#
Sometimes, I wonder if we take the idea of progress for granted.
#
Do we assume that just because time is moving forward, humanity is moving forward?
#
No, by and large, net-net, I believe we are progressing.
#
Technology enables individuals in magical ways.
#
Economic freedom, to the extent that it's been present, has lifted hundreds of millions
#
of people out of poverty.
#
We are more interconnected than ever before, more prosperous than ever before.
#
And yet, in certain areas, we do seem to be going backwards.
#
Take India, for example.
#
Our society seems to have become more and more polarised and intolerant.
#
Our politics is shrill and full of anger.
#
Our languages are an amazing wealth of languages.
#
Our fading away, if not dying out.
#
Our cities sometimes seem to be becoming unlivable.
#
And to make sure that we keep progressing, we need to question all these fault lines.
#
We need to watch the watchmen.
#
We need to empower the better angels of our nature.
#
The only way to ensure progress is to not take it for granted.
#
Welcome to The Scene and The Unseen.
#
My guest today is Rakshanda Jalil, a writer, translator, critic and literary historian.
#
I think of her as someone who preserves a fading world and chronicles a changing one.
#
She's written an outstanding book on the history of the progressive writers' movement.
#
She's translated many great Hindi and Urdu writers.
#
She's been an essayist and columnist.
#
She's written a book of short stories.
#
And I particularly love her brilliant book of essays, but you don't look like a Muslim.
#
In this conversation, we chat about Urdu, the personal and the political, the art of
#
translation, the changing face of Delhi and the elephant in the room, the social polarisation
#
This conversation contains multitudes, and I hope you will enjoy it as much as I did.
#
But before we get to it, let's take a quick commercial break.
#
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
#
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
#
Please join us on our journey and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel at
#
youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
The show is called Everything is Everything.
#
Please do check it out.
#
Rakshanda, welcome to the scene and your own scene.
#
I want to start with what might appear to be an unusual question.
#
I've just come from Bombay.
#
We are recording this on Jan 10th and there is this immense cold wave in the north and
#
I've of course come from Bombay to Delhi and yesterday I stepped out of the airport and
#
I felt that I have stepped into a windy freezer.
#
I have experienced north winters before I was born in Chandigarh, but this was like,
#
And later I got to thinking about, you know, how difficult it is even for a modern person
#
with all our modern privileges and all that to kind of survive in this winter.
#
And it got me to thinking about how, you know, in the past people would have dealt with these
#
kind of extremes of weather and in a sense it is, it's lucky that I'm speaking with
#
you because you've also written among many, many other things on Delhi's past and all
#
And I'm really fascinated by Delhi in the sense that there have been many different
#
cities overlapping over time in the same geographical space.
#
And with every city, the way that you live changes, like there is this famous saying
#
about how first we shape our buildings and then our buildings shape us.
#
You know, the form of the city changes the way that we live and equally, I guess the
#
weather does that as well.
#
So I'm wondering in a broader sense, not just in terms of adapting to the cold, but in a
#
broader sense when you've written these books and when you've gone back in the past, what
#
is your sense of how people lived their lives 300, 400, 500 years ago?
#
Like if you were born 500 years earlier, what would the texture of a typical day look like?
#
That's very interesting.
#
But I think we, the people who lived in Delhi before us, 300, 400 years, I can only imagine
#
it or I can imagine it with the help of what I've read of the literature of that time,
#
I would say people were more in tune with the seasons.
#
And I think what's happened is that we lead our lives according to the way we want to
#
live it, not how the weather expects us to live.
#
So our homes, and most of Delhi now is this builder built flats, they are all cut from
#
They're of cookie cutter homes that we live in, most of us.
#
They're designed to be pretty and pretty again is a subjective thing.
#
So I don't think these houses that most of us now live in in Delhi flats, let's call
#
them, are meant to accommodate the seasons and the whims of the seasons.
#
I think summers are still okay because we hunker down in our coolers, in our ACs and
#
wait for the worst summer days to pass.
#
But I don't think these houses are meant, they have no sense of catching the sun, there
#
is no Angan, there is no concept of sitting out in the sun.
#
So the Delhi I grew up in, and we need not go back 300, 400 years in time, I'm willing
#
to go back to the Delhi I grew up in as a young person.
#
I lived in Nizamuddin East, there were lots of parks.
#
Most homes had a little sit out or you know, Angan or call it what you will.
#
The idea of spending as much time as you could out in the sun during winter was very prevalent.
#
You will notice that there's a lot of vitamin D deficiency now.
#
Doctors are routinely prescribing vitamin D supplements, which is ironic in a country
#
which has so much sun ordinarily through the year.
#
We as a people are suffering from vitamin D deficiencies and we are having to take supplements.
#
I think it's all to do with our lifestyles, with our homes, with the way we spend our
#
We spend fewer hours out in the sun.
#
I think the generations before us had an intrinsic sense, an organic wisdom I would say, you
#
know, about what to eat, kis cheez ki kya taaseer hai, khaane ki, peene ki, the things
#
around you, kis cheez ki kya taaseer hai, taaseer meaning what is the benefit of a certain
#
or a certain drink and how it would help your body, be it immunity, be it just nutrition.
#
So I think somewhere we have lost touch with what was plentifully available and we buy
#
from cold chains, we buy out of season green peas in summer and fruits that have come in
#
iced containers from Japan and China.
#
My fruit seller was trying to sell me big fat cherries from Brazil and Chile.
#
Now I don't see the need for that.
#
I'm perfectly happy eating apples that have come from Kulu, you know.
#
So I think our ancestors didn't have these amenities of fritz and cold storages, but
#
more importantly, I think they ate local, they ate seasonal.
#
All of this and the kind of houses they lived in, I think all of this made it that much
#
better to cope with the vagaries of the weather and the seasons.
#
There's a great essay I'll link from the show notes by Alex Murrell called The Age
#
of Average, where he talks about how in almost every area of life, things begin to look the
#
same over a period of time and what you said about buildings falls into exactly that and
#
he's got these beautiful montages of buildings from all over the world and they look exactly
#
the same, you know, 300 years ago they would have looked different.
#
It's the same with cars, for example, all SUVs basically go into the same wind tunnels
#
and come out looking exactly the same way and so on and so forth.
#
And I was beginning to wonder there about the nature of how the form of living shapes
#
our culture. And like you said, you know, back in the day, you know, you attuned to
#
the weather, to the way it was, you ate accordingly, you ate according to what was available.
#
And, you know, even houses were designed that way.
#
There's a great book called Order Without Design by Alain Bartho, where, you know, he
#
was an economist and urban planner, an urban planner and economist rather in that order.
#
And he was in Algeria, which was sort of under French influence at the time.
#
And he speaks about how he was out there, that he had this problem that he had to as
#
part of the bureaucracy, he had to sort of enforce these regulations, which told you
#
how a house should be built and how it should look.
#
And he realised that there is a problem there because the French government is imposing
#
its vision of what a French townhouse in a French city should look like in an Algerian
#
town. And his description of their way of life seemed very similar to me to how a lot
#
of India, particularly North India, has lived, where you will have a joint large family,
#
you will have an open courtyard in the centre, everything within the house will look
#
inwards towards that open courtyard where there will be a communal gathering in the
#
evenings and there is not much interface with the outside, you know, and his point was
#
that you cannot build in a different way from what the culture is like because you risk
#
a clash happening. But a point that you have also made in columns of yours, which are linked
#
from the show notes, I think you wrote this for the wire, is about how, you know, so much
#
of Delhi's beautiful architecture is just being taken over by these cookie cutter
#
apartment buildings. And while urbanisation and all that is great, one kind of needs to
#
think about it. And the question that you sort of seem to pose there is like, what are
#
we losing in all of this? So what are sort of your thoughts on that, seeing the city
#
evolve over the time that you've been here?
#
I came to live in Delhi when I was about three years old from a small town called Aligarh
#
nearby. So my entire schooling and most of my growing up has happened in this city.
#
In the process, I've also seen it change over the years. In the 60s, when I came to
#
live here and we lived in Nizamuddin East, we had vestiges of a Nehruvian India.
#
Nehru was, of course, gone by then.
#
But by 67, when I first came here, we had a city that was
#
learning to cope with a lot of dignity and, you know, with a lot of grace, with the
#
We had people, many in the neighbourhood I grew up in, we used the word colony in
#
Delhi. It's an awful word, but that's what we say here.
#
So Nizamuddin East was a refugee colony.
#
Most of the people who had come had come from out there, as they say.
#
And they had stories of their homes, of the Angans they had left behind and the, you
#
know, the kind of life they had.
#
But that Delhi, the houses that were given to these migrants, refugees, call it what
#
you will, survivors of the partition, were issued by the government, but changes were
#
Today, what you're referring to is a city or a government council telling people what
#
their houses should be like and imposing a certain uniformity, which to some extent
#
Unfortunately, we are living in a time where our houses and our design aesthetic is
#
decided not by the government, not even by us ourselves, but by a bunch of people who
#
So their aesthetic, their idea of what our houses should look like is a mishmash of
#
something out of an American sitcom and something out of their idea of you see the
#
high rises also, you know, you can mistake yourself for being in Singapore or anywhere
#
in the world. There is a there's a kind of, I don't know, a cosmopolitan, global,
#
homogenous, cut from the same look.
#
And it's not just the high rises, it's even the the builder built apartment buildings
#
in in neighborhoods in Delhi.
#
They also have a certain sameness.
#
The aesthetic is not yours or mine or individual at all.
#
It is a builder's aesthetic.
#
So the use of glass of steel, none of which are very conducive for our environment, for
#
our weather, the use of marble, you know, the use of things which have which don't even
#
have lasting value, by the way, because the builder who's selling you the flat is not
#
interested in its in the life, you know, he'll be perfectly happy if you knock it down
#
and build it again. So we're not even talking of longevity here.
#
We are talking of a kind of again, I will use a word with a lot of caution.
