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My guest in this episode mentions how a PhD advisor in the 1980s would ask all aspiring
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PhD students one question.
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He would say, do you sleep well at night?
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If the answer was yes, he would say, well then, you don't need to do a PhD.
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The implication of course is that doing a PhD is a task of such seriousness that you
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should only attempt it if you really really care about a problem, if it keeps you up at
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Now, the question may seem glib.
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Most people I would hope even in these times sleep well at night.
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That doesn't mean they don't have deep interest or they don't care about them.
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But I like the question as a way of concentrating the mind.
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The question I really is, what do you care about?
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One question I've asked myself and that I ask you, dear listener, is that when you wake
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up in the morning, what is it that makes you look forward to the day?
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The meta questions that arise out of these, what matters to you?
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Are questions that we often don't think about enough.
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We get into a group of living our lives in a certain way, thinking about the world in
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And then inertia ensures it continues like that.
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But if we asked ourselves these questions, if we knew ourselves a little better, maybe
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we'd live different lives.
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Maybe we'd snap out of the same old, same old.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen, our weekly podcast on economics, politics and behavioral
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Please welcome your host, Amit Verma.
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Welcome to The Seen and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Mukulika Banerjee, who would stay awake at night asking a question that
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became her first remarkable book and who then kept asking questions, though she's going
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to be at the receiving end of questions today.
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Her first big question came to her in 1988 when Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan died.
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He had led one of the largest nonviolent movements anywhere.
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And her question was, how did this nonviolent movement arise from a community, the community
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of Pathans, that was stereotyped as being violent and macho?
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She took over a decade to answer this question, some of which she spent living in the northwest
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frontier province in Pakistan, traveling from village to village to find survivors of the
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Khudai Khidmatgar, or servants of God, as the movement was known.
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Her book, The Pathan Unarmed, answers this question.
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And her other books also take on big questions.
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Her 2014 book, Why India Votes, asks the question, why do poor people bother with voting when
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elected governments don't seem to be making their lives any better?
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She co-wrote a book called The Sari, where the question is, why do modern women wear
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such a seemingly ancient dress?
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It's a study of our society, not just a dress.
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Her latest book, Cultivating Democracy, takes a closer look at the hollowing out of Indian
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All these books are so rich in detail and her life itself so interesting that even though
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this has ended up as the longest episode of The Scene in the Unseen, I don't know how
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the time passed and it felt like we had so much more left to talk about.
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Even in our conversation after the recording stopped, she was dropping gems like, quote,
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instead of vigilance, we have vigilantes, stop quote.
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I love this conversation, which is not just about her awesome books, but about her life,
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the understated feminism of her mother's generation, the idealism of her father's generation, the
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evolution of her academic disciplines.
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It contains multitudes.
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I'm sure you'll like it as well, but before we begin, let's take a quick commercial break.
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These days I look around me and I see people making two kinds of mistakes.
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One, they overestimate human intelligence.
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I know many people who would fail the Turing test.
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And two, they underestimate artificial intelligence.
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When AlphaZero beat Stockfish in chess a few years ago, I realized that AI is not just
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about doing computations and calculations better than humans, but that AI can think
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and it will inevitably do so better than humans.
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I don't see this as a threat, but as an opportunity.
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AI is already making our lives better in countless unseen ways and will keep helping us to be
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the best version of ourselves.
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And tracking this is the sponsor of this episode, a fascinating new podcast called Paradigm
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Paradigm Shift is a new show by Microsoft India produced by ATS Studios and hosted by
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my friend and former guest on the show, Harsha Bhogle.
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In this show, every Friday, Harsha tells us stories of the intersection of artificial
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of innovation shaped by intelligence.
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Mukulika, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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Thank you very much for having me.
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Now, you know, normally what happens is that whenever I have a guest on the show, I read
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their books, do all of that, which of course I did this time as well, but what I was struck
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by is that your books cover such vast territory, right?
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So you know, with other authors, there's one trajectory, it's like kind of one thing, which
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in a sense this is, I mean, three of your books are, you know, ethnography and anthropology
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and all of that, and they come out of that.
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But there's also a book on the sari.
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There's also a wonderful book you edited on, you know, Muslim portraits, which I feel is,
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I mean, the central premise of that is so sort of relevant in the times that we are
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We'll discuss that also, but before we kind of, you know, get started, tell me a bit about
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your, you know, your early life, you know, where did you grow up?
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How did you, you know, get around to beginning the journey of yours?
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Well, I suppose you encourage your guest summit to narrativise their lives.
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And so this is a wonderful invitation to impose some sort of, you know, post-facto structure
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on one's intellectual development.
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But I think there have been very formative periods.
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The first, which I don't have any memories of, but clearly had a very strong influence,
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which was just being born in a military hospital in the middle of an Indo-Pak war.
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And I think it has curiously shaped my subconscious.
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A, I'm very rarely late to anything.
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Many events I organise and I've done many, many, many events in London and elsewhere.
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I always start on time, which is a rarity as we acknowledge as South Asians.
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But also being born in the middle of an Indo-Pak war.
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And my first friend, I suppose, in this world was a young Tibetan boy.
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And these are stories, of course, you're told by your parents and it shapes how you think
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about these relationships and what you make of them as an adult when you can shape them.
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So I think those remain as formative influences and we can talk about whether they have in
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fact had an influence later.
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But then I had these very foundational five years living in the Andamans, you know, in
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the Andaman Nicobar Islands, in Port Blair, the capital.
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And it was a time when I was just, that was my first school.
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My first experience of education, of learning, going to a school run by Catholic nuns.
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But unlike the other Catholic institutions I studied in later, here there was, you know,
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the Carmel Convent School in Port Blair was run by very austere nuns.
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You know, I remember very vivid memories of frayed collars, of, you know, clean washed
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but frayed collars and cuffs of nuns teaching us to mend stuff, making do with very little.
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And so that was a very early exposure to austerity and the sort of simple virtue of it.
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But also I think it was my first exposure to what we now recognize as that very precious
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aspect of India where you were meeting children from all different parts of the country.
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I had Tamil friends and Assamese friends and Punjabi friends and we were in and out of
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each other's houses and eating each other's tiffin boxie and out of each other's tiffin
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boxes, therefore tasting cuisine that was unfamiliar and not made at home.
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And I think those have been very, very lasting influences.
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But also Port Blair physically as a place was stunning.
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You know, it was beautiful.
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There was very little infrastructure, very few cars on the road.
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We could walk to school.
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But there was a district library.
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So the first time my mother was a great feminist in many ways in that very understated way
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without ever saying it, she took my older sister and me to the district library once
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and said, this is how a library works and got our cards made and so on.
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And it was, you know, it was about for our little legs, it took us about 20, 25 minutes
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And we discovered the joy of checking books out and going back every week and getting
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You couldn't wait for Saturday when you could take your pile of books back and get another
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So that was important, as was the sea, which we could see from our house.
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We went and bathed in it every Sunday, there were cashew groves and coconut and papaya.
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And in our own house, there was this huge mango tree.
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And that mango, the love of mangoes, I think was definitely formed that way.
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But also the importance of gardens and gardening.
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Because my mother, it's only much later I realized that she had this interest in gardening
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and I certainly loved just being in the garden and watching things grow.
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And I mentioned this because, as you know, I've just completed a book called Cultivating
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Democracy and cultivation and what it means as a practice is something that you really
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have to do at some stage, even if it's just trying to grow a potted plant on your windowsill.
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It doesn't matter what the scale of it.
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But I think the practice of it, the kind of alertness, vigilance, commitment that the
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act of cultivation is, again, that was something that I remember from those very early days
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But also it was really, you know, you could have the Navy band in the house rehearsing
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for a dance drama that we were part of or Bharatnatyam classes.
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And so there was that mix which we took completely for granted.
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And of course, in contemporary India, we now realize just how threatened that kind of formative
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I was, you know, while reading your book, the Pathan Anand, I was struck by this anecdote
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in it, which again, you know, which came back to mind because you mentioned the sea and
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mangoes and gardening and all of that.
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And this was an anecdote about the notion of time, where you ask one of these old gentlemen
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from the Khudai Khidmatgarh, or rather he asked you how old you were.
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And then he said, I had spun 20 sets of clothes by the time you were born, stop code, you
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know, measuring time almost and you take a charkha and you make yourself a set of clothes
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and then they wear out and then you make another and it's like 20 cycles of that.
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And I was just struck by that way of measuring time.
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And then you sort of mentioned the sea and gardening.
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And it seems to me that there also that those are conducive to developing a slower sense
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of time, you know, cliched as it is a sea with a sense of vastness and peace, the very
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act of gardening is really an act of patience.
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It is an act that is not looking to immediate gratification, but just taking joy in a process
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and trusting it gets you somewhere.
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And one of the sort of things that struck me about your, you know, your rich career
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and your writing life is that there is that sense of everything stretched out.
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Like I would not even I can't imagine myself doing the things you did because I just I've
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always kind of been in a little bit more of a hurry and yet you took this relaxed pace,
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you know, while writing the Pathan Anand, you spent 10 years in Pakistan and you know,
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all of that actually living there, just letting time pass.
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And I understand that that's part of ethnography, that you study people, you live among them
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and you do it for a long period of time and so on and so forth.
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And I think most modern people won't have that patience.
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You know, most young people today, even those who find the kind of work that you are doing
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attractive and you know, they might think to themselves, hey, I'd like to do something
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But when you think that I'm going to spend 10 years in one place, just talking to people,
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or I'm going to go back to the same couple of villages in this obscure place for 15 years,
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I'm going to spend my, you know, university vacation just going back and living in these
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two villages, as you did for, you know, cultivating democracy.
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And tell me a little bit about this, that was it always like this for you?
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That you're relaxed, you're chilling?
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Did it have something to do perhaps even with Port Blair in the sense that you're not in
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a city, you're not in a hustling bustling city, you're always, you know, going here,
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going there, party here, class there, all of that.
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But you know, or is it just something inherent to you that you just want to settle into the
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things that you do and not take time?
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That's a very interesting way to think about it.
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I had honestly never done that before.
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And you may be right, it might be that formative period in Port Blair, which to my mind is
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still my happy place, you know, when I have to think when I have to be to return to one's
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childhood, that's always the happy place, precisely because it wasn't full of pressures.
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Just as you said, there was time, I remember digging a hole in the garden, you know, I
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must have been four or five years old, and painstakingly digging a hole with God knows
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what, you know, a spoon probably, because I wouldn't have been allowed any tools.
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And then waiting for it to fill up with monsoon water.
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And then taking the pleasure and going and standing in that pool of water for no purpose
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other than feeling what it is to stand in muddy water in the garden that I had dug.
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Now it's not a bad metaphor for field work.
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Yeah, now that you say it, it's, I think, you know, anthropology is the kind of discipline
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that recognizes it's very humbling, because you realize that you may know a lot of things
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and you may have read some, you know, lots of books and thought a lot of thoughts and
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written a lot of essays.
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But you land up in a place where you don't speak the language and you're learning to
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speak the language as I did in Pakistan.
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And I didn't live there for 10 years, just to get it clear, I took 10 years to write
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But no Indian citizen would have been allowed to live for quite that long, as I did live
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for several months, it's true, in what used to be called the Northwest Frontier Province
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and now it's called Khyber Pakhtunkhwa in Peshawar Charsadda.
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But when you land up in a society like that, where you don't know anything, right?
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You don't know any norms, you don't know how to behave, you don't know what is polite,
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you're learning, you're worse than the children are in that situation, you can't rush.
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You know, if you rush, you're like a bull in a china shop and you'll offend people.
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And the major goal for an anthropologist or a sociologist, as we would say in India, is
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So unless you can build trust and confidence with people you want to understand, you're
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not going to get anywhere and you can't build trust by rushing things.
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So you've got to allow yourself to make those mistakes, you've got to ask the questions,
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the stupid questions we laughed at, deal with the loneliness, write a diary every night,
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think about how you behaved, what you did, the conversations you had, reflect on all
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That takes time, right?
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And it's intensely lonely doing research like that.
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And then you realize actually the best way to deal with that loneliness is to build friendships
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in the field, and it is people you're working with who become your friends, who look after
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you when you're ill, who you can have a cry with if you're missing home.
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And that's how you build trust.
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Suddenly they begin to see this academic or scholar or student, as I was in Pakistan,
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you know, I come from the University of Oxford, a place that they had all heard of, and suddenly
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all that is stripped away and you're just a young, vulnerable woman in a strange country.
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And I think that's when the shift happens and people begin to tell you stuff that you
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want to learn and want to know.
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So yeah, you can't rush this, I don't think anyone who knows me would say I am a patient
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I'm not, I'm always, you know, I like to get stuff done.
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But intellectually, you're right, I haven't been in a rush, partly because I have quite
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successfully, I think, resisted the need to churn out stuff to publish all the time, which
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is very much how academia has got now.
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It wasn't quite so bad when I started 25 years ago, but now it's relentless.
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And I still have managed to stay quite old school about this and say that, you know,
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it's worth publishing when you have something to say and something that other people should
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spend time reading rather than another citation on your CV.
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And that again, that means that you probably talk more about your ideas, you present stuff
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at seminars and conferences, have informal conversations, let those ideas pickle and
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percolate and stew and form themselves into ideas that are then worth sharing in print.
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And I've been quite happy to let that happen and not rush things without being lazy.
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I think it requires work every single day, but to let it take its own time.
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With Cultivating Democracy, it was 15 years, because there was part of me that wasn't sure
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what the book would read like, you know, what kind of book would it be that would be worth
#
again somebody's money and time to pick up and read something about Set in Village India.
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There are lots of books about Village India, and I didn't want to write yet another village
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book describing, oh, here's a little village in India, read about it, because think why,
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you know, why would anyone be interested?
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And I was interested in democracy.
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So it took some time to think of the intellectual framing of the argument.
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But in the meanwhile, I also, you know, got involved in other projects and wrote the book
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on the sari and did this massive sort of comparative work across India with a big team.
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And while all those other projects were happening, the ideas for the big monograph were being
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tossed about and tested and some settled and some didn't, and the ones that settled then
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made their way into the book.
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Yeah, so that, you know, it strikes me that then that process of slowness, which I alluded
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to, which is during field work and you're patient and you let things marinate and you
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let things happen around you and don't force anything that it's a, you know, it's a similar
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process after the field work where you let ideas marinate and, you know, years can pass
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like, you know, on your bio page at the LSE site, it says that you have presented your
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work at various platforms.
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And I'm quoting now in Bern, Bonn, Chicago, Columbia, Delhi, Duke, Edinburgh, Göttingen,
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Heidelberg, Illinois, Indiana, Kalyani, Kolkata, London, Madison, Melbourne, New York, North
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Carolina, Oslo, Oxford, Pavia, Paris, Philadelphia, Princeton, Sussex and Yale, stop code.
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And thank God it's in alphabetical order.
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So by the time, you know, I could feel some relief and I reached P knowing it's not going
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And so I can see all this is also being part of the process where, as you mentioned, you're
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kind of sharing your ideas with people and letting them kind of form and so on against
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the pressures of academia.
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We'll come back to academia and indeed, you know, Pakistan and all of your work later.
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But to sort of go back to biography, you know, when you were talking about your childhood,
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another thing that struck me interestingly was when you said that your mother was a feminist
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And this interests me, like I did an episode with Mrinal Pandey recently, and she spoke
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about how when she was, you know, around 14 or 15, she had an argument with her mother
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because her mother was always obsessing about whether her dad liked her food and so on and
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And Mrinalji then 14 or 15 said, why do you have to care about that?
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You know, why are you so obsessed, obsessed about his food, live your own life and so
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And that was interesting because at that point in time, as Mrinalji said herself, the feminism
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It came from some instinctive sense of injustice.
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She put a frame to it later when she got down to reading books and all of that.
#
So when you speak of this understated feminism that you saw in your mother, and I guess it's
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something that I guess perhaps you notice in hindsight when you, you know, look back
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Tell me a little bit about, you know, the understated feminisms of the past, because
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today it's natural for every sensible person to be a feminist, male or female, you better.
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But you know, in the past where, you know, all these notions would have seemed so exotic
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where, you know, expressing feminism could, you know, sort of just be out of place, you
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know, maybe threaten the fabric of your everyday life and so on and so forth.
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You know, tell me about that, about these understated feminisms that you might have
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observed in others and perhaps even in yourself before you could put a frame to it.
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That's such a lovely question.
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Let me tell you one statement that my mother made, which was a statement.
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And so it was not understated in that sense.
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It was in the Andermans as it happened.
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And she was sitting with a bunch of women, friends, you know, drinking coffee in the
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morning and the sort of senior ranking officer's wife, so to speak, said to all of them.
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And she said to my mother who was expecting her third child and she didn't know whether
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she was going to have a boy or a girl.
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And so they were talking about children and she was, my mother was asked, Roma, what do
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you want your daughters to be?
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Because she already had two daughters or maybe she just had her third daughter, you know,
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so yes, that's probably what it was.
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And she said, what do you want your daughters to be when they grow up?
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And my mother's reply was, I want my daughters to be able to think.
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And she said, what kind of an answer is that?
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You know, I'm asking you what?
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She said, as long as they can think, they will know what they want to be.
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But they must be able to think for themselves.
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And so this is probably the most articulated statement of her feminism.
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She wasn't a social scientist, she taught physics, right?
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But she had come from a world in the 1950s where she and her sisters were professors
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They had grown up in Bhagalpur.
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They came to Patna University because that was a big university, her sisters taught philosophy,
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They didn't have any family in Patna.
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So they just hired this huge mansion, which with lots of rooms and they all had rooms
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and they all collectively kept, you know, contributed to the budget and they rented
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So the other lodgers were also young women, working women.
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And I think they realized how radical this was at one level.
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But at another level, it wasn't as if a huge fuss was made, their parents were perfectly
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But they did mad things like, you know, once take a tanga from Patna to Banaras, you know,
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because they felt like it and on a whim, and had, you know, watched the latest cinema movie
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in the cinema house on a Sunday and then went out for brunch.
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You know, things that sound incredibly modern.
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But there was, there were, I think the 1950s for that generation of women was a decade
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of possibilities because they had access to education.
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They had, I mean, in my mother's case, I remember asking actually quite recently, not long before
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she passed away, whether she had memories of 15th August, 1947.
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And I'm glad I did because she said she did have memories.
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She had just finished school and she heard the news and her instinct was to run all the
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way back to her school because she felt that was a place where the new flag was going to
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be hoisted and she wanted to be there and she wanted to sing the anthem.
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And she remembers running with the flag or running to the school and the complete exhilaration
#
So this is that generation.
#
You know, we have inherited that sense of possibility that they had about not only independence
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from colonial rule, but also the possibility of women choosing to be certain kinds of people.
#
And she didn't actually rush into marriage, unlike one of her sisters, but she decided
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that it was a bit of a bore to, you know, to be hampered by in-laws and being told what
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She had resisted wearing a saree right up until she, you know, was 20, I think, you
#
know, she'd wore those women in home.
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I don't know whether you've ever seen those magazines.
#
I think many of our mothers of that generation were subscribers and they had those elegant
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And these were women who just taught themselves how to tailor, right?
#
My mother, I don't think was an exception, but they just made themselves these gorgeous
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dresses and resisted wearing a saree until they went to university and certainly after
#
But again, you know, she would never have called herself a Gandhian, but she thought
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it was entirely appropriate that when she taught at university, she would wear very
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simple saris, that this wasn't a place of glamour.
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Education was serious business.
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You were smart, but simple and wore very simple saris.
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Anyway, so she resisted marriage.
#
So ultimately when my father and she met and they decided to marry, it was very much a
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decision they jointly took.
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It was an inter-caste marriage.
#
And frankly, you know, my mother got a lot of grief from extended family for many, many
#
But because it was a choice she had made herself and understood the implications of it.
#
But then curiously, very much like Mrinalji's mother, you know, was in her own domesticity
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a woman who attempted to do everything.
#
So she always worked full time, but she always insisted that no cook could produce a meal
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worth serving at the table, both for herself and her family.
#
And so therefore, and she was a very, very brilliant and accomplished cook, so insisted
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So at enormous cost to her energy and her time, but they didn't, I don't think she saw that
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as a contradiction, you know, to have been so fiercely independent in her choices and
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yet wanting to be this kind of, you know, multi-armed goddess woman who was trying to
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do everything at some cost to her own sleep and energy and health.
#
So when we were growing up, it was, I didn't quite have the argument that Mrinalji had
#
And I remember listening to that episode and identifying with it.
#
But what was, what we did know was this was not right, that she should be working so hard.
#
So we would land up in the kitchen to help and say, what can we do?
#
And her, always, her response was, have you finished reading every book in the house?
#
When you finish reading every book in the house and you have nothing else to do, come
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and help me in the kitchen.
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Until then, please use the time to go and read or do something else.
#
You will all, and then we'd say, oh, but we want to learn to cook, you know, everyone
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And she'd say, well, you'll learn.
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It's not rocket science.
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You will learn when you need to, but you'll never have this time back.
#
So this was, I think this was the feminism and then to be very aware.
#
And I, you know, I know you've always said on your shows that you're half Bengali.
#
So, and I'm assuming from your surname that your mother was Bengali, right?
#
So you're, there is a certain, you know, Bengali society, as we all know, is extremely cultured
#
and values education and especially that kind of bhadralok, middle class, upper caste culture.
#
But one of the advantages of always growing up outside Bengal, you know, my mother had
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My father's family were the first Bengalis in Gwalior.
#
So our families were from outside Bengal, but we always spoke Bengali at home.
#
There was lots of music and both classical and Tagore and others.
#
So we were a very Bengali household outside Bengal always, but my mother was very clear
#
right about the hypocrisies of bhadralok society towards women as well.
#
And this she was acerbic about, you know, and she would point this out to us that it
#
was interesting that, you know, Bengali women were expected to be intelligent and accomplished
#
and well educated and well read, but always had to know when to speak, not to speak out
#
of turn, never to be too argumentative, not too loud, to have enough feminine guile to
#
be able to navigate social spaces.
#
And she would talk to us, not in any didactic fashion, but we would discuss this stuff.
#
We would discuss the Bengali literature that she read voraciously and loved and was clearly
#
very good at and spoke very beautiful, slightly literary Bengali, which was, which I think
#
instilled my love for the language.
#
So we went, I think we didn't have a choice except to be extremely circumspect of any
#
societal expectations of young women.
#
And in this, she had 100% support of my father, who was not going to raise three demure girls
#
and their project was to be, for us to be what we wanted to be.
#
And they would do as much as they could within their limitations, but they would never say
#
And I don't think they said no very often to what we wanted to do.
#
And that in retrospect and that compared to other, our friends and families we saw around
#
And you appreciate this only later because remember this is, you know, and we all know
#
I mean, certainly anyone growing up in India knows this, that on countless train journeys
#
or landing up at weddings or where people didn't know you, when passengers on the opposite
#
berth would look at my mother and three daughters and say, you don't have a brother, you don't
#
have a brother, was a statement and a pitting question that we grew up with.
#
And as we got older, we learned what reposts to offer.
#
So there was in our teenage years, when we were much more angry about this, we'd say,
#
so what, why do we need a brother as if we are not enough?
#
And then we learned to feel quite sorry for women who felt they had to be defensive about
#
this or even answer this question.
#
And we learned to laugh off these questions, but not entirely because it was always hurtful
#
and always made you angry every single time that somehow you were incomplete if you didn't
#
have a son or a brother.
#
And therefore, decades later, of course, very recently, when both my parents passed away
#
quite actually just 18 months apart and my mother passed away first.
#
And when we went to do the cremation and relatives showed up, I think there were some who still
#
felt that they should offer their services as male relatives to perform the last rites.
#
And there was not even a second's hesitation in our head that it was going to be anyone
#
And my older sister was very quick also to get rid of the ageism of Hindu rituals, where
#
she said, no, the three of us will do everything together.
#
And again, they found that first it was the women doing the rituals, which to be fair,
#
I have to say in a crematorium in Delhi, nobody really asked any questions.
#
They did hesitate when they realized that the oldest was not going to take precedence
#
and all of us were going to do this together.
#
But you could see the surprise and slight shock amongst relatives, definitely rather
#
than friends, but they got used to it very quickly.
#
And we did talk amongst ourselves and say really, especially for my mother, it would
#
be such an insult to her legacy and her memory to have it any other way.
#
So I think a lot of these, to sum up what you're asking, I think the unarticulated
#
feminisms were the ones that were part of our DNA and education and being in Delhi in
#
growing up in school and university and all those later influences and reading gave us
#
the language to articulate these ideas better.
#
And that's such a lovely story about you going to the kitchen and your mother saying, no,
#
you come and help me after you've read all the books and there's something so elegant
#
about this kind of feminism that comes out through choices you make in your everyday
#
life where you're exercising your agency.
#
Like we live in an age where people, we live in an age of so much posturing going on around
#
us that there is always a need to signal how virtuous you are and how feminist you are
#
and all of these things.
#
And it seems that in that generation, through quiet actions, maybe just going out to see
#
a film or of course, the not so quiet action of taking a Tonga from one town to the other
#
in the fifties, like my God, that sounds so dramatic today.
#
Well, I mean, your parents must have been really impressive people, therefore, but tell
#
me when she asked you to come back after you've read everything, what is the kind of stuff
#
you were reading at that time?
#
Like in your childhood, what were the kind of books that you had around you?
#
And what way did they influence you?
#
One of the things I've kind of realized over time is that the parts of that we often remember
#
our first few years much more vividly than later, you know, adulthood things can just
#
pass in a flash, especially when you're going to so many cities as you are and all of that.
#
But you know, memories of childhood can sometimes be vivid, you know, you can remember early
#
books that you read, what influenced you in what way.
#
So what kind of things were you reading and how were you shaping?
#
How were you shaping as a person?
#
You know, what was your concept?
#
What was your conception of yourself?
#
I'm sure as a 10 year old, you weren't saying I want to do ethnography.
#
So you know, how was that developing?
#
Tell me a bit about that.
#
OK, so I'll talk about what Delhi was like later.
#
But let me, you know, address your question about what I was reading.
#
So one of the big, there were many shocks, as you can imagine, moving from Port Blair
#
to Delhi, and one of them was that we realized just how bad our Hindi was.
#
Because it's the bane of many Bengali households.
#
But my father's Hindi was brilliant, having grown up in Gwalior.
#
But we never really had conversational Hindi because at home we spoke Bengali.
#
And increasingly, as we began to go through schools, a classic thing, the children would
#
speak to each other in English.
#
So in good middle class household fashion, we used to have, you know, the newspaper guy
#
used to also give you periodicals and you read the periodical for two days or three
#
days and then you gave it back.
#
So you didn't have to buy periodicals, right?
#
It was a circulation periodical that the newspaper guy gave you.
#
So my mother began all these subscriptions of Nandan, Champak, Chandamama.
#
You know, these were the children's Hindi magazines, which we began to read.
#
And so that was the first time I began to read Hindi properly, you know, and with any
#
Of course, the temptation was always to just to do the puzzles and to read the cartoons
#
But we had to read at least one or two stories in it.
#
And they were beautifully produced.
#
I mean, I haven't seen those magazines in even in stalls recently when I used to look
#
for them for my daughter when she was growing up in London and I thought how lovely to have
#
those kind of publications.
#
I just couldn't find them.
#
So there was that, though I can't ever confess to, you know, having read Hindi properly beyond
#
what was the fantastic literature actually in the Rashtrabharti textbooks that we had
#
And there was also a burgeoning culture of reading English periodicals of Illustrated
#
Whitley or Junior Statesman and all of the others.
#
And then eventually the sort of glossy, glamorous India Today arriving every fortnight with
#
advertising of the kind that we had never seen before and so on.
#
But again, learning to read news analysis, reading columns, that was the first exposure
#
But in school, of course, having switched from Carmel Convent Port Blair to Carmel Convent
#
Delhi meant that we were in that English Convent-educated environment where the library was run by an
#
absolutely outstanding woman called Sister Patricia Anne, who as giggly teenagers, people
#
made up all kinds of stories of what her past may have been of being jilted at the altar
#
because she was a very attractive, smiling, lovely woman.
#
But she ran the library and curated the collection with such love.
#
But in that very Catholic way, there was a prescriptive order in which you could read
#
So all these glass-fronted cupboards had class three to four, class four to five, class five
#
to six, you know, kind of thing.
#
And you were only, so when you had your library period, you went to the library and only those
#
two glass cupboards were open.
#
But of course, while you waited your turn, you had all the time to read periodicals in
#
the library, but also look through the glass covers of the other cupboards and you could
#
see what you were missing and what you were being shut out of.
#
So a friend of mine and I then having read all the books in our cupboards very quickly
#
by borrowing everybody else's copies and so on, went to Sister Patricia and said, you
#
have to let us read Thomas Hardy.
