakhapatnam. And then I went back to the US.
#
And my parents really wanted me to study business administration or something like that. So I went
#
to business administration or something like that then. It was so boring, man. It was so boring.
#
And I went to this large commuter university in Los Angeles. And I went to art school,
#
partly because I think it was nearby and partly because I liked it. And I was always a little
#
maker, like my mother taught me how to sew falls and make samosas and kajas and these things and
#
those things like, you know, from a generation of women in India, you learn to make stuff.
#
So I went there and I liked it. So I started studying design. And I like design because it is
#
something like you want something and you have to sit down and work for it. You have to think about
#
how to make it work. But you have to remember this was the era, or you may or may not remember,
#
but I think something similar was happening here too, just a little bit later where certain things
#
like, you know, that sun that came over Birla Sun Life or Bank of Baroda, these are motifs of
#
an economy rising. So when I went to undergraduate, Reagan had just been elected.
#
And there was this idea of an economy in motion. So the swoop was very important. So every goddamn
#
thing from vans to supermarket to this thing or that thing had the swoop. And I think that was
#
the moment where I said, this is stupid. I mean, I can say those kinds of things, like this is
#
really inane and stupid. And I think we had some tasks to design a magazine cover. I like that.
#
I was the last batch of students that was not mandatory learning computer aided design.
#
I still hand cut all my letters and pasted them and used benzene to clean up the thing.
#
And the chemicals really got to me. And the temporality of retail design is horrible.
#
You have to be awake whatever time to meet the deadlines. Part of the education there was you
#
had to take art history classes as part of your art degree. And my first art history class,
#
I was working three jobs and going to school full-time. My art history class was at two in
#
the afternoon after lunch. I would fall asleep and I failed. I got a D, but I took more art history
#
classes. And the next one, the next one, I just loved it. I loved literature classes too,
#
which was also there. I liked the philosophy classes. I love philosophy. I mean, I read
#
philosophy for fun in those years. And even now, I love it. I love that somebody says,
#
let's contemplate this thing called friendship. And they spend 350 pages contemplating friendship.
#
I love the idea that somebody says, let's contemplate. What does it mean to print money?
#
Money is a very philosophical thing. So let's sit down and really reflect on this. I loved all
#
this. And what I loved about art history was it still was connected to the idea of anthropology
#
about people, like viscerally connected to people. People make things. But what I liked about it was
#
that unlike literature, it doesn't privilege an already privileged object, which is the printed
#
text. So I was aware that people who could read and write had more status in society and things
#
which were about reading and writing had more status. And I really wanted to spend time listening
#
to the things that objects said about people and about themselves. And gradually I came to understand
#
that objects don't even say things about people. They say things about material. And objects might
#
say things about, might be designed to speak for themselves too. And we can talk about that.
#
And I was fascinated by that. So the turning moment was I had a Japanese art history professor.
#
It was a wonderful place because Los Angeles has many museums and museum curators who are not in
#
the top most positions, often teach as adjunct faculty. So I had pre-Columbian. I had Korean.
#
I had Chinese. I had Japanese. I had, not Korean was part of this, Chinese and Japanese. I had
#
the history of modern design. I had Greek. I had Roman. I had modern art history. I had so much
#
art history that when I went to grad school, I realized that students who went to much more
#
elite schools didn't have this range. So the turning point for me was when
#
I had a Japanese art history teacher and Japanese people believe objects speak.
#
They have this idea of mono no aware, which is that there's a beauty of things. You have this
#
sense that things are impermanent and passing. And Japanese people have a sense of, and this is the
#
irony that they became such a great industrial giant later, but until modernity, they made objects
#
in multiples, like for example, massive numbers of teacups or whatever. But there was a sense that
#
these objects had to respond to the touch. They had to have a conversation. They had to respond
#
to the eye. And he allowed us, Joseph Newland, allowed us access to that world. He didn't drum
#
it into us, but he showed us objects in such a disciplined way. He taught us in such a disciplined
#
way to come to this. So he told us the story. I don't know if you're aware of this. There's six
#
persimmons is a very famous painting. It's a very, very famous painting. And he told us the story
#
about this painting. And then he told me about his teacher who was a Zen teacher and who had a Zen
#
master as his teacher. So apparently he wanted to see this very beautiful scroll or painting that
#
was in this monastery. And the teacher kept refusing to show it or kept putting it off,
#
not refusing, putting it off. And then one day, I think he went to the toilet and when he pulled
#
out the toilet paper, there was the painting on the roll. And I don't know in America of the 1980s
#
anything else that could have given me access to the weirdness of human existence, the weirdness
#
and interesting. This is other people that have had other experiences. This was my experience of
#
how to understand that there's just so many interesting ways of being in this world, living
#
in this world and teaching and all these kinds of things. And then I had another teacher for
#
modern art and she was very interesting because I was not a very good writer. I mean, she said,
#
I'm going to give you a D if you want to keep your paper this way, but if you want to improve
#
your writing, I will work with you till you get the grade you're satisfied with. So I decided I
#
would be satisfied with an A. So she worked with me and that was like a quantum moment for me,
#
transformation movement to be really, really understand that if I spent my time really
#
delving into something and laboring, I would be able to do the things I like doing, which is
#
thinking and writing and making something. So that's it. So then for me, art history continued
#
to be very beautiful experience. And then I did well in my studies in my undergraduate,
#
in spite of the Ds, they eventually put me, they were just moments. It was like a, I don't know,
#
whatever, buildings Roman or whatever, you pass these things. And then I decided I wanted to go
#
to grad school at Columbia and I was accepted. I thought about going to baking school,
#
Pilledberg baking school, cause I love to cook. And then I thought about studying folklore because
#
that's also close to anthropology. So Indiana university at Bloomington was very important
#
school of folklore. I thought about studying Japanese art history, but I did not want to,
#
and I neither had the funds nor had the ability to study Kanji for five years in order to master
#
that. I thought about studying African art, which I loved, loved, loved, loved. But I think I was
#
still enamored with the idea of having recorded voices, recorded documents about objects. And I
#
didn't have a very good deeper sense that records come in different forms and you can listen to
#
objects in different ways. So then South Asian art became the thing that I did, even though I never
#
studied it in my undergraduate, I fell in love with my teacher. The first time I went to see her at
#
Columbia before I started teaching, being a student there. And she was one of the few South Asian
#
this in the South Asian women in the field. And she was outlined, they were this narrow room,
#
her office and both sides were covered with books. She was sitting near the window. It was July 29th
#
or something like that in 1989. And I saw her and I said, it was love at first sight. And I said,
#
okay, this is, I'm going to come and study here. And never did I imagine myself becoming a professor,
#
an academic. I'm very clear that being a scholar and being an academic are different things.
#
It's very important for me. Being a scholar, being an intellectual, being an academic,
#
they're different, different things. And they can all merge in one person. They don't have to.
#
I had choices. So my PhD from there became a beginning point to a life I think, which is so
#
rewarding of work and thinking and doing. Yeah, that's what I do. And I'm very grateful to my
#
teachers who never said that your destiny is to be this or that. I'm grooming you for this or that.
#
My teacher Vidya Deheja was so generous about letting me go. In between, I thought about
#
becoming a doctor because I love medicine. And I started doing some pre-med courses at Columbia.
#
It was just too much. I couldn't take the load of PhD core classes as well as pre-med classes.
#
But yeah, so it's things like that. So fascinating. And I'm very interested in
#
what you said about the Japanese conception of objects being able to speak. Have you read
#
this writer called Ken Liu? No. His surname is L-I-U. It's pronounced Liu, I think,
#
who's written this beautiful book called Paper Menagerie. That's a title short story. And it's
#
just incredible. And I don't want to give spoilers about it at all, but you will love it, I think.
#
And I will post a link in my show notes for all the listeners to also kind of read. Thank you for
#
doing such things. I want to kind of double click on a few of the things you mentioned. And one of
#
them is the difference between being a scholar and an academic. What is that difference and
#
why do you feel you're more of a scholar? So I teach all the time and I'm a dedicated,
#
I adore teaching. I adore it. I was blessed with the most amazing teachers at every stage in my life.
#
And if I am who I am, it is for many reasons for my teachers. They're very close.
#
So I love teaching. So teaching is also not necessarily collapsible to being an academic.
#
I think that academia is a model that developed at a certain moment in time,
#
certainly in post-independence India. And as a model, it is changing rapidly.
#
And there's a struggle over what its future is going to be, whether it's in India or in the U.S.,
#
it's happening. And that's a good struggle. Academia is the first place many people
#
grate their teeth against politics, how to be political in this world,
#
how to be adult, and how to be political. All these are very important.
#
But whether that actually, the structure of academia, whether it's in America where there's
#
constant pressure to produce research or writing or text or something, the constant pressure to be
#
original, innovative, the new, or in India to be critical all the time. All of these have now been
#
completely absorbed into the educational-industrial complex. Let's be really clear about this.
#
So in the educational-industrial complex, where is the time to reflect? And what is a scholar,
#
if not someone who labors and reflects? Labors in the archive, labors with what they arrive at,
#
discover, labors with the battling interpretations in their own head, labors with acknowledging
#
their debts to the past, their breaks with the past, crafting ways of thinking about the past,
#
their breaks with the past, crafting ways of doing things which reflect this experience
#
of engagement, which are imaginative. If you read people like David Shulman or Velcher Narayendra
#
or this wonderful new scholar, new for me, Arik Moran, who has been working on Himachal,
#
and the queens of Himachal, the Pahadi queens during the British era, these things take time.
