#
Let me tell you a story about how I got hooked on to literature.
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I was damn lucky when I was a kid in the sense that there were thousands of books in my house.
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The surface area of a serendipity was large.
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I grew up reading story books from a young age, the typical stuff children read.
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And then one day, at the age of 10, I came across this fancy, hard-born book called The
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The title attracted me.
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This could be a fun, horror story.
#
Maybe there were zombies in it.
#
Whatever, let's read it.
#
It was a book by Fyodor Dostoevsky.
#
It was a fictionalized memoir of his four years in a labor camp in Siberia.
#
I knew then that this was something different from the Enid Blyton's I'd been reading
#
so far, and I wanted more.
#
That year, I read all of Dostoevsky and then all of Shakespeare and so on and so forth
#
as I dived into a world of books, much of which I actually wasn't even capable of processing.
#
But great storytelling can open you up to the world and to your own self, one layer
#
And that is what happened to me.
#
In a sense, a journey into any of the arts, for any of us, is kind of like this.
#
You start with a primal reaction.
#
You could be entertained by a story, you're moved by music, or viscerally struck by some
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art, and there isn't yet an understanding of what this form is and why you feel the
#
way you do and what else this form is capable of.
#
Then later, you get serious, you dive into that art form, and many more layers open up.
#
Well, I've gotten into literature and music and cinema this way, but poetry and art always
#
felt somewhat mysterious and mystical to me.
#
Poems are perhaps my favorite art form.
#
My Desert Island book is almost invisible by Mark Strand, or just his collected poems.
#
Poetry can strip away everything artificial in me, everything that the world has put,
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and make me feel like I just got a glimpse of my true self.
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But I often feel that there are aspects of it that I just don't get.
#
It's the same with fine art.
#
There is work that I love and work that I just don't understand.
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And even the work I love, I don't know why I love it.
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And I want to understand.
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I want to dig deeper into these forms, because I feel that by doing so, I can understand
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human beings better, and I can understand myself better.
#
Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
#
My guest today is a poet, architect, cultural theorist, translator, and an all-round good
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Ranjit has been a legend in Bombay circles, and even outside Bombay, obviously, for being
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a curator, not just in the narrow sense of the art exhibitions he curates and puts together,
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but in a larger sense in the world of culture.
#
I have loved some of his work.
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I have also been intimidated by some of his work.
#
So I really wanted to sit down with him, ask him questions, educate myself.
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Ranjit has had a deep engagement with languages, done beautiful translations of the poetry
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of Lal Dehr, among others.
#
He's engaged with Indian culture.
#
He has some great insights on Hinduism, for example.
#
And he's a thinker I can't get enough of.
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I love this conversation so much, I'm sure I'll hear it again through the years, and
#
I invite you to join me on this journey.
#
But first, let's take a quick commercial break.
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Hey, the music started, and this sounds like a commercial, but it isn't.
#
It's a plea from me to check out my latest Labour of Love, a YouTube show I am co-hosting
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with my good friend, the brilliant Ajay Shah.
#
We've called it Everything is Everything.
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Every week, we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about, from the profound
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to the profane, from the exalted to the everyday.
#
We range widely across subjects, and we bring multiple frames with which we try to understand
#
Please join us on our journey, and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel
#
at youtube.com slash amitvarma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
#
Please do check it out.
#
Ranjit, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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I'm very happy to be here, Amit.
#
Thank you for having me on the show.
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No, no, I wanted to have you for a long time.
#
The stars hadn't aligned so far, but now they finally have, and I'm really glad.
#
And one of the reasons I wanted to have you on the show for a long time is that, in a
#
sense, even though you are a Bombay person, even though you have so much common in terms
#
of background with various other people like Jerry Pinto, who's been on the show, or my
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good friend, Gary Shahane, one of the, I kind of almost find you sui generi in terms of,
#
you know, looking at your work, your poetry or your writings about art or whatever.
#
It's sort of, you know, one can't, I could never quite figure out where it comes from.
#
It's unlike anyone else in this space.
#
And I always, you know, especially when it comes to your poetry, and I think I've tweeted
#
I was telling someone the other day that when it comes to Ranjit's poetry, 30% of it just
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The remaining 70%, I'm not sure I understand.
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And so I'm looking at this as a great sort of learning opportunity for me where I can
#
learn about poetry and art.
#
Again, another subject that sometimes leaves me a little befuddled because my reactions
#
to art are always kind of visceral and instinctive, and I haven't really built frameworks to think
#
So I'm hoping to sort of learn a lot from this and understand a lot from you.
#
But before that, I'd also like to sort of get to know a lot more about your life and,
#
you know, so why don't we just start at your childhood?
#
Tell me about, you know, where you were born, what were your early years like?
#
Well, in the first place, let me say that visceral and intuitive is a great place to
#
begin any journey into the arts.
#
I think for me, that's something that comes first because we begin with sensations or
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intuitions, experiences we don't understand and don't really have words for yet.
#
And then we create out of the need to explain these things to ourselves.
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So it's also very intriguing that you should say that for you, I don't seem to fit into
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a kind of a Bombay context.
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And part of this might be that although I was born in Bombay, my parents moved to Goa
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when I was one year old.
#
And this was in the early 1970s.
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The Portuguese had just been gone about a decade previously.
#
And I grew up in, I spent my formative childhood years in an Indo-Iberian ethos with multiple
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languages being spoken within the family already, but also in, you know, in wider social space.
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And also Goa was really unspoiled.
#
This was before charter flights and before it turned into what I now think of as Greater
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Kailash part four, but it was growing up in the midst of nature.
#
Our house was really on the crest of a hill.
#
So to me, it was this set of experiences that's really been at the core of how I think about
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our relationship to the natural world, our relationship to water, to the sea.
#
The sea has always been a very important presence for me.
#
And also in terms of how we shuttle among languages.
#
So when I think about my poetry in which I try and push in some ways the borders of what
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it means to write in a particular language, in my case, English, but an English that's
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informed by other languages.
#
I also think about where my practice of translation came from.
#
And I think it really is founded in these childhood experiences of constantly being
#
on a bridge between languages.
#
And let's, I want to double click on the bit about languages because it seems to me that
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every language that you are well versed in or that becomes sort of instinctive to you
#
in some way or the other is like a separate world that you occupy.
#
And I often think about how in India we are really incredibly lucky to be so multilingual.
#
And the more we immerse in different languages, the better it is for us.
#
In your case, what I notice is that the depth of immersion is great.
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That the depth of immersion is great enough to, of course, as you point out, English is
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an Indian language and all you're writing is in English.
#
But at the same time, you've you translated, and your facility with other languages is
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obviously at a certain depth where you are almost a natural or an adept at them.
#
So tell me about, you know, how it was like, how were these, what role were these, which
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were these different languages?
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What role were they playing in your life?
#
And did you have to code shift when you move from one world to the other, or was it sort
#
of did it blend into a harmonious whole?
#
What part did they play?
#
What part did knowing one language affect the appreciation of the other?
#
Like I imagine a poet in English who knows five other languages will have more tools
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at his disposal than someone who knows just English.
#
You know, it's amazing you should say that, Amit, because I find that standing in the
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presence of the untranslatable actually is, for me, an experience of well-being.
#
Because then you're taking up that challenge, you're being stimulated by it.
#
For instance, I find that a word like zamana or mahol, I mean, these are untranslatable
#
into English because you have four or five different things that it could mean, but never
#
that composite whole that it conveys to you in Urdu or in Hindustani.
#
So for me, it's never been a situation where I say, oh my God, this is a dead end.
#
You can't translate this.
#
It's always about curiosity for another language, its life world, the kinds of relationships
#
that are possible within it.
#
And it's also a situation where I find myself subtly shifting, shading into a slightly different
#
personality depending on the language I'm speaking or reading at any given point.
#
Now during the lockdown years, which happily we're all forgetting, one of the things that
#
we set ourselves to do was to really read Hindi in a fairly systematic way.
#
So at home, Nancy and I would really read to each other from Govind Narayan's poetry,
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Okay, they're not saying Ashok Vajpayee and Nagarjuna.
#
And that was one of the ways in which we really not only kept our sanity, but also found a
#
space of abundance within all the captivity that the lockdown imposed in a way.
#
So when I think about how language has had that meaning for me, again, I think back to
#
a childhood where multiple languages were spoken in the home, Konkani is the language
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we spoke at home, and English, interchangeable first languages have never had a sense of
#
In fact, for a long time, I thought words like marmalade or teapot, for instance, many
#
of these very, very everyday words gradually dawned on me that these are actually English
#
I just assumed that they were Konkani.
#
And also because I belong to this ethnic micro-minority that has a diasporic background, Kashmiri
#
is a lost language, which haunts our past.
#
And for me, it became an important life project to reclaim that language.
#
Also because several cousins had either grown up in Delhi or in Hyderabad, or that was the
#
armed forces part of my family, they grew up speaking either a really fine Hindustani
#
So it was, for me, a situation where I was not only speaking in and responding to Hindi,
#
it was not a monolithic Hindi.
#
There was an ability there to switch among the different kinds of languages that have
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fed into what we today call Hindi.
#
It's not like this was evident to me at the time as a child.
#
In fact, sometimes I would find Dakhani locutions quite comical, I have to say.
#
In retrospect, I think it was a blessing to have had these different tonalities, different
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vocabularies, different ways of articulating a word to yourself.
#
And as a poet, this to me is a very, very primary tool, really.
#
So to use a word which you just invoked, tell me about the mahal around you when you were
#
growing up, and how that influenced the shaping of yourself.
#
My parents were very committed to the arts, and they didn't practice an art themselves,
#
but they were well attuned to music, to literature, and to the visual arts.
#
And I just grew up in the midst of listening to music across a range, depending on whatever
#
mood my parents were in.
#
It could be Hindustani classical music.
#
It could be Ravi Shankar and Ali Akbar Khan Sahib, Sitar and Sarod, or it could be Bismillah
#
Khan Sahib, or it could suddenly be Stravinsky or Tchaikovsky.
#
It was a very, very eclectic musical taste that they had.
#
So as a result, I don't find myself trapped within a single genre or tradition.
#
There is an ability to switch back and forth among different kinds of musical forms.
#
Again, I'm leaping forward in time, but in my teenage years, when I discovered what is
#
sometimes called minimalist music, avant-garde 20th century music, Steve Reich, Terry Riley,
#
I did not find myself disoriented by that music.
#
There was a sense that rather than be disoriented because your assumptions are shaken, there
#
was an instinctive sense that you need to remake your assumptions to embrace this music.
#
And I think it came out of these early experiences of listening to this very eclectic musical
#
Also, my parents would read to me from the poems they loved.
#
With my mother, for instance, it was the Ghazals of Ghalib.
#
I remember even if I didn't grasp what was going on in the Ghazals, there was the cadence,
#
the musicality, which just became part of my system.
#
And with my father, it was more a Paul Graves' treasury kind of words with Coleridge, Coleridge
#
I remember I can, even as we're speaking now, think back to an early moment in life when
#
my father was reading the Rime of the Ancient Mariner to me.
#
So I think it was a case of simply being conditioned into cadence, into musicality, into forms
#
And the arts for my parents were never an optional extra.
#
They just, even if they didn't enunciate it as a kind of policy, it was just very clear
#
that the arts were important and integral to life.
#
So when I finished school, they were actually quite keen for me to go to art school because
#
I used to paint as a child and was very, very active in the visual arts at school and at
#
It was just my own dogmatic sense that I needed to do science in order to do architecture,
#
that I went into science and long story.
#
I then moved out into the social sciences and began to write poetry.
#
And then eventually, rather than painting, I began to write criticism about the visual
#
Give me a sense of how, you know, when you speak of all the music you used to listen
#
to and when you talk about how your mom would read out poems to you, whether it's Ghalib
#
or whatever, your dad would read out stuff to you.
#
And I'm always fascinated by the role of sound in language and the way that poets use it.
#
And again, I think the fact that you have different languages at your beck and call
#
can make a difference to the kind of poetry you write because if you just read and write
#
in English, you have a certain, to use a phrase popular these days, you have a limited LLM
#
of influences to draw upon, right?
#
And that's all you have.
#
You have a much larger repository of sounds and, you know, musical intonations, for example,
#
from all the other languages to draw upon.
#
Do you feel that this sort of affected the kind of writing that you would later go on
#
Do you feel that one essential part of your poetry and perhaps even your writing itself
#
is, you know, at some level, everything that you got from osmosis from these other languages?
#
And do you think about sound consciously?
#
Like I teach an online writing course and one of my webinars is just about sound, you
#
know, beginning with iambic pentameter and then kind of taking them through the glories
#
of sound and how to think about it consciously.
#
So give me your sense of sort of, one, all of it seeping in through osmosis and affecting
#
your work and be actually thinking about it consciously and looking at the way it plays
#
out in the works of others and even in the different languages.
#
Because one thing I haven't quite wrapped my head around is how writers and poets in
#
different languages use sound differently because each language is so inherently different.
#
Sound is for me paramount in poetry and it's what carries the sense.
#
It's what creates epiphany.
#
It's what creates surprise.
#
And in the last few years, I finally come around to a kind of working definition of
#
how I function as a poet and I see myself as a multilingual reader who happens to be
#
And the poetry that I increasingly have been writing now is definitely nourished by these
#
multiple streams, linguistic and literary and musical.
#
But it wasn't always like that.
#
The way in which I was socialized into Indian poetry in English, Anglophone poetry in India,
#
call it what you will, meant also that I would take on board the kind of political and historical
#
situation in which we were as Anglophone writers in the 1980s, the late 80s and early 90s.
#
I have to say in retrospect that we inhabited a citadel at that point.
#
There was a crushing burden of nativist criticism to deal with where effectively you were being
#
told that you were writing in the colonizers language.
#
It was not legitimate to use English, that there was a lack of authenticity and so on.
#
This is an argument I've never understood because ultimately language is it's like sculpture.
#
You make something of it.
#
You craft shapes in it.
#
It's not as if the mere fact that you write in a Basha automatically guarantees you some
#
The question is, what are you doing with that language?
#
Well, one result of that citadel mentality is that I think there was a kind of a resistance
#
to opening oneself out to other languages.
#
The entire emphasis was on somehow securing your endangered and threatened territory as
#
Fortunately, in my generation, particularly, we've put that behind us in different ways.
#
A key sign of that is the fact that many of us are translators, whether it's Jerry Pinto
#
or Mani Rao, Arundhati Subramaniam, Vivek Narayanan, Mustam Sirdalvi, Sampoorna Chatterjee.
#
I can think of many, many people.
#
Translation to us is, if I can speak for our generation more or less, translation is not
#
It is a creative activity that is part of the poetic process, part of our life and work
#
And this is altogether a far healthier way of addressing this issue.
#
You may not write in one of the Deshbhashas, but these Deshbhashas are inside you.
#
They've formed parts of your consciousness.
#
They're among the ingredients you have when you sit down to create a poem.
#
They also inform the ways in which you address various histories that you inherit.
#
I find it, for instance, very, very refreshing to be able to read, say, a text by Kumar Narayan,
#
And I realized that the cosmopolitanism that one has in English has its counterpart in
#
Or when I read Vilas Sarang's fiction in the original Marathi, it's that same refreshing
#
And you realize that the citadel mentality that I spoke of earlier was really very, very
#
limiting because it also gave you a false and distorted picture of what was going on
#
in the other languages.
#
Now, all of these languages have their own modernity.
#
They have their own cosmopolitanism.
#
And it's wonderful, for instance, to apprentice yourself to somebody like Kumar Narayan.
#
I mean, I've been reading him intensively, which is why he's so much in my thoughts.
#
Now, here was a poet who was really on a par with Mewosh, Shbigniew Herbert, Brodsky, Derek
#
Walcott, I mean, any of these people.
#
And yet, unfortunately, has remained within a kind of a national or nationalist understanding
#
So I'm kind of wondering now from how I think about other languages and how they inform
#
me, but also thinking about a sense of empathy, I think, that I've had as a poet with writers
#
I'm not sure what form that will take, whether I will bear witness to that as a translator
#
or as a critic, but it seems to me very, very important to acknowledge these other cosmopolitanisms
#
within the larger South Asian context.
#
And I think as Anglophone writers, we need to do more of that, to really see the points
#
of affinity, the grounds that are shared, rather than to be anxious about the particular
#
choice of language you're writing.
#
So a two-part question.
#
When I was much younger, I also had this terrible, deplorable, snobbish attitudes where in my
#
mind there was a hierarchy of languages, and English obviously being the one I was most
#
comfortable with was at the top, and again, this is part of, you know, the legacy of colonization,
#
that you think English is kind of at the top, and therefore I would take in westernized
#
culture, I would watch a lot of world cinema and not watch Bollywood at all.
#
And of course over the years into adulthood, the attitude changed, and now I kind of embrace
#
everything except SRK films, and over time that attitude changed.
#
And was that kind of the journey you make as well, like when you speak of being in a
#
citadel, was it just a sense of being besieged as writers in a language which was supposedly
#
inauthentic, though as I am always at pains to say, English is as Indian a language as
#
any other language, so like, what the fuck, and, or did that whole citadel mentality also
#
mean a kind of sense of seeing yourself above all the rabble around, that hey, you Hindi
#
guys are reading other Hindi guys, you Punjabi guys are reading other Punjabi guys, we are
#
You know, was there a sort of a sense of that, because obviously by now all of you, all the
#
names that you took and yourself have engaged so deeply and translated so much that it is
#
clearly not the case, but was there a sense of that, that's part one of my question,
#
and part two is when you begin to appreciate works in other languages, do you have to use
#
other frameworks, for example I often find that if I am watching a Hindi film, a traditional
#
Hindi film, it is completely pointless for me to judge it by the framework with which
#
I would look at world cinema or realist cinema elsewhere, it is in fact a category error,
#
you know, these are completely different art forms, they are both equally noble art
#
forms, there is no hierarchy, and one must judge them differently.
#
I had an episode with Sarah Rai a while ago, Munshi Premchand's granddaughter, and one
#
of the things that we kind of spoke about was that when I read Premchand's work, one
#
I am deeply affected by it, at the same time it strikes me that a lot of the values that
#
we would teach in western literature, like Sure Don't Tell for example, you can't apply
#
that prism to him, because he is writing almost a story a day at a point in time, he is churning
#
them out, and very often he is telling, not showing, you know, but nevertheless there
#
are so much beauty happening there that it affects you deeply anyway, and therefore is
#
of equal artistic value to anything you could read by perhaps a western writer, so do you
#
have to code shift there also when you are viewing poetry and art in all the different
#
And I think this is what makes it so invigorating, the fact that you not only are you taking
#
on board utterance of a very different kind, but also you are engaging with the life world
#
from which it comes, a different aesthetic, reading Nirala for instance, or reading Nagarjuna,
#
or reading Kedarnath Singh, it's for me also this tremendous sense of discovering different
#
kinds of rhetoricity. What is this voice? Is it declamatory? Is it persuasive? It's
#
this play of tonalities that makes these different poetries, I'm going to have to say, rather
#
than poetry, this is what makes these poetry so distinctive and so significant, and this
#
is how you learn. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, I think we were also as Anglophone
#
poets enthralled, even if many of us personally militated against it, to a certain dominance
#
of an ironic awareness of the world, a certain refusal to take the world seriously, a certain
#
suspicion of affect, of emotion. A lot of this changed for me also through conversations
#
with let's say Arun Kopkar, the filmmaker, discussing with him what rasa might mean,
#
how it might play out in forms like kudiyattam or Kathakali, what was the nature of temporality,
#
or just spending a lot of time watching money calls films. In what way is time stretched
#
out? How does it become a continuum? How does it become a cocoon? These questions,
#
I realized in retrospect, really had a huge effect on me in drawing me into this world
#
where it was possible to shuttle from one way of looking at art making and making art to another,
#
which is also why as a critic, I've never been able to function from some singular dogma. If
#
you think of Clement Greenberg, his notions of flatness and medium specificity, they were so
#
important to him. They almost had a religious article of faith quality. I've never been able
#
to do that as a critic because I think it limits the whole purpose of criticism. If you arrive
#
with your assumptions and dogmas in place and then try and reduce everything you're looking at
#
to your dogma, then you might as well stay home with your dogma. It doesn't add to your sensibility,
#
it doesn't help you discover more dimensions of the world. My article of faith is that one
#
has to be pluralist in embracing what different kinds of art forms have to offer. How do you
#
then arrive at criteria? I think those criteria get developed along the way in relation to what
#
that artist is trying to do. What is that practice about? Trying to hold all kinds of
#
artistic and literary practices to some predetermined charter is simply not going to work. I think we
#
know that as readers. It's always wonderful to find yourself in a new landscape. If you know
#
what that landscape is going to be already, there's a kind of a predictability there.