#
And we were 12, 13, and she said, no, no, it's not for you.
#
And we said, yes, it is.
#
You know, we are bored of reading G.A. Henties or whatever we had in our cupboard.
#
And then we were obsessed.
#
We were reading a Hardy novel every week.
#
After the fourth week of continuous Hardy reading, she said, right, that that's the
#
You're going to turn suicidal girls if you're going to read so much Thomas Hardy.
#
But the fire had been lit, you know, but it was so we were but the biggest I remember
#
from those years, the biggest struggle was to get hold of books that you could have.
#
No one had a copy of a book, you read it and passed it on and circulated it.
#
But then the nuns were very strict about not allowing non academic books in your school
#
So we used to have like, you know, like Secret Service searches of our bags of who's brought
#
in because I think they worried that girls were eating mills and booms all the time.
#
And this wasn't good for their moral development or something.
#
So getting hold of books was so you know, they were so pricey.
#
And that's when the sort of People's Publishing House came into its own in Delhi, because
#
they had, of course, all the Russian greats at very affordable editions.
#
So we just read all the Russians, we read Gorky.
#
And we read, of course, the great Tolstoy and discovered short stories and novels and
#
And that the fact that you could read a Chekhov play, while also attempting to and we performed
#
the proposal once and we used to do a play every year in school.
#
So I think getting hold and then my father had this big collection of fiction, which
#
we worked our way through, but they were slightly it was books that he had bought when he was
#
probably in medical college or something so older, and which we I'm sure were not meant
#
to be reading, but we did.
#
And you know, so I think what it inculcated more a love of literature, of course, and
#
a love of reading, but also the absolute joy of illicit pleasures of reading slightly beyond
#
your level of reading things that you should not quite be reading as a 12 year old or a
#
And then, of course, you know, a lot of households, you'll remember that you may know this, of
#
course, that there are I find this so curious now living in the UK, as I've done for more
#
than 30 years, is, you know, completely pulp fiction writers like Sidney Sheldon.
#
And of course, Ayn Rand, I know I've heard her mention on earlier shows of yours by others,
#
I mean, you know, these were the books which are really, I mean, pulp were I used to have,
#
I remember a relative one saying, oh, I have the complete works of Sidney Sheldon.
#
But those were available.
#
So I think so going to university and having a library full of books that you hadn't read
#
was got to be the most thrilling thing about starting university.
#
It's such a fantastic story.
#
And even even looking through glass bookshelves is such a wonderful image, such a wonderful
#
And I think, you know, today, of course, everybody has everything available to them.
#
But I think just having those two shelves open, just it's so much richer.
#
This is, you know, the world of discovery, just there.
#
And it's so delightful that you were, you know, when the boys your age were reading
#
Hardy Boys, you were reading Thomas Hardy, which is, yes, I did read a lot of Hardy Boys
#
and Nancy Drew, of course, too.
#
You know, I got into serious literature when I happened to discover Dostoyevsky, where,
#
you know, I think I was 10 and on my father's shelf, I came across this modern library edition
#
of something which was called House of the Dead.
#
So I thought, oh, House of the Dead must be a good story.
#
And of course, it's his years in the Siberian prison and all of that, and got completely
#
And my dad never actually stopped me from reading anything.
#
But when it came to cinema, he was a little strict.
#
So I remember once I wanted to see an American werewolf in London and he had the tape with
#
And he said, OK, but you sit in front of me and every time I tell you to turn around,
#
turn around and don't look at the screen.
#
So continuously through the film, I would be told to turn around and I would have to
#
look at him looking at whatever was happening.
#
So which, you know, and I've randomly remembered this after maybe, you know, 35 years.
#
So maybe I should, you know, check out that film again and see what I missed.
#
So tell me about your dad.
#
So I mean, he was a surgeon and had joined the army because the Indian army needed surgeons
#
at that point in the 60s.
#
So completely on a whim, he used to, he was in CMC Valour where he had trained, he had
#
gone to Gwalior Medical College and then went to Valour, which was, of course, the place
#
to be where he met my mother and then joined the army.
#
And he was posted to what is now everybody knows as Chakrata.
#
But in those days, because it was a secret medical establishment, it used to be called
#
So it didn't have, you know, nobody knew where, so none of the relatives knew where
#
he was working and was in charge of the hospital.
#
And he absolutely loved army life.
#
And so I think I was, when I was born in Chakrata, it was this very regimented, reassuringly
#
disciplined but also incredibly physically challenging set of circumstances.
#
No electricity, no water, snowed six months of the year, lots of bears around.
#
And so on, again, back to Delhi.
#
And then when he went out to Port Blair, really again on a whim because they needed somebody
#
to be director of medical health services in the Andamanakum Islands and my dad went
#
So that was interesting because it combined his skills as a surgeon with having to be
#
And of course, the medical superintendent was also the superintendent of the cellular
#
jail where, you know, all the political prisoners used to be kept.
#
And he loved it, really thrived in that dual role, both running the jail, working with
#
the prisoners, but also touring the islands.
#
So his job really was, there were primary health centers in some places, but all emergency
#
surgery and so on, you know, it was his job to make sure that people were looked after.
#
And on one of those trips, he took the family with him.
#
And there, I would say that, you know, while I was still very, very young, I have very
#
vivid memories of that trip, but certainly the anthropological curiosity about people
#
who were so unlike you, you know, they looked different, you didn't understand a word of
#
what they said, there were the Andamanese, the Jaravars, the Ongays, you know, there
#
were so many tribes of the Andaman Nicobar Islands that we were very aware that we had
#
nothing to do with them.
#
You know, we were from mainland India, as it was referred to, who had been plonked
#
there as part of the Indian state.
#
And the Indian state's attitude to indigenous populations there as elsewhere was, we've
#
got to civilize them, you know, and that word was used without any sense of irony.
#
And so the story that my father loved to tell to his dying day, and quite rightly, it's
#
a great story, was being interrupted in a party one evening to be summoned to the hospital
#
for emergency surgery, because five men from the government of India, either PWD or something,
#
had gone to build roads forcibly in some island, and they had been shot at with arrows.
#
And so these five men had been rescued and brought back with arrows sticking out of their
#
bodies, and they'd gone through the body.
#
And my dad was only surgeon, so he spent all night operating on each of them, pulling out
#
those arrows carefully, all five of them survived, and my dad kept two of the arrows as a souvenir.
#
And it was the perfect metaphor for, I think, what, you know, what, as I said, our attitude,
#
our post-independent attitude to indigenous populations all over India has been.
#
And my father's, again, not a social scientist, but I think there was a basic humanism which
#
made him say, well, why on earth would you force yourself when people, you know, no wonder
#
Okay, of course I'll save your life, because that's what I do as a doctor, but why on earth
#
So the move to Delhi, I think, you know, which was obviously better for his, they needed
#
But what was really, there's so much one can say, and I'm sure, you know, your listeners
#
have a limited appetite for hearing about my parents, but I think what was remarkable
#
about him was his complete commitment, despite the possibility of making a lot of money in
#
His entire career was spent in public hospitals and government hospitals.
#
So he worked first in LNJPN, you know, Loknayak Jayaprakash Narayan Hospital, that used to
#
be called Irwin Hospital when he joined it first in the mid-70s, and then to Ramanohar
#
Lohia Hospital and was head of surgery there.
#
But there was never a moment's doubt, a lot of his friends had gone into private practice
#
and made a lot of money and had fancy cars and big houses, but he rather relished the
#
challenge of not knowing how he's going to get through the 300 patients waiting in his
#
outpatient's department, you know, four hours to see all those patients, a huge variety
#
of illnesses that you had to be incredibly creative, a diagnostician, to get to the bottom
#
But he kind of thrived in that, and those stories of, you know, where LNJPN Hospital
#
is in Delhi, it's on Jawaharlal Nehru Mark, where we also lived on the same road, which
#
is a very aptly named road because it connects Old and New Delhi.
#
So it's on, it runs along Ramlila Maidan, where of course the big political meetings
#
used to be held, flanked by Turkman Gate and Delhi Gate.
#
And so in Irwin Hospital, NNJPN, Shahjahanabad, Old Delhi's working population of plumbers
#
and car mechanics and tailors and cobblers, all of these, this working population used
#
to come, this was the main government hospital.
#
So I think, you know, 75% of my father's patients were Muslim and very poor.
#
But it also meant that my father, being a good Bengali householder, on Sundays went
#
shopping for fresh fish and vegetables, as any self-respecting Bengali man would do.
#
But he couldn't really walk through Shahjahanabad for very long without being recognised or
#
He was completely plugged into that population.
#
You know, we were there during the emergency.
#
And so when the bulldozers, which of course are in the news now for all the wrong reasons
#
and were in the news then for all the wrong reasons, we could see from our house the bulldozers
#
And you know, there was of course no social media, not even many telephones.
#
We always had a telephone because we were a doctor's house.
#
But word spread through staff and the few neighbours we had that this was happening
#
and it rippled through everywhere because we were just so shocked by the violence of
#
that image of people's homes being just razed to the ground.
#
And these were people who, you know, we were connected to.
#
These were people who came to our house at Eid because my father was absolutely very,
#
very strict about never accepting any presence or rewards for being at the end of treatment
#
of successful treatments of patients.
#
But on Eid, they would say, you know, you can't say no today.
#
And so we would be drowning in Seva or in Kormas or whatever that people brought.
#
So these were people who were in and out of our house.
#
And it was those homes that were being razed.
#
Of course, we were too little to know the whole sterilisation program and what was going
#
And in a bizarre coming of full circle, Jahangirpuri, where the bulldozers have been recently are,
#
of course, is one of the places where displaced populations from there were settled.
#
So these things come back in cycles in modern India, much like its politics in some ways.
#
So while it is something that happened in the past, the resonances in the present are
#
And for my listeners, if you want to read more about Turkmen Gate, the sterilisations,
#
one of the many books on the emergency that I recommend strongly is Kumi Kapoor's book
#
on it, where she does a really good job writing about it.
#
And you know, the thing is, looking back in hindsight, we know that it ended there.
#
It was terrible, but it ended.
#
Looking at, and this is, you know, completely unrelated to our conversation, but looking
#
at what's going on today, I don't know where it ends.
#
I don't, you know, this is, this is not, this is not sort of, we haven't seen the worst
#
But, you know, leaving that aside, another thought that strikes me, like you refer to,
#
you know, your dad's idealism of working in government hospitals and just giving himself
#
And I remember chatting with my dad about why he joined the civil services in the mid
#
sixties and what it was like and all that.
#
And he could have, you know, he had offers from the private sector.
#
He had offers from Cambridge, I think, to do a PhD there and all of that.
#
He chose to join the IES for different reasons.
#
But one of the things that struck me was the idealism of him and his colleagues at that
#
point in time, where they're joining this, not because it's a good career path or they'll,
#
you know, be in positions of power and all of that.
#
But there is that fresh idealism because, you know, we are still a young country and
#
Like you spoke about your mother's excitement when she wanted to run to the school to see
#
And, you know, in that generation, I just, you know, you see so much of this, this idealism
#
and I'm just thinking aloud, I wonder, where are these idealists today?
#
Like, you know, in the sense that if you were to see such idealism, where would you see
#
Is it that we are just in different times where you no longer, you know, you know, that
#
it doesn't make sense to be so idealistic, that you're probably, you know, that the upside
#
of, you know, following a different kind of life is so good that, you know, why bother
#
So you're completely thinking aloud and obviously one can just look at outliers in any generation
#
But do you sort of have any thoughts on this?
#
I do, actually, because I spent so much time in rural India.
#
I mean, to start with, even with the services, with the civil services, with the IAS, with
#
all the other services, I mean, right up until when I was traveling around Bengal in the
#
early few years of the century, you know, trying to find a field site and settling down
#
and just going to other places everywhere.
#
Of course, the people you could talk to was the DM or the collector or the SP.
#
And often they were living apart from their families who were in the capital and they
#
And they were, of course, delighted if an educated English speaking person of their
#
class and showed up and had a chat, but I've learned so much from officers of, you know,
#
they were my counterparts often in the services and they had that sense of commitment.
#
And I, you know, I'm not, I don't think it's disappeared.
#
I really don't think that our parents had it and where has it gone?
#
I don't feel a dispirited, I mean, apart from anything else, the civil services are
#
still a very coveted career, maybe coveted for the wrong reasons and we've got to fix
#
But there are everywhere, I mean, on any given day, one can quite easily, thanks to the way
#
we can access this kind of information, there are just millions of people across India making
#
it a better place, you know, experimentations with farming of the zillions of Anganwadi
#
workers who've been working despite not getting paid.
#
I'm not sure they're doing it because they have nothing else to do.
#
It is they understand that, you know, if they don't keep a track of polio vaccinations,
#
you're going to have, even if you skip a few years, it's a disaster, right?
#
So the commitment with which a local Anganwadi worker, a local, you know, somebody cooking
#
the midday meal properly, the way the cleaners on the trains, you know, there are people
#
who are, they take certain pride in what they're doing and it is a public good often that they
#
It is not one for private gain.
#
Yes, they have the security of a salary, which is why these jobs are so coveted.
#
And it is frankly shocking that so many of our public sector job remain unfilled, you
#
know, those posts are vacant and that there are so few of them.
#
So it's not just the fact that we don't have enough jobs, but that there is such an appetite
#
to do jobs where the financial rewards are not very high.
#
People don't want to worry about the precarity of, they don't want a lot of money, but they
#
just don't want the precarity of wondering whether the next salary is going to come from.
#
And in return, they're willing to put their energies into running things.
#
So I know the public sector gets bashed a lot with, oh, you know, they just pocket the
#
salary and sit at home.
#
And of course that happens, you know, one sees that a lot.
#
It happens in my research village, there were two men in the PWD and I always found them
#
at home, you know, and they always got their salaries.
#
Of course they never were out there doing their jobs.
#
But for people like that, I think there are more people out there who do work hard.
#
And India's civil society space, which is becoming just so unbelievably difficult because
#
it is exactly the space that has the potential, not for any ideological reasons, but just
#
because of who they are, because civil society is modeled on cooperation, on diversity of
#
opinion, on privileging capacity over rank.
#
The way you build anything in civil society is precisely against the principles of majoritarianism
#
And so civil society, by the nature of its activity, is able to ask questions of the
#
dominant political ideology in the country.
#
And that's why they're under attack.
#
I mean, there is an agenda to squeeze them out.
#
But yet, look at India's stories of people making their little corner of India a better
#
So I think we do have that capacity, we just need to make a lot more of it.
#
Yeah, and maybe just thinking aloud, it shows up in different places than it used to.
#
Like I once wrote a column about that Hori question people sometimes ask that our founders
#
in a sense, were all such remarkable men and women.
#
And where are our leaders today in comparison?
#
And my point there was that if you just apply the economic lens to it and look at incentives,
#
our founders when they were fighting for India's freedom, they weren't motivated by the lust
#
for power because there was none to be had.
#
They were fighting against the Great British Empire, defeat was practically guaranteed.
#
But because they believed in those principles so much, they threw themselves into it.
#
So you have that entire generation of great leaders, one upon another, you're Gandhi,
#
Patel, Nehru, and so on and so forth.
#
And today it's different today you have this predatory state and anyone entering politics
#
given the game that it is, is, you know, largely motivated by the lust for power.
#
And even if idealistic people get in, they just get corrupted along the way because that's
#
just the nature of the beast.
#
So where do the idealists go?
#
The idealists go and do things within civil society, the kind of things you mentioned,
#
trying to make people's lives better in different ways.
#
So I imagine if Nehru and Patel were alive today, I really don't think they'd bother
#
You know, they do something else somewhere else.
#
Another sort of question that struck me when...
#
Can I just say something to that, I mean, I think it's also, you know, it's quite sad
#
that our understanding and use of the word politics has become reduced to a zero sum
#
One of the things I, you know, as an academic would like to push more, and I'm writing about
#
this developing on cultivating democracy, is that politics is as much about building
#
Politics is not just about competition.
#
It's about cooperation.
#
It's about learning to work with others.
#
It is learning to agree to disagree, but pull together.
#
And if you begin to see that, then civil society may not be party political, but it is political
#
in that life-affirming way.
#
And I think we should expand our notion, or we should not concede politics to be only
#
what corrupt leaders do.
#
I was thinking of it in a narrow sense of electoral politics and so on and so forth.
#
So you're absolutely right.
#
I mean, in a sense, what you and I are doing right now is politics.
#
So you know, in a different kind of way.
#
So my next question comes from that observation you made about how, when you went to the Andamans,
#
and you could suddenly see that these are people who are not like you, they are a different
#
And you can see the Indian state's attitude towards these people, you know, especially
#
like in your musing about your father's hypothetical question of why were these guys going there
#
in the first place and imposing themselves on the local people, right?
#
And I would imagine that that's like one scale dropping from the eye.
#
And I just kind of look at how I learned to think about India, that obviously when you're
#
growing up, it's your country of full of patriotism and blah, blah, blah.
#
And then gradually, and the patriotism and the love for the country can remain, but you
#
begin to notice one layer at a time, all the different things that are wrong with it.
#
How our society treats women, for example, then, you know, things like caste, things
#
like communalism, all of them, you begin to notice those layers drop off.
#
At a later point in time, you may begin to question sort of line nationalism, the lines
#
on a map, you know, must I think of my country as this?
#
What is the cost of it to be this?
#
You know, when I've done episodes on that part of India's history, where this nation
#
kind of came together, you know, 47 to 50, like an episode I did on VP Menon and how
#
he helped Sardar Patel, you know, get it together.
#
It seems to me to be an act of fast track colonialism.
#
What the British took a couple of centuries to do, these two guys using coercion and promises
#
that they later broke, essentially, you know, created this political entity.
#
Now, you know, I love this country as it stands now, but I can't help but look back and feel,
#
you know, deep unease at the means through which we achieved this particular end.
#
So I've, you know, through my life just started questioning so much one layer at a time, all
#
these layers kind of drop off.
#
And of course, today, I think, you know, there shouldn't be any more layers left to fall
#
But in that case, how did your notion of India sort of gradually evolve?
#
Because I would imagine as a child, of course, of idealistic parents and all of that, you
#
look at this country as a great project, your idea of India, I presume your inherited idea
#
of India, received idea of India would be very similar to what Nehru's would have been.
#
But then you look around and, you know, so tell me about that process of coming from
#
that idealized notion of India to the real India that we see around that.
#
What was that process like?
#
You know, what were the, you know, what were the sort of the revelations of the TILs that
#
kind of really made you sit back, that shook you, so on and so forth?
#
Okay, so that, you know, I think being in Port Blair during the 1971 war was interesting
#
because we used to have blackouts and my mother and all other women and others were making
#
up food packets and knitting stuff and, you know, the usual kind of war effort.
#
And we had no clue what was going on, you know, what this was until we began to see
#
And India's aircraft carrier, INS Vikrant came by and docked, it couldn't come into
#
the harbor because it was too big, so it stopped mid-sea.
#
And we were taken out to be on it.
#
And so suddenly you begin to realize, as a very small child, that there were this enormous
#
machinery to protect the sovereignty of one's country and that Sama India was in this just
#
war fighting to liberate another country.
#
And actually, East Pakistan was not even a word that was used very much, it became Bangladesh
#
And, of course, there's a big Bengali population in Port Blair that's local to it, Bengali
#
These were the two big communities settled there.
#
So Bangladeshi and what Bangladeshi liberation meant, the rights and wrongs of it, the importance
#
of language and not curbing, not imposing languages and the consequences of imposing
#
Urdu on a Bengali-speaking population and look what happens.
#
You know, that message came through even to a very small child at that point.
#
And that the Indian state had the sheer muscle power of something like INS Vikrant to press
#
into service, to defend these principles.
#
So obviously you felt incredibly loyal and patriotic about it.
#
But then, you know, asking questions about why we were in Chakrata and why were India
#
and Pakistan fighting and that relationship raised a whole set of issues around Pakistan,
#
which obviously, you know, stayed with me and determined my first project.
#
But actually the watts of this country that one belonged to were almost at every social
#
You know, what we don't talk about, you think, well, I was as privileged as they come as
#
being born into a Brahmin Bengali-educated family.
#
Of course, you're female, so that's one disadvantage instantly, I told you the story about whereas
#
And the second thing of being dark-skinned, you know, and we don't talk about very much
#
in sociological terms very much, but, you know, it explains Indians' racism towards
#
darker races all over the world and in India all the time, but look at the way we treat
#
I mean, you know, so the fact that through non-verbal violence, you can destroy the self-belief
#
of young women because they are dark-skinned, men too, but, you know, the redeeming feature
#
is that they're male, so you can be forgiven much.
#
It doesn't matter how tall you are or how dark you are, but if you're not very tall
#
and you're dark in Indian society and a woman, you spend a lot of effort trying to overcome
#
those disadvantages, so that was one big thing.
#
The caste thing, which again was never, that is what happens when you live in a Brahmin
#
household, right, you never think about it unless you start to see the inequities around
#
you and then you begin to understand that they are shaped by caste.
#
I mean, why, you know, in a government bungalow that we lived in, when the drains got blocked,
#
why did another human being have to come in and climb into those ancient colonial drains
#
And I remember thinking, I remember being appalled, not just by the ickiness of it,
#
but just thinking, you know, here was this guy who was standing here one minute talking
#
to me, next thing, and I used to often, you know, take charge of things like this getting
#
done in the house that, you know, just it didn't seem right and learning to then think
#
what this was structured by.
#
And then living in, you know, living, as I said, next to Old Delhi and understanding,
#
you know, to be part of this very normalised routine where there were mosques all around.
#
There was a mosque right behind our house, so, you know, before exams you had to get
#
up to do revision, you woke up with the dawn azaan, in the evening you had to come in from
#
playing outside before the evening azaan, you know, so our lives used to be regulated
#
by the azaan, and suddenly to have bastis being destroyed because they were Muslim was,
#
these were the ruptures, you know, the moments where you think, you stop and think about
#
what you've taken completely for granted and you ask questions, some of which are answered,
#
some of which are not answered, and it sets up all those questions that you spend then
#
time trying to understand.
#
And almost, like I said, every encounter, whether amongst people you knew or using public
#
transport as we did, you know, I joined the NCC, so the only way I could be in the NCC
#
and stay behind was, you know, I couldn't come back on the school bus, so I had to come
#
back on a public bus, and you know, you're fair game on a DTC bus, and we used to be
#
fair game, every single time we got on a DTC bus, you had no idea who was, what kind of
#
man was going to be stood next to you, and you kind of put up with it because, you put
#
up with it because you saw everybody else putting up with it, until one day you thought,
#
hang on a second, why should I be putting up with this nonsense, and did something about
#
So whether it was polite conversation, whether it was public transport, whether it was the
#
political speeches one heard at Ramleela Maidan all the time, you know, so the greats, JP,
#
Jayaprakash Narayan, Raj Narayan, Atal Bihari Bachbhai, they all used to come, this was
#
where you made your big political speeches, and one heard them all, at all these, every
#
one of these encounters threw up questions about, that made you question, not just the
#
status quo, but question what you were taking for granted, it just made you think, oh hang
#
on a second, this is not right, and maybe this is why it is not right.
#
And so much of the excellent education one had in Delhi University was really learning
#
to ask and answer those questions, learning to know how to ask the question, learning
#
to ask the right questions.
#
That's what university education is about, and now when I, you know, this obsession that
#
we have in India, as indeed elsewhere, with the STEM subjects and science and technology
#
and mathematics, which are of course all brilliant, and you know, they make rocket fuel and tell
#
us about Mars and built the internet, fantastic disciplines, all of them, but what the social
#
sciences and humanities do is to help you understand and ask those, the right questions,
#
and then how to think with those questions, what to read, how to read, ask those questions,
#
and that's why often when you look at right-wing trolls, you find they are IT techie guys,
#
you know, and that's what is missing in that kind of technical STEM education.
#
So speaking of the social sciences and asking questions and all that, tell me a little bit
#
more about your journey then, you know, as a young teenager, you're noticing all these
#
things, you're going to college, you're, you know, presumably, although I would still
#
imagine that if you're asking questions about all of this, you're still one of the outliers,
#
everyone isn't quite like this yet, but you know, so is that true, number one, and also
#
how is then your journey happening to, you know, are you like, were you an accidental
#
anthropologist or did you at some point start finding the whole field fascinating and said,
#
okay, this is what I want to do.
#
Okay, so I think I am an accidental anthropologist, but I found it very, an interesting field
#
because my first degree was in English honors.
#
When I finished school, I thought I was going to be a surgeon, like my father, I loved being
#
in a white coat and making people better, yes, I used to love, I used to, you know,
#
I used to love pinning a chloroform frog down and dissecting it and, and doing that dissection,
#
I used to love it, I did A level science, but for various complicated reasons, I never
#
made it through the medical entrance and, and couldn't get into medical college and
#
was heartbroken, but again, I had very enlightened parents and, and who pointed out to me that
#
actually my second love was English literature, it wasn't a sort of replacement science subject
#
like zoology or botany, you know, that's what people did if you didn't get into medicine.
#
And so I went off to study English honors and flourished, I did very well, loved, absolutely
#
loved reading what we read in the curriculum, which was admittedly not a very decolonized
#
curriculum at all, you know, in the 80s, English honors and Delhi University was as canonized
#
canonical English books as you can imagine, and you know, it's quite right that it has
#
been revised since then, but we started in a very classical, we read plotters and Plato
#
and Homer and, and then moved down through the centuries to Chaucer and Milton and, and
#
Shakespeare, of course, and then the 20th century grades. I love these books. An additional
#
what really made I think my three years of English honors was discovering Samuel Beckett's
#
plays in the very first month of starting my degree in the college library and being
#
blown out of my mind, you know, by, by this play that Beckett is called play, it's called
#
the play. And I was looking for a play to perform for the freshers drama competition
#
and I did a lot of theater in those days and found this play and then discovered Beckett,
#
but that was a whole other journey. But alongside reading these texts, we also had to do what
#
were called historical background. So if you were reading, say, Jonathan Swift, you needed
#
to know what was happening in 17th, 18th century England at the time. And I found those background
#
papers very interesting. And so when I came to the end of my three years and I did very
#
well and topped the university and so on, I thought, okay, I'm going to always read
#
books. And I still to this day, every single day, I read some fiction and I read literature
#
quite much as much as I can. But those social backgrounds, they were sociological, you know,
#
and that that's what interested me, I realized. And in those days, and possibly even now in
#
Delhi University, you could not do a master's in any subject unless you had a first degree
#
in that subject, except for sociology. So sociology in the Delhi School of Economics
#
was the only place where they would have an all India entrance test and give you some
#
fairly general questions to answer. You wrote a couple of essays and then they took 35 people.
#
So and they admitted people on that basis. And I got in there. And that's when I studied
#
to study sociology, which in those days, the sociology department in Delhi School was at
#
its heyday. You know, so it had the grades. This was the department that MNC Universe
#
had set up. But Universe was gone. But we had Ajitpal Singh Oberoi, André Bette, Veena
#
Das, A.M. Shah, B.S. Paviskar. These were the people who were teaching and they taught
#
they had a real sense of mission. We had a real range of research interests and they
#
were captivating. Amitav Ghosh, that was his last year of teaching sociology. So he taught
#
me in that first year. And then he wrote The Circle of Reason and became terribly famous
#
and quite rightly gave up teaching anthropology to writing fiction, full time writing, not
#
just fiction, full time. But that was what was, you know, we had sociology of India papers
#
when for the first time one was reading about India, reading about village India, reading
#
about caste India, reading about social stratification and, you know, social inequality, something
#
like Bette, who had spent his entire career writing about inequality. So that's when
#
we got the, or I certainly developed the analytical language to talk about what I could see, you
#
know, things that I was talking about earlier. But when it came to just to anticipate the
#
next stage was I left and I did my MPhil there as well. But when it came to doing a PhD,
#
I was very happy to stay and do my PhD there. But by that point Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan
#
had died in January 1988, 20th January. And we were finishing our masters and doing this
#
wonderful course that Professor Oberoi taught on Southwest Asia, which was effectively,
#
you know, what Euro-America calls the Middle East. And we were reading all this anthropology
#
of Pashtuns and Pathan country and Afghanistan and so on. Frederick Bath, Akbar Ahmed, these
#
were people who'd written about, these were anthropologists of. And we read about blood
#
feuds and this incredible Pathan notion of courage, the sort of cultural code through
#
which they regulate their social systems. And in the middle of this Khan Abdul Ghaffar
#
Khan died. And the Indian newspapers were, of course, full of, oh, this is Frontier Gandhi,
#
Sardhadi Gandhi, non-violent soldier of Islam, and, you know, a man to match his mountains
#
was the name of this book. And, you know, the Afghans used to call him. And it struck
#
me as very odd that the anthropological literature on the Pathans and the day's headlines were
#
in complete variance. You know, how could you have a Pashtun from a society where blood
#
feuds were such a big thing being non-violent? You know, what the hell was going on? So I
#
remember asking Professor Oberoi about this. And he said, oh, think about it some more.
