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The scene and the unseen can be a metaphor for many things, and one of them is time.
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To us, the present is always seen.
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Everything happening around us now is real.
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We can feel it, we acknowledge it, we are shaped by it, we are often prisoners of it.
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The past, on the other hand, is unseen.
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Especially the further back you go, the more removed it seems from us.
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Maybe as well be fiction or fantasy, with no relevance to the textures of our everyday
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And yet, behind everything that is seen, there is everything that is unseen.
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Today is shaped by yesterday.
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This present moment is a child of a moment thousands of years ago.
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Our attitudes, our social structures, our mental frameworks, are all legacies of the
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As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same.
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In some senses, all of the show, all of the scene and the unseen, is an attempt to come
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to terms with this complexity.
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Why are we the way we are?
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Why do we want what we want?
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What is the right way to live our lives?
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What is our dharma, if we have a dharma at all?
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To even begin to grapple with these questions, we have to expand our frame from the here
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and now to everything that came before.
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And this need not be boring.
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In fact, as anyone who has read our epics would know, they can be entertaining and enlightening
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And hey, what do I even mean all at the same time?
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What is this time thing?
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Welcome to The Scene 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 Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is a wonderful Asher Sattar, who studied our ancient literature under A.K.
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Ramanujan and Wendy Doniger, went on to do an acclaimed translation of Valmiki's Ramayana
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and then wrote a number of books and many great essays on our epics, exploring issues
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like dharma in great detail.
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Her work is priceless, because to understand the Ramayana is to understand our history
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The Ramayana is not one book.
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There are countless versions of it across time, in all languages, and each version mirrors
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the values of its time and place.
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In the shifting sands of the many Ramayanas, you see many Indias, twisting and turning
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This is what makes our epics so special.
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They are not one thing.
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In fact, they contain multitudes.
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Arshia is a great storyteller and a clear thinker, and I have learned so much from reading
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her books and from this conversation, which was recorded just a week ago in Bangalore.
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I hope you like it as much as I did, but before we get there, let's take a quick commercial
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Do you want to read more?
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I've put in a lot of work in recent years in building a reading habit.
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This means that I read more books, but I also read more long-form articles and essays.
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There's a world of knowledge available through the internet, but the problem we all face
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is how do we navigate this knowledge?
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How do we know what to read?
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How do we put the right incentives in place?
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Well, I discovered one way.
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A couple of friends of mine run this awesome company called CTQ Compounds at CTQCompounds.com,
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which aims to help people up-level themselves by reading more.
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A few months ago, I signed up for one of their programs called The Daily Reader.
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Every day for six months, they sent me a long-form article to read.
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The subjects covered went from machine learning to mythology to mental models and marmalade.
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This helped me build a habit of reading.
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At the end of every day, I understood the world a little better than I did before.
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So if you want to build your reading habit, head on over to CTQCompounds and check out
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New batches start every month.
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They also have a great program called Future Stack, which helps you stay up-to-date with
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Future Stack batches start every Saturday.
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What's more, you get a discount of a whopping Rs. 2,500, 2,500 if you use the discount code
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So head on over to CTQCompounds at CTQCompounds.com and use the code Unseen.
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Arshia, welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
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It's a real honor to be Unseen and Unseen because it's certainly the most significant
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podcast in the country.
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That's very kind of you to say.
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I mean, I've been thinking of inviting you for a long time, but, you know, finally glad
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Let's start by talking about your early years.
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You know, where were you born?
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What was your childhood like?
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Tell me a little bit about how you grew up and so on and so forth.
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Well, I was born in Bombay.
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My parents, we moved a lot.
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So I had a childhood in Bombay, in Madras, in Delhi, in Calcutta, Pune, which I feel
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very lucky to have lived in so many places even before I was a teenager because it made
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me feel that I belonged everywhere rather than to a specific place.
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I'm an only child, so my parents were not only very protective, but very loving and
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I was a very, very happy child.
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I think I remain a happy person.
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And I remember traveling, we'd go places, and I remember books.
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I remember stories a lot.
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And I doesn't really bear saying, but I was born in 1960.
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So the books that I grew up with were largely Enid Blyton, Western books, so books from
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outside the country, as a consequence of which, actually, the stories that I remember best
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or the stories that are still with me are fairy tales and folktales and myths from other
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parts of the world and legends.
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And I think what unites these stories or makes them a genre, as it were, is the possibility
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So whether it's a fairy tale or it's Arabian Nights or something, anything can happen.
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Anybody can become anything.
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And I think for a child, especially an only child, that's a marvelous world to live in.
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And years later, when I'm in my 20s, when I was in my teens, I thought, oh, I'm going
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It's very posh, and you know everything.
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I started studying philosophy, and I was like, oh, OK, this is not as interesting as I thought.
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And then I had the opportunity, really, to take a class on mythology with Alf Hiltabattle.
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I was studying in the US.
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It changed my life, Amit.
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I thought like, wow, I can spend my life reading the stories of my childhood rather than worrying
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about whether the table is really a table.
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So when I look back on my own childhood, one of the things I look back on regretfully is
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that as a child of a sort of Westernized elite, in a sense, if you call us that, in my early
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childhood, I definitely had an approach that the Western literature that I was reading
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was kind of worth more.
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And I would sort of condescend towards the Indian stuff and think of it as, oh, this
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You know, who wants to read this kind of stuff?
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And you're kind of into more sophisticated literature after a period of time and so on.
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And the same approach, in a sense, permeated to the arts, where I'd look down on Bollywood,
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but I'd be deeply into world cinema.
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And of course, gradually, you kind of grow up and you see the light.
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And all of that changed over a period of time.
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Like, you know, it's one thing to be fascinated by, say, Hans Christian Andersen's Fairfork
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Tales, and you're reading all of this literature in English.
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But was the fascination for, say, the Ramayana and our epic something that was there from
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Or is it something that happened after you started sort of studying it, as you mentioned
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Actually, Ramayana is one of the first stories I remember hearing.
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We lived in Delhi, and I had an Aya, Roshni, and she was Himachali.
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And somebody was always telling me a story at night before I went to bed.
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My parents, and if they were out, then Roshni would tell me stories.
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And she told me Ramayana when I must have been about four or five.
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And my first memory of fear is actually Ravana, because, you know, of course, Roshni was telling
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me much emotion and acting and all of that, and I was terrified that Ravana would come
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and take me away as he had taken Sita away.
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So in a very, very unlikely and unexpected way, it is the story of my childhood.
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And it's, I guess you could say it took me, you know, 20 years to come back to the story,
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15 years to come back to the story.
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And my mother loves to say that, oh, she is interested in Ramayana because a monkey bit
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her when she was three years old, which I remember.
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I remember also the monkey biting me.
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We lived in Madras, and we'd gone to Gindi Park, where they have a little zoo.
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And this monkey managed to get out of its cage and, you know, bit me.
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I remember, you know, going to some very sort of white, bright place where I had to take
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an injection and all that.
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So there's a mythological aspect to my connection with the Ramayana, which is the monkey biting
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And there is a narrative, a sort of biographical narrative in that this is a story I first
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heard from Roshni, both of which I think are actually very important, that, you know, people
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sometimes use it as a pejorative, like, oh, so-and-so is always mythologizing her life.
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And it's like, no, we must mythologize our lives.
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We must see the patterns.
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We must see the influences.
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We must see the chaos that we are trying to control.
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We must see the universe that we are creating for ourselves, the sort of psychological and
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So to the earlier part of your question, I'll say that, you know, because I was reading
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stories, and this is really thanks to my parents, because they made sure that I was not only
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reading Enid Blyton, you know, I was reading Persian folk tales and Chinese fairy tales
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So I didn't have this terribly strong sense that Western literature was better.
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But of course, we were an English-speaking household.
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We are an English-speaking household.
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I went to convent schools.
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So I lived in Calcutta in the 60s, where the whole sort of mahal was still very Raj.
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There were lots of white people, British people, who were still running the multinational companies
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So I had a lot of friends who were little British girls.
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And of course, I wanted to be called Silvaria instead of Ashiya, and the pictures that I
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drew and the stories that I wrote all resembled what now they call Disney princesses.
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But I don't think I grew up with a sense that Western literature was superior to other literatures.
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So one common arc that many people take in their lives, and certainly I have taken, is
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in the way the frames through which you look at the world first evolve to give you insight
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into the world, and then you realize the limitations.
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For example, and it's like a bell curve of certainty, where you might begin where the
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world is vast and complicated and you know nothing, then you find frames that make sense
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So in the case of someone like me, those frames could be things like autonomy and individual
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autonomy, liberty, everything that takes you towards feminism as well.
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All of that become part of the frames through which I look at everything.
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And when I consider those frames and I look at something like the Ramayana or other epics,
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the natural reaction is to be disdainful and just to kind of brush away.
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And also you become judgmental when you embrace those frames too tightly.
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And over time I think what happens is that the certainty also begins to dissipate, that
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you realize that the world is deeply complicated, that these frames are necessarily reductive
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and simplistic in some ways, they don't explain everything.
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And you realize that to understand the way we are, we can't be disdainful of any of
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We can't look back at that, so to say.
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So you know, what is in that sense, I feel that you must have gone through some of that
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in your dealing with the Ramayana or our epics, because the first natural impulse is to look
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at them and maybe when you are young you read Iravati, Karvej, Yogantha and so on.
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And you are just noticing all the things that you don't like about it.
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But later on you take a more generous view, you sit back and you are no longer looking
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for prescriptions but instead descriptions, deeper understanding of why we are the way
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So you know, does that make sense to you, is that a kind of journey you have been on
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Yes, of course it makes sense to me.
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Of course we approach stories and in this case Ramayana is not just a story, it's a
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grand narrative of a culture and to not notice that I think would be just stupid.
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So of course one comes at it with a certain naivete and I think Ramayana is really quite
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unique in that because of Hanuman, because Hanuman is such an extraordinary character,
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you truly can experience wonder and joy with Ramayana in a way that you can't with Mahabharata.
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You can have many other very, very important emotions but wonder and joy, probably not.
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I mean Hanuman, you go to Ramlila or you watch even this fellow's Ramayana on TV, Ramanand
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or whoever you are, whether you're a child or you're an elderly person, Hanuman enters
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and everybody goes, you know, there is a real, you just feel like you're in the presence
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In your case it's because Hanuman bit you when you were three.
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My feeling is much bigger than yours, Amit.
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As you said, one grows up in years as well as in perspective, one's perspectives become
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more complicated, rightly so, and then I think it's very important for us to look back.
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Not everybody does it, I don't think, and I think that's where many of our problems
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come from, that the things that we believed were perfect in our childhood, if you still
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think they're perfect, well, there is something really wrong, you've got to do a lot of examining.
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So yeah, of course one looks back on the Ramayana and, you know, again, no surprise, you know,
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being a young person in the 70s and 80s in India, not being a young person, being a young
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woman at that time, obviously feminism was something that I was very drawn to and feminism
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transformed me, I think very, very much for the better, and then I started studying Ramayana
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formally and I studied it in a secular environment, in a critical environment, rather than in
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a theological one or a religious one, and yeah, there are lots of things that I find
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deeply, deeply disturbing about the Ramayana, but also the next step in the trajectory is
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the things that we find disturbing, the things that make us uncomfortable, we don't always
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have to reject those things, we have to look at them more closely, and not only look at
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them, but look at ourselves, like why is this disturbing to me, I mean, if it's got to do
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with violence towards women or mythology and all, it's like, no, I know why this is disturbing
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to me, right, but we have to think again more largely about where did this come from, why
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is it there, why was it there then, why is it still here, am I complicit, do I participate
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in this, where does my critique come from, all of those lenses, it's like when you go
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to the eye doctor, you wear glasses, so you know what this is like, they put the lens
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in, this is better, and take it out, and then red and green, and that is really, I think,
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how you spend, not simply a lifetime with the text, but that's how one lives one's
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life, you know, trying lenses, which makes me see better, which one gives me a more coherent
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picture, so, I think of the way I translated Ramayana, I was in my mid-30s when I did that,
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and I think about the books that I'm writing now about Ramayana, and I can see that it's
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the same person, but it's an older person now, and I can't say wiser, because I think
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I had insights and perspectives as a younger person that are really quite electric, as
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we all do, you know, the sort of, the gumption of youth really allows you to see things that,
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you know, you get cataracted as you get older, you know, so, and both are valuable, both
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are very, very valuable, and so I do, of course, there are some things that I say, oh my God,
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I can't believe I said that, no, that's not true, there's nothing that really truly
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embarrasses me about what I said, but sometimes I'm like, oh, this could have been said better,
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but it's all, it's all part of the journey, you know, I think, yeah, I think the people
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that interest me most, whether they're scholars or writers or friends or anything, there's
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an arc that you're watching, yeah.
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Let's sort of, you know, go back chronology, as it were, and let's go back to your childhood,
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and you know, you mentioned that you like to draw and write and all of those things,
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tell me a bit about your childhood, what kind of person were you, tell me about your parents.
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My parents, my parents are absolutely lovely, my parents are Muslim.
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My father is from Gujarat, my mother is from the north, and so we always tease her about
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that, you know, all this Lakhnavi, Tehzi, oh my God, you're such a snob, and all that.
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My father's family was very, you know, like many Gujarati communities, Gujarati Muslim
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communities, they were very business oriented, my mother comes from a long and wide line
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of intellectuals, my mother's father, my grandfather was the first principal of Ismail Yusuf College
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in Bombay, he studied in Cambridge and all like that in the 20s, so I have two very distinct
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aspects that I grew up with.
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So they didn't have an arranged marriage, my parents, they happen to be Muslim, my mother
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is older than my father, but what I remember most about them, my father died 20 years ago,
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my mum is 93, and sharp as a tack really, what I remember most about them is how much
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It was a very, they loved each other, they loved me, I loved them, which doesn't mean
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of course that we didn't have all kinds of horrible fights, especially when I was a teenager
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and it's like why can't I do this, and all my friends are allowed to stay out at night,
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that kind of stuff, also slightly more political stuff, I accused my father once of being a
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running dog capitalist and he was just like, okay, I'm not going to speak to you for a
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while, he didn't say that, he just stopped talking to me for about two weeks.
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He sounds like Michael Nugger.
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So again, this is the security that young people have, that I am right, and of course
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But yeah, there were lots of holidays, it still is my parents' house, my mum's house,
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it's always full of people, there's always visitors, there's always friends, there's
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a lot of food always, lots of conversation, no alcohol, it's a Muslim house, yeah, it
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was a very, very happy family, then there was a dog, and I also remember there was a
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constant, constant negotiation about what they wanted me to do and what I wanted to
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do and there were no, nothing was ever imposed on me without a conversation.
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So it was very open, which of course I had secrets from my parents, forgot to tell them
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everything I did, and that also was good, you know, because they were not my best friends,
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any of that stuff, they were parents, I was a child, it's still possible to love each
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other and yeah, yeah, and my father never finished college, so he was inordinately proud
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of me because I went off and got a PhD and this and that, and sometimes I wonder if it
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intimidated him a little bit, you know, that his little girl had suddenly become talking
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stuff that he couldn't understand, but he was a very funny man, he was very, very funny,
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he was very generous, so even if he had these discomforts, they just got absorbed in a much,
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My mother is everything that I am not, she's terribly elegant, she's truly, truly a lady
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with grace and beauty and she's soft-spoken, yeah, and I think because when I was growing
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up, because she was so perfect in herself, I had to be the opposite, so I had to be a
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little bit rambunctious and, you know, aggressive and all the things that she isn't, and she,
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over the last 40 years, has been working with the Anjuman Islam, which is an institution
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in Maharashtra, which was really formed for the education of Muslim girls, so she's been
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working there in Pune and her work is admirable, yeah, so after my father died, of course,
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we became much closer, my mom and I, and also, and I'm sure you've experienced this as well,
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you know, you leave home at 18, 19, 20, whatever it is, and when you come back, you realize
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that your parents are people, not mommy and daddy, you know, that they have personal histories,
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that they have likes and dislikes, that they actually exist without you, you know, so the,
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that for me was a great, great pleasure, getting to know my parents, you know, when I was about
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20, 21, and then I went away to America, and I was just like, oh, these are actually objectively
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very good people, not just my mommy and my daddy, so yeah.
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I'm struck by what you said about them, which might seem to some people to just be a banal
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observation, but the fact that you chose to mention it drew my attention to it, which
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is when you said they loved each other, right, and one of the things that I have noticed
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what happens in sort of Indian society and maybe all societies and maybe all marriages
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is that beyond a particular point in time, you fall into a role, right, there's this
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great quote by Iris Murdoch, love is the extremely difficult realization that something other
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than oneself is real, right, and I guess that realization can come in the early stages of
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a romance, but otherwise your median Indian marriage is a marriage where the two people
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don't really love each other in that way, they are kind of living in their own separate
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worlds and they're playing their roles, and one is a husband and a father, and he's, you
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know, living up to what he considers a masculine ideal, perhaps, you know, the Maryada Purushottam
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of Ram or whatever, those idealized roles, and the other is Sita Savitri and all of that,
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or whatever, you know, even if it's not those specific roles, there are roles that are sort
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of set up, and like you said, most people do no self-reflection, it is kind of what
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So this is not so much a question about your parents or the Ramayana, both of which I mentioned,
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but a question in general about, you know, sort of the world around us, in which it is
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so sort of disturbing often how many of us are trapped in this sort of main character
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syndrome, right, that I am the main character and everybody else is a prop in my play, they
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are fulfilling a particular part, and they're not real, real people in that sense.
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So what are sort of your thoughts about it?
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Because in a sense, in that particular aspect of first seeing your parents as parents, and
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then seeing them as people after a time, even that is a journey most people don't make,
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but in that particular aspect, you kind of made that journey, right?
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And I feel that for all of us, you know, the main character syndrome is reflexive, and
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you have to sort of be mindful and intentional in your relationships at all time to not fall
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What are your thoughts on this?
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That's a really difficult question.
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I think, okay, first of all, there are, it's really, really difficult to be a woman in
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the world, but I'm so glad I'm a woman because there are certain things that women experience
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more naturally than men do.
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One is solidarity and sisterhood, right?
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Indian men in particular are brought up to believe that they are the king of the jungle,
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the king of the house, the king of the city.
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I think it's much harder for men to think of themselves as not the main character, right?
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Whereas for women, for the good part is that we understand ourselves as part of community,
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and so we don't think of ourselves as main characters, but the bad part is that it's
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the patriarchy that keeps telling us, no, you don't matter, you are subservient, you
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So we never think of ourselves as main characters for patriarchal reasons as well, which are
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obviously profoundly disempowering.
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But once we actually feel sisterhood or a community, then you can really negotiate the
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patriarchy in ways that are increasingly necessary.
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So I think that's one thing.
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I think also, I wonder if it has something to do with joint families and nuclear families.
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When we as a society lived in joint families, which are very, very complex mechanisms, which
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sort of seem to exist in chaos, but of course they don't, they're highly, highly regulated.
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So how does one individuate oneself in a very, very large family group?
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Maybe that's why people think, I'm the hero of my own story.
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No, no, I'm the hero of everybody's story, not just my own story.
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And I think once we live in more nuclear family setups, then there's less to compete with.
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So one can think that, oh, okay, these are my parents, this is me.
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But the narrative that you construct is not simply your own.
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There's the mother, the father, the dog, the person who brought you up, the person who
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So you move from that very tight kinship to the less kinship and the less kinship and
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my school teachers, my school friends, the people in the building, you know, maybe, maybe
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it's that, but that's a very, very existential question, I think, that you're asking.
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I think it's a very important one that how do we see ourselves in the world, where do
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You know, I'm struck by the lovely word you used, and almost an academic word, individuate,
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you know, which strikes me that, A, men don't actually need to do this because they are
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by default, you know, the masters of their destiny.
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But at the same time, they are also trapped by the patriarchy and by the Rose Trust.
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And both of those hold, and for women, I guess, it must, at a certain point in time, be such
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a delightful mental leap to be able to take, just to be able to conceive that you can escape
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all of these, you know, situational, circumstantial things.
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You know, you said it's hard to be a woman in the world, you spoke earlier about how
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feminism transformed you, tell me a bit about that, that as a young girl growing up, like
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on the one hand, of course, you mentioned that you were sort of a counterpoint to your
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mother in terms of being assertive, and I guess, you know, all of that.
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But at what point does your sense of yourself in relation to everything around you kind
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How do you see yourself when you sort of start to take that step back?
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I think leaving home was the biggest one.
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I was, just before I was 22, I went to study in the US, and it was 1982, so you're going
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to study in the US means once every two weeks, you'll get a letter.
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And that was close communication.
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And maybe once a month, you had a trunk call, and it's that extend, extend, six minutes,
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you know, all that, which actually, I think, sharpened the communication that I had with
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my family and my friends, and not like this constant, like everything, I'm thinking, you
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know about not only you, half the world, you know, but I mean, this is auntie talk, you
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know, all of us, after a certain age, we just think that whatever the young people are doing,
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So I don't want to get into that.
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But I think, particularly because as an only child, I'm a girl child, and my father, of
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course, out of love, and also out of, you know, being Indian patriarchal father was
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fiercely protective, which was weird, because also they let me go out at night, they let
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me go out with boys, girls, it didn't matter.
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I traveled on my own, I traveled with them.
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So going to America, I understood the power of anonymity.
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Hamid Sartar ki beti, Nazura ki beti, kuch nahi, I was Arshiya.
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I could have been anything.
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I could have told them I'm an Arab princess, kuch bhi bol sakti thi main, you know, even
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your name in 1982 in America was not signifier necessarily, and especially even now, Arshiya
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Sartar, people take a while to figure out, you know, what is this creature?
#
Because what is your caste?
#
I still get those questions.
#
You think now it's not necessary, I mean, you know, these names are potent enough.
#
And anyway, so being in America on my own and growing into this feeling that I could
#
reinvent myself, I think that was the starting point of self-aware self-definition, you know,
#
because I was in college, of course, in India, in Elphinstone, in Bombay, at an absolutely
#
magnificent time, it was hugely, hugely free, Elphinstone, all kinds of people were there,
#
leftists, rightists, centrists, you know, red, green, blue, yellow, everything was there.
#
But you're still part of a group, you know, like a class group or a school group, because
#
school friends that I had graduated with also went to Elphinstone, and you're still hanging
#
out with, you know, other people on your street or your building friends or your, you know,
#
and America wasn't like that, it was just like, okay, I have to really start from scratch,
#
I have to make new friends, and I have nothing in common with these people, I didn't have
#
a natural class affinity, I certainly didn't have a caste affinity.
#
Also in 1982, there were very few of us going to America, you know, the big migration had
#
been in the 60s, and their kids were too young to be our classmates.