#
Can you share some of the sort of insights that you gained along the way? For example,
#
you mentioned that in your conversations with Arun Kulkarni, you learned more about
#
Rasa and the ways it's used in these Indian forms and all of that. Can you tell me a little bit
#
more about that or even anything that constituted a sudden additional layer of understanding of the
#
world? Since we are talking about cinema, I think two crucial experiences in cinema for me were
#
discovering Tarkovsky and recognizing how one might be entirely in the contemporary world,
#
in a narrative, and yet have that experience be colored by the epic, by the spiritual,
#
by the enigma of the sacred. That was one major experience on which I continue to draw, actually.
#
Which films in particular?
#
Thinking of definitely Stalker, for instance, Sacrifice, not so popular with people. Even if
#
you look back at Ivan's childhood, I find that this sense of experience being available to us
#
as shards and fragments, with something that brings them into a totality that is just slightly
#
elusive outside your reach. I'm still decoding this. I'm still going back to Tarkovsky and seeing how
#
this plays out. So that was a major experience. The other was the cinema of Parajanov. That,
#
to me, was the color of pomegranates, Syatnova. That was, to me, another experience in the
#
importance of storytelling. How might one bring together poetry, music, and a certain kind of
#
narrative? How does that play out in terms of a fabulous sensibility? How do you compress these
#
images and yet find yourself being carried along on a narrative flow? That forms another stream in
#
my writing. Although I've very rarely written fiction, I find myself at the threshold of
#
fiction often in the poems. The prose poem is one of those areas where this question comes alive
#
for me. On the one hand, there's the immense seduction of the compressed image that releases
#
itself. And on the other, there is this sense of discovery that you share with the reader
#
when you're telling a story. So storytelling on the one hand and the compressed image on the other.
#
The changing relationship between these two is something I've been fascinated by.
#
When you first got drawn to poetry, who were the kind of poets who you really loved and who inspired
#
you to want to write yourself? And you're most welcome throughout the course of this conversation
#
to read out anything if you feel like, or to read out something that evokes memories.
#
I began to write poetry rather early in the day. And when I look back at that writing from when I
#
was seven or eight or nine years old, of course, a lot of that had to do with what I was reading
#
at school or at home. It fell into a certain kind of prosody that came out of the romantic period.
#
And at the same time, beyond that musicality, for me, there was also a sense of conveying the
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the sharp visual nature of the world. So for a long time, that was the tension for me in poetry.
#
How do I bear witness to everything that amazes me visually? And how do I bring that into
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a form that makes a musical claim on the listener?
#
But at a certain point, I think, late school, early college, I found myself completely captivated
#
by Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Geoffrey Hill, very much these masculine poets, if you will,
#
who were looking at the viscerality of the agrarian life, of political strife, of myth.
#
Of recovering lost histories, which hasn't left me. It's still very much there. But I'm surprised
#
at how a few years after that, I found myself moving very, very strongly in the direction of
#
American women poets and everything that they had to present in terms of their inquiry into
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the universe, its asymmetries, thinking here of Jori Grimm, for instance, Sharon Olds, Louise Gluck.
#
Rita Dove, as I discovered these poets, it's only in retrospect that I realized that
#
I'd moved from these extremely robust, masculine British poets to these sophisticated American
#
women poets whose writing opened up different kinds of questions. And even if I didn't share
#
their politics or their questions, I found that there was a great deal to learn there.
#
And Jori Grimm, in particular, I find that it could be that the music of her lines is what it is
#
because she also grew up multilingual. She effectively grew up in Italy and with Italian
#
as a first language. So I guess I reach out to poets who have this ability to draw on
#
plural linguistic archives, and which somehow shimmers through in what they write.
#
Can you elaborate on what you meant by, on one hand, robust and masculine, and on the other hand,
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that obviously you're not just referring to the gender of the poet in question, but also
#
the kind of writing and the kind of themes, I'm guessing. So can you elaborate a bit on that,
#
maybe, with examples? If I think, for instance, about
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Seamus Heaney or Geoffrey Hill or Ted Hughes, the first image that comes to mind is that of the hard
#
edge. In their poetry, again, I'm summarizing brutally, of course, the three very distinctive
#
words. But what comes through very, very strongly is a haptic need to hold on to and bear witness to
#
objects, to the play of power in life, to the assertion of the self's agency in a particular
#
situation. With, say, Jori Grimm or Adrienne Rich or Louise Gluck, what I sensed in their work,
#
and what I hope I've learned in some ways, is the way in which they're able to invoke the aura of
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interrelationships among objects. Whilst equally having this tremendous sensuous ability to
#
bear witness to the world and its objects, there's also a particular attentiveness to shifting
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recalibrations of relationships between humans, between those who have power and those who are
#
vulnerable. There's a different set of issues at play, I think. So that, I think, is if I had to
#
think carefully about what it was, what that shift involved for me, I think it was this kind of shift
#
between these two sets of poets. But equally, very, very crucial figures for me along the way were
#
A.K. Ramanujan, Agah Shahid Ali, Dilip Chitre, Arun Kolhatkar. I was already in my 20s, I think,
#
when I realized just how inspiring these practices were. Meeting Shahid for the first time,
#
being in the presence of this warm, generous, incredibly empathetic personality
#
was for me quite a crucial experience. Tell me about each of these people who you met and who's
#
not just a poetry, but the person also was an influence on you. Like you have a
#
moving Instagram post, which of course I'll link from the show notes about Giv Patel after he
#
passed away, and how both of you were protégés from different generations of Nisim Ezekiel.
#
I'm paraphrasing, of course, and how you used to hang out at Nisim's office and how you used to
#
hang out with Giv. And in a sense, I'm a little awed that, I mean, I could have met some of these
#
people myself had I been into reading poetry at that time, but the thought that there are people
#
who have actually met Arun Kolhatkar, whose work I absolutely adore, is... So tell me a little bit
#
about all of these people, because it seems to me that there is... One layer is that there is this
#
unique ecosystem, not necessarily with the citadel mentality, but simply having something in common
#
by the fact that they write poetry in English or they care about it, and that's the language you're
#
interpreting the world in. And secondly, there's sort of another layer where all of these people
#
are, in a sense, showing you what is possible. How can you write in this language about your
#
experience in this country? And thirdly, there are all the personal relationships,
#
where instead of a sense of competitiveness or whatever, and a world where there is already
#
scarcity of attention given to poets, that one hears about all these poets who are mentoring
#
each other, helping each other, and sort of immersing themselves in each other's work.
#
So tell me about who these influences are one by one, talk a little bit about them.
#
Yeah, I realize that I've been zigzagging across...
#
That is very much the design of the show, so feel free to do that.
#
No, but let me try and do this more systematically.
#
The first of these figures would have to be Nissim. Nissim Ezekiel was my first mentor.
#
My father literally took me to him, because Nissim had been my father's senior at Wilson College,
#
almost in a previous life, in the 40s. And at some point when my father realized I was actually
#
seriously committed to poetry, he said, well, let's go around to Nissim and see what he has
#
to say about this. So Nissim had a remarkably clear-sighted sense of how this works. So he
#
told me plainly that this was going to be a serious process of self-critical, rigorous
#
activity. And I'm really grateful that he did that, not that I had any delusions that I was
#
fully formed, but it was very, very good to have a mentor who made it clear that
#
there was hard work involved and that it wasn't only going to be a simple kind of career graph.
#
So this was the end of 1986. Along with that clear-sighted sense that the poet's life is
#
not an easy or uncomplicated one went Nissim's great generosity. The way in which he brought
#
me on board, readings he was doing, some of them were on radio, actually, for AIR. There was one
#
that I did with him at the American Center, which was right across Theosophy Hall then.
#
And he also opened up doors for me in terms of a younger generation of poets. The Poetry Circle had
#
just got off the ground in 1986. So Nissim said, you might want to go around and join this group
#
and see what they're about. And that led to many very fruitful years of conversation with fellow
#
poets, lifelong friendships that emerged from it, as were Jerry and with Arundhati. And Nissim's
#
office at Theosophy Hall, it's appeared in many people's poems. Amit Chaudhary has a beautiful
#
poem about that. The door half ajar and the light and this white-haired aquiline figure sitting
#
there reading or counseling poets. The office at Theosophy Hall was really a place where you could
#
have completely unexpected meetings with researchers, translators, novelists, poets,
#
anthropologists, people from very, very diverse domains. And that is indeed where
#
I first met Giv. And that led to another long friendship of nearly 40 years.
#
Giv and I realized that we, I mean, of course, like many of us, my first acquaintance with
#
Giv was On Killing a Tree, which we had in this textbook panorama at school. But to actually meet
#
the author of that poem, I was still a teenager when that happened. And then to get a sense of
#
his larger preoccupations in theater as a painter, it was a series of discoveries of the
#
universes of imagination that Giv inhabited. Then there was Arundhati Krishnamurtra, who would
#
spend part of the year, a month or so at a time in Bombay in those years, particularly.
#
Then through the poetry circle, we organized workshops or readings or lectures with many,
#
many poets such as Gekki Dharawala, for instance. That's how Agha Shahidali came to us.
#
So it was a platform. It was a crucible. It was really, it was, when I think back at it,
#
it was such an incredibly formative period. And it was a blessing to have so many of these poets
#
who were generous, who were intergenerationally attentive to what was going on. And again,
#
when I look back now, I realized that many of them were in their prime. They were starting
#
off on new projects. They were going off into a different phase in their arc. I guess when
#
you're a teenager, everybody looks infinitely old to you. But when I think back, many of these
#
people were in their late 40s, their 50s. And now that I'm 54, we are infinitely old.
#
We are infinitely old indeed. You have a birthday coming up shortly.
#
Shri Ramanujan too, in fact. Yeah. I remember hosting a lecture for him as part of the P.A.
#
and All India Center's activities. And you always had more than a glimpse of what they were working
#
on, whether it was a new set of poems, which would soon turn into a published volume or an
#
ongoing translation. Then there was a number of years spent working with Dilip Chitre.
#
I began to translate several of his stories, stories long enough to be novellas really.
#
That didn't eventually go anywhere in terms of published work. But I made a pilgrimage
#
with Dilip to the landscape of Tukaram. We went up to the Bhandara cave where Tukaram had composed
#
many of his abhangs. 1994, April, I will always think back to that experience as having also been
#
very, very pivotal in many ways. I'd just started working on Lala at that point. So this seemed like
#
a great affirmation, a sense that one was dedicating oneself to
#
this long and pan-South Asian lineage of saint poets, thinking about the nature of utterance,
#
its connection to particular landscapes, so much there that again, I'm still unpacking.
#
One of my favorite poems by Dilip Chitre is Father Returning Home. What a remarkable poem.
#
What also strikes me is that if you weren't in Bombay at that time, if you were in some small
#
town or if you were still in Goa perhaps, your trajectory would have been very different,
#
your journey into poetry would have been much harder because you wouldn't obviously have had
#
all these examples and the kind of support in different ways that one gets. But it also strikes
#
me that apart from the fact of all of you being Indian poets writing in English, there is often
#
not much in common. You're writing in very different ways and I'm wondering how you came
#
about at the kind of poetry that you wrote because when I look at Harun Kholatkar's Brilliant
#
Jejuri for example and it's really extremely a different kind of language which anyone can
#
appreciate and which is sort of accessible. Nisim kind of built his own language with Indian
#
English and did such an amazing job of that and so on and so forth. And there also I struggle to
#
figure out who your influences are because what you were doing was again really visceral, really
#
powerful but there seems to be nothing like it in Indian poetry in English at least to my really
#
limited knowledge so forgive me for any naive questions. So tell me a little bit about how
#
you know your poetry took the kind of shape that it did and how did other people react to it,
#
how did they respond to it because it is natural for us to be dismissive of something that we may
#
not immediately understand or that may not be familiar we may not have encountered and I'm
#
guessing that that might have led to a certain amount of self-doubt within you yourself and
#
you know you would have had internal struggles of like I think at the first level the struggle
#
that every poet no doubt faces is just figuring out that is this poetry is what I am writing
#
poetry I'm reading all these great people again but is this poetry and once you kind of figure
#
that out the directions that you grow in often there are certain directions you give yourself
#
permission to go in because they are familiar directions others have gone in them and it seems
#
that you kind of almost charted your own path and of course I'm seeing it from a distance and with
#
no knowledge at all so enlighten me. No it's actually it corresponds very very precisely
#
to phases that I did in fact go through. In the early years for instance I think I had what I
#
would have to say it was an undeserved reputation for being obscure or somehow complex and I think
#
a lot of that had to do with people reading my early art criticism and then which was I have to
#
say it tended towards a certain kind of arcane expression but that's another story because
#
I really wanted to develop a kind of art criticism that made some demands
#
on the reader's attention and ability to wrestle with questions rather than being
#
purely descriptive or purely analytical but I think people's response to my art criticism
#
tended to spill over into how they responded to my poetry. I don't think the poetry was ever
#
intentionally obscure it's just that in the first book for instance Zones of Assault there are a
#
number of linguistic experiments there is a way in which syntax is quite deliberately thrown out
#
of gear there is a desire to go back to the strong old Norse or Anglo-Saxon roots of the language and
#
play that against more Latinate dimensions of the language there's I think all of this may have
#
seemed rather strange to people but on the other hand for years there was the sense that my poetry
#
was about myth and history which of course they are among my subjects but not in themselves more
#
from the point of view that what we take to be the past never actually goes away
#
these are patterns of persistence that inform our contemporary experience and in this I found myself
#
very very closely aligned with Dom Morais and with Gekki Daruwala. To me these were
#
very important presences in my life as a young poet I greatly admired Dom's writing and eventually
#
one of the things that I did do coming out of that was to put together an annotated edition
#
of his selected poems which really gave me the opportunity to reflect on his
#
his practice his historical contexts and the reason I was sustained by Dom's practice and
#
by Gekki's is that to them myth and history were not external they were live they were current
#
and they helped us to better understand our own present as something that has
#
um you know deep roots the syndromes of today can be read back into the past so I think
#
for all of these reasons readers who are more attuned to or expected a certain kind of poetry
#
of the city may have felt a bit thrown by some of my work but to me you know I sometimes when
#
people say oh you're one of the Bombay poets I sort of step back and say am I really I mean
#
I've lived here most of my life and of course Bombay is a presence in in my poems but I don't
#
really see myself so much as a Bombay poet more as a poet who is concerned with the natural world
#
and what we've done to it and how does one write poetry out of a sense of responsibility towards
#
a natural world that we've damaged that kind of question has become more and more important to me
#
for instance but why else might my poetry have seemed to be at a kind of tangent to everything else
#
you know when I think of the the substrata from which that poetry emerged a very important
#
source of inspiration for me also were the volumes that came out as modern poetry and
#
translation that Penguin brought out edited by Ted Hughes and Daniel Weisbord
#
you know when you when you read these Polish or Yugoslav or Czech poets there was a kind of a
#
crystalline clarity to to those poems which masked something else something more allegorical
#
something more enigmatic that was going on very soon you realized of course two things one is that
#
many of those poems came out of of situations determined by authoritarian regimes so the kind
#
of poetic utterance there is really refines its ability to to work mysteriously and the other
#
thing of course is that you realize that there's it's it was written in a kind of translateries
#
but to me engaging with that that kind of language which was a language of transition
#
a language that represented another language again I found that bracing I found that I'm
#
wandering off topic no you're not this is all of it is illuminating it's pursuing this interest
#
that I have of in languages that are somehow in transition or at thresholds of different kinds
#
thresholds of different kinds it made me think about what these translations were pointing to
#
what kinds of shifts what kinds of adjustments were going on behind the scenes so
#
you know it brought me around again to there's a long way of saying that I went through MPT to
#
come to Arun Kolhatkar and to understand him more fully because when you read Kolhatkar in
#
in English it's a very crystalline American idiom when you read what seems to be that same
#
poem in Marathi it's richly colored by regional inflections and why am I saying this partly at
#
least because it it gave me an insight on how poems can exist in different languages
#
in different dimensions for different audiences and could one could one infuse the same poem
#
in one language with these different kinds of of dimensions that's a formal question that
#
has been with me also for a long time and in a book like Jonah Whale for instance I
#
I tried out poems which I tried to do this which transited from say English into Rajbhasha
#
or came back or brought something back from another language into English how does the
#
body of the poem open up to embrace these different dimensions how do I make my syntax
#
in English more diaphanous as it might be in Urdu for instance these are the kinds of questions
#
that have become more and more preoccupied with and in a strange way they've allowed me to infuse
#
my poetry with more affect more of an emotional valency than I think was previously the case
#
you wrote this brilliant column in 2003 for the Hindu called Poets Nightmare which the Hindu
#
no longer has on his website but it's there in the internet wayback machine because nothing ever
#
disappears and and it's it's it's about sort of three simultaneous three nightmares that you
#
mentioned and I'm going to ask you about the first two of them but first I'll read out this
#
beautiful paragraph and the whole of the piece is just incredible so I'll link it from the show notes
#
and you write the poet has a recurrent nightmare he has been invited to give a reading the appointed
#
evening comes around and 15 minutes into the session he finds himself in a room where he is
#
reader moderator and audience all in one the organizers flit in and out hoping that listeners
#
will materialize on the strength of 11th hour prayer at length a feature writer representing
#
the sunday pages of a daily shows up quietly pleased to see that the customary notice about
#
the death of poetry stands unchallenged he thinks up a jaunty obituary and leaves for more entertaining
#
pastures stop quote and you have three nightmares which you talk about through the call of the
#
poet's nightmare and the first two of them I mean the way I'm summarizing them is number one is no
#
one is listening and number two is it's difficult to understand right and I want to hear ask a sort
#
of a two-part question but it's really the same question and one is that when was that a fear or
#
was that an insecurity you faced as a poet that who is reading me and the second part of that
#
and related to that and arising from that is who are you really writing for because I imagine that
#
if you are to write for only your own self then perhaps you need not write at all perhaps a grunt
#
would suffice right because you already have all of the context within you and nothing needs to be
#
said equally if you are to make it completely accessible to someone who knows nothing at all
#
then it is not poetry it's like you know borges said a map of the world has to be as big as the
#
world itself and it can sprawl forever and between these two mad extremes of nothing
#
at all and everything at once you have to figure out who you're writing for and what the poem is
#
and I guess part of the you know the early acquisitions made against you that you're being
#
too sort of obscure and you're like talking about myth and stuff and you have illusions no one can
#
understand is because you drew the line in a particular place and then later perhaps you
#
draw the line in a different place and I wonder how you know in your own mind you've wrestled with
#
that question of where you draw the line because at one level we think of our work our art or
#
whatever we create as something that needs to be pristine and authentic to us that this is what I
#
want to say and I will not change it for anything at another level we also do want to reach out
#
because it's outward facing we're putting it out there we are publishing a book we're putting the
#
poem down on paper so how do you wrestle sort of with that question and you know I don't have any
#
of those criticisms at all but these are criticisms that you faced and it's nonsensical criticisms you
#
know that not accessible enough or whatever but for you you know from the inside out did you think
#
about where do you draw the line do you think you ever aired in terms of where you drew that line and
#
so on it's actually a question that's been with me all of these years let me let me respond with
#
an anecdote or several which is that when my first book of poems came out zones of assault the one
#
that was thought to be obscure and so on and so forth it was published by rupa and company it was
#
part of the series called rupa new poetry that rupa new poets which nism was the general editor
#
for to my great amazement I would get letters which were sent to rupa's office in Daryaganj
#
and then they would send it on to me from Srinagar from Kalimpong from Coimbatore at one level this
#
speaks to the the glory of a distribution system that really gets these books out to to a wide
#
array of places but what moved me was that these were very very serious responses from readers
#
who were reaching out who wanted to sought clarification for some poems or offered
#
generous responses with some of these people a schoolboy in Srinagar who at that point this
#
was remember 1991-92 who had missed months of school
#
and reading my book was for him one of the things that he had held on to during this period that
#
moved me deeply what moves me yet more is that we kept in touch and are still in touch and today
#
he's and he's an academic at Ashoka and and when I taught there for a semester last year we were
#
colleagues in the same department and he's an impressive scholar and I'm saying this because
#
we never know who our readers are I mean to me the the figure of the unpredictable reader is is
#
crucial which is why I think when we put our poems or any of our texts any of our writing out it
#
as you said it cannot simply be for ourselves if that was so then you know then you know we
#
could easily write a journal and keep it to ourselves there's something invitational and
#
exploratory there's a quest for common ground a sense the dialogue might follow I think it's these
#
impulses that that really have a lot to do with why we publish at all and what kinds of responses
#
um come our way so this is what this is what inspires me as a poet this figure that I'm
#
going to call the unpredictable reader and another set of responses to this question to me would come
#
from the world of Hindustani classical music and today concerts tend to follow
#
the formats of western classical music where the audience is supposed to maintain a hushed
#
funereal silence while the vocalist or the instrumentalist does their thing but if you
#
look at how bear tucks used to be in the old days or sometimes if you have these bootleg recordings
#
of private bear tucks you realize there was a great deal of dialogue you know it's not that