#
And I said, no, I want to write an op-ed piece and send it to the Times of India and see
#
if they'll, you know, isn't it interesting? And he said, no, no, just go away and think
#
about it some more. So I thought about it some more. I said, okay, let me read what's
#
there on the Khuda-e-Khidmatkar movement. What was this movement that he set up? And
#
there was nothing. There was no book I could read that would tell me about the Khuda-e-Khidmatkar
#
movement. And what I found was Tendulkar's biography of Bacha Khan, which was the sort
#
of appendix to his multi-volume biography of Gandhi. And that was very much how you
#
do it. So it was slightly hagiographical and it was, you know, Frontier Gandhi, it was
#
amazing and he did this and that. But there was some interesting historical detail there,
#
no question. But what, by then my sociological muscle had been developed enough for me to
#
be interested not in just in the big leader theories of society, but how the ordinary
#
Khuda-e-Khidmatkar had managed being Muslim, being a Pashtun, being a man, and being nonviolent.
#
It seemed like a cultural joke that you could have the most successful Gandhian movement
#
for 17 years, from 1930 to 1947, amongst the Pashtuns. It was just bizarre because what
#
we'd heard of in popular culture was, of course, Kabuliwala based on Tagore story and the film
#
and my father had stories of Kabuliwalas used to come and sell, you know, dried fruits and
#
all in places like Gwalior or Ittar, you know, they used to come and refill my grandfather's
#
Ittar bottles once a year. There was nothing. So that's when I realized that I had to,
#
I really wanted to find out more. And the only way to do it was to do a PhD. But my
#
brilliant professors at Delhi School in those days, bless them, said, sorry, you can't go
#
to Pakistan. That's not possible. I said, why not? And they said, because you're Indian
#
and because you're Hindu and, you know, there's a war going on in Afghanistan and you'll get
#
killed. I said, well, that's up to me, right? I should be able to take a chance. No, no,
#
Indians can't go in there. I said, why have Indians been turned down before as anyone
#
tried and been told they can't go? And they said, no, but there's no question. You just
#
won't get the permission to go, at which point I realized that I was not going to be able
#
to talk myself out through this. So I left, I left Delhi School of Economics and hoped
#
to then get a scholarship to go abroad. And while I did, I actually did the best thing
#
I could have done with my time, which was to go and work with Kapila Vatsya in the Indira
#
Gandhi National Center for the Arts in Delhi.
#
Wow, what a story. And you know, you mentioned Beckett earlier and I thought you're surely
#
going to mention waiting for Godot and that involves a lot of waiting. So that's, you
#
know, could prepare you for a life in ethnography. Hang around 10, 15 years and see how these
#
people live their lives. And you also mentioned, you know, cutting of frogs, which is something
#
I could never do. But I remembered this beautiful quote by Asimov, which is apropos of nothing,
#
but I'm going to read it out anyway, because there's a memorable phrase in this quote which
#
really struck me. And this is Isaac Asimov saying, quote, I could not endure zoology.
#
Oh, I would have done well enough if it were a mere matter of book learning, but it wasn't.
#
There was a lab and we dissected earthworms, frogs, dogfish and cats. I disliked it intensely,
#
but I grew inured to it. The trouble was that we had to find a stray cat and kill it by dumping
#
it in an ash can, which we filled with chloroform. Like a fool, I did it. After all, I was only
#
following the orders of my superior, like any Nazi functionary in the death camps. But I never
#
recovered. That killed cat lives with me. And to this day, over half a century later, when I think
#
of it, I double up in misery. Stop quote. And which is such a, you know, such a-
#
Wow. That's no, I don't, I think I'm, I'm with Asimov on that. I don't think I could have killed
#
even a frog to have cut it up. But once it had been dissociated and as Elliot would say,
#
like a patient etherized above the table, you know, that once it was there on the wax thing,
#
then, you know, then it was a, it was a procedure that you learned and learned how to
#
pin it down, so to speak. And, and, and then it became, it was like looking through a telescope
#
into the night sky. It was looking into the organs of a, of a mammal. So you knew that there was
#
enough mirroring, you know, there was something of you that you learned as well, not just about
#
that. But you learned something about yourself. I mean, I would have never known I was not
#
squeamish until I began to do dissections. And unlike Asimov, I think I wouldn't have ever
#
studied science if there wasn't so much practical work in each of the three subjects.
#
You know, in that bit I read out, I love that, you know, that line that killed cat lives with me.
#
And question to all my listeners that, you know, are there killed cats which live with you also?
#
Something to think about. And just speaking of, you know, the frog being already dead,
#
I am reminded, and this is another digression, I'm reminded of Leo Tolstoy, who in his later
#
years had turned militantly vegetarian and, and was an inspiration to Gandhi for various reasons.
#
And one day his aunt said, you know, I'm coming home for, I'm coming home for lunch and I'd like
#
to have some chicken. And he said, you know, we're a vegetarian household and all that. And she's
#
like, no, no, I want chicken, I insist on chicken. So when she came, she was taken to the dining
#
table and there was a chicken on her chair, a live chicken. And he said, okay, you kill it and eat
#
it. And it's a very interesting way for Tolstoy to point out that the chicken on the chair is
#
going to be the chicken on the plate. So, you know, I could say the same thing about the frogs.
#
But, you know, can I, on that, Amit, there's, you know, there are a couple of things one can
#
say from that digression. One is a very funny story in the North West Frontier, right, about
#
being vegetarian. And the other one is a more profound one about killing and consuming animals
#
you love, which is the essence of Qurbani in Islam. And I write about that in some detail.
#
I have a whole chapter on that in my latest book. But let me tell you the funny story first.
#
So when I arrived in the North West Frontier, finally, I was staying in Wali Khan's house.
#
Wali Khan was one of Bacha Khan's three sons. And they were very hospitable. And Wali Baba
#
basically just took me, he made me his fourth daughter. He had three daughters and he said,
#
now I have four daughters. And the first evening I sat down to dinner with them and they said,
#
Mukulika, are you a vegetarian? We thought if you're coming from India, maybe you're
#
a vegetarian. And I said, no, I'm not vegetarian, but it's fine. You know, if there's vegetarian
#
food, I'll eat it very happily. So we sat down and we used to sit around together on this floor
#
with a sandali. It's called in Pashto. You sit with your feet tucked into this lovely toasty
#
oven and the table is, you sit around it on the floor. And the food began to come in. And,
#
you know, these were aristocratic landlords. So there were lots of servants bringing in
#
fresh bread from the tandoor and various dishes. And I couldn't see anything vegetarian. So,
#
you know, after about 10 minutes, I said, I'm very, really, I'm happy to eat the vegetarian food.
#
Please, I'll eat it up. And the whole family looked at me shocked and they said, but it's on
#
the table. You know, there's the dal. And I said, yeah, but this dal has keema in it. You know,
#
so I'll have the dal without, it's like, yeah, but it's dal, it's vegetarian. So there was the
#
notion that you can cook anything without putting a little bit of keema, a little bit of meat in it
#
was just completely strange. So that was the idea of, of vegetarian. But I think Wali Khan was very,
#
also very happy to, he loved telling the story about his conversation with Gandhi when he was
#
young, where he told Gandhi ji, you go on about nonviolence, but what, how can you teach nonviolence
#
to a mother hen who's trying to protect her chick from the butcher who's coming to kill it
#
for the evening meal? And what good is your nonviolence at that point? And, and so of course,
#
you know, we talked about nonviolence after that Wali Baba, but it was very much this, exactly
#
this metaphor that he used about chicken and eating and killing. But that's why I also think
#
that was the other reason why I began to eat beef for the first time in the frontier, which
#
obviously, you know, like most of us, many of us growing up in India, even if you're non vegetarian,
#
you don't eat beef, not upper caste Hindus anyway. But in the frontier, beef was the poor man's meat.
#
That was what was plentifully available. And you kill the chicken for special guests. And for a
#
special, you know, guest show. And their idea of hospitality is off the scale. It is, we haven't
#
seen anything like it in most other parts of the world. So if you just arrive in somebody's house,
#
you know, and they'll of course assume we will stay for the next meal whenever it is, and so on.
#
And I realized that if I said I won't eat beef, they would kill the only chicken that they're
#
saving for a special occasion. And I was traveling up and down the frontier province looking for
#
these old khudaikidmatghars, you know, going to very, very poor households. And they didn't have
#
a lot of money. And I knew that their norms of hospitality would mean that they would not think
#
for a minute that there was a guest and they would kill the chicken. So I began to eat beef.
#
And so I, it seemed the most human thing to do. So when I came back from Pakistan and I met my
#
grandmother, my paternal grandmother, who's to live with us a lot, and I had to confess to her,
#
I said, I have to tell you, I've been, I've had to, you know, I've been eating beef there. And she
#
said, I see. And she was, you know, she was a widow in white and kept all her fasts and, you know,
#
denied herself in the way that Brahminical widows are expected to do in that very violent way.
#
But of course, you know, lived her religious life according to the azan from the mosque behind our
#
house and, and never turned up, never thought anything of all this Eid food coming in and out
#
of the house. And she asked me, she said, why did you eat beef? So I explained what I just said to
#
you. And she said, well, that's good. You did, because you did it out of humanity. And that is
#
surely more important than some rules that you've been brought up with. And so, you know, these are,
#
I have no thought anything of that. You know, I was, I love my grandmother and that made me love
#
her even more. And I was relieved. But these are quite, these are, you know, my grandmother was no
#
radical, but I, I dare say that this also is Hindu society in India. And she wasn't an exception.
#
And this kind of humanity, this kind of accommodation, this kind of keeping your eye
#
on the big picture, you know, that innate sense that she had, this is what is widely held by so
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many people. And this is what is being destroyed. The moment in India, this sense that let's keep a
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perspective on what we are being dogmatic about for heaven's sake.
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This is such a beautiful, evocative story. So thank you for that. And, and, but I can't imagine
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why, you know, you would give chicken to special guests. Like I eat everything, but I love beef,
#
you know, I just, I just asked for the beef. The special guest should get the beef, you know, but
#
anyway, leaving that aside, you know, so before we go into the break and after the break, we'll come
#
back and continue with your time, you know, writing the Pathan unarmed. But before that, you know,
#
another question that occurs is when you mentioned that, you know, your advisors and all that, they
#
felt squeamish. They didn't feel that they wanted you to go. And one reason, of course, is that,
#
you know, will an Indian be given a visa by Pakistan? But the other reason also would have
#
been your gender. Like, you know, you mentioned earlier that you met Nirupama Rao and you'd heard
#
my episode with her. And even she talks about how, you know, when it came to choosing the foreign
#
service, they were like thinking that, oh, is this the right profession for a woman? You know, she
#
might have to go to the airport at an odd time to receive a diplomat. And is she up to it? I remember
#
a long time back, I did an episode on Me Too with the caravan journalist, Nikita Saxena. And she
#
was talking about how when she would go to report remote stories, you know, in India, you know,
#
in small towns and all that, there would be all kinds of problems that would be there for women
#
that would not matter to the men. For example, hotel doors, which you cannot actually, you don't
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have a separate latch from the inside. You have the regular thing you turn, but you don't have a
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separate latch from the inside. And someone like me would not think twice, you know, just shut the
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door and go to sleep. But for women, obviously, it's something you need to think about. It's an
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extra layer. And despite that, they would want to go because that's the job they want to do. And
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that's so, you know, in that sense, even within a field where you'd expect more progressive values
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to, you know, be present, you know, what's that a thought? Because ethnography, for example,
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anthropology requires that you go out, you live among the people, you do all of that. So was it
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harder for women than for men? And is that changing? If so, it depends on where the women are
#
going and what kind of choices they make. And I think this is as much a gender thing as well
#
as an age thing, you know, which is a separate issue completely. It's where people are doing their
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second projects, you know, and third projects. And we'll talk about that later. But going back
#
to that conversation, you're absolutely right. I doubt if I was a young man, I would have been
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summarily told that this was impossible. And all I was, in fact, arguing for was that I try
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to go to Pakistan. And if I was denied permission, we could we could now say going forward that an
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Indian tried and was denied permission that this was now on record, nobody else had done this before.
#
And I would come back and do my PhD on something else or not at all. Because the only reason I
#
wanted to do a PhD was to study this movement. You know, I wasn't interested per se in writing a
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PhD. But they made this they said it was impossible. And in fact, the clincher was when one of them said
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to me when they realized that I wasn't they were not going to change my mind. One of them actually
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said to me Mukulika, this is such a great idea. Do you think if it was possible, one of us wouldn't
#
have done it by now. Wow. And I thought, okay, I've probably outstayed my time here, it's time to
#
move on somewhere else. Because there was so much paternalism, arrogance, chauvinism, intellectual,
#
I don't know what in it, that, you know, and this is where it didn't entirely surprise me, because
#
this were the kind of conversations my mother would have with us. And you know, my three sisters,
#
my two sisters and I and my mother, we would have these conversations about how perfectly
#
well educated, progressive, seemingly progressive people we knew could be ultimately when push came
#
to shove incredibly narrow minded. So suddenly, you become a female, and an intelligent female
#
aspiring to do something above her pay grade was unacceptable, that if it was so good,
#
it would have been done by somebody else by us, you know, venerable men. So, so it didn't
#
entirely surprise me, but it did shock me, nevertheless, that this really indeed was the
#
case that this is how the world worked. I suppose the contrast, I also did not appreciate at the
#
time, just how mad an idea it was, you know, to want to go to Pakistan, I, we didn't know anyone,
#
I wasn't even going to the Punjab, I had absolutely no clue, but I had, you know, got, and I literally
#
lost sleep at night thinking about it. And you know, my professor Jeet Oberoi, who's to teach
#
us, if anyone wanted to do a PhD and went up to him and said, sir, I want to do a PhD with you,
#
and his question to such students used to be, can you sleep well at night? And if the answer was
#
yes, he said, you don't need to do a PhD. It should keep you up at night, your problem. And so,
#
and that's when I realized how obsessed I was with, you know, wanting to do this. And the fact that
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at home, literally, there was not even half a conversation about the fact that I might not be
#
approved to be doing this, you know, there was no question, you want to do this, you find a way,
#
we can't help you. And you know, my parents were certainly not plugged into the sort of diplomatic
#
cocktail circuit, or, you know, they weren't part of that sort of, what is now called Lutyens Delhi,
#
but you know, the power elite of Delhi, they were not at all part of that. But they, they said,
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if you can find a way, absolutely, you know, why not? And that was unusual, I think, you know,
#
not many households would have said that. So you ask whether it is getting easier, I think it depends
#
very much on the individual and how committed they are to making it happen and what constraints
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they're working with. Whoever, whatever kind of constraints, there is money, there is families,
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there is, you know, all kinds of other constraints. What I noticed, and what I was going to say about
#
age is that with anthropologists, since you're asking about the discipline, you also begin to
#
see a very clear division amongst anthropologists of doing the brave, adventurous, intrepid fieldwork
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for the first project when you're young and in your 20s often. But with marriage, parenthood, age,
#
creature comforts, salaries, people begin to do fieldwork in, you know, urban settings,
#
there's suddenly urban India studied a lot more than village India. And, and so I think the,
#
so I think the second project of starting out studying a village very far from where I knew
#
anything was again another instance in which it was issue driven. You know, in every case,
#
all my projects have been the result of being intrigued by a question and then doing whatever
#
it takes to try and answer it. So, so the cultural joke of how can you have a bunch of Muslim
#
Pashtun men pull off the most successful Gandhian movement in the world? That was the question that
#
drove it. And the democracy work was very much driven by that question is why do poor people
#
in villages vote more than anyone else? And then you do what it takes to answer that question.
#
That's what research is. I just love that question Professor Oberoi asked you of do you sleep well
#
at night? That's such a lovely sort of metric to examine sort of the things that you should do. So
#
let's, you know, take a quick commercial break and on the other side of the break, we'll continue
#
this conversation. Thank you. Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten
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at indiancar.com slash clear writing. That's indiancar.com slash clear writing. Being a good
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writer doesn't require God given talent, just the willingness to work hard and a clear idea
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of what you need to do to refine your skills. I can help you. Welcome back to the Scene in the
#
Unseen. I'm chatting with Mukulika Banerjee about a fascinating life and a fascinating work and so
#
on and so forth. And I just realized while I was looking at my notes that there are a couple of
#
threads where you said you were going to speak about particular subjects and but, you know,
#
we digress on to other things. So I'll just draw your attention back to those. And one of those is,
#
you know, before you told us about Sister Patricia and the last book cases you mentioned you want,
#
you were going to chat about Delhi. But before that, quickly, when you mentioned the animals
#
bit, you were going to, you said you were going to speak about Qurbani that, you know, and all of
#
that. So, yeah, we can talk about, I mean, Qurbani, what I was going to say, this is quite a
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serious argument. And I attempt to link it to an argument on democracy as well. But
#
but it's very, you know, it's a contemporary issue in India at the moment. But Qurbani as a
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festival, which, which is one of the Eids, right, is based on the U, Qurbani, as we know, stands for
#
sacrifice. And it is about sacrificing an animal. And therefore, one of the caricatures or
#
misunderstandings of Qurbani is that, oh, it's when Muslims eat meat. Well, it's anything but.
#
And in places like India and Pakistan, Bangladesh, the animal that is being sacrificed is not bought.
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It is one that you've raised. And that is meant to be a genuine Qurbani is when you sacrifice an
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animal that is very precious to you. So it is to mimic the Abrahamic sacrifice, which is what we're
#
doing here, is that Abraham gave up his son, offered to give up his son. So you give up an animal.
#
So in my village, where I do research, where mostly everybody is Muslim, I knew people and
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their animals and their relationship to their animals, where on Qurbani, I knew that people had
#
given up the one little, the cow that they were most fond of, had given it an affectionate name,
#
whose fussiness they knew and would feed them special treats or whatever. People had that kind
#
of intimate relationship with their animals. And when you give that up, you know what it is to give
#
up something that is really close to you. According to the rules of Islam, meat is then the meat
#
from the sacrificed animal is then divided up into equal portions. You mix it all up. So it's not
#
even like better cuts of meat are kept for certain parts of the family. You have those certain rules
#
in other parts of the world. But here you mix up all the meat, you make it into seven sections.
#
You give away most of them according to rules of kinship or rules of people you're friends with
#
or neighbors. What you keep for consumption is a tiny amount. Of course, you receive from other
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households as well. But in a place like my research village, where yes, people were Muslim,
#
but people were too poor to eat any meat through the year. In fact, they couldn't even get fish.
#
If they had a, you know, they pushed the boat out, they got, had eggs. So most of the year,
#
they were eating a very rice heavy diet, maybe some watered down dal, some vegetables, you know,
#
these were poor villages. So on Qurbani, when meat was, when animals were sacrificed, it wasn't just
#
the Muslim households that had offered the sacrifice who ate meat. Everybody in the village got to eat
#
meat. There was a bhakti and a dome communities as well. So there were two low caste Hindu ones as
#
well. Everybody got to eat some. So there was this idea of redistribution as well. So there was plenty
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and abundance. And yes, these were wealthy Syed households that could afford to offer an animal,
#
but everybody got to have some. And, you know, this is, there's a very democratic idea in this,
#
that this is how, for instance, taxation works. You pay tax, especially direct taxes.
#
You pay income tax or you pay tax on, on, on road tax or, you know, property tax on, on possessions,
#
because it means you have enough money to own these things. But what the state does with that
#
tax is then make sure that everybody has a certain basic standard of living. I mean, that's the
#
theory of, of it anyway. So, you know, what we were talking about earlier of Tolstoy's, you know,
#
what he made his aunt do, that relationship between an animal that you've seen alive, killing it and
#
eating it, he's absolutely, he's absolutely right. He made his point very effectively, but that is
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the power of qurbani as well. You know what it is. And I think it's a very powerful idea that, that
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Muslims who have practiced qurbani like this live with.
#
Yeah, a couple of things. I mean, one, I just make the distinction that, you know, the families
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which are distributing the meat to the entire village are doing it voluntarily and taxes are
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not voluntary. I mean, one common question that has now that I asked my friends, which is sort of
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a philosophical question, is that when the regime in power is what it is, where we essentially live
#
under a state which is not, you know, protective or productive, but predatory, you know, to use
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James Buchanan's terms, is it then moral to give some of your, some of your labor, some of your
#
money to this oppressive regime, which is using it to do whatever they do with bulldozers, which is,
#
you know, a separate thought experiment. I am, of course, a law abiding citizen. I pay all my taxes
#
and too much of it. And even this sort of notion of, you know, killing an animal you love just so
#
that you know, so that you feel the pain. I don't know it somehow doesn't sit well with me. I mean,
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the part of the story which I love is that they're sharing it with everyone in the village and that's
#
great across cast and whatever, but it just seems very brutal, especially if you're a kid in the
#
family and you've grown to love an animal and then you see it being sacrificed like this, like, you
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know, I love dogs, but one of the reasons we haven't got a dog is because, you know, mentally,
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I know that I'm likely to outlive a dog and I don't want that pain at the end of it when it
#
dies a natural death, right? So, yeah, maybe I think one has to remember that you, in this case,
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yes, you love your animal, but you love Allah more. And what you're proving precisely is that
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you love Allah so much that you can give up your most prized possession, you're willing to give it
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up. That's the real test. So that's the theology behind it. And of course, you know, one has,
#
you can understand or not up to a point and certainly you can understand, but not agree
#
with certain philosophical, theological positions.
#
About taxation, I mean, I am interested because this is going to be my next body of research,
#
which I'm just starting now. India is a very curious case. You know, India has a big tax gap
#
given its GDP, the size of its economy and its tax revenues. And looking into it, it's quite
#
extraordinary. I mean, to start with, almost as a social scientist working on India, pretty much
#
any topic you think of, there's been at least 1500 books written and articles written on that topic
#
because India is just so richly studied by different disciplines. But curiously, taxation
#
has been written about only by economists and public economists more than in the Indian case.
#
The rest of the world has lots of literature. In fact, the international literature on taxation
#
is very dominated by work from Euro-America, which of course is a totally different history
#
of taxation. In India, you know, the word lagan is one that is an emotive word. And the relationship
#
of taxation and colonialism is a very strong one. And this idea of taxation without representation,
#
which is what the colonial state was, has made taxation a very important part of the world.
#
It has made taxation a very hostile concept historically. Our historical consciousness
#
is very hostile to taxation for this reason. But part of the building of a new nation
#
is entirely reliant on a public buy-in to the social compact of taxation, which we need to
#
understand much better in India. The fact that in India, the majority of taxes come from indirect
#
taxes is a regressive move. Why is a rickshaw puller and I paying the same tax on a packet
#
of biscuits? And these kinds of creeping taxes is what makes up the majority of the tax revenue
#
of the government is entirely wrong. So you need a certain level of fiscal capacity, state capacity
#
for the state to be in a fair fashion tax people, number one. So the mechanics by which you collect
#
taxes has to be fair. And of course, there's got to be accountability. You know, taxation without
#
accountability is ludicrous. That's not democracy. I mean, democracy without accountability is. And
#
part of what is happening in India on a daily basis now is precisely this hollowing out
#
of its democratic project, where we have a paper thin veneer of, you know, so it resembles a
#
democracy when you look at it from the outside. Oh, they have elections. Oh, they look, their pay
#
is press is free and so on. But it's been hollowed out of meaning in multiple ways. But taxation is
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part of it. So you're not ever allowed to ask any questions. You can't, you don't know who to ask
#
the question. I mean, that we also are, you know, we all, I think, remember having civics lessons.
#
We had civics textbooks and it was we thought it was almost like a free period because it was so
#
light touch. But most of us don't have any idea how local government works. So we don't know what
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the relationship between those of us who are privileged enough to be paying income tax,
#
what the relationship between our income tax, somebody like you, you said you pay all your taxes
#
and you live in Bombay and you see the state of the roads after the monsoons and you don't know
#
how to connect who to ask the questions of, hang on, I've paid my taxes. Why have these potholes
#
not been fixed? And who is in charge of which bit of the public good, you know, roads, quality of
#
air, rubbish collection, bread and butter governance issues. We just don't know. That's one. The second
#
thing is that it is a very federally heavy system. So we are politically federated and fiscally
#
centralized. So even GST, which was meant to be an innovation, has been brought in such that the GST
#
council, you know, it is first all collected in the center, then in a power move, you dispense
#
those to the states. So this is politics of taxation. We have Panchayati Raj institutions,
#
which was a brilliant innovation of the 73rd and 74th amendments to the constitution. But we have
#
created local bodies that we elect, terrific, but these local bodies can't collect taxes. So they are
#
always dispensing and carrying out schemes that somebody else has cooked up rather than responding
#
to local demands. So I see my forthcoming work on taxation as an extension of my work, obviously,
#
on democracy so far. If voting was one way of participating in the democratic process, paying
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taxes, because we all pay taxes, we all don't pay income tax, but all of us in any society pay tax
#
to indirect taxes is the other. Yeah, I mean, totally agree with you about the hollowing out
#
of democracy. And I can't wait to therefore read your next book and chat about it with you for a
#
few hours as well. Couple of quick responses that one, of course, I mean, the reason I have no
#
control over the pothole on the road outside my very house is that in local governance, the way
#
it is, there is no connection between power and accountability. I did a great episode with Shruti
#
Raj Gopal on urban governance. I'll link it from the show notes. But there's no connection between
#
power and accountability. And also, we are federated really in theory. Otherwise, it's
#
extremely top down and we don't have the kind of local government we should. The other aspect of
#
it is that the problem with India and people have kind of, it's like become normalized and has become
#
normalized 70 years ago, frankly, it's been this way right since then, is that instead of having
#
a state which does a few things which the state should do and does them really well, we have a
#
state which does a whole bunch of things and does them really badly and doesn't do those few things
#
which we really should. For all practical purposes, we don't have rule of law in this country,
#
for most people, unless you're incredibly privileged, but that's just a ground reality.
#
We don't have it. And that's the most fundamental thing that a state should do. And this is,
#
I think, something that, then you begin to wonder, you spoke about accountability,
#
we're paying taxes, all of that. I mean, the point is, I calculated the other day that I spend more
#
than 50% of my income, I give it to the government, right? I have the 18% GST, which I can't offset
#
against anything. And I have my 30 plus percent income tax, plus all the indirect taxes. So I
#
am basically a slave of this government between, you know, January and June, you know, and everybody
#
in this country is suffering part time slavery from the state. And it's okay if you're in
#
Scandinavia, and you're getting those kinds of services back. It's okay if you see a state
#
which is actually doing something like providing the rule of law or taking people out of poverty,
#
you know, we are still such a desperately poor country. It's unconscionable 3000 children die
#
of starvation every day, you know, if a natural disaster was to cause those kinds of numbers,
#
we would all be like up in arms, but we've just normalized it. And it's a shame. And anyway,
#
these are sorry. No, I think these are the questions of today. I'm at this, you know, and I
#
think we really I don't see why we don't ask them more. Because you say there is no rule of law
#
unless you're incredibly privileged. But as we know, as the last 12 months has shown up,
#
if you are the most privileged and the most wealthy Muslim in this country, you're completely
#
vulnerable in in today. And that is what that was precisely the point that was what was being
#
performed through that entire episode of of jailing a child of a superstar. That was what was
#
being proved. And if there are there's you and there are millions like you who are who are exactly
#
in this position of paying taxes and getting nothing in return. Why don't we have more questions
#
being asked? I mean, this is there is such complacency and fear. I think the complacency
#
comes from just having enough money to not notice even if a significant part of your income goes
#
in taxes for which you get nothing in return, you can still buy rubbish disposal, you can still
#
buy water, you can still buy security. And so you think, well, you know, yes, it's rubbish. And
#
therefore you send your children abroad. And, you know, sitting in the UK, I see the numbers of
#
students going abroad to study is just multiplying. Every year, year on year, we are seeing this rise.
#
So people, you know, this has been the classic definition of being middle class is how your
#
middle class if you don't if you use very few services provided by the state and health and
#
education, this is a truism. We all know that. But the fact that we should be holding this government,
#
any government accountable, it requires on the one hand, a basic civic awareness and some basic
#
courage to say, look, hang on a second, this is what being a citizen is about. I don't want to be
#
a fan or an admirer of a politician. I'm a citizen, you know, and the job of a citizen is to ask
#
difficult questions politely. There is no need for violence or you know, but you can be civil about it
#
and ask those questions. This is Gandhi's legacy, right? This is what civil disobedience is about.
#
So I am surprised at how quiet people are in not asking these questions more. I'll admit that.