#
They take time. And they take time not because you spent hours looking at the computer screen,
#
but they take time to… Sometimes I read, read, read, research, research, research, visit temples,
#
temples, temples, and suddenly this essay of 5,000 words comes out over two, three weeks,
#
very cogently and lucidly. Now, are you saying that it only took me two or three weeks to write
#
something or did it actually take years of preparing and doing and preparing and doing?
#
Where is that time? And then if you're funded in a certain way, as far as I know, money of the
#
people who are at a certain stage in their career, they are constantly battling for grants.
#
They're constantly applying for job talks or conference papers or this. And some of it's
#
very productive and very generative, but a lot of it is just getting in the way of being
#
scholarly. And why is being scholarly important? That's the next question we have to ask,
#
because being a scholar respects learning, the process of learning. It really respects
#
the process of learning. Now, how you represent that process is very much in your hands to some
#
extent. Is it a book? Is it a podcast? Is it the way you teach? Is it the way you treat
#
buildings in a policy discussion? And being a scholar means that you're willing to go back
#
to beginner's mind on a regular basis. And to me, that's very different from the intense pressure
#
to have certitude that academia puts on people. I am not interested in so much in certitudes
#
because the fun is over. And then teaching is very different. Teaching is a real commitment.
#
I have students who have been my students for 20 years. I spend a lot of time with students,
#
and the fruit of that labor of teaching for them and for you happens over a long time.
#
And there's nothing as rewarding in work as watching a book you've written make someone really
#
happy or deep. Deep is better than happy. Or a student feel like they've arrived at something
#
very profound for themselves. It's really important. Yeah, I think that's the distinction.
#
The distinction between industrialized academic work is the production of certitude and scholarly
#
work is the claiming of a beginner's mind as a wonderful existential space.
#
So is it then sort of fair to summarize this by saying that academics are forced onto these
#
grooves. They have to go along those grooves and they have to keep moving all the time.
#
And if you just talk of incentives, there are incentives that drive them towards all the time
#
publishing and producing and trying to be different. There might also be incentives that force them to
#
conform to a certain way of thinking that might be fashionable within academia. Whereas if you're a
#
scholar, those incentives don't exist. You are just in search of the truth in your own way,
#
at your own speed. And that's what drives you. And would that be a correct summation?
#
It's very stark the way you've painted it. But I am a person of my time. So there are many,
#
many academics who do wonderful work. My critique is more of academia than academics in general.
#
But I do feel that I pay attention to what they're saying because what they're saying
#
and how they're saying and where they're saying it is important to shaping the things,
#
the environment in which I'm saying things. So for example, I read a lot of things that
#
come out of university presses. Thank you, university presses. I also think that university
#
presses will not be the only place I publish. So I don't publish only in university presses.
#
I write in different avenues because I want different kinds of audiences. Even my engagement
#
with the JCB prize was for me to come out of one space and enter another space.
#
Right? All these things are really, really important. Yeah. I think being a scholar
#
is a deeply romantic space that you must allow yourself to have. It's deeply romantic. The
#
romance of reading something late into the night or getting up very early and writing,
#
of being very thrilled to connect to. So I work on medieval material or I work on
#
like that essay I sent to you, one of the founders of the Indian studio pottery movement.
#
These are people that existed before my time. But if I give myself the time and the space
#
and I'm observing myself, I'm observing what I'm reading, I'm observing the things they've made,
#
I'm reading other people's writing on Japanese studio pottery or something or something or
#
something or something. Something happens. And that something happening takes time and space.
#
I want to see an academia that promotes that. I'm not sure that that's where academia is headed
#
right now. So we are headed now for a quick commercial break. And when we come back,
#
I have lots more to ask you and lots more to double click on from what you already mentioned.
#
One of the things I've learned most over the last year and a half is sharing my insights on
#
my two greatest passions, writing and podcasting. And I'd love to invite you to be a part of this
#
journey. Registration is now open for the January cohort of the art of clear writing,
#
where over four webinars on four Saturdays, I teach all I know about the art and craft of
#
writing compelling prose, much interaction, many exercises. And at the end of it, you get to join
#
the clear writing community and online community formed by the 18 previous cohorts of this course.
#
In that community, we have book clubs, workshops, writing prompts with feedback and much else.
#
I am also doing a special cohort of my podcasting course, the art of podcasting,
#
which I had conducted for three cohorts last year before I took a break. All my learnings from five
#
years of the scene and the unseen in three webinars over three Sundays for more details.
#
And to sign up for my writing course, head on over to indiancar.com slash clear writing.
#
To sign up for my podcasting course, go to scene unseen dot i n slash learn. These links will also
#
be at the bottom of the show notes. These are exciting times for the creator economy. And I'd
#
love to help you be a part of it. Welcome back to the scene and the unseen. I'm chatting with
#
Annapurna Garimela about whom, you know, I was telling one of our fellow fellow jurors the other
#
day that if you speak for more than 30 seconds, I feel like I learned something new, which is a
#
combination of how insightful you are. And also your world is so different from mine. So I just
#
feel like I'm learning so much even, even during this conversation. And what have you learned?
#
You've given me a lot to reflect on. So I don't want to put my finger on things that I have
#
necessarily learned, but this is a conversation I will revisit. I know it. And I'm sure many of my
#
listeners will feel the same way. And for a moment, I'll move from the subject of you speaking
#
to object speaking, which is, you know, that point you brought up earlier, which is so fascinating
#
to me because we take everything around us in a sense for granted. In fact, you know, I was,
#
I was feeling very jealous earlier when you were talking about your innate tendency to notice
#
things deeply. And if there's one thing that I consciously try to make myself do more, it's
#
notice because I don't notice. I can go through an entire meal and somebody will ask me, what did
#
that taste like? And to my shame, very often I won't know because it's just, you're just going
#
through the motions and one wonders if, you know, just the world around us. Like I remember when I
#
traveled, I had once traveled through Pakistan in 2006 when I was covering the cricket tour there.
#
And I was just looking at everything with such intense eyes, like walking through Lahore or when
#
we went to Peshawar and we went to bid down the Khyber pass and everything I saw just had so much
#
meaning and value for me. Or I was putting meaning into it because I was desperate to find things
#
interesting and find things beautiful. And then I come back to Delhi and I realized that everything
#
is invisible. It's a seen and the unseen. And I guess to some extent, I think that is what you
#
were alluding to earlier. In the context of object speaking, I'd really like you to elaborate on that
#
so they can speak to me as well. I want to say something first before I get to object speaking
#
because it's tight, but it's something you just said. It's about going to Lahore and noticing
#
things. Why do we notice actually? What are the conditions for noticing? I think, well,
#
there's often the conditions where, you know, you have a bomb blast or some horrible thing happens.
#
Yeah. There's noticing because a technology is or a social framework is developed around that,
#
which requires noticing. For example, the marriage photograph, right? So that's a form of noticing.
#
The selfie is a form of noticing to some extent. It might also be a deep form of blinding too.
#
But I think that to be noticing, to have noticing as a form of the ethos of life,
#
you have to be intentional. So you told me when you went to Pakistan,
#
you were very intentional in your looking. You didn't take anything for granted.
#
So you saw everything. I think that intention to be present and to look,
#
to notice, notice isn't just passive looking. Noticing, if you ask me, it isn't necessarily
#
detached either. Like there's this notion of a writer being detached and observing life and
#
then recording it. No. Noticing is intentional. It's intentional. It's intentional. It's
#
intentional. It is aware. And it is aware of both thing you're noticing and yourself as you're
#
noticing. So there is a kind of flowing dialogue between this. And then of course, there can be
#
many things that are happening in that situation and you will be connected. What that does,
#
if you ask me, is begin to populate your world in a very different way. It isn't linear then.
#
And that's how objects start speaking to you because you start understanding, noticing things.
#
So my Japanese art history professor introduced me to Ogata Kenzan, who is one of the great
#
ceramists of early modern Japan. So he made many things, but he made this very beautiful tea cup,
#
which is considered a national treasure. And one day I will go to Japan and maybe I'll get to see
#
it. But it's just one cup and it has all the kind of, it touches all the criteria that the Japanese
#
people feel is a great coalescence of beauty, great coalescence that allows for beauty to be
#
there. So there is a tea cup. So this tea cup is no handles. It can fit in the palm of your hand.
#
It is for a tea ceremony. There would have been, as you're studying this, you would learn that
#
there would be a tea house. You would learn that by this point, a aesthetic of very noble, elite
#
people of exploring humble things had developed in Japan. So this world of the great, luxurious
#
world of samurais and the shogunate worlds and all this thing would also have this other component.
#
It's not anti to that world, but it's another component. So you would court humble experiences
#
like sitting on the floor and a bunch of people gathering, but also friendship. You might learn
#
with your Zen master a tea ceremony, all these sort of things. So here's this tea cup that Ogata Kenzan
#
made. No, I'm not a scholar of Ogata Kenzan. I am very knowledgeable about what I took away from
#
being confronted by Ogata Kenzan's tea cup, which is that that lesson has traveled with me. I was
#
23 when I first encountered him and his tea cup that traveled with me. It reconciles and it brings
#
into confrontation all the things which are considered polarities, luxury and humility,
#
worldliness and somebody who retracts themselves from the world. So all of this is there in this
#
one tea cup and also the tea cup itself. It's the world that produced this tea cup. All of this is
#
there and that tea cup itself is designed in such a way that the way that the glaze has emerged
#
is so accidentally beautiful that it fits into this quality that's Japanese, the qualities that
#
Japanese aesthetics loves, mono no wari, the idea of accidental beauty and the idea of
#
things which are broken, which can be repaired very beautifully like with gold. Like when a tea cup
#
breaks, you can repair it with a technique called kintsugi, where you use gold to emphasize the
#
crack, not hide it, but to emphasize the crack. And of course, I'm not the first person to talk
#
about this. There are people who have fallen in love with Japanese ideas and objects because
#
they're confronted with these ideas. But for a 23-year-old to confront this was really
#
important. So this object, I wrote about it. My semester paper was on this object and then
#
I kept myself, I've always been very close to this idea of thinking, because you see art history as
#
a field is deeply complex and contradictory. You're working with objects often made by people
#
who are not a very economically well-off standing. They're often deeply vulnerable to power.