#
the the exposition was the raga start to finish not that there is really a start or a finish to
#
a raga exposition but that there were interruptions occasionally the the musician would reach out to
#
the audience there would be a playful teasing exchange someone would make a request that kind
#
of interplay between artist and audience is something that I cherish I mean how do we
#
achieve that in the age of print modernity I don't know but it's important to be informed
#
by that sense that you are in this kind of mutually replenishing dialogue with an audience I think
#
that's truly important otherwise we'll all be condemned to our own
#
solipsisms so I'll take a digression here and ask you a question about form you know one of the
#
most impressive books that I read recently is David Byrne's book How Music Works and he talks
#
about how the places in which music is performed shapes the music so deeply and therefore shapes
#
the entire culture like your early music is so percussive because they're outdoors and you know
#
the beats have to gather people etc etc when you look at a western concert hall percussive
#
simply would not work there it would be complete madness and neither would too many details or
#
too much nuance because it would kind of get lost so you have that kind of symphonic sound
#
which works best in concert halls and then when you enter for example the alternative rock clubs
#
like the legendary cb gbs in the 1970s where there are chairs everywhere and people everywhere and
#
waiters are going around with drinks and everything and you're performing
#
and the separation of sound is fantastic because there are just so many things physical things that
#
are in the way and you can do really intricate things and play intricate patterns and all of
#
that and I find that what therefore happens is that just the way in which you consume that
#
particular form shapes a content that comes out of it and then it shapes the entire culture around
#
it because a certain kind of music may be more given to a certain kind of social gathering or
#
a certain mahal as it were and in terms of poetry how does one think about that because I can find
#
that there are many different ways in terms of form that one can interact with poetry I can be
#
sitting in 1985 quietly in my room with no other distractions and open a book and on that book there
#
is a printed poem and I read it and that's one form of interaction another form of interaction is
#
I'm in a local train today and I'm quickly going from one station to another and I'm flicking
#
through things on my phone and I come across this poem and I read it and it's entirely different
#
and the imperatives that are required for this reader to read it are entirely different then
#
you have spoken word where people are going to these spoken word places and they are performing
#
and this might bring about a different kind of incentive into play where perhaps the sound has
#
to be spectacular perhaps you know much as stand-up comics know that you need these certain beats at
#
regular intervals perhaps so spoken word you need that I'm just thinking aloud and I'm guessing
#
there are all these different forms interacting with each other I listen to you know Lou Reed's
#
great 1989 album New York you know and that seems to me to be really an album of poetry it's spoken
#
word you know you've got your guitar and the rock sound and everything but it is poetry kind of being
#
read aloud in a different context you know Dylan got the Nobel I'd written a sort of a TOI column
#
sort of celebrating that and that is also poetry but it's only poetry within the context of the
#
song outside of it sometimes you may look at it otherwise so what is your sense in the modern
#
world where we engage with poetry completely differently where we can adapt it to different
#
forms like I look at hip-hop for example when I first encountered hip-hop in the 1980s in India
#
one heard a random rap song and you would think that what nonsense is this these people can't
#
sing so they're just talking to a beat but then you begin to realize that my god what an incredible
#
art form and an incredible art form that involves a spoken word that is literature as much as
#
anything else is literature and the the best of it you know invokes in you the same feelings as
#
the best poetry does so what is your sense of you know poetry and all the different forms in which
#
it can be consumed and and have you at times been attracted to different forms and done things with
#
them is a poem necessarily is your poem necessarily different when you're reading it on the page
#
and when you're actually performing it yourself it's amazing you should invoke in beautiful
#
detail this question of the contexts in which music unfolds and how it responds to those contexts
#
for for many years I've thought of the poem as a score actually and tempo is is an important
#
question for me so say over the last decade particularly I've been giving thought to this
#
I mean how I read my poem is not necessarily how I think everybody should read the poem
#
it has within it various cadences and a whole system of off-rhymes slant rhymes
#
assonance and so on which gives it its musical character but how this is to be interpreted I
#
would like to leave to individual readers I of course this demands a certain year for these
#
things but I I'm excited to hear this poem read in different ways at you know with variations on
#
this temple so this to me is is is an important question also in a number of poems from this
#
collection called Jonah whale onwards I've been thinking about the libretto as a form
#
I mean how do I bring together multiple voices how does the poem open itself up to be not just
#
a singular voice but a multiplicity a set of dialogues that go on with different kinds of
#
differently graded and grained voices coming in this direction in my poetry came out of an
#
experience of working with Vanraj Bhatia we were working for a number of years on on an opera
#
based on Girish Karnad's play the fire and the rain so I got a call from Vanraj out of the blue
#
at some point and he said do you would you is this of interest would you like to do this
#
so I said I've never done it before so let's give it a shot and it was extremely fruitful
#
Vanraj of course was incredibly eccentric and very particular character but it was a great
#
experiment to be involved with I developed the first of two acts of this opera and then I had
#
to step out because I got caught up with other things but thinking through questions of when
#
spoken dialogue takes on the character of recitative halfway to song and then there
#
is an aria or a duet or some wonderful musical expression that surges and then it comes back and
#
gradually through song into speech these transitions to me were profoundly captivating
#
and again I thought of that as an apprenticeship to another art to music to opera
#
somewhere in the background to everything I do is the hope of what Wagner used to call a
#
Gesamtkunstwerk the total artwork which would have dimensions of theater music poetry painting
#
architecture I think in the various arts today we can only arrive at some kind of fragment of
#
this totality but the possibility that you could do that is something that remains inspiring
#
what comes closest cinema I think was a definite wager on the total artwork
#
whether it's through scenography music narrative the one limitation there might be that
#
eventually it it is all held captive within a particular kind of ultimately slightly flat
#
moving image but I think there are various forms where people have tried to get to this and by a
#
kind of circular process I find myself thinking also about how festivals come close to this ideal
#
in some ways so festivals have also been a focus of interest for me over the years what is it what
#
is the choreography of a festival like how are all of these different articulations brought into
#
play which led me to actually think back to and write a little about about Wajid al-Isha in
#
Lucknow and my argument there was that through his through his particular chosen art form which he
#
which he refined he actually was ahead of Wagner in thinking through a total art form because when
#
he created these I would have to say opera one falls short of another description you know it
#
partook of all of these all of these aspects the script would have the actors in these leelas that
#
he produced you know at large in the Kaserberg which was partly palace partly urban space
#
new forms of dance and music were pioneered within that ethos so I find myself attracted
#
to these moments in in cultural history where visionary figures have tried to embrace these
#
these larger possibilities so since you talk about this sort of this total one art form that
#
encompasses everything and of different different forms being fragments of that I'll read out a
#
couple of poems from John Avail as you've been sort of mentioning that and I remember when the
#
book came out I excitedly took photographs I had a physical copy and I was tweeting out poems from
#
there I'll read out a couple of them and I'll get to my question and one is called planetarium
#
a stupa with the night sky trapped inside growling that's it that's a poem it's a single line and it
#
just it's so powerful and hits me so hard and it leaves me with one kind of feeling and another
#
poem which leaves me with a different kind of feeling self-portrait as child in the rain shadows
#
trapped in the door rain tapping out a message on roof and branch an ampersand of cloud scared
#
bird wet waiting for the others to catch up at the finish line and this also leaves me with a
#
different kind of feeling and I read these and it seems to me that these are complete expressions
#
on their own to add anything to it to take away anything from it would completely destroy it
#
they're incredibly powerful they're perfect as they are and yet I get what you're saying when
#
it's like you've captured a moment you've given a glimpse and you've left it at that
#
and I remember sort of thinking recently like there's a friend of mine who's 21 years old and
#
he's written this play and it's a musical play and he's written all the songs and I went to
#
watch it recently and I was completely blown away and I thought that it has all the sort of the
#
passion and the revelation of poetry but not the depth of literature and I didn't mean this in a
#
bad way the way in which I meant this was that you know and I was thinking about why many poets
#
and many rock stars can achieve great things write great songs or poems when they're extremely
#
young but you will really not find great novels from the very young you have to kind of be in
#
your 30s or 40s and the greatest work perhaps comes even after that and in my mind the reason
#
I postulated for that is that it is a moment of inspiration a magical moment that you know you're
#
trying to capture in poetry like you know a stupa with the night sky trapped inside growling which
#
is brilliant and of course you were much older when you wrote this but you get what I'm saying
#
that a moment like this it is possible for the young to glimpse upon it like a revelation
#
but if you're writing a sort of a larger work like a novel you need that lived experience
#
because a novel like that would necessarily have to involve a deeper understanding of human nature
#
and a lot of concrete details which you cannot kind of get if you're 20 or 21 which is not to
#
say it's not possible but there would be outliers so what is sort of your sense of this in terms of
#
the different arts and not passing judgment on any of the arts like if you give me 24 hours to live
#
the last thing I will probably read is poetry I love it that much but they're all really different
#
in these kind of roles that they perform so what are your thoughts you know across the I agree with
#
you that there are different kinds of competences arising out of training in some arts and of course
#
there's the arc of experience that you need to produce great work in other arts I'm sometimes
#
tempted to see across the arts two figures two different approaches that you might have one is
#
the way of the virtuoso someone who has really mastered the forms and techniques of their art
#
and then are able to produce brilliant work thinking of glengold the pianist for instance
#
in this case and the other is someone who is more of a pilgrim I would say someone who proceeds
#
through trial and error who moves through hurdles and obstacles doesn't necessarily have a sense of
#
what the goal is but simply by wandering about with a certain desire to keep at this quest
#
is able to bear witness to what it means to be a pilgrim in that sense and I think both of these
#
both of these approaches are equally valid to me the virtuosos approach to me is honestly you know
#
at there was a time in life when I had great admiration for the virtuoso now it seems to me
#
now it seems to me that virtue virtuosic skill is ultimately you know
#
it's skill at an extremely high level but I don't know what one is likely to discover through it
#
where are the moments of passion the transports the great departures the discoveries that you
#
might make all variations and you know you slip through the score into something else
#
that you're able to offer your listeners in the case of music for instance
#
and I think the pilgrim is much better equipped to do that
#
another associated question that comes up is you know of course you're acquiring experience you are
#
you're just the world is revealing itself to you in a certain complexity
#
but you're also you're also committing yourself to ever deeper research in a certain way
#
and again in joe novel for instance a number of those poems that had to do with with maritime
#
history with how people are transformed in the act of crossing the ocean and forming new languages
#
and new relationships a lot of that came out of years and years of reading and thinking about
#
the histories of the sea so I would add to this arc of experience also the arc of research which
#
I think is really important for for any art is your journey the journey of a virtuoso who
#
became a pilgrim and was translation uh you know one milestone on that journey or maybe a turning
#
point I think there was an ambition at one point to to have a certain kind of virtuosic sense of
#
things but to be if I if I think back to that period the tug of the pilgrim's path was always
#
stronger I often found myself gravitating to the other arts and learning from them
#
and you know I think I think that has had a lot to do with why I've proceeded through these detours
#
and meanderings and you know by indirections often I've found myself you know as as I said for
#
instance this this experience of working with van raj on the opera there was so much that I
#
learned that I internalized and that I was able to articulate then in in in changes in my poetry
#
I think that was important translation very definitely I think working on for a 20 year
#
period on the on the varks of lala that that was definitely a transformative experience
#
working on urdu poetry in these last in the last 10 years or so again has been that has that I can
#
I can actually graph that shift in terms of how my poems have opened up in their syntax
#
the way in which I now drop capitalization and punctuation how does this poem float in a certain
#
way how is it legible how could it be readable in multiple ways these are these are lessons learned
#
from the practice of translation yeah absolutely so you know my so I have a whatsapp group with my
#
writing students some 700 people on it because whatsapp increase the limits and amazing there
#
are plenty of them there and one of them heard my episode with our mutual friend danish and they
#
picked up on a particular share about caravan that the you know the caravan of love kept getting
#
whatever I mean I won't even try to remember it but essentially what they did was they reproduced
#
the urdu and then they gave their own little translation for everyone and I said hey you know
#
incredible share but the translation doesn't cut it and another person said no problem I'll take
#
it to someone who knows the language really well and I said no you're missing the point completely
#
it's not about knowing the language to translate a piece of poetry you have to be a poet that is
#
the only way because you have to understand the essence of what the poet is getting at and you
#
have to reproduce it and from here I would say that if you're translating a you know a poet is
#
likely to be a good translator because you're engaging with language very closely if you're
#
a poet as opposed to other forms and b again if you're translating poetry it's like doing something
#
entirely anew and therefore I imagine when you're for example when you were working on I Lalla I
#
would imagine that it would also be a transformative experience for you as a poet because just
#
because all of it is poetry like I'll read out you know three of my favorites from that book which
#
is such a masterpiece and one is about about pilgrimage where you write going on a pilgrimage
#
is like falling in love with the greenness of faraway grass you know and it's such a beautiful
#
poem in english alone like all of these just stand on their own and their masterpieces there's
#
another one I love I wore myself out looking for myself no one could have worked harder to
#
break the code I lost myself in myself and found a wine cellar nectar I tell you there were jars
#
and jars of the good stuff and no one to drink it and then another one that is incredible you
#
won't find the truth by crossing your legs and holding your breath daydreams won't take you
#
through the gateway of release you can stir as much salt as you like in water it won't become the sea
#
these are brilliant it's impossible for me to make out that they're translated because
#
they just work so well on their own and did this process then also shape your poetry because
#
whatever you're writing now you know you've done these experiments with prose poetry there is
#
the poetry of jonah wale and and in a lot of these there is this sort of there is this economy this
#
pithiness and they're very different from zones of assault in a sense so take me through your
#
own evolution as a poet and as a user of language and and the role if you can sort of disentangle
#
the many influences on you whether it be laldeyad or whether it be just working with vanraj bati on
#
that opera you know take me through you know that journey let's begin with the the varks the varks
#
paying close attention to the texture of each verse meant also recognizing
#
from the linguistic evidence that hadn't actually been written by one person or in one particular
#
time frame so this then became the basis of an argument i make in the introduction to the book
#
which is that it's not the work of one it's built around the nucleus of one historical person
#
but actually it is the product of centuries of work by anonymous contributors who've
#
composed under the sign of the of the saint much like kabir or many other saint poets
#
but what that gives us then is is these verses which even if internal evidence points to
#
you know external facts in the real world what brings it together is this this this belief in
#
the illuminating power of the aphorism so it's what it's exactly what you referred even in the
#
three varks the translations that you read what i found compelling was this power of compression
#
what is it that the aphorism or something like the epigram what is it that they convey
#
remaining in a spoken voice everyday register but leaping out you're creating this arc of sense
#
through the use of sometimes very robust quotidian materials but you know what gets conveyed is
#
is brisk it's pithy it transforms the way in which you look at your own practice so that i
#
think is something that has that has come into my poetry by way of of of this particular
#
i mean i hesitate to call it a project it was really like a life project more than more than
#
something undertaken academically or professionally from the experience of working on the libretto for
#
the opera there's the sense of how the the short lyric poem can yet be a theater for multitudes
#
now this ties in with another long-term preoccupation with me which is that
#
we can't really hold on to what the english lyric has been about for a long time which is
#
essentially the voicing of a sovereign individual eye and its concerns its anguish its joys whatever
#
it might be our crisis today is a planetary crisis i mean our destinies are tied in with
#
the destinies of people and members of other species we'll never even know so how does what
#
does that do to the sovereign eye so for me the even if it's just a poem that's a page long
#
it needs to be able to bear witness to this sense of being one with
#
multitudinous other beings how does that come in what are the different kinds of voices the
#
tonal shifts that i can bring into play and what's the scale that i need you know when
#
you read that one line poem the monistich from jona wale one of the things going on in jona wale
#
was precisely this desire to see how poetic space and time could be an accordion what is it that i
#
can say in a single line and what is it that i can present as a polyphony so for me the shape of a
#
book the shape of a collection also comes about from these formal concerns
#
how do i represent what is going on in my laboratory so to speak how do i get that across to
#
to a reader i mean we all read books of poetry in different ways there's the kind of reader that
#
will start with the first poem and go right through respond to the architecture of the book
#
and so on and then there are people who will dip here and there and read read poems at will
#
to me it's part of putting a book together to have that architecture in place with all of its
#
internal patterns and then i leave it to the reader to discover that or to ignore it but
#
you know as the creator of a book it's important for me to have that entire system put out so
#
so i think there are also questions of scale at work here in i have wandered off topic as i seem
#
to do quite regularly you haven't at all not even once the topic is you and the topic is poetry and
#
i don't see how you wondered off but i think this speaks to to what you were what you were asking
#
earlier also about the the particular kind of interplay between the poet and the reader
#
i mean who is my audience it could be the person who's the reader it could be the person who dips
#
in and reads poems in no particular order but it could also be this other kind of reader who's
#
interested in the shape of thought that's gone into the book how it reveals itself why is it
#
in sections how does it all hang together i'll think aloud about form again you know you mentioned
#
the book and the book as sort of a structure within which you you're then using it to you know put the
#
poems in a particular way in case someone is reading them in order and that's how musicians
#
also talk about albums and there'll be people who'll say i don't want people to you know listen to
#
random song on spotify an album is an album for a reason but these forms are also outdated
#
artifacts in the sense that the 40 minute album the tradition originates because that's how much
#
the lp could hold 40 minutes of music before that you had the three minute song because turn of the
#
century that's how much a disc could hold and so you have an album which is 40 minutes full of three
#
minute songs and that artifact no longer that constraint no longer matters similarly with
#
books why do we put words in that form because it's a grammage of the paper and how much you
#
can bind and etc etc so you have an upper limit and a lower limit and that's pretty much what it
#
is and i wonder here if you know just going back to when you mentioned the walks and you spoke
#
about the remarkable compression in them and i'm guessing that that compression would also be
#
dictated by the form because pre-writing and pre you know the printing press and all of that
#
everything is oral so you cannot have something that is too long so you both need to compress
#
whatever you want to say and make it so powerful and memorable that it actually carries on and
#
after that is seduction bias so whatever bark survive will obviously be the ones that are
#
most memorable and the best and thinking aloud again i am just wondering if we are reaching full
#
circle in the sense that in this world today where there is no longer a scarcity of either
#
entertainment or enlightenment potential and enlightenment or knowledge or whatever
#
that compression becomes a need again that people have so many things to consume
#
and if you're living in an instagram age and i will not necessarily look down on an instagram
#
poet i mean why not it's a form then does compression again become a virtue for that reason
#
not because of scarcity but because of surfeit i completely agree that we are now in a very very
#
diverse ecology of communication so whether i'm putting this across on instagram or reading it
#
for instance on a podcast or if it's printed in a journal or if it's online or on blog or in a book
#
all of this constitutes a variety of claims on the reader's attention or the listener's attention
#
so i'm intrigued by the possibility of poetry that is if you will designed for these different
#
contexts and i i'm also very very aware of the technological shifts that underwrite
#
what you beautifully call the artifacts in which our work is enshrined in some ways some weeks ago
#
we were at simon frazer university in vancouver in their special collections section and it was
#
almost a religious experience to see and to handle some of the earliest printed books in the west
#
aldous minutius in venice who put out these palm-sized portable books in at the beginning
#
in the at the beginning of the 16th century so to look at this dante you know which has bears
#
the date 1502 it's absolutely incredible but also a reminder that that was a revolution in its time
#
so instead of parchment of vast bulky books that needed to be you know kept on a stand and read in
#
a library here was this enterprising scholar publisher printer in in venice who created these
#
books that were meant to be portable that you could slip into the pocket of your robe and read
#
while on a journey or you know in the middle of a camp during battle or whatever else people did
#
in terms of mobility and occupation in those days and it was a salutary reminder that there's
#
nothing sacrosanct about the format in which we read or in which we listen so i've been thinking
#
also about you know how does one how does one achieve some kind of hybrid form i've also been
#
fascinated for the longest time by the interplay of text and visual image and i've long wanted to
#
work in a format that allows me to move between these so i'm actually you know very open to these
#
kinds of experiments and to the possibility that poetry can be distributed in in in diverse ways
#
and what that might do to the form of the poem this is something that i am actually quite quite
#
interested in have you seen in with your invigorating examples of this which kind
#
of inspired you and said hey i would have liked to have done that or i'd like to do an experiment