#
Aesthetics need not be our aesthetic, it will be just an aesthetic that has been foisted
#
on us. Now, here I just want to mention the work I've been doing over Delhi's built
#
heritage. The, you know, the forces of urban renewal tell us that the past has its place,
#
but it has its place in a limited sense and people interpret it differently.
#
Cities as old as ours, like Istanbul or Rome, have dealt with urban renewal and dealt
#
with it in different ways.
#
Ours, I'm afraid, has not been so, let's say it doesn't compare so well.
#
We are, the Delhi we live in is supposed to be the 10th, some say 11th city built either
#
one on top of each other or contiguous to each other, often cannibalizing one city in
#
order to build another.
#
Many years ago, by Times of India, I was asked to write a column.
#
I called it Invisible City.
#
I wrote it as a weekly column.
#
Then it shifted to another magazine called Invisible, called First City, where again
#
bearing the same name, Invisible City, it became a monthly column.
#
And eventually I put them as a book.
#
It continues to sell very well today.
#
The book is called Invisible City and it's all about the lesser known monuments of Delhi.
#
So all those years I would go and research a monument.
#
I would go look at a monument, talk to the people living in its neighborhood and write
#
it. I'm not a historian by training.
#
My training is literary history.
#
So history is something I read.
#
It came from a position of great love for the city, where I came as a very young person,
#
where I grew up and I was concerned as to why we have this disregard for the past and
#
why we think that history is not a continuum, not a river, but something from which we can
#
pick and choose. So we can throw away this and say, oh, this part doesn't make sense to
#
me. So let's do away with this.
#
This part I'm willing to keep because it makes sense to my larger narrative.
#
Many things came together, I felt, in our understanding of history in a city like Delhi.
#
There were the inconvenient bits and pieces that were jutting into people's homes.
#
So it seemed OK to just lop off a dome here, a wall there and extend your own terrace.
#
I can give you an example on Haley Road where the Agra Senki Bauli is, which is a beautifully
#
Well, there used to be, I have seen it with my own eyes, a kind of next to the Bauli, a
#
kind of, you can call it, it had three domes and it was possibly a rest house, sarai, inn
#
for travellers next to a Bauli.
#
I remember the three domes.
#
Over the years that I would go to research this, one dome was lopped off, then another
#
Why? Because the person living next door wanted to put his dish antenna and this dome was
#
And this is in Haley Road in the heart of central Delhi.
#
So this sort of thing, even though we have rules in place, the ASI has rules saying that
#
you cannot build anything, you cannot renovate, you cannot even do your home constructions,
#
renovations without taking proper permission from the relevant authorities if there is a
#
protected monument in your neighbourhood.
#
But there is blatant disregard for those rules.
#
There is a flouting of all possible safeguards that are there.
#
I mean, legally, we are fine.
#
Legally, we've got all the safeguards.
#
It's the flouting of the rules that is where the problem lies.
#
And in all those years when I was researching and writing those columns, I always found
#
that things that I had gone to see, I'm a chashmadeed gawa, I'm an eyewitness, I have
#
seen Baulies, I have seen tombs, I have seen sarais with my own eyes in my own lifespan.
#
And here we don't even need to go into history books.
#
We don't even need to go into Asaro Sanadid, which is this wonderful book written by
#
Sir Syed Ahmed, we know as the founder of the Aligarh Muslim University, but he was a
#
Delhi wala and a proud Delhi wala.
#
And he has written this wonderful book called Asaro Sanadid, which means remains of the
#
past, which contains beautiful, immaculate documentation of the many monuments.
#
So which was written in about the mid 19th century.
#
So from 150 years ago to now, I don't need to compare.
#
Of course, many, many of those things are gone.
#
I'm talking about my own life span.
#
I'm 60 years old and I began doing this work in my 30s.
#
So in 30 years, I've seen an enormous change.
#
There is greed, there is capriciousness, there is plain and simple blithe disregard.
#
The menuki culture that we call in Delhi and the reverse is tenuki.
#
Like, how does it matter to me and why should it matter to you?
#
So this menuki and tenuki culture lies at the heart of what we are seeing in Delhi.
#
While we're still talking of, we're not coming into culture, we're not coming into
#
behavior, we are still talking of built heritage.
#
And here I see greed compounded by this disregard, by this, how does it matter?
#
Oh, there were some kings who ruled for five years.
#
You know, so, you don't know why, what, when.
#
I used to go and talk to the people who lived there.
#
I would ask the guard of some house, that do you know what place this was?
#
And they would say, it was the palace of the queen.
#
Now, this is not a palace, there was no queen.
#
So even architecturally, we can't be bothered to find out the exact name, the exact purpose
#
of that building, why it was built, let alone when it was built or by whom it was built.
#
But we often don't even know who lies buried there or what purpose did the building serve.
#
Which is why I call my column and then later the book, Invisible City.
#
So all of these many cities that are in modern Delhi are for many of us invisible because
#
we might take our dog for a walk through their grounds.
#
We might take a shortcut, we might drive past them on our way to work, but we couldn't
#
really be bothered to find out even the real name of that structure.
#
And in South Delhi, where we are recording today, there is an embarrassment of riches.
#
There are so many monuments, some listed, some not listed, some protected, some not
#
Even the ones that are protected, the ASI, the Archaeological Survey of India, thinks
#
that it's okay to just build a fence and throw away the key, you know.
#
Now, history is not a caged beast.
#
It's not something that you have to view through the bars of a fence.
#
I think we will be invested in our past if we are able to see it, be a part of it.
#
So I don't subscribe to this way of government agencies building fences, throwing away
#
keys, and then you just see it as a, as a, I don't know, artifact, just a lurking beast
#
And if it's pretty, and again, I use the word pretty, you know, with inverted commas
#
and emphasis, if it's pretty, then it's just a postcard-like background to our lives.
#
In South Delhi, we see it everywhere.
#
There is a scenic-looking tomb that you can see from your balcony, and it just adds
#
value, it just adds to the property price of your flat.
#
I don't think that's the purpose of history.
#
If only these places were accessible, some of them are now, in the 30 years that I've
#
been writing about them, I have seen, let's be, let's not diss everything, let's not
#
throw the baby out with the bathwater.
#
I think there is a change happening in some ways, there is, there are heritage walks,
#
concerned citizens groups, RWAs, they're trying to do their bit.
#
I'm seeing some light at the end of this tunnel, but I wish there was more.
#
I wish the government agencies had a different view of history, of built heritage.
#
Concerned citizens groups, for example, let me give you an example.
#
Three effigies of Ravan and his brothers were burnt right bang in the middle of a
#
cluster of tombs in RK Puram.
#
The RWA went to court and said, and given the charged religious mahal that we have in
#
our times, I think it took a lot of courage and foresight and vision of this concerned
#
citizens group to go to court and say, let's by all means burn the effigies, but let's
#
please not burn them right here, where the noise and the smoke will do damage to these
#
So every now and then something like this happens.
#
Every now and then an RWA says, let's do these large sprawling grounds of a monument.
#
Let's have rainwater harvesting systems in place.
#
You know, so every now and then it really pleases my heart to see some sort of citizens
#
initiative. It's still coming from citizens groups.
#
I'd be that much happier if this spills over into civil society and there is more, you
#
know, government-private-public partnerships happening.
#
I think the Aga Khan Trust for Culture and the amazing work they've done here under the
#
helmsmanship of Ratish Nanda, the conservation architect, he has shown us the way towards
#
public-private partnerships.
#
I think a city like Delhi, we can't just expect government agencies to do everything.
#
Why? Because there's so much.
#
It's not one or two or three.
#
We have an embarrassment of riches.
#
So we can't always really expect the government to do everything, nor other government
#
agencies, be it the ASI, the MCD.
#
I think civil society needs to step in.
#
I think more public-private partnerships are the way forward for a city like Delhi with
#
I'm not saying start having fashion shows in Lodi Garden.
#
I'm not saying that people have tried to do that.
#
It's a balance, you know, and that fine line has to be found by citizens themselves.
#
I share your lament about what's happening to the city.
#
And as you yourself have pointed out, you know, there are other great cities which we
#
visited tourists like Istanbul and Rome, which have a completely different approach.
#
And you get a sense of the city of the past coexisting with the city of the present.
#
I have a broader question here, which I'm thinking aloud, so I might be kind of
#
incoherent. But the broader question is that what is a city?
#
Right. Like I have lived in Bombay since mid 1990s and I love the city, but I cannot
#
say that I really know the city.
#
I know a particular sliver of the city, which is the sliver that has surrounded me and
#
that I carry with me and that has actually developed with me.
#
I don't really have a deep historical sense of it.
#
And yet I think I have as much claim over the city as anyone else who kind of lives
#
there. And as you've pointed out, you know, more than 90 per cent of people in Delhi are
#
probably migrants, perhaps even more depending on how far back you go.
#
And they are coming from different places and their imperatives are possibly different.
#
And even the 10 per cent who are here may not have that deep sense of history of knowing,
#
oh, I'm in Shahpurjaat and this is what this place was.
#
And a city is clearly not its buildings alone, because that would make it completely
#
dead. Equally a city in an immediate moment might seem to be its people.
#
But it is also actually a lot more than that.
#
I had an episode ages back with Rana Safi where she spoke eloquently about all the many
#
different cities that, you know, whose ghosts kind of are superimposed on each other as
#
we are. So how should we think of a city?
#
Because on one level, you could say that, hey, the 90 per cent of people who are migrants
#
here, they just want to live a good life.
#
They are happy with a cookie cutter apartment because a cookie cutter apartment is
#
obviously it makes ends economically for builders to just put them up and they're kind
#
of happy with that and they're getting on with their lives.
#
And I wonder and again, I'm thinking aloud that do citizens start caring about their
#
cities and the history in the past after they reach a certain sort of level of prosperity
#
or whatever? Because otherwise, if you're living amid the everyday sort of scarcities
#
that one lives through in these cities, it does become a natural way to think about the
#
world. You know, how have how have the Istanbul's and Rome's evolved for that reason?