#
They could be beheaded, they could be exiled, they could be kidnapped and brought. Like some
#
of the most beautiful carpets that we know are populations made by populations of weavers who
#
were essentially kidnapped and brought to a new city because the ruler of that city said,
#
I want this technology, this talent, this art to be in my city for a new economic product,
#
or because it's prestigious or whatever. At the same time, art history is full of institutions
#
and people who come from unbelievably elite backgrounds. So now in the last, the struggle
#
has been ever since the civil rights movement and in some, to some extent, the post-colonial movement
#
and nationalist movement to question this. So Rabindranath Tagore did it in his own way.
#
Other people did it in their own way. But at my point, the way I get it is through the civil
#
rights movement and the feminist movement and the post-colonial movement. But I never really
#
but I never really put everything together in a neatly neat ideological package in a shelf
#
on which to put this teacup, right? So what I get out of this is
#
we get it, we get, I have a small organization that I founded and I run with my colleague
#
Sindura. And we get asked to do curate an exhibition about the, for a museum,
#
which no longer exists in some sense. And we decided let's do a history of a material.
#
So this is unusual in and of itself. A history of clay in India after 1947.
#
So how are you going to tell this story? Clay is a ubiquitous material. Indus Valley is built on
#
clay, right? Indus Valley, Harappan civilization, whatever you want to call it, it's built on clay.
#
But clay is, is completely transformed in value and meaning and purpose at the temperatures that
#
you fire it, what you use to fire it, how you choose to work with its ephemerality and how you
#
choose to work with its capacity to be permanent, right? We all know this in some sort of tacit way
#
when we immerse our Ganeshas, when we break the Kullard, when we decide to buy better quality
#
brick, all these things. But if you decide to sit and meditate on this quality of clay and write a
#
history of how the qualities of clay are inborn or given to it or over time, then it's very
#
fascinating to me. So it was my colleague who curated this show primarily, but there were things
#
that I also worked on because we curated it together, but the book that she wrote that
#
came out of the exhibition is hers. So we, we decided to organize it into some sections.
#
And one of the sections was, was about studio pottery. And in studio pottery, there was a table
#
for the people that would be considered the founders of Indian studio pottery. Among them
#
were people like Devi Prasad, the Gandhian, Nirmala Patwardhan from Pune, Ira Chaudhary here from Delhi
#
and Gursharan Singhji, who is the late Gursha, all these people are dead except for Ira Chaudhary.
#
So Gursharan Singhji was here in Delhi for a long time. In fact, there's a Delhi blue apartment,
#
it's still there next to Ames. So he was a man who came from Jammu to Delhi and started working in
#
Delhi. He studied geology and his father's friend was ran a brick factory here. And he said, I'm
#
making tons of bricks. Why was he making tons of bricks? Because New Delhi was being built.
#
That Delhi that's being broken down and torn apart in some sense was being made by
#
a group of contractors, including Gursharan Singh's grandfather and several other people.
#
And this man, Ram Singh Kavli, was a subcontractor to these five major Indian contractors
#
who were producing the buildings that Baker and Lachens had designed, among other people.
#
So he's here, a 19-year-old man walking around working in the brick factory. They're also
#
observing, and he's also observing the city. And he sees this blue everywhere in the monuments
#
because the British, as they redesigned Delhi, are keeping things which have a slight
#
masala to them. And one of the things that's luscious and delicious is this blue color
#
that you see in the tombs in Lodi Gardens and stuff like that. So he's a naturalist.
#
And he also falls in love with this Kavli's daughter, and he asks for her hand in marriage.
#
And he says, well, you can marry her, but you have to go to Japan because Japan was
#
the big center for ceramic production then, one of the big centers. Germany was another one.
#
Go and learn how to do commercial ceramic production. So he's in love with this girl,
#
and he wants to do commercial ceramic production. So he went to Japan, and the principal there said,
#
you know, you have to learn Japanese. So he started learning Japanese. And he fell,
#
while learning at this institute, while learning commercial production, he fell in with the group
#
of people who were at the foundational moment of minge, which is the Japanese arts and crafts
#
movement, which was responding to Japanese own history of industrialization. So the arts and
#
crafts movement in England was responding to the rampant industrialization of England
#
and the degradation of English crafts. So people like William Morris were protesting against it.
#
And also, of course, the entry of products made in India, raw material that was taken from India,
#
sent to England, made there, and then sent back to India. What was this doing to Indian English
#
production, whatever. So an arts and crafts movement started where you would labor and make
#
beautiful objects and really make crafts. Of course, the irony of it is that you can never
#
go back. So these products were exorbitantly expensive because that's the nature of post or
#
industrialization. That's one of the characteristics of industrialization, that it uses craft to make
#
craft almost impossible for ordinary people to own. So similarly, Japan had gone through
#
industrialization. So this minge movement has started. And this minge movement
#
had people who were Japanese, like Shoji Hamada and ideologues and an Englishman who had been
#
living in a very famous person for his own leadership in the global studio pottery movement,
#
Bernard Leach. And Gursharan Singh happened to fall into that group. And this group really
#
praised the handmade, the local. They wanted to de-emphasize authorship. They wanted to think
#
of the artisan craftsman, the artist craftsman, all these very romantic, very complex and internally
#
contradictory ideas. And Gursharan Singh is absorbing all of this. And he's very, very
#
intelligent man, deeply intelligent man, even at that age. He comes back to India and he starts
#
work. He marries Chattarkar, Ram Singh Kabli's daughter. He works in the factory. The factory
#
was situated where Willingdon Airport is there, and now it's Subterjan Airport. And all these
#
kilns were there and he would have been seeing lots of things. And then, of course, this whole
#
world changes when New Delhi is constructed and India gains its independence. The big factories
#
close. And Gursharan Singh, before independence, had already left and was working in various
#
places, Kota, Ambala, setting up ceramic institutes, working as a geologist in Bundi, actually, for the
#
King of Bundi, in Bundi State, different, different places. And then he comes back in 1946 to Delhi,
#
or slightly later, he comes back to Delhi. And then he starts Delhi Blue Pottery. He's retired
#
from government service and he starts Delhi Blue Pottery. Now, this is a studio pottery place. And
#
here's where objects have been speaking to him all the time, the blue in the blue tiles in the
#
monuments, the bricks he's making. We don't know what they were saying to him till this moment.
#
He invites Sharada Akhil, who was a Shantiniketan actor and who came, an artist and also theater
#
person, he came and he designs the tiles for his new house in Delhi. So when he starts Delhi Blue
#
Pottery in the new way, after independence, he's confronted that, you know, India made this rule
#
that you couldn't import ceramics anymore, that in fact, domestic ceramics had to take the place
#
because we didn't have any foreign exchange. So only crafts, the crafts we sold gave us foreign
#
exchange. And not very different from the British, by the way. So he starts designing products and
#
he's very smart. So what does Delhi have that needs a lot of products? Already when the railroads
#
had come and Delhi became major terminus, various scholars have pointed out, the culture of having,
#
and the hotel started, the culture of having china for dining had started. Gradually as Delhi's
#
elites, the lalas and the rich elite of Delhi were transformed, they started having tiles,
#
tiled images of gods and tiles and ceramic plates. All these things started coming,
#
ceramic plates, all these things started coming into their household. So that culture had already
#
started. But after independence, the big thing was there were all these embassies that were being
#
built and all these people who had dinner parties here. And they needed dinnerware because you didn't
#
serve dinner to people in tallies, you served it in crockery. So he started making things
#
that people like to buy and vases and things, but they were on his terms. And he worked deeply with
#
a potter named Abdullah who had the secret, the formula for Delhi blue. So it became a signature
#
style for him. So then for that show that I was curating, we saw a tea set he had made. He made
#
it for a Chinese restaurant in Karnat place, lots of things. So this Chinese set is made in a clay
#
body called stoneware, which is not a native clay body. It's a clay body that comes from Japan.
#
So he had introduced it because he had this training. So he brought it from Japan.
#
Now it's a high temperature fired clay, so it's not porous. So it's unlike a coolant which starts
#
absorbing the chai, this does not absorb the chai. It sits, you glaze it and then it's sealed in some
#
sense. So he decides, remember how old is tea? Tea itself is not more than 60, 70 years old as a
#
beverage to drink in India. As a widespread drinking thing, it's in the 1920s I think that CTC
#
becomes a technology that allows for the finer, cheaper kind of tea to be made. So tea is growing
#
every bit. So the coolant itself is a new invention. So there's been a culture of tea sets in India.
#
Indian people are making tea sets in silver. They're making them also in bone china, a problem
#
because it has bone in it. And we're a vegetarian country by and large. So in South India,
#
stainless steel tea sets start emerging as a response to this. So all these objects are
#
telling you about the society, what the concerns of the society are. And the kind of tea sets that
#
are emerging here are the version of the tea set. Remember tea came from China to Europe to England
#
and then of course from India. They all emerge from the British idea of drinking tea or the
#
European in which you have a cup which holds the beverage and you have a handle and it's an
#
aristocratic drink in its origins. You hold it and you have a silhouette that your hand makes
#
with this teacup. So all of this is possible because of the size of the ring on the teacup.