#
So this was a new generation, but after that, I mean, between the 60s and the 80s, rich
#
Indians or ambitious Indians or Indians who wanted to study more were still going to the
#
UK, America was like, hmm, it's a brash country, really posh people don't send their children
#
It wasn't even like I had an Indian community to join, and of course I carried many, many
#
of my, of the reading tastes and the ideological positions that I had been a part of in India,
#
of course I carried those with me, but suddenly I had to, not suddenly, it wasn't suddenly,
#
it was slow, slow, slow, I had to sharpen these things on my own, because my best friends
#
who I used to read with, or my best friends who we used to go on, you know, Dharana, they
#
So what is the political decision that I'm going to make, who am I going to align with,
#
and I remember, for me as a young person, I studied for two years in Washington DC,
#
one of the most important things that I did was, it was 25 years of Martin Luther King's
#
I Have a Dream speech, so I went to that rally on my own, right, so I suddenly started doing
#
things on my own, and lots of the books I'd been reading in India, I couldn't be bothered
#
anymore, but new stuff was coming to me, another very, very, very important moment that I remember
#
was the Dalai Lama was coming to campus, this is 1982, he was not the Dalai Lama that we
#
know now, he was not speaking any English, he was a much younger man obviously, and he
#
was speaking through an interpreter, so I went, this guy that I knew, I can't even
#
call him a friend, he's like, oh I'm going to the Buddhist center in the evening and
#
the Dalai Lama is going to be there, do you want to come?
#
So I was like, ah, so I went, and he blessed me, and he gave me, and I shook hands with
#
the Dalai Lama and all that, I mean, in 1982, this was like, okay, this is very special,
#
but now it's a miracle, you know, that I, things like that, so I think once you become
#
aware that you are defining yourself, then all these other things start to coalesce,
#
and then as you get older, you, within that coalescence, you seek coherence, you know,
#
because otherwise you could, all of us hold so many contradictory ideas in our heads at
#
the same time, or even, you know, I mean, in the way we live our lives, like everybody
#
is like, oh, climate change is a terrible thing, oh, carbon footprint, everybody thinks,
#
but you're still in your SUV, how is that?
#
You're still ordering from Big Basket, what about all the plastic, you know, so I think
#
as you get older and you try to simplify your life without impoverishing your life, these
#
kinds of pathways become important, they become visible, so, you know, building a self is
#
a lifetime's work, and then you die, ha!
#
Yeah, so it's all futile, we're kind of on the same page there, I'm known for being very
#
So here's another question, like one part of sort of understanding feminism as a man
#
is understanding that women, when they live their lives in India, even today, have so
#
many other layers of awareness that they have to carry with them, so as a man, I go out
#
for a walk at midnight, or I enter a lift with five other people, I'm chilling, right,
#
I'm in my own bubble, nothing can affect me, women are taking all that into account, right,
#
so that is one kind of layer that women have and that men gradually figure out.
#
And another sort of layer, I guess, is just what comes from being a well-to-do Hindu,
#
that a layer of what a Muslim might feel in a place where his Muslimness is apparent,
#
for example, and I think this is much more, I would speculate, this is much more an issue
#
today than it perhaps was, because growing up I don't really remember it so much, or
#
maybe I was blind to it because I was in a bubble.
#
Tell me a little bit about this, what sort of a growing up Muslim, albeit in what I'm
#
guessing is an elite westernized family, you know, what that was like and how the idea
#
of India was looked at at that time, like one of the anecdotes that moved me greatly,
#
I think it comes from a Harsh Mandir piece on Ehsan Jafri was about how there was a riot
#
sometime in the 60s where his house was destroyed or whatever, and the advice he was given is
#
why don't you move to this more Muslim neighborhood and all of that, and he said no, I'm not going
#
to ghettoize myself, that's not my idea of India, my idea of India is we're all kind
#
of living together and we are all chilling, right, and we know what happened.
#
So the question there is that, you know, what was it like when you were a young person growing
#
Was it a layer that you have to be aware of in any context?
#
You know, in what ways have you seen the world changing in that sense?
#
Well, I mean, honestly, I didn't grow up Muslim, I didn't, yeah, I had no, I mean, I knew I
#
was Muslim, but it didn't mean anything, you know, like, I mean, yeah, somebody's Gujati,
#
somebody's Marathi, somebody's Muslim, it didn't mean anything at all.
#
Also, I think because my parents, they both have a practice, very, very private practice
#
of Muslim rituals and all like that, but we always celebrated Eid, of course, in the house,
#
but somehow, and I don't know how this happened, I never learned to say my prayers, I never
#
learned to read Quran, I mean, my parents tried, of course, you know, I had to go to
#
some Mullah Ji or some Mumani Jannah, but I was always protesting, I could not deal
#
with it, not because I was some rebel or anything like that, but it was, on my school holidays
#
I had to go and, you know, it was not fun for me.
#
And I think my parents understood that there's no point in forcing this child to do this
#
now and I think they imagined that at some point in my life, I would learn to say my
#
prayers, you know, it'll come back, but it never did.
#
So of course, I am very, very culturally Muslim in that the food in my house, the clothes
#
I wear, my language, my accent, all of those things are very, very Muslim.
#
But my parents have had, separately from each other, more and less intense ways of actually
#
practicing Islam and there's always, always, always been a lot of discussion about what
#
it means to be Muslim in the household, right, like one of the things I would say to my parents,
#
again, it was, you know, like one of those outrageous things that only a young person
#
can say, like, you are not Muslim, you don't practice, where is your namaz?
#
You don't go on hajj, you know, you don't give zakat.
#
And both my parents are like, what do you know, little girl?
#
But it was a real conversation, you know, how is it, how can you be a Muslim if you
#
don't do namaz, then if you don't think that going to hajj is important and of course they
#
give zakat, but you know, the so-called five pillars are not observed fully or at all.
#
And then this other conversation of to be a good person in your, in my parents' categories
#
of good people, do you have to be a good Muslim or is it possible to be a good person even
#
if you're not a good Muslim or a good Hindu or a good Christian?
#
So you know, lots of that kind of conversation.
#
And then I went to the U.S. in 1982 and of course I would keep coming back.
#
But effectively, I came back to live in India in very early 1990.
#
So Shah Bhanu had happened, the Diorala Sati had happened, the weaponization of Rama had
#
begun, all this time I'm studying Ramayana, and so I come back in 1990, Sanjay and I come
#
back in 1990, and you know, all this bubbling, bubbling, bubbling that Rathiyatra is going
#
to happen, that Mandal Masjid was happening, oh and of course also what had happened in
#
the 80s was satanic verses had been banned, so the polarization was, you know, really
#
But people like ourselves chose not to see it or didn't recognize it.
#
We thought like, but in 1990 when I came back and I was talking to my friends who'd been
#
my friends, you know, through college and everything, whatever I said in this conversation,
#
somebody would say, oh but you're speaking as a Muslim, and I was like no I'm not, I'm
#
speaking as a human being, I'm speaking as a woman, I'm speaking as a Shia, I'm not speaking
#
as a Muslim, but it was not possible for me to participate in that conversation as a secular
#
person or a person without a religious identity.
#
My Hindu friends could perfectly participate in that conversation without this being leveled
#
And of course since then, it's been growing, and now Amit, now I can say whatever I want
#
about who I am, but for the world, I'm a Muslim.
#
It's like a tattoo, you know, on my forehead, musalman hai.
#
So I was thinking like what the hell did I spend 60 years doing, developing an identity
#
that was, you know, I mean so unique, or you know, so yeah, it's, I think that is the most
#
horrific change over, you know, these last decades is that we are defined more and more
#
narrowly, right, and not simply by the world, even by ourselves.
#
I am, you know, I mean the whole gender spectrum business, the whole national identities and
#
within national identities, parochial identities, and that I think is something is going to
#
take generations to recover from smaller and smaller identities rather than more and more
#
inclusive identities, so that, yeah, it's, yeah, like I am, certainly my generation never
#
thought that this would happen, not that we would live to see it, and yet I think that
#
one of the reasons it has happened is precisely because my generation abdicated, you know,
#
like either it's not going to happen, that ostrich thing, or many of us went abroad and
#
never came back, or we were too busy being cool and smoking dope, you know, we seeded
#
the stage, the national stage to a very, very different kind of ideology and a very, very
#
different kind of discourse, and now that we have been disinherited as it were, disenfranchised,
#
now we're all on the margin saying, hey, he can say what, he can say what, it's just
#
So I do think that, of course, it's very important for us to push back, it's very important for
#
us to complain, it's very important for us to develop counter narratives, but we also
#
have to take the responsibility for having not seen what could happen, that confidence
#
that we are a secular country, or the confidence, the more embarrassing confidence, we are the
#
intellectual elite, we may not be a money elite, but we are the solid middle class,
#
we will always be in control of this country, right, and now we're not.
#
It's a very timely slap in the face, but, you know, it's, yeah.
#
So I have sort of two related propositions, tell me what you think of them once I go through
#
One is that what we see happening in our society is not something that is necessarily new,
#
it is just an expression of the way that we always were, you know, I did an episode with
#
Akshay Mukul on his great book about the Geeta Press, and our society was always, you know,
#
like this, like many of the issues in the 1920s are issues that you would imagine are
#
new but they're not, they were there in the 1920s, like love jihad, cow slaughter, so
#
So this was always kind of waiting to happen.
#
And my second proposition is that I agree totally with you about what you said about
#
elites abdicating, I think what happened was that when the country was formed, we gave
#
ourselves a constitution, elites gave ourselves a constitution that was relatively liberal,
#
not as liberal as I'd like, but relatively liberal to the country, and we were like,
#
you know, constitution bana diya, we've built these little bubbles for ourselves in Lutyens
#
Delhi and wherever else, and our work is done and everything will take care of itself.
#
And our work was not done, you know, politics, I keep saying has caught up with society,
#
which is where we are today.
#
And do you feel that this was sort of inevitable or could something have been done?
#
Like in hindsight, it is easy to look back and say that, hey, we abdicated, you know,
#
the task of building a liberal society was still in front of us, giving us a liberal
#
constitution was not enough.
#
So do you feel that in some ways that this was inevitable, that we were going to get
#
here because this is what our society was, and of course, perhaps exacerbated in modern
#
times by, you know, just the structural incentives which push politics to the extremes always,
#
you know, which even makes these kinds of simplistic narrative battles almost inevitable
#
That's very well put, because, you know, 1947, in terms of world history, there's been two
#
world wars, the Holocaust, we have seen, I mean, not Indians, because we're so cool,
#
the whole world has seen what human beings can do to one another, right?
#
So when people try to build to replace the inequalities, the prejudices, the tribalisms
#
of the first half of the 20th century were things like the Indian Constitution, right?
#
And that sort of euphoria all over the world carried into the 60s, yeah?
#
There's Woodstock, there's, you know, students marching in the street in Paris, there's like,
#
you know, 1968 was like a year of 100 flowers blooming, really.
#
And that generation, which we are a part of, actually, even though we're born in 1960 and
#
all like that, but we believed that a better world was possible and that we could create
#
But that's where we stopped.
#
We thought, okay, it's ready now.
#
We have made this constitution in India, or like in, you know, in the West, perhaps we
#
have fought the battle by the 70s, like the Vietnam War is over, you know, there are new
#
nations in the 60s, there is the Bandung Conference, there is like Panchashil, there is a sense
#
of like the so-called Third World or the Global South rising to its own destiny, they're in
#
control of their own destiny, you know, self-government, nationalisms, diversity, pluralism, everything.
#
It seemed like we were set, right?
#
And then something, you know, you blink and it's gone, you take your foot off the pedal
#
for a minute and you know, I think the mistake we all made, all over the world, is not realizing
#
that the gardens have to be nurtured, you know, we sowed the seed and said, now God
#
will take care of everything or nature will take care of everything, whoever you believe
#
But we forgot that we need to be gardeners, that this needs to be tended, that, you know,
#
you make sure that you don't get like aphids, that, you know, weeds don't grow and cover
#
the grass, we just became less aware of our surroundings.
#
And I think that part of that is naivety, I think part of that is arrogance, I think
#
part of that is not understanding, or not fully understanding, that time is cyclical,
#
you know, that some, it doesn't mean that something's not going to come back, just
#
because Eegbar-o-Karliya, one time you've uprooted it, it may still come, so we were
#
not prepared for the same prejudices and the same discomforts to reappear, and we are incapable
#
of fighting them in some way, because we're the middle generation, we're not the people
#
who fought for independence, because they have a way of fighting that, we were the ones
#
who inherited and inherited promises and dreams and aspirations and all that, we were the
#
lucky ones, you know, so we're also namby-pamby, we don't know how to fight back, we don't
#
have the vitriol, we don't have the certainty, I think one of the things also that defines
#
our generation, which is something I used to be really, really proud of, is self-doubt,
#
you know, that you're constantly re-examining yourself, that you're always wondering, am
#
I doing the right thing, is there somebody I'm not listening to, is there, do I have
#
a blind spot, and that self-doubt now looks like paralysis, actually, that, you know,
#
there's, it's a lack of certainty, really, but also we are the generation that grew up,
#
I think, very, very profoundly with existentialism, you know, that what if there is no God, where
#
do I find meaning, and if it's up to me to create meaning for myself, it's dark, it's
#
difficult, you know, so for all that we were, the sunshine generation with our flower power
#
and all of that, we were also a generation that really had to chart its own course, because
#
we were not aligning ourselves with religions that gave us certainty, we were also questioning
#
ideologies, however much we were leftist and all like that, it was after Stalin, we had
#
seen, we knew about the purges, we knew about the horrors of state communism, you know,
#
so we were also a generation that was, that didn't want to be rooted, you know, the idea
#
of the global citizen, the idea of like, yeah, I can read Jack Kerouac, and I can also read,
#
you know, Lady Murasaki, and it's, and I can read Shankaracharya, or like, whatever,
#
Marke Narayan, whatever it is, know that we were not culturally confined, and the world
#
changed for us, it became easier to travel, it became movies, books, yeah, yeah.
#
And also hold that, you know, the phrase you mentioned, self-doubt, at one level, I think
#
in a different context from the way that you meant it, and I agree entirely with you that
#
everything you said is resonant to me, but in one sense, I think that there wasn't enough
#
self-doubt, right, where what happens is that the, and the elites have themselves to blame
#
not just for not doing enough, but also for thinking too much of themselves, also for
#
painting themselves that, you know, elites are good, and like, we are modern, they are
#
primitive, almost in that kind of a way, that whole condescending sort of nature to it,
#
and perhaps we are guilty of it when we talk about changing society and all of that, like,
#
who are you to change society?
#
And I think that the fundamental, I think, value that we didn't embrace there was the
#
value of actually really engaging with society, of doing real politics, which is you're engaging
#
with disagreements and contradictions and everything that is out there, and that engagement
#
is rich and that engagement helps there be a certain kind of dialogue, whereas today
#
The elites are irrelevant and in a certain way with good reason, and there is no dialogue
#
and that space simply isn't there.
#
No, I absolutely agree that, yeah, we did think too much of ourselves, I mean, we thought
#
we're going to inherit the world, let alone the country, you know, we will always be the
#
elite, we will become the IAS officers, we will, but at the same time, I'm not going
#
to the hustings because politics is too dirty, you know, I could become a bureaucrat, but
#
parliament and all that's not my business, or it's not my choice, so there was that.
#
I think also, and I'm not suggesting this as an excuse, this is also a legacy of colonialism,
#
right, that as we were saying earlier, you know, the orientation towards the West, I
#
read Western literature, my first language is English effectively and all that, which
#
is fine, it's great, it makes us global citizens, it makes us very, very dominant in the world
#
of information technology, all of that, but the disdain for the vernaculars, not just
#
languages but cultures, that stopped us from engaging, right, and this for me is becoming
#
more and more of an issue because of the sort of the larger sort of space in which I choose
#
to live, which is the literary space, how many of us are reading in modern English,
#
how many of us are reading in two languages, you take the generation, somebody like Girish
#
Karnad, five languages man, five, reading, writing, thinking, speaking, right, extraordinary,
#
and none of us can at best, at best, we are bilingual, right, but we are not equally so,
#
in English we will read and write and speak in Hindi, yeah, and how much of this conversation
#
could be entirely conducted in Hindi, so what is happening actually is that because we're
#
not reading in vernacular languages, those literatures are dying, you know, and we are
#
losing out on worlds of experience and expression, so that, I mean, you know, especially when
#
I'm talking to young people, one other language, don't just speak it, at least read it, if
#
you can write it so much the better, but at least you must be able to read in it, so that
#
is a colonial legacy, but, you know, if we were so smart about so many other things,
#
why we were not so smart about this, we should have been, we should have seen that this fundamental
#
barrier, you know, to a more complete engagement and, you know, also our very, I mean, I was
#
saying that, oh, we didn't want to be rooted and all, but we chose to be rooted in metropolis
#
and cosmopolis, you know, rather than, yeah, a larger, so all, everything that we've been
#
thinking so far, you know, nuclear families and joint families and all like that, in our
#
quest for modernity, because it was a quest for modernity, it is a quest for modernity,
#
I think we didn't carry enough of the past with us, you know, we only looked forward,
#
we didn't look back, because if you're looking back, oh, there is casteism or there is hierarchy
#
or there is gender discrimination, of course, of course, that is, was is, but we could have
#
taken the better bits of it and left the worst behind, so, but again, you know, I mean, I
#
think the way people are talking about what happened in America with Trump and what happened
#
with Brexit in the UK, it's the same thing that there's a cosmopolitan elite that is
#
seriously disconnected from a working class, right, and in the West, of course, working
#
class means something very different, because here we have feudalism, we have working class,
#
we have the rural poor, we have Adivasis, we have Dalits, you know, there's so much
#
more to be disengaged from in India, actually, yeah.
#
I think these sort of globalised elites across the world are also different from each other
#
in many, you know, subtle ways, like you pointed out in India, there are so many other layers
#
to it, and part of that sort of colonial legacy also is that when we talk about being bilingual,
#
we automatically assume one of those two languages is English, right, there's, I had done an
#
episode here with your fellow city resident Sugata Srinivasaraju, and Sugata made this
#
very interesting point that the interplay that happens between languages in India always
#
involves English, so you'll have language X translated into English, language Y translated
#
into English, but rarely language X translated into language Y, it is as if English is the
#
centre of the universe, you go to small towns today and one of the big sunshine industries
#
is English coaching classes, and part of that is of course, you know, it's natural, it's
#
rational, that is a bridge language to the world, so that's all cool, but at the same
#
time, you know, how can you engage with a society if you're not talking the language
#
of that society, and like, you know, those of my guests who've grown up reading Hindi
#
newspapers or Kannada newspapers or who've grown up reading other than English, they
#
always tell me this, that there's always an additional perspective that they have and
#
they just don't see these city slickers have that at all.
#
Absolutely right, I mean, when we say bilingual, we always, almost 90% of the time we're talking
#
about English and another language, right, and the other language is typically our mother
#
tongue, but one of the reasons that's happening, and you know, I do a lot of work with not
#
simply myself translating, but with translation programs and translators and all, it's where
#
are the people who are translating from Marathi to Gujarati, right, our parents perhaps, right,
#
but not people my age and people younger than me, I mean, so many of my younger friends
#
in Bangalore, right, very comfortable speaking Kannada, Tamil, Malayalam, understanding Malayalam,
#
some people even speak Telugu, Hindi, English, like Bombay, you know, four, five languages,
#
So they are, it would be impossible for them to make a translation from Kannada to Tamil,
#
right, that would be acceptable by what we call translation, that's also true, that in
#
previous generations, okay, again, taking Girish Karnad as an example, he made rough
#
and ready translations of, he translated Badal Sarkar into Hindi, even in the Teeth, right,
#
now he did that not because he speaks Bengali, but he knew somebody who had done the Hindi
#
translation, so between the Bengali and the Hindi, he brought it into, excuse me, Bangla,
#
something else and he put it into Hindi, I can't remember what the language was, but
#
now that would be considered illegitimate completely, oh, you didn't do directly, oh,
#
you used Ling language, oh, it is not literal, oh, you know, so as far as literary translation
#
goes, there are more and more rigidities, which of course have good and bad consequences,
#
but the idea of like, you know, I mean, suppose you and I find a text that we really like
#
and one of us has the extra language, the fact that you and I could sit together and
#
bring out a book, that's gone, that is totally, totally gone and I think also the reason that
#
we have lost our second and third and fourth languages, of course, it's because of the,
#
you know, the school system being so oriented toward English and all like that, but it is
#
also about the nuclearization of the family, you know, because even now you see lots of
#
people who say, well, I speak Bengali only to my grandparents, I can understand what
#
my grandmother says, but I reply in English, but when it's a fuller universe, when you
#
live in a larger community that speaks that language, then obviously you speak it.
#
So yeah, it's a, yeah, the language thing is very complicated and whichever way you
#
cut the pie, it's sad that we are not doing as much with our languages as we should.
#
I'm connecting what you just said about nuclearization with something really interesting Peggy Mohan
#
revealed in an episode she did with me and a book is a masterpiece.
#
What a great book that is.
#
And of course, one of the revelations of that book is that when the Aryan migration happened,
#
you know, it was men who came, it is a men doing the migrating and they're marrying
#
local women, whether by consent or force or whatever, that's irrelevant, they're doing
#
But one of the consequences of that is that for generations, the men are speaking a particular
#
language and the women are speaking a particular language.
#
So the girl of the house will grow up speaking a particular language and the boy will first
#
three or four years, he'll be with the mother and the women, but then he'll move out into
#
the male world and he'll speak a different language and the world changes.
#
And it strikes me that what nuclearization then does, and this is something that I repeatedly
#
hear when guests of mine reminisce about their younger days, that this was a kind of a thing
#
in their homes as well, that the women spoke one language and the men would speak in a
#
And what nuclearization will then do is that it will kill it because a woman has nobody
#
to speak that language with, so she conforms to whatever, you know, and that kind of strain
#
Ramanujan used to call it father tongue and mother tongue, only Ramanujan has this kind
#
of like genius, you know, because it's literal and it's metaphorical and exactly he talks
#
about himself or so many young boys in a, ironically, so many young boys in a more divided
#
household spent their early years in the kitchen with their mother and the mother tongue.
#
And then my mother grew up like this because her father was very insistent that they should
#
speak English and her mother, you know, my grandfather got his arranged for his wife
#
an English tutor and this and that, and she enjoyed her things, whatever.
#
And then one day she said, no, I'm not going to speak English because otherwise our children
#
So she made that choice that there will be a separated discourse in the house.
#
But what Ramanujan says also is that we talk about different things in our father tongues
#
and in our mother tongues, yeah, that we, the mother tongue is a language of intimacy
#
and the father tongue is the language of the world outside.
#
And Peggy Mohan's thing also was Wendy, my teacher, Wendy Doniger and I, we were talking
#
about her book and, you know, the sort of the sweetness that she brings to the possible
#
interaction between the Indo-Aryans, the Indo-Europeans who arrived and the local people and the intermarriage
#
and, you know, again, like how the boys would be with their mommies.
#
And then after a certain age, they had to go out and live the lives of their fathers.
#
And Wendy was saying that really it was those little boys who were the transmitters, right,
#
of words, of sounds, of the retroflex sounds, because from talking to their mothers, they
#
took it to their fathers.
#
And so what we think of as Sanskrit is actually, it's a language made possible by what the
#
children took from one parent to another, and that, I think that is so beautiful to
#
think about, you know, because otherwise we think, oh ho ho, Vedic, oh Sanskrit, oh Brahmins,
#
oh men, and everything is very sterile and you're supposed to be very impressed with
#
But when you think of it as little children as being couriers of languages and words and
#
how those words then become part of the outside language.
#
Peggy Mohan's book is fantastic.
#
And that's a lovely insight about little boys being carriers, you know, just for the benefit
#
Basically retroflex sounds is what makes dhant into dhant, you know, the d and the t instead
#
And these sounds are not there in the other Proto Indo-European languages, you know, but
#
they're there in Sanskrit.