#
Like I went to Athens a few months ago and I was actually really disappointed because
#
everything that was there from the past, whether it's a Parthenon or whatever, seemed to me
#
to be like, you know, put in a showcase for tourists and they weren't really living in
#
that sense. And I also wonder about if we speak of an historic spot like Lodi Gardens
#
when it first came up was something, then it became something else.
#
Today, if you have jazz concerts, it'll be one thing or if you just have other things
#
happening there, it'll be another thing. What is a place really? And can cities really
#
survive? How does one think about them?
#
I think cities are some of its parts. You know, it's not any one thing. It can't just be
#
people. It can't certainly can't be just monuments, roads, parks, trees. It can't be
#
those, but it can be the sum of its parts. My Delhi will be very different from somebody
#
living in Silampur. So, you know, there is all of that. But the example that we like
#
to give of other ancient cities such as Rome and Istanbul to name just two is in some ways
#
not fair to Delhi because Delhi has had this great, great tragedy that these two cities
#
have not had, which is the partition of 47 and the outflow of population of those who
#
lived here and the inflow of another set of population. So that changed the demographics
#
and the dynamics of the city. It's not just the refugees who came post 47. It's not just
#
the people from Shahjahanabad who left. Remember, this is also different from other cities
#
because it's the capital of India. So people came and not just from now 1911, from the
#
time of the Darbar onwards, this was the colonial seat of administration. So even in British
#
times, there were a whole bunch of people from other parts of the country living and
#
working here because they worked for the colonial administration. In fact, all of Lutyens
#
Delhi was built to accommodate all those houses in Lutyens Delhi where our bureaucrats and
#
judges and others live was actually built to accommodate the colonial officers. So and
#
not just them, there were also flats and other things built for those who were smaller cogs
#
in that larger machinery, which was the clerks, the typists, this and that. And then when
#
a post 47 again, I mean, with all of those Shastri Bhavan and this Bhavan and that Krishi
#
Bhavan and all that, that was there in central Delhi, which is where the central government
#
really ran. So people came from different parts of the country to work for the central
#
government. So it was not just the refugees who came from Pakistan to live here, to for
#
whom these new colonies, Lajpat Nagar and Amar colony and Punjabi Bagh and Nizamuddin
#
East, all of these were built. But remember also that housing had to be made for all of
#
these government employees. And they came in very, very large numbers and they came
#
from different parts of the country. In the 60s, the Delhi that I grew up in, when you
#
ask somebody, where are you from, they would name their village in Bihar or Tamil Nadu
#
or wherever. And they said, we are our families from there. Today, when you say, where are
#
you from? They invariably say, def call or wherever, you know, so the roots have gone
#
in. You're very right in saying that the sense of engagement with the city comes from the
#
years that you've lived. The Istanbul and the Romans are different from us because they
#
and their ancestors have been living there. Of course, there must be people coming from
#
other cities too, to live in these two big cities like Istanbul and Rome. But I think
#
there must definitely be a large population of people who've been living there for a very
#
long time. In Delhi, that is not the case. But in these 30, 40, 50 years, I think I see
#
the change in people. And that is reflected in very many ways, these heritage groups
#
that we're talking about. I remember going for them. I remember conducting some myself
#
many years ago. There would be smaller groups, a small stray bunch of people, sometimes
#
some foreigners, expatriates who would go for these. Now I see very large groups. I
#
don't run these groups myself anymore, these heritage walks, but I know people who are
#
doing them and I know that the turnout is very good. People pay money to come for these
#
and there are many, many players. So all of this gives me a sense that the sense of
#
engagement with the city has deepened, which is very good, because till there is a sense
#
of engagement, there will not be this sense of investing in the city. And I'm not talking
#
of philanthropy. I'm not talking of putting your money where your mouth is. I'm only
#
talking of an emotional, intellectual involvement. I see that happening now because people are
#
willing to, you know, many things that have come to the courts, such as, for example,
#
do not burn, do not cut trees, do not burn your refuse in open fires, because all of
#
that adds to pollution. Many of these things were taken up by the courts, so motto on their
#
own, but many things were brought to the notice of the courts by concerned citizens
#
groups. I'm seeing all of these things in a cumulative manner. I'm seeing all of these
#
things towards a larger good, whether it's the courts in Delhi and the courts in Delhi
#
are quite proactive, whether it is the judiciary, whether it is the people's groups,
#
whether it is RWAs, I think they are coming together and they are seeing the larger good
#
of the doing away of diesel run buses about 10 years ago by the previous Shiladikshit
#
government. I think that was a very visionary step for this city to make the investment
#
in CNG run buses. All of this will have a cumulative effect in the years to come. So
#
I think we are looking at a Delhi where the sense of engagement, where the sense of
#
involvement is increasing. There will be a trickle down effect, I hope maybe not in my
#
lifetime, but certainly in the years ahead.
#
When you talk about, you know, something that binds the city together, that it's more
#
than its people or more than its monuments, I guess, the nebulous word culture, the culture
#
of a city could be, you know, used. And this reminds me of this beautiful passage I want
#
to read out from, you know, but you don't like a Muslim, which is, you know, which I
#
got reminded of in this afternoon.
#
May I interrupt you just for a second because an image has popped into my head and I just
#
want to share it. And please do read the passage later. You were talking about living in
#
Bombay and so on. Now, there is a citizens group in Bombay for history buffs. They did
#
a walk, Basuda's Bombay, you know, so the films that he shot in Bombay. So your city
#
is what you make of it. For this group of people, you know, that Mosme Chatterjee and
#
Amitabh Bachchan song, somebody recreated that. All those places on a monsoon day in
#
Bombay, where that song was shot. So this group of heritage buffs retraced and went
#
all the places where Basuda shot his films and some of the most iconic shots. So a city
#
is what you make of it. It can be anything. Now, those, that's mostly central Bombay,
#
South Bombay, whatever, you know, town as it's called. And that's not all that is. There
#
is Andheri, there is the outskirts. I mean, there is Navi Mumbai now. So I think to come
#
back to Delhi, what we make of it, it could be a sliver. So there can't be a definitive
#
Delhi, you know, I mean, you have ad campaigns run by the government of Delhi, Mary John
#
and all that, which is all very good. But I think everybody will have, and this is true
#
for all big cities, New York and so on. Everybody will have their hood, their bit of the neighborhood
#
that they think is theirs. And they, they're very proud of that. So I don't know if it's
#
possible to have a monochromatic view of large cities. Sorry, I interrupted you. Please,
#
you were reading something. Please feel entirely free to interrupt me when such a delightful
#
image is just popped into my head and I do look up, look out for this. There's a, there's a
#
recreation of this Basuda song. It's beautiful. I'll absolutely want to, you know, go on that
#
and people don't mix either songs like that or films like that these days, which is
#
a different matter. What you're describing also tells you how cities contain multitudes.
#
And equally, one of the forces that you've lamented affecting culture is the force of
#
homogenization. And I was reminded of this today when I'm, you know, during this trip to Delhi,
#
I'm staying with a friend called Kumar and he said, I'll make you the best Dal in the world.
#
And I was like, okay, I'm like a strict non-vegetarian, but fine, make me your Dal.
#
I will try it. And he made the Dal and it really was very good. And then I asked him,
#
what Tarka have you used? And I want to read out this great passage you wrote on
#
Baghars and Tarkas where you wrote quote. There was a time, one that even I remember from my
#
holy childhood, when each dish had its own distinctive Baghar. The Aadhar ki Dal, for example,
#
loved by the true connoisseurs, including Mirza Gale was confessed in his letters,
#
had a Baghar of one Sukhi Lalmich, a whole red chilli, and roughly chopped cloves of garlic,
#
giving it a wonderfully roasted nutty flavour. The Masoor ki Dal would have browned onions.
#
The Urad, always white and not yellowed with turmeric as it comes now, would arrive smothered
#
under a melange of crispy brown onion, juliennes of ginger, finely chopped green chillies and fresh
#
green coriander. And the faintest smidgen of Hing, asophitida, popped in hot oil to reduce
#
the Dal's body gas-inducing qualities. Stop quote and apologies to everyone listening
#
for my pronunciations. They are uniformly bad across languages. And I also want to sort of
#
talk about this sense of homogenisation a bit, like you've described it in terms of food,
#
like you've spoken about the invasion of the tomato, how there is paneer and everything,
#
and how you are horrified that, you know, we are now reaching the time when no one will
#
remember growing up without the existence of paneer. You've described the distinction
#
between roti and fulka, and how the beautiful roti is lost to the, you know, to the sad imposter,
#
the fulka in modern times. So, on one hand, there are these multitudes we all contain,
#
and which are there in our culture, and which are so delightful. And on the other hand,
#
you do have these homogenising influences, which come at us in the context of food. Pushpesh
#
Panthji was on my show a while back, and he was really angry about, you know, what is happening,
#
the food they serve at weddings, which is the same North Indian nonsense all over the place,
#
so they might have a charming counter. And the other aspect of this is that technology also
#
enables people to sort of keep their little niches and grooves alive, you know, in different
#
ways. I've had an episode with Vinay Singhal, who runs a platform called Stage.in, which has
#
content in Haryanvi, Bhojpuri, you know, the dialects and not the major quote-unquote languages.
#
And his argument is that it can go the other way, that everything doesn't have to get homogenised
#
into something that is bland and dull and so on. And you've got a beautiful section, your part two
#
of your book, but you don't look like a Muslim, is entirely on culture. I love the memories and
#
that, and you've written about food and music and so many other things. What is your sense of this
#
through all of these years, having kind of engaged deeply with all this?
#
You know, globalisation is all very good and useful and important, and you can't be an ostrich
#
and stick your head in the sand and say, I don't want to look at the world around me.