#
If you have a beer mug or a tankard it has big rings so that your your knuckles fully enter it
#
and fold over it, right? So that tells you the nature of the hand that is carrying that mug to
#
the mouth. The way that the silhouette is, like your muscle would bulge when you hold that tankard
#
full of beer. When you hold a teacup you don't need to have any muscle barely exertion, bare exertion.
#
The Japanese way of thinking about tea is very different. You hold it in your hand.
#
It is something precious. It warms your hands in a very cold climate so the contact between
#
the hand and the hot beverage and the cup is less mediated by the handle. You have it entirely in
#
your hand. Gurshanji has seen both the Kular, he would have seen the English teacup and he would
#
have seen the Japanese teacup. So when he decides to make teacups and he's been part of Mingay which
#
emphasizes the local, he's also been part of the Swadeshi world because the Swadeshi movement was
#
big the years he came to Delhi. So local is a big thing. So what does he do? In Ambala he designs
#
a tea set. The teapot is designed based on a Kamandalu. A Kamandalu is a water carrying pot that
#
ascetics mendicants use to carry holy water. So it privileges the liquid inside that vessel.
#
Kamandalu is in some way elevates the liquid inside the vessel. The liquid itself might be
#
sacred like the Ganga or the Narmada or and because it's in this beautiful pot shaped like
#
a cow shaped like something made out of precious materials is further elevated and the person who's
#
carrying it, it has a handle on it. You would put it on your forearm. You will see hundreds
#
of rishis and mendicants carrying these around and he takes that as the inspiration for his
#
teapot. So local is covered. It's made in India, Swadeshi. Then he has to decide but it's made
#
not out of bone china, not out of terracruda which is unfired clay. It is not low fired clay like a
#
kul but it is stoneware. So from Japan. Now he cannot import all the materials to make Japanese
#
stoneware. So if you do an analysis of that teacup, that tea set, you will understand that he
#
digested all of this knowledge and experience, found local clay bodies, local minerals, synthesized
#
all of this to produce a local clay body that had Japan in it, that had England in it, and that had
#
the Indic world in it. And then this clay body, he has to decide the shape of the teacup. So I
#
remember my Ogata Kenzan again very deeply and I see that his teacup has a handle but the shape of
#
the teacup is somewhere between the English teacup, the Kulari-ish kind of shape, and the
#
Kula-ish kind of shape because to produce vast quantities he'll have people helping him to throw
#
this, and the Japanese teacup. So somehow he's mediated all these anxieties. We're a new Indian
#
nation, we have dinner parties, and we have English in the way we present ourselves.
#
He's producing something that doesn't look English, it has no floral designs, it's not white bone china,
#
it doesn't have any meat in it, any bone in it, nothing. He's done all these things. And when you
#
hold that teacup, all you have to do is listen to what it's telling you. And then you can start
#
doing this research or you can do all this research and come to the teacup and say,
#
how do you hold the whole story, all the stories of the clay and Gursharanji and the histories of
#
tea in yourself as you're in my hand? And that's how objects speak. And when you see that tea,
#
that warm tea in that cup, with milk in it, because Japanese don't drink it with milk and
#
the English don't necessarily drink it with milk. But the way the tea was marketed in India by
#
Lipton, door to door, they went and told people, because people drank milk in Northern India. They
#
told them how to mix it with sugar and milk to make it more marketable. So here we are,
#
people drinking milky tea, which has a particular color in this cup that could be anywhere from a
#
mossy green, to brown, to a deep deli blue. And it looks really nothing like Japanese,
#
nothing like English, nothing like a Kullad. It is its own thing. And we, as I, as an art historian,
#
as a person engaging with this deeply, have to be able to listen to those things,
#
what it's telling me, and respond to it and articulate it.
#
So you've just shown me the universe in a tea cup, and you asked me earlier, what have I learned
#
from you? And this is, you've added a new layer of appreciation that I'll have when I look at a
#
tea cup the next time. Yes, you should. And I don't drink tea, so it won't be too soon.
#
No, you can look at your coffee cup then. I can look at my coffee cup then. No, no, it's so kind
#
of fascinating. Now, okay, I'm going to ask you a sort of a provocative general question that can
#
also dive back to this. I just remembered this joke that I heard in school, which is in the 1980s,
#
or maybe early 90s when I was just in college. And it's a joke about M.F. Hussain. And the joke
#
is that this rich industrialist goes to Hussain and tells him that I want to commission a painting
#
from you. Will you paint something for me? And Hussain isn't feeling particularly creative at
#
that moment, but he says, okay. And after the guy is gone, he just spreads out a lot of red paint
#
on the floor. He takes off his clothes, gets naked, sits down on it. Then he goes and sits on a
#
canvas. He calls it Apple It sells for a crore. Okay, that's a joke, right? And my question here
#
is this, that when I think of art, and by art, I mean, you know, paintings, fine art, that kind of
#
stuff, with any other art form, like literature and music and cinema, I just feel that beyond the
#
point, what I think of them is not mediated by elites, what artists like what seems to happen
#
with fine art is that you become a painter. But then whether you're considered a great artist or
#
not a great artist doesn't depend so much on what, you know, reaction you might necessarily have on
#
the general public out there, the army like me, but on a group of narrow elites, who might be
#
driven by a certain kind of ideology or politics, who will then pass judgment on the art, and
#
someone becomes a great artist and someone becomes just a craftsman and is forgotten by time.
#
And it's a very small group of people, kind of deciding this is not a larger process. And, you
#
know, if you don't fit the flavor of the moment, you could just be lost. Like I have actually spoken
#
to artists who've pointed out to what critics have written about them in praise, and said that I
#
didn't understand what he was saying. Because these are just artists who are just doing work
#
they love for whatever reasons they love doing. And then, you know, you'll have critics and the
#
gatekeepers apply their own kind of lenses to it. And in that sense, I think that world of fine art
#
seems to me to be very different from all these other artistic worlds, where someone in a far
#
corner somewhere can write a book, and me, random person can read it, and, you know, react to it,
#
and it's not dependent on someone else's judgment. I mean, this sounds really negative. I'm not being
#
entirely critical, you know, like even when it comes to poetry for the first time, it's
#
like even when it comes to poetry, for example, you know, before I really got into poetry,
#
I would think that some poetry is like this, that I just don't get it. What the hell is going on?
#
And I remember reading Mary Oliver's great book, Poetry Handbook, and rereading the poem Red Wheel
#
Barrow. She deepened my appreciation of it to the extent that I tear up when I read that poem,
#
that there's no reason for me to, it's not about any concrete thing, but it just has such a powerful
#
impact on me. And I understand that a lot of art, which, you know, is not accessible, can be
#
approached in that way. But this question struck me because earlier you spoke about how that art
#
wasn't something just restricted to the privileged or whatever, and books were because of printing
#
press, and, you know, not everybody could, you know, necessarily read and write. So what would
#
be your response to this rambling question, which I did not intend to be offensive, but
#
I am now worried that. I really, really like not being offended easily. It gives me in a lot of
#
space. And then I can really have nice conversations. So thank you for asking your question.
#
There's a lot in that question. And as you rightly said, it's rambling, but it also has
#
threads of, which are not unique to you. These are large pressing concerns that historians
#
and critics and people have taken very seriously and deeply. So I think you're going to have to
#
help me unpack your own questions as I talk to your question, as I engage with it.
#
Okay. Let me, let me- No, I'm happy to answer it.
#
Let me add to it in another context, which is the context of music. I read this very interesting
#
thread recently about Billy Joel and his first album, Piano Man, right? Now what happened when
#
that album came out? And the album was brought out by a record label. It came out, but the record
#
label itself wasn't enthusiastic. Radio stations were simply not playing it. So they were going to
#
give up on the album and not give Joel any more work. And he was basically finished at that point
#
till one random enthusiast fell in love with it so much that he got in touch with the record label
#
and said, why the hell aren't you promoting this? And they just weren't interested. So this guy,
#
and I'll post that thread from my show notes, went around to different radio stations. And at
#
one point with a big radio station, he did a quid pro quo deal of some sort with somebody so that
#
they would play the record for a day. And they started playing Piano Man for a day. And then
#
listeners started phoning in and saying, we want more of this. What is this? This is amazing.
#
And then it blew up. And Billy Joel's had the career that he's had. Now, the truth of the matter
#
is that this is art. This is not something that is appealing to crass popular sentiment. It is
#
great art. I mean, that's what I would say about Billy Joel's work and certainly Piano Man. And it
#
would have been completely lost if it hadn't had a chance to get democratized in this way and to
#
reach a larger audience in this way. Similarly, to continue with music, I think of Johann Sebastian
#
Bach, who was not a big figure in his own lifetime. And after he died, in the decades after he died,
#
there was this kind of Bach Renaissance or whatever, I forget the exact term that people
#
give to it, where he became elevated in our consciousness to become the legend he is.
#
And you would imagine he was always a legend. No, in his lifetime, he was nothing. The elites of the
#
day, who were the arbiters of taste, did not care for Bach. And it took these centuries for him to
#
come. And with all of those, with books, with music, you can talk about what about the unseen
#
talents who never quite managed to emerge. But at least in those fields, you had a better chance.
#
In art, it seems to me that if you don't fit a particular conception of art that elites may have,
#
you're not going to make it in the fine art world. And a lot of talented people might today say that
#
that's irrelevant anyway, we'll do art in a different way. So yeah, so that's kind of my elaboration.
#
Okay, you said it well. So I can answer this in so many different ways. So I don't even know
#
where to start. Let's try all of them. So first of all, I was never interested in the distinction
#
between fine art and art. This distinction was produced at a certain moment in time,
#
let's say in India when the colonial art schools were set up, JJ, Calcutta, Madras, Lahore.