#
And that means that there is an influence in Sanskrit of the local languages as they
#
And that thought of little boys going from, you know, their mother's room to their father's
#
room and carrying these retroflex sounds with them is so delightful because I don't think
#
Peggy mentions that mechanism in her book at all.
#
No, that is Wendy Doniger's edition.
#
And it's, it's, and you know, there is like, I, there is a strain of thinking on YouTube
#
and it's kind of popular these days that the Aryan migration is a myth.
#
And I just want to point out for my listeners that there is now solid scientific evidence
#
that it is not, and we should not call it Aryan invasion theory, it's just Aryan migration
#
And I would recommend you listen to my episodes with Tony Joseph and Peggy Mohan.
#
Tony Joseph brings forward genetic evidence, Peggy brings forward linguistic evidence,
#
And if you still insist on believing that it must be a myth, perhaps you should ask
#
yourself why you want to believe that.
#
But my little rant aside, let's move on to chronology again.
#
Let's go back to you in university or you before university, like what I'm curious about
#
is that before you sort of leave India at the age of 22 to do your MA and so on and
#
so forth, and then to Chicago for PhD, what was your conception of yourself then?
#
Like what did you want to be?
#
Like I'm sure at that point you weren't thinking that I'm going to be a Ramayana scholar, right?
#
Tell me a little bit about that, you know, the sort of pre-Arshia-Arshia, as it were.
#
Pre-Arshia-Arshia, yeah, well, I always wanted to be a writer.
#
That was not always, well, my first ambition was to be a writer, and I used to write stories
#
which of course were about Disney princesses basically, you know, but there's a, okay,
#
so this is one of the mythologies of my life.
#
It's a true story though.
#
So my parents were friends with Nisim Ezekiel.
#
My mother worked with Nisim at Quest in Bombay in the 50s, right after my parents were married
#
And he remained not simply a friend, but you know, he was older and he was very sage-like
#
and also he, you know, he was a venerable presence in our family.
#
And we were living in Calcutta and Nisim came to visit and stole, you know, like he looked
#
And I was a fat little child and he said, well, what do you want to be when you grow
#
And then I want to be a writer.
#
And he's like, oh, and the next morning by my breakfast table, there was like full scab
#
And he said, write, my child.
#
And I was like, wow, this is like, you know, I mean, I have to, I'm sorry, I have to make
#
a very cheeky joke, you know, like the angel Gabriel said to Mohammad Drisait, Nisim Ezekiel
#
But I always think of that as a very critical moment that, you know, some adult had taken
#
So that's what I wanted to be.
#
And then when I when I was a sort of an early teenager, I wanted to be an interpreter at
#
the United Nations, very specific.
#
And then after that, I was very, very deeply influenced by a cousin of my mother's my aunt.
#
And she was a child psychologist.
#
So for a little while, I wanted to be a child psychologist, but that didn't that didn't
#
last very long, and I wanted to study philosophy.
#
So but I think like, one of my students actually said this to me, when I said all this writer
#
and this, but that's exactly what you are, you are a writer, and you are an interpreter.
#
So actually, you have you're one of the few people who has fulfilled your childhood dream.
#
And I was like, I never quite thought about it.
#
And yeah, yeah, stories, stories, it really is about stories.
#
But I actually I don't think of myself as a writer at all.
#
I think of myself as a as a translator, because somehow in my mind, writers are people who
#
create fictions, you know, and I absolutely do not have the courage to do that.
#
I mean, I think it takes a lot.
#
Writers are people who tell stories, you tell stories.
#
I suppose that's very kind, I take that as a compliment.
#
But in my own head, I'm, I'm amplifying somebody else's voice, you know, I'm not speaking
#
in my own voice, which is of course rubbish, because, I mean, I've written three books
#
about the Ramayana, which are very definitely in my own voice, but yeah.
#
So you mentioned how, you know, you took this class, which changed just the way that you
#
looked at the epics and the Ramayana and all that.
#
And it also made you sort of turn away from, you know, Western philosophy, what is a chair,
#
do I exist, all of that stuff into something which you could really kind of sink your teeth
#
So tell me about that process of rediscovering the Ramayana, perhaps, and, you know, I think
#
your MA was more focused on Hanuman, and then you kind of, in your PhD, you move more towards
#
So I was studying in Washington, D.C., and I was enrolled in a program called Religious
#
Studies, and there are five universities in D.C.
#
So together, they had a religious studies department, so it was a consortium program,
#
and I had to take, I could take classes at any of the five universities.
#
And honestly, honestly, I spent my first semester reading in English, Shankara's commentary
#
on Brahma Sutra, then I was reading Aurobindo and all, I was like, oh my God, but at the
#
same time, feeling like I'm so cool, you know, and thinking about all these big things and
#
these abstract ideas, but not enjoying it.
#
And my advisor, he said, look, you should really take a class with Alf Hiltabitell,
#
who used to teach at George Washington, and I was at American, and I was like, what is
#
And he said, it's mythology, and I was like, no, no, no, mythology is for children.
#
I remember saying that.
#
And he said, no, no, why don't you go and see, you might find it interesting.
#
And honestly, honestly, I'm two weeks into the class, and I was like, this is really
#
Well, Alf is a very great teacher and a very great scholar.
#
And he, I've been very, very lucky with the teachers that I've had, not simply at American
#
universities, but even in schools here.
#
A great teacher is, I think, somebody who persuades you that what they care about is
#
actually very, very important.
#
You know, so because Alf loved these stories so much, I thought like, oh my God, I think
#
So if he likes this, there must be something to it.
#
I mean, it's a very simplistic way to think about what happened in that class.
#
But it also, and of course, there was a class in Indian mythology.
#
And I went back to the stories of my childhood.
#
And I did not think that those stories could be seen as anything other than stories.
#
I did not realize that, I think that's the moment when I realized that storytelling is
#
about what it, one of the things storytelling is about is what it means to be human.
#
You know, the structures of our mind, the structures of our narratives, tropes, Jungian
#
stuff, which I don't favor much, but universalities, archetypes.
#
We are telling the same stories, whoever we are, whether we are invading Aryans or, you
#
know, migrating Aryans, we are telling the same stories as people in so many different
#
parts of the world, right?
#
So there is something, there's an essence that we all share, because whoever we are,
#
right, we love our children, we are scared of the dark, we want to be richer.
#
You know, there are certain human aspirations and anxieties, which we all try and work out
#
through telling stories and singing songs.
#
And also stories are the one place where all cultures are equal, you know?
#
It's not like, oh, Western science is more developed than Indian science, or that there
#
is a contrast between the science of the laboratory and the more holistic, though not scientific,
#
ways in which indigenous peoples understand, there's none of that separation.
#
All stories are equal, all stories are as good as each other.
#
Everybody has the greatest story in the world, whether it's the Bible or the Mahabharata
#
or Genji or, you know, and it is a great embarrassment to me that I don't know enough stories from
#
the African continent or the South American continent, right?
#
I'm very focused on that, you know, European universe and I know a little bit, again, because
#
of religious crossovers, I know a little bit about stories from China and Japan.
#
But yeah, I think that the most important thing about stories is no one is greater than
#
You know, no one culture tells a better story than another culture.
#
So let me ask you a couple of related questions.
#
Like many years ago, I read this interesting book by Christopher Booker called The Seven
#
And his argument was there are just seven plots, right, and everything is there.
#
So Ramayana is perhaps identical in that sense to maybe a Bollywood film or a Western fantasy
#
So there are seven basic plots and then one gets to thinking about, oh, they must be there
#
I was also struck by what in a couple of episodes ago, my friend Raghu jaitly quoted this line
#
from Sahir where I'll just sort of read this out where he said, and it's from a Sahir Ludhianvi
#
song which goes this way, yeh paap hai kya, yeh punya hai kya, reeto par dham ki more hai,
#
par yug mein badalte dharmo ko kaise adarsh banaoge, right, and the indication of course
#
is that, you know, it is not that religion is the original thing and society emanates
#
from there, but society is a particular way and you've got your mores and your conventions
#
and all of that, and religion is sort of a codification of that, and as society changes,
#
religion changes, right.
#
So my two questions and sort of related questions, and they might even be the same question,
#
is that one, in the context of stories and human beings, that, you know, what do the
#
stories we tell or structurally these common tropes that kind of carry through across cultures
#
and across whatever, what do they say about human beings and what we want and what we
#
are like, and I guess the other question about, you know, myths, what do they reveal about
#
society is in a sense perhaps a subset of this.
#
I think stories tell us who we are, and I mean that in, that's a multivalent statement,
#
and it should be a multivalent statement, right, and that I think is why we tell the
#
same stories, but we tell them differently, because the Indian subcontinent tells the
#
stories in this way, the Farsi people tell the same story in this way, and then, you
#
know, so on and so on and so on and so on, so stories are both universal and very particular.
#
Most classical stories, myths, which are always written retrospectively, yeah, even myths
#
talk about a time that was before, not a time that is, they're the deepest stories of them
#
all, I think, because fundamentally they're about what happens when we die.
#
You know, they're dominated by a fear of death, right, because, okay, so if you're
#
a Norse warrior, you go to Valhalla, if you are, I don't know, if you're a Vedic person,
#
then you worry, if you're an Indus Valley person, we don't know, this is a contrast
#
that I'm quite staggered by, actually, that the oldest traces of our civilization, we have
#
so many artifacts, we have buildings, we have coins, we have jewellery, we have seals, we
#
don't have any idea of what they were thinking, right, and then the next civilization movement
#
in India is the migration of the of the Indo-Europeans, the Aryans, right, not a single piece of anything,
#
but everything they thought, we know, we know what they think about the dawn, we know what
#
they think about Indra, we know what they think about the fire, we know what they think
#
about your husband's second wife, everything. And about meat eating, which they seem to
#
approve of. Yeah, exactly, also, also, yeah, yeah, so I think that when we look back, especially
#
in times like this, when we look back at Indian history or the Indian history, not even the
#
origins of humanity or homo sapiens, Tony Joseph's work is so, so important in this
#
regard. But anyway, when we look back on history, there's so much certainty. How do you know,
#
man? How do you know? One thing, we don't know what they thought, the other people,
#
we don't know what they left behind. Where did they live? Right? What was, so I was once
#
one of the times that I've been asked to work on a Rama in a film. And of course, I won't
#
mention any names. I was taken to meet the director, I was working with the script writer
#
and I was taken to meet the director and the director is like, but what did it look like?
#
What if I want to show Rama's palace? Give me a description of Ayodhya. I said, give
#
you a description of Ayodhya, I can only tell you what Ramayana says. And Ramayana doesn't
#
say much except the buildings were very tall and very white. But what was their shape?
#
Were they pointy, pointy? Were they flat? Who knows? Right? If I don't know what this
#
is, I'm not the movie maker, man, that's your problem. But so it's quite, quite staggering
#
that we're producing these certainties about the past from nothing. And also, of course,
#
the certainties we're producing are very us and them kind of certainties, right? Anyway,
#
so back to what do stories really tell us? So I think stories locate us in a very complicated
#
web of relations, right? Stories are about how we deal with each other, how we deal with
#
the gods, how we deal with the things that threaten us. So they become rakshasas, asuras,
#
daityas, whatever it is. I think stories, the stories that we should have paid more
#
attention to are the stories that tell us how we live in nature, how we might live in
#
nature, how we should live in nature, how we actually. So stories are very much about
#
locality, you know, that not what does it mean to be Indian, but rather, what does it
#
mean to live in a mountainous land? What does it mean to live by the seashore? Who do we
#
speak to when we feel gratitude? Who do we speak to when we feel fear? And as we need
#
to generate objects for our emotions, then we make gods, right? And then we know that
#
we have to live with people like ourselves and people not like ourselves. And how do
#
we relate to them? So for me, Ramayana is a story, the dharma in the Ramayana, the how
#
to be good part of the Ramayana, how do we be good and true to the people that we love?
#
And Mahabharata is how do we be good and true to the people that we hate and who hate us,
#
right? So that also we have to figure out, not simply for those who are like us and those
#
that we love and those that love us, but how do we deal with people who are not like us?
#
What do we do with excess? What do we do with scarcity? All of this is in mythology. What
#
do we do with the rain? How do we, how do we understand even what rain is? Yeah, okay.
#
So now we know that that science has told us that, oh yeah, evaporates, goes, becomes
#
a cloud, comes down. How unromantic. But if Indra is doing this, right, then a child can
#
understand it as much as a grandparent, right? So I really think that stories are the wheels
#
upon which civilizations move and develop and all that. They're what make movement
#
possible. You know, the ball bearings like they're like that. Yeah. And you know, there's
#
all, there are more logical reasons for why stories are told, oh, hunter gatherers, what
#
did they do at night? They built a fire. They couldn't go to sleep. Very sweet. But that,
#
that's a sort of, it's mechanical. It's the mechanics of storytelling. You know, there
#
has to be a fire. There has to be a group of people who speak the same language, who
#
share the same experience. It doesn't answer the why. It only tells us the how stories
#
were told. But why are we telling stories? To just make ourselves feel like we belong
#
on this planet, that there is a place for us. It's not an accident. It's necessary.
#
It's not contingent that we are here. Yeah. I guess the world is just so complex. The
#
only way to make sense of it is to tell stories. Otherwise, we will be bewildered every time
#
it rains. So whether you're telling me that evaporation, who are precipitation, who are
#
what a wonderfully romantic word, or you tell me that Indra is sending the rain, both of
#
those as stories work for me. Right? But if I don't have a story, I'm screwed, man. Every
#
time it rains, cognitive dissonance, what's going on? What's going to happen? Is the world
#
ending? Yeah. And I think that's, that somewhere deep down inside, that's also the reason why
#
I moved away from philosophy. Because stories give us equally good explanations about why
#
the table is brown and you know, whether God loves us or not. It's, we are addressing the
#
same problems philosophically and mythologically or narratively. And I actually just found
#
narratives to be more effective. And certainly as somebody who was, you know, at the time,
#
a young student, what would I rather read? Stories. You know, I could spend my whole
#
life reading stories to find the same answers, because the questions that stories ask and
#
the questions that philosophy asks are actually the same, but these answers are more accessible
#
as are the questions more accessible. Yeah. Yeah. Like, you know, in Upanishads, Nataket
#
goes to Yama and he says, what is death? Right. That's a big question. Of course, Upanishads are
#
philosophies. So there isn't quite, I mean, the answer is pretty esoteric, but it is the same
#
question, really. What's Yama's answer? I have to know. Sorry. How does Yama answer? Yama gives
#
that there's a series of riddles and this and that. Of course, he doesn't answer in the end,
#
because even Yama, he could have said death is me and you know, ended the argument right there,
#
but it, yeah. That is also, I find the sophistry, the trickery of philosophies, right? When
#
philosophies try to tell stories like this, Nataket, right? And they take you into a position
#
of no return. And then they just leave you there. And then when you reach that point of no return,
#
then you are told, oh, this is mystic knowledge. Meditate upon it and it will become clear. Yeah.
#
No, you would tell me you are the master, you know, you explain, but has also been my struggle
#
with so-called mystical texts, you know, like I'm not, I don't like being taken to the cliff and
#
not being, you know, left there on the edge. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, there may be uncertainty
#
about what death is. There certainly is uncertainty if you read enough philosophy
#
about what a table is, but I can tell you what a break is. A break is what we're taking now.
#
Just when I was going to ask you, what do you think death is?
#
Have you always wanted to be a writer, but never quite gotten down to it? Well, I'd love to help
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indiancut.com slash clear writing. Being a good writer doesn't require God-given talent, just the
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willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills. I can help
#
you. Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen. I'm chatting with Arshya Sattaran in the break
#
when she was taking a smoke and she asked me if I smoke and I said, no, I don't smoke.
#
And then I asked her, what did our ancestors do instead of smoking? What were our ancestors'
#
addictions? And you know, the reason I think of this is I have done a bunch of episodes with
#
Mughal historians, which is basically historians of the Mughal period and not actually Mughal
#
historians because like Iram Mukhoti and Parvati Sharma and so on and so forth. And one thing I
#
realized while reading up for those episodes is that half the Mughal royalty died from alcohol
#
poisoning, liver gout and apheme. And it tells you that in those times there were these sort of
#
limited addictions possible as it were. Today there are so many more addictions, you know,
#
social media addiction. I'm sure people are addicted to Twitter notifications and Facebook
#
likes as well. So we are surrounded by all manners of different addictions. But in the time of the
#
Ramayana, you know, what were people addicted to? Well, now we are surrounded by addictions because
#
it's Kali Yuga. So that's a given. What were people addicted to in the time of the Ramayana?
#
You know, what we were saying outside is it's rare, if at all, that there's the figure of a drunk,
#
right? Or I mean, as you said, we know so many of the Mughals, Jahangir, for example, was
#
an opium addict and an opium somehow is associated very much with Islamic eight cultures, right?
#
But we don't have the image of a drunk. We have, you know, thieves and we have philanderers
#
and we have dishonest merchants in Kathasaritsagara, for example, and we have
#
people who are adharmic. We have fallen Brahmins. We have like, you know, cowardly Kshatriyas and
#
like all like that. But the drunkard or the addict is more common in Arabian nights kinds of stories,
#
not in ours. So what were people addicted to? They must have been addicted to something.
#
Addictions are pleasures that have gone awry, as it were, you know. I imagine there was some
#
kind of grain alcohol. And certainly in the Vedic period, what is this mysterious soma
#
diet that people are drinking and saying, I'm the king of the world and I can fight without pain.
#
And of course, that is also an Indo-European trope because the Norse warriors had some
#
substance that they would drink and they would go into battle and they were called the berserkers,
#
which is where we, yeah, you know, and they sort of they would manifest bare like characteristics
#
or something is going on. But I don't know if those were addictive substances. They were clearly
#
mind altering substances. And all over South America, you have peyote and then you have the
#
coca leaf. So people are getting high. That's for sure in various ways and with various natural
#
substances. But the addict, is that like a modern phenomenon? Like the flanner is, you know, a modern
#
character is the addict of modern character. I wonder. It's a very lovely question. Yeah.
#
What do you think they were addicted to? Well, first of all, I don't think that addiction is
#
something modern. I mean, the brain is what it is. You crave dopamine and you, you know,
#
so it's really a question of where do you get your dopamine rush from? And by the way, I was
#
a professional poker player for five years and it is of course a game of skill, but you're also
#
playing with people who are just addicted to gambling, which disturbed me. I've seen lives
#
destroyed. And at one point I, I used to write a column on poker for the economic times. And at
#
one point I wrote a piece with the headline, you listed second game, I think something like that,
#
the second game of dice, pointing out that that second game was a problem, right? And using that
#
to sort of talk about addiction. So, but I don't know. I mean, that's why I asked you that question.
#
Or maybe the fetishization of the addict is a modern phenomenon or even the understanding
#
that this is addiction. It's not just excess, you know, as we get to know more about the brain,
#
perhaps we sort of, you know, modernity has allowed us to posit the addict as a type.
#
Maybe we have the framework to understand the addict, but the phenomenon would always be there
#
because our brains are what they are and they were like that even then. So I wonder what,
#
you know, a caveman doesn't have a cell phone, doesn't have alcohol, doesn't have,
#
you know, cigarettes or narcotics. So what is a caveman addicted to, which is a great title also
#
for an essay, should someone wish to write it. We should probably get back to the subject of our
#
conversation, which is you. Also an addict, not only the subject of the conversation, me, but
#
seeing as I'm a smoker, therefore, yeah. So at what point during your time doing your MA
#
or perhaps your PhD after that, at what point does it fructify that, you know, that this is what I'm
#
going to do now, that I'm going to look at the epics and I'm going to look at the Ramayana and,
#
or that, you know. It's terribly mundane. I wish I had some sort of epiphanic moment
#
to relate, but I had to write a thesis for my MA. And I don't know how Hanuman actually
#
entered or re-entered the picture, but my thesis advisor in Washington DC was
#
a professor called Charles White. And he said, oh, you know, I was talking about Hanuman. I wanted
#
to write a paper on Hanuman. He said, why don't you write your thesis about Hanuman? I was like,
#
okay. And I did, you know, it's a master's thesis. It's rubbish completely. But then when I was with
#
Wendy and, I mean, I knew that I wanted to work on epic. I knew that I wanted to work on Ramayana,
#
Mahabharata, one of the epics. And as I was casting about for a thesis topic, a dissertation topic,
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Wendy said, look, nothing has been written about Hanuman. This is 1986. And she said, why don't
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you write about Hanuman? I was like, oh, I can do that. But I remember also telling her,
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but you know, Hanuman is in Ramayana and people who write about Ramayana wimps that if you're
#
really a scholar, you take on Mahabharata. And she said, no, no, no, no, no, don't think that.
#
And then the other thing I felt at the time, I was 26, I think, I said, but Ramayana, I don't
#
like it. And she said, well, you don't always have to write about what you like. And of course,
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by the time I finished my dissertation, by the time I finished the Ramayana, translating Ramayana,
#
I loved it. I think it is against all odds and against popular opinion. I think it is the greater
#
of the two, the more complex of the two texts, because Mahabharata, it's like, you have to choose
#
between right and wrong, and they all choose wrong. So they're not good people, simple. Ramayana,
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Rama chooses the right thing always, except perhaps banishing his wife, not perhaps, except
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banishing his wife. Rama usually makes the right choice. And killing Vali. And killing Vali, and
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mutilating Shri Manakha. There's a couple of clips in there. But he's, the decision to obey his father
#
and to go into the forest, that is the first right, and that, and everything unfolds from,
#
from there. So he, in Mahabharata, people know that something is wrong, and they don't mind doing it.
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But for Rama, he has to do the right thing. And everything goes so horribly wrong. That,
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I think, is a much greater human problem than choosing between right and wrong. Yeah, that what
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if we choose the right thing? What if we choose for the greater good? What if we choose to give
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up our personal pleasures and our happiness, as he does when he banishes Sita, right? And things
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go horribly wrong. How do we live with that? Where does the blame for that lie? Is it on,
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is it on our karma? Is it our past actions? Is it that dharma is no guarantee of happiness, success,
#
contentment, peace, all of those things? What do we do when our moral principles themselves are not
#
stable? Yeah, I think that the Ramayana is a tragedy, is an individual tragedy, and therefore,
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much sadder, much more painful than Mahabharata, which is the tragedy of a clan, or even of an
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era, you know, since Mahabharata makes such a big deal about being the transition to Kali Yuga and
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all that. There's none of that in Ramayana. And so you're really, it's also, of course, the tragedy
#
of the Ramayana is the love story, the tragic love story, but it is also Rama's existential tragedy,
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you know, and that leaves you with a much sadder feeling than Yudhishthira, Duryodhana,
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Karna. Karna is the one that we feel the most for. But yeah.
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Yeah, so I'm going to double click on the Ramayana much more, especially the dharma aspect of it,
#
which, you know, is so fascinating. And in fact, you wrote that book, Mariyada, about just that
#
aspect. And those essays were so great. But before that, to kind of continue that sort of personal
#
journey, what I'm also curious about is you mentioned the great influence that Wendy Doniger
#
and Ramanujan separately had on you. I'd love you to talk a little bit more about them and what you,
#
how, you know, the way that you looked at the world, you know, changed because of them and the
#
way they shaped you and the influence they had on you. So I'll filter by with whom I did the
#
myth course that changed my life. He was the one who said, you have to go to Chicago. And Wendy was
#
already, you know, it was 1984. And she was already a real, real presence in the academy.