#
You can't do that, you can't get away from the world really. In culinary terms, let's first talk
#
of food, then we'll come to culture in a broader sense. In food, you know, fusion can work sometimes,
#
but there is a great deal to be said for the Nani Dadi ki recipes. I'm not saying that you throw
#
away your mixer grinder and install a mortar and pestle. Well, have one as a standby for days when
#
you want that authentic look. Why authentic? Because the mortar and pestle or the silbatta
#
crushed the surface and did not puree it, you see. So the texture was different.
#
And scientists also tell us that garlic should be crushed for its flavours to be released. There was
#
a great deal of native wisdom in the pantries and the kitchens and the way it was done in
#
Nani Dadi's kitchens. So native wisdom is one thing. The other thing is that, you know,
#
there was something to be said for the way a dish is conjured. There is a science to it, you know,
#
there is a logic to it. And this just because tomatoes, for example, are plentifully available,
#
they weren't in my growing up years, by the way, we had desi tomato, which came at a certain time.
#
The Green Revolution that was taking place in the Punjab and the creation of food chains and
#
other things made food available throughout the year. The tomatoes we get are not the desi
#
tomatoes anymore. They are a hybrid variety of the Roma tomatoes. These were unheard of,
#
nobody had had it. And also tomato, as it was called, was either put in designated dishes,
#
like tomato gosht, for example, or it would be chopped up and used in a salad. Today,
#
we use the tomato to thicken curries, to add colour to something that doesn't need colour.
#
We use it just like that because we like to see the pale bits of reds floating around in our dals,
#
which never initially had them. So I'm saying that sometimes the fidelity to a recipe is important.
#
If a recipe did not require, let's talk of plain simple dals that we all have,
#
does not really need an arhar ki dal benefits in no particular way with the addition of tomatoes.
#
Why are we doing it? Just because we like to see that pop of colour, which is not adding flavour,
#
which is not adding texture, which is not doing anything. So the homogenisation is happening,
#
not just because these things are available, but because the people who are cooking for us
#
in the essay that you have just read referred to, it's the people who are cooking for us in big
#
cities. We have help maids, again, not a very politically correct word, but they are domestic
#
helpers, are people from distant towns and states where they don't eat these things themselves.
#
The food that they eat is very different from the food that they're required to cook
#
in the homes of the people they work for. So there is no native wisdom there. There is no
#
native way of doing things. They are learning things, which is why they are adding things that
#
are neither native to them, nor to the people they are cooking for. I don't see this as an
#
example of fusion. I see this as an example of just things going awry. I think that is also one
#
of the reasons that in the process, I think what will happen, and I can understand the fury of a
#
food purist like Pushpesh Panthji, whom I respect very much, and I can fully share his frustration
#
and anger at the homogenisation that we are having, not just in our everyday food, but in our
#
banquets, in our weddings and so on. I personally see no reason on earth why we must be serving
#
Italian and Chinese and so on. The array of food, the sheer wastage of food, the sheer mindless
#
display of wealth that we see on such occasions, a great deal of it is wasted. I personally would
#
be perfectly happy having one cuisine, of course with vegetarian and non-vegetarian options,
#
but not this ridiculous mindless variety. My driver has just come back from, he lives in
#
a village in the Awadh region, somewhere near Faizabad, and he'd got his daughter married,
#
and he said he had Chinese, he had pasta, he had apart from the
#
meat and everything that is made in a UP wedding, and I was asking him why? He says,
#
so if this is happening in small rural India, this notion of this notion of showing that you
#
have arrived, this notion of showing your wealth through food, through buffets, through banquets,
#
I think somewhere this has to stop. We shouldn't have to wait for a war. My mother tells me that
#
during the war with China, there was a ban on banquets, big fancy weddings. During the war
#
with China, Shastri ji gave the Jai Jawan Jai Kisan slogan, and many families
#
chose to forego one meal, like they would skip a lunch, they would skip a dinner because
#
food was being rationed, there were food shortages. I don't think we as a nation, as a society,
#
should wait for, God forbid, God forbid, an act of war or terrorism or a calamity to happen. Why
#
can't we be a little more mindful of the wastage that we have as a society? I'm sorry, I'm showing
#
my age and sounding like a very old person talking like this. No, I think any sensible young person
#
would agree like 100% with what you're saying. The wastage of electricity, lights come on at
#
Diwali time and they run all up till New Year. So for a good two and a half months, you have
#
a very conspicuous consumption of wealth, of what is called in Delhi, showing off.
#
I'm not sure what purpose, if it brings you good cheer, yes, but two and a half months is excessive.
#
So I think as a society, as a people, we are richer as a nation. We've moved away from the
#
wartime shortages of 60s. We've certainly moved away from post-47 India, where there was
#
rationing and, you know, all kinds of shortages. We are no longer a closed economy. We've had our,
#
you know, globalisation and our opening up of the economy. All that is all very good. But this
#
display, this wastage, this, I mean, this money can be put to better use, I think.
#
I think my real objection is like, if you really, really want to have a lot of pasta,
#
I have a lot of pasta. But my real objection to all of this, as you pointed out, is that it
#
is like signalling, like your driver said, that I have to signal to the people around me that
#
meri bhi kuch, you know, hasiyat hai. And that's what kind of makes me sad, because I think that
#
is really new money playing out. You know, old money in a sense would be content to just be what
#
it is. And it speaks to perhaps, you know, you might be wealthy, but there is a poverty of the
#
soul here, if you feel the need to signal anything at all. I mean, I wish people were like
#
more mennu ki tennu ki in this regard, you know, and saying that's one place they should be.
#
That's one place they sort of should be. And you were going to go beyond food and talk about
#
culture as well, that this aspect of homogenisation. Yeah, culture again, you know, it takes a Yash
#
Chopra film to remind us of the beauty of Indian culture, of whether it is Karwa Chauth or whatever.
#
So I don't think this we need to go beyond the scenic quality of these rituals. You know, culture
#
for me is a lot of the things that we grew up with that are part of that are reflected in our dress,
#
in our clothes, in our food, in what we eat, how we conduct ourselves and what I referred to very
#
early on in this conversation, the seasonality, you know, of being in tune with seasons and tuned
#
with climate of the horis and the kajris that were sung, not necessarily the same sort of music,
#
even music, even the perfumes, the ittar that was used would be, according to the season,
#
it would be khas, it would be something depending on the time of the year. So I think this should
#
not be, we should not be in such a hurry to throw it all out. We should not be in such a hurry to
#
diss it and homogenize everything. So I'm using the word culture in a very broad sense, like I
#
said, what you eat, what you wear, even how you think, your rituals, what a baby is fed at
#
four months, at six months. You know, there are these rituals in different parts of the country
#
known by different names, but essentially coming from the same place, the first annan, the first
#
cereal that goes into a baby's mouth, it could be rice in somewhere, it could be milk and banana
#
somewhere else. It would depend on which part of the country it is, but there's a ritual and there's
#
a little ceremony that accompanies that ritual. So whether it is rituals for life, for death,
#
for mourning, for coping with grief, I think there is a lot to be said for those rituals. So again,
#
I'm using the word culture in its broadest possible sense to encompass all of life.
#
And what we are now doing is we have a remembrance meeting, we hire a, at the time of a death,
#
we hire a hall and we are, I think, just aping the West in very many ways. It's all about making
#
speeches about, I don't remember the death ceremonies that we used to have in our different
#
cultures, in our different regions, being necessarily about making speeches. You know,
#
it was not how you felt, but it was about how you shared your grief. So the family came together,
#
you ate together, a neighbor or a family cooked the first meal after somebody had departed so that
#
chulha nahi chalega, you know, somebody would cook and send food for you. You would all sit together
#
and eat. I think there was a lot of camaraderie. There was a lot of good sense also behind it that
#
you don't need to be alone when you've had a bereavement, you need to be with friends and
#
family. So if somebody cooks and brings food and sits with you and eats that food, they are also
#
giving you company, you're not all by yourself. So all of these rituals which were time-honored,
#
they had a lot of good sense behind them. Somewhere in a hurry to just imitate
#
Western cultures, we are doing away with a lot that was good in our own culture.
#
And what we are replacing it with when we talk of Indian culture is a kind of hyper-nationalism,
#
very jingoistic nationalism. We talk of Bharatiya Sanskriti, but we talk about it from one lens,
#
and we talk about it, I'm sorry to say from a very saffron lens and from a very political lens.
#
Instead, I think we need to have a more humane attitude towards culture. Bharatiya sabhita,
#
Bharatiya Sanskriti is not the monopoly of any one set of people. I think it belongs to all people
#
who live in this country, who are from here. Even the diaspora for that matter has every right to
#
claim Bharatiya Sanskriti just because they may not be living in India as of now, but their ancestors,
#
their purvaj did, and maybe they have carried the seeds of that Sanskriti and sabhita with them.
#
So I for one don't feel that the NRIs and the larger Indian diaspora community cannot lay claim
#
to it. Of course, they have as much claim to it as those of us who live within the physical
#
boundaries and borders of this country. But it must be borne in mind that culture
#
is not monochromatic. Culture is not cut from the one cloth. Culture is not what any
#
party or power decides to tell us is culture. I think the culture will vary widely between Assam
#
and Kerala, between Rajasthan and Kashmir. So one culture does not have legitimacy,
#
and the other culture has no legitimacy. I don't think that is right and fair. Neither does one
#
culture have supremacy over another culture. You cannot say that the culture of this state,
#
it could be Gujarat, it could be Kashmir, it could be Bengal, is representative of Indian culture.