#
Yeah. Yeah. And there's a tweet I remember from a tweeter called Sir Qasem Jeevi. I think he does
#
satirical tweets. I have no idea who the person really is. But he posted a tweet recently which
#
seemed to me to be a great metaphor for this where he said that, you know, if a Hindu goes to a job
#
and he doesn't get the salary he wants, it's okay. You can tell him that, listen, I'll give you zero,
#
but I'll pay the Muslim even less, right? And he'll be happy to work for you. And this is really
#
a metaphor for what's happening to our nation, where I think that there is enough widespread
#
bigotry that, you know, people are just happy that that's been given expression too and they
#
don't really think about this stuff and it's all been normalized anyway and yeah, and we could just
#
rant forever about this. But it's not, I don't think we are ranting and I think these are,
#
you know, there are various ways in which we can think about it. And I know that there are many who
#
choose to say that, well, you know, the seeds of this were sown a long time ago and, you know,
#
India is in a sense fulfilling a prophecy that, and I distance myself somewhat from that kind
#
of position because it is simply, and we have enough historical evidence both in India and
#
elsewhere to show that the politics of hatred is actually the easiest politics to construct,
#
right? It's that politics of competition and hatred and bigotry. It's the easiest game in
#
town. It is much harder to build a politics of feeling solidarity with people you're not related
#
to, to be aware that you are part of a system that is much larger than you, that, you know,
#
that one of the jobs as a citizen is to imagine the public good and put something into it. It's
#
not impossible. I mean, India has the potential to do it. It's had that and to increase those
#
numbers takes work, but absolutely it's there. You see that, you know, and it's that, but that
#
kind of politics also takes work and it takes a lot more work. You can't buy people's attachment
#
to love. Hatred is much easier to peddle. Even to create love and solidarity, you need certain
#
techniques of how to be political and people need to feel not squeamish about gathering under a flag
#
or loving their country, as indeed many have done, I think, on the more progressive side of things.
#
There's been a sort of embarrassment about getting Dewey-eyed about your country, but we need more of
#
that. We need to get Dewey-eyed about the things that are worth getting Dewey-eyed about. And there
#
is plenty of that in India and that kind of politics takes work and we need to do that work.
#
Yeah, I mean, my lament is I don't see that kind of politics anywhere as people like you and me
#
kind of getting Dewey-eyed, but I'll ask you, you know, I'll carry on from that and ask you a question
#
from there and we'll come back to Delhi later. You know, Delhi is not far away or Delhi is a little
#
more far away rather. So, which is this, like one of the, you know, I spoke earlier about the many
#
layers that have fallen away from my eyes about India and one of those layers is that I always
#
assumed that we are fundamentally a tolerant people, right? We are a melting pot, we are a
#
khichri, we've taken influences from everywhere, blah, blah, blah. I remember at one point I had
#
the politician JP Narayan on my show and I pointed out that hey, India is deeply illiberal because,
#
you know, women cast all of that and he said if you look at it another way and he wasn't
#
disputing what I said, but he said the opposite is also true because our liberalism is in this sort
#
of lift tolerance where our food is a mix of everything, our clothes are a mix of everything,
#
so on and so forth. But I've realized that no, that's not it. I think what really happened in
#
47 was this interesting experiment where a relatively liberal constitution, there's a lot
#
wrong with the constitution, it doesn't protect free speech at all in my view, but whatever,
#
a relatively liberal constitution was imposed on an illiberal society and a top-down experiment
#
like that was always bound to fail. Gandhi, in that sense, was right that the change has to
#
come from within. We stopped trying, we got the constitution, we said okay, we've done our bit,
#
good constitution, blah, blah, blah. We stopped trying and today, you know, politics has caught
#
up with society. We were always like this. It is not that this bigotry is something new that has
#
been created by politics. You know, politics is downstream of culture, as Andrew Breitbart once
#
said. So we were always like this and it is we, English-speaking elites in our little bubbles,
#
who thought that hey, we are a tolerant nation and all of that. Our idea of India was always
#
a delusion. That's sort of my negative and pessimistic view of where we are today. Now,
#
you've actually, you know, spent time out there in these two villages and otherwise and, you know,
#
lived among people and spoken to people and all of that. So, first of all, what is sort of your
#
sense of that? You know, do you feel I am overstraiting it or do you feel that there
#
is something to this? Because, you know, I did an episode with Akshay Mukul on the Geeta Press
#
and, you know, with that and, of course, you must have read the book and you realize that,
#
you know, this is not new. We were talking about love jihad and cow slaughter 100 years ago. This
#
is not new. And, you know, that, you know, gives me great cause for despair. But what are your
#
thoughts? Okay, so I refuse to despair because then I don't think I'll be able to get out of bed
#
because it is that serious in many sense. So, the only way not to despair is to constantly think of
#
counter examples. So, let me give you, to my mind, the most important counter example of
#
we are always like this and, you know, nothing's going to change. My biggest counter example to
#
that is the polling booth in India. The polling booth in India is unlike any other public space
#
in India. Think about it. Where it is a public building, everybody has to come there to vote.
#
There is no other way to vote. There are orderly lines and you may land up, Amit Verma, to vote
#
and you see your driver standing ahead of you in the queue and you want to go and meet your friend
#
for coffee because it's a holiday. But you cannot go up to your driver and say,
#
can you go to the back? And that is the one place you can't do it.
#
I don't have a driver but I buy your point.
#
Yeah. So, that, the fact that you can't do that, it is the only space and the only moment where
#
both you and your staff know that you won't ask and they won't agree. Now,
#
and there is discipline, we say we don't have discipline, people go on time, they do it,
#
it happens, it works like clockwork, it works. This is not to say that, so what is this proof?
#
It proves that if you, in a committed institutional setting, institutional input,
#
so as economists would call it, can create new kinds of behaviour. This, to my mind,
#
is the only instance in India of genuine what we would call civility or what Ambedkar would
#
call fraternity, where basically what is the meaning of that? It means that you are willing
#
to accommodate people you are not related to and don't know from before, but you conduct
#
yourself in a manner that makes you part of the common project. That's what creating fraternity
#
is about. Now, we are able to do that in the polling booths. You don't get it in the cinema
#
queue because not everybody can afford a cinema ticket. You don't get it in the railway queues
#
because not everybody goes on the trains and the middle class again exit that and fly as much as
#
they can. So, the polling station is actually the only place in India where you get genuine
#
social mixing, genuine orderliness, genuine discipline, and as I've had Dalit friends tell
#
me, both in my research village but in different parts of India, I remember talking to this young
#
girl. She had just voted for the first time. She was 19. And she said,
#
when she comes out of the polling station, she said, you know, that sense of being
#
valued and she used the word English, the English word value. Now, and she's showing me her ink mark
#
on her finger. So, the shared dignity that being recognized as a citizen who is exactly equal to
#
the next one standing in the queue, regardless of who you are, the dirt under your fingernails or
#
your torn sari doesn't discriminate. People can't look you up and down and say,
#
that means that this is an institutional intervention. So, we should not therefore
#
be surprised that the lower down on the social hierarchy you are, the more keen you are to vote.
#
That is one of the explanations I offer in why India votes on the basis of this team of 12 people
#
who worked in different parts of India is that people like to vote. It's the one time they get
#
dignity, man. You know, so they turn around and say, why won't you vote? This is a pleasurable
#
activity. So, which is to make the point that institutional interventions are important and
#
institutions and public institutions are incredibly important. The Election Commission of India
#
is, for no surprise, the most respected public institution and survey after survey after survey
#
done by Lok Niti for many decades. Part of our hollowing out is that we are hollowing out the
#
Election Commission of India now. We used to pull off this amazing. So, you ask whether there is
#
despair or whether there is hope. I mean, there is hope because you know, we know, and this is
#
therefore not to compare India to any international body. No barometers, no indicators that, you know,
#
I know this government and other people are touchy about who is X and Y country to tell us how
#
democratic we are. And I think, yeah, sure, let's just compare India to its own record.
#
You know, how you were doing 10 years ago, 15 years ago, and let's see what's got better and
#
what's got worse. Let's compare India to its own record. And there, I think what has been happening
#
with elections is genuinely worrying because we had a good thing. We were being able to do something
#
there that was genuinely transformative. So, that would be the counter to your question,
#
but I had another thought it'll come back. Yeah, no, there are many DIL moments in why India votes,
#
which also I want to discuss in some detail when we get to it. Though my brief counter thinking
#
allowed to this would be that fine, they're voting. I understand it's an egalitarian process.
#
Everyone feels like they have a voice, but they're voting for the party, which is going to shut the
#
butcher shop and lynch the butcher. So, who are the real butchers? And that majoritarian trend
#
within society, the way we think, worries me. I'll sort of ask a question, which is in a sense,
#
another aspect of this same question. And for that, I'll quote from your book, which you put
#
together, which you edited called Muslim Portraits. And there, towards the start, you wrote,
#
writing about the Muslim in India, the historian Shahid Amin has pointed out that with stereotypes,
#
we leave biography and history behind, recognizing those different from us largely through visible
#
signs, as if such human beings belong to a different species altogether. His quote ends here,
#
you continue. This volume strives towards breaking down challenging and humanizing this category by
#
presenting a set of portraits of Muslims in contemporary India in a climate of widespread
#
stereotypes and prejudice. This book attempts to offer a chance to read about ordinary and real
#
lives, stop quote, which is a fantastic project. And what, therefore, you are doing here is that
#
you are fighting the abstract notion or that, oh, Muslims are like this and so on, with concrete
#
instances of lives lived. So, you can see the difference and you can see the difference it
#
makes. And this is something I've discussed with many guests. And I think first with Aanchal Malhotra,
#
where she was talking about when she was in Pakistan and she was talking about someone
#
who related that at the time of partition, before partition happened, you know, there was this
#
village and they would all sit together, Muslims and Hindus, and the village was in Pakistan and
#
they'd listen to the radio. And everybody in the village was all sort of together. They knew each
#
other. I mean, it's the same community, right? Hindu, Muslim, whatever, it's the same community.
#
But then as news begins to come of the violence and all of that, they begin to sort of split apart
#
and it kind of gets worse and the abstract takes over the concrete. Similarly, she talks about how
#
she's talking to one family, a Muslim family in Pakistan who fled during partition and they're
#
saying, oh, Hindus did this, Hindus did that, Hindus are like this. And then they realize she's
#
there and she says, you're not, son, you're not. So, you know, abstract bad, concrete good. And
#
this seems to me to be like a sort of an important project of putting like one way of kind of fighting
#
this is putting the concrete more and more out there. So that because these abstract notions
#
like nationalism and purity and all of this rubbish is, you know, what is, you know, getting
#
us into this. And you've, you know, in a sense, what an anthropologist or an ethnographer is doing
#
as opposed to say a political scientist with grand theories or even a sociologist is you are just
#
leaving all that abstract stuff aside and you're going straight to the concrete and you're actually
#
talking to people and seeing how things are and all of that. So in your time in these two villages
#
and so on and so forth, you know, what are your observations and in general, you know, what would
#
you say about sort of this framework? So the ethnographic method, you're absolutely right,
#
is very grounded in interaction, but we also are able to create categories and analysis
#
inductively on the basis of that data, right? So we close the circle. It's not just about picking
#
up raw information. It's about, you know, we're thinking to ask certain kinds of questions as
#
ethnographers and we turn it into anthropology by engaging with the philosophical analytical
#
literature that we are contributing concepts to on the basis of people's lives, lived lives.
#
So theory is not so, you know, and thinking about rural India, this is very important because rural
#
India has always been seen to be the recipient of progressive ideas. And on this, I, you know,
#
I have a, I think Ambedkar and Nehru were on the same side on this and they've done a real disservice
#
because this idea of this village being a sink of localism and vice is, you know, is the image
#
that is, and of ignorance, that they have to be taught stuff. And this is across the political
#
spectrum. So the left thinks the vanguard has to go out and, you know, middle-class intelligence
#
have to go out and educate the peasants. And even, you know, the paternalism of progressive ideas
#
is that you've got to educate these people. And part of what I'm trying to do here is also turn
#
the tables completely and say, look at the village. It actually teaches us through, say,
#
the practice of cultivation that we spoke about right at the start, that there's something
#
to learn here about the nature of democracy. So let's put that to a side for a minute. We
#
can return to it. I just want to come back to this volume, Muslim portraits. You know, this,
#
this volume was a response to the 2002 pogrom in Gujarat. And I think a lot of people were
#
horrified and traumatized by what had happened. And we were all thinking of how to understand it,
#
how to comprehend it more than anything else, if you're academics. And it struck me that some
#
of the best anthropologists of India had been working in Muslim societies and they had all
#
done very academic, brilliant piece of writing. It's a who's who, right? The list of contributors.
#
But what I appealed to them was to do what you read out is to just write about any one person.
#
Let's make it real. Because even what I found was even my most progressive friends would call,
#
would talk about the Muslims or the Muslim. You know, you knew in many cases they hadn't
#
actually ever known a Muslim or, you know, been part of their lives or known what it was like or,
#
you know, and not to fetishize it in any way, but beyond the point, you had to humanize this story.
#
And journalists are very good at doing this. They're writing about a cyclone somewhere,
#
but they'll pick on this five-year-old girl who was separated from her parents and you are invested
#
because you read about that one individual. And that's kind of what we were doing. And each of
#
these portraits, you know, anyone who reads the book can see what a, I mean, it makes several
#
points, extraordinary lives, but every life is extraordinary to my mind. I think every life is
#
extraordinary once you learn about it, but also the natural diversity that, you know, how different
#
Muslims across India are to each other and how much like the, so where I work in my, you know,
#
in my research village, the only difference between the Muslim women and the Hindu women
#
is that the Muslim women don't wear bindis, but literally there is, and they wear glass bangles,
#
but there is nothing else. The food they eat, the way they keep their homes, you know, the Hindu
#
homes will have a Tulsi tree in it. That's all. And the Muslim will have a rolled up prayer rug
#
in the corner. But other than that, it's indistinguishable, their language, their, you
#
know, and one needed to put a sort of whole cast of characters like this out in a book for people
#
to see for themselves. Now, I hope, you know, and I must give a shout out to Yoda Press who published
#
this book, Bravely, at the time, a small independent press, and they took it on and then
#
Indiana University Press did the global edition for it. But there was a chance of hoping that
#
people who read the book will be persuaded by it. Now, part of the hollowing out of democracy that
#
is happening that that we are concerned about is that in the current climate, I think it is difficult
#
to contribute anything to a public conversation that has been saturated mainly through untold
#
sums of money that comes in through newly introduced electoral bonds to the point where
#
you cannot escape the drip, drip, drip of five WhatsApp forwards every day.
#
And you've got to be incredibly resilient to not be swayed by even one of those five
#
WhatsApp, you know, you've got to be really, really grounded. And therefore, when I talk about the
#
hollowing out, I think electoral bonds and what it has done is, is this that, you know, the UP
#
elections were a very good case where a government with a record that did so badly in the pandemic,
#
one million deaths, where migrant workers were treated the way they were stray cattle has caused
#
that, you know, there are blindingly obvious reasons why an incumbent government would be
#
punished. And Indian voters have been very good at punishing incumbent governments for,
#
you know, not performing. And people always would say in India, you know,
#
you've got to cook both sides of a chapati, otherwise one burns, you know, so you've got
#
to keep changing the governments. This is how people talk about it. In that kind of scenario,
#
when people don't do that, you realize that something else is going on. There is a communication
#
strategy that is enabled by untold, non-transparent sums of vast sums of money.
#
And the challenge for any of us who write, who want to intervene, who want to contribute
#
a public conversation is, how do you do that now? Publishing books is not going to be, you know,
#
nobody's going to, even if they read it, they'd say, oh, this was like in, now India is a different
#
place. They will completely put that to a side. So how do you fight back? And I think, you know,
#
you again, Riyadhav talks about a truth army to deal with the troll army. And I think that's,
#
you kind of think, have to think in that kind of scale, with battle lines drawn, now.
#
Yeah. And you mentioned COVID and the elections is also demon, like after demonetization happened,
#
I thought, oh my God, they're going to get hit so hard in UP. How can they possibly win after an
#
assault like this on people's rights? And just look what happened. It's like, kind of blew my
#
mind. And, you know, what you said about untold sums of money funding this, of course, that's
#
true. And, but I'll both counter that and counter my counter. And the counter to that is, look,
#
I think society is like that. Society is the way it is. It is what it is. Like, I think the reason
#
Yogendra's truth army would not work is that people don't want that truth. People want the hate
#
because it amplifies what they feel inside them. And that is my sort of negative view of that. But
#
to counter what I just said, it is also true that all this money and this machinery makes a difference.
#
Because imagine you're a 15 year old in 2015, and through your friends or through whatever you come
#
across this WhatsApp video, which is full of hate or full of lies or full of, oh, Muslims are
#
multiplying so fast or whatever, full of this shit. Once you watch that, your social media algorithm
#
will keep showing you similar stuff and you will never be exposed to anything else. You know,
#
people like you and me, we often come at the curse of knowledge, where, you know,
#
the curse of knowledge, where we think that we have a certain bedrock of understanding what India
#
is and all of that. But most young people today have no way of accessing that. It's just us,
#
right? And what I'm talking about these social media rabbit holes, I actually experienced it
#
myself because a couple of years back, I did this experiment where I wanted to figure out
#
what the Hindu right wing is kind of talking about. So I didn't want my YouTube algorithm
#
to get messed up. So I opened incognito window and different Gmail account, and I go into that.
#
And my two YouTubes are completely different. The normal YouTube that I listen to is whatever,
#
the normal shit I like. But the other one is just filled with hate. You know, people talk about
#
Yati Narasimhan and now I started watching his videos and saving them a year and a half back
#
because I couldn't believe what I was seeing. Those guys refer to Modi as Mulana Modi because
#
to them he hasn't done enough for Hindus. You know, those guys criticize Adityanath because
#
he's saying he's been like CM for so long. What has he done for us? Right? So it's, I mean, one,
#
I think these guys have unleashed a tiger which even they can't ride. And, you know, and so it's
#
both of these happening. Society is messed up. It's being amplified by money and, you know,
#
these tendencies of social media, which are driving engagement and so on and so forth.
#
But you tend to kind of amplify this more and more. But then to that, you know, I think
#
this is where the empirical evidence is really important. And you go state by state in India,
#
and I'm not the first one by any means to point this out, that there are certain states in India
#
where this kind of narrative gets you nowhere. Right? So it's not, you know, so this despair
#
is also lazy because one is worried, but you, especially because one is worried, you need to
#
look at what are the places where clearly it works in UP, that we saw. It didn't work in Bengal,
#
but it worked to a certain extent. They did much better, right? The BJP improved its performance,
#
but they did throw everything in the kitchen sink at it, and they still didn't. So we know
#
that there are some things that work and some things don't. And there are certain parts of
#
India where this kind of hate mongering works better than in others. And it is interesting
#
that where human development indicators are better, like in Tamil Nadu, Kerala, etc.,
#
they don't get a look at. So the clue, I think, is therefore to find why it doesn't work in certain
#
parts. And that is where one finds the resources to push back. You know, this idea that
#
you can't do anything is, I mean, I know it may be pie-in-the-sky stuff, but
#
I don't know. I just think, can you live with yourself if you don't even try to push back?
#
Try to be brave, try to call out, say the emperor has no clothes.
#
So I was chatting with a friend of mine about this, where, you know, he brought up the Akar Patel
#
episode. I did an episode with Akar. And Akar, through it, was full of optimism and I was full
#
of pessimism. Now, I love Akar. I love his optimism. He's always going out there and fighting
#
and all that. And at the time we recorded, his passport was with the government, but they gave
#
it back, but they didn't let him leave. So it's quite funny. But where my pessimism comes from
#
is my pessimism doesn't mean that I shut up and I just, you know, disengage. I think I will still
#
wake up every morning and do what I feel is the right thing to do because it's the right thing
#
to do. Forget outcomes. So we do that. But at the same time, like I am convinced that things are
#
going to burn and but somebody has to be there after that to build it back up. And I volunteer
#
for the job right from now, but it's going to burn. That's my pessimism. And I agree with you
#
that that pessimism should be tempered with acknowledging that in large parts of India,
#
especially our more sensible friends in the South, it's not quite like that. I was really
#
thinking of the Hindi heartland where I talk about, you know, where my pessimism is going to
#
where my pessimism comes from. And speaking of Hindi and speaking of heartland, I think we
#
should now go to your Delhi experiences. So go ahead. Yeah, I think, you know, Delhi is unlike,
#
say, Bombay and Calcutta. Delhi is, you know, people don't Bombay and Kolkata are cities that
#
filmmakers have made films to and people have written novels about and, you know, they feature
#
in the imagination in a way that I think Delhi gets short shrift on it. And it's quite fashionable
#
to bash Delhi. And, you know, but I mean, just, you know, part of doing this exercise with you
#
makes me think that 1980s Delhi was such an extraordinary place. It was an extraordinary
#
coming together of world class academic work. And when I say world class, I know this is a
#
bone of contention, but it's a very simple litmus test, you know, would people in other
#
countries put your writings on their reading list or not? You know, are you a historian by
#
not what your peers here tell you, but whether somebody who has no stake in who you are, whatever
#
thinks your work is, follows the protocols and has the credibility to call you a historian and
#
give their students your published work to read. And that's the kind of credentials I mean,
#
what language you spoke in this. By the way, just to go by in case I forget to say this, you said,
#
oh, you know, it was all a dream of the English speaking elite. I'm not sure the English speaking
#
elite is quite as progressive as we think it was. So that's a side. So Delhi had, you know, so it
#
was the social science. It still is in many ways the social science capital of the country.
#
But at a ground level, there was, you think about, say even a square kilometer around the
#
Mandi House area, the National School of Drama producing the greats for generation after
#
generation after generation. Sahitya Academy, cheek by jowl with terrific auditoriums where
#
the greatest artists were performing. And then you have all the houses of culture of all the
#
embassies. You have the House of Soviet Science and Culture where my younger sister learned ballet
#
for nine years. Cheek by jowl with where Hindustani classical music is being taught at
#
a Gandhar Mahavidyalaya where theater, Triveni Kala Sangam is set up and Singhajeet Singh is,
#
you know, this great Manipuri artist. And then you have, you know, what scholars have called
#
the ethnic revolution, a complete discovery of India's handloom and textile, where the look
#
to have was to wear silver jewelry and India's exquisite textiles. And, you know, the festivals
#
of India happening abroad. So suddenly you have incredible pride in your crafts traditions, your
#
arts traditions, your music, your theater, your writing. And, you know, it is of such value that
#
people across the world flock to come and see this. And my own experience of this really was
#
partly just going to, you know, all these, they all had film festivals. The documentaries section
#
was always free. You had to buy tickets. So as students, you had no money to buy tickets to
#
watch the features. So we started by just watching the documentaries because it was always free.
#
And so one's appreciation of why documentaries are so important came from that. And it was just there.
#
But also, you know, every college had a film club. The Tel University had a film club. When I went
#
to do my masters, we knew how to run projectors and watch Herzog and Truffaut and, you know,
#
the great, the greats of world cinema alongside our own greats of Ghatak and Ray and Benegal
#
and everybody else. And all of this came together, you know, in what, to my mind, now looking back,
#
I think what the student movement, Spig Make achieved, the Society for the Promotion of Indian
#
Culture and Music Amongst Youth, was really to take this huge amount of creative capital that India
#
had and take it into schools and colleges. You know, and so many of us got swept up in that.
#
And I spent the best part of my university years, totally involved in Spig Make, working with
#
everybody from Ravi Shankar and Bismillah Khan to, you know, Rashid Khan was a new young artist to
#
the Bahawalkar. They were, you know, 1920, just coming into their own, performing as first artists.
#
You could, I think, you know, Bismillah Khan telling a bunch of young students what it is to
#
be a Muslim who did his Riyaz in Kashi Vishwanath Temple had more impact than any chapters on
#
secularism you could teach them, right? Because Bismillah Khan said it with a twinkle in his eye,
#
with his affection, and alongside producing divine music.
#
And this was repeated over and over again. Every artist did it in their own way. They were living
#
embodiments of some of these values. So when we think about what kind of, you know, this is
#
political, this is, and the politics of solidarity has to harness this aspect of India, which
#
I personally feel it was, of course, a huge privilege, you know, to live in the nation's
#
capital at that time. But Spig Make, for instance, took, you know, when we, I was all-India secretary
#
for Spig Make for two or three years, and when I took over, we had about 50 chapters. Within
#
two years, we had 200 chapters. You know, they were all over India. Now there are even, you know,
#
way more all these years later. Kiran Seth, who started it, you know, has remained so focused.
#
It's incredible. It's his life's work. But you could see the buy-in of students and academics
#
based in universities and colleges across the country that they completely, and artists themselves,
#
who we had no money to pay, you know, did it because they understood the value of creating
#
a new generation of listeners to share what they had rather than be complacent.
#
And that, you know, when we think about what we need to do more of, we need to do more,
#
we take it so for granted. You know, I think the opposite of cultivating democracy is not
#
to not cultivate. It is complacency. We just think it's going to just happen. It's going to
#
just continue into the future without any effort on our part. But it takes effort, and we are
#
fortunate enough to live in a country which has this embarrassment of riches. You know, you have,
#
if you see a kudiyattam performance from Kerala, you will never forget it. Because I remember
#
once in Delhi, a group had come from, and they were going to perform in the School of Planning
#
and Architecture, and there was a courtyard in SBA. And so we went, you know, organizers finished
#
classes and went running to help and see what was setting up. And then, you know, it was about three
#
o'clock in the afternoon, and they had been at it from 11 o'clock in the morning making this huge
#
column, right, with rice powder. Intricate design of the goddess and all kinds of things happening
#
and, you know, and remarkable skill. And it was really complex and covered this whole courtyard.
#
So for a long time, I just sat there watching them make this column and making sure they had
#
cups of tea or whatever they wanted. Then they went off and got dressed, and the performance
#
started as it got dark and the lights, and then this drumming and the music and the dance started
#
in the theater. It's a theater form. But they danced over that column. So by the end, there was
#
not a trace of that exquisite, intricate design left on the floor. Now, the ideas of patience,
#
of skill, of performance, of talent, and an attitude to hard work that was so ephemeral
#
that you, within hours of creating it, danced on it and vanquished it.
#
You know, these kinds of things are India's traditions. And where are we creating the
#
conversations of what does Kuri Atam have to teach us about Hindutva and how can we help it think
#
against a majoritarian, homogenizing agenda? And there must be those answers, but we've got to think
#
with them, right? Yeah, I had a lovely conversation with the biologist Gautam Menon on the show a year
#
ago, and he was also talking about, you know, how Delhi was in the 80s and all the concerts he went
#
to and the music he listened to. And it just made me incredibly envious that though I was sentient
#
at the time, and we would visit Delhi sometimes, that I was completely oblivious to it. But,
#
you know, so here's my next question, that, you know, you spoke of all this, all the culture,
#
all the music, what Speckmache did, all of that, with nostalgia. So why with nostalgia? Does it
#
not exist? And if it doesn't, does it not exist? If so, why does it not exist anymore? And if so,
#
then what can people listening to this, who find it attractive, what can they do to, you know,
#
build something like this again? What would you do? I mean, it's, no, it's not, it's not, it's not
#
nostalgia for an India. I mean, you know, I think it's nostalgia is a very, you know, I'm not saying
#
India, I'm saying that cultural scene where things were happening, you were exposed to all this.
#
I think there is a lot of that happening. I mean, I'm in India several times a year, I, you know,
#
because my research is there, I go in and out, one of my sisters lives there. So I'm very, you know,
#
I hear about what is happening. And I think it is there, of course, it's, you know, it's existing,
#
we had never seen a mall before that. And so when Dastakar had its annual sale, it was the biggest
#
event to go and stock up on your, you know, on buying new clothes once a year, or, or things
#
that you were going to decorate your room with in university and so on. So I'm sure it's not, it's
#
not as if it's disappeared. I think we've got to think about it's become harder now, because
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the post 1991 India is one with more traffic, more, more malls, more machine made stuff,
#
more more global cuisine. So we have had to, I think, as Indians think about what was there
#
before any of these came in from the outside to speak and, and find accommodations. It was like,
#
you know, when the first burgers were being sold in wimpy's and so on, people thought, goodness,
#
you know, chart and samosa is going to disappear. And it didn't, you know, people realize that you
#
eat, you can eat chart once a week, but you'll eat burger once in two months. It's a different
#
kind of sociality of eating going to a burger joint, as they're called, and or eating chart in
#
your neighborhood from your local chart. So India's, you know, there's been all kinds of
#
accommodations, but with our traditions to I think we need to think more about how, what those
#
accommodations will be. And maybe some of the messages that were implicit, and Bismillah Khan
#
didn't ever have to talk about the Kashi Vishwanath temple, because of, of Kashi now being the
#
prime minister's constituency, or because it was, you know, in a state where the chief minister is,
#
is Ajay Bisht, but, but because he just wanted to share what his Thaleem had been like. So the
#
agenda now may be more different, and maybe needs to be made more obvious. But that is going to be
#
can't, that has to be an engagement with our traditions, engagement with our artists, to
#
articulate some of these ideas that we have taken for granted.