#
So because you had to produce a population that was trained in a certain way to produce craft,
#
or you had to produce a population that need to be saved by middle class and elite people in order
#
to preserve inheritances and heritages. And then there were going to be a group of people who would
#
be fine artists who would help it become more civilized or modern or whatever, depending on
#
which language or which kind of things. So I wasn't interested in it except as a historical
#
artifact. So if we set that aside, what do we have then? What we have is a field of production,
#
a field of thought, a field of sensuous experiences, a field of aesthetic proclivities.
#
If that's the case, then I'm interested in everything. And I've been this way from the time
#
I could, because I come from that generation, I think partly, but also because I'm listening
#
to Hindi film music and I'm listening to D. K. Patamal, but I'm also coming from a world
#
from a world where art making wasn't as thoroughly industrialized
#
as it has become through certain kinds of technological forms over the last century.
#
Those things were still available to us in India in the 1950s and 60s and 70s when we were born.
#
When I was born, 1966, I was born in. So I think that something about your perspective is also the
#
experience of living in a certain kind of world. Now, then there is this whole question of taste.
#
So here you have Pierre Bourdieu, the French sociologist who talks about constructing social
#
distinction and taste and all these sort of things. So knowing what is good art didn't constitute
#
a form of social distinction in the world that I lived in.
#
For most people in India, it's caste or much cruder forms of capital demonstration,
#
much more obvious forms of capital, not cruder, but art can be pretty damn crude.
#
Forms of distinction are there. So that's one set of answers. Another set of answers are
#
I should clarify that this wasn't sort of a challenge to you per se.
#
No, I don't think that's a challenge.
#
I understand that your interests are much broader.
#
I think we're discussing.
#
Yeah, so I'm talking more about the art world.
#
I understand that you're-
#
Yeah, so I come to the art world. So I come to the art world. I'm coming there,
#
but we have to map this ground out first. So who goes to art school? So I told you that early on,
#
art schools were set up. There was a population of people who were hereditary craftspeople who
#
were brought to teach. They were potters, let's say from Multan, who were brought to JJ to teach
#
people how to make art pottery. They were people who were weavers, came from weavers families,
#
and they learned weaving in their own households and their own communities,
#
but had to go to school for weaving in order to produce the way the British wanted them to produce.
#
So there is a set of systems that started developing in our country, in the world over,
#
in the modern world, which created certain groups as elite producers and certain people as less
#
than elite producers. Simultaneously, it produced elite consumers, elite patrons, whatever.
#
Patronage was, of course, elite patronage is a much older phenomenon, but elite consumers.
#
And then there are people who want to affiliate with certain kinds of eliteness because
#
they would like to be an elite art critic or whatever, right? So there's a production and
#
a proliferation of class, classifications, distinctions. So words like kitsch have been
#
thought about very deeply, words like popular categories, like popular culture.
#
I work with the category called vernacular art. All these things are deeply, deeply problematic
#
and deeply important because they've shaped entire art worlds. So after independence,
#
the who goes to art school, very often they're people who come from families. They also might
#
come up. It's a great melting pot also from other kinds of families, people who have some
#
modicum of education, at least let's put the common denominator is there. It's primarily men
#
also because women have always have practiced some form of art or the other in India,
#
either embroidery if they're middle-class women or cooking or painting of some kind like Alpana
#
or these are certain. So certain art forms like Tagore's great intervention was to say all of
#
these forms could become part of the curriculum of Shantiniketan and we could have an institution
#
called Sriniketan that would also cultivate these forms. So art is being defined by that
#
institution to be in a much broader way. It's when MS University, this is our art world.
#
I'm going to talk about our art world because our meaning, the art world we have here in India.
#
So when we have MS University fine arts department set up, it is set up with a great
#
nobility of intention. Hansa Mehta was a great woman and she was deeply involved in setting up
#
the program. The early people who were behind it like Markand Bhatt, who had come from the Barnes
#
Foundation in Philadelphia back, had spent a lot of time with the great modernist collection there.
#
So there was an idea of what would constitute not the Bombay progressives, not the Shantiniketan way
#
of being progressive, not the colonial art school way of being progressive, what would be this new
#
language that would be taught here. So of course there were all sorts of things that happened there.
#
K.G. Subramaniam insisted on bringing lots of craft and Ghulam Ahmed Sheikh who also taught
#
there later on, was very interested in promoting an engagement with Indian manuscript painting.
#
But in the process, and there were people like Bhupen Kakar who were not formally trained but
#
were deeply interested in using the medium of painting to talk about unbelievably complex
#
things like being a gay man in middle-class Baroda.
#
A.M. And he wrote lovely short stories as well.
#
K.G. And he wrote lovely short stories. And when I think of his painting, You Can't Please All,
#
I just cry. I cry. It's this man looking out, his naked body on a balcony, looking out
#
into the square. And it's based on that parable of the donkey and people wanting to be in conformity
#
so much that they want to please all. And he's standing there reflecting on all of this and
#
realizing at that moment in life, it's a gay man. It's not a young body that's in that painting.
#
You can't please all. And I saw this for the first time in person at the end of the book.
#
And I really think that all these possibilities were there and they continue to be there.
#
But we did not have an art market like this. We had ideology. Ideology and we had teaching
#
lineages. We had cross-affiliations. So if you went to Shanthi Niketan, you might come to teach
#
at Baroda and then go back to teach at Shanthi Niketan. You might go and teach in Rajasthan.
#
Or in Vishakhapatnam or start a school in Hyderabad or wherever. But the art market really
#
starts growing. So if we look at an institution like Kemmold in Bombay, it created a place for
#
people to sell paintings, but it didn't see itself as constructing an investor's market, right? I
#
mean, there was no possibility. The
#
TIFR, Homi Bhabha and the Tata's... They were the big patrons of art in Bombay
#
and they made institutional collections of the Tata's art. And they were huge grille
#
artists from all over the world. And obviously we al still want to get onto defenders of art
#
Homi Baba and the Tatas, they were the big patrons of art in Bombay and they made institutional
#
collections which are now unbelievably valuable in terms of monetary ideas.
#
But when the art market comes, and this is where we must go back to our dear Karl Marx,
#
capital changes social relationships, right?
#
So social relationships, what is an art world but a set of social relationships that are
#
And here it's very important to keep marking out distinction and in this way it's no different
#
from books, it's no different from music.
#
It's just that the realm, the geographic expanse of art making that comes out of formal art
#
academic teaching, do you know only 2% of students who graduate from art schools actually
#
become professional artists in the sense of working, showing work in galleries, the rest
#
of them become set designers, they might do puja pandas, they might become graphic designers,
#
they might do animation, they might do so many other things.
#
So this 2% is, but so the largest population of artists are not these artists, they're
#
the artists who do temple sculptures and who do this and this and this and this.
#
For the largest population after farmers in India is weavers and textile workers.
#
So if we look at the idea of culture work as one idea and art production in the gallery
#
sense of it is just one facet of it, first it changes our framework.
#
Now you're talking about people feeling like why am I left out of the game?
#
And it is a game in some sense, an economic game.
#
Because it's in market and so many people and I'm not the person who can speak the most
#
interestingly but you get yourself an art gallerist who is willing to talk honestly,
#
their words are worth are like pure bullion compared to mine because they really know
#
the inside information on things.
#
But you know what they would say so you can tell me.
#
I don't know if I know what they would say but I would say that I know how they're positioned
#
What I feel is that the way that the art world developed in India in the last let's say 20,
#
30 years is not the way Kemol started.
#
It's not the way a Mary Boone in New York or Alfred Stiegler or any of these great supporters.
#
What you have is a bunch of people who are kind of interested in something.
#
So a lot of culture work in India is supported by industrial families through their women
#
It's a gendered project, culture.
#
And this is not going to make anyone happy but I must say this.
#
I'm not the only one to say it but I will say it.
#
Until very recently much of this fine art world that you're talking about was supported
#
Now this is black money coming from buyers.
#
It's black money that artists are being paid and it's black money that's being laundered
#
through this business called art, sale and resale.
#
So when you have this it constructs very little space for intellectual.
#
So how do economics impact the space for intellectual in art?
#
So there's very little room for investing in something that's risky.
#
A lot of it is based on nepotism.
#
You scratch my back, I'll scratch your back.
#
A lot of it is also the situation you're talking about is based on obfuscating this rather
#
What part of India is not based on black money?
#
Let's be really clear about this.
#
Investing this through opaque discourse which is unbelievably unreadable.
#
It's hard to understand.
#
Then art education itself does not prepare artists to intellect about their own work
#
and that's the saddest thing.
#
When we think about early artists they wrote their manifestos.
#
A manifesto is a deep act of intellection.
#
You are proposing something.
#
It's a propositional thing, a proposal for an art world, for a kind of art community,
#
for a kind of economics, for whatever it is, a language.
#
Many artists were also pedagogues so again you have to think this through.
#
They also wrote books about it, Paul Klee, K.G. Subramaniam, Rabindranath Tagore.
#
All these people wrote books about what does it mean to teach, to make, to live, to think
#
So you have a group of people who are today not taught very well to intellect about their
#
So it very quickly moves to how do you represent yourself.
#
Once you jump into that act of representing yourself it's like you're already in a selfie
#
place without self-knowledge.
#
So then the people that have really deep self-knowledge are really spending the time thinking.
#
Sometimes they are able to take up a lot of space because there's also a market for the
#
thinking artist, the intellecting artist.
#
Now whether they're thinking something deeply original all the time that's a different question
#
And I'm not sure how much originality is possible sometimes either.
#
I think there's work that is so interesting that it makes you think about thinking.