#
like this in terms of in terms of just a poet going beyond form you know i have a friend and
#
colleague who is based in london steven fowler he tends to every now and again come up with
#
amazing either chapbooks or performances or concerts in which he pushes these boundaries
#
between the text of the poem and an image or poetry and theater also in terms of temporality
#
something that has i've always been fascinated by is this concept of a long night of performances
#
you know what does it mean to for an audience to listen to a number of poets each doing
#
their own thing some of them possibly pushing up boundaries between you know page and performance
#
page and image page and music and for a number of years i tried to do that in the context of the
#
kalaghota arts festival i used to curate its literature section so i always had this feature
#
which tended to alarm some of the organizers though called hope street poets which was a long
#
evening of poetry and we always had an audience that was up for it and you know they were sort
#
of theirs they were with us and enjoyed the enjoyed this sequence of different experiments
#
coming together so i think it's at a variety of levels it's medium its scale its temporality
#
again i feel that you know although my primary commitment is to the printed book
#
i'm endlessly excited by these other possibilities so i'm going to meld a couple of your quotes
#
together from different places and come at a question at one place you write about the
#
audience for english poetry and you say unlike the audiences that sustain the hindi in marathi
#
or the hurdu to name only three of the vital interfaces between poets and audiences in india
#
the audience for english in india does not truly bring a shared and consensual understanding to
#
bear on the poetry it receives the commonality that binds it together a shared knowledge of
#
english is nominal and presumptive in fact this audience is greatly divided fragmented and
#
distributed etc etc and in a different place you write a sort of almost speaking to this you write
#
literary criticism which could have served as a common ground for the construction of a shared
#
literary culture also fails indian poet in english the terrain is divided between a high
#
highly theoretical discourse which is its own idiosyncratic art form and an often though by
#
no means always irresponsible and ill-informed popular reviewing style that regards literary
#
criticism as a bloodsport stop quote and earlier in your piece about nightmares your third nightmare
#
was about academics who are trying to impose their narrative or their framework on your poetry and
#
looking at it through that and there is at its heart a certain kind of sort of clash here
#
which is that you will have for example like literary criticism and sometimes i don't i don't
#
get what that term means or what it is meant to do because people who actually study literary
#
theory and become literary critics on the basis of that what they write often has no relation
#
to the book that i am reading i am like what on earth is this that i have a different experience
#
as a reader all readers do and these people are kind of talking to themselves they're in
#
a circle joke of their own it's a little game that's going on there and i and i don't want
#
to be completely populist and say ki nahi janta decide karegi obviously not that but at the same
#
time i think a lot of these literary critics and a lot of this literary criticism has nothing to
#
say to the serious reader or indeed to the serious writer so how does one think about this especially
#
in your case as a poet when the audience of poetry is already so limited and then you'll
#
come across poets trying to sort of impose their narratives or saying you know why don't you deal
#
with you know questions of decoloniality or whatever whatever the sort of jargon of the day
#
might be so what are your thoughts on this i've i've i've been haunted by this question of what
#
criticism can be or what it should be one of our problems might well be that there isn't enough
#
of a larger critical apparatus a set of availabilities here for instance do we have
#
enough do we have enough biographies of poets or writers do we have larger social histories
#
there's so much that a reader in say germany or italy or france or the uk can take for granted
#
that we can't and i think that that is a deficit for criticism proper i would i would really
#
welcome a criticism that is certainly well informed by some of these theoretical questions but that is
#
artisanal in how it goes about its business i mean criticism rather than seeking to
#
constantly deconstruct texts and turn them into something that corresponds to what the critic has
#
in mind i i wish we had a criticism that could take on what the text is trying to do and then
#
to develop an account around that and then of course to bring in a whole body of responses but
#
in order to create common ground that's invitational for a reader i've just been
#
reading james wood one of his one of the collections of essays and serious noticing
#
where actually in the introduction he talks about how he was trained academically in the
#
deconstructionist tradition and then he talks about this question that can mean two completely
#
different things what's at stake you know so on the one hand if a certain kind of deconstructionist
#
critic is asking that question it's about what what principles of reading might be at stake here
#
but for another kind of more popular reader or critic the question is what is important to this
#
text what's at stake for the writer what is what is the what's the thrum of life that's going into
#
this text and i think both those questions are worthy of of being pursued i think too much
#
criticism falls on you know falls into a binary between these two these two opposites
#
having said that i think that we are at this point going through a period where there's a lot more
#
criticism that is responsible that's responsive that's responsible people are writing about
#
literature that's being produced in a spirit of caring for it not just to tear it down
#
i wish that spirit would leak through more into academic writing
#
i still find a lot of critical writing that comes out of indian academia
#
that is quite lacking in that spirit of of of being a saharid there of of having that sense of
#
you know of being of one heart with the writer so to speak now again i'm thinking of someone
#
who is very important to me from another field bn goswami the art historian
#
uh it's extremely i mean you know this samit he was extremely erudite uh you have chandiga
#
it's one of my great regrets that i never asked him on the show i kept me i kept meaning to what
#
i thought the logistics of chandigarh and whatever and it's so sad that he's passed
#
because his books are masterpieces and he is absolutely the best kind of critic he just opens
#
your eyes exactly yeah so you know professor goswami's kind of criticism to me is is an ideal
#
so erudite finally researched very very meticulous on empirical detail but celebratory
#
something that really tells you why this is important not as an artifact not as something
#
out there but as something that can transform your sensibility i'll link mr goswami's books
#
from the show notes i'd encourage all my listeners to pick them up immediately and by immediately i
#
mean after finishing listening to this and not immediately immediately and i'm reminded by what
#
you said also of you know martin amis's i think it was martin amis's advice for critics where
#
he said i don't criticize a book on the basis of what you want it to be but on the basis of
#
what the writer is trying which is you know something to kind of keep in mind i want to
#
also talk about this really delightful thing that i've noticed perhaps in the last few months
#
which is a popularization of poetry into a form that people who otherwise never read poetry are
#
tapping into and it is happening or at least a place where i see it happening is on twitter or
#
what was formerly known as twitter now x and sparked i think to a certain extent by a poet
#
called joseph fasano are you familiar with any of this no tell me about it you're not so let me let
#
me tell you about it because it is just it is absolutely mind-blowing so joseph fasano is a
#
very fine poet i i don't even know whether he's english or american or whatever because for me
#
the country he belongs to is twitter and he will and and there is a certain sort of ecosystem
#
called poetry twitter where people are just posting their favorite poems either by other
#
poets or by themselves all the time and it's wonderful you you know one of the good things
#
about twitter and it's a great space and what fasano started doing while he was teaching poetry
#
is for students he would give certain writing exercises and i will give an example of one of
#
them where he would give certain poetry exercises where he would lay out the structure of a poem
#
and they would have to fill in the words and the kind of output and i will send you these links
#
and i will link them from my show notes is staggering so much so that he's putting together
#
a book of a lot of the stuff that has happened and what happened with that was that random people
#
across twitter who had no interest in poetry were actually writing poems trying to write poems
#
within structures given so i'll give an example of one of these sort of structures that he laid
#
out and i will link to it in the show notes and then i'll read out a couple of my own i first just
#
to show the rhythm and you write the title of the poem and then this is the structure
#
my name is brackets name today i feel like a brackets adjective noun verbing in the noun
#
sometimes i am a noun sometimes i am a noun but always i am objective i'll i ask the world
#
question and the answer is and now you repeat the and now you repeat line two right so just
#
to read it out again my name is name today i feel like an adjective noun verbing in the noun
#
sometimes i am a noun sometimes i am a noun but always i am objective i ask the world objective
#
but i ask the world question and the answer is and the repeat of line two so one example of this
#
could be and i just wrote like dozens of these and i keep giving them to my writing students as well
#
and everybody freaks out so one example is my name is virtue today i feel like performance art
#
basking on the boulevard sometimes i am pretty sometimes i am grotesque always i am fake i ask
#
the world how can i be me and the answer is performance art this is one and here's another
#
my name is i love you today i feel like fuck you fighting in the streets sometimes i am hubris
#
sometimes i am despair but always i am crying i ask the world can you help me and the answer is
#
fuck you right so i just read out examples i have written because i don't want to without
#
permission read out some of the incredible sort of contributions by my students or friends that
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i've given this to and what sort of struck me about the exercise itself my name is my name is
#
name today i feel like an adjective noun verbing in the noun is that what fasano did with this was
#
he lays out a structure which is inherently a musical structure whatever you write in this
#
structure will sound good you know it cannot really sound bad and then having given people
#
the structure you're asking them to use their imagination and people who have never written
#
poetry before are actually coming out with what would constitute in my opinion you know really
#
good poems whereas if they sat down and they tried to write a poem all by themselves you know
#
normally we've seen the amateur attempts of bad poets this is also why i never show my poetry to
#
anyone because i am worried that it is probably crappy like most you know beginner poetry is and
#
but within this structure it kind of makes sense and it just feels to me such a beautiful way of
#
popularizing it that where beginners will get stuck isn't figuring out language figuring out
#
how do you structure something you know where do you you know just all of that and this guy is
#
giving them a ready-made template and then it's just sort of the imagination at work so i i mean
#
i was hoping you'd be familiar with this but i'll point i'll send you all these links but in general
#
what are your thoughts about poetry being elevated into you know something that is mystical
#
that you know lonely people do in attics and etc etc to something that can actually be a mass form
#
and one could argue it is a mass form if you look at hip hop and if you look at popular music and
#
so on and so forth but what is uh you know what are your sort of thoughts on this actually i have
#
very little patience with notions of poetry as being mystical and you know the product of
#
sublime inspiration for which you need solitude i mean in every art you need some
#
element of retreat and solitude but i'm going by these wonderful examples that you just shared
#
and this project the phrase that comes to mind is dancing in chains which is sometimes applied
#
for instance to translation but i think it's true of so much artistic activity it's uh you have
#
certain parameters you know call them rules or call them the you know scaffolding that you need
#
trainer wheels whatever any meter any meter exactly yeah so you know the constraint and then
#
you're working with against through it against with through by the side of you know basically
#
keeping that constraint in mind and then developing developing something that has measure something
#
that has depth and to me this is this is very exciting indeed to see that that it's happening
#
and i i really don't believe that you know to write poetry you have to
#
you know suffer solitude and you know develop some kind of misanthropic attitude towards the world
#
i think the contrary is probably true that really it it is much more conditions of
#
empathy and compassion of trying to step out of yourself it's these kinds of conditions that
#
that predispose you more towards towards poetry it's it's really a training in responsiveness
#
attentiveness of different kinds and is can you teach creative writing is another question that
#
comes out of this i'm not so sure you can teach creative writing but i think you can
#
create the conditions of creative reading and expansions of sensibility from which
#
people will be able to write it could take the form of this exercise for instance it could take
#
the form of a new medium a platform as a challenge i mean something i'm working on now
#
a translation of mir taki mir began as a twitter project now i would i would take a share
#
have the original in roman script have the translation and then have an image
#
either from mugal or rajput or dakini or stuff of it art and that was the tweet basically
#
to which then you know i was you know i was fortunate there were many many responses to
#
to these things so it became a you know it became a collegial conversational kind of space
#
in which i was able to present quite a few of these of of these early efforts and then you know
#
that's built into a book but i'll always remember that it came out of this beautiful redemptive
#
space that twitter can be or x can be at its best and you mentioned you can't perhaps teach
#
creative writing i i think you can ignite creative writing by just sort of you know setting
#
setting the circumstances for it and that also leads me to wonder that you know if you and i
#
wanted to be artists the ground was laid for us by the lucky childhoods we had where we are
#
surrounded by books we are reading all the time our parents care about art so we are extremely
#
fortunate there and that works for us and yet there are many who don't have that good fortune
#
so they grow up not reading anything and the question that comes to me that my writing
#
students have even asked is is that if i am not a reader if i have never read anything can i still
#
aspire to write and can i still aspire to be a creator and my answer is always a vociferous yes
#
you know that i i believe it's possible for anyone to write great prose now whether you sort of go
#
ahead from that and actually create great art just depends on a whole sort of bunch of things
#
but i think it is possible and the other argument could be that the people that you see come up
#
without that kind of background and still manage to create great stuff are sort of outliers and i
#
you know instinctively i want to sort of disagree with that so i wonder how you feel about it like
#
there was you know there is this old study that a friend of mine Ajay Shah keeps sort of citing
#
by a Nobel prize-winning economist if i find it i'll link it in the show notes where he found that
#
children who grow up listening to 10-letter words around them and 10-letter words obviously
#
being a proxy for you know discourse of a certain kind will have an extra layer of intelligence that
#
other kids won't have and my friend's point while telling me this is that when we think of privilege
#
we must not think only in terms of wealth or money you know you can be in a family which is
#
wealthy but then do you read in your leisure time is it accepted that not everything you do will be
#
goal-directed you could be in a wealthy family that gets you makes you study for IIT and you do
#
IIM and you become a city bank vice president and etc etc but that extra layer simply isn't there
#
and the question there is that if you grow up in a household which doesn't have these privileges
#
can you still be a deep thinker and all the examples I think to the contrary like a person
#
both of us admire Ambedkar you know they are sort of outliers that they did not have this good fortune
#
but through sheer force of will and incredible intelligence managed to sort of make their way
#
out of it so how do you think about this you know the early setting being a key enabling factor
#
in a person becoming what they are and and I would continue to hold that at any point in time if you
#
want to create you can create and I think Fasano is in fact showing that because his work is just
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and there are many exercises he sets like these and it's a delight to follow the kind of work
#
that comes out of seven-year-old kids are writing these great pieces of verse
#
but this project itself is part of a training in creativity yeah it is so you know yeah I would
#
like to believe that potentially anyone could discover their creative gifts
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if they if there were the proper conditions for it but I mean empirically I recognize that
#
if you have this good fortune to start with and I'm quite struck by by the research that you cited
#
through Ajay Shah you if you begin with that kind of I wouldn't say an acceptance an actual
#
encouragement of something that is not goal-directed that emphasizes play and creativity as as important
#
in their own right I think that is that that is that is truly a blessing and I I went through
#
this experience myself as a child so I you know I I when I think back I've been saying think back
#
too often we have to edit that out no we will not because you are thinking back what else would you
#
say we are not constructing a poem this is exactly the opposite in fact oh my god all the drafts
#
really visible and audible as it should be
#
I'm just grateful for the hours and hours spent in childhood doing things that were never called
#
to account you know just painting for instance or drawing or reading being at large in the world of
#
reading or following through an interest in amateur astronomy not in order to become an
#
astronomer but just because it was a way of expanding one's imagination you know give Patel
#
wrote this beautiful essay a long time ago called to pick up a brush in which he talks about how
#
much of a struggle it was for his generation of Indian artists to actually have that courage to
#
pick up a brush because all around them were voices saying this is not going to get you
#
anywhere how does this become a career what does this mean in the real world what is I mean
#
effectively meaning what how do you monetize this and to be able to do that at a time when there was
#
no money in the art world these are you know I think these are these are very very precious
#
things to be able to have had a childhood or a youth where you didn't have to think about these
#
questions immediately but on the other hand not that I can think of them all off the top of my
#
head but there are people who've had childhoods and teenage years that didn't have this kind of
#
permission and yet were vigorously committed to a life of creativity and you cited Ambedkar for
#
instance absolutely but even with Ambedkar I begin to ask myself his father was a Kabir Panti
#
oh I didn't know that yeah and you know there were there were a literary spiritual imaginative
#
possibilities that were present in the background but again there was an immense courage and
#
fortitude and you know a dedication a commitment to charting one's own path that really shaped him
#
yeah I mean there's just two different ways of of going about this but are there ways in which
#
we can create systems and conditions where you can have that people can have access to these
#
possibilities later in life that's something in terms of a more generous pedagogy that is
#
something that has preoccupied me I mean I feel that's a great problem to solve in the ages to
#
come that how can we make and I'm using 10-letter words as sort of a in a metaphorical sense because
#
I keep telling my writing students don't use 10-letter words but you know in the metaphorical
#
sense how can we have that sort of respect for leisure time the respect for play and a rich
#
discourse of that sort available for everyone regardless of background and that would be
#
an incredible problem we are not really close to solving yet but surely I hope that one day
#
sort of technology will get us there you know before we go in for a break I'll you know push
#
a thought experiment or a counterfactual upon you let us say that you do not have the upbringing
#
that you do let us say that you're a mill worker's son and that you haven't read a book till you are
#
20 and it is frowned upon what do you become and I say this not in the sense of a playful
#
counterfactual or whatever but I say this to try and get to what you feel is essential about you
#
a lot of what you have achieved is kind of helped helped across helped along by circumstance by
#
context all of these things things just working out perfect storms of events assuming all of
#
that simply isn't there you know what is that essential thing about you that is ranjit hoskote
#
if there is something oh my god do I need to answer that now or after the break we can do
#
it after the break you can think about it but the first thought that came to me when you proposed
#
your counterfactual about if you're a mill worker's son what happens I mean instinctively
#
there was a voice in my head that said you know you might turn into narayan survey but that was
#
you know for every survey I'm sure there are there were many thousands of people who simply
#
got ground down by routine and circumstance and need and urgency but the reason I cite survey is
#
because I did have the privilege of getting to know him a little from having read with him and
#
been at site academy conferences and so on I was always struck by how incredibly gentle and generous
#
he was despite having had the most appalling circumstances of upbringing to grow up with he
#
was he was a foundling his parents the mill workers who found him his adoptive were adoptive
#
parents and then at some point with there was some great downturn or was it a strike or a famine I
#
can't remember quite what but they had to go back to their village at which point they just literally
#
abandoned him and in his case he found a context in in I think in left politics and its cultural
#
apparatus I think there was a sense of what was missing in terms of the family I think was made
#
up for this community of peers but one of his collections is called my university by which he
#
means the street and the first thought there might be oh my god does he mean the rough and
#
tumble of the street and then you realize more closely that it's the street as the place of
#
protest of resistance of a certain kind of peer-to-peer education within this
#
wager on a more just and happier future that the left was at its best
#
so there again you know even within the terms of your counterfactual we are still thinking about
#
conditions paradigms alternative platforms that can give you that sense of community and
#
allow you to express what is within you to express not in a narrowly instrumentally political way
#
way necessarily but also through creativity what was it about survey that came through that world
#
of of of the cultural left that's the question I would ask myself and is that still available
#
to someone who who might begin a survey began today where is that to be found I think we're
#
all looking for different kinds of home definitions of you know how do we craft a sense of belonging
#
for ourselves on that note let's take a break and we'll come back and explore this further
#
have you always wanted to be a writer but never quite gotten down to it well I'd love to help you
#
since April 2020 I've enjoyed teaching 27 cohorts of my online course the art of clear writing
#
and an online community has now sprung up of all my past students we have workshops a newsletter
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#
through four webinars spread over four weekends I share all I know about the craft and practice
#
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the end of it the course cost rupees 10 000 plus gst or about 150 dollars if you're interested head
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on over to register at indiancard.com slash clear writing that's indiancard.com slash clear writing
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being a good writer doesn't require god-given talent just a willingness to work hard and a
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clear idea of what you need to do to refine your skills I can help you
#
welcome back to the scene of the unseen I'm chatting with Ranjit Hoskote about his life
#
his poetry and we shall continue talking about art and culture and the times we live in and so on
#
and so forth but I'm just reminded by you know just before we I hit record just now you know
#
we mentioned a particular event and then you said gosh it feels so long ago it's almost
#
like a century ago now and actually it was about 15 years ago and I you know that reminds me of
#
something that a friend of mine says I first heard this from a friend of mine called Gautam John
#
where he said the days are long but the years are short and I think of that more and more as I kind
#
of grow older you know by the time this episode is released I'll be past 50 though thankfully as of
#
this moment this is actually my last episode I'm recording in my 40s and you of course are already
#
a veteran of being 50 as it were you've been there for a few years how has the way that you