#
Yeah, and I actually am not, I mean, if there's one of the things I'm hopeful about, I mean, one
#
thing I'm hopeful about, of course, always is that in this future of unknown unknowns, you know,
#
technology, much as it might help the state also empowers individuals in a way that political
#
battles for liberalism haven't really been able to. So that's one hope. But the other hope is that
#
I think young people today have more interest in arts and culture, and better attention spans than
#
people give them credit for. I think there's too much of a stereotypical notion of what modern
#
life is like, short attention spans, everything is materialistic, blah, blah, blah. I don't really
#
think that's true. I mean, I teach a writing course also, I interact with, I've interacted with
#
thousands of young people literally through that. And that's not at all the case. So maybe there is
#
I agree with you completely there. I think this bashing of the next generation, and as I always
#
say, that, you know, none of us in our generation, my generation growing up, had to worry about
#
whether the planet is going to outlive us, whereas the young people today, this is an urgent issue.
#
They're much more cognizant about what they eat and what they buy and how much they do
#
for these reasons. And that's a completely different level of anxiety they're dealing with.
#
And look at the flourishing of poetry and music in and how ways in which people are able to
#
communicate despite the shutting down of dissent. So, yeah, I'm in complete agreement that dismissing
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the next generation is incredibly unfair.
#
Yeah, not just the shutting down of dissent, the shutting down of dissent, but the shutting down
#
of TikTok, which I thought was such an incredible tragedy, because TikTok just empowered so many
#
people who didn't have access to other platforms at the time. I mean, in combination with, of
#
course, the Jio and the good Mr. Ambani making internet, making broadband widely available, it
#
just, you know, the kind of art that was happening on TikTok, I taught a course on it briefly, I
#
could only teach one batch on TikTok and Indian society, where I shared hundreds of videos on
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WhatsApp. So it was literally WhatsApp University, but it shut down the internet.
#
I did my course, so like, whatever, you know, so can't do it anymore. But I was blown away more
#
than anything else, because you had people who otherwise had no access to these common traditional
#
entertainment platforms, actually being able to point their mobile phone at themselves and
#
express themselves. And initially, it is a simple stuff, you're lip syncing to something and you're
#
recreating a meme. But some of it was just so incredibly mind bogglingly good. And, you know,
#
shutting that down just because TikTok is Chinese seems completely ridiculous, especially since we
#
can't do anything else about China. I'd love to, I'd love to hear more about, you know, what you
#
put together, I really would, because I read the Indian press quite closely. And I've come across
#
several stories, you know, we were talking about women in India, it was such a important way in
#
which women could communicate, right, and express themselves. When you take everything away from
#
them, if they have a reasonable quality of smartphone, they were using it.
#
Women, people of alternate sexualities, like, imagine if you're a person of alternate
#
sexuality in a small village in that small sample size of people, you might be the only person like
#
you. And you think you're a freak, you know, and you think, you know, all of that shit. And, and
#
then you realize that there are so many people like you, and they're all doing great work, and
#
you can join in that community, and you can do great work, and you can do creative work. And
#
it's just so incredible and so moving, you know, I'll figure out a way to kind of share those
#
hundreds of videos with you and talk about what, you know, we'll make that a project at some point
#
in time. Let's sort of go back to your journey. And before, you know, we get to Pakistan, and
#
before we get to the Pathan unarmed, I want to understand your subject a little better as well,
#
like anthropology, sociology, in the minds of someone who is not into the social sciences,
#
these are all kind of very fuzzy terms and all of that. But they are specific things, there are
#
specific differences between them. You know, one of the interesting parts of, you know, reading
#
your book was how you talk about the academic debates within social anthropology and its
#
relationship to history, you talk about the subaltern school, you talk about post structuralism
#
and all of that. So I want you to kind of demystify this for me and all, you know, all the listeners
#
that what are these fields? What are the sort of frameworks through which you look at the world?
#
And what were the specific dilemmas that you faced when embarking upon this project? Because
#
I think one of the things that happens when we are young, not just in academics, but also
#
in academics, is that you discover a framework and the framework explains the world so well,
#
it answers everything and you think, wow, great, and you fall in love with the framework.
#
And sometimes, you know, that is all you ever carry with you and you're close to everything
#
else and you have one hammer for every nail. But sometimes you keep, you know, discovering
#
the world and discovering different aspects of it and forging your own path. And, you know,
#
in your book, The Pathan Unarmed, it feels like you did a little bit of this in the sense that
#
you went beyond stereotypical notions firstly of what Pathans were like, but also you grappled
#
with the idea of what an anthropologist is supposed to do and thought deeply about the
#
different schools and all of that. So I'd love you to think about that.
#
Thank you. It's very generous of you to create this kind of space for a question like that.
#
Now, the first thing to say is that sociology and anthropology are the same thing in India.
#
In as much as what, say, what, you know, what I was trained in at the Delhi School of Economics
#
for three years was sociology, which officially would be social anthropology in the UK and
#
elsewhere. In India, in the West, it's become, sociology is crudely put, it's a study of the
#
modern West, anthropology is about the rest of the world. In India, that kind of distinction
#
is meaningless, right? You study sociology, you study India, you study other places. This
#
is true of the global South generally, you know, in most parts of Latin America, Africa,
#
universities, people use the word sociology, not social anthropology. But in India,
#
people use the word sociology, not social anthropology. And of course, social anthropology
#
in here, in Euro America, also carries the burden of the colonial project in its initial
#
years. And that's a complicated relationship. And we can talk about it, but it's not directly
#
relevant. But it's very much there and people should be aware of it. And we can always link
#
a couple of things if people want to read about those debates, and especially what's
#
happening with decolonizing the curriculum now in several universities. Personally speaking,
#
I think I've always, I have never found a single frame that helps explain the world.
#
I have, like I said earlier, I've always come up with questions that have intrigued me,
#
that have robbed me of sleep. And then I'm quite Catholic about using disciplinary methods from
#
different disciplines to help understand the issue. Now, this has caused me no end of trouble
#
within academia, because universities are built on the logic of disciplinary silos.
#
Disciplinary silos are very important to academic, to university academics. And I have,
#
to put it plainly, just zero patience with it, because I think it's a little bit pathetic,
#
because you're trying to understand the world, you know, talk to, see what works.
#
Having said that, I wouldn't want to be any other kind of social scientist. I would always
#
want to be a social anthropologist for the principal reason is that it's the most satisfying
#
for two reasons. One is that it's a very holistic understanding of any society. So unlike, say,
#
political science, economics, theology, the names indicate what aspect of society they're interested
#
in. Sociology or social anthropology is equally interested in a society's religious beliefs,
#
as it is on its economy, as what its politics is about. And the way in which society is
#
interested in politics is about, and the reason why we can afford to be so all-encompassing
#
is because the unit of study is small. So the method is to immerse for many months,
#
sometimes years, to try and understand all these different aspects of that society and
#
relationships. But you do this inductively, like I said, which means that you don't come in
#
with a predetermined question, or you don't come in with a predetermined hypothesis normally.
#
So I went to these two villages, for instance, to give you an example, or, you know, the Pathan
#
work that you asked me about. My question was how on earth can Muslim Pashtun men turn nonviolent?
#
I had no idea what the answers were, so I was not testing any hypothesis. All I knew was,
#
I would not find the answers only in the archives, because it was a question I could discuss with
#
people who had been Khuda-e-Khidmatgars, and I had to find them. But having said that, I was also
#
aware that all the details of the Khuda-e-Khidmatgars movement, what was happening,
#
how many people were getting arrested, the scale of it, what jails were being used, what was the
#
colonial government's response to it, all that would be there in the archives. In the 90s,
#
when I was doing this work, anthropologists were fighting this battle with other anthropologists
#
and with historians, saying, no, no, anthropologists also can work. You know, now it's completely
#
given, it's not an issue. But in those days, you have to be quite defensive about studying in the
#
archives. I'd worked in the National Archives in Delhi, and I worked in the India in London.
#
What I couldn't get was access to the archives in Peshawar. I went to the archives, I saw the room
#
was slightly open, and there was a pile of dusty piles of files on the floor, but they would not
#
give me permission on an Indian passport. I was not allowed into the archives. So that has remained
#
a regret all my life. But what I could do by bending all the visa rules that the government
#
of Pakistan had for Indian citizens, which is that, you know, if anyone's been, they'll know that
#
you get three places on your passport. So I had to fly into Lahore, change flights to Peshawar,
#
and then Wali Khan's house was in Char Sada. But I was not going to find the Khuda-e-Khidmatgars
#
there because they had been seen to be people who had betrayed the cause of Pakistan. They were
#
allies of the Indian National Congress. They were people who were pro-India. And so the Khuda-e-Khidmatgars
#
or the redshirts or the surqposh, as they were called, faced more violence from the Pakistani
#
state than they did from the colonial state. And so nobody would own up to be a Khuda-e-Khidmatgars.
#
And, you know, from 47 to 1991, when I went, it was a long time, and people had been completely
#
silenced. So it involved traveling literally village to village to village saying,
#
who are the elders? Can we talk to them? And I had this wonderful Pashtun man called Habibullah,
#
whose father had been a Khuda-e-Khidmatgars, who had just died before I got there.
#
So he was always very regretful that I never met his father, but he said he would help me. Thank
#
goodness, I had no what else I would have done otherwise. So Habibullah had a car and we would
#
just drive from literally one village to the other looking for these. And then we'd sit down and talk
#
to them. Of course, finally, we'd find somebody because they had enough detail and you realize,
#
okay, he'd gone to jail, he knew. And then we'd say, do you know anyone else who is a Khuda-e-Khidmatgars?
#
They say, oh, there used to be this man, he must be dead and, you know, so on. We'd say,
#
oh, can we go and check him out? And they'd say, yeah. Have you seen him? No. Do you want to come
#
with us? Yes. And before you knew it, you know, it would be the end of the day and I would have
#
half a dozen Khuda-e-Khidmatgars at the back of the car because we had done the snowballing.
#
Now, these are in the textbooks of anthropology, anthropological methods, you'd say snowballing is
#
a technique. What that technique becomes in real situations looks very different. In my case,
#
it was picking up a gaggle of old men by the end of the day and actually letting them.
#
Trill was having, I mean, of course there was my PhD thesis work, but my presence had allowed
#
old comrades to meet, you know, they had never thought they would meet again. They didn't even
#
know whether the others were alive. They were all above the age of 75. They were very, very old men.
#
And many of the conversations I had with them about what was happening in the 1930s and 40s,
#
did they wear uniform? What was Bacha Khan like? What was the colonial police like? All this.
#
When, you know, these went on for hours, they were a bit like your podcasts, Amit, and you know,
#
they went on and on and on and, but riveting and like your podcasts too. But
#
they said, many of them said at the end, many of them, you know, I would in my very Indian way,
#
I didn't know how else to say thank you, right? So I would always touch their feet
#
at the end of it. You know, men in their 80s, who had given so much of their energy and their time,
#
they were toothless, poor, had nothing to their names, but they had these incredible stories.
#
And they would say that, you know, now we can die in peace because somebody has our story.
#
And we haven't been able to tell this story. So yes, I know the partition, you know, so much of
#
our 1947 story is dominated by partition for completely valid reasons. But I had hoped with
#
the Pathana Namd to also tell this other story of silencing, of an enduring legacy of violence
#
by people who had been so Gandhian, completely contrary to everything they'd been raised with
#
and given their lives to it and suffered for it for the rest of their lives. They were no heroes,
#
they were not known as freedom fighters, they'd been written out of history. And they were
#
no heroes, they were not known as freedom fighters, they'd been written out of history.
#
But here was a chance to recover some of those voices before they died. So that's the kind of
#
thing that, you know, anthropology in that sense has no rules about if you're interested in something,
#
go for it and find out how you can privilege the voice of those who haven't been heard. And that's
#
you know, you mentioned subaltern history, of course, this was the heyday of subaltern histories.
#
And for the historians, it was very important to privilege the voice of the subaltern and, you know,
#
it came with a huge influence of Gramsci and social history writing in Europe. For an
#
anthropologist, there is no other way to write history. So, you know, it was brilliant work,
#
it absolutely was seminal and formative. But also there was part of any anthropologist thought,
#
sorry, very, very happy for the historians, but you know, this is something that
#
we kind of have contributed to as well. And so one of the, you know, is, yes, the subalterns
#
been silenced and Gayatri Spivak's very famous essay Can the Subaltern Speak is read very widely
#
for very good reasons, but a very small answer to that also is sometimes you just also have to listen,
#
literally make possible the conditions in which stories can be told.
#
Yeah, well, by reading this, you know, one of the things I was struck by when you speak of,
#
when you wrote in the book about speaking with them and all of that was damn, I wish she had
#
recorded them and just put it all out there because it would have been, you know, way more
#
fascinating than even the scene in the unseen, what conversations it would have been. And the
#
other thing I was sort of struck by was that it would make such a fantastic web series because
#
it is fundamentally such a fantastic story. And there are two arcs to it. And one arc is,
#
you know, you're a young sort of enthusiastic ethnographer beginning out, you land up there
#
at Wali Khan's house, everything that happens there, you immerse yourself in the culture,
#
all of that, you're doing all of that, but you can't find any, any, because, you know, nobody
#
knows of any. And then you go to this rally, I think it was a fourth anniversary of Bacha Khan's
#
death in 92. And you go to this rally and you meet Habibullah and he takes you around and then he
#
finds a couple of people he remembers through his father and he speaks to them, but you can't speak
#
to them there. And then he takes you to a village and you find one guy and then you find another
#
guy. And then you ask this guy, do you know anyone else? And first he says, no, they must all be dead.
#
And then he says, let's go and see if so and so is still there. And you go to another village and
#
then they meet and they talk and they're sharing memories and you're there. And, you know, they're
#
interjecting when they speak to you. And also that lovely detail of how, you know, you can't enter
#
the men's section of the house and they can't come into the women's inana. So they put this cot in
#
this outdoor space and the custom is you have to sit on the comfortable part of the cot. Well,
#
they sit on the other one. And these are lovely details. And what if I was like crafting a web
#
series out of this, I would do an interplay of this and the narrative of the Khudaikidmet guards
#
themselves that you earlier mentioned that, you know, 17 years of a successful nonviolent struggle.
#
But actually, after 47, it's then a heartbreaking failed nonviolent struggle where Bacha Khan goes
#
to jail and eventually an old man, he finally dies in Afghanistan, you know, in Jalalabad.
#
And even, you know, right at that end that, you know, when he dies, that there is a ceasefire in
#
the Afghan-Soviet war you mentioned so that people can, you know, travel between Peshawar and
#
Jalalabad, which just shows you sort of the stature of the man. But it also shows you these lost
#
tragic lives of all these young people who were in that movement. And then they are treated as
#
criminals by the state that they helped to free. And of course, they opposed partition and all
#
that. And that's one reason why and then they wanted Pashtunistan and all that. So it is just
#
such an incredible story. And I would just tell my listeners that, my God, you know, just go out and
#
read this book, if you can get hold of it. You know, a couple of your books are not even
#
available on Amazon. Why is this? I mean, maybe that's a conversation that I should have with
#
OUP and maybe you should have a conversation with OUP who did the Indian edition. I mean, you know,
#
it's very, with this particular book, it was my first book. I had no bargaining power at all as
#
a first time author, but I absolutely insisted that there had to be an Indian edition and a
#
Pakistani edition. And in Pakistan in 2017, when OUP marked 70 years of Pakistani independence,
#
they republished 70 of their titles and they picked my book as one of them. So it's definitely
#
in print there and we need to have it in print more widely in India. And let me say a couple of
#
things about recording it, right? And it's not as if the idea hadn't crossed my mind.
#
The entire time that I was in Pakistan, I had the ISI on my tail, right? And at one point,
#
and this is not in the book, but I got interrogated. It was, I was in Waziristan. I was very far from
#
Char Sada and Bali Baba and you know, that whole infrastructure. I was way out in Kohat and somebody
#
from Waziristan was going to come and see me. I was staying in a circuit house and suddenly four
#
Bali Punjabi men showed up, you know, as ISI guys and sat there and interrogated me. Nobody knew
#
they were there in my room for, and it was very useful not to have recorded anything because there
#
was no, you know, I could tell them what I was talking about and they could see that I wasn't
#
doing anything seditious. And the promise I made to them was I was not going to talk about post-47.
#
You know, I was talking about the independence movement and that was the basis on which I managed
#
to clear my, you know, dispel some of their suspicion. The reason I managed to dispel their
#
suspicion was because it was in the middle of Ramzan as it is now while we are recording this.
#
And I kept all my rosas, you know, in my enthusiasm as a field worker and I said, right,
#
you know, everybody around me is keeping. So I was fasting and these men came in and I knew very
#
quickly that men often cheat, right? And they'll go and sneak off and have a cigarette or have a
#
cup of tea. And when they refused to leave my room, I said, can I order some tea for you guys?
#
You know, would you like some? And the guy in the back started to say yes. Now in Pakistan,
#
it's a criminal offense if you are caught eating and drinking during Ramzan. So as government
#
officials, you know, this was not a complete no-no, but he began to say yes because my question was
#
very natural as if they had come to my house. And till the supervisor turned around and glared at
#
him and he stopped. And that's what made them leave because, you know, in a sense, I had learned
#
living with my Pashtun friends that calling out a man's honor is always a pretty effective way of
#
getting the upper hand, especially if you're weak as, you know, as I was as an Indian citizen,
#
as a female on my own in that situation. So that was hilarious. So not recording anything and not
#
having any traces was very important. I was very aware that this was priceless stuff, but I think
#
it was, I don't think I would have got the wealth of detail I got from them. Also, if I, you know,
#
it was a completely, the moment you put a, you know this, you know, the moment you put a tape
#
recorder on, there is a self-presentation that goes on. And here it was, you know, there was
#
laughter and tears and hugs and marching up and down to show me what this Khudaikin Mudgara army
#
used to look like and how they used to do their drills and parades. And so there was so much going
#
on, which was entirely the result of that, you know, what academics would call that intersubjective
#
space between me and my interlocutor. So, and very quickly they began to realize that the ISI was
#
tailing me everywhere. So every time I landed up somewhere, they would check if I was safe and say,
#
just watch yourself. And I said, yes, I know, but I'm so sorry if you, they said, yes, they come
#
asking questions after you leave. And I, and I apologized and I said, I'm sorry, you know,
#
my Pashto was pretty good by then. And I'd apologize for disturbing him. They said, don't forget,
#
we've dealt with the British police. You know, we can deal with this. We are not in danger. You are
#
the foreigner here. And the fact, so you look after yourself, we'll be okay. But, you know,
#
it is very powerful when the blessings of old people are on you as well. They blessed me profusely
#
for telling their story. Like you say that, you know, these are people who've been silenced,
#
having pulled off such an incredible feat. And you talk about a web series. I mean, it did make
#
me think about Pashtuns, Pathans, as we call them in India. Pathans in Bombay cinema is such an
#
interesting phenomenon. You, you start with Kabaliwala, right? So the hot headed Pathan,
#
who forms this incredible bond with this little girl, but ultimately has to go to jail because
#
of his hot headed nature and, you know, killing a man because somebody had insulted his honor.
#
So this was the image of the Pathan that everybody works with. So even Tagore's very
#
empathetic account of it and the very moving story that he wrote that was adapted. Ultimately,
#
is that stereotype of a Pashtun of a hot headed but affectionate man you can trust with a little
#
girl. That's the other thing, you know, that at no point was Mini's own safety ever in question.
#
Then you begin to see that, you know, the occasional Pathan shows up in Bombay films
#
in various ways. And then you, often the Pathan is the Muslim because often, as we know,
#
for many decades, there was always a Muslim character in the biggest masala films.
#
And then, you know, with films like My Name is Khan and so on, where the Khan, the Muslim,
#
is the main protagonist. There's not a walk on character actor, is the main protagonist.
#
And then they kind of disappear. This whole grammar of Amar Akbar Anthony grammar disappears
#
from Bombay cinema. And I was very, you know, interested to see that after ages in the latest
#
one of the latest films to be released, Gangubai, in which Alia Bhatt features. And of course,
#
the film is around her and that's the story. But what the main relationship she has that enables
#
her is her relationship with a Pathan gangster in Bombay. And that relationship between those
#
two characters played by Alia Bhatt and Ajay Devgarn. Ajay Devgarn is exactly, he is a man
#
capable of incredible violence, but it is in the past. So his reputation is that he's capable of
#
violence and he unleashes that violence on one of his own men precisely because he dishonored a woman
#
that even prostitutes had their honor that you did not dishonor. And then he is a loyal brother
#
to Gangubai and helps her achieve her ambitions and bankrolls her election campaign and so on and
#
so forth. So I was very struck that after many decades, I know it wasn't by far, it wasn't the
#
most important aspect of the film. You know, Gangubai, it's a story of a woman, but the Pathan
#
has reappeared in Bombay cinema after a long time. But you're right, we need to have, we need a
#
really decent, ambitious, well-funded biopic on Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. It's just the most
#
fabulously cinematic and dramatic story. It's a mind blowing story. And just to quickly, you know,
#
fill in those listeners who may be wondering who's Baatshah Khan, what are we talking about? Khan
#
Abdul Ghaffar Khan was known as Frontier Gandhi at one point, which I think is in a sense a little
#
bit of a disservice. Gandhi could have been called Mainland Baatshah or whatever, Mainland Ghaffar.
#
And Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan was also known as Baatshah Khan. And he founded this organization
#
called Khudai Khidmatkar, which means Servants of God in 1930 and grew it very fast. You know,
#
1000 people in 1930, you mentioned 25,000 in 1931 and just a tremendous natural politician and man
#
of the masses and just sort of a great figure. And the fundamental question, which of course,
#
you set out to answer is that what you've called a historical riddle that Patans are, you know,
#
violent macho, you know, all those stereotypes are attached to them. But how did this nonviolent
#
movement emerge from within? Because one of the things that is also clear is that it's not as if
#
Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan got his ideas from Gandhi or he got his ideas from the West or wherever.
#
It flowed naturally into what their society was like and the way that their community lived,
#
which again is against all stereotypes of Islam and so on and so forth. So tell me a little bit
#
about this, right? Then what are the answers that you came up with to this historical riddle,
#
as it were? Okay, so Baatshah Khan's response to the colonial government when the scale fell from
#
his eyes, he could see the level of deprivation more than anything else, you know, that was to
#
first was to respond by opening schools, right? They were called Azad schools. So this was in the
#
20s and he formed alliances with other revolutionaries like the Fakir of IP and so on. Now in those,
#
it's important to go back to that because of two reasons. Two important things happened.
#
One was the choice of nonviolence at that stage was entirely strategic.
#
That there is no way we can deal with the, you know, the Northwest Frontier Province was the most
#
heavily militarized area in the, in British India, because it was guarding the Hyber Pass through
#
which the British feared Soviet interference. So they, this was where they set up guides cavalry.
#
This is, it was armed to the teeth. So trying to fight with guns that rusty rifles was not going to
#
so he chose it as a strategic option. The Hijrat movement happened at that point, right? So it was
#
about the exile, the Hijrat of moving to an Islamic nation like Afghanistan as a denunciation of the
#
injustices of what was happening in British India and linked to the Khilafat movement in Turkey.
#
And he realized, he says this in his autobiography, and by the way, a fantastic new
#
English translation is just out and Roli Books has published it in India and Folio in Pakistan,
#
is that he says, he says like, you know, you realize we've been unwanted guests very soon
#
in Afghanistan. We were a burden after the first few weeks. He, Amir wanted us to go back.
#
And that's when he realized that if you have to fight for independence,
#
or fight for justice, you've got to do it sitting in your own country. But he continued to open
#
these schools and then got jailed. Now the frontier didn't have any jails at that point.
#
They had to be taken to Punjab. The North West Frontier had so much military, they didn't
#
expect to ever have any civilian unrest. At that point in the 1920s, remember the Akali
#
movement was going on and Baba Karak Singh and other Sikh revolutionaries who had protested
#
against colonial interference in the Gurdwara movement and the Gurdwara governance had been
#
jailed. And that was the first instance really where Bacha Khan saw in modern parlance the
#
weaponizing of non-violence, you know, of how you can use civil disobedience as a way of protest.
#
So the food was very bad in the jail and they kept saying that we're falling ill,
#
they wouldn't listen. So the Sikh men refused to wear any clothes and they opened their hair
#
and they wouldn't tie up their hair and they wouldn't eat any food and they wouldn't wear
#
any clothes and they lined themselves up and the jailer was desperate. He said, please go back,
#
please. And Bacha Khan says, he says, you know, I saw how powerful that was. They just used their
#
own bodies to resist, to make a statement of protest. So this is before he met Gandhi.
#
So once he met Gandhi, what happened really was that the political philosophy of non-violence,
#
which he had arrived at exactly as you said, completely on his own,
#
the political philosophy that Gandhi was developing around that idea of truth, of courage,
#
being essential ingredients for protest. You had to have those on your side. That is something
#
that he felt he learned from Gandhi. So Bacha Khan himself didn't like the term frontier Gandhi
#
because he said, it seems almost completely wrong. He said, it seems almost completely wrong.
#
It's called, it seems almost competitive. It seems as if I am somewhere as good as
#
Gandhiji, but of course I'm not, you know, he's like my older brother. So
#
this idea, you know, developed into a political philosophy. Of course, I argue,
#
worked very well with Pashtuns because in Pashtunwali, which is the sort of, you know,
#
the cultural code by which life is organized, there are some key concepts of mailmastia,
#
of hospitality that I mentioned, gherat, of courage, and of badla, of revenge. Now what
#
they did was really to take these core concepts of badla and said, how do we take revenge without
#
killing? So everybody had to withdraw from any blood feuds they were involved in before they
#
could allow to rejoin the movement and they took the oath and signed up and so on. Mailmastia was
#
really, you know, it was the idea, it was a very gay Gandhian deployment of the idea of hospitality
#
where you don't hate the person in front of you who's the enemy. You show them the injustice of
#
their ways. That very Gandhian idea. That was how the notion of hospitality was marshaled.
#
And gherat, you know, of courage is so critical because we talk about, you know, we talk about
#
the Dandi march and we remember visuals from Attenborough's films and we talk about civil
#
disobedience and look at what is happening with protests in India today. It takes a huge amount
#
of strength and courage to face the violence of the state without hitting back. And this goes for
#
the students who were pulled out of Jamia's libraries and beaten up by the police. It goes
#
for students everywhere who've been subject to state violence and violence of the goons,
#
in some cases vigilante violence, not even state, to not hit back, to be able to have the courage
#
to protest, to go on marches knowing that you may face the brutality of the state.
#
Took a certain kind of extraordinary courage that being Pashtun was part of their self-definition
#
was that. I'm not saying everybody was lived up to it, but that is what you aspire to be.
#
And being Muslim, they got a lot of grief from the mullahs and, you know, the sort of more
#
conservative reactionary forces in Pashtun society saying, oh, these guys have become Hindus. Is
#
this any way to behave? And insisted that Bacha Khan, you know, had grown his hair and, you know,
#
he was becoming Sikh or Hindu. And that's where Bacha Khan stopped covering his hair. And in those
#
days, as we know, all over the subcontinent, men always wore a headdress. He never did. He just gave
#
it up because he said, here, you want to see what's on my head? You can see it. And what, but what
#
they did with Islam was to take the idea of sabr, of patience, and say that, you know, patience is
#
actually a very important, it's a virtue in Islam. And to have support, to be able to be patient is
#
important because the real jihad, the Jihad-e-Akbar, is the jihad of patience, of self-restraint.
#
The Jihad-e-Azhar is the one that you take revenge, of batla, of a tooth for a tooth.
#
But to not take a tooth for a tooth, to restrain yourself and be patient and fight for justice is
#
a much larger jihad. Akbar means big, no? Great. That is the jihad. And those were their ideas. So,
#
you know, my explanation or my analysis of the movement is that really it is these cocktail of
#
ideas, these idea of jihad from Islam, the idea of Gharat and Mael Mastia from Bakhtunwali,
#
combined with Gandhian ideas of how to use non-violence as philosophy of resistance,
#
is what made up the sort of driving ideology of the Khuda-e-Khidmatkar movement. And it was,
#
it didn't require the Pashtun, it played on the strengths of being a Pashtun. And that's why I
#
think it survived for so long. You didn't have to go and live somewhere else, you didn't have to be
#
at, it was about self-cultivation. And so the real struggle was that, was cultivating, experimenting
#
on yourself. Again, you know, a very Gandhian mode. And you know, you mentioned the Akalis and
#
there's this lovely passage from your book which I'll read out where you write, quote,
#
In Dera Ghazi Khan jail, the political prisoners from the Akali movement refused to take off their
#
black turbans in the prison as instructed by the guards. When forcibly stripped of them,
#
they protested by removing the rest of their clothes down to their loincloths and chanting,
#
sar jaave ta jaave, mera Sikh dharam na jaave, or I may lose my head but not my Sikh faith.