#
There's some work that's so interesting that makes you think about the idea of originality.
#
But whether complete originality in some sense of having nothing, no connection, so we generous
#
emerging I think that's almost impossible.
#
So I think my rough provocation has led to a subtle critique from you which kind of went
#
in the same direction, right?
#
I'm critiquing your critique while saying the same thing you're saying in some ways.
#
Thank you for that because you'll improve my critique the next time I make it by doing
#
But I think that in all of this there are people who are making unbelievably interesting
#
And how is that possible?
#
I'm a product of, let me put it this way, they're making choices that are hard choices
#
I don't think it was easy to be Nazarene Mohammadi when everybody else was practicing a different
#
She was doing this like really, really abstract work.
#
And I don't think she was in the pocket of any great institution in the West either.
#
It took her many decades after her death for her work to gain that kind of recognition.
#
And that's also the market.
#
So I'm going to commit you with another question where I think we won't exactly be in agreement.
#
You've been sort of decrying and lamenting what you called industrialization and commercialization
#
and the market and all of those things.
#
I would go the other way and I would say that for artists I would in fact celebrate that.
#
And the reason I would celebrate that is that I don't think they lead, as some people imply,
#
to homogenization of culture and the death of creativity or any of those things.
#
I think what they instead do is that individuals get empowered in various ways, through technology
#
and otherwise, to actually be able to express themselves in unusual ways that otherwise
#
would not have been open to them.
#
In fact, I think a lot of people today with maybe a visual imagination or someone who
#
wants to storytell through images may not need to go in for the fine arts.
#
They can be filmmakers.
#
They can do other things which are not necessarily lower forms of art.
#
I mean, God knows what kind of manner Bhupen Khakkar would have expressed himself in.
#
And he did it brilliantly in two mediums as we spoke about.
#
But maybe he could have been a filmmaker.
#
Maybe he could have been a YouTube creator, for example, and I would not look down on
#
But just speaking of my own podcast, for example, I think commercialization, the markets, what
#
they have done is they have put the technology in my hands to make exactly the kind of show
#
I want, which conventional wisdom would tell you will not work, long four-hour conversations
#
with obscure scholars like me, like you and many others.
#
And the conventional wisdom would not have allowed me to do this.
#
I have been empowered by all these things you mentioned, industrialization, commercialization,
#
which I don't think are necessarily bad words.
#
I think they are good for artists because more and more people have gotten the means
#
of production in their own hands.
#
They are not dependent on gatekeepers.
#
They're not dependent on like you spoke about how the cultural project today is almost like
#
a vanity project of the wives of industrialists.
#
Most artists are not dependent on that.
#
That is not even a project that I take seriously.
#
Most artists can do what they want today and they're empowered to do that by the fact that
#
the technology is there, the markets are there.
#
I can produce a show which 30 years ago I would have been laughed out of any room of
#
any radio station if I proposed something like this.
#
And I can reach my viewers and they can express their appreciation for it in monetary and
#
So that kind of would be my counterpoint that I feel that this invocation of industrialization,
#
commercialization is a bad thing.
#
And I understand that in many domains it leads to homogenization.
#
We are losing languages.
#
We are losing different types of bananas.
#
The freaking bland Cavendish banana is everywhere because of these forces.
#
So I get the negative aspect of it, but I don't think that it's a death knell of art.
#
On the contrary, I think it is what has empowered so many individual artists to do their thing
#
without needing to please gatekeepers or elites.
#
I hope you're going to be friends after this.
#
I don't think I'm decrying industrial means.
#
I'm not decrying the technological or the commercial.
#
So when we add the word ization to industry or commercial, we are talking about something
#
else than mere industry.
#
We're talking about a logic, an ethos that pervades every aspect.
#
So that's something we have to keep in mind.
#
So it's one thing to set up a factory.
#
So for example, a cottage industry is a scale.
#
It's an ethos of making, but it's still an industry in the way that the Indian government
#
thought about it until very recently.
#
So you might be making thousands of Dia's, and it's mass production.
#
And it might be a cottage industry.
#
So then an industry that produces porcelain Dia's on molds in a factory is also making
#
Dia's, but they're doing it in a different way.
#
And then if you think that the way of making Dia's in a cottage industry is a problem,
#
and the only way to make Dia's is the one that this is making, then we know that there's
#
That's what's happened.
#
And then there's another thing that says, this is even too expensive.
#
You have to pay workers their salaries and blah, blah, blah.
#
Let's just get LED lights from China and string them all over, which is what's also happening.
#
And this takes care of the whole Dia business.
#
There's no mess of oil.
#
We don't have to pay workers.
#
So it's very important to think about what something does.
#
So let's go back to rap music.
#
Let's go back to music and let's talk about rap music.
#
Rap music is a deeply crafted form of music that comes out of industrialized music production.
#
So the idea of taking records and capturing snippets from previous records, adjusting,
#
crafting them, recrafting them, retooling them, retooling the record player to become
#
All this is recrafting.
#
It's a second order of craft.
#
It's not a primary order of craft.
#
So craft and industrialization are not opposed.
#
There's a very great scholar whose name I've forgotten who talks about the fact that in
#
the Soviet Union, when people had factories, these machines that they ran were industrially
#
But because the Soviet Union's economy was so bad, all repairs had to be done by the
#
person that ran that particular machine.
#
In the end, that machine was thoroughly handcrafted.
#
All parts had to be remade.
#
And only that person could run it because they had made it.
#
So there isn't a linear journey here.
#
So what you're saying about technology being put into the hands of many people, like for
#
example, rappers or you or even me, maybe I wouldn't be able to do the kind of work
#
I like doing if certain things had not happened, but they also have like really profound effects.
#
And I'm interested in understanding the effects.
#
So I actually think we're in agreement because we both agree that there are good aspects
#
and bad aspects to this.
#
Is it necessary to think about things in agreement?
#
We're looking at different parts of the same elephant and that's really interesting.
#
But I'm going to look at another part of the elephant in terms of the exact limb that you
#
examined of the elephant, but from another side, which is that earlier it struck me,
#
like when you spoke about your years in the U.S. and you said that you were there at a
#
time where one, if you look at the past, society had just made the massive mistake of the Vietnam
#
And yet at the same time, society could reflect upon the massive mistake of the Vietnam War.
#
And I had a slight disagreement with that freezing or I found it a little simplistic
#
because I am wary of terms like society subsuming individuals.
#
I think the individuals who took America into the Vietnam War are a very different set who
#
may not necessarily have reflected.
#
And the individuals who reflected are reflecting not on their own actions, but the actions
#
I'd rather think in terms of individuals and I think that using group terms like society
#
or in a later sense, industrialization, you know, can hide some of the nuances that lie
#
They have their limits.
#
They have their limit terms.
#
They have terms that can hold everything.
#
So in America during the Vietnam War, I mean, remember, I'm only eight and a half, nine
#
How did I experience remorse or regret or those sort of things?
#
That was from seeing people who were, it was very narcissistic.
#
American remorse was very narcissistic.
#
That's a great way to put it.
#
I'm not the first person to put it.
#
There's a wonderful Vietnamese American writer who writes it about this beautifully.
#
His book got nominated for some major award.
#
It was very narcissistic.
#
You know, I was, let's say, let me put it this way.
#
I was in Bhopal and the bombs and we had to black out our windows in Bhopal because of
#
And I never grew up in a world that was virulently, I'm shh, and I know now because I've seen
#
much more of the archive, that was virulently anti-Chinese or anti-Muslim.
#
There wasn't that kind of virulent anti-Muslim rhetoric in my world about this war.
#
I go to America and I see remorse or regret about Vietnam.
#
Not so much about Vietnamese people, but about a president who promoted the Vietnam War,
#
Lyndon B. Johnson and then less about Johnson, but particularly Nixon.
#
Now we know the story is even more complex than I'm saying it now because he did Watergate
#
and he was like this megalomaniac.
#
He challenged America's ideas about its own democratic commitment.
#
So the Vietnamese people were maybe a picture on Life magazine, that young girl with her
#
back burning from napalm, running.
#
Those kinds of things, but in general, and I think there's a lot of people, Vietnam veterans,
#
they were vastly, how do you experience remorse?
#
Well, you might drug yourself to death, alcoholism to death.
#
And America in the 1970s, you saw that.
#
You saw that in public spaces.
#
I was making a point about language actually, where the use of the term society, and even
#
now you said that America's own idea of its whatever, and even that's such a general term.
#
It is a very general term, but I'm going to talk in generalizations, but then I'm going
#
to keep working away from them.
#
So can I go back to your earlier point about industrialization and do that, where you said
#
that you spoke of industrialization and you invoke the image of millions of DRs being
#
produced and suddenly then you get LED lights from China and that's it.
#
That's not all that industrialization is.
#
So industrialization is also giving us the microphones, the software tools that I used
#
to make my podcasts, and if there are budding filmmakers who are making their own short
#
films, putting them on YouTube, all those tools, which they couldn't have dreamed of
#
using 20 years ago, are now in their hands.
#
I think we're thinking about industrialization in two different ways.
#
And I'm saying that your way is perhaps reductive and not appreciative enough of the nuance
#
that individuals are so empowered.
#
No, I am not at all a Luddite.
#
I am not at all a Luddite.
#
I'm not claiming you are.
#
I am not anti-industrial, but I am very aware that the developmentalist agenda that was
#
thrust upon this country, which was so intensely committed to industrialization, I am a product
#
of Bharat Heavy Electricals Limited, right?
#
I grew up in an uncle who was a controller of Hindustan and machine and tools in Hyderabad.
#
So I'm completely a product of that world.