#
look at time changed because you mentioned earlier about how when you would meet all these great
#
poets and all of them would seem impossibly old to you you know in the late 80s and early 90s
#
and today you realize that you are now older than some of them were at the same time and sometimes
#
one can get that same staggering realization about one's own parents that you think of your
#
father at a particular point in time and at that time you looked at him as if someone who was like
#
totally not with not with it really old you know a man of yesterday and today you realize hey I'm
#
older than that what must he have felt you know etc etc and I wonder how you look at time differently
#
because we are actually you know from the time of our birth till today there is almost as much
#
distance as the end of the first world war for example you know well when we were young it would
#
seem that the first world war is like impossibly far away and I think one begins to sort of realize
#
that history passes so much quicker than we realize and a lot of what sort of happens in
#
that passing of time is really accidental and in no one's control and so on and so forth so do you
#
look at time differently has it changed the way you look at yourself and think about your own
#
happiness I have begun to think more and more of time as a as a pressing presence at least partly
#
because you know it's like that famous story of Saint Augustine's hymn you know when it begins and
#
the voices are surging up there's a great sense of things to come and hope and so on by the time
#
you're in the middle some patterns are clear and as you come to the close you're thinking in fact
#
of the end and for all kinds of reasons you know the passing away of parents of dear friends
#
of mentors time as mortality has come to occupy more and more of my my thinking but it's also
#
had the aspect of looking back and realizing that one could have been more understanding
#
more forgiving of older friends because although they seemed to us as teenagers to be complete and
#
fully formed they clearly were also going through their own struggles in times of great transition
#
as as a young person so many of my friends the people I felt closest to were
#
decades older than me I'm thinking here of Nessa Mizeekil the poet I'm thinking of painters like
#
Jahangir Sabawala, Mehli Gobai, Giv Patel again and I'm struck by how younger people today do not
#
seem to have intergenerational friendships when I asked my students at Ashoka last year when I was
#
teaching there for a semester it turned out that their friendships were all far more horizontal
#
and most of them cited essentially grandparents as the people they were close to in another
#
generation this seems to me to be a sad thing because even if even if as young people we were
#
you know somewhat antagonistic sometimes wanting older people to respond in a more definite way to
#
certain things nonetheless I think those relationships were characterized by a great
#
deal of warmth generosity on both sides and just the privilege of learning so much and expanding
#
one's world I don't know what's going to happen to that kind of intergenerational friendship
#
such possibilities as we as we go along perhaps irrelevantly I think that for me time also
#
sediments itself in technological changes when I look back at things I've written 20 or 30 years
#
ago I think to myself my god will a young reader even know what I'm talking about here what is a
#
fax what was that sound that the early modems made which might come back as a ringtone maybe
#
now the rotary dial-up kind of telephone things that had a real presence for us growing up
#
just don't even exist anymore so time the experience of passing you know time passing
#
as it is seemingly more and more rapidly comes through to me also in acts of reading
#
you know and I think back to not things written in the 1920s or 1930s because they seem to have
#
you know a stylized place in a certain kind of memory but it's our childhood and youth which
#
seems to be vanishing without having been adequately archived maybe I don't know what
#
do you think I mean for instance a novel like English August might speak to some aspects of
#
what our childhoods and teenage years were like but I don't know if the 1970s 1980s have really
#
been archived or stylized enough not just that one thing that I think of and it's both a good
#
thing and a bad thing is that inevitably when I have guests of my vintage over here and I ask them
#
about their early influences I'll find that we grew up reading the same kind of books because
#
those are the only sort of books that there were so in your extreme early childhood you'll
#
read you Annette Blyton's and Hardy Boys and then you'll move on to a certain kind of literature
#
maybe in college you'll listen to a certain kind of music and those are sort of shared cultural
#
references we could have because there was something definite called the mainstream
#
and in a sense that was an that was extremely constricting right Steve Vans and the guitarist
#
of the East Street Band with Bruce Springsteen once said that rock and roll really began when
#
Dylan went electric and it ended when Kurt Cobain died you know and although those are arbitrary
#
points in time it still kind of makes sense because I think what started happening in the 90s across
#
fields and has accelerated today is a crumbling of the mainstream now in some ways that is
#
outstanding it is outstanding because it gives people like you and me the means of production
#
in our hands I don't have to go to some big corporate and beg them let me do eight hour
#
conversations I can just put them out and everyone has a means of production we no longer have to go
#
through gatekeepers we no longer have to conform to conventions of the day we no longer have to be
#
mindful of news cycles or sellability or conforming to forms which as we discussed are actually
#
artifacts anyway all that is great but a knock-on side effect of that is that a there is no consensus
#
on the truth anymore that we are instead engaged in different narrative battles and that has
#
polarized us deeply in the sense that the first time a 15 year old is send a youtube video
#
it might be from some extreme friend sharing a conspiracy theory but then the algorithm takes
#
over and serves him more of that and then he is in a world formed by that algorithm and I could be
#
in a different world formed by the same algorithm but taking me in completely different directions
#
and then we meet it is two algorithms meeting it is not one human being and another and there is
#
no shared point of reference so I understand all the positive things that come out of this
#
the fact that there are long tales the fact that you know for an artist success is no longer about
#
being part of the top one percent because earlier it was all top heavy the top one percent make all
#
the money and then 99 percent are just struggling today you can find a thousand true fans a hundred
#
true fans everybody can make a living everybody can find their niche that is great but those
#
shared references aren't there if the same podcast is happening between two 50 year old people 50
#
years later they might not have read any of the same books or heard any of the same music
#
and that's both good and bad I think it's good because there are there's a multiplicity of
#
options and entertainments and all of that open to us but the worry there is that we may lose
#
common ground especially when it goes beyond the question of art and it goes to a question
#
of reality itself and politics and all of that what are your thoughts this is a terrifying
#
but very plausible scenario I was reminded as you were speaking of two different moments in my life
#
one is when I first discovered the writing of Alvin and Heidi Toffler future shock the third
#
wave I would have read these books in the mid 1980s but they were actually written as I recall
#
now in the late 70s so for them to have had such an incredibly real sense of the future
#
minor details that I'll offer one is when they say for instance that the future metropolis will not
#
have a single rush hour because people are going to be transiting different ways and that some
#
might not even might just be working from home all this became real to us also the notion of the
#
prosumer that they came up with someone who was a producer and a consumer with some control over
#
the means of production unrelated to huge corporations exactly like you said we're
#
living that already but what you then went on to say about this the beautiful but terrifying way
#
in which you characterized it that it's not two human beings meeting the two algorithms meeting
#
that is that that takes away so much by way of what we bring to a to a meeting to a conversation
#
in terms of imagination uncertainty curiosity it's tragic and when you put it like that it's true
#
if more and more people are going to be essentially constructed by their algorithms they're effectively
#
living in a digital reality and how then do we what is it that we can take for granted as shared
#
I don't know the other moment that I was thinking of as you were speaking was how excited I was
#
when I first read Chris Anderson's book the long tail and I thought this is a great justification
#
for those of us who seem to be caught up in in sort of minority arts if you like you know where
#
there isn't much of an audience but you know there you are somewhere along the long tail with
#
your particular context but what seemed like a bold way of thinking about these things
#
now seems really to have its downside and its deficits because it means that there doesn't
#
necessarily have to be any bridging of these different constituencies but there will be
#
large-scale social and political moments where these groups come at least into a space of
#
adjacency then what is it that they can say to each other how how do you mobilize larger
#
public opinion but honestly as we see from things that have unfolded in the last two weeks
#
I don't know where that climate of public opinion is anymore or what it can even mean I want to
#
digress from the arts and we'll come back to the arts and culture and actually zero in on exactly
#
that because it seems to me that the most worrying aspect of this is in our political discourse like
#
you know what happened to you recently the whole documentary episode and you wrote this really
#
graceful letter so much of which resonated with me so you know when when all of this happened the
#
Hamas attacks and Israel's retaliation people who have in the past looked at me as a sort of
#
sense maker of some events said will you please comment on it and I said look I don't know enough
#
to comment on it and then I also thought that and I haven't commented on it in public this is a safe
#
space so I'll kind of share my feelings and the reason is that I can get attacked from all sides
#
like my sense is I support the Palestinian people I support the Israeli people I am against Hamas I
#
am against the Israeli state right and but as you pointed out in your letter that people keep
#
conflating these people assume that if you're against the Israeli state you must be anti-semitic
#
and that if you support Palestine you must perforce support Hamas though I honestly feel that
#
Hamas is what is harming the Palestinian people the most at the current moment
#
and I cannot express any of this in public because I will be jumped upon and cancelled by all sides
#
you know so I have just stayed shut and I think that has a chilling effect on the discourse
#
and part of I think what is happening here is an increasing tribalism that's exacerbated by
#
social media and this is I wouldn't blame technology per se I would blame human nature
#
for this that we have these we are a bundle of many instincts some are good some are bad some
#
are contradictory and these tribalistic instincts are really easy to tap into and you know Jonathan
#
Haidt speaks about the Facebook like button and the Twitter retweet button as being particular
#
villains in this case but the big tech companies in their search for greater engagement ended up
#
amplifying the worst aspects of our nature and we become increasingly tribal which you know in
#
my opinion it really has taken in only a minority of people but those are vocal minorities and the
#
silent majority is just too scared to say anything like why do you want trouble why do you want to
#
kind of you know enter that kind of territory and at a rational level the pursuit of truth
#
and this is also something I think about that you and I engage in the world of ideas and we
#
care about truth but at a rational level the pursuit of truth only matters in those domains
#
which affect you materially immediately so if you are for example an engineer in a company somewhere
#
you need to know whatever affects your job or whatever affects you know if your kids go to
#
school you need to know what the good schools are you don't need to know what this government is
#
doing or what the truth is and is there really a genocide there and is there is the economy really
#
doing badly or what the GDP is right that is not rational and therefore what happens is that the
#
truth ceases to matter and we get carried along these narrative lines and these narrative battles
#
become starker and starker because we are incentivized to be extreme that is the only way
#
we get the applause of our tribesmen as it were exactly so so you know tell me a little bit about
#
your experiences and how do you really think about you know all of this you know exactly as
#
you said amit it's becoming more and more precarious to speak for tonality for nuance
#
in discussions like this because the way in which all of our experience today is being structured is
#
is on binary lines there's an either or ism at work you know it's either you take this side or
#
the other the entire possibility of common ground is just being vacated in fact it's seen as
#
undesirable and this is a global phenomenon in that kind of situation i mean how do you even
#
present your readers or your audience with the possibility that there might be a variety of
#
positions that you can take on a on a subject coupled with that is again i'm i'm reminded of
#
sociologists who meant something to me at one point or another you know decades ago
#
juergen habermas the the german sociologist who unfortunately today i find myself agreeing with
#
him on on almost nothing but years ago he predicted that there would be a turn where people tended to
#
retreat into civil privatism and move away from the public sphere and this you see happening
#
you know as you pointed out people tend to prefer to retreat into their own priorities as private
#
individuals and leave aside any notion of participating in the public space and then you
#
have nation states governments corporations that are actually encouraging people to move away from
#
participating in the public sphere so that's that's the situation that we're in and if we
#
are supposed to give voice to a range of opinions how do we do that how do we do that also in
#
a scenario where surveillance is simply becoming a a fact of life not only in public but invading
#
your private and intimate spaces then i'm thinking of the polish sociologist zygmunt bauman
#
who talked about our epoch as a time of liquid modernity where all kinds of certitudes are
#
melting down but as one reaction to that is what he calls a neo-tribalism you know rather than form
#
nourishing nurturing replenishing spaces of community what people form are groupings
#
mobilizations based on resentment and out of defensiveness so that's these are these tribes
#
that that that are these neo-tribes that that we are now increasingly being asked to to be part of
#
but what happens if you reject tribal membership what happens to the contested vexed often
#
criticized figure called the public intellectual you know it's a it's a really solitary path to
#
to be following but i don't know what else one could be true to i mean how do you bear
#
witness to the complexity of this situation or any situation that we're in
#
on a related note you know in a recent episode with rahul mathan where i was grilling him about
#
surveillance and privacy and all of these things and a fine man and he's written a couple of
#
interesting books privacy 3.0 is particularly interesting and there he talks in great detail
#
about bentham's concept of the panopticon right and the panopticon for those of my listeners who
#
haven't heard the episode is bentham's extremely serious design wasn't a thought experiment it was
#
a serious design where there's a prison and a circular and all the cells are facing inwards
#
into a central control tower from which they can be surveilled at all times and they can't actually
#
look inside those towers and it wasn't built in england where bentham was but there were
#
panopticons built in the u.s and what was found is that the people housed in those panopticons
#
essentially went crazy the pressure of being under constant surveillance just drove them nuts
#
anxiety and all kinds of other issues and what rahul and i were musing aloud about was if we are
#
back to the age of the panopticon because of technology you know jonathan hate often speaks
#
about how there is a rise in depression and even suicide rates among teenage girls in the u.s
#
because of you know the pressures of instagram where you're always contrasting your real self
#
with the projected selves of others and i wonder if that's in a sense true of all of us that we
#
we feel because of form we feel that we need to be part of that public square on twitter always
#
projecting always being part of whatever but at the same time that means that we are being looked
#
at all the time and and and i wonder what kind of new age anxieties that leads to and how even
#
people like us you know technically we are we grew up in a different time but i find that i am also
#
always checking my phone if there are notifications and i am also scrolling reels for like two hours
#
at a time and all of that what is what is your sense of all of this i'm in exactly that situation
#
myself i mean i recognize critically and in an objective way that you know one needs to maintain
#
a certain distance from one's devices but so much of one's sociality you know our social
#
interactions now are mediated through through our digital space and digital platforms so there's
#
in one sense we are condemned to the panopticon we've condemned ourselves to the panopticon
#
but what does that do to our sense of selfhood our subjectivity and without
#
without turning into luddites how do we go back to a point where we recognize that
#
rather than become enslaved to these devices we need to
#
somehow transform these devices to be in constants with what we want i think there's been a it's just
#
the cascading tempo the relentlessness the 24-hourness of this of this digital
#
environment that just becomes so captivating for some reason yesterday i found myself revisiting
#
an old movie called tron i don't know if you remember it i think it was 1982
#
where our so to speak real world in person set of conflicts get translated into
#
into a computer game and then back again you know i suddenly thought tron seemed so incredibly
#
futuristic which was such a word for us in the 1980s today it's upon us we are all inside that
#
computer game so it's a question of now finding the portal that brings us back out of it to be
#
able to see all of this with some kind of dispassionate distance and when you went through
#
your recent sort of document experience and what kind of solidarity did you find among people you
#
consider to be fellow travelers like was it just something that went wrong at an institutional level
#
where the institution behaved in a mad way and essentially everybody reasonable was on your side
#
of the matter or was it a case of you know that many people you thought were fellow travelers with
#
the same kind of values uh suddenly sort of you know weren't with you anymore actually the the
#
best part of that that dreadful experience was the enormous surge spontaneous surge of
#
support and solidarity from friends and colleagues beginning first in in the german
#
speaking world i mean just the very evening that our evening there afternoon when when
#
the first of those articles came out immediately there were calls and messages from from friends
#
and colleagues in germany and austria and switzerland and some people almost from from
#
a previous life who i hadn't spoken to in a while or we hadn't interacted and then you know the
#
you know people in the cultural world in the arts and literature and then rapidly from friends and
#
colleagues everywhere in india the u.s the uk it rapidly became a global situation really not
#
not something that i would either have expected or welcomed but what it threw into contour was
#
the the steep rapid descent into a toxic space in german politics and in german cultural
#
institutions it's truly tragic that under the camouflage of in this idea of protecting and
#
supporting israel what what is actually underway in german politics is a thoroughgoing islamophobia
#
which you know is is being articulated more and more strongly because the legislation against the
#
bds movement was originally put in put in train by the if day which is a far right party inspired
#
by by the nazi past in the last few years it's actually captured more and more of the vote
#
chair and centrist parties are falling in line with its doctrines and it's tragic that
#
this kind of doctrine where you know legitimate criticism of israel is just simply labeled as
#
anti-semitism it's tragic that that kind of doctrine is now coming to define the work of
#
germany's cultural institutions which have you know for decades been very open to dialogue and
#
debate they've been open to dissent they've welcomed dissenting voices much of this is not
#
going to be possible anymore so documenta which began in 1955 and which across its many additions
#
has really been a counterpoint to prevailing dogmas it's almost impossible in these circumstances
#
for there to be a document i know and this is true of so many other institutions we've seen in
#
the last month or so how many exhibitions and projects have been pulled because curators or
#
artists have expressed sympathy for palestine called for a ceasefire criticized israel in a
#
number of these cases these curators and artists have actually been jewish people or israeli citizens
#
so and i've repeatedly said isn't it absurd to to decide that a jewish person who critiques israel
#
is anti-semitic i mean how are you anti yourself in that case and there's a there's an absurdity to
#
this leave alone other people who are were not jewish and it's a similar kind of you know
#
distressing move in politics happening across the world which often makes me you know doubt whether
#
you know the arc of history really bends in a positive direction whether towards justice or
#
freedom or equality or whatever but i want to sort of bring your attention back to india for a bit
#
you know you mentioned sort of growing up in goa then coming to bombay so on and so forth
#
and one of the things that i've realized and the many conversations i've had in the course of
#
recording this podcast have actually brought me to that realization is that i was profoundly
#
wrong about the nature of indian society i grew up within a bubble i grew up as part of an english
#
speaking urban elite and i imagine that how we are broadly secular we are broadly tolerant we
#
are broadly liberal and i have kind of since come to realize that no i was a french that that was
#
simply not the case you know episodes like you know i did an episode with akshay mukul on his
#
great book in the gita press and episodes like that kind of made me realize that actually
#
you know this was always a very strong strain running through our society now obviously
#
whatever we say of india the cliche goes the opposite is true so we are definitely liberal
#
in some aspects of our lived reality like the syncretism that goes into our food our clothes
#
our culture all of it is just this delightful khichri and a mix of influences but nevertheless
#
we are also deeply liberal in the way we treat our women in our caste system itself
#
and in this disturbing anti-muslim strain that is really the dominant aspect of the politics that
#
we are kind of talking about and my sense is that we were always like this that politics is
#
downstream of culture and it is only now that indian politics has caught up with indian society
#
that there was a brief period where you know after independence where we had sort of a relatively
#
liberal constitution not as liberal as i'd like but a relatively liberal constitution
#
imposed on an illiberal society by a bunch of elites who at the time were in fact unelected
#
and however good the intervention the intentions might have been top-down intervention simply do
#
not work you know this is one thing gandhiji was right about that you have to change india from
#
the bottom up and we sort of we stopped trying we assumed we've got a constitution
#
we stopped trying and the result is we are where we are and some of it is of course i think
#
exacerbated by social media that you know you can have these kind of preference cascades you no
#
longer have to hide your bigotry or your misogyny or whatever because it is now acceptable to be all
#
of these things and it is most particularly acceptable to be anti-muslim and and and to
#
you know which is by far the most distressing sort of aspect of all of this so i want to ask
#
you what is your sense of this like looking at the world through the prisms as you were growing up
#
first in gua then in bombay and all of that am i being too negative and pessimistic about this or
#
was our society always like this were you and i always in a sort of a bubble and was it therefore
#
somehow inevitable that we would come to this you know and what are the failures that our leaders
#
and our public intellectuals made you know through this process you know i can't help
#
feeling that we were probably in a bubble because i also was brought up in a context that now i've
#
come to describe as neruvian pluralist because this is what it was and it now seems to have
#
been something of an exception rather than the rule i think as people affiliated with
#
so let's say the liberal center i think what we were guilty of was complacency the feeling that
#
these liberal institutions were going to be robust even as late as 2014 people will say oh these are
#
institutions of democracy are robust ultimately they are made by people they are made through
#
decisions that can be altered in in you know through executive decisions through legal
#
mechanisms and what we're seeing is the rise of this extreme bigotry but i don't know if the
#
bigotry is the real india either i i would actually like to think that this conflict between a more
#
liberal and a more illiberal india probably goes back to the aftermath of 1857 when there was a
#
concerted effort among various by various political actors to really create these hard-edged
#
mutually exclusive identities of so-called hindu and so-called muslim and that played into the