#
Which is again so Gandhian, so moving, this kind of spontaneous protest. And you know,
#
there's another sort of passage I want to kind of read out which sort of wrote in a sense,
#
you know, addressing that historical riddle, which I think sums it up so well that I'm just
#
tempted to read it out. So here we go, quote, In Dera Ghazi Khan jail, the political prisoners
#
from the Akali movement refused to take off their black turbans in the prison as instructed by
#
the guards. When forcibly stripped of their clothes down to their loincloths and chanting,
#
sar jaave ta jaave, mera Sikh dharam na jaave, or I may lose my head but not my Sikh faith.
#
And you know, there's another sort of passage I want to kind of read out which sort of wrote
#
in a sense, you know, addressing that historical riddle, which I think sums it up so well that I'm
#
just tempted to read out, quote, In Dera Ghazi Khan jail, the political prisoners from the Akali
#
movement refused to take off their black turbans in the prison as instructed by the guards. And
#
there's unwanted guests who had breached the code of hospitality and needed to be evicted
#
politely but firmly. The uncivilized and violent response from the visitors was met with great
#
dignity and unwavering courage until eventually they did leave in 1947. The revolutionary ideology,
#
the khudai khidmat guard's fashion was thus rooted organically in their society and therefore
#
readily communicable and comprehensible to its rank and file, stop quote. And this speaks to me
#
for so many different reasons. It speaks to me because we have these stereotypes of Islam,
#
we have these stereotypes of patans and we also have this narrative that many of the values that
#
liberal people speak about, we are often told that they are imports of the West and they're not
#
relevant here. You know, even Nehru made this exact argument during the first amendment debates,
#
where he said, what free speech and all that, right? And you know, what your book shows is that
#
so many of these values that we value as it were, I think I'm saying value too many times,
#
you know, you don't have to look to the West for them. They come from within us. They are
#
inherent to us, which was what, you know, Bacha Khan really used and that was just so
#
evocative and it's just such an incredible epic story. So someone kindly make a great web series
#
of it. Though I should also be careful what I ask for because, you know, some, you know,
#
Karan Johar will then produce it and make Shah Rukh Khan play the role of Bacha Khan and we'll,
#
you know, and we'll both regret ever recording this episode.
#
Look, I'm a Shah Rukh Khan fan, so I will never regret it if, you know, if this means that Shah
#
Rukh Khan has to, I have to brief Shah Rukh Khan on his, but you know, Shah Rukh Khan's father
#
was a Khuda-e-Khidmatkaar.
#
Yes. And Shah Rukh Khan doesn't talk about it often, but I managed to
#
confirm this with him directly.
#
Yeah, I've asked him this directly and he said it was true and, and, and therefore I think if he ever
#
had a project like this, I don't know, you know, he's making a film at the moment called Pathan
#
and they're still filming it. There's Deepika Patukone and him. I don't know what the film is
#
about. I doubt from his eight packs on show that this is, you know, the few publicity stills that
#
we've been treated to has anything to do with this story. But seriously, I think, I think it
#
is an epic story and I would, I think Karan Johar has produced some incredible films and
#
it would make for a, for a tremendous, a tremendous story that, you know, needs to be told and we need
#
to, and we need to make it attractive for people to flock to the cinemas and boy, if anyone can make
#
a film and make sure that people go to watch it, it's Karan Johar and Shah Rukh Khan. But people
#
need to, I mean, I would be keen because I really think people need to think about the implications
#
of the story, which are far reaching and absolutely relevant to today. And the, I'll tell you this,
#
again, I haven't said this in print anywhere, but when the book came out, Amit, it came out in 2001,
#
January, right? Very early in January. It was my first book. It was very quiet. Nobody read it.
#
Nobody, you know, there was no social media too. It wasn't like on Twitter, people send off a draft
#
of an article and they put up a tweet saying they've just written an article. You know,
#
it wasn't like that. So there was really no one to tell. And so I didn't think anyone had read the
#
book really for the first few months. And then 9-11 happened, right? And the whole narrative of,
#
and as we know, the global Islamophobia started with 9-11, this legitimized Islamophobia that,
#
it's a 21st century phenomenon in very particular ways. And this essentializing of the Muslim is
#
violent was instant after 9-11 and there was so much anger and outrage and so on. And so this
#
went on and you can imagine what it was like having just published a book on nonviolent Muslims,
#
you know, and not being able to intervene in this debate in any way until the New York Times,
#
a journalist of the New York Times, had come across my book and wrote a column about it saying,
#
hang on a second, there's a counterintuitive, counterfactual example from history that proves
#
exactly the opposite is the case. And, you know, it did several things. One is suddenly people
#
sat up and took notice of the book. But it also, more importantly, de-essentialized Muslims and
#
Islam. But you know, in an abstract way, it also said something about academic research
#
that all those years when, you know, I couldn't convince the scholarship committees
#
to give me a scholarship to go to England and, you know, they kept shortlisting me and kept like
#
those professors in G-school saying, how can we fund a project that's doomed to fail? And therefore,
#
we love you and you have a brilliant CV, but we are not going to give you a scholarship. And this
#
kept happening. All those years of struggling, you know, and wondering whether you're ever going to
#
sleep well again, and just holding out the hope that you would go to Pakistan one day and do it,
#
it was all driven by a very, it was just a commitment to an obsession with an idea.
#
You know, I want to understand what went on there. I want to meet some of these guys. I want to see
#
what it was like. That's all it was. There was no future beyond it. So often academic questions
#
are like this. They are questions in themselves because they have their own integrity and their
#
own curiosity. And this is what we call pure research, I suppose, you know, and somehow pure
#
research is sometimes a bad word because, you know, are you making the world a better place by doing
#
pure research? Shouldn't you be finding alternative fuels? You know, why are you working on
#
things that are not obviously useful? But this was an example of pure research, which suddenly became
#
100% relevant in the world, that at that stage, to recover the example of nonviolent Muslims who
#
have said, oh, you're scrambling around for examples because you have an agenda. But here
#
this was, it was already ready-made. And frankly, a lot of those old Khuda-e-Khidmat guys had passed
#
away by that point, but those stories had been told. So I think that, you know,
#
that the story has been recovered and it's there, but it is a story that needs to be retold. None of
#
my Pakistani friends have ever heard of the Khuda-e-Khidmat guys, my contemporaries, nobody.
#
So when I went to Pakistan, I'd say, you know, friends in Oxford would say, where are you?
#
And, and, and they would say, sorry, what is this? And so I would, and some people would have heard
#
of Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan because he was National Assembly member or because of the Awami
#
National Party, which, you know, his sons formed and so on, but nobody had a clue. So it's a story
#
that needs, that across the subcontinent we need to engage with because there are multiple
#
lessons for us. And my goodness, this is one of the most charismatic people to have lived in,
#
No, and you know, I learned so much about him by reading your book, because obviously I knew who
#
he was and the broad history and all that, but I just discovered so much more. And the other sort
#
of fascinating, like, like you said, no one in Pakistan has heard of him. You also point out in
#
your book about how, when, you know, the Pakistan government cracked down on Khuda-e-Khidmat and,
#
you know, post independence, they destroyed all the documentation that arrest all of these guys.
#
And it just destroyed all the papers and everything. So there is nothing left. Everything is in
#
memory. Everything is in memory. And 50 years later, these men meet you and they talk to you.
#
And that is just so magical to me that, you know, that this is happening, that it's unfolding
#
like this. And it's such a stroke of luck. So, you know.
#
Yeah. And also the documentation, everything had been destroyed. And of course, their memories,
#
you know, I mean, one's got to be also aware that after 50 years of silencing and an old
#
person's memory, so you think about how memory works and you've got to, you've got to be aware
#
of the fact that. So there are ways in which you don't rely, for instance, on an old person's
#
recall of a particular date or which year. They may get that wrong. But the description
#
of being beaten up by a police or the fact that, you know, it took me very long to understand
#
my Pashto wasn't so good. And they were obviously speaking in euphemisms that so much of the
#
punishments meted out to the Khuda-e-Khidmatgars who were arrested were sexual, you know, and
#
they were brutally sexual punishments meted out to these men. And I was trying to understand
#
it and they'd be crying while they were telling me this story. And Habibullah would then sadly
#
piece that then they'd be embarrassed because they couldn't talk to me. So, you know, the
#
silencing happens in so many ways. It's not just the fading of memories. But then because I had
#
already done the archival research in the India Office archives, I'd gone with my file of notes
#
to Pakistan. So I would carry this around with me all the time. You know, I had a big ring binder
#
with all my notes written in pencil from the archives. And I would, once I would get going
#
and I'd say, you know, I've been to the archives, can I tell you what was being written about you
#
at the time and read out bits, thereby creating a sort of post-facto dialogue. And sometimes
#
they'd nod along and say, oh, yes, yes, yes, that's right. You know, that place is named correctly
#
or I'd forgotten. But any imputation of motivation or accusations of violence on their part
#
to discredit them would be met with complete horror and anger after all these years saying,
#
how dare they report our behaviour. You know, we had to work so hard to learn to be restrained. And
#
they just blindly tell their bosses that they need more money for their military because
#
they're having to, you know, fire on us because we are firing back. And that's just unjust.
#
So you can, you know, the sort of point scoring that's possible in this artificial dialogue
#
that's created. And you are merely a conduit to witness this dialogue. And that was a privilege.
#
You know, you think, my goodness, my life will never be the same again. When I say, you know,
#
this was a life altering experience because after this, how can you ever be the same person
#
once you've seen something like this and heard these things?
#
Yeah, I mean, it just sends a chill up my spine just thinking about it. And also, you know,
#
the nature of memory, one of the things I learned about memory is that when you remember something,
#
the first time you remember something, you remember the event. The next time you remember
#
the memory of remembering it last time and so on and so forth in this game of Chinese whispers.
#
To find these gentlemen decades later, sitting back and trying to piece it together and then
#
it becoming a dialogue because you're coming up with, you know, the clippings you have on it
#
and all of that is just so incredible and also so cinematic. So before I go on to my next serious
#
question, quick question about no doubt the forthcoming web series, I'm perfectly okay,
#
whoever does it, I was kidding. Who would you want to play you?
#
I knew this was coming.
#
So you've thought about it, that means?
#
No, I have listened to enough of your podcast to know that that's the kind of question you would
#
ask. I don't know, it doesn't matter. I'm not, you know, I think as long as you get a wide-eyed,
#
enthusiastic, dark-skinned woman, you'll be fine.
#
Are there dark-skinned women in Bollywood?
#
Exactly. So maybe it has to be from somewhere else.
#
Yeah, maybe Anushka also produces stuff. Maybe she'll want to play you. Would you want her to
#
She's a very fine actor. So, yeah, why not?
#
Yeah, I think she'd sort the role. So here's my next question.
#
We just discussed that this is OUP, out of print, what do you do?
#
And I have a larger sort of question here, that many of the guests who come on this show,
#
including yourself to some extent in the context of this book, I often think that why the hell are
#
they publishing with academic publishers? You know, they should publish with trade publishers,
#
this book should reach many more people. And it seems to me that there are choices here,
#
that, you know, academic publishers, the way I see it, and of course, great books come out of there
#
and I'm reading, you know, OUP and Rutledge books all the time. But nevertheless, they reach a
#
limited kind of audience. And they play to this little sort of academic circle jerk that kind of
#
goes on where you're writing for other academics, you're writing in, you know, academic language,
#
which is often turgid prose, not at all the case with you, by the way, I did this was all your
#
books have been so riveting, but can be the case with some others. And that's kind of one area.
#
But then there are academics who then make that extra step and they write for trade publishers
#
and they'll write for a penguin or a Harper Collins, and they'll write in a way that they
#
can reach many more people. So, you know, I often think that, you know, many academics kind of get
#
stuck in that rut that, oh, okay, I'm going to write a book and I'll do it for Cambridge
#
University Press, Oxford University Press or Princeton or blah, blah, blah. And they limit
#
their audiences in that way, when the stories that they're telling all the ideas that they have
#
can should reach many more people and will resonate with so much with many more people.
#
So, you know, is this stuff that you've kind of thought about or what would your approach in this
#
be? You know, if you are a professional academic with a job in a university, you build your
#
credibility by publishing with academic publishers. And to be perfectly honest, you're not taken
#
seriously if you publish with non-academic publishers, non-university presses. And also,
#
the other bizarre thing is that there's an unspoken assumption that even if you publish
#
with university presses, but your book sells well, then it must, there must be something wrong with
#
it, because you're communicating too well with your audiences. People actually want to read
#
your stuff, you know, so there must be something lightweight about it. So, the other thing to say
#
is that the market for non-academic, non-fiction writing and publishing has only got better and
#
better and better, right? So now, and especially in places like India, where global publishers
#
have realized the size of the market and have very serious operations here in India, that
#
a lot of non-fiction books are being written by non-academics, mostly journalists, but also by
#
academics writing for a wider audience, because they're writing for publishers who are able to
#
market their books in a completely different way, as you asked, to a much wider audience, et cetera.
#
You can afford to do that when you don't need brownie points from your publications and
#
credibility in promotions, procedures, and so on. So really, it is only after a certain seniority
#
that you can afford to do it, is how the story goes. Now, I have not followed this script again.
#
I did it with the Pathananam. Actually, the originating publishers were James Curry in
#
Oxford, and they had this brilliant arrangement where any book they published from Oxford
#
always was co-published by a publisher based in the country where the book, the research, was done.
#
And in my case, I said, sorry, I can't choose between India and Pakistan, so we have to do both.
#
And OUP India, as indeed OUP Pakistan, whatever you may say, Amit, have a reach in marketing,
#
in libraries and institutions that is unparalleled by anyone else. So you have to be
#
your average. They're not stocked at airport bookshops. It's true. But in terms of reaching
#
institutions and colleges and district colleges and universities all over the country, they are
#
brilliant because acquisitions teams don't think they just have standing orders. Any book that
#
OUP publishes, so Cultivating Democracy, will have that kind of fate, and that is very important.
#
But you come across something like Muslim Portraits, which I put together, which I was
#
adamant that I was going to publish with a publisher who had a bigger reach, and
#
Yoda were very good in taking it up. The SARI was my experiment. Now, the SARI is based on
#
ethnographic research. I started, I first went to my village, and I co-wrote it, of course,
#
with Daniel Miller. And we did all the research for it together. He's also an anthropologist,
#
a very well-known anthropologist who's written about a number of things. But in those days,
#
he was writing about fashion and women's clothing and so on. I had never written about this stuff.
#
I knew about India. And we did this work together. We did all the writing and the fieldwork together.
#
But the question there that we were answering was a question that a huge number of people
#
were curious about. So it seems silly to go with a niche academic publisher. But having said that,
#
actually, the publishers that commissioned the book, in a sense, or the head of Berg Publishing,
#
Catherine Earle, asked us to write this book. They were an academic publisher. But Catherine Earle
#
also had the publishing nous to know that this had to be marketed as what they call a trade book.
#
So academic publishers occasionally will have a completely different marketing strategy,
#
print run, sales strategy for some books. And that's what they decided. Berg Publishers was
#
then bought over by Bloomsbury later. So now Bloomsbury sells the sari. And Catherine Earle
#
continues to be a very senior person in Bloomsbury in London. The sari was, as you will see when you
#
read it, for anyone who reads it, is not only written in a very different language, it is illustrated
#
in full color on every single page. And a designer has designed every page. So Orindas is the designer
#
who worked on it. And Dixie, Benjamin Dix, took the photographs for it. So it seemed absurd, even
#
though we were two academic anthropologists teaching in a university, that we should write
#
a book about an object. But actually, it was not a book about the sari so much as a book about
#
modernity and Indian women. It was answering the question, why do Indian women who are so
#
modern continue to wear something that looks so antiquated? To put it bluntly, as one of my
#
students did in London. And she used to teach at the London School of Fashion, so she knew what she
#
was asking. And so we decided that we had to write it in a way that a large number of people could
#
read and made it accessible and also do justice to the beauty of the garment. That's why it looks
#
the way it does. It's an absolute visual treat, right? And it sold lots of copies. In academia,
#
it's not considered an academic book. Even though all the research for it is done according to the
#
protocols of academic anthropological research. It looks too good and it sells too well. It can't
#
be academic. Yeah, and it's written too well. I enjoyed reading it a lot. The moment I picked it
#
up, I figured that it's going to answer that question of why do women wear the sari? Not just
#
that it's a traditional garment and women are modernizing and all that, but you have one of
#
your characters Meena in the first chapter talk about how incredibly impractical it is in terms
#
of some part of my body is always exposed, whether it's a belly or the waist or whatever,
#
and she gets inside a bus and she's totally stressed out till she sits down. And it's just
#
so difficult to put on and all of that. And then chapter by chapter, you kind of go through all
#
the different aspects of it, which is quite excellent. But it's also like a coffee table
#
book, right? So I bought a physical copy from Amazon and now my Amazon algorithm is completely
#
messed up because God knows what they'll recommend to me next. But yeah, no, no, of course. And it's
#
a it's an enjoyable read. I just like read it in one sitting and it's great. You know, you've
#
reproduced the voices of some of the people you speak to and that kind of really worked for me.
#
And you know, so a book I enjoyed reading, even though I'm a man, as it were. Good. No, I think
#
and we spoke to a number of men, you know, when we did the research, we thought it was really
#
important because women wear saris for themselves. They wear saris for people around them. And of
#
course, the men have a view on this. So it was important to engage the men in conversation. And
#
I said in this was the book, I think that was the hardest for me in terms of making sure that it was
#
based on research, because it is so autobiographical for me, because I remain. And the reason why the
#
book even came about, you know, like I said, the student of mine asked me this question, because
#
I remain to this day very committed to wearing a sari to work in London. And you know, none of my
#
friends do. A lot of my friends wear saris. They'll wear it in the evenings for social occasions.
#
But I wear it not as costume, not as dressing up, but as clothing, you know, and so to take public
#
transport and, you know, to go up and down escalators on the London Underground and, and,
#
and do it. It's partly possible because it's London. London is the kind of city where
#
being yourself is to be a Londoner. There is no one way to be. That's what makes London
#
amazing city it is. People are confused because it's older sort of Gujarati women, you know,
#
the sort of old immigrant families who the elderly women wear saris. What, what people
#
initially struggled with, I think in the initial years when they spot me on the underground was
#
to be wearing a sari, but reading The Economist, you know, this wasn't, this wasn't what part of
#
anyone's imagination. So one had to sort of respond to a lot of these challenges. Now it's become
#
entirely normalised. And I think one of our best lines in the book is, is what we say about
#
wearing a sari is a bit like driving a car. It's difficult to do. You have to learn to do it,
#
but the more you do it, the better you get at doing it. Right. And this is, this is exactly
#
my experience and loads of other women's experiences. But as an anthropologist,
#
as an anthropologist, I was very clear that this had what, this is what had got us started on the
#
journey, but it had to be a story about a wide cross section of Indian women. And that's why we
#
spent so much time and money travelling across India, very carefully making sure we were talking
#
to different kinds of demographics of women construction workers, paddy farmers, you know,
#
these are the women who wear nothing else but a sari. They are not the most visible when you
#
think about our cities, but, and people say, oh, in cities women don't wear saris. And you're
#
thinking, have you looked at the woman who comes and cleans your house or the press valley or the
#
one selling vegetables or the one on construction sites? They're all, you know, the middle class
#
may not, but actually numerically, the number of Indian women. And therefore it was a real challenge
#
to try and understand, I know why I choose to wear a sari in London and go to work, but to try and
#
understand why a construction worker chooses to wear a sari was a completely different set of
#
questions. And that needed to be understood. And I think this is, I'm glad that you found it readable
#
because we want people to read it and to think about these lives that are so invisible, you know,
#
they're there. And yet we don't really stop to think so blithely. People say, oh, you're going
#
to Bangalore. Why are you going to in Bangalore? Everybody, you know, women don't wear saris in
#
Bangalore because this was at the height of the IT revolution. And so we just did a census count of
#
standing on a street for a few hours. And of course, young college girls were not wearing saris, but
#
there was, you know, it was like nine to one, the number of women in the public who wore a sari. So
#
our imagination of what is happening in India, what is happening with women, et cetera, is needs
#
to be challenged and only academic research or any research, not serious research, can challenge
#
them. Yeah, I mean, the reason I like the book is not that it gave me insight into the sari, but that
#
it gave me insight into society and the way people live and the different sort of things that a sari
#
represents. You've spoken about how, you know, the maid and the mistress will wear different kinds of
#
saris and the mistress will automatically assume when she's giving a Diwali gift that, you know,
#
there's a particular kind of sari that, so, you know, just that dynamic reveals so much. You've
#
spoken about the sari as sort of how it reflects modernity. Like you named, you know, one of my
#
favorite films from one of my favorite filmmakers, Mahanagar by Shyutajit Rai, where you speak about
#
how the main character, when she starts working and she's getting successful and self-confident,
#
and she changes the style of sari she wears, which people in the house notice. And that
#
kind of spoke to me. You've also got this lovely chapter on the pallu with this great
#
quote, which is quote, which one of your, one of the people you were speaking to told you,
#
and she said, quote, it is as if by caressing a leaf, one is touching the tree. So, this is the
#
role of the pallu. That is a good line. I've forgotten that. Yeah. Yeah. I love that line.
#
And then you speak about how there's a sex worker you spoke to in Kolkata who doesn't allow clients
#
to touch her pallu because it's only going to be for whoever she marries. And that spoke to me.
#
And I'm going to come to my next question for you via the sari, in fact, where at one point,
#
you have this fascinating passage about the sex worker who says that she, you know, one of her
#
clients whom she slept with for 300 bucks and not slept with as it happens, but who gave her 300 bucks
#
was a famous actor who just made her wear a white sari with a red border, nothing underneath,
#
and then fantasized himself in different kinds of situations with her, you know, different kinds of
#
public situations. We're going to a temple was one of them where she's wearing a transparent white
#
sari with a red border. And that, you know, the whole sexualized role and this role playing fantasy
#
kind of fascinated me. And that led me to think about this book, which came out a couple of years
#
ago called Everybody Lies by Seth Stephens Davidowitz. I think that's his name. And what he
#
really did was he did a kind of ethnography while sitting at his laptop in the sense that he got
#
Google and Facebook and all of the, you know, a bunch of these to give you to give him access
#
to anonymized search data from which he could figure out what people were searching for.
#
Because his thesis, which I find has a lot in it is that people are most themselves when they
#
are searching for something on the internet and they think no one's looking right. And then through
#
that, he came up with some incredibly startling insights. And, you know, I'll link an essay I
#
wrote on the book from the show notes in the book itself. Some really bizarre stuff like one of the
#
things which is just nuts is that India and Bangladesh are outliers in the sense that
#
grown adult men fantasize constantly about being breastfed. Right. It's completely bizarre. The
#
rest of the world is nothing like it. But you look at the searches from here. So it's sort of
#
eye opening in that sense. And that got me to thinking about ethnography. And you've, of course,
#
written a lot about ethnography and at least a couple of these books, you have these sections
#
on it, which I learned a lot from. And one of the things that you're doing in ethnography is
#
that you are number one, you're talking to these people and you're taking their words seriously
#
and all of that. But number two, you're also observing them in action and seeing what they do.
#
It's say words and their action coming together. And, you know, and I know ethnographers will react
#
to shock and horror at the next thing I'm about to say, but it seems to me that this is something
#
that AI can actually, you know, take over a large part of this, because what Stevens Davidowitz
#
managed to do is something that no army of human ethnographers could possibly have done
#
in terms of the insight that he got through their actions and through what they are searching for.
#
So how do you think about this, that we have tremendous technology, so many tools available
#
to us of, you know, gaining insights into the human condition and all of these interesting ways.
#
Is this something that you've thought about and it's, you know, are these tools that
#
ethnographers use and so on and so forth? Sure. I mean, in fact, digital ethnography
#
is a growing area and some of our students are thinking with this and, you know, it's a
#
generational thing, really. But one thing to say about this question is that insight is not the
#
preserve of any one methodology. I think you can have insight through algorithms, you know,
#
AI can actually. The scale, whenever you need scale, using artificial intelligence makes
#
absolute sense. And you begin to see patterns. In my own way, it wasn't artificial intelligence,
#
but my whole engagement with the survey method was this. And I'll explain it because it directly
#
answers your question that there are some things that you need scale for. You need the macro picture.
#
And there are some things which only an ethnographer can tell you.
#
And the biggest example of this in my work was when Lokniti found this finding, right, that
#
low-caste, female, illiterate, rural voters were more likely to vote than anyone else.
#
Very interesting. This was what you can find from this big data, huge national sample,
#
brilliantly sampled, etc. Statistically, it was true. And so the moment I saw this,
#
my question to my colleagues in Lokniti was, why is this happening? Why are these people?
#
And they said, we don't know. This is a why question, it's not what surveys ask.
#
That's a bad survey question. And here is when we need qualitative research, we need ethnographers
#
to go in. So that's what took me into doing this. Now, my first hypothesis, after seven years,
#
seven, eight years of work, when I published this article called Sacred Election, right, in 2007,
#
was to say that elections have a sacrosanct status in India. And so people think that
#
if there's an election, you must, of course, you must vote. You know, it's like,
#
why would you not light a diya on Diwali? It's that kind of attitude. It's not religious,
#
but it's sacrosanct. It's inviolate. And people said, you know, people who read that article said,
#
yeah, that's very convincing. It rang true with a lot of people who spent any time studying Indian
#
politics. But this kind of articulation of arguments, maybe this is a Bengal thing. This
#
is, you know, they have communists, so you know, Bengalis are very clever, you know, all these kind
#
of things that you say that actually make no sense. But anyway, people said, maybe all of these things
#
are true. And what they were basically saying is, how do we know this is true of anyone other than
#
your village? You've said it on the basis of doing field work in one place. So the only way to say,
#
and my hunch as a scholar studying Indian society was this can't be an exception to my village.
#
But I had to prove it with evidence. As an ethnographer, I couldn't obviously physically
#
go and do field work in multiple places. I don't know that many languages. You have to
#
speak the local language. So there, what I needed to do was to recruit a team of 12 ethnographers,
#
who all spoke local languages, and they then took my conclusion as their hypothesis.
#
And it was an experiment. And they said, so all of them, all 12 of them asked the same four questions
#
in there during an election, including why do you vote, but what was happening in a polling station,
#
and how the election was conducted. When we met to debrief at the end of the research,
#
none of us had any idea what we had found, what we had each found. It is only in the
#
sharing of our findings, by the end of day one, we realized, oh my goodness, you know,
#
India has remarkable consistency in this thing, and then wrote it up as why India votes.
#
But then I could, so people feel this sacrosanct, people feel this inviolate commitment.
#
But then you think, where is it coming from? Where are notions of inviolate commitment
#
nurtured in human life, in social life? How do people learn that some things you can't mess with?
#
And for that, people don't sit down and tell you stories about this kind of thing. You've got to
#
learn to observe life and see what is going on. And that's when one took that back into the village
#
as an ethnographer, in a place that I knew so well, and I wasn't asking people, so what makes
#
you so committed? Because I was working and living with paddy farmers, and I could see that
#
growing paddy is all about inviolate commitment. You can't say that today is too hot, I can't go
#
and check whether the water is flowing in the channels, it should. You have to go and check,
#
because one day is delay and you can ruin it. So there are certain things you know as a farmer
#
that are absolutely, it's about being inviolately committed to farming, and you don't have a choice.
#
And that's where it goes back to an insight where you're beginning to see in that holistic,
#
anthropological way, how different bits, how that inviolate commitment of farming is then taken to
#
how they, say, run their religious festivals, or how they learn to act politically when there's
#
a crisis. And all of these come together when there is an election. I mean, an election is
#
after all a momentary thing. It's not once in five years, because we vote in India at three
#
tiers of democracy, so people are voting every couple of years, if anything. But still, it is
#
episodic. But what is happening in between elections is what is shaping people's sensibility,
#
and that you have to be there, observe, make the connections, infer. This artificial intelligence
#
couldn't do. So depending on what question you're asking, and what kind of insight you're
#
trying to generate, you use different methods. Exactly. I was being slightly glib, so. Sure.