#
But we have to be aware that the way we make things, the things we make and the way we
#
And you asked the question about why so much stuff is being made and called art.
#
Why is it some stuff not being called art?
#
It has some things to do with that.
#
In fact, so many things which are not industrially, every fine artwork is actually industrially
#
Where is that paint coming from?
#
Who's sitting around grinding that paint?
#
But what's wrong with that?
#
There's nothing wrong with that.
#
So in fact, it is very important to find out the relationships between different modes
#
of production, is what I'm saying, and then how they make the art form.
#
So just because millions of Dias are made in a potter's workshop, Dias are made in
#
a factory, an LED, it doesn't mean that one…
#
It's not a teleological relationship.
#
One doesn't come to an end and another doesn't come.
#
Somebody might figure out which they have to wire a terracotta Dia with an LED light.
#
This is the nature of making.
#
And I'm interested in that.
#
But it's going to produce certain kinds of situations.
#
That is exactly, you mass produce technology, speakers, this thing, that thing, at different
#
There might be, I don't know, 5,000 such microphones made a year for this quality or
#
And you have access to it and you're able to do this beautiful thing.
#
Everyone has access to it.
#
You know, I think TikTok showed that, that TikTok for me was revolutionary because it
#
showed that to be a creator, you don't need access or money.
#
Everybody can be a creator.
#
You don't want to link creativity with production.
#
Many societies, like the other places in the Trobriand Islands or whatever, imagine that
#
creativity is something that's imminent in the universe.
#
We at certain historical moments, certain production methods construct that creativity
#
in certain ways and market it in certain ways, make it possible to come from imminence into
#
a particular form of imminence.
#
So a novel, a podcast, whatever it is, there are people in India who have access to certain
#
kinds of technology, which they would not have had before.
#
But the minute, for example, when COVID came, they were robbed of the access to that.
#
There are people who are more vulnerable to precarity, to the lack of access than others.
#
I will say one thing, though, with reference to TikTok, that after COVID came, some of
#
the best art about COVID, which took time to emerge, was on TikTok.
#
It got banned two or three months after.
#
I have zero opinions about certain technologies or whatever.
#
Like for example, I'm totally fascinated by cranes.
#
We went to the JCB factory, they had a little display of their machinery.
#
I was like, wow, I love cranes.
#
But if you go to central India and you look at the mines there and the way that mining
#
is happening there, you know that that place has been rich in mineral since the beginning
#
of time, maybe, for eons.
#
And that people in that area have known how to get metal for their needs for thousands
#
But if you put that JCB crane, I'm going to be killed for this, and earth mover into
#
and have it produce, excavate the earth at a pace far greater than an axe or something.
#
It's going to produce something else.
#
It produces a new relationship to the earth.
#
It produces a new aesthetics.
#
I want to be attentive to that, not whether this technology is bad or that technology
#
is bad or is industrialization bad or what.
#
These things emerge in certain ways and are used in certain ways, and I want to understand
#
I want to understand that.
#
And I want to understand who wins, who loses, how are we transformed, and it's not just
#
about winners and losers.
#
I also don't like binaries.
#
It's not about being pro-industrialization.
#
It's about understanding things, not accepting them so easily or rejecting them so easily.
#
It's about understanding that that's what emphasizing the dynamic things are.
#
If things aren't dynamic enough, if earth movers today have not made it possible for
#
people to develop, I don't know, I'm just making an exaggerated silly example, new kinds
#
of housing that everybody can afford very rapidly, if it's not been miniaturized enough
#
so that lots of things can happen, whatever.
#
Just because we don't care enough to do those kinds of things.
#
So on this, we are completely on the same page.
#
Maybe you wanted us to get there.
#
That's why it was important to you to have this conversation.
#
I mean, it's like different angles of an elephant.
#
We don't have to agree or disagree or anything, like you correctly said.
#
But we are entirely on the same page.
#
But I would say that the exact analogy that you made, the exact field that you spoke of
#
mining, I think what we've really seen over time, and you just happened to take the JCB
#
name, I think we should both clarify, I think I can clarify on your behalf that we have
#
no opinions on JCB at all, except that they run this brilliant literature foundation and
#
But in general terms, I would say that something like mining illustrates how we have moved
#
from a parasite state to a parasite crony capitalist.
#
And in both of those cases, I think the problem is not a conceptual problem with markets and
#
industrialization, but with power, but that's perhaps a different kind of-
#
Yeah, but power, it doesn't exist in an abstract way.
#
It doesn't exist in a power.
#
And power is reconceptualized when new things come along.
#
So for example, human beings have loved to extract things from the earth, as I said,
#
diamonds, Golconda diamonds, for example.
#
But if you have, Golconda diamonds were like this.
#
I like the mining analogy because it covers a gamut.
#
So Golconda diamonds were so precious, they could become a God's eyes.
#
Kings had the first dibs on the largest stone recovered.
#
You didn't emphasize faceting, you emphasized weightage.
#
So that's why most diamonds were often limitedly faceted when they were put in Mughal jewelry.
#
When the idea of faceting comes very big and new ways of cutting diamonds becomes important,
#
the speed of excavation increases.
#
And of course the diamond mines are now more or less dry.
#
And then the South African hoard emerges and diamond mining happens there in a crazy way.
#
Now we're going to produce industrially made diamonds, which are called peace diamonds
#
or something like that.
#
And that's going to change the whole dynamic again.
#
Now it's this that is really interesting and saddening and all those.
#
I don't want to leave it at some detached way of interesting.
#
I want to have an opinion about certain things.
#
I want to say that lots of people were in some sort of bonded labor in mines.
#
But because you could only do so much with human hands and certain kinds of machinery,
#
it allowed for specialization to happen and it controlled it in its own way.
#
Not because the intention was to control.
#
I'm sure if there were people who were able to get more out, they would try.
#
But there are also some religious problems, like for example, you could not do everything
#
under the earth because the earth doesn't have the same kind of sanctity for many people.
#
Even indigenous people who live in certain parts of area are deeply involved in the extraction
#
of wealth that was in land that was sacred in one way or another.
#
The thing is that what we need to understand is that when the technology of the earth mover
#
came, it allowed for some set of factors, the desacralization of the earth, the creation
#
of large markets that were globally networked, the intense real estatization of land.
#
All these things came together.
#
The de-emphasis on investing in human beings and thinking more upon privileging extraction.
#
All these things were possible, not at one instant but through a cascade of things that
#
Just like I talked about Gushan Singh's teacup as being a cascade of things at that very
#
Everything just pulls back when you look at something else.
#
If I look at a podcast and I understand, say, recording technology and the impact it had
#
for, let's say, Tawaifs to record their voice and sing and have it recorded, I am Gauha
#
It's so beautiful to think that when the Kerala saint, Narayan Guru, he wrote, for
#
example, that, and this is also why I am not anti-industrializing, he says he's proselytizing
#
to people who are deeply underprivileged.
#
So the metaphor he has for the soul is that your soul will be, in his writing, he says
#
that your soul will be like a steamship that goes up the river, or when the rifle comes
#
into southern India, Gama no longer holds bows and arrows, he holds a rifle of love.
#
The bullets of love are shot, right, or pellets of love are shot.
#
I think this is really important.
#
They're just such key moments, but we cannot take the whole package for granted.
#
We must break it down and remake it, break it down and remake it, because that's how
#
But if the process of continuing something extends over long periods of time and people
#
have very little agency in breaking it down, then it starts becoming more often than not
#
So we're able to still love the family because it keeps breaking down.
#
And then we put it back together in some new formation.
#
So you know, you spoke exactly to my concerns when you spoke about people not having agency,
#
the oppression it leads to, power, and that's a long discussion and we will do another six
#
hour conversation someday in this because this cannot be a last conversation.
#
So you know, I'm now feeling that just in the same way that my show went from being
#
a half an hour show to a three hour show, it should now go to a six hour show or an eight
#
So you and I can do justice to the many things we want to talk about, but you have a flight
#
So all hail industrial flights.
#
And I'll end with a couple of questions which really intrigued me, things that you said
#
earlier while we were talking, which I found super interesting and I want to double click
#
And one of them, like I asked you, what are the things you feel deep love for and what
#
are the things you have deep knowledge of?
#
And you named a bunch of things and I'll go through them, but I'll ask you about one
#
Like when you spoke of deep love, you spoke about places, children, partner, family, grandfather,
#
work, India, yoga, the way the body lives in the world, which is so fascinating, friendship.
#
And I think through the conversation, people would have got a pretty good sense of, you
#
know, what all these things mean to you.
#
But what I was most intrigued by in this deep love section was when you said, quote, love
#
is my ethics, top quote, which fascinates me.
#
Tell me a bit about what you meant by that.
#
I didn't expect that, actually, first of all, I want to say because the time will go and
#
the time is going and I hope we will talk more and I will get to talk to you as much
#
as you have talked to me.
#
So there are many ways to be in the world.
#
You can be deeply ambitious and then goal setting and those kinds of things.
#
You can be focused on, let's say, morality.
#
There's some cord you can pick up and say, this is going to become the ethic of my life.
#
I think that love is a profound ethics because it's not easily holdable.
#
So it kind of, you can't control it.
#
I mean, let's think about the time when Sufi ideas of love enter into popular culture in
#
India sometime around Amir Khusro's time.
#
That's the 12th century.
#
So he writes a song called Chap Dilak, which is a song in praise of his Bir, his Ustad,
#
a beloved, and that song is still being sung today and it's the song that people use to
#
talk about the radical nature of music or love or anything.
#
It's so deeply, deeply powerful.
#
So if I say that love is very, it's an ethic, it means that you do things.
#
You find the love inside of you.