#
language wars as well absolutely the language wars exactly it's then also as in the course of
#
working on my mir takim translation i've been going back into something that's been with me
#
for a long time but now i'm trying to articulate it in the introduction that what we now regard as
#
urdu is more heavily persianized more heavily perso-arabic in its emphasis it's really that
#
emerges in its in these contours really in the aftermath of 1857 just as a far more sanskritic
#
kari-boli oriented hindi is you know comes out of this that same period before that if you look
#
at how me writes his i mean there's braj there's avadhi he makes fun of words imported from farsi
#
it's a very robust language that draws on multiple sources so then i'm thinking back to what is that
#
really he calls his own language hindi so it's part of what i see as the hindavi continuum which
#
then gets fractured and sharpened and polarized as you say that's you know the language wars are
#
part of these larger wars of constructed identities i'm also thinking here of what
#
ambedkar said in in in a famous closing speech actually to the constituent assembly where he said
#
said that you know democracy is uh is is is a topsoil in in a profoundly undemocratic country
#
and undemocratic society so it comes down to our taking these liberties and this
#
liberality for granted also i think for a very long time the left liberal liberal formation really
#
did not take cognizance of the power of the religious imagination i think this notion of
#
taragoing secularism which would keep all religions at a distance i think it really
#
failed to see how very important the religious imagination is in this country for good or ill
#
i mean and that's been that's been uh weaponized by the other side so some of us are caught between
#
an aggressive secularism that has no place for the religious imagination and on the other side a
#
politicized religiosity which is simply uh cynically manipulating religion so what what
#
can it mean to to have a certain belief in a spiritual dimension or to appreciate and accept
#
the role of the sacred without falling into these extremes the german theorist karl schmidt spoke
#
about how in politics you always need an other and it strikes me that in the religious imagination
#
to borrow borrow your phrase you don't need another that there can be a religious imagination
#
that is about community and fulfillment and a whole bunch of other positive things
#
without necessarily the othering of muslims or these extremely toxic you know negative some
#
narratives so and i feel that there is also a failure of imagination in india of people who
#
would kind of oppose what is going on in not sort of speaking to the better angels of our nature in
#
terms of both what we instinctively value in the world and in both what even those who have that
#
religious imagination or care about that which i don't but even those who kind of have that
#
in sort of appealing to better aspects of that so what do you think about that is there a failure
#
of imagination and if we are to envisage a road forward what are the attributes either of our
#
nature or within our culture that we could possibly you know amplify or appeal to to
#
get out of this morass i i honestly think that we need to look back to the more redemptive more
#
self-critical aspects of the tradition the way in which the tradition is looked at on all sides
#
today is is still coming through a colonial lens of something that is over that is sealed
#
and that it's not living experience anymore
#
there's still room to there's still time and room i hope to look back at how the various currents
#
and streams within the hindu formation have always prized debate dark dark has always been important
#
there's been course correction there have been there have been thinkers in our own time who've
#
taken forward these aspects of of hindu thought i'm thinking here ramchandra gandhi for instance
#
or mp rege or dayakrishna it's tragic that philosophers of this stature are
#
not widely appreciated or thought about i mean i think of dayaji's work on the rig veda where
#
pretty much for the first time he demonstrated how many rishikas had contributed to the rigvedic
#
hymns that they were as it were female authors present in that constellation or rege working
#
through the tradition to think of what a samanya dharma is what is what does it mean to have a
#
a dharma of the everyday which is accepting of the other which forms common ground which
#
tries to create constructive and generative relationships
#
or ramu bhai's ramchandra gandhi's drawing attention at the height of the ayodhya crisis
#
to sita ki rasoi you know talking about how one of the many shrines that was erased on the way to
#
this grand edifice was the was sita's kitchen and what is it that we're losing in terms of
#
in terms of the feminine the manifestations of the devi the matrakas
#
what is all of that that we're losing in constructing this very modern sense of a
#
macho masculinist hinduism so there are all of these dimensions of you know within within
#
hindu thought within hindu spirituality that need more far more attention actually
#
do you think there is something inherently nuanced and complex in them that prevents them from
#
appealing to the popular imagination for example the popular imagination will always
#
hit upon simplistic notions of the world and not want to embrace engage with complexity and so on
#
and so forth do you feel that that is an issue or do you feel that he know that these are so
#
much a part of people's social fabrics anyway that you know it's just a question of getting
#
these ideas out there anymore and it is actually happenstance and not inevitability that a
#
particular strain of thought has won out i think that many of these things that i talked about
#
were in fact part of normal social and cultural experience what we see today is actually the rise
#
of a victimology it's it's an ideology that speaks to to resentment to deficit to lack
#
yes populism applied to hinduism absolutely yeah and and you know it depends on speaking to the
#
most to to the most base and aggressive aspects of of the personality to achieve its ends so it
#
really has neither time nor patience nor knowledge of all of these aspects of of i have to say hindu
#
practice which even when i think back to you know think of the late 19th century think of my
#
grandparents generation so many of these values were you know present in in everyday life today
#
it's strange that we have to actually identify the syncretism or reform but they were they were part
#
of a lived a lived reality can you elaborate on you know the phrase you used just now colonial
#
lens can you elaborate on how the colonial lens has affected how we look at our own religions
#
in our own cultures let me begin with the way in which vedanta is now taken by most many if not
#
most hindus to be the ideal expression of of hindu thought although many of us know that it's one of
#
six and even more darshanas or ways of thinking through reality and our real our connection to
#
the universe now i can't help thinking that that is a fallout of the colonial encounter
#
that you know we under pressure from having to engage in dialogue with at that point preeminently
#
anglican missionaries there was a sense of i'm thinking here for instance of say raja ramo and
#
roy to name but one example of this tendency you know you meet a monotheism that comes in
#
from elsewhere with the corresponding monotheism you know you're faced with a religion that is
#
premised on one major text and then you scramble about and pick from a variety of texts that are
#
available one that then gets taken to be preeminent over the others
#
you know there's vishishta advait there's kashmir Shaivism there's any number of the nyaya schools
#
none of which are premised on the same principles that motivate advait but it's almost as if we've
#
ceased to ask these questions to look at the diversity of philosophical positions that are
#
available within this formation and this it's a symptom of of this larger problem of how we've
#
come to our understand our own religions through this lens or for instance the way in which
#
tantra is seen as something verging on the obscene something strange and not to be taken seriously
#
that stems out of a victorian orthodoxy in actual fact so many of i mean the basic household puja
#
is based on tantric principles but you know in the in the kind of mainstream hindu mind it's
#
identified with strange sexual rituals and you know there's so much within our spiritual and
#
philosophical heritage that we're just cutting out or stigmatizing because we don't have lived
#
access to it anymore or are able to see it as something that sustained a a more holistic way
#
of being in the world so is it fair to sort of paraphrase this and say that our religious
#
reality is really disaggregated and decentralized and at the coming of the british then forces us to
#
place upon this a narrative that they can engage with and that therefore is almost a
#
mirror of what their religion itself looks like absolutely and i think it has i've argued this
#
actually in an introduction brief introduction that i did to a translation of the isha panisha
#
that i did one of the things i did during the lockdown actually i think this has prior roots
#
in a well-meaning experiment which was dara shikoh's desire to have a dialogue with
#
hinduism and you know he was uh i mean he produced this together with the collegium of of
#
of scholars he produced this book called the majmal bahrain the sagar sangham the meeting of oceans
#
but if you actually read it it takes a comparative religion approach what he's doing is to identify
#
from within the diverse hindu corpus those aspects that most closely approximate what he's familiar
#
with out of islam and you know there's the you know what we see today as these overwhelming
#
principles of monotheism or monism and in hindu thought it actually has its origins in this in
#
this symposium and this text which then i think forms the basis for what anglican missionaries
#
would then get to and how hindus began to construct themselves so it's tragic that what we take to be
#
most integral and important about our religious experience is actually a mirror image and we need
#
to emancipate ourselves from this actually to to look at the diversity of perspectives on what the
#
religious imagination is what its objects are the ways in which we've formed connections with
#
with the universe or with the larger notion of divinity or sometimes without even the device of
#
divinity one of my learnings from reading tony joseph's great book early indians and from doing
#
an episode with him was that after all the migrations to india had happened including the
#
are in migration for a thousand years or a couple of thousand years everybody was
#
partying there was intermingling we were all chilling it was like full on musty happening
#
and then around the time then then around 2000 years ago one particular ideological strain in
#
the gangetic belt pins over and you have cast endogamy coming into play and that remains for
#
the next 2000 years which is why you know david reich says if you want to look for a large
#
population look at the han chinese india is an aggregation of many small populations that is
#
you know what endogamy has kind of done to us and that particular ideological strain winning over
#
and then again when what you describe in that encounter with colonialism is again that one
#
particular vision of hinduism winning over which is a light to that very ideological strain
#
and that makes me wonder that is it some what is so attractive about that particular ideological
#
strain is there something that is inevitable in this whole exercise and also those good
#
aspects of our disaggregated religion whatever name you want to give it have we lost a lot of
#
it are we in danger of losing more of it until everything becomes simplified and we end up with
#
this sort of caricature version of a religion that then becomes a religion itself because nothing
#
else is left that is that is the way we're headed i think what happened in within the terms of this
#
colonial encounter was that in responding to an apparatus of knowledge and a certain theology that
#
came from elsewhere i think we ended up creating a theology there was a mirror image of essentially
#
of anglican religion and in the era of print modernity i think the crisis was you know which
#
is the most authoritative text i think that has done a great deal of damage to to our textual and
#
scriptural tradition so much of which is based on virginality on recensions on local versions
#
you know if you if you get to the point where you need that one critical edition which has
#
authority and nothing else does you know it's it's it's creating a monolith and the hindu
#
formation has never been monolithic which is why i cherish the the idea of this tala purana you
#
know it's where what you might want to call the margi energies of you know the great tradition
#
meet the desi or robustly local traditions and a third thing that's created something that is
#
specific to the locale that's responsive to that particular culture in that particular historic
#
moment so for me the sthala purana becomes a metaphor for this kind of diversity which is also
#
quite inclusive inclusive and embracing of all kinds of different things going on which is why
#
you know so many sthala puranas have figures who are in some sense wonderfully ambiguous
#
in the sundarbans area for instance think of bond baby i mean there is there's there is you can see
#
her as a bond baby and other figures like her you know they have a place in sufi lore they have a
#
place in hindu practice and this is true all over the place including khandoba closer home
#
for instance and originally yaksha figure who has a place in what you might want to call hindu
#
practice but who also has an aspect as a muslim peer there's some reference to that in arun's
#
arun kalatkar's jezuri in fact so we've you know we're in danger of losing this this
#
manyness this virginality and that would be a huge loss i think because you know it would
#
flatten our culture it would narrow down and instrumentalize our religious imagination
#
one thing that i used to worry about a while back and i don't worry about it so much now
#
and i'll talk about why but one thing that i used to worry about was increasing homogenization
#
of everything under cultural pressure you know i've done an episode with bikram doctor on
#
indian food right and of course most indian food is not really indian indian in origin but at the
#
same time everything is indian because what the hell it's ahar zam masala dalenge usme but the
#
great metaphor i got out of that was a cavendish banana which you know doc pointed out that hey
#
you know we sent bananas all over the world and then this homogenized version called the
#
cavendish banana became really popular in latin america and it's got great advantages like i
#
suppose it lasts longer than other bananas easy to grow etc etc and now it's been brought back
#
to india coming a full circle and it is wiping out all the indigenous forms of bananas and
#
everything is cavendish right and that's a process which is happening and and i thought that there is
#
a danger in that happening with culture as well the great great flattening sound as it were that
#
you have you know a very small percentage of artists you know actually becoming mainstream
#
stars and then they influence everything else because the corporate suits are just doing me
#
twos and franchises when it comes to movies and all of that so i used to be worried about this now
#
i'm not so worried anymore because what i feel has happened is that there's been a countervailing
#
tendency which has been enabled by technology for example one of my guests who i learned a lot from
#
was vinay singhal who runs this site called stage.in and they call themselves a netflix for bharat
#
and this doesn't mean that they do otts in languages like hindi tamil bengali instead they
#
ignore the languages and do content in the dialects like haryanvi bhojpuri and so on
#
and and vinay's point is this that you know that you know languages are in cities dialects outside
#
cities whenever you urbanize which is a damn good thing the the pressure there is to homogenize to
#
fit in with the dominant language and so all these dialects eventually over a period of time get lost
#
but where that seems to be reversing is that technology gives you the power to express
#
individual preferences and what has happened at stage.in is that the the content and haryanvi
#
bhojpuri methili all of these have become enormously popular leading to what he calls
#
the reverse migration from bollywood where a lot of haryanvi kids who were interested in
#
filmmaking had come to bombay have now moved back and there's a flourishing film industry there
#
and i think he's charging netflix rates and has three and a half lakh subscribers or whatever so
#
it is absolutely mind-blowing and and i find this happening more and more that you will have cloud
#
kitchens coming up which will give you you know naga pork curry and all kinds of things sitting
#
here in bombay and that great flattening sound is now being met by a sort of sharper and sharper
#
expressions of individual insistence on whatever little niche that was dying out that they want
#
to protect is and i wonder if there is sort of some hope here because a great flattening sound
#
is going to be bloody loud but at the same time you know there are all these individual ways to
#
keep aspects of your culture or even your religion alive so do you think there is
#
something in there that the future might you know have some hope for us here you know i
#
warm to these examples particularly the example of the languages because you know none of those
#
are dialects exactly i mean they are all robust languages with vibrant literatures and the only
#
reason we see them as dialects is because of this mechanism by which certain
#
uh actually quite modern languages were seen as the standard against which everything that went
#
before was actually derogated to the level of also like they say the language is a dialect
#
with an army so so much of it is political exactly that yeah yeah so you know what you said about
#
you know the the movement now being back to harianvi or bhojpuri or magai maithili is undoing so much
#
of the damage that the linguist that linguistic politics has enacted in through the first half
#
of the 20th century but i don't know if that can happen with the religious imagination i'm not sure
#
where those redemptive sources might be are they present because there's there's something that's
#
so compelling about this large and you know extensively promoted ideology of resentment
#
and victimhood that it seems to somehow take over anything else that might be going on i hope i'm
#
wrong here and i hope that there are circles and lineages in various parts of the country where
#
there's a push back against this but um you know that's something that i would place my hope in
#
but i'm not quite sure if it's happening i don't have the empirical evidence for it just a hope
#
hmm what's the role of religion in your life and does it kind of melt through closely with culture
#
with art with whatever you know i mean it seems to me that you when you look at it you're looking
#
at it as a source of great ideas great ferment great uh you know creativity and so on and so
#
forth are you also religious at the same time or are these a cultural aspects of it that fascinate
#
you no i would have to say that over the years i i have come to appreciate and recognize that
#
there is a spiritual dimension to my being and it gets expressed in a variety of ways it's not
#
it's not necessarily linked to a particular a particular religion or for me it's actually
#
a quest for the sacred through its various forms and expressions and it's not that far away from
#
cultural expression for me i think i think that a great deal of cultural expression would actually
#
find itself deepened if it recognized how much it has in common with a quest for the sacred
#
recently i found myself talking but actually in the context of give who who also was uh you know
#
very much in tune with the spiritual quest again in a non-dogmatic way we don't often recognize
#
that so many of the great modernists all had one or another form of religious belief you know
#
gandinsky was a theosophist mondrian was a theosophist mark toby the abstractionist he
#
was a bahá'í and you know one can multiply these examples but when we look at their artworks we
#
somehow imagine that they exist in a kind of a broadly worldly secular plane and uh to that
#
extent i think we tend to miss the point of what drove and inspired these these artistic practices
#
one of the things that sort of irritates me about the way bookshops make their categories and this
#
is possibly arrogance on my part is when i see a section called religion and philosophy and they're
#
together and i'm always thinking what's going on but i have discovered recently that once upon a
#
time you were religion and philosophy editor for times of india and you started the column speaking
#
tree in fact which is you know such a sort of a cultural institution on its own right almost
#
so tell me a little bit about that like how early was your interest in religion and philosophy
#
how do you you know is that just suppose that you were given or do you feel that the two belong
#
together in the same phrase uh how do you think about all of this i think my preoccupation with
#
religion and philosophy has been present from from the earliest times i mean as part of this
#
this quite variegated family background is also a family connection with theosophy
#
two of my great-granduncles were in the circle around annie bazant and or besant as she insisted
#
her name should be pronounced to go with basant the preferred season for theosophy time of
#
regeneration so these two great-granduncles of mine who also did other things one was in the
#
civil service and another one was eventually a parliamentarian they were committed to theosophical
#
ideals and then when the theosophists so to speak discovered krishna murthy they were part of this
#
group along with with the lady i forget her name now her first name latience edwin the architect
#
latience's wife they they were part of this group that were tasked with preparing krishna
#
murthy for his messianic future and of course krishna murthy which is so rare among spiritual
#
teachers broke with that and decided that he was not going to be theosophies messiah but he was
#
going to you know chart his own path forward when that happened my ancestors went with him actually
#
and then helped work on and develop rajghat which was the first krishna murthy school
#
so there was all of this in the background too you know kind of a fairly present sense that
#
the religious quest spirituality but you know that that all that is important to
#
how one leads one's life and of course as as a kid and a teenager i tended to be a bit skeptical
#
of it and then gradually began to see see why this might be of value and how one might work towards
#
a form of life in which the spiritual dimension was important at some point this came to the
#
notice of people at the times of india so samir jayan was very keen that i should
#
do this in a in a kind of an institutional manner at at at the times of india so i became the terms
#
of india's first religion and philosophy heritage but for me it was equally important that the
#
speaking tree should be a clearing house for different kinds of religions different
#
philosophical positions including the atheistic or the agnostic and also that it should attend
#
to the spiritual quest in the arts and that the sociology of religion should also be part of the
#
discourse over time i know this has changed for the speaking trade now tends to focus on a
#
particular kind of religious pedagogy if you will but in those early years
#
uh i found it quite invigorating because it really you know my contributors in those few
#
years came from all kinds of religious traditions what was important to me there was to develop a
#
discursive tonality where these questions could be talked about as though they really mattered
#
and not as you know windy abstractions that one came to in retirement or because one felt some
#
sense of lack so i'll always be grateful for those years of you know also the discussions
#
with contributors thinking through how they were relaying their ideas and the climate of
#
discourse that kind of got built up around the column and i named the column for uh richard
#
lanois book now richard was another friend much much older than me but his work was
#
always very inspiring i mean to ask you that you know earlier when you mentioned that
#
young people today don't have friends older than them if that is the case why do you think that
#
is the case what changed i i have absolutely no answer to that i i but to some extent i might have
#
been a bit of an exception too in my own generation but i can't believe that no one else in my
#
generation had friends older than themselves i i have no explanation for why kids in their
#
20s today are so horizontal in their friendships and and just thinking about your you know speaking
#
tree experiences i think it is a great tragedy for our nation that you did not somehow take
#
another turn and become a famous god man you know like a sadguru or sri sri ranjit hoskote
#
we could be in a better place there could be a different kind of politics and at this point i
#
shall bring in the suitably anti-national note that our mutton samosas have probably arrived so
#
we should take a break and partake of some sinful refreshments and we will be back then
#
for the last part of the show all in the noble cause hey the music started and this sounds like
#
a commercial but it isn't it's a plea from me to check out my latest labor of love a youtube show
#
i am co-hosting with my good friend the brilliant ajay shah we've called it everything is everything
#
every week we'll speak for about an hour on things we care about from the profound to the profane
#
from the exalted to the everyday we range widely across subjects and we bring multiple frames with
#
which we try to understand the world please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing
#
to our youtube channel at youtube.com slash amit varma a m i t v a r m a the show is called
#
everything is everything please do check it out
#
welcome back to the scene in the unseen i'm chatting with ranjit hoskote and
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you know we've spoken about poetry we've spoken about society culture many things i want to speak
#
about art and that particularly kind of fascinates me because my relationship with art sort of is
#
that like i mentioned at the start of the episode i don't understand it at all my reactions are
#
visceral intuitive there'll be some stuff i'll really like and i like the way they look and maybe
#
they'll affect me in a particular way but i won't be able to say why and i will not ever care about
#
historical context or any of those things and i want to ask about how you came to you know first