#
And Alf himself was out of Chicago from the Divinity School. And he said, no, you just have
#
to go to Wendy. You have to study with Wendy. And so I did. And what I learned from Ramanujan
#
and Wendy is both of them are actually structuralists. And they're so profoundly
#
structuralists that you don't actually see it in their work. You know, it's so internalized.
#
So both of them, together and separately, and they were very, very good friends,
#
personal friends, as well as academic, collegial friends. Both of them taught me how to read
#
a story, which is pay attention to what you've seen before, or what you've heard before,
#
or what it reminds you of. Those connections are very, very important. And that's also what
#
I was saying earlier, that we all tell the same stories. We just tell them in different ways. And
#
the stories are simultaneously universal and very, very particular. Ramanujan was also trained
#
in linguistics. So he's a very sociopath, sports kind of intellectual. But Ramanujan's
#
enormous talent was that he was able to bring all this primarily Western
#
hermeneutics and heuristic devices to the study of Tamil language and literature,
#
which itself has highly, highly sophisticated aesthetic theories and linguistics and all like
#
that. But he was able to somehow combine the two in a way that illuminated Tamil literature like
#
nobody had before. And because he did that, he, I think, pretty much single-handedly just changed
#
the scope of South Asian studies, which had been so Sanskrit focused until then. And now suddenly
#
we had a whole other language, another classical language, another worldview, which was very
#
interesting. Another worldview, another aesthetic, another metaphysic, really. Of course, it was still
#
a classical language. Of course, it was still Brahminical, which is the critique that has been
#
made about Ramanujan from the 90s onwards. Oh, he was such a Brahmin. All right, he was. He got
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throughout the baby with the bathwater. What he says is still very, very profound. And what
#
Wendy did with structuralism was that she, so for all that structuralism gave Raman a way to come
#
down to a particularity, structuralism gave Wendy a way to expand into a universality. So she, you
#
know, the books that she was writing in the 90s and the early 2000s are all about like the bed trick,
#
for example, or the woman who pretended to be who she was. Those books are about how tropes occur
#
across the Indo-European spectrum of storytelling. And then of course, you know, people have forgotten
#
how great works, because of the controversy with the Hindu's book, which has all kinds of
#
fairly nasty implications, not just for her, but for scholarship in general. And again,
#
not just Wendy's scholarship, but everybody's scholarship. The other thing that people forget
#
is how feminist Wendy's work is, that she writes about women, she's been writing about women forever
#
from, you know, her first Shiva book and all like that. So the tools that Ramanujan and Wendy use
#
really made it possible for me personally, and for all their students, to read differently. And
#
that way of reading is not simply for classical texts or for mythologies. You watch a movie
#
differently, you read a contemporary novel differently, you look for different things.
#
And we were talking about novels that we've recently read outside. And even when I'm reading
#
novels like that, which are by contemporary Indian women, what I'm looking for is a structure.
#
And you know that a well-structured novel is going to, oh, I don't know, to have more depth
#
than one that has not given any regard to structure. That's why Girish Karnad is such a
#
great playwright, because you look at a play like Nagamandala, right? Look at Hayavadana. I mean,
#
they are so tightly written. He has a frame story, he has an inner story that reflects the
#
flame story. There's still a third story. They're all talking about the same thing, these stories.
#
And so they're illuminating a particular problem, whether it's hybridity or, you know,
#
the quest for the perfect lover. They're illuminating it from three, four, five different
#
perspectives, which is what the epics do. And Ramanujan had a lovely phrase, which I use very
#
often when I teach. He says, the epic is like a crystal. It grows where there is a flaw.
#
Right? So why is there so much? Why is the Vali episode so written about in the commentaries? Why
#
does Tulsidas spend so much time on it? Because it's a problem. It is one of Rama's serious dharma
#
violations, and you do not expect a man like him to do something like this. So there are 101 excuses.
#
Oh, you know, they had some past friends, they had an affair, they had an affair, they had an
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affair. Oh, you know, they had some past friendship that didn't work out. Oh, you know, it's a bhakti
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thing. He kills Vali because Vali will then get moksha. You know, the lady doth protest too much.
#
So wherever that's happening. And that is a structuralist way of approaching what is
#
fundamentally a theological problem. How does God do something like this? How can it be that
#
God can act incorrectly or God can make a mistake? And then you look at Mahabharata and there are
#
Gita's all over the Mahabharata. You know, when Arjuna, when they're in the kingdom of Virata and
#
the cattle raid, the Kauravas attack, and Yudhishthira and Arjuna and all of that have been
#
distracted by the Kauravas in another direction, and Arjuna takes Uttara, Virata's son, and he
#
tells him, he takes him to the Shammi tree where he's hidden his weapons. And the guy's like, but
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you're a eunuch, man. You're my sister's dancing teacher. How are you going to be a great warrior?
#
And he's like, let me tell you who I am, right? And then there's the Bhima's anugita, Haruma's
#
anugita with Bhima. And you know, so that structure replicates itself over and over again through
#
this massive text. And that tells us many things about how the text was composed over centuries
#
by many hands and many hearts and many minds, you know. But they know what they're doing. There is
#
the sort of dialogic pedagogy as it were, I'm teaching you, or the dialogic epiphany is critical
#
to Mahabharata in a way that it's not to Ramayana. But what is very important to Ramayana is not,
#
let me tell you who I am, but let me tell you who you are. Because for example, you know, they
#
reach the shores of the ocean, the monkeys, and they're like horrified, like, you know, they know
#
where Sita is, Sampati has told them, she's on this island. How are they going to get there? And
#
they're all sitting around and they're ready to kill themselves and you know, all this. And
#
Jambavan says, I know who can jump across the ocean, Hanuman. It's you. And Hanuman says, me?
#
Really? And like, yeah, don't you know who you are? And he tells him. Rama himself, after the
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Agni Pariksha in Yuddha Kandha, when Sita is restored to him by the gods and all that. And the
#
gods are saying, Rama, how could you do this? You should know better. And he says, but who am I?
#
And they say, don't you know? You are Vishnu. So, and it's, you know, it's interesting because
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both the epics deal with, I mean, with a hundred other things, but the replicating parts of the
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epics are also questions of identity. So the Mahabharata question is, let me tell you who I
#
really am. But the Mahabharata question, which is much more poignant, is let me tell you who you
#
really are. The Ramayana question, you mean? Yeah, excuse me, the Ramayana question. Yeah. So all
#
this stuff is, the ability to see these things is all from Wendy and Raman. And they do their own
#
work like that. And they've, you know, they've certainly spawned a generation of us that, yeah,
#
so it's, and of course, the thing with this kind of structural analysis or this kind of structural
#
vision is you have to really know the text, right? I mean, this is not going to happen to you the
#
first time. They go, oh, this is a structure. You really, really have to know the whole text.
#
And say, oh, this is this, and this is this. And, you know, you go to a university. I mean,
#
you know something of who's teaching there. But you have to be really, really lucky to have two
#
great teachers at the same time, and two great teachers who are generous, you know, with their
#
ideas and their time. And yeah, yeah. So, you know, one of the, you know, I love reading all
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your books, of course, and one of the things I loved about them was that they made things clearer
#
for me. And often, I find with academia, that it is the other way around. You know, things just get
#
more obscure and you're like, oh, what the fuck is going on? And I don't, you know, and there's
#
jargon and all these terms and all that. And your work, of course, had the opposite effect on me.
#
Now, what's happened is, you know, earlier, we were talking about philosophers debating whether
#
a chair can be a chair and so on and so forth. And there is a sense that perhaps some philosophers
#
have disappeared up its own ass, as it were. And I find that with a lot of academia, specifically
#
in the humanities over the last few decades, a lot of it did disappear up its own ass and lose
#
complete relevance with what is happening in the real world and so on. So on the one hand,
#
I see the value that you're giving me frames through which I can examine what I otherwise,
#
what otherwise is normalized and I don't see those layers. But at the same time, sometimes it's just,
#
it just recircles your game that you're playing with yourself and there's no illumination there
#
for me. So tell me, how do you look at academia? How does one avoid those traps that one can perhaps,
#
you know, fall into? Okay, I'm going to really stick my neck out now. Please.
#
It's easy for you to say. I think the greatest damage done to clear and persuasive argumentation
#
was critical theory, yeah, which was started to take over academia in the 1980s and flourished
#
until it's only literally last week that I was reading an article in the New Yorker about like,
#
you know, the depth of the book review precisely because of critical theory. Critical theory has
#
its own vocabulary and as you rightly say, it's not a vocabulary, it's a jargon. Can you, for the sake
#
of me and my listeners, what is critical theory? I wish I knew what critical theory was. It's a lot
#
of big words. It's, I mean, the good thing about critical theory is that it has truly, truly opened
#
up the canon, right? And I think also within reason, one of the great gifts that critical
#
theory has given us is reader response, right? I'm not so crazy about death of the author and
#
intentionality. It's a way to read literature, excuse me. It's a way to read a text. Anything
#
is a text. A culture is a text. A movie is a text. Mahavartha is a text. All like that.
#
And SMS is a text. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Our podcast is a text too, yeah. SMS is definitely
#
a text. It grows where there is a flow. It could be an epic actually. So again, Wendy, I remember
#
as a student, I said, oh my God, Wendy, do I have to deal with critical theory? And she said, no,
#
you don't. You can just write an old fashioned dissertation that doesn't take this into account.
#
And then later in another conversation, she said, the problem with critical theory is that there is
#
no text, yeah? That you are not talking about Mahavaratha. You're talking about what Arshia
#
said about the Mahavaratha. And Arshia is talking about what Alphill Tabital said about the Mahavaratha.
#
So you're not engaging with the primary text at all. You're critiquing other people's critiques
#
of a text, right? So for somebody like Wendy and even Ramanujan, that is a weird kind of false
#
consciousness, right? What is Mahavaratha saying? Why don't you look at that before you tell me what
#
Amit said about Mahavaratha, right? So I think in the multiple iterations and in the object of your
#
study, it's not Mahavaratha, but other people's ideas of Mahavaratha. So in that mediation,
#
in that excessive mediation, you kind of lose, you lose the forest for the trees. And I think
#
that because we are not talking directly about the text in critical theory, you have to substitute
#
that with something. And you substitute it with a more and more specialized and more and more
#
obscure vocabulary. So I do think that critical theory has done more to, I do think critical
#
theory has done more to distance academia from the so-called real world. And that is never a good
#
thing. It cannot be a good thing because, so that's the other thing also I learned from Wendy and
#
Raman is like, you have to write for the interested layperson because your fellow academic probably
#
knows what you're talking about or knows the same thing in her own field, right? But the layperson,
#
it's a kind of missionary activity, it's didactic. You want more people to read Ramayana, you want
#
more people to read Mahavaratha, A, because they're great texts and B, because if you read these texts
#
for yourselves, you will see that they are radical, they are subversive, they are all the things that
#
the patriarchy doesn't want them to be. And what we are doing in this time and have been for many,
#
many generations, we're listening to Nani and Dadi and Mummy and all, we're listening to Swami
#
so-and-so and all of that, telling us what's in the texts, but nobody reads it. Okay, nobody
#
reads Sanskrit. It's all right. That's what I'm there for. Of course, you could learn Sanskrit
#
and read it yourself, but the chances are you're not going to do that. So you read Arshiya's
#
translation and you read Vivek Debrau's translation and you read as many translations as you possibly
#
can. So you are free because you're reading a translation and not an opinion. You are in a
#
better position to make your own judgments, your own choices, your own loves and hates towards that
#
text. And so sweet, Nani's and Dadi's. Of course, their versions are beautiful and lovely, but
#
they are often idiosyncratic. And the text is actually saying something quite different from
#
one Nani. When a man like Valmiki writes something, you're fine with it. Your Nani and your Dadi are
#
writing something idiosyncratic. It's not okay. Because the text is called Valmiki Ramayana,
#
not Nani Ramayana. If you call it Nani Ramayana, go ahead. I mean, Ashok Banker, Amish, Ramesh Menon,
#
Devadatta, Devadatta Patnaik, they're all writing Ramayanas, but they're not called Valmiki.
#
Three hundred Nani's should get together and write three hundred Ramayanas.
#
Exactly. Samitha Arni is a magnificent Ramayana, the missing queen. It's absolutely fantastic.
#
And the gentlemen that I mentioned before, they're male gaze Ramayanas. They really are.
#
How could they be otherwise? I mean, you have to be really, really special to
#
put your own gaze so far behind you. So tell me also about structuralism,
#
you use a word. Now, I'll be naive again and say that, OK, I don't really know what it means.
#
So just break it down for me. What does structuralism mean? Structuralism
#
actually is based in linguistics, right? You can analyze a sentence.
#
Wittgenstein's famous saying, the cat sat on the mat, the mat sat on the cat, right? Exactly the
#
same elements in a different order. Meaning changes completely, right? There are also rules
#
for how words change. For example, Sanskrit is a language that has eight cases, right? So the
#
nominative, if something is the subject of a sentence, it would be Rama. But if Rama is
#
the object of the sentence, it would be Ramam, right? If something was done by Rama, it would
#
be Ramena. You know, if it's evocative, if you're calling out to somebody, you say, hey, Ram,
#
not Rama, right? So like that. So how do things change? How do events, how do characters,
#
how do actions change depending on where they are in a sentence for linguistics and in a text for
#
structuralism? And if you break down these elements, you are able to see, OK, for example,
#
handsome prince and beautiful princess get married. Handsome prince and beautiful princess live in the
#
forest. Handsome prince and beautiful princess is taken away by Batman. Handsome prince fights
#
war, gets beautiful princess back. Yeah, OK? So that is one kind of structure. Now what happens
#
in Mahabharata, for example, is handsome prince and beautiful princess go into exile in the forest,
#
but they take hundreds of people with them, right? Handsome prince's wife is abducted,
#
but it's not a major abduction, like Sita's, right? Draupadi is taken away by Jarasandhana.
#
She comes back. So that is a variant. So structuralism allows you to see invariant
#
and variant ways in which a story or an episode is put together. Now, how does that benefit you?
#
Not at all. I mean, it's not going to change the world, but it is going to change the way
#
you think about things. And I think that's not a very great explanation of structuralism,
#
but it's enough for us to see how it would impact reading a story, right? Now, if you take somebody
#
like Barth, he's able to understand television programs in this way. He's able to understand
#
Roman wrestling in this way. He's able to understand photographs in this way. He's able
#
to understand myth in this way. Now, again, compared to what scientists do and medical
#
research and all, who cares about structuralism? But some of us do. I think structuralism also
#
gives us a way to consider how we think, how our own ideas are formed, how our own prejudices
#
are formed. And that I think is useful. That is very useful because I don't want to say it's
#
something as exalted as self-knowledge, but it's a self-awareness if you choose to use it in that
#
way. I find it very useful, actually, and very fulfilling because really the question with
#
stories and with storytelling is why do we choose to tell it in this way? The quest really is for
#
human nature. Why are we like this? And what can we expect when we know that we are like this?
#
Let's talk about the Ramayana now. And one of sort of the fascinating aspects of it
#
is that it's not one book, right? It's something that's evolved so much over a period of time.
#
Ramanujan, in fact, you've quoted him as saying that the story is always there, always, always
#
already, you know, and Hiltobital defines it as a narrative continuum, which also I found, you know,
#
sort of fascinating. And I love this passage from Ramanujan, so I'll read this where you quote him
#
as having said quote, to some extent, all later Ramayanas play on the knowledge of previous
#
tellings. They are meta Ramayanas. I can't resist repeating my favorite example. In several of the
#
later Ramayanas, such as Adhyatma Ramayana 16th century, when Rama is exiled, he does not want
#
Sita to go with him into the forest. Sita argues with him. At first, she uses the usual argument,
#
she is his wife, she should share his suffering, exile herself in his exile and so on. When he
#
still resists the idea, she is furious. She bursts out, countless Ramayanas have been composed before
#
this. Do you know of one in which Sita does not go with Rama to the forest? Stop quote, which is
#
quite lovely. And also, you know, you've spoken in your books and your writings about how these
#
variations also reflect something that's changing within society, right? For example, in Valmiki's
#
Ramayana, you point out how everyone's in agreement that there are five books in the
#
middle which he wrote, but the first part and the last part were, you know, later additions,
#
and they almost seem to explain things, rationalizing, so on. You've spoken about
#
how, you know, Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas makes what you call the divine assumption, you know,
#
takes his divinity as a starting point. You know, the key part of Valmiki's Ramayana, which you talk
#
about, which I found fascinating and really this thing is that Rama does not himself know that he
#
is divine and this is his purpose. He's got to play the game and at the end of the game, you know,
#
he's sort of at the end of the Yuddha Kanda, as it were, you know, after that Yagna, the gods come
#
and they reveal to him. But in Tulsidas's Ramcharitmanas, it is evident he knows that he's
#
divine and that therefore becomes a justification for pretty much anything he does, like the killing
#
of Valli, that, you know, his divinity confers upon him a sort of, you know, he can go above
#
the conventional considerations of Dharma that a mere mortal would have to deal with in his omniscience
#
and so on. So, when you were engaging with this text, therefore, it is not merely a text, but in
#
all the mirrors and the versions that exist of this text, it is really a history of a society,
#
as it were. You know, this is who we are, this is how we are changing, this is how we are, you know,
#
evolving. There's another, you know, you speak about Kritibala's Bengali version, where after
#
killing Valli, Rama is, you know, he apologizes, he really feels bad about it, he realizes he's
#
done something wrong, which is not there in any of the other versions. Valmiki's version, he's just
#
rationalizing madly. In Tulsidas's version, he's above all of this shit, he doesn't need to think
#
about it. So, you know, how does that then affect your engagement? Because I guess at one level,
#
then it would appear that this is such a diffuse and almost intimidating body of work, that is not
#
one text, it's just body of work that's everywhere. And then when you narrow down, you know, do you
#
choose to narrow down on Valmiki's Ramayana as a matter of convenience, that it gives you a solid
#
starting point? Or, you know, tell me about that whole process of how you kind of got into this.
#
I think one of the big mistakes we make with all religious texts is that we forget that they're
#
born in history. You know, that there is a historical moment, or several historical moments,
#
where the Bible, it takes three centuries for us to get the Bible that we now have, for it to be
#
canonized, yeah? It takes probably a little bit less time, certainly not three centuries, for the
#
Qur'an to become what it is now, right? Because in the end, Muhammad, the Prophet Muhammad himself
#
was reciting what the angel Gabriel had told him, and that was being written down by somebody. And
#
therefore, we have the possibility of Salman the Farsi miswriting, either out of malice or out of
#
ignorance, what the Prophet had actually said, and that is the basis for satanic verses. And so we
#
have also the Ramayana appearing in being written at historical moments, and what happens with the
#
Ramayana story, for reasons that are not entirely clear, why the story becomes so beloved, and
#
literally every Indian language has a Ramayana, right? But there is also a dark ages of the
#
Ramayana, between Valmiki and Kamban, there isn't, and that's a millennium, that's a thousand years
#
before we get the second Ramayana. But I have a new idea about that, which I'm not going to say
#
right now, because it's just germinating, but I'll tell you off record what that is. But anyway,
#
the point is that we have basically a thousand years between Valmiki, what we call the Valmiki
#
text, and Kamban, and then we have about 300 years between Kamban and Tulsi, and in between,
#
a little bit later there's Kritibasa, then there's Pamparamayana, then there's Mullaramayana, then
#
we're not even talking about Adivasi Ramayana, like Goan Ramayana. I mean, you know, it is a
#
story that is repeated over and over again, and each time it is told, it is told from its historical
#
moment and from its geographic location. So Kambaramayana is going to have southern landscapes
#
and southern trees and southern foods, and you know, Tulsi is going to, Tulsi Das Ramayana was
#
written at a time when Muslims were the dominant presence in northern India, and how Hindu bhakti
#
responded to the dominance of a highly systematized religion such as Islam, right? Kambaramayana is
#
written 12th, 13th century. What is happening in Tamil country at that time? Those are the things
#
that are reflected in these texts. It's also true that as Ramanujan says, each of, each subsequent
#
Ramayana acknowledges Valmiki, right? That Tulsi, when he opens his text, he says, I'm like a cat
#
lapping at the edge of the ocean of milk, that is Valmiki's Ramayana, right? So there is a great
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awareness of the so-called primary text, the Urtext as it were, and of course it isn't an Urtext,
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who knows how many iterations it went through before we get this version that we have. Tulsi
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also, he says, no, no, Valmiki is really, really the person. I'm just a pale shadow, right? So this
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acknowledgement of a previous text to which the current writer is actually responding
#
is very clear, and you know, that makes for intertextuality. I mean, in the Indian literary
#
tradition, especially the classical literary tradition, is intertextual to the point of
#
neurosis almost, right? That everybody thinks, it's also a validation, right? And then Kamba
#
ends his text with like, all the mistakes are mine, all the great stuff is Valmiki's, all the bad
#
stuff, please forgive me, right? Even the Greek epics, right, we say there is Homer. So this kind
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of text production, when a culture produces a text, is truly phenomenal, and very, very different
#
from what we have been taught to think of authorship, ownership of text, authorship of text,
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readership of text, response to text. So we do have to think about Ramayana and Mahabharata very
#
different. We also have to acknowledge the fact, in rational terms, Vyasa and Valmiki were probably
#
not real people, right? But what is so interesting about Indian literary production is that you can
#
have a visible narrator, an author of the text who acts within the story that he tells, and to whom
#
we ascribe a historical reality which is different from the narrative reality which is
#
there for all to see. But there's not a problem for us. We say Valmiki Ramayana probably isn't
#
Valmiki Ramayana. I don't even know there was a Valmiki. Not only that, Valmiki gets his own
#
backstory. He was a dacoit, you know, and somebody asked him, he was robbing somebody and they said,
#
why do you do this? And he said, because I have to feed my family. I have to, you know, look after
#
my family. And so the man says, why don't you go home and ask your family if they will also share
#
the bad karma that you get from being a bandit. And he goes home and his family says, no, no, no,
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bad karma is all yours. These gifts are ours. So he goes and sits under the tree and meditates.
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And this is a very complicated version of the backstory. The backstory is just that he was a
#
bandit. He met an ascetic who told him, why don't you meditate on death? Right? So he said, how do I
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meditate? He said, Mara Mara Mara Mara Mara. So Mara Mara Mara becomes Rama Rama Rama. And he
#
gets enlightened and he sees this great story and he tells it. Right? Now, why is it so important
#
that Valmiki be a dacoit, that he be a bandit? And how late is that story? Right? It's not in
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Valmiki Ramayana. The other thing, of course, is that because we have so many Ramayanas, nobody
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reads Valmiki. So when I was translating Valmiki, you know, people say, why are you translating
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Valmiki? Everybody knows the story. I said, everybody knows. Tell me a story from Valmiki
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Ramayana. Everybody, every single person without exception, told me a story from their Ramayana,
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means whatever linguistic Ramayana was closest to them. Right? I said, but that is not in Valmiki,
#
which is really, really interesting that nobody knows the Valmiki text. And I think,
#
of course, nobody knows Sanskrit or very few people know Sanskrit, but even people who
#
know Sanskrit in the age of the Sanskrit Valmiki scholars. I can't say the age is over because
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there's always somebody studying Valmiki in Sanskrit and a true Sanskrit scholar, unlike somebody like
#
myself. It's the most complicated text because of the very vexed question of Rama's divinity.