#
You find a loving position with which to do mundane things, to which to do hard things,
#
things which you don't like, things which have to be done, things to let things go.
#
You must, it's a way of engaging with life because you can make life about many things.
#
But if you choose to make a life, the ethics, the ethics of life, love, it changes many
#
The woman who started the Me Too movement, Tarana Burke, she was sexually molested when
#
she was young, or maybe it was Tarana Burke and some other people involved in that movement.
#
One of these people said that she met the boy who sexually molested her much later in
#
life and what she realized was, or maybe it was an older person, I forget, because there
#
were several instances, it's after all the Me Too movement, so it's going to come from
#
She said that she didn't have any idea of punishing them because what was it that they
#
could be punished with that could possibly give back to her what was taken away from
#
I thought that was such a loving way of understanding yourself and your loss.
#
So this is what I mean about love, being in ethics.
#
I think that a lot of times I practice silence because that's the most loving thing I can
#
Because if I talk, speech, words, there's not enough love in any word to actually bring
#
about the love that is required.
#
So there are choices you make.
#
You talk about agency and it's so important to you, and I'm totally with you.
#
You have to give yourself the intention.
#
What is being intentional?
#
I am intending to cook a nice meal today.
#
I would like my child to have a nice tiffin box.
#
So that's an intention that's coming from love and care.
#
So that means you don't wait till 745 when the school bus is coming to cook that nice
#
You get the gas in place.
#
You make sure that you have the time, that you have the knowledge, that you understand
#
your child's environment at school.
#
What is it possible for them to eat?
#
All these things are part of being loving.
#
So it's profound ethos.
#
Yeah, and I'm fascinated you should, you know, the second time today, intentionality is coming
#
up the first time in the context of noticing and now in the context of love, that it's
#
not something that you just spontaneously feel, but you make an effort.
#
You look at the beautiful aspects.
#
You cannot force yourself.
#
Effort is different from force, deeply different.
#
You cannot, a lot of people force themselves to swallow shit that is completely not worth
#
the child swallowing and also very unloving to the self and to the other person.
#
I believe civil disobedience is a profound act of love.
#
I really believe in that.
#
When I practice satyagraha in many parts, including as a parent, sometimes my kid does
#
stuff I don't like, I practice civil disobedience with her.
#
So there's no reason why I have to do this, even engage in a conflict with you just because
#
I told my students when I would turn up, fly from Delhi to Hyderabad to teach them once
#
a week for three days and fly back and they couldn't be bothered to come on time, I said,
#
They came maybe two hours into the class or one hour into the class.
#
I would come from the airport, land in Hyderabad, drive directly to class with my suitcase,
#
This happened enough times.
#
Then I said, I met my contractual obligations.
#
There is no where in my contract that says I have to teach when you are not here.
#
So I'm going to practice civil disobedience and somehow that sort of started touching
#
them a little bit, a little bit, a little bit, a little bit.
#
I practiced it in several ways, but yes, I think love is a deeply ethical, it's an ethics.
#
So I'm reminded of a couple of things and one is from what you just said, civil disobedience.
#
The very dear friend whose house I'm staying at in Delhi, Mohit Satyanand, he told me the
#
story of once how next door to him, there was this sort of a office or a working environment
#
and people would go out and I forget exactly what it was, either leave cigarette butts
#
on the road or leave teacups, one of those two and they would just leave it there.
#
And he asked them politely once, can they please not litter and they didn't do it.
#
So the next day he went out and he collected everything that they had littered and he put
#
And he did it a couple of times and it completely stopped.
#
And the other example is from this great book I'm reading called Think Again by Adam Grant,
#
where he talks about this African-American piano player called Darrell Davis, who goes
#
to a gig in Maryland in 1983 and over there he just does a great gig.
#
And after that, a white gentleman comes up to him and says, wow, that was amazing.
#
And he realizes that the white gentleman is a member of the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, but
#
they have a drink together.
#
And then he starts talking to the guy, asking him questions and so on.
#
And the guy eventually reforms, not just reforms, gets his other white supremacist friends.
#
And over a period of time, there is this change that is happening just because they're talking
#
to this person and he's talking to them.
#
And this leads me in a bit of a digression, but this leads me to something I've come to
#
realize more and more, that the hate that we have within us is for abstract things.
#
But when we encounter them in the concrete, we don't hate them.
#
You know, you will, for example, Achal in her episode, Achal Malhotra told me about
#
how when she was in Pakistan, people would rant and rave against Hindus.
#
But then they would notice she's there and she said, tum nahi beti, tum theko, tum nahi.
#
So in the concrete, I know a lot of people who are bigots on Twitter.
#
In the concrete, they'll be nice to their Muslim friends, but treat them like exceptions.
#
And the problem is when abstract concepts like nationalism and race and all this nonsense
#
gets into it, that there is hatred.
#
And when I read this, you know, incident about Daryl Davis, which is in the sixth chapter
#
of Grant's book, I just thought that this is such a great example of these bigots who
#
hate a particular kind of person.
#
But when they meet a person like that in the concrete, there can be change, you know.
#
So I often feel that it's a good idea.
#
I don't know if love is transactional or not transactional, ethics are relational or
#
But I know that, I know the ideas behind those kinds of ideas.
#
I'm not interested in them at a point as a way of living.
#
I'm interested in them maybe in a mild way to read about them.
#
But actually, love as ethics means that you are both deeply aware of the dynamism of life
#
and also deeply non-transactional.
#
Otherwise it's, and transaction itself can be a deeply loving thing.
#
So the first time I often go into a new place, I go shopping, nothing spectacular.
#
I love the love that you exchange at a very simple level, koi bhi threatening cheez nahin
#
Aapne ek daal moori kharid liya, you bought a naayal paani or you bought a set of bangles
#
or maybe a pot or some thing.
#
And you find out so many things about yourself and the other person in that transaction.
#
But there is a way to do that transaction in a non-transactional way.
#
That's the loving part.
#
You're attentive to the attention he's giving you.
#
You're attentive to how he positions that project.
#
I mean, I can go on and on, it's unnecessary.
#
But I really feel like that's a good way to live for me.
#
So my next question is related.
#
What I also then asked you about is what do you have deep knowledge of?
#
And you mentioned a bunch of things which we will explore in our next conversation together,
#
which I hope you will be kind enough to allow me at some point.
#
But you mentioned things like teaching, individuals, ideas, this country, cooking, textiles.
#
But you also at this point while talking about this said another interesting thing, which
#
And you said, quote, knowledge and love are not far apart.
#
Tell me what you mean by this.
#
Oh, what a beautiful way to wrap up this conversation.
#
I just love this country.
#
My parents moved to America and they became American citizens.
#
My sister was born there.
#
She's an American citizen.
#
I have this extremely thick Middle Atlantic accent because along with changing my name,
#
they put me into speech therapy because I did not have.
#
I just kind of reflect on this thing happened to me.
#
I have no problem with it, but it's not something I can shed very easily because it came and
#
was so ingrained in me.
#
So even now I have this accent when I talk.
#
The white doll your grandfather could not throw away.
#
The white doll grandfather could not throw away, which has become me in some way.
#
My grandfather wasn't around then.
#
So I love this country and I have to love it like this with the American accent.
#
I get into so many unpleasant situations because people judge me a lot because I wear saris
#
or I have this accent or I have white hair.
#
If you want to start judging people, there are hundreds of ways to do it.
#
When I step out into this country, this is a moment like another sanskari moment for
#
So we get everything connected.
#
So I went to the 2012 Kumbh Mela.
#
I was asked by my friend Ranveer Shah to come and talk to some students that had come from
#
an American university there.
#
Of course, there's lots of free time and then you walk around and you watch all the sadhu
#
babas and sadhvis and everything, and I noticed that at one particular place grouping of sadhus,
#
there was a guy from Japan with all his jetta juta and everything and there and then there
#
was another place there was a guy from California.
#
As I kept walking, I was there for three days and I walked and walked and walked through
#
the Kumbh Mela and I realized that India is still a place where you could be on the far
#
horizon of consciousness or desire or want, that people believe India is a place you can
#
come to and you can be that and you can maybe make a community out of it.
#
So I know this about this country because I am a person from Andhra Pradesh, but I grew
#
up in Bhopal and Hyderabad and I lived in Bangalore for many years and I also lived
#
in Delhi and I've lived in Punjab, many places.
#
What I love about this country is I feel like there's a possibility of making a community
#
because we are 1.3 billion people, your community can be pretty big and I think that's important.
#
For me, that's important that people have an opportunity to do that if they want.
#
Some for better or worse, it's there.
#
I was actually drilling down on the quote, knowledge and love are not far apart.
#
So these are these observations.
#
And then when I started, looked at myself making such observations, I said, why is this
#
That's because I know this country so well.
#
I have been on the Indrail Pass twice and traveled across this country.
#
I have lived in Northern India.
#
I have lived in Southern India.
#
I have spent vast amounts of time in Calcutta.
#
I have lived in rural India.
#
I work on many different things associated with various pockets of this country.
#
I know it and know it and know it and know it.
#
And at a point, I can't tell you where my love begins and where my knowledge ends and
#
where my knowledge begins and where my love begins.
#
Where else could I live that I know this well?
#
This is such a beautiful way to end the episode.
#
Anapuna, thank you so much.
#
Anapuna or Poona or Anna, Anna, the white dog, or Bhavani, not just in names, but we
#
contain multitudes in so many different ways.
#
And I guess knowledge of them is what brings a love, right?
#
Thank you so much for having me.
#
If you enjoyed listening to this episode, head on over to the show notes, enter rabbitholes
#
Anapuna doesn't seem to be on Twitter, but you can follow me at Amit Varma, A-M-I-T-B-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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