#
be fascinated with art and then to actually how did you make that intellectual journey of figuring
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out the frames of looking at art figuring out art history because today you know everything is on
#
the internet everything is a click away but i remember in the 1980s it was anything but that
#
any knowledge that you had to get was hard one you had to somehow locate the right book and
#
etc etc and so tell me about that journey of yours towards first getting attracted by art
#
and then figuring it out you know my journey in art began actually as a practitioner as a child
#
i from from the earliest times i used to draw and paint and had a very strong sense of the visual
#
image and so much so that my parents actually thought that i should go to art school when the
#
time came unlike most parents in their generation would have regarded that this is a major example
#
of folly but this eventually turned in the direction of wanting to bear witness to art
#
so i did two years of science because i wanted to do architecture in the event the science years were
#
a complete misadventure i didn't do architecture i turned instead to the social sciences and
#
continued with my looking at art and gradually began to write about it how was i socialized
#
into the into the arts is again it's a story that goes back to to home and family my parents
#
were you know great readers they loved the arts there were books at home which you know had to do
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with the great tradition i have to say at that point of western art
#
but that was how i launched off on my journey and then you know there would be periodic visits to
#
the art galleries which in those days were literally two there was the jangir art gallery
#
there was gemald above and there was pandul and there was once in a while the tarjad gallery
#
but that was part of my growing up just being taken to the galleries by my parents and
#
i can't really remember how and why i began to make this shift away from painting myself
#
it had a lot to do with the fact that i had become far more invested in in poetry
#
and fortuitously shanta gukhle who was a very courageous arts editor
#
came upon my writing because her son girish was a dear friend a classmate i wrote something about
#
vivan sundaram's exhibition a long night which was going on at gemald at that point just across
#
the road from our college from elphinstone and girish said let me just take this to my mother
#
so i thought well why not and thought no more of it until it appeared in print on on the arts page
#
which shanta pioneered for the times and then she asked if i'd like to stay on and write
#
and again when i think back it was such a brave decision on her part to have
#
four or five young people writing for her for her page there was arun dati subramaniam writing
#
on literature there was himan shubh burte writing on architecture there was me writing on the visual
#
arts it was a time of many discoveries and in the act of writing i found a way of bringing
#
together my interests in in art theory at large art history and also the crucial importance of
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bearing witness to what i was really looking at and what i was experiencing with my senses
#
that took some doing and i think it was a an arduous apprenticeship because it was also a
#
moment when there wasn't really a definite clearly defined audience for art criticism
#
there were people who were used to a certain kind of descriptive art writing with a certain
#
amount of analysis but this was the kind of criticism that i was trying to write was
#
um framed within larger questions of you know what or what other kinds of cultural questions
#
is art relevant to and so on so gradually i uh and i have to say that the maximal above in library
#
was was uh a marvelous habitat to be part of it was all part of the same cultural geography
#
there was elphinstone college there was this jungle gallery there was the maximal above
#
and right next to it so i think my first few years as an art critic were also a time of sorting
#
through what kind of aesthetic i was aligned with it was also a time when i was just taking in
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so many diverse forms of artistic practice and it was also a transitional time in indian art
#
because it was during these years essentially 1988 to 1993 or so when
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there was a generational turn the first installation artists were presenting there were
#
vivan sundaram nalini malani romana hussain it was it was a time of intense debate and
#
it was wonderful to be a part of that moment and to be a contributor to that debate when i look back
#
again i find that you know some of the stances we were taking at that point could have done with
#
more subtlety but it was still one of those historic occasions when you know the flat
#
two-dimensional painted image was yielding place to immersive environments expanded sculpture
#
performance art it was as if 40 to 50 years of euro-american art was being compressed into
#
a few months tell me about the influences on you i mean a in terms of looking at art and
#
thinking about art and be also in a broader intellectual sense of you know you've described
#
yourself as a cultural theorist as well and we'll come to that later but just in general like who
#
were your big influences the people who sort of opened your eyes to different facets of the world
#
and how you can think about it and how you took those frames to the art that you then looked at
#
it some of the key influences on me didn't necessarily come from within the art world or
#
art history i would count for instance uh clifford geertz the cultural anthropologist as someone
#
who's writing was very very influential for me because this is also what i was committed to
#
as an art critic how is it that these visual images or their symbolic intensities how do these
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connect to a larger set of relations in society how do they build into a culture what's the
#
nature of iconography that is shared and yet is the subject of debate so i found that reading
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anthropology was was a very very generative way of approaching these these questions but also
#
John Berger's writing even at his polemical uh most polemical and antagonistic
#
best i found that there was much to learn from him just in terms of of responding in a visceral
#
and intuitive way but one informed by context and then there were so many other thinkers that that
#
that uh that played a role i was also voraciously reading theory at the time so of course there's
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Foucault Derrida Barth was reading also the Frankfurt School thinkers Adorno Horkheimer
#
Walter Benjamin uh Terry Eagleton so in one sense my forms of thinking were shaped through these
#
through these debates with people in distant parts of the world or who had already passed on
#
so again it was a kind of intergenerational debate and in each case to see how this might
#
apply in our particular context again it was a pivotal moment because we were emerging from our
#
long period of being a protected economy into the global economy 1991 marks that moment of
#
economic liberalization and the onset of globalization so in in the first phase of
#
my work as an art critic i was also preoccupied with those questions what is integral to our
#
local context here and how might those questions and urgencies be different from
#
what seems relevant to this much larger global art world so it's in that gap between what then
#
was still something like a local and the global that i found a number of artistic practices
#
which were negotiating that gap so Atul Dodia, Sudarshan Shetty, a little later Jitish Kalath,
#
Ravinder Reddy, Anandjit Rai there were a number of artists whose work really spoke to me
#
so a lot of my writing then was in a sense partisan writing i was bearing witness to their
#
work trying to create an intellectual and a cultural context for it and i wonder how you
#
maintain this particular delicate balance that i guess has to arise when you're you know when you
#
embark upon something of the sort in the sense that you have your particular frames and questions
#
that matter deeply to you and you bring that into the work that you're looking at and obviously our
#
response to anything we look at is personal so to pretend the personal is not there or try to
#
whitewash it is completely pointless and counterproductive but at the same time you
#
don't want to overwhelm you know your concerns and you know you don't want to you don't want
#
to put your concerns at the forefront and you want to perhaps do more of you know what Martin
#
Amis warned about earlier that you want to see what the artist is aiming for rather than what
#
you would like the artist to do and there is perhaps a danger that you just look at him with
#
the prism of what you want and what matters to you and therefore there is a danger you might do
#
with the service to an artist who may not share those same prisms or those same frames or the
#
same concerns or who might be coming at them from a different direction that is not perceptible to
#
you so how did you negotiate these did you feel that like in my youthful exuberance every time
#
i would discover a new way of looking at the world i would totally go overboard it would be part of
#
everything that i did so did you find that you overstepped sometimes in what you did that you
#
know looking back now in hindsight you know do you feel that you could have looked at some art
#
differently you know what are sort of your thoughts then as now it was important for me to
#
engage with what the practice was trying to do which i think helped me to not fall into the
#
the avant-garde trap of deciding that this art is of the moment and everything that came before is
#
irrelevant and we were also fortunate to have several generations of artists practicing
#
at the same time so i was able to engage with the generation of suza jangir sabawala barpadamsi
#
krishn kanna and so on but also with much younger artists like atul and then even younger artists
#
like jitesh and to see them operating in their own with their own artistic
#
preoccupations and to create contexts for them so this function of contextualizing
#
was from the very beginning important to me so that prevented me from going overboard with
#
an enthusiasm for an artist to the point where i felt no one else was as important
#
but it took me a little longer to embrace the other kinds of artistic practices that were emerging
#
from what you call what you might call rural or folk or tribal backgrounds all these are inadequate
#
terms but i think through the whole first phase of my writing i tended to be focused on urban academy
#
urban academy trained artists gradually that opened up to looking at what might
#
what might be artistic practices that come from other domains entirely and in this i have to say
#
there were two two key influences one was okwui enwezer the nigerian american curator who really
#
was a mentor and a guru to me he had this unerring ability to identify
#
artistic expression no matter what its milieu was and he tended to look outside of the academy
#
outside of the gallery system to see what was going on in say architecture or design
#
or activism or some associated field so that was one the other was actually is actually nancy
#
nancy adagianna my wife was a cultural theorist and a curator and who from the very beginning had
#
a strong sense of affinity with and a desire to amplify what she called what she still calls
#
actually subaltern art art by artists who for various reasons come from socially and
#
economically vulnerable sections so she was uh she was the founding coordinator of the
#
craft center at the ncp in the mid 1990s so it was really through her work that i began to be
#
resensitized to what was going on with say in in say mithila or in bastar and to recognize that
#
these two were claims on the contemporary and that they were not to be set aside as as crafts
#
from and in some ways it allowed me to to revisit things that i've grown up with but which in my
#
early years as an art critic i just seemingly repressed from consciousness because my mother
#
particularly had always been very very interested in textiles in so-called crafts and you know
#
kamaladevi chatupadhyay was one of her icons so i'd grown up with all these stories and
#
sama had just simply repressed all of that so in a strange way it was it was a return to
#
to appreciating something i'd grown up with but had somehow lost along the way
#
so it's just a series of expansions of of critical and curatorial imagination for me that's how i see
#
this journey well criticism many people have a fine art and that i have some sympathy for is that
#
it seems deeply inaccessible because in one fundamental way it's different from all other
#
arts in the sense that it seems to me that in the world of fine art not only is it not really open
#
to the masses in a sense of accessibility but also it is a small cabal of insider elites who decide
#
what is good art what is bad art what is a prism through which you must look at it what are the
#
ideological fashions to follow and if you are lucky enough to you know get their good graces
#
you're fine you've made it as an artist otherwise you are not and they said the entire fashions of
#
the day and there isn't a multiplicity of you know market forces like when you have cinema
#
you know i can watch something on movie and decide for myself how i like it and so on and so forth
#
you know something can be a sleeper hit even if critics don't approve of it but critics are
#
practically the whole game in fine art or have been for decades that's how it seems to me and
#
it is a small narrow band of people who determine that you know abc artist is you know with the
#
program and approved by the academy and xyz person is just a craft person and what do they
#
know they haven't been trained and etc etc and is that something that holds a whole field back is
#
there something to that how would you kind of respond to this general criticism i think the
#
age of the sovereign dominant critic is over i mean this was in fact true for a long time but i think
#
the the role of the critic as gatekeeper the function of criticism itself is really in eclipse
#
partly because there are no not only are there no venues for criticism but that function itself
#
seems to have lost legitimacy what has replaced it in large measure is the curator function
#
which has gone to another extreme with you know great proliferation of people who set themselves
#
up as curators but effectively are you know quite often essentially organizing exhibitions and
#
which means in turn that there is no there's no shared ground no consensus in terms of what
#
the criteria for art are or even a space when where one could discuss what the dynamic changing
#
criteria might be i'm reminded here of how arthur c danto in the early 1960s developed this notion
#
of how the art world was really a conversation and that what was recognized and even sanctified as
#
art it could that process actually came about through conversation but conversation which is
#
very exclusionary only a small number of people can take part that's right and that that is always
#
a weakness of the art world that to be part of that conversation you need to have some kind of
#
stake within it and usually an institutional institutional stake with the power of patronage
#
not so far away from the surface i have a sense that what has gone wrong in our context is that
#
monetary value has overtaken all other forms of value as something that determines why an
#
artwork or an artistic practice is important with the result that a lot of interesting work
#
tends to languish or is neglected and we don't seem to have as robust a system of art institutions
#
now as as we need if you look for instance at the central european scenario there are
#
there are there are foundations of all kinds there's there is a vibrant support system for
#
artists working in different ways at different speeds in different forms here everything
#
tends to have to be validated within the market so if you have a dominant market with monetary
#
value as its key as its key and no well agreed criteria you know how does one establish the
#
value of anything it opens the door to i did i it sounds cruel but to charlatanry of various kinds
#
i don't know what the antidote to that is unfortunately and under what you say is the
#
old system that no longer is a critic dominant and no longer a small elite determining what goes as
#
fine art and what doesn't and it seems to me that within the system within that system there is also
#
a danger of part dependence that once a cultural elite's decide that x is art and y is not you
#
naturally have aspiring artists for their own self-interest and their own monetary interest
#
going towards creating more of x and less of y and it continues that way till someone is radical
#
and free-spirited enough to shift in a different direction at the same time as the winds happen to
#
be shifting and they kind of get lucky that way but you know that seems to me to be a really
#
unsatisfactory model and while i get what is happening now in terms of the charlatanry and
#
everybody kind of every instagram influencer can call himself a curator if he wants and i
#
completely get that but i i like the sense that you don't anymore have to pander to gatekeepers
#
or fashions of the day that a thousand flowers can bloom and then people can decide for themselves
#
you know which flowers are kind of worth it so what is what is you know do you feel that
#
the way art has evolved to some extent has had that problem of part dependence
#
that intellectual fashions have shaped some of it rather than the other way around
#
you know what what is your sort of take on that i i don't know if it's intellectual fashion so
#
much as a certain cultural inertia that propels along certain artistic styles or preferences
#
and once in a while someone comes along who really shakes all of that up but that's that's
#
the exception rather than the rule i would put my faith more in what i sometimes think of as
#
liberated zones where people have hybrid practices that you know it might be artists who are also
#
activists artists are also involved with design or have a writing practice of some kind alongside
#
their art making but necessarily that is a kind of fragmentary and episodic tapestry
#
but but that's what i tend to look at more as um for for sources of inspiration so there are
#
some practices that emerge from that kind of context i'm thinking here of someone like Ravi
#
Agarwal for instance who was a for a long time has been an environmental activist is also a
#
photographer and an artist and a curator it's a rich complex practice across domains is there a
#
danger of art and activism or other activism rather sort of taking over the artistic impulse
#
to a way that you know art ceases to be art per se and just becomes too filled with agenda and
#
you know just an act of that is a challenge for people who are active in both of these
#
domains but someone like Ravi who i just mentioned is very acutely aware of that and is is very
#
alert to the fact that each of these domains has its own integrity and you know one cannot
#
be instrumentalized in the cause of the other also i want to sort of double click on the term
#
curator partly in what it meant to you when you started as a curator and what kind of sort of
#
vision you took into that and also in what i think is a changing meaning of the term
#
where today yeah it's it is popular among and i'm not referring to the domain of art itself but i'm
#
referring to just all of the world of knowledge that we today stand in a situation where the
#
mainstream has crumbled where people are confounded by the knowledge around them by the information
#
around them by the stories and narratives around them and they don't know how to navigate this
#
and they need filters to navigate this and more and more what happens is that those filters become
#
people who in a sense are cultural curators like i remember when covid happened there was so much
#
of a sort of so much information floating around that i just didn't know who to trust so i did a
#
lot of reading and eventually figured out that okay if i'm on twitter i can trust eric topol when
#
it comes to medicine i can trust zenith of fact she is reporting and you kind of figure out that
#
these are sort of the figures i trust and for me they are all curators now the point is technically
#
everybody's a curator because everybody's posting links but that's a great thing because eventually
#
whatever you know everything rises to its own level and you have your trusted curators who you
#
trust and kind of care about and that broader sense of the word is really important to me which is
#
where i i see that figure as someone as important as an artist or a creator because what we seek
#
most in this world is sense making there is so much around us we can't make sense of it we look
#
for sources to make sense of it and most of us choose the wrong sources but and there is so much
#
propaganda around but you you get what i'm saying so what do you what do you think of the the sort
#
of the vocation of curating in this sense like you did curating in that particular context of where
#
you are putting art together and all of that so how did you look at that what goes behind it what
#
is the thinking that's part one of my question and part two is that in this modern world i would
#
strongly feel that there is still a role for people like you to be curators of that because
#
you have all of that background even everything that you you know said about religion and etc etc
#
in the second part of our show is something that most of my listeners would never have heard of
#
before and we need people who are sort of our bridge between knowledge in their minds so what
#
actually the image of the bridge was very much in my mind i think curators need to be bridge
#
builders because they are mediating between a certain kind of expert culture and its audiences
#
but curators also have to work from a strong awareness of their intellectual biography
#
curating is an intellectual project i mean what is it that you're discussing and bearing witness to
#
it's not just putting together a set of objects i mean what are the larger cultural debates that
#
you want to intervene in these are these should be important questions for a curatorial practice
#
and it's interesting you should flag the discussion on on the religious imagination because
#
i've curated many many exhibitions in these last few decades in different ecologies you know
#
galleries museums festivals foundations one that's very very dear to me is an exhibition called the
#
sacred every day which was curated for the serendipity arts festival in goa some years ago
#
it was across two venues the adil shah palace in panjim and uh the church of the convent of
#
santa monica in old goa and it was a trans historical show i mean some of the earliest
#
works in it were sixth century tantric devis sculpt stone sculptures and the most recent were
#
objects works commissioned for the show so it was uh it the argument of the exhibitions that
#
the southeastern religious imagination has always been inventive syncretic
#
not constrained by dogmatic scriptural notions of of religion and there was a great deal in that from
#
posters posters made for shrines popular posters architectural manifestations uh kali ghat there
#
was any number of things in that show which all showed us instead of telling us that this was the
#
case you know it was it it was at one level of kind of an archival trans historical show
#
but it also was a political argument for the present so to me that that's that's the kind
#
of thing i'm happiest doing and i think that as curators we need to make sure that
#
our exhibitions are deeper than the objects that they present of course the objects that we present
#
the practices that i mean that's something that viewers engage with but then what are the deeper
#
contexts and the questions what's that landscape of urgencies which these works inhabit i think
#
those are questions we have to ask ourselves but alongside the curator i think we also need
#
other kinds of figures to play these roles that you're talking about i miss for instance
#
popularizers it's very very important to communicate between expert culture and the large
#
interested but not necessarily informed audience i find this is true as much of the arts as it is
#
of architecture and of science because if there's a gap between this kind of public which wants to
#
know more and an expert culture that doesn't want to impart anything about what it's doing
#
that gap becomes a vacuum which is then filled with filled by purveyors of ignorance
#
you know so as a society we can't afford for that kind of gap to happen which is also why
#
over the years have been involved with a series of architecture exhibitions presenting architecture
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not just as one of the arts but also to see how it's been shaped and how it shapes policy
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or the built environment and ultimately all of our lives similarly ravi agarwal who i just
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mentioned he and i collaborated on a series of of initiatives called the state of nature
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which was an exhibition a symposium keynotes which brought together artists anthropologists
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scientists and activists to talk in an intelligent legible but interesting way about the environmental
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crisis not through statistics and pie charts and so on but in in a way that appeal to the
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imagination whilst being organically wedded wedded to an empirical fact so this is how i would i
#
would think the figure of the curator needs to expand through solidarities with other kinds of
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specialists who are committed to sharing that whatever it is their specialty is with this
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larger public i mean i'm using the term curator in a much broader sense and i'm including
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popularizers in that you're sort of curating a knowledge and a cultural experience for the
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people and are you sort of implying that you're happier being part of expert culture but you
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don't want to be a popularizer no i think it's it's absolutely valid i mean if you
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either you do it yourself and play that role or you ally yourself with others who are to me it's
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it's a relay and i think the way it works we all end up playing many of these roles