#
And you kind of touched upon both your books over here, Why India Votes, and then Cultivating
#
Democracy. And I found Why India Votes particularly interesting, because it tackles the central
#
question, as you articulated, is, quote, Why do poor people bother with voting when elected
#
governments don't seem to be making their lives any better? Stop, quote. And that's a question
#
that's always been there, you know, public choice service will call talk about rational ignorance,
#
that every individual knows that one vote is not going to decide an election. So it is not
#
rational to even think about issues or look into them, you just got to get on with your life.
#
Though, after I mentioned this somewhere, a friend pointed out that there was some really local,
#
teeny weeny level election in Rajasthan, which was divided, which was decided by one vote.
#
And the losing candidate's wife and her sister didn't go to vote. So, you know,
#
kya hua hoga ghar pe one only knows. And there's also, your book is full of these lovely quotes,
#
you also talk about how politics has a bad rap. And you have this quote from the 65 year old guy
#
who tells you quote, politics is the most abominable thing in the country and elections
#
are the only means to extend that. Why should I waste my time on deciding which snake is the
#
most venomous one? Stop, quote, which is, I love that so much. And what I loved is that, my God,
#
you come up on, you come up with a menu of these wonderful explanations, all of which
#
kind of make sense, you know, inertia, instrumentality, loyalty, protest,
#
effectivity. And the community ones were the ones that I was sort of, you know, most interested in,
#
where, you know, at one point you write quote, the relationship between community and vote,
#
though, as we know from Rajni Kothari's recent remarks, can be a more complex and straightforward
#
match between the cast of the candidate and that of the community of the voter. As he put it,
#
politics is affected by caste, but the reverse is also true. One significant way in which we can see
#
how caste is affected by politics is by observing how much the act of voting together as a group
#
was valued by people, regardless of whom they were voting for or whether they were using their votes
#
instrumentally or not. The elections marked an important moment to express and make manifest a
#
generic collective identity. The vote in these cases became a modern extension of older rules
#
surrounding marriage and commonality that were practiced to express group solidarity. It was as
#
much an expression of a general sense of collectivity as an assertion of any particular identity as a
#
middle-aged man. Put it, hum agar humare log ki saath nahi kharay honge toh kiske saath kharay honge.
#
You know, and this reminds me of this anecdote, you know, so I'll digress briefly to bring this
#
light touch into it that there used to be this video news magazine in the early 90s called News
#
Track. Do you remember that? Yes. So I remember a News Track episode where, you know, when David
#
Devilal was Deputy Prime Minister, he'd made his son Om Prakash Chautala, the Chief Minister of
#
Haryana. So there was this interview of Devilal Ji where he was basically, I think, in a banyan
#
and a dhoti and he was sitting in the garden with his leg up and the camera angle was right next to
#
the shoe. So you have a massive shoe and in the distance you have Devilal's head and the question
#
they asked him was ki aapne apne chore ko Chief Minister kyu banaya? And his answer was toh kya
#
Bhajanlal ke chore ko banao? You can't argue with that. You can't argue with that. And at a later
#
point, you had another person tell you ki, you know, jaat apni beti aur apna vote sirf jaat ko hi
#
deta hai, which translated means a jaat gives his daughter in marriage and his vote in an election
#
to only another jaat. So tell me about this community angle and what it means as, you know,
#
self-expression because, you know, one hypothesis one has heard about voting is like that voting
#
for your party is the same as, you know, going to watch a football club in action. So if you're a
#
Manchester United fan and my sympathies to them right now, but if you're a Manchester United fan,
#
you know, going to a match is really the same thing as going to your voting. You're sort of
#
expressing your allegiance to a tribe and you're part of that group and all of that. So tell me
#
about your kind of findings of this and how this then, you know, counteracts against the rational
#
reasons for not voting. Okay. So the rational reasons for not voting are, you know, come out
#
of a literature that has been discredited really. I mean, you know, the more work you do
#
sociologically, it just doesn't make sense because nobody makes decisions in the way that they imagine
#
individuals making decisions. I think if I might, what public choice theorists would say is that
#
they would not argue that people are rational. They would say it is not rational to vote yet
#
people are voting. So you're acknowledging the reality from both angles. Yes. It's just that
#
you can extend, you know, part of what anthropology does, of course, is extend
#
the definition of what is rational, you know, what is rational. And we found this bizarrely even with
#
the saree book, say, oh, it's not, it doesn't make sense to wear a saree and what makes sense,
#
what is rational in one context is not rational in another. So that's all one was flagging. But
#
it is about, see, I'll tell you, let me give you an anecdote from Why India Votes,
#
which I think still is one of the loveliest anecdotes, which one of the researchers in
#
the team collected, Mekhla Krishnamurthy, working in Hardamandi. And it was, she'd been doing field
#
work for her PhD for a while there. And then one day on the day of the election, she found this
#
woman, Rukmini Bai, whose job it was, she, there was a very male space, but there were two women,
#
and her job was to, you know, at the end of the weighing and selling of grain all day,
#
all the grain would fall on the floor and she would sweep it all up and it would be weighed.
#
And whatever the value of that grain, she'd get half of it. This was how she made her
#
wages. So she found this woman, Rukmini Bai, in tears, unable, because she couldn't vote.
#
And Mekhla said, what happened? And she said, oh, I didn't have the right paperwork and various,
#
whatever. And she was inconsolable. So when she was asked why it mattered so much,
#
you know, she says, after all, it was only one vote, you know, and it's only one election. It'll
#
come back again, you know, next time you can vote. And she said, you see what work I do.
#
I spend all day running after every grain that falls on the ground. And I know that that final
#
heap, the value of which determined her livelihood, is made up of every little grain. So my vote is
#
like that. Now, this sentiment, now, this is one thing which is about quantifying that, you know,
#
every vote makes up a thing. The other thing was in your neighborhood, but don't know about your
#
neighborhood, but certainly in your city in Mumbai, I was there once on a thing in Bandra,
#
talking to outside a polling station, a man who literally his shoes had fallen apart. He was
#
sitting on the pavement inconsolably crying, because you remember some elections ago, there'd
#
been a big problem with voters lists, and some very important people also couldn't vote, so it
#
became a big story. Anyway, he was a casualty. And I sat down with him on the pavement, and I
#
was talking, and he said, and I said, look, it's okay, you know, your next election, I'm sure
#
they'll sort out the paperwork, your name will be on the list. And he looked at me, he said,
#
you just don't get it, do you? Look at me, I have nothing. I don't even own a pair of shoes I can
#
wear, these are falling apart, I sleep on people's floors in different jolls, every night in a
#
different place, I have nothing to my name. But I have a vote, and I am on that list, and nobody
#
can take that away from me. And that was taken away from me today. And without me, how can there
#
be an election? So I said, look, but there's going to be a result anyway, whether or not you
#
voted, right? So it's not like you're not voting and stopping anything. He said, yes, but I won't
#
be part of that result. I'm not part. So that sense of attachment is, you know, that is the
#
relationship of the individual vote and the collective result that I want to emphasise.
#
The second thing that is very, very important, which goes back to what we were saying about the
#
polling station a while ago, is that it is this extraordinary space of where every Indian citizen
#
for the only time in their entire lives experiences political equality. They know they
#
have their political equal on paper, but it's the only time they actually see it at work.
#
And it's a fleeting glimpse. So a lot of the enthusiasm for going to vote is to experience
#
that. You know, so in itself, it is meaningful. Even before you start asking questions of who
#
you're going to vote for, you're voting because you want to have that experience of feeling good.
#
The third reason, which I think your football allegiance is very
#
very opposite, is what I found in West Bengal looking at vote chair figures for 20, 30 years.
#
So, you know, as we know, the left front bunch of communist parties in West Bengal
#
ruled for 34 years from 1977 to 2011. When I started research in West Bengal in 1998,
#
the left front looked invincible. You know, they completely dominated everything and every
#
election and they won, increasing their margins. But throughout those left front 34 years,
#
Congress, which was the main opposition party initially, polled 40 percent of the votes.
#
This is like being a Manchester United supporter today. You don't change your club because they're
#
not in the top three. You support them because you support them. It's your club. And you live,
#
of course, in the hope that next year they will do better. And as people said, how can you stop
#
voting for the party because they're not winning? How will they know? So there are various reasons.
#
One is it's my party. Second, the people in power should know that there are other parties we support.
#
Third, we live in a democracy. Democracy is about multi-parties. If you stop voting for
#
parties that are small or stop voting for independent candidates, then how will we get
#
a diversity of choice? People will lose heart and leave. So these are the kind of explanations
#
people give. And so here in this case, one can see a lot about caste and community and, you know,
#
we can talk about that. I want to talk about that in some other context of the Republic
#
rather than about caste. But in this case, I think the community of voters made up of
#
being citizens and feeling attached and feeling part of it is a huge motivation.
#
Yeah, and I find that story quite moving of the guy, you know, sitting with torn shoes on a
#
pavement and saying that I don't have this, I don't have that, I don't have this, but I have a
#
vote, you know, and I think elsewhere, you know, you've termed it bureaucratic existentialism,
#
that if I, you know, exist in the voter ballot, I exist in this. Exactly. Reminds me of another
#
digression. Have you heard of the Uttar Pradesh Mitak Sangh? No. This is the Uttar Pradesh
#
Association of Dead People. This is a story I enjoy telling. So there was a gentleman named
#
Lal Bihari, I think born 1951 or something like that. And around 1973, 74, sometime in the 70s,
#
this tragic thing happened to him, that his cousins, they had him declared dead, and they
#
took over his land. So now Lal Bihari, as his name was, Lal Bihari has to prove he is alive.
#
So how does he do this? Well, one, he organizes his own funeral in Munna Bhai and Gandhism style.
#
That doesn't work out. He applies for compensation for his widow, then a widow in court marks,
#
then he throws stones at a police station so that if he gets arrested, they have, you know,
#
they're recording his existence, then he kidnaps his cousin. And what happens after he kidnaps
#
his cousin, who's a 10 year old boy, is that he realizes the uncles don't give a shit about
#
their kid and whatever, and he's there with the kid for a few days, so he buys him ice cream and
#
sends him home. And then, and this goes on for many years, and in like in 1988, he decides,
#
I'm going to stand for election. So he stands against B.P Singh in Allahabad in 1988. So
#
presumably, at some level, his name is out there, but he's still not recognized legally as alive.
#
He stands against Rajiv Gandhi from Amethi in 1989, loses again because, hey, dead men don't win.
#
And by this time, he realizes that there are many other people like him. So he founds this thing
#
called the Uttar Pradesh Mitak Sangh, which is an association of legally dead people. And at one
#
point in time, they had more than 20,000 members. And finally, Lal Bihari came back to life in 1994,
#
and I hope he's hail and hearty today. But this kind of, this is so dystopian. It tells you that
#
this is not, you know, we take this shit for granted, that of course we exist, of course,
#
you know, we are legal people, as it were. But life is so precarious for most people. So I totally
#
get that sentiment. It breaks my heart, the sentiment of somebody saying that I exist because
#
I have a vote. It's just, you know, beautiful at one level. Yeah, it is. I think it's a very
#
powerful idea. It's obviously equally shameful that it's about that invisibility, invisibilization
#
that is so effectively achieved in India, where you don't see the guy operating the lift, you
#
don't see the guard at the mall, you just don't see them as people. You don't know, you know,
#
you can employ people for years and not know what their surname is, right? You know them by their
#
first name. So there are all these ways and therefore you can see why, you know, one thing
#
that a lot of people have said to me across the country is when you go and they check out your
#
name, check your name on the voters list when you go into the polling booth, and then the second
#
polling officer calls out your name to indicate that you are the person going. And so many people
#
have said, you know, it's the only time I've heard my whole name being called out. It sounded very
#
nice. Just that. And if you think, if you've been, you know, doing Jharu Pocha in somebody's house
#
and that woman just knows you as Sushma and doesn't even know whether you have a surname,
#
that's the existence of, this is, so why would that person not value being seen as a whole person
#
who is not there because of what she does, what her caste is, you know, what kind of saree she's
#
wearing, but the fact that she is there and she belongs to the voters list. And that bureaucratic
#
existentialism, there's a hilarious, you know, your story. I remember actually hearing you
#
tell that story on a previous episode that I heard. No, and I remember thinking that my term
#
bureaucratic existentialism was perfect for it. And there is this wonderful Shyam Benegal film
#
called Well Done Abba. I don't know if you've seen this, where it is, it's Baman Irani and
#
this one in Hyderabad trying to, it's basically dealing with the Indian state about,
#
I think, a tube bell that should have been dug and wasn't dug. It was, you know, one of these
#
public projects, but it was all about bureaucratic existentialism. It's been long winded, the film,
#
but brilliantly achieved. So I have a sort of micro question just driving into one curious fact
#
that I sort of, that came up in this book, which is, I mean, there are a number of toads that
#
they're thinking about, like you've pointed out that, you know, the more local an election is,
#
the more voters will turn out and all that. But I was struck by the fact that more women vote,
#
especially more rural women vote, and they take it so seriously. Like in Cultivating Democracy,
#
I think you talk about how most women in those villages, they'll have like two saris for everyday
#
wear, which they'll rotate between, and one sari for special occasions, which is if it's whatever
#
the special occasion is, and they wear that special sari for the day they go to the polling
#
booth to vote, you know, which is also, which tells you something, which tells you the, you know,
#
the importance of the sacredness and the role that it plays in their lives. And one can imagine that
#
because people like us take equality for granted, but for them, they are equal at a polling booth
#
with everybody, you know, the maim sab and the maid, they will both have to stand in line and
#
the same amount of time. And my question, therefore, is this, and this is, you know,
#
when I did an episode with the data journalist Rukmini, she pointed out that people often talk
#
about women vote banks, but women are not a monolithic vote bank per se, different places,
#
they'll vote for different kinds of reasons and all of that, so on and so forth. And an earlier
#
guest Shruti Kapila also spoke about, you know, her interest in women voting and whether they can
#
be mobilized. So I want to ask you the why here, that why do so many, like beyond all of these
#
reasons that we have kind of discussed, why do more women vote? Why do more rural women vote,
#
you know, beyond all of these? So what are sort of your thoughts?
#
Okay, so I do have thoughts because I've just published a paper on this, on this very question
#
in the April issue of seminar. And there are three reasons I propose.
#
The first is, what is, if you look at the figures, women's turnout has been rising from 2009 onwards.
#
And it is steadily rising, and in some places, it has outstripped men. Right? So now more women
#
are voting than men in many states in India. And I think this was true of 2019 as well,
#
but I have to check at the national level. Now, I propose three reasons. One is that
#
the decade that, from 2009, if you keep looking, since 2009, what has also been happening is that
#
women's labor participation ratio rates has been falling. Now, this is not a causality.
#
It is a correlation, but I think it's a very interesting correlation that women, as they are,
#
and if you look at the people who are doing work on women's labor participation rates,
#
they are not voluntarily withdrawing necessarily. There are structural reasons that shut them out.
#
That would be a fair conclusion. So just at the time that women are being shut out of the economy
#
for various ways, their utilization of their political voice to the vote is going up.
#
That's number one. The second thing is, this is also the same thing that women are doing.
#
This is also the decade and beyond when you're about 10 years and therefore two cycles of
#
elections after when the 73rd and 74th Amendments, i.e. local institutions and local democracy,
#
is instituted. Of course, in local elections, there is reservation for women. We don't have
#
that at the national and the regional levels, but there's 33% to 50% in some cases. So while you had
#
that initial, oh, there are Pradhanpattis and actually women stand because that's a women's
#
seat, but men are firing from their shoulders, et cetera, that was true. I mean, like with any
#
reservation, it takes time to mature. But I would argue that the fact that women see other women
#
standing for elections, number one. Number two, they see that there is reservation and therefore
#
women are getting a voice. They see how women perform, how quickly men try and usurp that
#
and women fight back. And most importantly, democracy and the electoral process becomes
#
very proximate. So a local election, you know who the candidate is. It's a very small scale
#
and which is partly the reason why turnouts are so high and highest at local elections. So
#
the whole electoral process becomes much more familiar, encouraging women to participate and
#
therefore that has a knock-on effect on all others. And the third reason is that this is also a decade
#
after self-help groups as an idea and as an institutional intervention has matured,
#
you know, it's a whole 10 years after. Now, the self-help group argument is that
#
the economic benefits of self-help groups are extremely patchy and variable and frankly,
#
you haven't turned women into entrepreneurs and it's a neoliberal con, right?
#
But what they do achieve is an unintended consequence, which is
#
in some cases like in Bengal and I've written a paper about this, where I showed that a small
#
intervention like here, the left front says, yes, there is money and you can form, you know,
#
you get seed funding, but you'll get the seed funding if you ensure that every self-help group
#
has members from different castes. All the castes in the village have to be represented in every
#
group. So you can't turn self-help groups into caste groups or your friends and family. Whatever
#
the form, what happens with groups of 10 women acting in concert is the capacity for collective
#
action is enhanced. And so I call this in my paper, you know, the economic growth argument
#
has been disputed by economists and others writing about it. And I say actually what self-help
#
groups have been successful in doing perhaps is creating civic growth. There is political
#
capacity being created just through a non-political activity. You know, the most successful self-help
#
group in my research village basically took over this local school's midday meals. They said,
#
this will be our activity. And it was a brilliant choice because women could cook, the supplies
#
came, they just made sure it was used properly and the children ate well and they all had a steak in
#
it. But it allowed them, you know, that 10 rupee fare for a bus ride to go to the district meeting.
#
The fact that women were mobile, that were going attending meetings, were meeting women
#
from other parts of the district, that they learned to organize, were all things that
#
contributed to their political capacity. And therefore, you begin to see your participation
#
in elections in a completely different way. And therefore, I think it's a very plausible
#
explanation for why their turnouts go up. So these are my three reasons.
#
Wow, this is fabulous. And send me the link for your piece. I'll link it from the show notes.
#
And I was struck by the line that they all ate together and they all had a steak in it. And for
#
a moment, I was thinking, oh, they're eating a steak, but surely not. But yeah, yeah.
#
And the women didn't eat. No, the women, it was for the children. But, you know,
#
this was one thing as mothers, they knew that the children, and look at the tragedies we've seen in
#
modern India around midday meals. And, you know, the tussle over whether you're going to give them
#
an egg or not. And here were these women who were innovating. They were saying, oh, if we save money,
#
if we do it like this, maybe we can give them all a small bunch of grapes each. They were very aware
#
that just eating so much rice was not good for them. They needed vegetables, they needed protein,
#
they needed fruit. So if you organize and learn to work, then together, the benefits way outstrip
#
every individual contribution. You know, that was their takeaway from. Absolutely. And having skin
#
in the game helps. It's not paternalistically decided from somewhere in top. So my next kind
#
of question is, and you know, your book, I think is a lot more than just answering the question,
#
why India votes? It's also, it's got great insight and great anecdotes about how Indian
#
elections actually are conducted. And among the things that we realize is, number one,
#
the importance of good looks. Like at one point, you have somebody saying about, you know, this,
#
and about this Adivasi politician that, quote, she does not look like an Adivasi,
#
she has an educated face. Then you also have this bit about how it matters what they wear.
#
And when you talk about the significance of what they wear, like Mayawati Shining, Salwar Kameez
#
being sort of an illustration of her mobility. And I would take that further and say, maybe,
#
you know, Arvind Kejriwal, Shirt Pant being an illustration of, I'm one of you, I'm one of the
#
middle class, and so on and so forth. And, you know, different examples of why they vote and
#
why they go to rallies. And I wondered if, you know, it's almost like mythology that we,
#
you know, Ram Leela Hora Hai, or as kids, we would go to Dasera and we would watch rallies,
#
are a bit like that. Now, my question is, therefore, there's so many complex factors
#
go into voting, like what is already what is your community, or what is the tribe that you have
#
chosen, or, you know, how someone looks or what someone wears, and, you know, perhaps even that
#
hardwired instinct to prefer a strong leader, and so on and so forth. So is it the case that
#
a lot of what happens in elections in terms of campaigning and all, is actually redundant,
#
it's a facade, the voters have already decided, like I remember reading a Nick Hornby book,
#
I forget which one, where he came up with this interesting thing that, you know, when two people
#
are about to start dating, you know, the woman decides very early on whether she's going to go
#
with the guy or not very early on. And the rest of it is, it's just this elaborate social dance
#
that kind of goes on. But the decision is made early on, and there's nothing anyone can do to
#
change that. Is it the same for voters in that case? Is it that, you know, people talk about
#
security theater and pandemic theater and so on? Is there also like an election theater,
#
which would be both amusing and kind of wasteful if, you know, and I'm guessing that you obviously
#
got tons of insights into not just why people vote to begin with, but why they vote for whoever
#
they're voting for. Yeah, so I should preface my answer by saying that when I was working on
#
Wind Air Votes, it's based on research that the team conducted in 2009, and the book came out in
#
2014. Elections in India have quite fundamentally changed after that. So when one looks at elections
#
now and studies them, it's like we are, it used to be a cricket game, and now football is being
#
played, but we are talking about it as if it's cricket. It's like that. It's still a game,
#
there are still spectators, but the game itself has changed. And I think it's really important
#
for all of us who write about elections, think about elections, to call this out by analyzing
#
election results as if they are elections in the way that they were meant to be conducted.
#
We are complicit in legitimizing what has been a very serious distortion of Indians' electoral
#
procedures. So I think there is a before and after story. And as I say in the preface to Cultivating
#
Democracy, it was a privilege to study Indian democracy when it worked, when it was a democracy
#
while it lasted. So in the same way, Wind Air Votes is, I can offer explanations for what was
#
happening in elections at that time. And now one would need to update one's analysis. And I've
#
been traveling in India, even in recent elections, 2019, I was there. It is a different ballgame.
#
So that's the first, you know, that's a very important preparatory remark.
#
People don't make up their minds way in advance. And the Lokniti surveys actually show this from
#
election to election. You can tell because they do post-poll surveys and they do pre-poll surveys.
#
They actually are able to tell us after every election, whether it is Vidhan Sabha or Lok Sabha,
#
at which stage most people are making up their minds. So, and it changes from election to
#
election. The performance of, you know, you're right, it is like a Ramlila. It is, you know,
#
that's where the, you know, like Times of India board will say it's a festival of democracy and
#
so on. You know, it is a festival. It's a tamasha. And like all tamashas in India, it is an assault
#
on the senses. It is loud. It is colorful. It is noisy. It is overwhelming an experience. So
#
I'm always struck. I voted in more British elections than I voted in Indian elections
#
because as a Commonwealth citizen, I can vote here. And I'm always struck how it's not a holiday.
#
Nobody seems, if you came to Britain on an election day, you would never know it's elections are
#
happening. Whereas in India, that's impossible, right? It is such a big deal. It takes over public
#
space. And political communication, whether it is through oratory, which India has had incredible
#
orators and continues to do, and I've heard many of them live. So one has a good sense of how to
#
compare people. But that's sort of verbal communication. But in a scale, you know, an Indian
#
Lok Sabha constituency is 20 times the size of a British MP's constituency. Britain, given the tiny
#
size it is, just compare the state of the population, it's the population figures. Britain has more MPs
#
than India does. And a British MP is talking to one twentieth the size of a constituency. So
#
communicating with your constituency and those millions of people, thousands, thousands that show
#
up at political rallies, the drama and the theatre of it is very important. So what you wear, you know,
#
and we remember politicians who, you know, Mrs Gandhi always wore the saree of the local area.
#
Narendra Modi wears the headgear often of places because people see that from a distance, even if
#
they can't hear them, they can at least see them. That, so all of those do, and conversation and
#
deliberation and discussion. So it isn't, in the past, it certainly wasn't a foregone conclusion
#
who was going to win. There was a genuine sense of excitement and suspense. You know, it was like,
#
we didn't know it was like a one day match. You didn't know what was going to happen till the last
#
ball. To a certain extent, that is true of any election. But the reason why I say now to have a
#
discussion about the festival and the theatre and political communication, all of these things has
#
to be quite fundamentally changed, because just the scale of the theatre, I mean, there's clearly
#
some decorator who uses yards of pink fabric to decorate any BJP event, and they all begin to
#
resemble each other, right? The distance between the stage and the crowd seems to expand at every
#
rally. So people are standing very far away. So you've got to then put up expensive large screens
#
for people to actually see the leader you've come to hear. And political communication,
#
you know, this is the show to, it is a show of money and visual, it's a shock and awe strategy.
#
Because the communication is being done through those WhatsApp groups. It's the, and the scale of
#
it, where, you know, just in one small district somewhere, a single person is running 1400
#
WhatsApp groups, and his job is to send out messages, not to 1400 people, 1400 groups a day.
#
So political communication and what is being said from the stage and oratory and all is just a,
#
it's, you know, it is a tamasha that you may or may not be part of. It's like going to the circus,
#
it's like going to the circus, literally. You're not really going there to learn anything about
#
anything because that is already on your phone. You're going there for entertainment. And part
#
of the shock and awe now is precisely the further away you're from the stage, you appreciate just
#
how much money and power there is. So I suppose what I'm saying is that the business of elections
#
has changed radically in India because of electoral bonds, as I've said before.
#
The second thing that has changed, which again also I've alluded to before, is that the neutrality
#
of the Election Commission of India, which was famous. And no, I mean, Britain set up its
#
Election Commission, Electoral Commission, they called it in 2001. And they sought advice from
#
the Indian Election Commission, irony of ironies, you know, and India routinely advised nations
#
across the world about because it had a standing in this. That famous neutrality, that calling out
#
of hate speech, regardless of how powerful it was, the person offending, the model code of conduct,
#
which is an unwritten model, unwritten code that all people signed up to respecting,
#
those things have frayed very badly, right? So that's the second way it's been assaulted.
#
And the third way, which I really hope Amit, your listeners, think about this more. I'm very struck
#
that people don't think about this more. And I think it's very dangerous is there is a lot
#
of controversy over EVMs, right? And whether machines are tinkered with or not. And I think
#
the jury is out on that. I don't have a view either way. I haven't seen enough evidence.
#
If you could fix all machines, then frankly, a party as powerful and as wealthy as the BJP
#
should be winning every election, which they don't. So I'm not saying that there is no truth to it,
#
but I don't know how much truth to it. But the most serious problem, for which we do have evidence,
#
is that when there were paper ballots, paper ballots, the ballot boxes from every polling
#
booth were collected in the counting center. And the first thing you did was you emptied them all
#
into a drum. And the drums were rolled to mix the ballot papers. Then you started the counting.
#
So the provenance of each ballot paper could not be as established. When you count EVM by EVM by
#
EVM, every electronic voting machine is assigned to a political booth. And so you get boot level
#
data. You know for an every booth covers about a thousand voters. So for every thousand voters,
#
you know what the vote division is. And therefore, the incentives and more worryingly, the
#
punishments for not voting for the poor party in power are exacerbated.
#
A technological solution has been invented. It's called the totalizer, which will electronically
#
mix the votes of all EVMs before counting. And several political parties led by the BJP have
#
blocked it. So the secrecy of the ballot, which our research in the 2009 elections, which,
#
you know, which we found to be such an important aspect of people's enthusiasm for voting, saying,
#
you know, this is one thing you can't, I can do, I can vote for who the hell I like. Nobody will ever
#
know. That has been threatened. And it has been deliberately threatened. And I remember talking to
#
the late Arun Jaitley about this and asking him, you know, what it would take. The law commission
#
has recommended that the election commission adopt these totalizers. And he very blithely
#
said to me, he said, you know, it helps with our booth management. And I said, what is, you know,
#
to have the data? And I said, what is booth management? And he said, booth management is
#
when we can tailor our manifesto to the needs of particular areas. So if somebody wants, you know,
#
a new pipe, new road, then we can respond to that and so on. I said, okay, Mr. Jaitley,
#
can you give me an example of this? And of course, there's no example of it. Right. So booth
#
management has become a word that, that a term that is a euphemism for managing the electorate
#
through carrots and sticks, but more sticks. And you will remember that some years ago,
#
Manika Gandhi actually said this in one of her election rallies. She said, we know if you'll vote
#
for us and if you don't, there'll be trouble. And she was immediately silenced and told to
#
quieten down because you're not meant to reveal the game.
#
Yeah, there's, you know, I mean, as far as EVMs are concerned, I'm kind of skeptical about the
#
hackability, but that's a moot issue. Because as my friend Nitin Pai says, you don't need to hack
#
EVMs when you can hack mines, which is something these guys are experts at. And I had an episode
#
with Shivam Shankar Singh also who used to work for the BJP earlier, where he outlines the different
#
ways in which that happens. And you mentioned sort of the scale of the tamasha. And in your book,
#
you've also written about another sort of way that, you know, voters react in the sense,
#
you point out that how very often at a rally, it doesn't matter what the person is saying.