#
Did it really come later? Is it such a massive interpolation? With Mahabharata, you can't tell
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quite so clearly as you can with Rama and the other huge differences from the beginning.
#
Krishna knows that he is God and you know that he is God. Rama, you don't know, he doesn't know,
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you know, he knows, you know, but he doesn't know. It's much easy and it's a very complicated idea
#
to hold in your head as well. Does God know he's God? If God lacked self-belief, he'd be an atheist.
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I'm glad you said it. Absolutely, it is that. David Schulman has written very beautifully
#
about this, the consciousness hidden from itself. You know, that's why at the end of the Yuddha Khanda,
#
that moment is so important when the gods tell him, you shouldn't have done this. He said,
#
why not? Who am I? You are Vishnu. Oh, am I? I always thought I was the son of Dasaratha. So,
#
the poignancy of that moment is just amazing. You know, even with Hanuman, you feel it, right? But
#
this is God being told, don't you know who you are, right? So, then the question becomes,
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if Rama had these flashes of intuition that I'm God, I'm not God, when did he create, when did he
#
do the bad actions? When he didn't know that he was God, the mutilation of Shurpanakha, the killing
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of Vali, the banishing of his wife, or did he know that he was God when he did them in the way that
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Krishna knew that he was God and willfully violates Dharma for a greater good? And I
#
think this conundrum can only be resolved by bhakti, that God knows what he's doing.
#
And it is us who fail to understand it. And God is actually doing this for the benefit
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of the people that he appears to hurt. And bhakti is very late in Hinduism. It comes
#
at least 500 years after Mahabharata and Ramayana are composed, right? So, again, this is religion
#
in history. And I think instead of seeing this as a weakness of a religion or the weakness of a text,
#
this to me is the beauty of a religion and the strength of a text, that it can absorb new ideas
#
and it can become what it needs to be at that time, you know? Yeah. I love the phrase, God knows
#
what he's doing. You know, people often look at me and say exactly that. I'm also struck by,
#
you know, Valmiki's family in his bandit days saying that, hey, we don't want the, you know,
#
we don't want the bad karma, just a good one. That's almost like, you know, to use a modern phrase,
#
socializing losses, privatizing profits. That's very funny.
#
And so, let's double down now on Dharma and couple of fascinating aspects as you point out,
#
that number one, unlike the Mahabharata, Ramayana is sort of going into the question of, going
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directly into the question of what is the right way to live. And the problem there is that there
#
is this multiplicity of appropriate choices, as you put it. So, to read this bit out quote,
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Dharma is always and everywhere about a multiplicity of appropriate choices, that when
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we choose one way of being and doing over another, we will often be as wrong as we are right.
#
When Rama tells his mother Kaushalya that he will obey his father's wish and go into the forest for
#
14 years, her anguished question to him is why he privileges his duty as a son to his father over
#
his obligations to her as a mother. When Vibhishan decides to do what he believes to be right,
#
his alliance with Rama is predicated on the betrayal which leads to the killing of his
#
brother, stop quote. And these are all sort of complicated. You have one duty as a brother,
#
one duty as a father, one duty as a whatever, one duty as a king. And you know, you get into
#
these situations where whichever path you take, you are kind of messing with one. So,
#
how do these play out within the text itself? Because, you know, all of these exceptional
#
cases that we are talking about, where there is a clear sort of, where it is clear that this
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cannot be right. You know, for example, where he kills Valli. And the whole deal is he is allying
#
with this guy called Sugriva. When Valli was away, Sugriva took over his kingdom and took over his
#
wife. And then Valli comes back and he takes it back and Sugriva then allies with Rama and just
#
because of that he kills Valli and there is no reason. And you have pointed to the dialogue
#
where Valli is asking him, hey, what have I done wrong? And Rama is kind of rationalizing, coming
#
up with, you know, different explanations, almost like our government did after demonetization,
#
right? This reason, that reason and it's all kind of doesn't make sense. And there is also that
#
Surpanakha thing where, you know, I mean, how on earth, like just for the benefit of listeners who,
#
you know, may not be familiar with the story, what basically happens is that when Rama and Lakshmana
#
and Sita are disguised as ascetics and they are in the forest, Surpanakha who is described in the
#
book as incredibly ugly or whatever, pot-bellied and all of that and happens to be Ravana's sister,
#
she comes and she tries to seduce first Rama and then Lakshmana and that's it. She's just
#
hitting on them. There's nothing else. She's just hitting on them and then Rama gets pissed off and
#
he says mutilate her and then Lakshmana cuts off her nose and her tongue and whatever and she's
#
mutilated and then that becomes a reason that Ravana gets pissed off and he says, hey, I'm going to
#
take revenge, right? And it doesn't matter how you cut it. It's not justified and in one of the
#
possible justifications that you speculated about, you know, the central problem here seems to be
#
presaged, which is the justification you speculated about was that Rama had seen his father fall prey
#
to lust and temptation and all that and he wanted to avoid it so viscerally that he decided that this
#
woman must be disfigured and tells his brother to do the job and the problem here is again the main
#
character syndrome. It's like, you know, your dharma is predicated less on any kind of coherent
#
rational way of looking at the world, but just on what you deem to be good for you in that emotional
#
moment without really thinking it through. But there are other people involved whose nose is
#
getting cut, whose tongue is getting cut and, you know, on all of that. So when you sort of look at
#
these dilemmas and even everything that he then did with Sita, which one doesn't need to go over
#
because I'm sure all my listeners know that sort of the story, then, you know, on the one hand,
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you are an assertive feminist and you're, you know, coming with that frame and you're talking
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and I'm sure you believed in human rights as well. And on the other hand, you see in a book that
#
talks so flamboyantly about dharma, you see this stuff playing out and not only do you see this
#
stuff playing out in the Valmiki Ramayana, you see later texts, including the first and last chapter,
#
which were added later, trying to find ways to justify it, to rationalize it, to even change
#
the story so that in that Bengali version, he's actually repentant. You know, so tell me a little
#
bit about how Ramayana deals with dharma and to what extent do those, you know, because everything
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in that storytelling mirrors society at that time. In that sense, it's very much a historical
#
document in the sense that it is historical fact that someone wrote it and it is historical fact
#
that it resonated and continues to resonate. So just in terms of dharma, then, how did your,
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the way that you looked at the book and the way that you look at that question of dharma and the
#
way that you think about whether, you know, whether it reflects the burning questions of the day
#
and all the various efforts to come to terms with it. You know, how does one sort of think about it
#
and as a feminist and, you know, and an individual, how do you come to terms with all of these?
#
So, the simple question, the simple answer is, again, picking up from Ramanujan,
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all Ramayanas are metaramayanas. Every single Ramayana after Valmiki, somehow or the other,
#
justifies Rama's, the actions that make us uncomfortable via bhakti or mistake or like,
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you know, whatever it is, right? Bhakti, of course, is the final seal on Rama's eternal
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and unchanging righteousness. So that's, that's one thing, right?
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Anything he does is right because he does it.
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Exactly. Because he does it and because he's got, by the way, he's got, by the way,
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is really a by the way, right? It is right because he does it.
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So good is defined by what God does and God doesn't have to be good. It's not a separate thing.
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Well done. That's an excellent, excellent, excellent response that it is good because
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God does it. Okay, let's modify that slide. It is necessary because God does it because
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lots of what Krishna does cannot be thought of as good. Certainly not what Rama does either,
#
but it's necessary for some larger Dharmic balance, as it were, right? Now, again, Ramanujan,
#
he has a very wonderful phrase, which is very Ramanujan. Dharma is context sensitive,
#
right? Now you can see that as a moment of sophistry and slipperiness, but it works, right?
#
Now, why is Dharma context sensitive? Because in Hinduism, we are not an individuated self.
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We are always a relational self, right? That I'm simultaneously a mother, a daughter, a friend,
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a teacher, a wife, whatever, a rock star. And whenever I choose to privilege the dharma of one
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of myself, I am ignoring the dharma of the other self. I'm actually violating that dharma.
#
So Rama choosing to obey his father means that necessarily he will be abandoning his mother and
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will not be able to. And that's why dharma is a series, is a constellation of appropriate choices,
#
right? And what you do determines who you are. So in that sense, that is precisely the point at
#
which dharma and karma coincide and end up constituting a self or at least constituting
#
a narrative self or giving a self a narrative, right? As a feminist, how do I deal with Rama?
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How do I deal with Ramayana? Of course, for many years as a younger feminist, I did not. I was
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like, no, no, I can't do that. Even after I finished translating Ramayana and all that.
#
And then in the early 2000s, actually, so I just turned 40. I must have been in my very early 40s,
#
42, 43, something like that. And I thought to myself, this book is called Ramayana. Yeah.
#
If I claim to know this text, then I have to contend with Rama, whatever the contention ends
#
up being, but I cannot ignore him and say, I'm not interested because he is not very nice to women.
#
Right? Therefore, I'm not interested. That's not possible. Yeah. So I re-read my own translation.
#
I read other Ramayanas and all like that. And then I began to see two things. One, which is the
#
sympathetic position that these were terrible choices that he had to make. And because he was
#
fundamentally a good man, he knew that making one choice would mean hurting some group of people or
#
another individual or something, but he had to do it anyway. Right? So the burden that Rama carries
#
as Maryada Purushottama, as the upholder of Dharma, as righteous Rama, is actually very,
#
very, very heavy because he cares. The other person who's sort of like this, but not in such
#
a full blown way, of course, is Yudhishthira. Right? So first I was like, okay, I have to
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understand this about Rama and then let me think about his actions towards Shurpanakha and towards
#
Sita and all that. I don't think they justify his actions because just because you're troubled
#
doesn't mean you can go beat up people. Right? But you see why he might have beaten them up.
#
Okay. You can still choose to disregard him, to reject him, to feel hostile to him. That is,
#
but at least you're continuing to be hostile or choosing to be hostile despite what you know,
#
rather than from not knowing. Then the next step in my sort of holding onto my feminism and holding
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onto this text, Kim, maybe like 10 years later or something, certainly a while later, it's like,
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as a feminist, it is very important to make very clear to people what exactly is happening in this
#
text. What is happening in this story? What is happening to the women? Who are the women?
#
Let us not kid ourselves for how long violence against women has been sanctioned. Violence
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against women has been perpetrated. And let us also think about how these women respond to that
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violence, which is either emotional or physical. Now it's very easy to think of Sita as being
#
submissive and this and that. But if you read Valmiki, which is very important, that's why
#
people must read Valmiki. From the moment we meet Sita, she is saying, no. Rama says, you can't come
#
with me. The first is why not? No, no, you can't come. But I will. No, you can't. I will. And then
#
she tells him at some point, you don't even know what dharma is. Don't teach me. I am the daughter
#
of Janaka. She also says, what are you so scared of? Why did my father give me in marriage to a man,
#
to a woman who is disguised as a man? It's very rude. Then she tells him in the forest, she says,
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don't carry these weapons. You're not a Kshatriya here. You're an ascetic. And if you carry these
#
weapons, violence will come to you. And he said, Sita, you don't know what you're talking about.
#
But at the Agni Pariksha moment, she says, how could you talk to me like this? You don't know
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who I am. I've been your devoted wife for so long. You are blaming me for the sins of other women.
#
After all these years of marriage, Rama, you do not recognize me. So she's constantly contending
#
with him. This is not some girl. So it's the patriarchy that has persuaded us that Sita is
#
submissive because she goes with him into exile. And then at the very, very end of the story,
#
of course, when he calls her back, when he's doing his Ashwamedha sacrifice, he says, please,
#
one more time, can you prove your chastity? She doesn't even look at him. Yeah. She disappears
#
into the earth. The first time with Agni Pariksha, she said, if I'm pure, let me stay. The second
#
time she says, if I'm pure, take me away. Yeah. So when Indian men tell us, older men especially,
#
be like Sita, I'm like, yes, please, thank you. I will be like Sita. But it's not the Sita that you
#
have in your imagination. It's the Sita that is in Valmiki's text. Now, as a feminist, it's very
#
important for us to know that story, to own that story, and to tell that story to our sons,
#
not to our daughters. Daughters know when they are being oppressed. Sons pretend to not know when
#
they're oppressing women. Right? So the Upadhi story can also be appropriated by women in that
#
way. Right? We have to own these stories, not to change them, not to say this didn't happen,
#
but to say, this is what happened. This is what we have to watch out for. This is the mirror.
#
Do not kid yourself. This is the mirror. So as a feminist, yes, it is important. And that's why
#
I was saying when Nani is Ramayana, Dadi is Ramayana. No, our generation of, not that Nani
#
and Dadi are not feminists, yeah, many, many, many of our mothers and grandmothers have been
#
very radical in the way they've occupied families and all like that. But this, every generation
#
needs its own articulation against the patriarchy. Right? That's what we have to learn to do.
#
Speak of it in our times, in our time, because when we do that, we will be telling our Ramayanas,
#
just as Tulsi in this one and that one, we're also doing Metta Ramayanas. Yeah. So we're in
#
the tradition. We are in the zone. You just have to listen to us. Yeah. You know, we are the Nani's.
#
Exactly. So I was, I was, I was messing around, you know, before you came with chat GPT and I
#
and I asked chat GPT, give me a positive feminist interpretation of Ramayana. Yes. And it gave me
#
five pointers, which I'll show you after the recording. But the first one was strong female
#
characters. Ramayana features several strong female characters, such as Sita, Surpanakha and
#
Mandodari. Right. And what you're saying is really interesting because like one of the common themes
#
that comes up when I speak with guests of our vintage, when they talk about their mothers and
#
so on, is that while from the outside, if you look at surface events of their mother's lives,
#
it might seem that they were oppressed and they went with the stereotypes and so on and so forth.
#
In a certain sense, they found their own way of negotiating the constraints upon them. So there
#
was a kind of lived feminism, even if they're not outburning bras. Right. And it seems to me that
#
what you're saying about Sita is, is her way of showing strength and dealing with those constraints
#
like a modern day couple. If a man thinks that the woman has been, if a man is so suspicious,
#
basically, you know, I would expect the woman to after a while, just to fuck off, you know,
#
and go off and live alone and be perfectly happy and be self-sufficient and all of that.
#
But you cannot look at Sita from that lens, you know, from centuries ago. Instead, you look at
#
the constraints that she has, the givens that there are and how she negotiates that. And then
#
all the points that you make suddenly make sense. And then it's not like, but within that,
#
this is how she's asserting herself. Absolutely. I mean, this is one of the
#
things that it's very, it's a very difficult negotiation, especially when you're teaching
#
Ramana for younger feminists and for young men who are, you know, feminist sympathizers and all
#
of that to say, you, your 21st century critique of a two and a half thousand year old text is
#
not always appropriate. Yeah, it's very easy. It's very, very, oh, this one is like that,
#
that one is like that, that one is a philanderer, that one is a rapist, that one is Falana.
#
We are not talking about a contemporary text. We're not talking about a text written by a person
#
who shares your consciousness, right? But even if we, even if we put those critiques aside,
#
look at what this woman is doing. And that in a sense is what Lost Loves is about, her exit,
#
which is a choice. Now, that same exit is read by Tulsidas and Kamba in all kinds of different
#
ways, right? There's an apotheosis. She leaves because she's going to become Lakshmi and wait
#
for Vishnu because it's her departure signals the end of Rama's time on earth. Okay, that's also a
#
very nice explanation. It doesn't happen to be the one that resonates with me, but of course,
#
it makes sense to millions and millions of people. Why should they not enjoy that explanation? But
#
for those of us who struggle with that explanation, here's another one that may make the story
#
a happier one for you too. The other thing, of course, is, okay, so again, this is why Valmiki
#
is so important because his Sita accounts or his Sita shows will, she shows agency, she acts on her
#
own, right? Now, when Kamba is writing in the 12th century, when Tulsi is writing in the 16th century,
#
women had a very, very different position. Valmiki was writing at a very interesting time, or the Rama
#
in our text is at a very interesting time. It's the transition into oligarchies, right? The Vedic
#
period has been left behind. We finished with the Upanishads. Now, the real tucker between Brahmins
#
and Kshatriyas for temporal power has begun, right? So, women are not as secluded. Women are not as
#
separated from society as they later became, right? So, what does, in Kamba Ramayana,
#
the idea that Ravana might have touched Sita is horrifying because she's pure, she's the goddess,
#
she's Rama's wife. So, in Kamba Ramayana, Ravana scoops up the earth around her and it's mother
#
earth that cries out, Sita's mother, that her daughter is being abducted. He doesn't touch her,
#
right? In Valmiki Ramayana, he picks her up and he puts her in the chandi and he's holding onto her.
#
In Tulsidas, because again of bhakti, because of the sanctity of the goddess, also because with
#
every successive iteration of Ramayana, Ravana has become more and more evil, not just oppositional,
#
but evil, right? So, the moment they go into the forest, the gods take Sita away, Sita mata and put
#
a chhaya Sita in her place. So, whatever happens to Sita, it's not happening to Sita, it's happening
#
to her shadow. Now, look at how anxious the cultures are becoming about women and sexuality
#
and abduction and conjugality. These are like, I mean, I think they're magnificent
#
interventions of the imagination. How do you keep the woman pure? Oh, he didn't touch her.
#
How did he not touch her if he took her away in a chariot? Oh, she was a shadow. Oh, he picked up the
#
earth around her feet. This is lovely. It's superb. I mean, in that sense, Valmiki is boring. He
#
picked her up, he put her in the chariot and he took her away. But what it's reflecting is anxiety
#
about women and sexuality. That is what we have to expose as feminists when we read the text.
#
You know, this is not because of Muslims, it's not because of Victorian, Raj people and all.
#
We already have a very, very, very fundamental anxiety about women and their bodies.
#
And, you know, two great examples of that also, you know, come in your great book,
#
Mariyada, in the chapter with the women outside, where you talk about Ahilya and Shurpanakha,
#
right? And Ahilya is the wife of Gautama, who I think is a sage or whatever. So, yeah, so a god
#
comes and Indira comes and, you know, pretends to be a husband and she knows it, but she's like,
#
hey, let me check this out, you know, let me check out what this god is like. And she does her thing,
#
and therefore for that she is cursed because she has expressed her sexuality. And Shurpanakha,
#
of course, for expressing her sexuality is disfigured in the horrible, brutal way that she is.
#
So this sexuality becomes such an incredible threat. But it's also with Kaikai, which we don't
#
talk about quite as much. Look at Kaikai, what was she doing? Why is she so reviled? She's doing
#
what is best for her son. She's performing the dharma of a mother, right? But she's not performing
#
the dharma of a queen or of a stepmother. And the implication is that she is a sexy one of all the
#
wives. Sumitra, of course, doesn't open her mouth in Balmiki Ramayana Hindi. You have to wonder why
#
she's there at all, like the twins in Ramayana. Rama and Lakshmana should be twins. Rama and Lakshmana
#
should be twins, but actually it's Lakshmana and Shatrughna. Shatrughna is with Bharata and Lakshmana
#
is with Rama. How does this happen? Why are they twins at all? So when we see the twins in Mahabharata,
#
Nakula and Sahadeva, what use are they? One like scows, one like horses. All the energy is
#
concentrated in the sons of Kunti, the Kaunteyas, not the Madhreyas, right? What do you mean by
#
one like scows, one like horses? Okay, let's not go there. What do you mean by one like scows,
#
one like horses? Well, one is very good with horses, one is very good with horses. And they're both very
#
beautiful. They have golden eyes. Well, so when we see, when we talk about the, okay, this is again,
#
this is Hiltabaital, this is Ramanujan. Why are there twins in the Indian epics when they are of
#
no value at all, right? There is no mistaken identity, there is no fight for kingship.
#
There is no fight for kingship between these. So we, it's an Indo-European trope for the
#
Indo-European form, the genre, which is the epic, right? So the fact that there are twins in the
#
Indian epics that have no narrative value at all is vestigial. Like the appendix, Ramanujan used to
#
say, this is vestigial. You know what is vestigial? Appendix is vestigial. So I always think of Nakula
#
and Sahadeva, you know. So like the Shekhov's gun, there could be Shekhov's twins. Exactly, exactly
#
like that. Yeah. So Sumitra, I think is vestigial. There have to be three wives for some reason,
#
though there is a third wife. But Kaikeyi, she's the one who has Dasaratha's heart,
#
really and truly, right? And she parlayes that. She parlayes that position that she has to gain
#
the best for her son. So she's also abusing her sexuality, exploiting it as it were. And so she
#
is punished as horribly as Ahalya and Shurpanakha. That was a funny little section of the shouting
#
about the women. Yeah. So you also, you know, point out in the second chapter of that book,
#
Ayodhya's Wives, how Kaikeyi also, if you think about it, it's conflicting dharmas. You know,
#
if you think about her role as a wife or a queen, sure, she's not going with her dharma,
#
but if you think about her duty to herself or her duty to her son, it all makes sense,
#
you know, and so on and so forth. Here's sort of my next question. At one point, you write, quote,
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Hindu epics are driven by four operators as it were, dharma, karma, vidhi, which is fate,
#
and that devya, intervention by the gods. I hope I said that right. And dharma and karma are
#
intrinsic to an individual character's actions. That is how those actions are determined by a
#
character's past deeds and how those characters choose to act given the choices before them in
#
the present, stop quote. And it struck me that if you, for example, look at the character of Ravana
#
in Valmiki's Ramayan, right, it is everything that he's doing is really responding to incentives,
#
as an economist would put it, that his sister has been disfigured. He decides to take revenge.
#
He says, okay, I'm going to kidnap Sita and I'm going to do all of that. And everything is really
#
kind of rational in that sense, you know, and of course they will be conflicting dharmas there as
#
well. And that's what the story is in its bare bones. But then those two chapters are added on
#
at the front and at the back, then the later Ramayanas come. And then you have this justification,
#
this larger sort of meta theme that actually this was fordained, you know, this is where fate comes
#
in that Ravana was a demon who had been tormenting the gods, but he had taken this sort of, he had
#
made a deal with them that he has immortality, no God can kill him, but a man can. So these buggers
#
send Vishnu down in the form of Rama to kind of do that. And therefore the story is a given an
#
explanation that neatly seems to wrap up all the loose ends together. And also it sort of ends
#
free will entirely. And we see these justifications in other ways. For example, you have a great
#
chapter about what is a dharma of the Rakshasas who are there. If you think about all the ways
#
in which the Rakshasas behave, including eating the flesh of others, they are fulfilling their dharma.
#
How can they be blamed for it? And the only pat explanation for this as it were, as they are part
#
of this cosmic scheme and they don't have a choice and nobody, you know, really has a choice.