#
I think it's the coming together of the parts. The mistake some of us are making today in India
#
is that we are allowing to be led by a very jingoistic, hyper-nationalistic, very chauvinistic
#
culture. Well said. And you know, of all the possible homogenisations happening around us,
#
there is only one I worry deeply about, and that is in our politics. That's exactly the
#
saffronisation that you speak of, and we'll come back to that. But before we get there,
#
a couple of other things I wanted to double click on. And one is also sort of the changing nature
#
of family within our society, because a lot of culture comes from there. You have this
#
delightful paragraph in your book, Memories of Summer's Past, where you speak of your
#
grandmother's home at 1 Shibley Road, Aligarh, and you just describe it so beautifully that I
#
will not even quote from it. I'll just ask all my readers to go and check it out. Lovely piece of
#
writing. And there, it is like the entire extended family is kind of together. The elders have the
#
kids around them, that native wisdom passes on and becomes native in another generation,
#
so on and so forth. And I think, in a sense, the journey of our society has been one from those
#
kind of families to nuclear families, and then to even worse, atomised nuclear families, where you
#
will have two parents and their kids sitting together for dinner, but they're all looking
#
into their phone. They're not even really together, in a sense. So what is your sense of the
#
evolution of this? Because you have both been that little child, you know, 55 years ago,
#
surrounded by everyone in your family. And I say 55 because I'm imagining you as a five-year-old
#
surrounded by all of those people. And you have also been a mother. What's your sense of how all
#
this has changed? And of course, there are trade-offs. There are some things about it which
#
are good, which are great. Families can be deeply toxic, but families can also keep you rooted in a
#
certain way. What's your sense of this? Yeah. So born in 1963, I'm 60 years old today. And I think
#
I'm very blessed because I belong to that Brit generation. India was already a free country.
#
India was well on its path to kind of finding its feet in the committee of nations. India was
#
already a force to reckon with in the larger sense. We had education. We had good schools
#
and colleges. Nehru had very grandly called them the temples of modern India. In one of his speeches,
#
he'd said, let the temples of modern India be the schools, the colleges, the dams, the factories.
#
So that was the India I grew up in. But at a purely family level, I was also fortunate enough
#
to see an older way of life, which was still functional in my childhood. The idea of growing
#
to grandparents' homes, spending the two months of the summer vacations with them,
#
going there for winter vacations, and going to smaller cities, in my case to Aligarh,
#
which is where my nanny and nana lived. So knowing life in a smaller city and then comparing it with
#
life in a big city like Delhi. Like I said, I was this bridge. I saw that other world,
#
which was still there, which was still intact. I also saw it as it were passed away. I saw my
#
own parents, hardworking middle class, truly the people who've built this India, that we are today
#
reaping the fruits of the hard work of this generation, my parents' generation. My father
#
was a doctor. My mother was a librarian in our school. So good, solid middle class values
#
that were given to us. Switch off lights because somebody in a village doesn't have lights.
#
Switch off the tap when you're brushing your teeth because some woman in a village is walking miles
#
to fetch water and don't take all that you have for granted. I remember Narasimha Rao's government
#
coming. I remember the opening up of the economy. I grew up in Delhi where there was just the
#
ambassador and the Fiat car. I remember the Maruti when it came. Of course, now there's no
#
shortage of the number of cars you have here. But so I remember that time when you would go
#
to a super bazaar, which was a government run outlet where you had a choice of two or three
#
shampoos and three or four soaps, all made in India, all made by Indian brands. I remember that time
#
and I remember the opening up and the sudden coming in of foreign brands. If you needed jeans
#
in my growing up years, you went to Effuse, which was a local brand, or you relied on a kind uncle
#
to bring you a Wrangler or a Levi's from abroad. So I am that generation. My children 25 and 27
#
today have had enormous benefits, not just in terms of greater affluence, but also technology,
#
more amenities. So I have had the benefit of seeing my grandparents' generation,
#
my father's generation, my own generation, and now I'm seeing my two children grow up into
#
young adults and their values. Change is inevitable. I mean, I can't say that everything was good in
#
my growing up years and everything is necessarily bad now. No, it can't be. That's not humanly
#
possible. But I think if we carry bits and pieces of our past with us as we move to the future,
#
I think we will do well for ourselves as a people, as a nation, as a society, as a country.
#
There was so much that was good in our past. One of them, and I'm sorry, in the course of this
#
conversation, I'll keep coming back to the elephant in the room, which is Communalism and
#
Secularism. So the one thing that was very good in my youth and early and childhood was the idea
#
of living together separately, which is how I describe it. People had their food fetishes,
#
like I had a neighbor who didn't eat in our house, but she didn't make us feel small for it. She
#
didn't eat in a house because she didn't eat in a kitchen where non-veg was made, which is perfectly
#
fine. If you gave her an apple or something, Bhabiji, we called her. She was an older person,
#
but that's how everybody, all the children in the neighborhood called her. So Bhabiji wouldn't eat
#
cooked food, but she would be perfectly happy to eat a banana or an apple or something or dry
#
fruits. And nobody minded it. It did not come from a place of you are inferior. Therefore,
#
I will not have your food. It was just that I don't eat in a place where non-veg is made,
#
which is a perfectly fine thing. I'm seeing a change now. I'm seeing less tolerance. I'm
#
seeing greater othering. Nobody othered the other. There were differences. Why will there not be
#
differences? Of course, there are always differences and there will always be in a country as big,
#
as diverse, as plural as ours. There'll be differences of culture, of language, of food,
#
of clothes, of everything. We are a melting pot and especially big cities where there's population
#
from all parts of the country. Of course, those differences will be there. But what saddens me
#
is that now we are allowing ourselves to focus on the differences. This living together separately,
#
which was a lived mantra in my growing up years. And even before, I'm told that in villages,
#
they would not drink hookah, but they would not eat at each other's homes. They would not marry.
#
You will not have marriages in each other's homes, which is fine. But as long as you don't have the
#
animus, as long as you don't have the ill will, as long as you don't have that hatred,
#
the toxicity, that troubles me. You know, I always salute the Sikh community.
#
If one community has suffered most from the partition, it is the Sikhs. There's been a
#
displacement of population, loss of livelihood, homes. All of Punjab was this bloodied corridor
#
through which people went from here to there and came from there to here. And yet, when I look at
#
the Sikhs around me, I see them as the most humane people in this country. And we, as a people,
#
have so much to learn from them. They are the first to stand up and offer help. We saw that at
#
the time of Corona. The Sikhs had organized themselves so well. They were offering aid,
#
medicines. When the big mosque in Delhi, Jama Masjid had to open at the end of COVID, at the
#
end of the lockdown, when it had to open for prayers, the Muslims were scared of going in
#
there and cleaning the mosque. It was the Sikhs of Delhi who went in, who cleaned the mosque and
#
allowed the Friday prayer to happen. I think we as a people need to have these shining beacons in
#
our midst and need to learn lessons from them of the spirit of community, of the spirit of brotherhood,
#
of helping. Here's one set of people who have every reason to carry the baggage of partition,
#
of carry the baggage of their losses. And here is one people who have chosen not to.
#
I find them the most egalitarian, the most large-hearted, the most generous people
#
within our midst. And this is truly laudable. If we learn lessons from them of leaving the past
#
behind, of not carrying toxic baggage with us, of standing up to offer help, then I think there is
#
a great deal to be said for us as a people. One truly inspiring story I remember is about
#
Yogendra Yadav. Yogendra Yadav's dad saw some of his relatives, I forget exactly who, killed
#
during the partition by Muslims and he chose a middle name for his son, Salim. Yogendra Yadav's
#
middle name is Salim because his dad did not want to carry that animus with him and he did not want
#
to change him and I find this deeply inspiring. And you mentioned the elephant in the room,
#
I'm reminded of this poem by K. Ryan which I'll read out. It's called The Elephant in the Room
#
by K. Ryan. The room is almost all elephant, almost none of it isn't. Pretty much solid elephant,
#
so there's no room to talk about it. So that's a poem. But I feel that in our room there is a
#
huge elephant but we can talk about it, so why delay that? Let's talk about the elephant in the
#
room and I want to sort of, before we get directly to the elephant in the room, I'll also use this as
#
a way to sort of explore your life itself because the sections, the section that I really loved in
#
your book But You Don't Look Like a Muslim is the first part where you speak about the dilemmas of
#
identity, where you wrestle with the question of are you a Muslim Indian or an Indian Muslim,
#
how it was to grow up, how you would go to school and people would ask you are you from Pakistan,
#
do you have relatives in Pakistan and so on and so forth. Tell me a little bit about this, what was
#
your sense of identity because on the one hand there is of course like you said that Nehruvi in
#
India feeling of hope and moving forward together, you know, not you know shutting the tap when you're
#
done with it because somewhere in a village there is someone walking to a well and there is
#
that feeling is there but equally there is another layer of awareness that you have. So
#
tell me a sort of bit about you know how you grew up, what the India of that time was like.
#
Let me share a moment of epiphany, one moment that I've described in the book also you may
#
have read it. It was early 70s, the war with Pakistan had just happened. I was in fifth
#
standard and a boy in my class would constantly call me Paki and I don't know what it meant at
#
that point. I must point out that in my family nobody really went to Pakistan so we didn't have
#
cousins or aunts and uncles there. There's no question of anybody coming from there.
#
So our family was largely UP based and had stayed put, nobody had really gone to Pakistan.
#
So when this incident in school happened, I remember coming home in tears and telling my
#
father, a man of great good sense, a doctor but a very wise and a very sort of stable presence in
#
my life. I told him that you know there's this boy and he keeps calling me Paki and I don't know what
#
it means. So first he explained to me what Paki meant, he said it's a shortened version of Pakistani.
#
So I said why does he call me Pakistani? We've never been there. Till that point, I mean I
#
visited Pakistan three times as an adult, all three times on professional work, somebody called me for
#
a seminar, a university invited me, a book launch thing happened, things like that. But till that
#
point there was no relative, no contact really. So my father sat me down and we had this talk and
#
I remember it to this day and I think it shaped me and my siblings and gave us a sense of identity.
#
So his words briefly were that look, a people of our generation, the Muslims had a choice,
#
some of them were people who were going, we chose not to go. You and we, all of us have every right
#
to be in this country. This country is as much yours and mine as it is anybody else's. Don't
#
ever think that you don't have a right to be here. This is your country.