#
You give this example of this person when, you know, Rahul Gandhi comes and you asked him later,
#
or your researcher asked him later, what did he say? And she says, oh, he told us that the young
#
leaders have to stand up against the established leaders. And he said no such thing. So they'll
#
just imagine, they'll just hear what they want to hear. And, and I connected that with that whole
#
tamasha scale kind of thing. And I remembered that, you know, when the Beatles first broke big,
#
right? You know, with I want to hold your hand and she loves you and those early number ones.
#
And when they'd go out touring and all that, the crowds would make so much noise that the music
#
couldn't be heard. So they could literally not play anything. And the noise of the crowds would
#
drown everything. And this struck me kind of like that, that it doesn't matter what music they are
#
playing, you know, and that's one reason the Beatles stopped playing life. So I don't know.
#
How interesting. But it is, it is, but it is very important, you know, in anthropology, we have this
#
wonderful term by Emil Durkheim called collective effervescence. And often people go to these things
#
to experience collective effervescence. It's what you experience at a football match. And why do you
#
go to live matches after all? You can sit in the comfort of your home and, and, and watch the replays
#
and you know, so on. But you go to be, to feel part of a collectivity where you as an individual
#
belong, but are lost and subsumed by it. And you know, it's a transcendent experience. And actually
#
what is happening is almost immaterial because you can be part of it. And there is no substitute
#
for that live experience, right? In, in other than to be, to be present. Yeah. You've got a few lovely
#
passages about the liminality. That's a nice word. Liminality of the voting board. It's a good word.
#
Yeah. Yeah. And what kind of goes on there. And the totalizer, by the way, is a great name, but I
#
think the BJP must have objected to it because they felt it applied. They should call themselves
#
a totalizer, random software. That would be, to be honest, I don't care what it is called. And
#
totalizer is not a, because it sounds like some sort of, I don't know, to me, it sounds like some
#
sort of enemy of a superhero, you know, that, that destroys everything, but it sounds negative
#
basically. That's why it would be a good word for the BJP. Well, it should be, it's a, it's an,
#
I think just to call it an electric mix mixing machine and everybody understands what it means,
#
what is, is what is required. So here's my next question. One of the things that has worked for
#
us in the past, like no matter how, how much bad governance you've got, no matter how much bad
#
economics you've got, and God knows over 75 years, we've had a lot of that. One of the things that
#
has worked for us has been our institutions, right? And what has happened recently is those
#
institutions have completely fallen away. You spoke about the election commission. We know what's
#
happening to the Supreme court. Recently, they made that judgment about those demolitions and it
#
didn't matter. It didn't matter. Supreme court has said, don't carry it out. They just went and did
#
it anyway, right? And it seems that through this one institution that is still functioning well,
#
is that institution of elections, that this is where we're all equal. This is more or less
#
an efficient process and it is the opposite of whatever the opposite of totalizer would be.
#
And you know, it does what it does. And I'm just wondering that why is that still the case? I mean,
#
I understand that whole thing of why hack EVMs when you can hack mines and even assume EVMs are,
#
you know, unhackable at scale if you think about it. But the point is that when a party has a kind
#
of power that they do, the kind of boots on the ground that they do, the kind of technology
#
that they do, you know, even this institution can be subverted. You know, Russia does it so well,
#
for example, I'm sure Modi is a great admirer of Mr. Putin. So, you know, is this, have we just
#
gotten lucky that so far we've been having elections and maybe these guys won't mess with
#
it because they're winning anyway? Or do you feel that, do you worry that this might be the next
#
step? No, but Amit, I think they have messed with it. That was my preface to my last question.
#
That is exactly what I'm saying, that I don't think elections in India are what they used to
#
be before 2014. They have been distorted so fundamentally from the inside, they've been
#
hollowed out. You know, when we talk about the hollowing out of democracy, which we were doing
#
at the beginning, they've been hollowed out of meaning by these three things, by the election
#
commission is no longer neutral, the vote is no longer secret, and the relationship between money
#
and elections, which was always a problem, has now been legitimately made opaque through, you know,
#
legislation that was rushed through parliament as a money bill to introduce electoral bonds without
#
any parliamentary debate, to introduce electoral bonds. So these three things have completely
#
robbed elections of the credibility that they used to have. But this is the triumph of
#
the distortion and the game being played, is that we are going through the motions of elections
#
as if they are what they used to be. So people turn out to vote wearing their best saris,
#
journalists run around telling us stories of what is happening in every election booth,
#
and what is happening in campaigns, and political scientists and journalists sit and analyze
#
election results as if they were a normal election. And I think to have to, every time we do that,
#
we are normalizing the distortion, which is exactly what is intended. That is what is going
#
to keep, if you talk to any Western government about India, and whether India qualifies to
#
belong to a club of democracies, the first thing they say, come on, but at least they have
#
elections, they have peaceful transfer of power, which is exactly what we want to hear. This is
#
what you need to hear if you want to play this game. So you want to be part of a club of
#
democracies, so you don't mess with it so much that you stop having elections, but you mess with
#
it as much as you can to tilt the scales. And I think electoral bonds have done that. And this
#
talk of one nation, one election that surfaces every few months is the final distortion. It is
#
the final death knell of what elections have been about in India, where people vote very
#
differently, whether it is a Vidhan Sabha or a Lok Sabha. And that difference is what you're
#
taking away by doing a one nation, one election model. And then it'll be complete. So I think
#
when you were formulating your question, you were talking about institutions and what credibility
#
they have, and you're right. I mean, the Supreme Court ruled that it was illegal to link Aadhaar
#
with your bank account. Can you have a bank account unlinked to your Aadhaar? No, people
#
have just gone ahead and done it, so it's irrelevant. So there is an institutional story
#
that is worrying, but there is also a citizen story that is even more worrying, because the only
#
safeguard, and this is my main argument in cultivating democracy, is that democracy is
#
not just about some institutions. Democracy is about trying to create a certain kind of society,
#
of how you interact, how you live with each other. And this is what Ambedkar was saying,
#
that institutional story of democracy is political democracy. But we also want social and economic
#
democracy. And that is what we define by the word republic. That is where the citizens are
#
important. And the only way you can keep a political democracy and its institutions doing
#
the work that they're meant to do, is by being vigilant as citizens. And you have to call this
#
out. And you have to call them out. You have to ask those questions. You can't say, oh,
#
all the elections are bent, all the institutions are what they are. This is where the activists
#
who call out the distortions on an everyday are so important to the life of a polity. And
#
anyone who cares about India's future as a democracy, in the true sense of the word,
#
in the sense of the word, where one year to the next, you want to be a better democracy this year
#
than you were last year, needs to pay attention to those calling outs, needs to pay attention to
#
why the Supreme Court is being ignored. Why is the election commission not calling out hate speech
#
from all political parties? Why is the media taking its cue from the government on what story to
#
cover? Why are we having, why are there elected representatives who don't face unscripted questions
#
from the press? Why are these, if these questions are not being asked, then it's not a democracy in
#
the true sense of the word. So let me, before we go on to talking about cultivating democracy,
#
one question from taking off from what you just said that, you know, if this last institution
#
that was kind of functioning okay, has also been subverted in this way, then how does this turn
#
around? Like forget what is happening in our society and we can talk about that also. And it
#
is distressing and is going downhill very, very fast. Forget that for a moment. Just look at the
#
decaying of our institutions, the hollowing out of our democracy, as you said, just at that level,
#
then, you know, how does this turn around? Because then it doesn't matter if, you know,
#
there are a few citizens who care and who want to make us a republic again and all of that,
#
the point is everything has been corrupted and subverted and where is this, where is the scope
#
for that change going to come from? It can only come from the citizens. But how, how, how, how,
#
because if even the voting process is subverted, if, you know, I think it will take, we should not
#
forget that a lot of people may not be happy with the distortion of institutions. You know, it is,
#
it's very easy. You hear this a lot about all national contexts, right? You hear this a lot
#
that, oh, it's so bad. Now, you know, how can you turn things around? Liberal democracy has been
#
complete failure. Fukuyama was wrong. And, you know, I, I think that even that despair,
#
it may be true, but it's a luxury. I don't, I feel personally, I can't afford to have because
#
it absolves the rest, everyone from having to do anything because it's like, you know, what's to
#
happen is going to happen anyway. But a lot more vocalized calling out of each institution and its
#
distortion. Imagine if, you know, on Twitter, there's a handful of people you can rely on
#
to ask those difficult questions. And imagine if the handful was several million. And everybody,
#
and I do believe that a lot of people feel quite invested in India being a self-respecting
#
democracy that is not about cheating the system, that is not about politics of hatred, that is not
#
about chauvinistic majoritarianism. And it is, but, you know, you need to mobilize that opinion. And
#
that's a political agenda that needs to be focused on and done. And it's no easy task. And it won't
#
be done in a rush because the people working on the other side and looking to build this kind of
#
Hindu majoritarian agenda have been working for over a hundred years.
#
Yeah. I mean, I actually, I do have a little bit more hope from the electoral system than you do,
#
but that's in the long run. In the short run, Eskeen should have said, we are all dead.
#
So let's talk about cultivating democracy then. And you started going to these two villages in 1998
#
and till 2013, you went every year. As you've pointed out, you never got a sabbatical year to
#
do it. So you were basically, whenever there's an academic holiday, off you are to your favorite
#
vacation spot, which are these, you know, villages in West Bengal. So how did this project take shape?
#
And what are the questions that you were looking to answer? And what were the methods through which
#
you chose to answer it? Okay. So I've answered, I mean, some of it we've talked about before
#
in 1998 is when Lok Niti did their survey, right? So that's, that's what we found out that year that
#
rural, low caste, illiterate voters are more enthusiastic about voting than anyone else. And
#
and they said, we need an ethnographer to go and do this. And I'd never lived in Bengal,
#
but I speak Bengali fluently. And as an adult, I had learned to read it when I was in Delhi school,
#
because of course, growing up in Delhi, I learned Hindi and English, but not Bengali.
#
So I felt I had enough distance from West Bengal. I'd never lived there, but I could communicate and
#
would locate my research there. And it had this interesting political story of complete dominance
#
by the left front. So I visited all the villages that had been covered in the sample
#
of the Lok Niti survey, and chose these two villages because they were mostly Muslim. I had
#
just finished my Pakistan book, the Pathan book. And, and as I said, the Dohm and Baghdi population
#
was near a highway. And, you know, a lot of Indian villages, you've got to walk for a long way from
#
the road, which you get off the bus, and then you've got to walk through the fields to access
#
them. These two villages quite fortuitously were right by the village, by the road. So that was a
#
big thing, because I knew I would be traveling a long way to come and do field work. And that made
#
a big difference. And I just plunged straight in. Now, for the first few years, to be honest,
#
Amit, nobody trusted me. They were convinced the Communist Party had sent me or the government had
#
sent me. I was a spy. I was reporting on their activities. And people were terrified of the
#
Comrade. Absolutely terrified. And because, you know, the word in Bengali to be used and to that
#
the local Bengali press used to use was Shantrash, terror. People, so people would talk to me about
#
everything but politics. They said, don't, Didi, don't ask us about Rajniti. You know, we'll talk
#
about everything else. So it took me a very long time to build trust and learn people's stories.
#
And the Comrade overstepped a line, a red line in the village. So despite his
#
omniscience, he suddenly was vulnerable. And I write about that's the first chapter of how people
#
began to challenge the Comrade's power. And that marked a turning point also for me, because
#
I began to hear secrets for the first time about the Comrade. And people realized I was very good
#
at never passing on secrets. That's my one field work tip for anyone listening and to my students,
#
that the only way to win trust is never, ever, ever to pass on secrets. So people suddenly
#
realized, gosh, you know, you can tell anything and nobody ever hears about it. So I think that
#
helped. And I then because people were not talking to me in the village very much, and Mamata Banerjee
#
had just set up her Trinamool Congress in 99 and won eight Lok Sabha seats immediately. I spent
#
one of my trips in Kolkata, just shadowing Mamata Banerjee. Again, I had no, you know,
#
I didn't know her. I just landed up and I said, I'm really interested. And can I just hang out
#
wherever you are? And I did that. And I got a lot of flak from my left wing academic colleagues
#
in Kolkata for it and friends saying, how can you take this woman seriously? You could have told
#
them you were researching her sarees. Oh, then I would have had absolutely no credibility,
#
Amit. But her sarees, of course, are a very important part of Mamata's, you know, this sort
#
of ordinary Dhoni Kali as opposed to any sort of expensive handloom. But one of the things that
#
was said to me, which was so revealing of, you know, those conversations that my mother
#
used to have with our daughters, was what a very well-known academic, who shall remain unnamed,
#
said to me, how can you take her seriously? She looks like a maidservant.
#
Wow. Like a G, you know, and word in Bangla is, she looks like a G.
#
Wow. I'm sure you do. And so, and I was really shocked. But this, you know, it told me a lot
#
about a lot of things, as you can imagine. But it also told me something about the nature of
#
communism in Bengal. And these were card-carrying academics who, you know, were progressive people
#
in life otherwise. But the Bhadralok, the patrician upper caste Bhadralok character of
#
the communist Politburo was unmistakable. So, to be challenged by, again, a dark-skinned,
#
not very literary woman, was, you know, Jyoti Basu was chief minister. He had patrician, fair-skinned,
#
good looks and a crisp dhoti. And here was this woman in a crumpled saree and Hawaii chapals,
#
saying she's challenging them. And how dare you, Jyoti Basu, to be challenged by
#
them? And how dare she, you know? I think if Mamata Banerjee looked different, it might have
#
been a different story and their response would have been, but that really did irk them for decades
#
until, I mean, Shingoor Nandigram gave her the opening. But all the time before that,
#
I think the grounds on which she was dismissed were several. And people didn't like her style
#
of politics. And it was this, you know, jumping on the chief minister's cars and registering her
#
protest. They just said in Bangla the words that women, Communist Party women's wing members would
#
say to me, it's not together. It's not in order. This is no way to behave. You have to behave like
#
a bhadra mohila. She's not a bhadra mohila. She may be a Brahmin woman, but she's not civilized in
#
the way that we think women should conduct themselves in public. So the criticism of
#
Mamata in those early years showed up a lot of the hypocrisies in left-wing politics as much as
#
anything else. But for me, again, it was a genuine question. You know, why were so many people voting
#
for Mamata Banerjee? She just set up a party. She had nothing to her name. And she had
#
no established credibility. But, you know, in the Maidan in Kolkata, which the big rallies used to
#
be held in Brigade Ground and so on, you talk to the guy selling chana chur, you're selling tea,
#
and, you know, these people who are absolutely wrapped by her speeches. And they say, oh,
#
Durga, you know, she looks like Durga. Look at her. She's fearless. All these strong men,
#
and she's never afraid. And if you're in trouble, she always comes and stands by you.
#
She comes and stands by you because she'd been fighting for the hawkers on Goriya Hutt
#
in that month as it happened when I landed. So it not only taught me something about West Bengal,
#
it also taught me something quite fundamental about our Indian politics works. And I went to
#
her rallies later and, you know, her incredible auditorial skills. But now I haven't met her
#
again in person since that one month. I spent shadowing her when I saw her every day. But the
#
fact that her exterior style hasn't changed, she's still wearing those Dhoni Kalasharis and still
#
have white chappals, it's not insignificant at all, you know, that she isn't wearing designer
#
clothes, like other politicians who claim humble beginnings. They haven't, you know, she may have
#
done good, but it's not reflected in her. That political visual communication hasn't changed.
#
Anyway, to go back to the village then, so it was, so it really was to study the village in its
#
entirety, as I said, I was interested, there was nothing I was not interested in, to, you know, how
#
the Pukur is drained every few years. And, you know, when a Pukur is drained, you take the soil
#
from the bottom of the Pukur, which is wet and muddy. And that is the best fertilizer you can
#
ever have for the crops. So it's very coveted. From that to the minutiae of farming, to weddings
#
and circumcisions and, you know, in that very anthropological holistic, I'm interested in
#
everything, kind of way, began to get a sense of what the village was about.
#
And what I also found fascinating was just in the way that you approach this in terms of
#
methodology, that you pick these four events, and then you analyze them threadbare, and you
#
come at these larger principles and larger conclusions from there. And, you know, you spoke
#
about that being inspired by something called the Manchester School. So tell me in general,
#
what is this Manchester School? And then what are these four kind of events, and what are the
#
insights that you kind of, that they drove you towards?
#
Okay, so the Manchester School of Anthropology was really set up by Max Gluckman, a South African
#
anthropologist, who then came to Manchester and set up the department there. There are many things
#
can be said about the Manchester School, but for our purposes, what was significant was, you know,
#
they were the first really British anthropologists who, or South Africans, white anthropologists
#
studying Africa, who were interested in change, who had a theory of, you know, were wanting to
#
understand how the post-colonial or the colonial context was not just a static place where people
#
from time immemorial, you know, the tribes had existed like this forever, but saw societies as
#
a dynamic space where things changed. And to also confront social inequalities, including through
#
race. So Gluckman's own work, he puts himself as a white anthropologist very much in the frame.
#
But what inspired me most was, you know, what was called situational analysis. You took, like,
#
he has this famous essay on the inauguration of a bridge, and every aspect of that inauguration is
#
described and analysed. So, you know, where the missionaries are standing to, where the
#
magistrate is standing, are they standing together, is there a tent, who's in the sun, who is not,
#
who's eating cake, who are the native populations that are there, what do they cook as part of
#
feasting, every detail is presented. And you begin to realise that to really understand the
#
significance of any such event, you need to appreciate that minutiae. And you appreciate it
#
because the people participating in it think it is important. So the one, the person who baked the
#
cakes and put it on a particular tray in a particular tent has done it with a certain set
#
of intentions. And as anthropologists, our job is to pick up on those details. So, you know,
#
that was a big takeaway. Victor Turner, who, of course, you know, whose biggest contribution
#
to the literature is that word liminality that you mentioned before, had this whole sort of
#
anthropology of ritual and how you see an event that is, what is the ritual form? You
#
dissociate the ritual form from religion, from smells and bells, as we call it. You think about
#
it as a structural moment where there is a similarity in all rituals, whether, say,
#
it is a college graduation, whether it is a wedding, whether it is a football match.
#
A ritual moment always has three aspects to it, drawing from Van Genep's work, of you first
#
mark the start of a ritual by dissociating it from the status quo, so you wear different
#
clothes or you stop time, you go somewhere special. Then the ritual happens in a time
#
when it is, you know, anti-structure. It's not like society. So, often the rules that would
#
normally be applicable in society are not applicable, and they are often egalitarian.
#
They are liminal. They are fleeting. This moment of anti-structure is not permanent,
#
and that's its power. And then you reincorporate yourselves into the status quo. But this time,
#
touched by the transcendence of that liminal ritual moment in the middle.
#
And I take this and I use it to analyze in this kind of detail four events in the society,
#
each drawn from the four main subsections of any society, politics, religion, kinship,
#
and marriage, and the economy. And the scandal is a sexual scandal. And, you know, I talk about how
#
people use it to challenge the power of the comrade. I look at the harvest to see how
#
it is conducted, and then kurbani, which we talked about earlier, and then an election.
#
Now, this does various things. You begin to see an election as part of a village's social life.
#
You know, journalists go to villages only during elections. They have no idea what happens in
#
between elections. And this is redressing that. You see how an election fits into a community's
#
life. But you also begin to see the interrelationships between them. And you see how,
#
through this framework of the anthropology of ritual, one thing that the anthropology
#
of ritual teaches you is that one of the products of rituals is that they are able to create
#
values. Values not for the first time, but they reassert the values that we want to
#
be associated with. They make them desirable, and they recommit ourselves to it.
#
Commit ourselves to it. So, if you think about, say, a college annual day,
#
you all belong to a college. You're very proud of it. You know, you belong to it. You want to be
#
an, you know, the alumna, keep in touch. But at the annual day, what you're doing is if you
#
have a college song, or if you have a function, or you stand together, or dress up and get your
#
parents to come or friends and family, you are re-asserting those aspects of the college that
#
you want to be associated with. You're not creating them for them, but you are re-performing them,
#
holding them up as ideals that you want to recommit yourself to. And any ritual does this.
#
Now, what I'm able to show is that each of these four events creates different values,
#
and these values that they create are actually essential for democratic politics.
#
So, just to give you one example from the harvest, so much is going on in an harvest,
#
but it is, as somebody said to me, actually, it's just like voting. You know, everybody has
#
one job in a harvest. You're either cutting the stalks or you're tying the strings or you're
#
sweeping a yard, but you know that without that one job, you will not have a successful harvest.
#
So, the relationship between individual effort and collective, the collective win at the end
#
is established. And it is a very democratic idea, this way of linking individual to the collective.
#
So, I show this with each of the events, to show how each event produces a cluster of values
#
that have affinity with democratic politics and therefore feed the creation of democratic culture.
#
You know, what I found so fascinating about this is, it's almost like things are happening,
#
and then there's a freeze frame, right, which is this event you're talking about. And then you zoom
#
into different parts of the freeze frame and you explain it and everything just comes to life so
#
beautifully. And it's just so kind of endlessly fascinating and a lesson in, you know, people who
#
want to sort of look at the world in this kind of way or explore possibilities like this. It's
#
almost as if you are zooming into a single water drop and finding the entire universe in there.
#
And you know, and I'll leave it to my listeners to, you know, discover the rest of your book and
#
they should really buy all your books so that they're not all available, but this kind of
#
cultivating democracy is. But my question here is, is that you've explained the universe through
#
this drop of water or through these different drops of water, and you zoom back up and you've
#
sort of written about this. Now, are you going to zoom back into more droplets of water or
#
given what you know about the universe now, given the picture that you've painted, given
#
the way in which you see India now, where every day we, you know, things are getting worse and
#
it's more and more is becoming clear. What do you see now as your role within this discourse,
#
within this whole field of taking knowledge and turning it into insight and all of that?
#
What's next for you? Where do you see yourself? What's happening now?
#
That is the question I ask myself every single day, Amit. You know, it really is.
#
Intellectually, I have the next project ready. You know, it's written up. It's, you know,
#
I'm raring to go start the field work for it on taxation, like I said. And again, you know,
#
the taxation will generate its own droplets, right? And it's a lovely metaphor. And you're
#
absolutely right. It's that zooming in that reveals patterns and so much insight. That is
#
exactly what the ethnographic method achieves. So as an academic, I can keep doing work that
#
hopefully will generate more and more insight into this endlessly fascinating society we call India.
#
I personally find it very difficult to stay within that role only because it may be because
#
of living abroad for nearly 32 years now and remaining an Indian citizen. You know, so I've
#
had to, I can't take it for granted being Indian. I have to consciously, every time I have to apply
#
for a visa or a queue at Heathrow for three hours to get into the country, even though I have
#
residency, I have to think about this choice. You know, why am I continuing to be a citizen?
#
Why am I continuing to be a citizen? And there are lots of reasons, but the relevant one here
#
is that if I'm that attached to being an Indian, does my relationship, when I can see what is wrong
#
and that some things are very wrong and need to be righted, can one get away by not doing anything?
#
And then you think, well, you're not an activist, you are an academic. And obviously my primary
#
job is to teach students and do my job at LSE and write and publish. And I have to keep doing that.
#
There is no way of not doing that. But is there more one can do? And I think it is important to,
#
when one is asked to, one thing that I really have tried to do all the years, and especially
#
in the last six or seven years, is engage much, much more with a wider audience that's way beyond
#
the university, way beyond academia. So I talk to the press, I write for the newspapers, I talk to
#
television stations all over the world. If anyone asks me to comment, I brief diplomats going to
#
to India. Because I think what else is academic insight for? If you can't analyze, I'm not claiming
#
to be the only truth. There is always anyone listening to my briefing has capacity, has the
#
free will to go and ask other people. So I don't have any privileged position. But if I think
#
something is the truth, then it should be spoken regardless of who is in power. What I said about
#
elections, I have studied elections so deeply for so long, I know that what I'm saying is true.
#
And it needs to be said. And that too is, I suppose, it's an expanded role of the academic.
#
It's not activism by any means, because I'm carrying on and doing a different day job.
#
But it can become a part of, I suppose, everybody has to make their choices. But my choice is that
#
I think this needs to be shared a lot more widely. And I do.
#
Well said and more power to you. So my final question, which is kind of predictable, I think
#
for both you and the listeners is that okay, we're done with the serious stuff. But tell us now
#
about the books and films and music that you love. Like what's your what's your desert island
#
collection out there, which you, you know, want everyone to read, or listen to, or watch or whatever?
#
I'm always, you know, it's a lovely question. But it's also, I think, you know, desert island
#
discs should be done with Indians as a program properly, you know, with the copyright, because I
#
think the music, the stories, the personalities are so fabulous. I think it's a format that can be
#
endlessly repeated. I always think it would be a great dinner party format, wouldn't it, with a
#
bunch of friends, if every time you met, you one person shared their favorite eight albums and
#
talked about why their favorite and would be a very nice way to get to know each other really well.
#
But I mean, recommend I read so voraciously so much fiction, that I can't really recommend
#
anything, so to speak. But there's one book which I think we need to, which, you know, has been very
#
significant for me, because it was one of those huge eye openers by Syed Mujtabali called Deshe Bideshe,
#
which is a Bengali gentleman from Kolkata who goes to the northwest frontier.
#
And you know, this is a sort of early 20th century account. And it's wonderful. And I've read it in
#
Bangla, but it needs to be read and translated and discussed because it's one of those tales that
#
upends so many held certainties. And I think, you know, that's what art and fiction are wonderful
#
about. Music, you know, I think for the first time in this most recent book, I've actually,
#
in my acknowledgments, mentioned a musician because I was finishing the book in the middle
#
of the pandemic and the lockdowns and which I found incredibly conducive to work as it happened.
#
But the person who really, it was Drupad, you know, and for me, through my Spick Mackay years,
#
you know, when my eyes were also open, my parents were great, great lovers of Hindustani classical
#
music. So, you know, that was what they got out of living in Delhi the most and took us along.
#
Even if he fell asleep, that was fine. We were just meant to be there imbibing it into our
#
subconscious. But Spick Mackay then opened my, you know, eyes to the great Karnatic musicians as well.
#
You know, so we're just getting to the end of Shyamangudi, Srinivasa Iyer,
#
DK Patamal, you know, these were people I wouldn't have otherwise heard. So one had a much more
#
all India sense of the different classical traditions in India. But in all of this,
#
now, the older I get, I find Drupad is my absolute favourite because it is the distilled essence of
#
what we would call Hindustani classical. You know, it's, there's very few words, you know,
#
there are just five syllables it improvises on. It's very meditative and very, it's the only music
#
I can work with because I'm, it's, I'm not getting caught up in it. You know, it puts me in a state
#
of focus and concentration. So Uday Bhavalkar is my absolute top favourite vocalist and we are
#
exactly the same age. And it's been such a privilege to, from when he was a young first artist of the
#
Spick Mackay concerts, he sang at my big birthday as it happened. It was complete luck that he was
#
in London that year at that time. And that was wonderful. But he, I mean, he's a great,
#
great musician and, and, and I love listening to it. And his guru is Yamayuddin Dagar, who's to
#
play the Rudravena. And yeah, but you know, I listen to any classical music from our traditions,
#
really. I'd love to listen to Bonavista Social Club, which I don't know, many of your listeners
#
know this, it's slightly dated, but I discovered it at a time when I was writing about my old
#
revolutionaries and the Pashtuns. And actually the stories are not that dissimilar. It is a producer
#
who goes looking for these old Cuban men and you know, it's, it's very similar. So what they create
#
by coming together because of the intervention of this outsider was very similar. And I love that
#
music anytime. And it's a lovely documentary. It's a gorgeous, yeah. What a, what a, that's the kind
#
of film we need to make, right, with, with this. And then there is, I should mention this very young
#
artist who is, I think my most favorite instrumentalist is this young chap who, again,
#
I've known for many years, a young musician called Shomik Datta. And I mean, Shomik learned to play
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the sarod from Buddha Dev Dasgupta, who is again, very favorite sarodiya classical musician that I,
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whom I knew and I love to listen to. But what Shomik also does is that he's grown up in London
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and had his talim in India and back and forth. But now the music, he's, so he's very well classically
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trained, but he's also, he produces a global, a London, you know, his music is the product of
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the city of London. He collaborates with a wide range of artists, range of musicians, sometimes
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dancers, voice, percussion, all kinds of interesting instruments, some of which I've heard only at his
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concerts. So in many ways, his music stands for the best kind of modernity that the classics can
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create, you know, which is about a bricolage of different traditions and creating something new
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and exciting and modern and life-affirming. You know, it's wonderful music. So I mean, if you're,
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if your listeners should just check him out. Thank you so much for that. I mean, there is joy
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in the world after all. So thank you so much. We've spoken for almost five hours, I think. And
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I love reading all of your books and I'm going to listen to this conversation again. And I'm sure
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I'll pick up a lot from it. Thank you. Thank you very much, Amit, for your questions,
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for inviting me and for the way you have curated this format. Thank you.