#
Similarly, you have later justifications of Kaikeyi's actions, you know, that her father,
#
when he allowed Dashrata to marry her, said that her son has to be the king. And which is like a
#
later justification, it kind of comes in and all of that. So do you feel in some ways that typically
#
how we'd expect an epic to evolve is that it is a work of pure fantasy and then over time it is
#
given depth and complexity and nuance. But instead here, it almost seems to me that Valmiki's Ramayana
#
has a depth and the ambiguities and the big questions, but later on all these other simplifications
#
and so on are added on. Oh, I absolutely agree with you. I think that's also why I've stayed
#
with Valmiki Ramayana for 30-35 years because it contains these ambiguities, it contains
#
these questions, it contains these possibilities, right? Now, as you said, once Bhakti arrives on
#
the scene, everything becomes very simple. And as Rama is elevated to the cosmic level of God,
#
his opponent must be, if the protagonist is elevated, you have to have a matching antagonist.
#
So Ravana gets elevated to this cosmic evil as it were, the opposition, no longer the oppositional
#
force, right? Now, Uttarakhanda of Valmiki Ramayana, which is the text that was written later,
#
after it establishes Rama's divinity, half the Uttarakhanda, more than half the Uttarakhanda,
#
stories of Ravana and how wicked he is, and not simply him, but his brother, his father,
#
his grandfather, his grandfather's brother and all like that. So it becomes that there is a lineage
#
of good gods, there is a lineage of bad anti-gods, right? So more correctly, actually in Uttarakhanda,
#
Ravana should be called asura, right? Because suras are the gods and what we say asura literally
#
means anti-gods. So that's what he is, right? But he becomes, as Rama becomes the epitome,
#
the paradigm of righteousness, he becomes, Ravana becomes a paradigm of unrighteousness,
#
of adharma. So then whatever you might've said about rakshasadharma, all of that is cancelled.
#
So it's really what we do, what happens when bhakti enters the epics. They're not narratives
#
anymore. They become theology, right? They become about God acting in the world. They become about
#
God, the nature of God. They become about the odyssey. What is the nature of evil that God must
#
deal with? So it's a completely different set of questions that we need to ask and a very different
#
set of answers that we must expect to receive once bhakti enters. And that is why, again,
#
Valmiki is so interesting to me because it has not settled. It hasn't been placed in aspic,
#
as it were. We can ask, why did Rama do this? Because Rama is actually like us. He is a man.
#
And also because Rama is human. The morality, the moral dilemmas, the question of dharma,
#
the question of the multiple appropriate choices becomes real. And if Rama is a human, then
#
Mariyadapurushottama has some value because despite everything he did, whatever your
#
justification might be for Mariyadapurushottama, but if he's God, then Mariyadapurushottama is
#
meaningless because whatever he does is right anyway. It's only when he could have done
#
something else, when he's a purusha, that he becomes resonant to us as fellow human beings.
#
So there's this really funny passage. I mean, I found it funny. Maybe I should not find it funny.
#
Maybe it is sacrilegious. But at one point where, you know, Lakshmana is grievously injured and Rama
#
sees him on the battlefield and he can't control himself. And he says, quote, what used to me is
#
Sita or my life. And I see my brother lifeless like this on the battlefield. If I looked hard
#
enough, I would find another woman like Sita in this world, but I would never find anyone like
#
my brother Lakshmana, my companion and advisor and stop code and so on and on and on. And I
#
thought, my God, this is a classic epic justification of bros before hoes. So, you know, in a sense,
#
right there. Here's my next question. Lakshmana at one point talks about dharma where things seem
#
to be going really badly for them. And he says, all this talk of dharma is futile. Your adherence
#
to dharma has not protected you from all these calamities. We cannot see dharma the way we can
#
see other objects. I am beginning to believe that there is no such thing. If dharma really did exist,
#
Ravana would be in hell and you would not be suffering like this, stop code, right?
#
And this seems to indicate that he is looking at dharma as something instrumental,
#
that if I do the right thing, I will get the right outcome. Almost the opposite of what Krishna is
#
talking about in Bhagavad Gita that do the right thing, don't worry about the fruits of your
#
actions, right? Process, not results, as we could say in modern language. And since you started off
#
studying philosophy and then got into studying these epics and you've looked at this fundamental
#
question of what is the right thing to do, this fundamental ethical question, which is a struggle
#
through these books, I'll ask you a slightly tangential question that at one point recently,
#
I had a discussion with one of my writing students about whether there is anything called
#
Indian philosophy, right? Where my point was that, look, you know, philosophy in a sense is a kind of
#
meta science, right? Or a proto science. It is asking really fundamental questions and there
#
is a coherence, it is working its way through a clear chain of logic towards certain whatever.
#
And my sense was that I didn't know, and this is me expressing lack of knowledge, not lack of
#
belief necessarily in such a thing existing, but I didn't know if there was such a tradition within
#
Indian philosophy in the sense that you're starting from certain first principles and
#
you're using them to get somewhere. Like, for example, you could start from certain first
#
principles and say X is the right way to behave, regardless of consequences, this is what you got
#
to do, right? So my question to you, therefore, is that since so many of us kind of conflate
#
philosophy with spirituality or philosophy with religion and philosophy with what has come down
#
to us from these epics, what is sort of your sense of this, that all of these dilemmas come up? In
#
that sense, you look at Valmiki's Ramayana, it seems like a wonderful novel. It is complex,
#
it has no answers. You know, all of this stuff is going on. Has there been a sort of a coherent,
#
systematic attempt to define terms and to get to answers of these questions? Answers remain
#
elusive, but you can have candid answers as you do in Western philosophy. Well, I mean, people say
#
that Bimal Matilal is the only Indian philosopher that there is because he starts with sort of
#
Aristotelian first cause, you know, all those kinds of things, right? Whereas what we think of
#
as Indian philosophy is actually metaphysics, ethics, ontology, you know, but it's not philosophy
#
in the way that Aristotle or Hegel or, you know, the Kant, none of those. And there are six schools.
#
And now, actually, now I feel at this time, we must not say Indian epic and Indian philosophy,
#
we must say Hindu epic and Hindu philosophy, because that's the place that we're being pushed
#
to. And we should have always said that it was always more accurate, but you know, in our fuzzy
#
secularism, we decided to call it Indian. So there are six schools of Hindu philosophy,
#
the darshanas, right? Now, that is a really interesting word, because darshanas is a position,
#
how you see it, right? So it's not even actually suggesting that it is the truth, or it is even
#
this is mine, this is my truth, right? So again, we are confronted not with absolutes, in the
#
Kantian sense or the Aristotelian sense, we are confronted with context appropriate, or context
#
sensitive explanations. Yeah, so there will never be a great system. They're interestingly paired,
#
right? There is Sankhya and Yoga, Nyaya and Vaisesika, and of course, Purvan Mimamsa, right?
#
The ultimate, what most Hindus actually follow, if they claim to follow philosophy, it is Vedanta,
#
right? I find Sankhya very interesting. I find Vaisesika very interesting. Vaisesika is paired
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with a school of logic. Nyaya is, it is really the five-membered syllogism against Aristotelian
#
three-membered syllogism, right? It sounds like very complicated. It's just that
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Aristotle takes three propositions to prove something, this takes five.
#
So it's more thorough as it were, be that as it may. So how these pairings occurred is,
#
I don't know enough about it, because I stopped studying that. But I feel that
#
dharma, really, is the crux of the problem, not simply of ethics, but also ontology and metaphysics,
#
right? Because it is, it claims to impinge upon what came before and what will come after.
#
This is the book I'm reading now, you'll be delighted to know. Alf Hildebattle,
#
Alf Hildebattle on dharma. It's a fantastic book because he traces dharma from the Vedas
#
and how the word is used there. And the way we think of dharma as being the nub of Hindu
#
ontology, I guess, really comes to us from Buddhism, right? It doesn't come to us from
#
Buddhism in the sense that we got it from Buddhism. But we must remember that after the Vedic period,
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in the later Upanishads, in the very, very early layers of the Veda, at the very end of the
#
Brahmanas, there is like this pool of vocabulary, karma, atman, dharman, Brahman, and all these
#
sects, all these spiritualisms, all these schools are dipping in and out of the pool and they're all
#
taking the same words, right? And they're using them in very, very different ways. But so the way
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the Buddhists use dharma is the teaching of the Buddha, most simplistically, right?
#
But the way Hindus use dharma, it also comes from Manavadharma Shastra. How do you act? It is not
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what do you think, but how do you act, right? So it goes from an ontology to an ethics,
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but we are not going to get a great system because for whatever reason,
#
Hinduism shies away from absolutes, right? And that could also be the influence of Jainism,
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which is neti neti, not this and not that. So we are not considering how much interaction,
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how much flexibility, how much Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism influenced each other
#
for a very long time, for three, four, five hundred years, right? So we speak of the,
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it's very easy now to speak of the Abrahamic traditions, right? As Judaism, Christianity,
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and Islam sharing certain ideological things or sharing certain strands of thought of like
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monotheism, Buddhism, Jainism, and Hindus were doing exactly the same thing. But that is not
#
coming into our discourse, right? Especially now, where Hinduism is unto itself complete,
#
right? Buddhism, Jainism, OK, OK, it was there, but you know, I mean, OK, there's Ambedkar Buddha
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was a good guy, Jain, so nobody enters, it doesn't even enter the conversation of the classical period,
#
right? But in fact, it is a great borrowing, a great refining, a great defining in terms of each
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other, right? You are saying this, I will say like this. The great Buddhist Hindu debate, Shankaracharya,
#
you know, he was always debating Buddhists and Nagarjuna, these were huge things. They were
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religions battling it out, battling it out so that they could own the hearts and minds of
#
people, right? And I think one of the great examples of the rivalries between Hinduism
#
and Buddhism is in one of the, in the Puranas, which lists the Dasha Avatara, the ninth Avatara
#
of Vishnu is the Buddha. Why is Buddha an Avatara? Because he will take all the stupid people away
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from Hinduism, purify Hinduism by taking all the silly people away. So he's also reestablishing
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Dharma. Now, what a story that is, man. If you want a story of a rivalry between two religions,
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this is the one to go to. And it's Puranic, so it's, you know, sanctioned. It's not like some
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weird story that's over in a corner. So there's lots going on there. And I think in a way,
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Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi, attempted to stabilize Dharma, you know, with Satyagraha and Ahimsa.
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If we see Gandhi, as some people do, as a modern philosopher, then he would be the man who tried to
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give Dharma some kind of basis in absolutism. I mean, my personal sense is that Gandhi was
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Gandhi for all his greatness was a sort of a fuzzy thinker who was winging it on many issues.
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Gandhi's reading of the Bhagavad Gita is honestly quite untenable. What book were you reading, man?
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What book were you reading? I'm not reading this in the Gita.
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What book was he reading is a really good question, because Naipaul once spoke of Gandhi
#
as the least Indian of the great Indian freedom fighters. And if you look at the early influences
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of all our freedom fighters, you know, you look at the 19th century guys like Gokhale, Agarkar,
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Ranade, they're all reading Mill and Bentham and all of that. Gandhi's reading like really fuzzy,
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quasi-mystical stuff like Ruskin, like Tolstoy, Unto This Last and all of that. Imitation of
#
Christ also he's reading. Yeah, so it's yeah. But leaving that aside, so I want to quote this bit
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about, you know, when you write about Wendy Doniger's book, The Origins of Evil in
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Hindu Mythology, and you write in her book, The Origins of Evil in Hindu Mythology,
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Doniger brings to our notice a fact that until the Bhakti period, there are multiple dharmas
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that impinge upon an individual's conscience as a possible basis of action. There is a dharma of the
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self, swadharma, determined by who one is. There is varnashram dharma, depending on one's caste
#
and station in life. There is samanya dharma or general principles that apply to everyone.
#
And there is over and above all of these, sanatan dharma, which is eternal and one imagines
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immutable. Stop quote. And out of these four categories, it would strike me that the kind of
#
ethics that we strive for in this modern world and certainly that I think about is, you know,
#
maybe the first and third of the first and third of these categories that pertains to the self and
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that pertains to others, right? How do I live in this world? How do I treat others? For me,
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all of ethical action is contained within those. You know, but you have this varnashram dharma,
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which seems to me incredibly toxic and ails us to this current day, without missing words,
#
and sanatan dharma, which just seems vague, vuvu, right? Sort of, I mean, what does it even mean?
#
What are you talking about? Because you inevitably then arrive at a situation where, however you
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define either of these two, varnashram or sanatan dharma or whatever, will in some way often conflict
#
with how you define your personal ethics, which is all I really care about. So what is your sense
#
of how deeply rooted these notions of dharma are in the Indian imagination? Because when people
#
today scoff at enlightenment values, and I must say that intellectually I consider myself a child
#
of enlightenment values, certainly. When people scoff at enlightenment values, you know, enlightenment
#
values, as I am, would privilege this kind of personal ethics and how you deal with other people
#
and not the other stuff that is embedded within that, including caste consciousness in these words,
#
which, you know, even Gandhi spoke about for that matter. Well, I was going to say what a modernist
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you are, when you say that you would, I mean, like myself, I would choose this word dharma,
#
but this also proves, A, that the Hindu self is a relational self, and B, that there are
#
multiple dharmas for who you are, when you are, what you are, right? So when you, now,
#
varnashrama dharma, I think to people like us, is extremely difficult to think about, extremely
#
difficult to handle, right? But it doesn't apply to us because we don't believe either in varna
#
or in ashrama, right? So that is gone. Sanatana dharma is what all these godmen are touting,
#
whether Jaggi ji or, you know, Baba Ramdev or anybody. It is because I think the idea of
#
Sanatana dharma came about precisely because there are so many dharmas and everybody is going to ask,
#
like Yudhishthira does, what is the greatest dharma of them all? Which dharma am I supposed to
#
follow? Arjuna is not interested in that at all. Arjuna's question, interestingly, is not, I cannot
#
kill, but is I cannot kill these people, right? Big difference, very big difference, right? And
#
of course, Krishna says to him, basically, bachu, you are a kshatriya, you perform your swadharma,
#
I'll take care of everything else, right? Which is a very complicated answer for people like us,
#
right? Because our idea of swadharma is individual and not caste or community, because
#
he is telling, Krishna is telling Arjuna, that his swadharma is actually his varna dharma, right?
#
He says, better your own duty done badly than the duty of another done well. That is also
#
something. So that is also like, who are you, right? Right now you are a kshatriya. How old are these
#
guys when they are fighting the war? We are used to seeing them as like handsome young men, all the
#
TV series and iconic, sort of iconographic images, show them as like, you know, 30-year-old studs.
#
If you think about it, they are probably 50-year-old men, right? Of course, Arjuna is the greatest
#
warrior, you know, but he is 50 years old. All these depictions come from Raja Ravi Varma,
#
right? Because, yeah, he made those paintings of them looking in a particular way and that is the
#
whole game now. Yeah, yeah. And that is why Peter Brook's Mahabharata is so radical, right? And so
#
difficult for Indians to deal with. First of all, because Bhishma Pitamaha is an African man.
#
He cannot be here, you know, and so is Karna. So anyway, I love Peter Brook's Mahabharata. But
#
anyway, back to this dharma problem. So, in a sense, Sanatana Dharma is the one that supersedes them
#
all. But the problem is that Sanatana Dharma does not fit in Hindu ethics because it belongs to
#
nobody. Yeah, your dharma has to belong to you in one of these ways. So, again, Sanatana Dharma
#
is an attempt to absolutize something. It cannot work. If we are, as a Hindu society, as a Hindu
#
nation, if we are hierarchized, nobody's giving up the hierarchies, how can there be something
#
that is universal or absolute? It's impossible. So, that's why when I teach Bhagavad Gita,
#
which is rarely because I find it extremely difficult to teach Bhagavad Gita, I don't think
#
I've understood it myself. And so I don't think, but you know, when I teach Mahabharata, I can't
#
say there's no Bhagavad Gita. So, I do it very quickly. And the way I teach Bhagavad Gita and
#
the way I honestly think about dharma in Hinduism, not Hindu dharma, but dharma in Hinduism, and one
#
of the things that I find so profoundly appealing about dharma in Hinduism is it's existential,
#
Amit. It is profoundly existential. What are you doing? Why are you doing it? What you do makes
#
you who you are. So, the self is constantly being constructed by your actions and by the ethics that
#
you choose in that moment as an individuated self. This is the part of Hinduism that I find truly
#
moving, that you are responsible for what you do, and only you are responsible. You can't say,
#
the devil told me, or you know, I'm following God's word. No, you are creating meaning for
#
yourself in whatever way you see fit, right? You are creating ethical parameters as it were. Now,
#
that is existentialism. That is 20th century European existentialism. And I think that between
#
dharma and karma, for myself, I cannot think of anything more profound to keep me on the path
#
of goodness. Not righteousness, but goodness, because righteousness is a little open to
#
interpretation. Yeah. I can totally imagine Yocklaus Sartre dying and going to existentialism's
#
heaven and finding Valmiki is already chilling there with the hookah and all that. Yeah.
#
Been waiting centuries, boy. Come on in. Yeah. Let's, you know, talk about how, I mean,
#
the very fact that this work has had so much resonance over a period of time and almost a
#
feedback loop with society, as it were, is also very telling. And you refer to different
#
interpretations of, you know, what's happening in the story and how it relates to the real world.
#
For example, at one point you write, several scholars have suggested that the monkeys and
#
rakshasas represent the non Aryan tribes of India and that the defeat of the rakshasas is in fact,
#
the story of Aryan expansion into India. And this hypothesis, particularly the idea that the monkeys
#
of the Ramayana, the indigenous tribal peoples of the subcontinent has had many supporters,
#
top code. And then you move on to the other hypothesis, which you find a little more
#
convincing than this, where you say other scholars have suggested that the rakshasas represent the
#
other of Hindu society upon which all his fears and terrors can be located. This hypothesis that
#
the rakshasas represent the innermost terrors of Hindu culture is far more interesting because it
#
attempts to analyze these creatures from within the mind of their creators. Besides that, it
#
opens up yet another dimension, another aspect to the text, further enriching it for its audience,
#
stop code. And then about the Uttarakanda, you write this very interesting para where you write,
#
quote, after Sita's banishment, the Uttarakanda has two other crises for Rama the king. The first
#
is when a Brahman's young son dies for no reason. The father laments that this can only have happened
#
if there is something fundamentally amiss in the kingdom. The sage Narada, who happens to
#
be visiting Rama's court at the time, persuades Rama that he needs to find out where this violation
#
of dharma, which has caused a disruption in the natural order of things, is located, and that he
#
needs to eliminate it at once. Rama kills the low caste Shambuka, who is disturbing the cosmic order
#
by practicing austerities that are not meant for him, and by doing so brings a Brahman son back to
#
life. Rama acts as a king chute swiftly and without equivocation, eliminating the person
#
whose actions threaten the well-being of his people, stop code. And this just, you know,
#
seen in modern times, and I don't even think you need to be in the 21st century to look at this and
#
feel profoundly disturbed by what is happening here. That, you know, and this is of course in
#
the Uttarakanda, so not in Valmiki's original five volumes per se. So why do you say exactly?
#
Because Valmiki would never say something like this.
#
Valmiki would never say something like this, right? So all these are sort of impurities creeping into
#
the text and impurities in more ways than one, right? Yeah, I don't know if we can call them
#
impurities, Ramit, because it is the evolution of the text. What is very clear in Uttarakanda,
#
also in Balakanda, but much more so in Uttarakanda, the text has been taken over by Brahmins, right?
#
Right? And in the epics, and it's much clearer in Mahabharata than it is in Ramayana, as I said,
#
it's the conflict between Brahmins and Kshatriyas, right? Mahabharata is full of Brahmins who behave
#
like Kshatriyas, Kshatriyas who behave like Brahmins. Who is going to rule? Who is more powerful?
#
Right? So Ramayana is obviously a Kshatriya text, but Uttarakanda, of Valmiki's Ramayana,
#
is a Brahmin text. It opens with Agastya saying, come Baba, I'll tell you, what do you want to know?
#
Right? And all Rama does, apart from banish his wife and kill Shambuka, is listen to stories
#
in Uttarakanda, right? Now Agastya, excuse me, from other backstories and side stories and others,
#
so it says Agastya is a very orthodox Brahmin, right? And up to that point, up to Uttarakanda,
#
Vasistha has been the Kula Guru, he has been the family priest of the Ikshavakus and he's a gentle
#
person, right? He's thoughtful, he's philosophical. Agastya is aggressively Brahmin, right? So the
#
stories that Agastya and all that, Agastya tells him who Ravana is and I was saying, Ravana has to
#
be elevated to be a worthy antagonist if Rama becomes God, right? So it's all about how bad
#
Ravana is. But this other thing of like, you as the king, it's a great power play. You are subservient
#
to the Brahmins, right? A Brahmin son has died, you go and find out what the problem is, right?
#
Now the fact that it's an untouchable, what is the name of the, oh, there's a beautiful Kannada
#
poem, Shudra Tapasvi, which is about this incident. And the fact that Rama goes without question or
#
anything, he just beheads Shambhuka, that's one very, very big problem. But that the Brahmin son
#
comes back to life is another big problem. And Rama is lauded for reviving the son of the Brahmin,
#
but nobody says anything about the Shudra Tapasvi who has just been killed. But it is a
#
Brahminization of the text. It is like, no, no, this story and all, everybody loves it,
#
it belongs to the Brahmins. It's really, so what are we going to do? It's now part of the text.
#
You know, Kamba is quite fantastic because he ends his Ramayana with the Pattabhishekam,
#
the return to Ayodhya and the Kauranesha. He says, after this, what happens? It hurts me terribly,
#
I can't tell you, please. And that's a wonderful way to say, I'm not going to deal with the parts
#
that really, really, really cast a very disparaging light on Rama and his behavior.
#
So, and of course, in Tulsi, the killing of Shambhuka is for Shambhuka's own good.
#
He achieves Moksha immediately. The killing of Ramana is for his own good. He achieves Moksha.
#
All these people that Rama has killed are suddenly liberated because they've died at the hands of God.
#
What's to question? All the bad actions, all the problematic actions suddenly become acts of mercy
#
and grace. Bhagwan ki kripa. Bhakti solves everything. Yes, it does, it does, it does.
#
Here's amusing that one of the great revelations in reading Tony Joseph's book and the other books
#
around it was this quote by David Reich, where he said that if you want to look for a large
#
population, look at the Han Chinese, they're a large population, but India doesn't have a
#
large population. Instead, it has a collection of many small populations. And the whole point was
#
that from the year 080 BC, whatever, before that, after the Aryans came for a couple of thousand
#
years, whatever the thing is, we were partying. Everybody was mingling with everybody. But from
#
around that time, from around 2100 years ago, a particular ideological strain within the
#
subcontinent won over from the Gangetic belt, which had caste seclusion and endogamy and all
#
of that happening and so on and so forth. And it strikes me that therefore, if I may speculate,
#
the late, those values could be reflected in some of these later versions of the Ramayana
#
when they're not there in Valmiki's original text. I love this thing about many small populations.
#
Look at us. If you look at Indians, nobody looks like anybody else. Anybody could be a Malayali,
#
anybody could be a Gujarati, anybody could be a Kashmiri, literally. So I'm hearing what you're
#
saying, but I think, I don't know if the epics are that old, that this moment would be reflected.
#
But Valmiki's Ramayana was about 500 BC to him. And the next versions that would have come up
#
would have been well after we were into this age of endogamy.
#
And 1200 would have come up, yeah. There you go. And Tulsidas, whatever, 1600.