#
So words to that effect, that I think as when you were in fifth standard and somebody tells you very
#
clearly, very simply, in very simple words that this is your home, you are from this land, from
#
this land. I think that gives you a sense of confidence and I think that confidence
#
helped in very many ways. The other thing my father told me was that the only key you have,
#
the key that will open doors for you is education because education opens you to and puts you on a
#
level playing field. If you do study and you do well in your studies, you know you have as much
#
fighting chance as anybody else and it puts you on level ground. I think that was
#
very good advice. I think education in India is the great leveler, not money, education,
#
I personally feel. And this was not just relevant in my generation. I think this is something that
#
will continue to matter in a country as diverse as India. We are still grappling with differences.
#
We are talking of mainstream, we are talking of minorities, we are talking of Dalits, we are
#
talking of super Dalits, we are talking of farmers' rights, we are talking of tribals, we are talking
#
of all the very many differences. But the one thing I think that can bring us on the same platform,
#
I think, is still going to be education and it will continue to be relevant. Yes, the differences
#
will remain. Yes, the differences can get exacerbated and can be used by political parties
#
to further their ends. But the one thing that will, I think, benefit us is the key that my
#
father handed me, the key that has continued to open door after door after door for me,
#
and that is education. And I think if there are any young people listening to this, I would say
#
that use that key wisely because money will come and go. It will come, it will go away,
#
it will bring you some things, but it will never bring you the wealth that education will and a
#
good education, a solid education. So I would say that if we were to invest in our education,
#
and I don't just mean regular schooling, but our education of the mind, which comes from reading,
#
from being open to ideas, of reading things apart from prescribed reading,
#
of not reading just WhatsApp forwards, that's the other thing. You know, you have arguments with
#
people where the other party is basing their entire argument on a WhatsApp forward. So I would say
#
that WhatsApp university is not in the business of giving out education, that is just information,
#
that to misinformation more often than not. If only people would take the trouble to read,
#
to educate themselves. And I'm not talking of just a degree-based education, of university
#
college education, but an education that comes from information, from knowledge. I think that
#
knowledge stands you in good stead, that allows you to hold your head high, that allows you to
#
have an opinion, to have a clear, unbiased opinion, and not go by what people are saying.
#
Also, there is a herd mentality that is growing. Unfortunately, regrettably, it's growing by the
#
day. The one who speaks away from the herd, or keeps thinking, we very quickly call him
#
your anti-national, traitor. You know, and we are using the word anti-national as a slur, as a
#
gali that we are hurling around. I think thinking differently from the herd is not
#
anti-nationalism. It is having your own opinion that matters. I think technology is all very good,
#
but technology is also being misused. May I share something that happened to me at this time last
#
year? The year 23 started on a very strange note for me. On Twitter, somebody made a group called
#
Bully Buy. They identified Muslim women. I was one of them. And they made an app on which
#
Muslim women were being sold to work as buys in people's homes. So my photograph was taken
#
from somewhere. And my name, my photograph, and they said that people talk of lack of employment.
#
It was very in poor taste, bad taste, very cheap, very hurtful. And in the Bully Buy app, it said
#
that, okay, this is so-and-so with my name and face. And she's a Muslim, she's a woman, and people
#
are saying that there is unemployment and poverty among Muslims. So we, as an act of philanthropy,
#
have set up this app and we have found all these Muslim women to work as maids, as buys in your
#
home. Of course, it was later taken down. There was hue and cry. There was solidarity. There were
#
messages of support from my friends and so on and so forth. Eventually, some action was taken.
#
The people who were found who were behind this, it hurt me. I mean, initially I was angry and so on.
#
When I saw the young people behind it, that is when I was hurt. What kind of toxic information
#
are we feeding the youth of our country that they feel compelled to use their technical knowledge
#
for something so cheap as this? There is misogyny in this that you are targeting women.
#
There is communalism in this that you're targeting Muslim women.
#
But more importantly, there is a sick mind at work that is sitting in some basement somewhere
#
in some small town or village that has access to technology but is misusing that technology,
#
taking people's photographs, taking people's personal information, and seeing that they have
#
views, seeing that they have views that you don't agree with. Somebody is feeding these little
#
people, these little, they are the workers, they are the pawns in the hands of larger forces
#
who are being fed this information. What kind of mind comes up with an app called Bully Buy?
#
This is a follow-up to something that happened before that was Sully Deals. That was also
#
misogynistic. That was also communal. What is happening now today is that young people
#
are being given a very toxic mix of many things. Misogyny is one of them.
#
She has a mind, she's speaking up. That's the other thing. As a woman, you're speaking up.
#
As a Muslim woman, you're speaking up. So you're ticking all the wrong boxes.
#
In the process, I think we are poisoning the minds of young people when we are encouraging them,
#
inciting them, maybe giving them even money to come up with apps like this.
#
I think we need to be more watchful as a society. Lots to double-click on, but I'll point my listeners
#
to this piece I'll link in the show notes written for Scroll by your daughter. It's a beautiful
#
piece where the first paragraph is a beautiful piece of writing where she, and I sent it to my
#
writing students, in fact, and said, you know, I always keep saying go for the concrete and not
#
the abstract. And the first three sentences are great where she writes,
#
My mother is a writer and a literary historian. She bakes the best sourdough bread and loves
#
going for walks in the rain. She is called Appa by almost everyone and is obsessed with red shoes.
#
I came to your studio wearing them.
#
I was watching your shoes.
#
Yeah, the same red shoes. Yes, I love them.
#
They are very nice red shoes.
#
They're very comfortable for Delhi winters.
#
They do suit you very well.
#
So a bunch of larger questions I want to ask. And you know, what you said about what your
#
father told you deeply moving reminded me of something Kapil Komeredi once said on the show
#
when he wrote My Level and Republic. He said that every Muslim who made a choice to stay in India
#
showed a commitment to this nation that the Hindus didn't have to. The Hindus who stayed
#
just stayed out of inertia. They didn't have to do anything. There was no choice to make.
#
But every Muslim had to actively make that choice that this is my vision of India. This is my idea
#
of India. And I am committing to it with my life. And I find that, you know, very
#
deeply moving and powerful. I'm also reminded of a point that you made eloquently again and again
#
in your book is about how the Muslims of India are not just one thing and Islam is not just one
#
thing. You know, there are so many multitudes there. And I remember I'd done this episode with
#
Mukulika Banerjee where we spoke about her book The Pathan Unarmed. And in your book,
#
you've also mentioned Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan. You'd gone to Afghanistan and there was a sort of
#
event in his honor. And she said that what set her off on the quest of getting that PhD and
#
writing that book was a question that hey, the Pathans are supposed to be a warrior race. Islam
#
is supposed to be like a violent religion. How the hell does this nonviolent movement emerge from
#
there? And what she found through, you know, it took her 10 years to write the book,
#
is that all those stereotypes were nonsense. That the nonviolence that came with that the
#
Kudai Khidmatgarh showed wasn't something borrowed from the West or the Enlightenment. It wasn't
#
something inspired by Gandhi. It came organically from within that society, from within Islam.
#
And I found an echo of this also in your book when you quote from, you know, your grandfather's
#
autobiography, this is Ali Ahmed Sarour, your maternal grandfather. And I'll just quote these
#
lines because I love them so much. Where he writes quote, I'm a Muslim and in the words of
#
Maulana Azad, the caretaker of the 1300 years of the wealth that is Islam. My deciphering of Islam
#
is a key to the interpretation of my spirit. I am also an Indian and this Indianness is as much a
#
part of my being. Islam does not deter me from believing in my Indian identity. Again, to quote
#
if anything, it shows the way. And then later in the same PC rights, the Islam that I know gives
#
more importance to rights of the people rather than rights of God. Stop quote and forgive my
#
mispronunciations if any. And so my, I have a two part question for you here. First is that your
#
sense of yourself as a Muslim, because I imagine when you are a young child, you have a Muslim name,
#
you have all the external trappings that may or may not be there, the rituals or whatever.
#
But later on, there is obviously a deeper self that you've grappled with and embraced,
#
which is evident in all your essays and your writing. And also simultaneously,
#
your sense of yourself as an Indian, what is an Indian and what does that sort of mean to you?
#
Yeah, I think this is a journey and it's an ongoing journey. I think,
#
see what the world shows. We are living in a changing India. I don't know what else awaits.
#
The next elections are going to be decisive. So 2024 is going to be a very important year.
#
So this extract that you read from my grandfather's autobiography, Khaab Baqi Hai,
#
it's nice, but you know, this business of dual identity is also troublesome. I'm not just
#
Indian Muslim, Muslim Indian, however, whichever way you wish to say it. I'm also a woman, a wife,
#
a mother, a sister, a friend. We all are multiple things. We are the sum of our parts.
#
So I don't think one is just a Tambram or a Kashmiri Pandit or a Bengali Bhadra,
#
you know. So we are many, many things. I think it's not fair to straight jacket people.
#
Yes, a lot of my work and engagement and querying and excavations have been about identity,
#
my own identity as a Muslim in the past 20 odd years. I don't think it bothered me,
#
especially in my growing up years that I was a Muslim. I had a Muslim name, yes,
#
but I went to a mainstream school. I lived in a normal South Delhi colony. I don't think I had
#
very many Muslim friends. We celebrated Eid, but then in our family, we also celebrated Diwali,
#
Christmas, Holi, everything. So I didn't think of myself as especially Muslim in any way,
#
even though I spoke Urdu, I knew Urdu. We spoke Urdu at home. All that was there, but then
#
that consciousness wasn't there that I must dwell upon or engage with in any way,
#
intellectually or emotionally with my religious identity. I think it took 92, it took an Ayodhya
#
and the aftermath of 92 for this consciousness to seep into it. I had begun writing by 92. I
#
was translating at that point. So in my literary career, an engagement with identity, the politics
#
of identity began if I were to look back with Ayodhya. And in the run up to Ayodhya, I remember
#
the Yatra Yatra's that Mr. Advani led. I remember sort of being very concerned by them as a young
#
person. I remember reading about them very closely, looking out for the newspaper and reading.