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you know it's yeah there's the fact that you cannot any longer define curating narrowly
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remember that the term comes from museum culture where essentially the curator was
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a keeper of antiquities so the role was conservation and research today it's much
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more than that so absolutely but i think that there are some people who might be
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better attuned to to to being popularizers and i say this as it's a compliment i don't mean
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popularized as a as a put down term you know and here's where i turn to science writers i think
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scientists who who write or science writers like david common you know some of my favorite writers
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come from this domain stephen jay gould oliver sacks carl sagan for the matter of that
#
it's intriguing to think back to how a certain epoch in television was so seminal i think for
#
our generation i was making a list of serials that i watched on it's you know much maligned
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but actually wonderful bombay durdarshan in the old days jacob brunowski's ascent of man comes
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to mind kenneth clark civilization this might all sound fuddy-duddy now but at the time you know
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these were great apertures to to new worlds and they still have a certain strength a little later
#
carl sagan's cosmos you know these were these were figures who invited you to participate in
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this adventure of discovery and it's you know that that's a very important role so whether i
#
play that role myself or ally myself with others who can do this beautifully it's an important
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function i also wonder about how the language of sort of the expert culture translates itself
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into language that might be popularly understood for example the earlier piece of yours in the
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hindu in 2003 which i quoted from the poet's nightmare is a model of clear and eloquent
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writing at the same time it is just fabulous i'm i'm going to send it to my writing students
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and demand that they all read it and at the same time a lot of expert language that once
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comes across is very obscure for example on your wikipedia page there is a sentence about you
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i don't know who wrote it whether it's you or someone else but here's a sentence as a cultural
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theorist hoskote has addressed the cultural and political dynamics of post-colonial societies
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that are going through a process of globalization emphasizing the possibilities of a non-western
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contemporaneity however you pronounce that intercultural communication and transformative
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listening he has also returned often to the theme of the nomad position now one it seems to me and
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apologies if this is language you also use but it seems to me that this is language that is not
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really meant for communicating or is meant for communicating to a really close group of people
#
and i also firmly believe that the language that experts use to talk to each other can
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simultaneously be language that can be understood by absolutely anyone and this is what we see with
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all the great science writers the people you mentioned and people like Dawkins or Steven
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Pinker when he writes about the brain absolutely that you know their language is absolutely
#
rigorous and accurate there is no quarter given to the to the truth but at the same time everyone
#
gets it everyone understands it and is it is this perhaps a problem with art itself or is it a
#
problem that you know the academia has created where there is this bridge because honestly to me
#
if if languages use the way it should and to me clear thinking and clear writing always go
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together hand in hand then you may not even need the popularizer so much you know
#
the sentence you read i think paraphrases various things i was working on at whatever time that was
#
it clearly there are citations throughout all of that passage so wikipedia yeah but
#
um no for me over the years increasingly clarity of expression is a great virtue and we needed all
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the more precisely for these reasons that we've been discussing so so no there might be a certain
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vocabulary which you do need for if you will certain professional discussions but there has
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to be a way of of putting all of that into into lucid prose there was a moment in academia when
#
i think everyone was swept along by the discourse of post structuralism and post-colonial theory
#
and that did lead to a great deal of unreadable prose but i see no virtue to that i think anything
#
that can be communicated can be communicated in a reasonably clear way it might be complex but
#
can still have clarity let's also talk about a sort of like earlier in the break you were chatting
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about how they seem to be you know less and less artists who are going to you know reach the kind
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of stature of artists of the earlier generation whom you just named people like you know jitesh
#
kallat and so on and i'm just wondering if part of the reason for that is that if you have a
#
tendency towards creative expression you have many more forms open to you today so earlier back in
#
the day if you wanted to write you would aspire to writing a book what else are you going to do
#
if you you know like to paint or you like to play with images you would want to be a painter you
#
would want your stuff to hang on walls but today with the internet there is a multiplicity of forms
#
through which you can express yourself you know a storyteller doesn't have to write a book he can
#
make an otp or he can just even do vlogging on youtube for that matter and an artist can just do
#
various things you know you can become a graphic novelist you can you know do other kinds of visual
#
art you can become just an instagram person and not need to go wooing a gallery and trying to you
#
know enter those circles which might sometimes seem like closed circles so what is kind of your
#
sense of that like looking back on yourself as a kid when you love to paint i would imagine if you
#
were a kid today of that age you would not just be painting there are so many other things you
#
could do you would be fiddling around with your phone you'd be shooting stuff you would be using
#
stable diffusion to see what images you could conjure up without needing to have the craft of
#
actually creating it yourself etc etc so what is your sense of that changing landscape of art
#
where not every artist necessarily needs to create art in that particular form
#
that you know would have been the only option open to them 30 years ago you know i warmed your image
#
of the crumbling or crumbled mainstream and i wonder if that has two possible outcomes one is
#
the great proliferation of positions i see that in literature see it in the visual arts see it in
#
non-fiction now this is something that technically we should be celebrating that there are so many
#
different practitioners doing things but what i miss there is practitioners who demonstrate a
#
certain ambition and audacity to take on large themes or large questions and i know this sounds
#
very windy and vacuous and abstract but when i think particularly say about the indian visual
#
arts right now there are very many gifted and accomplished young practitioners but
#
i'm not sure how many of them have this kind of requisite ambition and audacity that
#
at a certain point i found in atoll dodea in jyotish kalat in shilpa gupta to name just three
#
of sudarshan shetty for the matter of that krishnamachari bose is an institution builder
#
so that's that's my anxiety here even as i celebrate the proliferation
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and the the availability of techniques and audience a scope for inventivity for many many people
#
i i still miss these figures you are able to
#
do you think there is something about the texture of our everyday living today
#
that militates against artists having those big ideas having those grand
#
ambitions and taking leaps into the unknown i sense it but i don't have an explanation
#
likewise in literature there's a kind of a granularity in or non-fiction which i've been
#
looking at quite actively in in the last few years and i think that there is a kind of
#
in the last few years there's a certain granularity of the causes or the questions
#
that people are interested in and in each case the book is you know a fine example of research and
#
dedication makes its argument well but i my next question then is
#
isn't there a larger picture isn't there a philosophical question to be asked here what's
#
what's missing what is it that distinguishes brilliant reportage from
#
this larger inquiry into the human condition now that sounds like grand grandiose humanist
#
rhetoric but you know what i mean there is so this is and with visual with the visual arts
#
i have the same kind of question in the context of non-fiction which i think i probably know
#
a little better than indian art because i indian art i don't know at all or any art
#
is that what are the successful examples of non-fiction that asks a big questions and went
#
on those big quests rather than getting too granular and too focused on a particular thing
#
so what are the sort of maybe in the last three or four decades what are the books that asked
#
those big questions that impressed you that you feel aren't it isn't happening anymore
#
gosh when i'm put on the spot like that i oh my goodness it's it's amazing you take a whole
#
history of reading for granted but you can't seem to pull it or at least i can't seem to
#
pull it out immediately i mean i agree with what you're saying especially in one context where
#
i've had many discussions on this is in the context of academics that academics has gone too much
#
into specialized silos and you no longer have those kind of you know broader thinkers a
#
renaissance man or woman as it were who are just being interdisciplinary and asking those big
#
questions and unfortunately that's a dying breed and i mean in that context i agree with you
#
and i'm just trying to get a better sense of you know in non-fiction for example
#
you know what are the big books that you can sort of think of of that nature literally
#
i seem to have gone blank right now because i've been i've been focused on reading old
#
series of things now and being left with this question so tell me about the texture of your
#
every day and i like like i know you've been traveling a lot recently i know that during
#
covid you were stuck at home all the time but i'm really struck by this great quote by annie dillard
#
how we live our days is how we live our lives and i think about this more and more because i think
#
that too often we are always focused on you know bigger things and great goals and all of that and
#
we ignore how we actually live our days and that is actually how we live our lives so tell me about
#
what is an ideal day for you and how has the conception of that day changed over time and in
#
a broader sense have you you know when you were young like how have you changed in terms of what
#
you want from the ranjit hoskote who was 23 ideal day for me would be one in which various elements
#
were in balance but where i actually got a fair amount of of writing done because that i have to
#
say brings me great joy but increasingly i find that my day gets fragmented with like presumably
#
all our days unless one is extremely disciplined you know with our attention is there so many claims
#
on our attention that we tend to to not get down to to this but increasingly it seems to me that
#
an ideal day for me would be one in which i was for lack of another description when i was able
#
to commune quietly with some natural expanse much larger than myself and it's ironic that we live
#
in a city by the sea but i certainly don't see very much of it except when i'm driving over it
#
on the ceiling so so that that sense of that sense of of being in the presence of of an expanse so
#
much larger than oneself i curiously find that refreshing i don't feel diminished by it i just
#
feel oceanically as if i'm at one with this with this larger constellation how has car changed in
#
all the time that you've been living there and what is your concept of home is it bombay is it
#
car is it your apartment within car is it your ideas and emotions that you carry around inside
#
your head how do you think of it car has been home for a very long time but it's changing
#
dramatically it's really an it's really a textbook illustration of what people are calling
#
so nostalgia the the sense of loss in the face of immediate change it's not nostalgia as in
#
a sense of loss for something that's vanished in the past but something that's changing
#
changing your lived environment in in ways that make it unrecognizable so just this morning as i
#
was as i was driving here i thought you know when you look at the city from from the sky
#
it's usually the blue tarp that tends to define it because so much settlement here is
#
is essentially informal but there's another kind of blue that's just everywhere now which is the
#
scrim you know the scrims that that block off a demolition site where buildings come down so
#
the rate at which this very very familiar neighborhood is changing i find that very
#
unsettling so i have a feeling that there's a new sequence of poems emerging there but for me a
#
home is a is a is a multi-layered phenomenon it is at one level yes i'll have prized the nomad
#
condition and inherited diasporic history i realize that i'm very attached to to this
#
neighborhood to the house where i grew up my parents home to where i live now but at the same
#
time i'm actually able to craft a sense of belonging wherever i go and i think that's
#
that to me has always been an important project you know if you're in a new city how do you
#
connect with it connect with its history connect with friends and colleagues there
#
and i think that's that's a in in in a profound way i think we're all
#
in a cosmic sense i think we're all homeless and trying to craft the sense of belonging for
#
ourselves in a general sense outside the context of what we just spoke about what do you miss
#
oh what i miss is the sense of the sense that there is
#
i've been circling back constantly to particular moments in in childhood you know the
#
summer that the summer holidays that seemed to
#
go was forever absolutely gone forever the possibility of really immersing yourself in
#
a book and not having to get up till you'd finished it but of course you realize that
#
there was a complete infrastructure of home that that made this possible and it's not
#
possible anymore but i have a dramatic sense that time is really moving at an accelerated
#
rate i think many of us feel this but what i miss is really that possibility of a pause
#
and an ability to to be inside of that pause so there are two thoughts i'll share with you here
#
one at a time and the first one is that i came across this very recently that the reason time
#
seems to move so fast as we get older is because we cease having new experiences that there is no
#
novelty we're doing the same thing every day so when we are young there's a lot of novelty new
#
things keep happening all the time as we get older we are in a groove nothing new is happening every
#
day every day sort of melts into the day before it and the day after it and to militate against
#
this i think there is one vlogger i forget the exact details my friend amartya kosh a musician
#
sort of told me about this so i will ask him but he told me about this guy who figured out that
#
this was why time seemed to be moving fast and he said every single day i will do something
#
completely different and i will chase novelty and i will chase new experiences and i will keep
#
getting out of my comfort zone and that way time will move much slower for me which i find to be
#
sort of really intriguing and when i look at myself i find that most of the time i am actually quite
#
happy in my comfort zone now with something like when it comes to books and movies i'm always eager
#
to discover new stuff when it comes to music i am totally comfort zone person you know what if i
#
might recommend something sometime and i listen to it but otherwise i just don't have that energy
#
i'm happy in my groove and just going along and i think that's a dangerous thing so sort of tell
#
me about how sort of you think about this and have you thought about it like do you find it
#
important to kind of get out of your comfort zone do you like learning new things does it fill you
#
with a new energy it actually does so i do time here i think of two things one is of course that
#
it keeps your neural circuitry in shape as we age this is uh this is a fear that becomes more
#
and more compelling you know that's um we are used to a certain rate speed and strength with
#
which our brains work and is that you know you begin to wonder whether that's going to
#
be with you for an extended period of time so i i welcome opportunities to
#
learn new things acquaint myself with new disciplines but i wish i could do that there
#
was a time when i did do that quite a bit i i i find that i'm not doing as much of it as i used
#
to and i should i would learn i would love to learn a new language for instance also to go back to
#
things abandoned or renounced along the way like astronomy which i was you know i i loved it and
#
i was you know i used to go to the planetarium quite often did a course there you know and was
#
you know kept abreast of the field for a long time and now i find suddenly that
#
you know it's a wish but i haven't done anything about it and i need to and you speak of passing
#
time and fading memories and i'll go back to the question i asked you a long long time ago you
#
might remember it was just before the first break when i said that you know what is essential
#
to you if you strip apart everything that is contingent and i often think about this in terms
#
of how our memories construct so much of us that you know if we grow old enough we will eventually
#
our memories will fade and then our memories will be completely gone and then i wonder what is left
#
is that the real us are we just sort of a construction of the contingencies of the
#
experiences we had which formed our memory or is there something else that is essential
#
and is also not dependent on the accident of our genes and so on and the depressing answer
#
that i come up with is perhaps is nothing at all there's nothing unique about any of us it's just
#
accidental but when you think about what is the essential ranjit that obviously over the decades
#
we change we change in different ways and we might look back on our younger self and say like who the
#
fuck was that like what is that guy but at the same time uh no matter how much we change you know
#
there is perhaps a core of us that we recognize that yeah that is me whatever it might be so
#
you know who are you a maker i think it's not a great answer but i think if there's any aspect
#
of me that i would regard as it's constitutive is it's it is of someone who is endlessly curious
#
about the possibility of making things that weren't there before in however modest or ambitious a way
#
this might turn out to be but yeah that and that's that's crucial also
#
the way i define myself and i think what what is constitutively me is uh of someone who is on who
#
is not afraid of things that appear to be very dissimilar my attempt as from as long back as i
#
can remember is to see how one can build bridges between things that appear to be quite different
#
and to then see where that process goes what is it that gets created when you bring dissimilar
#
things together another question again outside of any context what are you intentional about
#
in in a certain devotion to again it sounds very abstract to the creative impulse
#
yeah in like where does the intentionality come in there and sitting down in a disciplined way
#
every day and saying i must create is that what you mean it's in one sense it's it's beyond
#
intention it's something that i've always had this impulse to express
#
something that seems to exceed what i have and it's only in the doing that it takes shape but
#
i know that there is something there but not in a way that is narcissistic i think to me it's
#
always important that this is connected with my sense of how i conduct myself in the world
#
what does it mean to extend myself through empathy what does it mean to recognize vulnerability
#
empathy what does it mean to recognize vulnerability what does it mean to live in a
#
largely shattered world in sequence of of healing i think the increasingly these are questions that
#
are becoming more and more important to me do you have a sense of purpose that is outside of you
#
can one have a sense of purpose no in the sense uh i phrased that wrongly a sense of purpose that
#
is outward directed for example one sense of purpose could be that i want to be the best
#
person i can be and another sense of purpose could be that in some way or the other i want to make
#
this world a better place and the latter of those is of course outward directed in terms of what
#
what an outward directed purpose is is i would i would like to be able to contribute with whatever
#
capacity i have to a culture of dialogue of discussion of seeking common ground i think
#
if if i have to think back to one value that i would always have at my core this is this is
#
actually it so whatever the whatever the domain might be it's to me this is this is crucial
#
sure great so you know i've taken up a lot of your time today you have a long and grueling
#
drive back to car through bombay suburban streets so i'm going to you know let you go
#
with a final question but i want you to give this question your full consideration because
#
i feel it's a terribly important one especially coming from you and what we discussed about
#
curators and all of that i end all my shows by asking my guests to recommend for me and my
#
listeners books films music that mean a lot to them and in this particular case books that
#
you with you know great passion want people to read and want people to consume and and
#
film the music also of course things that mean a lot to you i mean there are just so many books
#
that leap out and demand attention but the ones that i'm i i would i would recommend strongly
#
because i do keep circling back to them every now and again the first is shreelal shukla's
#
and i would suggest i would suggest that if you can you should read it in the original hindi
#
because gillian wright's translation is wonderful but it is necessarily abridged and there is a
#
great play of voice and tonality in the hindi which is amazing to read so many years after
#
the book was first published in 1969 the book is as old as i am
#
it's it remains endlessly relevant to indian politics as to you arunjeet as to you
#
you're very kind gosh the other one is jay krishnamurthy's krishnamurthy's notebook
#
which again distills his ability to
#
to to teach not by teaching or pedagogy but by simply demonstrating a way of being in the world
#
in relation to to animals to other human beings to subtleties of season and place
#
then i would suggest salman rashdi's shame which for some reason i think tends to be overlooked
#
in favor of his other better known works shame to me is not only a political allegory which is
#
resonant but its use of language is endlessly playful inventive
#
years and years after i first read it i can i can remember things from it
#
phrasing sentences and then there's a collection of short stories by italo calvino called marco
#
valdo again a book that tends to be eclipsed by the better known works but marco valdo is
#
is is a set of stories about a central character and his gradual development in post-war italy
#
through all of the privations and difficulties of that period and it's set as a as a as a sequence
#
of four years season by season again a meditation on time and mortality and possibility
#
among films i'd suggest films that i've loved really fritz lang's metropolis and
#
shota jeet thrice mahanagar music pink floyd a momentary lapse of reason
#
it's an album that i've gone back to often i'd sometimes really hear it in my dreams
#
learning to fly particularly that's a great list and for all the body you know one thing
#
that i've tried and i i actually want to mix my foot in doing is there is an audio version
#
of it in story tell and someone once said to me and this is something i want to try myself
#
is if you don't read hindi you can listen to the audio version in hindi and simultaneously
#
read along with it and i'm going to try that because i feel that might you know really help
#
me pick up my hindi habit which i really want to do so you know that's that so ranjit thanks so
#
much for you know spending so much time with me today it's been amazing thank you i hope you've
#
enjoyed this as much i as i have and i've learned a great deal from you amit in the course of this
#
conversation today you are always too kind thank you so much thank you
#
if you enjoyed listening to this episode check out the show notes enter rabbit holes it will
#
do by all of ranjit hoskote's books every single one of them figure out how to do it and
#
you know get the job done you can follow ranjit on twitter at ranjit hoskote that's one word you
#
can follow me on twitter at amit varma a m i t v a r m a you can browse past episodes of the scene
#
and the unseen at scene unseen dot i n thank you for listening did you enjoy this episode of the
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scene and the unseen if so would you like to support the production of the show you can go
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over to scene unseen dot i n slash support and contribute any amount you like to keep
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