#
Yeah, maybe. Okay, so this is another thing that I think is very, very important about Ramayana,
#
which Mahabharata does not have, is that Ramayana is able to absorb whatever it meets, whether it
#
is multiple populations, whether it is a Brahminical takeover, whether it is a Southern landscape.
#
It just seamlessly enters the text, right? The good and the bad.
#
Yeah. Well, I agree with Ramanujan. How can I disagree with Ramanujan? How can anybody disagree
#
with Ramanujan? Of course, they are meta Ramayanas, but they're also very culturally specific
#
Ramayanas, right? The fact that they speak to Valmiki's Ramayana is more intertextual than
#
meta-textual. Especially the lovely story that he tells us from Adhyatma Ramayana where Sita
#
says, have you heard of any Ramayana in which Sita does go, beautiful, right? Anyway, so the Ramayana
#
has, the word I usually use, the Ramayana has the generosity to absorb all of this. But today,
#
I think I want to use another word, which is elasticity, right? Now, Mahabharata, the
#
fundamental story and its implications do not change. Mahabharata stories get added on. Ramayana
#
story gets transformed. That is a huge difference. Is that the difference between capaciousness and
#
elasticity then? That the Mahabharata is capacious. Capacious and what's the other word? Elasticity,
#
like you said. So the Mahabharata then is capacious, that anything can fit inside that.
#
Whereas with Ramayana, you know, you use elasticity, which seems more precise in terms of.
#
Yeah, yeah. I guess it would be, except that capacious implies that there is a certain amount
#
of space, but it doesn't have the uncertainty of like, we don't know how much space we need,
#
but it'll just keep adding, adding, adding. That's the only problem I would have with capacious,
#
that it somehow implies that capacious has an object. Capacious is not in a capacious house,
#
capacious suitcase, capacious mind. The other word that people like Hiltabaital and all that use
#
very often for Mahabharata is encyclopedic, of course, but compendium. You know that and that
#
what Mahabharata says about itself is fantastic. What is here is everywhere, but what is not here
#
is nowhere else. Amazing, no? I mean, talk about like, do you want to know who I am? This is who
#
I am. That is very Wittgensteinian in a certain way. It is, all the rest is silence. Let's indulge
#
in our capacious appetite for beverages and take a quick break and after the break, we'll kind of
#
wrap it up. Okay, good, good, good, good. Long before I was a podcaster, I was a writer. In fact,
#
chances are that many of you first heard of me because of my blog, India Uncut, which was active
#
between 2003 and 2009 and became somewhat popular at the time. I love the freedom the form gave me
#
and I feel I was shaped by it in many ways. I exercise my writing muscle every day and was
#
forced to think about many different things because I wrote about many different things.
#
Well, that phase in my life ended for various reasons and now it is time to revive it. Only now
#
I'm doing it through a newsletter. I have started the India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com
#
where I will write regularly about whatever catches my fancy. I'll write about some of the
#
themes I cover in this podcast and about much else. So please do head on over to
#
indiancut.substack.com and subscribe. It is free. Once you sign up, each new installment that I write
#
will land up in your email inbox. You don't need to go anywhere. So subscribe now for free.
#
The India Uncut newsletter at indiancut.substack.com. Thank you.
#
Thank you. Welcome back to The Scene and the Unseen. I'm still chatting with Arshia Sattar.
#
If she's written about the epics for so many decades, it's not surprising that she has the
#
patience to sit through a recording of The Scene and the Unseen. So thank you for still being here.
#
My pleasure. As I said, you say Ramayana and I can talk for hours.
#
We could talk about Ramayana for hours, but I would really like my listeners to buy your
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books and check them out. Thank you. That's very sweet.
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Let's talk about that act of translation that you carried out. At one point, you have spoken
#
about the challenge of translation by saying, quote, even if we translate a classic from within
#
the same culture, we are never going to translate it from within the same time. The very notion of
#
a classic implies that while it may be removed in time from the reader, it still speaks with
#
relevance and meaning. Stop, quote. And among the many pitfalls, you point out something that
#
I actually noticed first time when I read what you wrote about it, where you said, quote, we have
#
all encountered translations of the Ramayana and the Mahabharata as well as the Iliad and the Odyssey
#
that are littered with these, thou's, wherefore's, and it would behove you, sire, even though these
#
translations were produced at a time long after such words and phrases fell out of common use.
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know, one, how you came to the task of translating at all.
#
Like in 1996, Valmiki's Ramayana, your abridged translation came out via Penguin.
#
You know, so had you translated before that, what made Penguin approach you?
#
And when you got down to the act of translating, what were the big challenges? Because, you know,
#
when we translate a contemporary work, and I've had episodes where I've spoken about translations
#
with Arunavasena and Shanta and Jerry in the recent episodes, and we'd all agree that languages are
#
so fundamentally different from each other that in a sense, it is an act of creation. You get the
#
essence of something and you create it. And that is challenging enough for a contemporary work.
#
But when you're taking an ancient work, you know, which is from, you know, a world removed,
#
not just in geography, but in time, it's just so, so what were the challenges like? How did you
#
set about learning how to get this job done? For my dissertation, I had to translate
#
vast tracts of Ramayana, all the Hanuman bits. And that's because, you know, it's the University
#
of Chicago. This is what they demand. If you're going to write about it, you please read it in
#
the original and show me that you've read it in the original. So that's where I started translating.
#
And Wendy, of course, was my dissertation advisor, but Raman was on my dissertation committee.
#
So I'd give them chapters to read. And after about two chapters, three chapters, Wendy was
#
really quick. I mean, I'd give her a chapter and within two days, she'd get back to me with
#
suggestions, questions, all like that. Raman would take a month to respond. And when you're
#
writing your dissertation, you're just like edgy, anxious all the time. And so after a couple of
#
months of this, and I always tell Wendy, I don't think he likes my work, you know, he's taking so
#
long. And she said, No, no, no, this is what he does. And after about two chapters, or maybe three,
#
so I'm halfway through my dissertation. And Ramanujan says to me, you should really consider
#
translation. I said, What do you mean? He said, No, you should translate the Ramayana. And I was
#
like, Oh, my God. And I went running back to Wendy and said, You know, Raman really doesn't
#
think I'm very smart. And she said, Why? So she said, so I said, because he told me to translate.
#
That means I'm not a scholar. I'm just a translator. This is when I was, you know,
#
2028 or 29. And I really at that time thought translation was for people, lesser beings,
#
you know, real people wrote books, and the rest of us translated. I still somehow believe that. I
#
mean, I think translation is not a secondary activity. It is. I mean, it is a secondary
#
activity, but not in terms of importance. It's a secondary activity in terms of time. So it was so
#
I can't say it was on my mind to translate Ramayana. But then I came back to India
#
in 1990. And shortly thereafter, in 92 or something, I get an email from Wendy saying,
#
No, no email, excuse me. There were no emails in 92. A letter from Wendy saying, I just was
#
approached by Penguin India to do a translation of the Kathasarit Sagara. And I said, No, you
#
should get in touch with my student Arshiya. And this is ironic, because when I left America,
#
Wendy said, What are you going to do next? And I said, Oh, I'm thinking about Kathasarit Sagara.
#
And she said, Oh, that's perfect for you. You know, it has the kind of stories that you like. And
#
so that was on my mind. And then David Davidar commissioned me to do Kathasarit Sagara. And then
#
shortly thereafter, soon after I'd finished the text, 94 or something, he got back in touch and
#
said, Will you do Ramayana? So now I realized that Kathasarit Sagara was actually a test.
#
So I was about 36. And it's because I was 36. I said, Of course, I'll do Ramayana.
#
If somebody asked me now, I probably would say no. And I thought I translated lots of it. But of
#
course, I'd only translated the Hanuman parts. But David said a very interesting thing. He said,
#
We want 700 pages. And I was like, Why 700 pages? You know, you have to abridge it to 700 pages.
#
And I said, That's a weird number. He said, No, we want a single volume. And that's what our binding
#
will hold. And I have the paperback edition. And I've been using it now for 30 years, just about.
#
And it bloody well, binding has stayed together, man. So that is lovely. The other thing that is
#
very important to remember about translations, and not simply abridged translations, but
#
translations in general, is that the more there are, the better it is for everybody. And Wendy
#
and Ramanujan both used to say that every generation needs its own translation. And that is
#
the dees and the daos and the bhuvs and all like that. At the same time, because you're translating
#
epic, and you're translating Ramayana, Ramayana, even in Sanskrit, has a slightly exalted register.
#
So this, you know, come on, man, where are you going, even though it is an entirely contemporary
#
idiom, is inappropriate for Ramayana. Mahabharata has much simpler Sanskrit. But it's still, you
#
know, it's, in Mahabharata, it is much more clear how the epic is composed, because it's a very
#
simple meter, the shloka. It's like the iambic in English, right? So anybody can add to it.
#
Ramayana is much more poetic. It has many, many more complex meters, even though it's predicated
#
on the fact that shoka became shloka. Valmiki announced his intention to write in this new
#
meter. But, you know, so I knew that I had to keep it exalted. But it's very hard for a 20th
#
century or 21st century reader to read with felicity when there's the and now and behove
#
and all that, right? So what I decided, so it can't be casual, but it must be readable.
#
And the other big decision that I made was that I was going to, and it was all because of the word
#
dharma, because I said, I'm not going to translate this word. If you are going to spend 700 pages
#
with this word, you're going to understand what it implies, right? Because nobody can translate
#
dharma. In fact, the van Boyten and the just beautiful, beautiful Mahabharata translation,
#
I think, is seriously flawed by that he uses the law. He translates dharma as the law. And the
#
reason why he picked that word is because you get so many adjectives, you get legal, you get legalistic.
#
It's not the law, man. I mean, it is, but it is hardly restrained or contained by that by that
#
word. So that so I didn't want to translate dharma. And I also didn't want to translate
#
rakshasa, because the only English equivalents really are demon and ogre. And those are rubbish.
#
Those just don't work, excuse me. So you make those kinds of decisions before you translate.
#
The other thing, of course, is that you cannot translate a text without knowing it. You have to
#
know what the text is saying. You have to know what the voice of the text is. You have to know
#
where you agree, where you disagree, all that you have to know before. And in the case of Ramana,
#
you cannot translate Ramana without knowing Mahabharata, and vice versa, because they're
#
companion texts. And very often, they elaborate on each other. And in very, very interesting ways,
#
they contradict each other, they not contradict, make counter arguments, you know, it's not like,
#
oh, they're so silly, they're contradicting. It's like, no, they're actually challenging
#
what the other text has said. So you have to read. That is the biggest challenge, really,
#
with translating. The people think they can just sit down, say, oh, I like this book, I'll translate.
#
No, what else has this person written? What else has been written at that time? What is really going
#
on? And because these texts are so far away in time, you really have to imagine, of course,
#
we have lots of historical information, but beyond that, you have to imagine, like, you know, what
#
were they wearing? What did their homes look like? You have to, not simply must you internalize the
#
text, but the text must internalize you. You have to be in it. You have to hear it. You have to feel
#
it. It's very visceral, actually, the process of translating. So the other thing I did to prepare
#
myself to translate was I read as many translations as I possibly could read in English because I
#
wanted to see what was possible. And equally so, I wanted to know what I was not going to do.
#
And to my great surprise, I found, you know, it was the standard thing for us in the 80s,
#
especially as snotty little graduate students. Oh, all the colonial translations are rubbish.
#
And who's going to read Rav T. Fritz translation? They're fantastic. They're absolutely fantastic.
#
I mean, he does the iambic pentameter and all like that, but they're much more accurate than
#
you think they are. And we were so wrapped up in ideas of Orientalism and, you know,
#
that colonialism is only bad. Of course, colonialism is only bad. But Orientalism so led
#
our ways of approaching these texts that we ignored these translations. And they were mighty
#
fine. I mean, of course, they are problematic. Of course, it's an archaic idiom, but in terms
#
of accuracy and sense of the original, that for me was a surprise to find a friend in a colonial
#
work. And then it's prose rather than verse, my translation. And that I felt that was playing to
#
my own strengths, that I'm not a poet, I'm a good prose writer. And I felt that Ramana's Kavya,
#
but it is fundamentally an epic and a narrative text. So I felt that I could justify the prose
#
translation. It takes a lot of mental prep, you know, to do it. But once you get going,
#
there's nothing, there's nothing more fun and more relaxing than translating it. It is marvelous.
#
But then what happens is you finish the whole text. And it's only when you get to the end of the text
#
that you are truly secure in the voice that you have found. So then you go back to the beginning
#
and do the whole damn thing again, which is another kind of exercise. And that is, it's also
#
really a test of, a test of character, I would say, because when you do your own second pass,
#
you have to get rid of lots of things that you're really attached to, you know, you have to say,
#
no, it's got to go, it's got to go. So yeah, it, I love, I love translating. I really, really do.
#
Yeah, I can see how much you love it on your face right now. And this also sort of
#
interested me when you wrote quote, in translating Indian classics for Indian readers, I'm not
#
compelled to explain concepts like dharma, karma, purushastra, ashrat, etc. in detail. However, I am
#
still compelled to negotiate such terms as Rama being described as a bull among men, and Sita
#
having the gate of a female elephant. The ideas of bravery and beauty implied by such formal like
#
Sanskrit phases are as foreign to the contemporary Indian as dharma might be to a Western reader.
#
Stop quote. And one of the things I kind of really enjoyed was the various ways in which you have
#
kept some of the color in the prose, but not made it exotic. And I just want to read out these
#
examples for my listeners, because the moment I do this, it will interrupt listening to this podcast
#
and go out and buy your books. One is where you talk about Dasrata and Kaikeyi. And this is when
#
Kaikeyi is throwing a fit after, you know, he's announcing that he's going to be a poet. And
#
Rama is going to be the king. And you write quote, he caressed her gently with deep humility as a
#
tusker might stroke his mate who had who has been injured by a hunter's arrow. And then later you
#
say, he looked at her as a deer would look at a tigress. He heaved a great sigh and fell to the
#
floor like a great serpent made powerless by a spell. The great king protector of the earth
#
wept like a man who has lost everything, and so on and so forth. And I can't believe you picked
#
this is one of my favorite passages. It's beautiful. Especially the Tusker one. Yeah, yeah, it's so lovely.
#
It just brings that whole thing to life. Like he's alarm, he's panic, you know, she's lying on the
#
ground in the anger room. Yeah. And then they had a special anger room, which is kind of
#
mind blowing in Bombay. Our apartments are so small. Exactly. I guess we have anger apartments,
#
I guess, in that case. And then Hanuman's description of Ravana as well, or your description
#
of Ravana when Hanuman comes upon, where you write, Hanuman came upon him suddenly and saw him
#
asleep upon that dazzling bed with his breath hissing like angry snakes. The monkey was startled
#
and left back in fright. He fled up a flight of stairs onto a race platform and settled down there
#
to get a better look at the sleeping Rakshasa. As Ravana exhaled in his sleep, his breath seemed to
#
fill the entire palace. His golden crown, slightly awry, was studded with pearls and jewels and his
#
face was illuminated by his glittering earrings. His broad chest was smeared with sandal paste and
#
his exquisite necklace added to his blazing splendor and so on and so forth. And later,
#
there's this great passage where Lakshmana tells Sugriva, you are a base and ungrateful liar monkey.
#
You made use of Rama's skills and you have not repaid him and so on and so forth. And what I
#
find that you did beautifully is that the language has enough limbo and energy that I'm really enjoying
#
it. But at the same time, nothing is so exotic that it doesn't speak to me at all. And this fine
#
balance that you seem to have managed would not have come in the first draft, right? Like you said,
#
you've had to go back, murder your darlings, do all of that. That's another one of my favorite
#
passages. And this is actually the monkey looking at the Rakshasa is drama at its best. I mean,
#
Valmiki is at his most magnificent in Sundarakanda, right? The descriptions are exquisite.
#
And I think that's another reason it's called Sundarakanda. But here you have this mythical
#
creature, two mythical creatures, right? The Rakshasa and the flying monkey. But Hanuman is
#
acting exactly like a monkey. He went and looked and he got terrified. He scrambled up the pillar
#
and then he's looking. So there's a naturalism of the monkey and the sort of supra naturalism
#
of the Rakshasa. It's amazing. And the text holds both together with such incredible comfort and
#
such ease. So lots of the beauty is, of course, Valmiki. But I loved, I just so enjoyed translating
#
Sundarakanda. And I enjoyed also in Sundarakanda, when he sees Sita, when he thinks he's
#
burnt Lanka. Oh no, he can't find Sita or something. And he goes through this thing, Hanuman like,
#
oh, if I don't find her, what will happen? I'll go back. Rama will be so sad, he will die.
#
Lakshmana will be so sad, he will die. Then Sugriva will look at him and he will die. And then all the
#
monkeys will jump off the cliff. Oh my God, what shall I do? So you know, this is a magnificent
#
monkey. This is a monkey unlike any other monkey. But Hanuman is simultaneously wise and also monkey
#
mind, a real chatterer, you know, like he can't stop himself from having bad thoughts. And he talks
#
himself out of them. And it's just like, who are you Valmiki, who has been able to do this? It is
#
just superb. And I mean, Mahabharata is what it is. But this is just fab. Yeah, complete boss man.
#
You also write about the problem of hyperbole, like you write quote, what then of the grand and
#
extended hyperbole that gives epics that the distinctive flavor, warriors are as large as
#
mountains, kings give away hundreds of thousands of millions of cows, gold and silver are as common
#
as salt and pepper, everything is larger than life, and so on and so forth. And your solution
#
to this was quote, once again, the theory is simple, but the practice is not a translation
#
depends on evocations, echoes and resonances. These are generated by the translator and nurtured
#
in a sense, by the reader, stop quote, and you elaborate upon this, and this is, you know, part
#
of your introductory essay to Valmiki's Ramayana, which everyone should have. So everyone who is
#
listening to this is definitely going to read this anyway. But my question here is that then
#
there is also this conflict you would face as a translator, that on the one hand, as modern
#
readers, so to say, we have been we have imbibed a sort of a sense of modern values, such as that
#
too much flamboyance is a bad thing, you do want to murder your darlings, you want the prose to be
#
transparent, as you've pointed out yourself in that earlier passage, you know, show don't tell,
#
for example, you know, don't put too many adjectives, let verbs and nouns do all of the talking.
#
And yet the original is not written quite like that. So how do you negotiate this difficult space?
#
You don't want to compromise on everything that the original is doing. But at the same time,
#
it must be like, you know, you don't, you also want to come up with something that is independently
#
good writing on its own. Yes, all of the above. But you yourself having read Ramayana, this my
#
translation, you ease the reader into the differences, you know, you ease them into the
#
fact that this is actually very exotic, not simply if you're an American, but even for an Indian.
#
And very soon, you'll say Dasaratha is 60,000 years old. Okay, cool. He's 60,000 years old.
#
Rama rule for 20,000 years, you've reached the end of the text is like, okay, it means 20 years or
#
whatever it is. But the yeah, it is hyperbolic it. And that's one of the great pleasures of the epic
#
that it is like us and yet not like us, you know. So by the time the reader gets to the end of the
#
text, what is the problem here if you're persuaded. So this is this is sort of why I think the measure
#
of the Ramayana is actually in Hanuman. And the Mahabharata doesn't have a measure like that.
#
Because if you can believe that a monkey flies and speaks perfect Sanskrit and does all this,
#
what is the problem with believing anything else, right? And Hanuman, he enters the text,
#
and Sugriva says, they go and meet those fellows, I think they might have come to harm me.
#
And he takes on the form of a bhikshu. And he goes and Lakshmana says to him also,
#
how come you speak such good Sanskrit? He didn't say how come your Sanskrit is very good.
#
Then he turns back into his monkey form. Neither Rama nor Lakshmana are at all disturbed,
#
right? That this is happening in front of them. Now, if they have suspended their disbelief,
#
how can you not? So Hanuman is accepted as a magnificent monkey right through the Ramayana,
#
except Sita again, right? Because when she sees him, she says, Oh my God, there's a monkey,
#
I must be dreaming monkeys don't speak Sanskrit. Oh, monkeys in a dream. It's a bad omen.
#
Something must have happened to Rama. And then he starts to tell her Rama story. So again,
#
it is Sita who actually, in a weird way, breaks the fourth wall, not by addressing us, but saying
#
what we have not bothered to say, you know, 100 pages ago, 200 pages ago, like, what is this,
#
man? How is this monkey speaking in Sanskrit? But it is absorbed yet again, and we continue
#
as ever before. Like I was teaching to American students once, and that passage about Ravana is
#
like, so charismatic, so powerful, so attractive. And Hanuman actually says, Oh my God, I hope I
#
know what Rama is up against, because this is something special. So I was talking about how
#
charismatic Ravana was. And because Ravana was so charismatic, there can be this suspicion
#
about what Sita did while she was imprisoned in Lanka. And so that fellows, the townspersons,
#
ugly whispers about, you know, did she really stay chaste? It's because Ravana is as magnificent
#
as he is. And this American girl puts up her hand and says, but he's a monster. And I was like,
#
why is he a monster? And she said, he has 10 heads and 20 arms. I'd completely forgotten that.
#
I'd completely forgotten that Ravana is actually monstrous in that he's very big and that he has,
#
you know, more heads and more arms than any human being should have.
#
Think of the incredible foreplay. You know, that's surely a feature, not a bug, right?
#
Well, think of it this way, actually. Think of how many women he could have at the same time.
#
But that's a male-centric point of view. I'm going with a female-centric point of view.
#
Come on, yeah, individuation.
#
But this business of the monstrous Ravana, the 10 heads and the 20 arms,
#
is beautifully worked out in Andhra puppetry, right? Because there are two Ravana puppets.
#
One is Ravana, the magnificent, and the other one is battle Ravana. So battle Ravana has got
#
these 20 arms and 10 heads. And I think, well, maybe that's what it was, that when he is
#
himself in Lanka and all like that, he has one head and two arms. But when he needs that extra
#
power, like when he has to kidnap Sita, maybe that's when he manifests in all his glory.
#
So that's all cool stuff. I mean, that's really exciting. And I think also, Ravana,
#
more than Mahabharata, and despite Raman and Sagar, it really calls upon us to suspend our
#
disbelief and to really enter a world that is not ours. And I think that's why children love it.
#
That's why people think of it as, oh, it's a fairy tale. You know, I mean, there's the hands
#
we were talking earlier about structuralism, the prince and the princess, and there's a wicked
#
stepmother, and the prince has to go into exile. And when he's in exile, like a demon comes and
#
takes his wife away. And then he has to make friends with magical animals, and they go to an
#
island, and they rescue the princess, and they bring her back. Of course, it's a fairy tale,
#
right? But it's not, because when you put karma and dharma, and the magic animal is Hanuman,
#
and Rama is dealing with moral issues, and Sita is remaining devoted, then it is Ramayana. It is
#
not Ramayana without these things. And so also, when I teach Indian students, they'll say, but ma'am,
#
is it true? And I'm like, is it true? Yeah, I mean, it's possible that there was a prince who was
#
exiled into the forest. It's possible his wife was taken away from him. It's possible he fought
#
a battle to get her back. But that is not Ramayana. Ramayana is the monkey who flies,
#
who speaks Sanskrit. It is the king who ruled for 60,000 years. It is warriors as big as mountains.