#
We didn't have that much information technology back then. So our information really came from
#
news, be it in the form of television news or from what you read in the newspapers. So I remember
#
watching and following the Rath Yatra very closely. And I remember being aware and conscious even then
#
that this will have ramifications. So when Ayodhya happened and then the Bombay riots and all of the
#
early 90s, the very tumultuous time that we saw in this country post 92, leading up to the Gujarat
#
riots at the turn of the century. All of these were worrying and concerned times for me as a person.
#
And I think the kind of writing I am now doing in the past odd years, which is not just about my own
#
anxieties about being Muslim in India, but it's also my anxiety about what is happening in the
#
country. I think I can trace this anxiety to that time. The writing happened much later,
#
but the concern and the seeds for that concern were sown at that time. I think Mr. Advani's
#
emergence as a political leader is when I first became conscious that change is brewing, that the
#
country is changing, that a cleft is being driven in. And from that time onwards, I remember
#
thinking more closely about it. As I said, the writing came later. Today, I think the personal
#
is political. This is a slogan actually that came out from the third wave of the feminist movement
#
and it was used by the feminists to talk about excavating their own lives to take,
#
to make larger political points. But I think it's not just confined to the feminist movement.
#
For each one of us living in very politically charged times, the personal is the political
#
and I certainly believe in it. I excavate my own life, my own experiences and I'm happy to see that
#
my daughter is doing the same thing. The essay that you referred to, I remember it was about this
#
time last year. We were sitting in the winter sun and she was typing away furiously on her laptop
#
and she turned her heart into an essay, into a political essay and I'm very proud of that.
#
And in the essay that you read an extract from, she talks about how you know that there's
#
communalism in the world, you know that there's misogyny in the world, you know that there are
#
trolls out there sitting somewhere and writing out all kinds of nonsense. But when it hits
#
close to home, when it happens to your mother, when that person is writing about your mother
#
who is your sanctum sanctorum, that is when you realize what it means to be a woman and what it
#
means to be a Muslim woman in the world. So she mined a personal experience to write a political
#
essay and I was very proud of that because I think that is what also what I have been trying to do.
#
For instance, I was looking for a house to rent and the difficulties I had in finding a house
#
to rent. Why? Because my husband and I are Muslims with clearly Muslim names and there's no fig leaf
#
of a Kabir or some name like that where you could be anybody. So with names like ours,
#
that was the first dead giveaway. And so I've used experiences from my own life to make larger
#
political comments. I think we live in a time in our history as a country, as a people,
#
where we can't afford to say let's not make it political. It is political. Everything around
#
us is political. A lot of my friends for even the Kathua rape, they say don't make it political,
#
but it is political. What is not political in today's day and age? So I see politics all
#
around me. I see goodness also all around me. I'm not completely looking at the world with a
#
jaundiced view. I see support and solidarity also coming. I see people speaking up against
#
bigotry in different forms also. Like I said, when this happened to me last year, there was support
#
and solidarity messages from friends, from random strangers, people writing posts on Facebook.
#
So there are two sides to the coin. Sometimes it seems as though the flood of hate and toxicity
#
will overwhelm you. But every now and then something happens that restores your faith
#
in humanity. I think I've strayed very far from the question you asked me, which was about identity.
#
But I think identity cannot be seen through a binary. You are just like cities. You are also
#
the sum of your parts, your experiences, your interactions with people, your past,
#
all of this shapes your identity or your understanding of that identity. My understanding
#
of my identity might be very different from another Muslim woman's. So everything is
#
individual. But I think talking about it helps. The first thing is to talk about it, to bring it
#
out in the open, to say, yes, this is troubling. Let's talk about it. I think that's a good way
#
to approach this business of othering, this business of somebody pointing a finger and saying,
#
you are different. So let's talk of those differences.
#
I want to ask my next question by first beginning it with these really powerful lines in your book
#
where you speak about how you were in some other country with a delegation and you were asked to
#
wear a abaya and a hijab. That was in Saudi Arabia. In Saudi Arabia and you spoke about them as tools
#
of exclusion and you had these great lines, quote, its dense blackness turns it into a portable
#
inferno. At such times, the only thought in my head was I wish the men were to wear it occasionally.
#
Then they might know how it feels, stop quote. And I love this feeling of inversion that I wish
#
the men knew how it feels because I often think that in my really lucky charmed life,
#
there were layers of awareness I never had to had and only came to realize later. For example,
#
I think most Indian men do not know what it is that extra layer that women carry with them.
#
Every time you're on a deserted street or looking around or every time you go out late, every time
#
you enter a lift, you're seeing who all is there. And men are just completely oblivious. We don't
#
have to do that shit. And similarly, there must be many layers which Indian Muslims go through,
#
which we may not realize. For example, at one point in your book, you just speak about all
#
these depictions in popular culture. For example, you write, quote, in pre-globalization India,
#
the film industry routinely depicted Muslims as smugglers or as pan-chewing surma wearing
#
hoodlums dressed in Pathan suits or as Qawwali singing debauched men who divorce their wives
#
for the most frivolous of reasons, stop quote. And I have, of course, seen all these films
#
and I never thought there was something odd because you just see a film as entertainment,
#
you just see it. But I imagine if you're a Muslim seeing it, there must be this little bit of
#
unease that is sort of there in you. You also describe this beautiful experiment your friend
#
Mayank Austin Sufi carried out and I'll link to his essay as well, where he did all the things
#
he normally does going on a bus, reading a book, et cetera, et cetera, except he wore a white skull
#
cap and he just wanted to see how people reacted differently to him. And I remember once I went to
#
a gathering of friends and it happened to be Eid, which I didn't even know. And I was wearing
#
a Pathan suit and there were a bunch of strangers that I hadn't met before. And the hostility with
#
which they looked at me till my host introduced me and told my name, at which point everything
#
softened and no one in my life has looked at me like that. Right. And later, of course, I found
#
out that these were pretty hardcore. They would go to shakhas and all that on the weekends. But
#
leaving that aside, I want you to sort of for all of my listeners and for me who may not be aware,
#
tell me about an extra layer you've carried with you. You know, despite your privileges,
#
there is that layer of awareness. Yeah. The privileges of education do sort of you think
#
isolate you and cushion you from this kind of outright communalism, but sometimes it doesn't.
#
I wrote a long essay for The Wire where I start by talking about an experience. I was at a lit
#
fest. I won't mention the name of the city or the organizers, but it was in a foreign country.
#
We were sitting in a bar. I was wearing jeans and a shirt. I have short hair. I was like anybody
#
else. The organizers had taken us to a bar where we were having some snacks before the dinner,
#
which was somewhere else. There was a bunch of us writers all from India attending that lit fest.
#
And we were all talking. And then at some point the host said, oh, let's have a round of
#
introductions because we were from different cities and some knew each other. Some didn't.
#
So I gave my name and there was one person again, whose name I will not take. He occupies a very
#
high position in the present dispensation. And who had been talking to me all this while,
#
because like I said, I look like a regular person. I look like one of us. You don't look
#
like a Muslim. That's the name of my book. So I didn't look like a Muslim. When he heard my name,
#
he just clammed up. He did not speak to me for the rest of the evening. Going back to our hotel,
#
it just so happens that he and I and one other person were sharing a cab. The only time he
#
addressed me after having heard my name was when we were going back and he asked me a very sharp,
#
very pointed, very nasty question. Now, the only thing I'm left to assume from this whole experience
#
is that everything changed the moment he heard my name. We are all writers. We are all adults. We
#
are all in a foreign country. We are all Indians. We are all Indian writers. You would imagine that
#
my privilege of education, of being a writer amongst fellow writers, of being a regular person.
#
I'm not wearing a hijab. I'm not talking about Islam. I'm not defending anything. We're having
#
a regular conversation about books, writing, whatever. What sets me apart? Just the fact that
#
I happen to have a Muslim name. And till that point, I had made no sharp political comments,
#
nothing to give away my political views. So, what is it that makes me different from everybody else,
#
those 8-10 people in that bar at that point? Just the fact that I have a Muslim name.
#
Now, this is one example that I used then in that essay for The Wire. You're welcome to see it.
#
I think the essay is called, Does a Muslim rose smell different from a Hindu rose?
#
From the show notes, I have read it.
#
Yeah. So, something like that. Now, this comes from Gertrude Stein's very famous statement that
#
a rose is a rose is a rose, which means that you are what you are. But in India, is a rose a rose
#
a rose or is a Hindu rose different from a Muslim rose? That is the question we need to ask ourselves.
#
So, yes, every now and then, whether I mentioned earlier the difficulty you have in finding a house
#
on rent if you happen to be a Muslim. If you go through a property dealer, they'll agree. And then
#
when you go to the house and they come to know your name, then they say, oh, we want vegetarian
#
tenants, you know, which is ridiculous because if you're giving your house in rent, you don't have
#
to eat in the house. You know, you should be concerned whether they can pay the rent or not.
#
But no, a lot of people don't wish to do that. I'm told it's more so in Bombay where the societies
#
have a lot more control. So the housing societies decide whether it's not just Muslim, but whether
#
we want only Gujaratis or we want only Marathis and so on. But for us in Delhi, this was new. So I
#
found it very alarming. But yes, there are small everyday instances such as the use of slur words
#
like katwa for a Muslim. You know what it means? Yeah, of course.
#
Mia, less offensive, but as benign, seemingly benign, but definitely a form of othering.
#
Or the use of bhai for name, so and so bhai. Just call him by the name. He doesn't need it.
#
Or something benign, but also othering. Asking a Muslim to recite an Urdu poetry at a farewell
#
function. All Muslims don't know Urdu. All Muslims certainly don't know Urdu poetry.
#
Urdu is not the language of all Muslims. A Muslim from Kerala has no reason to know
#
Urdu or know Urdu poetry. A Muslim from Assam or from Madhya Pradesh or from somewhere else
#
need not know Urdu, right? So this I find very, very strange that at a farewell function,
#
the mic always stops in front of so and so and say, Falani Mia, ab aap ek achha sa sher suna diji.