#
This is Ramayana. Yeah. And so it is literally true. It is not factually true. And I want it to be
#
a piece of literature, because it is such an exquisite feat of the human imagination,
#
of the storytelling imagination. How cool is that? Much more important than it, you know,
#
like this is Ayodhya, and this is Chitrakuta, and this is where, and the other thing, of course,
#
like is it true? So many villages in India, right, they'll have like a little kund, a little pond,
#
and you know, Sita was very thirsty, and so Lakshmana shot an arrow, and this is the pond,
#
or this is where they stayed the night. Everybody wants Ramayana to be in their backyard.
#
Everybody wants it close to them. So that's the magic of the text also, that again, the generosity,
#
the elasticity of the text, is that it was here. It happened in my backyard. They were so close to
#
me. And if it is true, we diminish that possibility of it belonging to everyone. It's because it is
#
emotionally true that it belongs to us all, you know. So I was recently watching RRR with a friend,
#
and at one point, you know, when that whole bridge sequence happens where they are... After you see
#
the movie, huh? Yeah, okay, there's a famous sequence where all kinds of mad things happen
#
when they rescue a little boy in the water, and they're doing things with ropes and all of that,
#
and then they're running underwater, and at the point they start running underwater in slow motion,
#
the person with me just burst out laughing like a maniac, and I was like, why are you laughing?
#
This is our cinema. You know, yahi toh hai. You know, even though I'm much more a world cinema
#
kind of person, but regardless, you know, this is our cinema. And I had done an episode a while back,
#
The Loneliness of the Indian Man, on how men are trapped by patriarchy, but leaving that aside,
#
my guest Nikhil Taneja spoke about Bollywood, and he said, see, there is a reason that we are
#
the only film industry where the main actor is called hero. Yeh film ka hero hai. Right? Because
#
we don't need a Marvel franchise, you know, we don't need superhero films, because in all these
#
Hindi films, what are our actors doing? What is Sunny Deol doing? What is, you know, Shah Rukh Khan
#
doing? They're all heroes only, right? And I wonder if this continuous tradition coming down from our
#
epics is kind of responsible for the suspension of this belief, where we do not have that Western
#
need in a sense to pay fealty to realism, to say ki this is realism, anything that is fantastic is
#
another genre, there's another word for it. But these are our stories, man, this is a shit that
#
happens, merges with reality, it's fine, it is what it is. No, I'm sure you're right, I mean, for us,
#
I mean, the gods are so close, or like, the potential for natural laws to rupture
#
is always there. I think that's great. I think it makes it a richer world to occupy, rather than
#
one that is entirely determined by El Nino or, you know, other scientific, semi scientific things.
#
No, yeah, I mean, I was thinking also that, like, talk about suspension of this belief, look at the
#
songs in Indian movies, anybody can break into song. And every woman falls in love with a toxic
#
guy who's stalking her. That's also suspension of this belief. It is, it is indeed, it is, it is.
#
Yeah. But that's why you should see Pathan, because it's so clever. Shah Rukh Khan is super,
#
super, super heroes in this, right? He could do anything. And John Abraham also, right? So
#
there's two of them. So it's a bit marvelous in that sense. But the sophistication with which the
#
self reflexivity is handled is, and, you know, reflexive is also an element in our storytelling
#
and the metterness. Ramana and Mahabharata both metter because it starts with Samga,
#
it's not just a frame. It's some guy telling you, I will tell you what happened, then that guy
#
appears in the story, then he questions himself, and then other people question him. What is going
#
on exactly? I mean, we were talking about literary criticism earlier. This is postmodernism with a
#
big capital P, if that's the way you want to think about it. But it is also a very unique
#
sort of indigenous mode of text production, which is unlike anything you see in the West, right?
#
Oh, it's, yeah. You're the second woman in two days to tell me to watch Pathan. Shreyana Bhattacharya
#
was the other one. We did an episode together and she's written that great book, of course,
#
looking at Indian women's loneliness through the lens of their fanhood for Shah Rukh. And
#
regular listeners of the podcast will know that I am not a fan of Shah Rukh Khan's acting. But,
#
yeah, maybe, who knows, one day I might suspend. I'm not a fan of Shah Rukh, but after this, I was
#
like, okay. Okay. Yeah, I'm probably going to watch your next movie too. Life is short. I have such a
#
big list of films to watch. Who knows if I will get here. What you also did interestingly is that,
#
one, you're translating these works for the modern reader, and two, you're then translating
#
them for children. You have a Ramayana for children, a Mahabharata for children, and again,
#
there, the prose is both invisible and lively at the same time. You know, it's just very beautiful
#
storytelling. So, tell me about, you know, how you got there, what, you know, I'm so intrigued.
#
Like earlier, you said I'm a translator. I'm not a writer. That, of course, is rubbish because this
#
is all writing, right? And you're polishing your craft all the way through this. Yes, that is true.
#
That is true. Tell me about this process. Tell me about what this challenge meant for you and so on.
#
Again, I mean, to play to my own strengths, I wanted to translate for the older young reader,
#
you know, like the 10 to 12-year-old. And in, for Ramayana, I was very clear that I wanted it to be
#
a book that an older child could read by herself, right? Perhaps with a little help from the parent,
#
and that an older child might read to her younger sibling, right? So, that, for me, the challenge
#
there, which was actually very good as a writing exercise, I had to limit my vocabulary, right,
#
that don't use, use the same words more. You know, when we write for adults, we are so self-conscious
#
about using the same word many times. I don't too often or too close to each other. So, for children,
#
it was, I felt it was different. The other thing I felt as remembering myself as a young reader,
#
how exciting it is suddenly to find a word like nin kab poop, you know? It's like, oh, what is this?
#
Because it's a strange set of sounds. It's also a funny word. It's big. So, and it has poop in it.
#
And it has poop in it. Three for three. You know, yes. So, that was the challenge.
#
And it has poop in it. Three for three. You know, yes. So, also to introduce slightly more difficult
#
words every now and then, you know. So, that was the intent of Ramayana. I was also very, very sure
#
with Ramayana that I wasn't going to cancel the ending, that we have to deal with Sita's banishment.
#
And a 12-year-old or a 14-year-old is old enough to understand that this is disappointing, to put it mildly.
#
What might have been going on? And they're old enough to think these things through, and if they're not,
#
there's a parent or a teacher or something, you know? And with Mahabharata, it's a little bit different.
#
But, you know, after Ramayana was published and all these interviews, like, what is your message?
#
Like, I don't have any message. Why do we assume that only adults read for pleasure? Right?
#
Children also read for pleasure. And if you think that these are tales that contain morality,
#
that have a message, you tell your children. It's not my job to do this, right? So, I'm here to give them
#
a very, very, very accurate representation of what the big story is, right? And one of the great
#
pleasures for doing Ramayana and Mahabharata was to be able to use phrases and images and all
#
from my own translation. So they're really, they're getting a sense of what the Sanskrit might be like.
#
So again, it's a register that is, I don't want to sound vain, and I don't mean to sound vain,
#
but the register is more lyrical in Ramayana, you know? That it's not like reading Percy Jackson,
#
who is, you know, I mean, the same kind of thing, some superhero type fellow.
#
Look, I don't want to be too critical, but Percy Jackson is no Valmiki.
#
No, he is not. No, no, no, no, no.
#
I'm kidding. I'm kidding. Sorry, Percy.
#
Sorry, Percy, really. But it's, and I really was, in my mind, writing back at, writing against other popular
#
children's versions of Ramayana, which are so holier than thou, so sanctimonious.
#
And so also what I wanted to do with Ramayana is write it in such a way that children recognize it
#
as a fairy tale. Make them into structuralists while they're 10 years old. Let them see that they
#
know this story already, you know? And then with Mahabharata, I just said, I thought I had to pitch
#
it a little bit older, because again, I didn't want to compromise the moral complexity, the dilemmas,
#
the heroism. Mahabharata was complicated because so many people are having, as they say, children out
#
of wedlock. And there are so many illicit and illegitimate relationships. I just say a beautiful
#
son was born to them. Also the violence. So there's a couple of places with Bhima where I keep the
#
violence when he kills Bakasura and all that, but otherwise not. And I also very much wanted to make
#
Duryodhana heroic. So I think that in my Mahabharata, the tragic relationship becomes Duryodhana and
#
Karna. Both men of valor, both, they're almost Shakespearean characters. They have one tragic
#
flaw and that undermines them, but otherwise, they're fantastic. And I also wanted to make
#
Yudhishthira, which I believe, as everybody does, he is the philosopher king. He really is. And
#
whether or not, I mean, this is too much for the kids, but in my own mind, I still think about,
#
is it appropriate for a Kshatriya king to be a philosopher? Is he doomed to failure? You know,
#
because he's a Kshatriya. I mean, he's got God. Yudhishthira is a terrible warrior. You know,
#
people are always protecting him. Like they have to fight around him, sorry, so that he doesn't
#
get hurt. And so Mahabharata was a lot darker. And there also, there are all those kind of
#
interesting choices that he has to make with regard to his dharma, like Ashwathama, the elephant,
#
all of that. How can you justify that? How? Yeah. But it's so, so like, okay, so in Mahabharata,
#
he tells this lie, a half lie, and his chariot sinks. His chariot is to float above. And so for a
#
child, that's a lovely story. Or whatever, that there is a consequence to lying, which is usually
#
not pleasant. And so in so many ways, Mahabharata is more literal than Ramana. And that works
#
very well for younger readers, but do not compromise on who are the good guys and who are the bad
#
guys. And also this thing of like, a 12, 14 year old is developing a sense of right and wrong.
#
They're able to make their own judgment. Instead of me saying, Duryodhana was an honorable king,
#
and those things don't need to be said. We should do a whole podcast where you're talking just like
#
that. Wouldn't that be fun? No, I enjoyed doing the books very much. And I think somewhere,
#
somewhere inside me, I felt that this was like giving back to children's literature, everything
#
that I got. Such a lovely thought. Tell me about teaching, because you mentioned that you've
#
taught it to foreign students, to Indian students and all of that. And I imagine that just as in
#
every time, in every age, readers of Ramayana are putting as much back in as they're getting out.
#
I imagine that even this process of teaching your students is also in a sense, perhaps a process of
#
learning yourself. Because they would be full of ideas and coming at you from all kinds of different
#
angles. And you would also be, I think, getting an enhanced understanding of the text and perhaps
#
your own earlier understanding of the text and therefore of yourself. 100%. In fact, other people
#
will say this also, that you don't realize that you're writing a book, even in the class, because
#
what you keep returning to, that is going to be your next book. So it's very difficult to write a
#
book without a classroom, actually, because that's the first test of your ideas. People respond in
#
different ways. With something like Ramayana, they'll tell you a story that you've never heard
#
before, which is from their village. So it's really actually wonderful to teach, not at like Ashoka
#
and, you know, Kriya and Jindala. It's to teach at FDII. It's to teach at Azeem Premji. It's to teach at NID.
#
Because your classroom, it's got kids from all over the country. So people are responding to you in
#
very different ways. And they know Ramayana already. Metropolitan kids don't.
#
Do you remember any interesting responses? You remember any interesting ways in which people responded?
#
One guy got really upset with me. He said, you are talking about my god. And I said, I hope I haven't
#
been disrespectful. He said, no, no, it's not that. He said that, why are you not telling us that he's
#
god? So I said, because he's your god and not mine. And I think there is a place within the Ramayana
#
to love it, to believe in it, without having to believe that Rama is god. So he was very agitated.
#
One of the, again, this response from this American girl about Ravana being monstrous, which I had
#
completely forgotten. My disbelief was so completely suspended, you know, that I didn't.
#
Yeah. But I've stopped teaching over the last four years because the classroom is no longer a safe
#
space. You know, things you say can be taken out of context, especially in the two years of
#
pandemic, you know, Zoom stuff, like they broadcast, I mean, they have to put it online.
#
And once it's online, anybody other than your students can see it. And it's just, it's too fraught,
#
you know. And I mean, I used to joke like, oh, if I don't have a classroom, I can't write a book.
#
It's coming true. I'm trying desperately to think through this book. And I don't have a place where I
#
can test it out. So it's, yeah. No, teaching is, I was told recently to not call myself a teacher.
#
I have to call myself an educator. Who told you this? Because educator means I'm also learning.
#
But teacher means I'm only teaching. And I was like, oh my god. I mean, really, surely it's, I mean,
#
I know what's going on in a classroom without giving myself a new label. But yeah.
#
Let's talk about this now. Let's talk about this because I was sort of wondering that could a book
#
like Yogantha, for example, have been published today? And I'm not sure of what the answer to that is,
#
right? Like I, in fact, quoted from Yogantha in a column of mine and got threats and all of that
#
for that, you know. So, and when you would have started getting interested in the Ramayana,
#
when you would have started, you know, translating it, writing about it, the times were a little bit different.
#
Today, our politics has become so vociferous, so angry, so reductive of these great books of ours,
#
you know, that it is almost dangerous to sort of venture into that territory in any case.
#
Like I came across this obnoxious tweet by that plagiarist fool, Rajiv Malhotra, where he was
#
writing about you. And he said, oh, she's a Muslim, married to a Hindu and blah, blah, blah.
#
And I was just face palm. I mean, it's like, because that may be better or worse.
#
The fact that I've married to a Hindu. No, it's completely irrelevant. Yeah.
#
But the fact that somebody is saying that is an indicator of the times that we live in.
#
Somebody with a pretty large online following is saying that is indicative of these times.
#
And, you know, and I mean, I don't even know if Penguin would have come to you to ask you to translate,
#
you know, a 36 year old Muslim woman, would they have asked you to translate?
#
At the time, it was a big feather in their cap. At the time. Yeah, at the time.
#
But now it's not a feather. Yeah. No, I mean, of course it.
#
I live on tenterhooks, actually. I mean, the good days and bad days.
#
But I'm always like, yeah, I can honestly, honestly say I've never been disrespectful.
#
I probably love Ramayana more than most Hindus do, certainly more than most Hindu women do.
#
But that is of no consequence because somebody, I mean, somebody can get offended by anything.
#
You know, even if you didn't, so what? Right. Exactly. Also true.
#
But in fact, I do. So I will say this. I don't change what I'm saying.
#
I'm still saying the same things. I'm still, as you can see, as you know, writing the same kinds of books.
#
But people are publishers and all that are responding differently.
#
I mean, not that they're saying take this out or take that out or anything, but everything's a bit subdued.
#
You know, they're not launched with the sort of, in fact, the publishers don't launch the books at all.
#
It's my friends who do, you know, like Shoma would say, oh, I'll interview you for something or I'll do a podcast or something.
#
You know, so all the publicity comes from really people like yourself who believe that,
#
no, this has a place in public discourse.
#
And, you know, but I'm so I'm writing more and more now for magazines,
#
which is also kind of a good place to test out ideas, but nothing comes back at you, you know.
#
And anytime anything is published online, I just do not look at the comments because who needs to know what Gandhapana is out there?
#
You know, there's something truly egregious. Some friend will say, you know, lie low for a bit.
#
Somebody said something really quite obnoxious.
#
And then I get agitated for three days. And then what do you do? I mean, I don't know how to do anything else.
#
I know how to read and write. This is this is my livelihood. This is my profession.
#
This is my vocation, you know, and I'm too old now to change. Can't teach an old dog new tricks.
#
I don't want to give these guys ideas, but it strikes me that the RSS should look upon you as a poster child
#
because they have forever been saying that Hinduism is not just a religion.
#
It is a culture. Everybody reads a Ramayana. And I'm like that, you know, you.
#
Please. Yes, kindly. Yeah.
#
But long, long ago in the first round of the aggressive Hindu right,
#
which was in the sort of mid 90s when I was translating Ramayana.
#
So it was at some party in Bangalore. I just got this perverse pleasure.
#
Like people say, what do you do? And I say, I translate Ramayana.
#
Conversation stopper. Right. But one person said to me, very good.
#
More Muslims should be like you, you know, translate Ramayana.
#
I said, no, you know what? More Hindus should be like me and translate Ramayana.
#
I was very proud of that. I'm very proud of that.
#
Because usually this is what you think of when you're at home in bed.
#
I wish I had said this, but it came out very nicely at the time.
#
And now the whole world knows you said it so well. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah.
#
So, you know, moving on from all your work on the Ramayana and all of that,
#
I am also fascinated by something that you did that I feel incredibly jealous of,
#
which is a podcast that you managed to record with Girish Kannaad before he passed tragically.
#
And which is beautiful, which is like a kind of an oral history.
#
It's a monument in itself. I'll link it from the show notes.
#
And I have been saying for a long time that we need to do more of these oral histories,
#
that we need to talk to people, we need to capture memories, not just famous people, you know,
#
like what I recommend to everyone is just sit with your parents with a recorder one by one
#
and just capture their stories and maybe something will peel away in the way that you look at them.
#
And so what was that experience like?
#
I know it was heartbreaking because the last recording you said was on a Saturday.
#
He passed on a Monday. But, you know, what was that experience like?
#
And are you planning to do any more of those? I really feel you should.
#
I completely agree with you first that we have to get more of these conversations going.
#
And as you said, it doesn't have to be all famous people.
#
It's elders because we are losing living memory, you know, partition.
#
I mean, this is literally we have like maybe another year to talk to people who live through partition.
#
And I think they're important also because we need to produce a counter narrative in this time.
#
And we are going to be able to do that with living memory by talking to people from previous generations
#
who remember a different India, who created a different India, you know.
#
So it's a political imperative, I think, that we do this.
#
Also, it's a great pleasure. And, you know, as we were speaking earlier outside, a podcast is there forever.
#
It's a resource that anybody can access it for a variety of reasons.
#
And it's ironic. It bestows a kind of immortality, which certainly Girish Karnad deserves and has already.
#
Yes. So the Karnad podcast was fortuitous in some sense.
#
We've been friends for many years. We became friends when he came to the University of Chicago.
#
And wrote Nagamandala there. And I was his stage manager for the play.
#
So, of course, it's my favorite play. And his family had been quite keen that we do a series of interviews with him.
#
But it started three years before he died. And he was like, no, no, no, no, I'm not interested.
#
He was very grouchy. And he at the time, he kept saying that he had nothing to say
#
because he was writing the second part of his memoir.
#
And then I think he couldn't write the memoir because he just didn't have the energy.
#
And so and I kept saying, let's do this, let's do this. No, no, don't bother me, don't bother me.
#
And one day he called me and he said, I'm ready to do it. I said, OK, when?
#
And he said, June 1st or May 1st or something like that.
#
And so with my colleague, Anmul Tikku, who is a very close friend of the family because he's Raghu Karnad's friend.
#
So I thought we would be a very good combination because Girish is comfortable with Anmul and with me.
#
And Anmul is a filmmaker. So also like yourself, he has these magic skills.
#
So I've seen that machine before, that very same recorder.
#
So he was going to record. And of course, I mean, how could you just record if you're talking to Girish Karnad?
#
You enter the conversation.
#
So we had this plan that we would get him to talk about the second half of his life, the part that's not in the memoir.
#
Did we have a choice? No. Girish said, I want to talk about this.
#
I was like, OK. But also, Girish was always very organized and in his own words, very meticulous.
#
So he would ask, what are we going to talk about tomorrow?
#
And we would say X, Y or Z. And he would say, no, not that, this, this or yes.
#
And then he would be prepared with what he wanted to say.
#
And he was on an oxygen machine.
#
So it was very hard to record because, you know, the machine beeping and his troubled breathing and all that.
#
But he would always be ready for us at exactly the time we would come.
#
Five o'clock was the time and he would speak for an hour and then he would get tired.
#
He's OK. I need to stop for a little while.
#
And so for like maybe 10 or 15 minutes, we'd stop and then he would come back.
#
So we would get about two hours with him every day.
#
And it turned out completely different from what he wanted and certainly very different from what we wanted.
#
But it's quite fantastic because he talks about everything, why he wrote his plays, which plays he likes.
#
He talks about his colleagues. He talks about his peers.
#
He talks about his political activism and Anmol.
#
He really pulled it all together, you know, into different episodes that are thematic.
#
Amazing what he did is really, really probably one of the great edit jobs.
#
Because, you know, when something is messy and you make sense out of it, you're a really good editor.
#
You know, it's easy to fix something that is already good.
#
But it was, I mean, honestly, I've never listened to the podcast and I don't think I can because it's too close.
#
Yeah, but I mean, thank you for doing it service to the world.
#
And, you know, before I let you go, I'm going to take you through this ritual
#
where I ask all my guests at the end of the episode to recommend books, films, music that they absolutely love,
#
enthusiastically love and want to share with everyone.
#
And you're not allowed to say Ramayana by Valmiki because that's understood.
#
No, no, we're not allowed to say that. No, no.
#
Music kind of blew Miles Davis. Everybody has to has to know that.
#
Yeah, everybody has to know that.
#
Anything but Miles Davis, really, but kind of blew for sure.
#
Did you just say I am Elena Ferrante? Is it a big reveal?
#
I said I am because I was going to say something else and then suddenly I thought of Ferrante.
#
I'm tempted to just keep this made up.
#
I am Elena Ferrante. Actually, let me put your mind at rest.
#
But there's also a book I think that it's called The Door by Magda Szabo, who's a Hungarian writer who
#
and fortunately this is translated into English. I couldn't have read it otherwise.
#
But I think it's a I used to think it was simply a book that Indians should read because it's about a writer's relationship
#
with a woman that she employs to clean her house, but is also profoundly metaphorical now about a fascist state.
#
And so I would. Yeah, it's on my mind a lot.
#
Yeah, movie. Peter Brooks Mahabharata.
#
Which, by the way, I am, you know, one of a small legion of fans of your career. You must be familiar with his work.
#
He he he wrote the script for Peter Brooks Mahabharata and for Louis Bonior's last three films before he died,
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which are masterpieces. Yeah.
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So Discrete Charm of the Bourgeoisie, Phantom of Liberty and That Obscure Object of Desire.
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And he co-wrote the screenplay for The Unbearable Lightness of Being, which Philip Kaufman made into a great film.
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Yes. I'm like, what a screenwriter. Who is this guy? Who is this guy? Who is this guy?
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That Mahabharata script is masterful. Absolutely masterful. Yeah.
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Are we allowed to say favorite podcast that everybody should listen to?
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You're not allowed to say the scene and the unseen. Apart from that, if you have a favorite podcast, go ahead and share it.
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Oh, OK. Well, there's a I would have said scene and unseen, but I heard this podcast that was made probably a couple of years ago.
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It's called The Thin Line. And it's it's about a U.S. Navy SEAL who's court martialed for killing a prisoner.
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You know, I mean, this Iraqi who and it's about his court martial and this and that.
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But it's funny, as I was writing Mahabharata when I was listening to this, because it's about what happens to men in war
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and what is the thin line of morality, because this guy's defense was I'm a soldier.
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You told me to kill the enemy. This guy was an enemy. He was a 17 year old child.
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They were not sure whether he actually was carrying weapons or not.
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So all these people, people from his own company testify against him.
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So many people defend him. And it is this really, really, really interesting exploration of morality.
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Wow. Yeah. So, yeah, I would say that it's not my favorite, but it's a really good podcast.
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I guess it's hard not to see dharma everywhere once you write.
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Yeah, yeah, yeah. Arshia, thank you so much for coming on the show.
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Thank you, Amit. It's been so much fun. Thank you so very much. Thank you.
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Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
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If so, would you like to support the production of the show?
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You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking.