#
Supposing that person doesn't know it. Why is this assumption, this stereotype? It's not offensive,
#
but it's troubling. So the stereotypes and the othering has a wide spectrum.
#
So you have the deeply offensive one, the katwa and the other things, and you have the slightly
#
less offensive ones like Mia, and then you have the kindly but patronizing ones.
#
So there are different ranges. And then as I've said in my book in the essay,
#
but you don't look like a Muslim, a lot of people say, you know, if more Muslims were like you,
#
we wouldn't have a problem. The problem is who are you to have a problem in the first place?
#
Why do you have a problem? The fact that you have a problem is your problem, not mine. Yeah, but
#
the people who are saying it are oblivious to the irony of what they're saying.
#
Looks are the most deceptive things. I may look like a regular person, but supposing I have a
#
rebellious heart that is planning all kinds of insurgencies, what are you going to do about that?
#
Yeah. So this business of stereotypes, not just for Indian Muslims, for anybody,
#
Tambrams, Kashmiri pandits, you are a South Indian, but why are you so fair? You know,
#
that kind of thing. The use of words for people from the Northeast. I won't even repeat those
#
words, but I went to Delhi University, which was a huge melting pot of people from different
#
parts of the country. And as young people, we didn't realize how offensive some of them were.
#
The nicknames we had for people from Bihar, the really offensive word we use for people from the
#
Northeast. I'm not saying Indian Muslims are the only ones single doubt, but I am saying that a
#
country as plural, as multicultural, as diverse as ours needs to be more mindful of the use of words
#
as labels for people from a region, from a caste, from a community. And they need to understand how
#
offensive this can actually be, even if it's seemingly benign. You're writing a book about
#
how there are these motifs in popular culture, like love jihad and like making a noise on Friday
#
at mosques and, you know, killing cows and so on and so forth. And the thing is, while there has
#
been a resurgence of these themes in our politics today, these are actually really old themes. Like
#
I've done episodes with Akshay Mukul and in his great book on the Geeta Press, he talks about how
#
love jihad and cow slaughter were absolutely live raging issues in the 1920s.
#
These have been with us for a long time. And in fact, reading his book was an important
#
moment for me because I realized through a course of various conversations that I had actually grown
#
up in a bubble. I grew up in this English speaking urban sort of bubble, which thought, okay, you
#
know, all of India is broadly secular and cosmopolitan and there's a violent fringe somewhere,
#
but they don't matter. And I realized I was a fringe. I realized that our culture was,
#
that this strain was a very large and very dominant strain in our society. And you could say
#
what has happened over the last few years is that politics has caught up with society, but our
#
society was always like this. Now, am I being unnecessarily bleak? Do you agree with this?
#
Because it's true that all of these are expressed with more vociferousness and with more a greater
#
show of power today than it was before. But is it the case that our society itself changed or is
#
it the case that, hey, you know, we were always like this? And those of us who wanted a liberal
#
India failed in that project to build it from the bottom up. Akshay Mukul is perfectly right in saying
#
that these things have always been an issue, at least for a hundred years, if not more.
#
From the turn of the century, early 20th century onwards, why just love jihad and cow slaughter?
#
Hindi-Urdu debate from the early 20th century was an issue. And in the years, the half century leading
#
up to the partition of 47, freedom, these were issues that were there. They were subsumed in
#
other issues such as the freedom struggle and that brought people together on a common platform.
#
The enemy then was the other, the imperialist power that was ruling us. So the divide and rule
#
policy and other things. So issues were there. They were always there. They were simmering away
#
in the backdrop. They would be fanned every now and then by little knots of people and they would
#
gain currency in small areas. But I think I will not agree with you that upbringings and childhoods
#
like yours and mine were the exception to the rule. I think they were pretty broad based.
#
I don't think we were the minority. I think we were, if not the majority, we were certainly
#
fairly mainstream, I would say. In most big cities across India, this was the norm that people said,
#
okay, let's talk of education. Let's talk of upward mobility. Let's talk about buying new TV,
#
new washing machine, new whatever, consumerism, all of this. See it as a chronology. First,
#
there was the freedom struggle. You had to fight for a common cause. Set aside your differences,
#
fight for the freedom struggle. In the years after 47, let's build a stable society.
#
So I'm not saying there were no communal outrages. Yes, we had communal rights. We had all of that.
#
But I think people kept a lot of things on the back burner. There were wars with Pakistan,
#
but even that, we largely said, let's get on with the business of nation building. Well,
#
let's put our shoulder to the wheel. We had a Hindi film cinema telling us,
#
let's not diss the importance of Hindi cinema in shaping us as a people. I think the crop of
#
progressive poets that we have, Kaifi Azmi, Majroo, Akhtar Sultanpuri, all of these people,
#
the kind of songs they wrote for Hindi cinema, they talked about building bridges. They talked
#
about finding common projects. Sahir is writing this. So a whole bunch of films came out which
#
talked of humanity, of looking for commonalities of Hindus raising a Muslim child and so on and
#
so forth. So all of this was happening. And I think this played a very significant role. Popular
#
culture played a very significant role in bringing people together and making sure they stayed
#
together. So they showed Diwali being celebrated by a Muslim family, ads being made about tea
#
companies welcoming a Muslim neighbor, welcoming a Hindu neighbor. So all of popular culture was
#
doing this. Now we have just the opposite happening. Popular culture, information technology,
#
everything is coming together to divide. So this mainstream that you and I occupied,
#
that normal happy childhood that you and I had, despite the age difference that you and I have,
#
but largely we grew up in a similar sort of India. You grew up in Chandigarh or I lived in Delhi,
#
but I think these were not aberrations. I think it would be too cynical to say that we lived in a
#
bubble or we lived a dream. I think we lived a real India. In India we can possibly still reclaim.
#
There is still time. There is always time till there is no time. So I think what is now happening
#
is that having reached a level of prosperity, we are a rich nation. There is a lot of superfluous
#
money. You see it in the conspicuous consumption of wealth and the weddings and all that we talked
#
about. There is all of that. Now there is time and technology is aiding and abetting us in this
#
othering that we are doing. So the love jihad, the cow slaughter, the Hindi-Urdu business,
#
all of this is being fanned not in isolated small mini fires, but in raging fires. My fear is that
#
we should not allow that fear to engulf us as a society. Every now and then a sane voice stands
#
up and allows that to be snuffed out. But there are also forces at work that are encouraging these
#
fires to rage and to blaze and to keep adding fodder to this, to keep adding fuel to this.
#
A love jihad was a loosely applied word. Now no less than the Supreme Court of India has used it
#
in one of the judgments. What happens? You give currency, you give legitimacy to a fringe
#
word that is floating around. When you start using it in your judgments, when you start using
#
it in your court observations, then you give it legitimacy. So what is happening is that
#
greater legitimacy is being given to things that you and I considered fringe. So what was the fringe
#
is increasingly occupying center stage. It is coming away from the margins and it is occupying
#
a center stage in our lives, in our society, in the world that we live in. That is definitely worrying.
#
Let me build a thought experiment for you and for my listeners leading up to a question. But
#
first a little bit of the setting of the stage. I kind of agree with everything you said and I
#
think about if there are different strains within Indian society like there is that old
#
cliche or whatever you say about India, the opposite is true. So let us say we are
#
illiberal in some ways, but we are liberal in many of our lived realities like our cuisines
#
and our clothes and our culture is such a delightful khichri. So let us say that we are
#
liberal in those ways. But one strain takes over and becomes dominant. Now when I think of the
#
reasons that happened, two of the reasons are actually really good things overall. One, opening
#
up to the world economy that lifts hundreds of millions of people out of poverty. But what it
#
also does as a side effect is that it again lifts hundreds of millions of people into a middle class
#
which has these traditional conservative beliefs and Hindutva is propelled forward by that.
#
And I still think the 91 liberalization is a massive net positive just for the humanitarian
#
good it did. But this is a side effect. Equally, I think the technological growth of the last 20
#
years is miraculous. It's a huge net positive. But as you correctly said, what it has also done
#
is that it has amplified the worst instincts of our nature. It plays to our tribalism. It is easy
#
to use technology to hack minds as it were and to sort of polarize us and to completely destroy the
#
discourse and that has happened. And I see these with a bit of bewilderment because for me the
#
economic opening up and the technology coming in is a huge net positive. But these things have
#
happened. Now here's the thought experiment. The thought experiment is supposing we do a
#
groundhog day. We start in 1947. We let the future unfold. My question is that if we do a
#
groundhog day say a hundred times, you know, does this toxic exclusive, does this toxic strain win
#
out every time or are there counter scenarios when maybe we move in a better direction? What
#
takes us there? Can we have the economy without the Hindutva? Can we have the technology without
#
the polarization? If I ask you to think aloud on this, what are your thoughts? Yeah, I think it's a
#
universally acknowledged truism that the middle class, the world over, not just in India, is
#
conservative and not just conservative, that menno ki tenno ki thing we talked about. There is that.
#
There is, I think it's a less, once it occupies a comfortable space, I think it is less open to
#
thinking of the others. It wants to consolidate its own position. And of people like them,
#
I think the middle class is less interested in lifting and pulling people out of poverty.
#
It is more interested in its own further upward mobility. There is all of that. But to come back
#
to your thought experiment, I think if our Groundhog Day is 15th August 1947 and we have
#
the future waiting to unfurl before us, what is it that we would have wanted? Yes, we would have
#
wanted, I think the slow opening up of the economy was actually very good for us, I personally think.
#
I'm not even an economist, far from being a political economist. In my limited opinion,
#
in my lay understanding, I think the gradual opening up was very good for us because all
#
this Swadeshi that we talk about actually was put into practice. I think our cars, our soaps,
#
our shampoos, our food, yes, we had food shortages. We went through terrible food shortages also in
#
that time. But remember the Green Revolution also happened in this country, the White Revolution,
#
the Amul experiment in Gujarat. All of these happened despite a closed economy.
#
So again, correct me if I'm wrong and as I say, I'm not an economist or not a political economist,
#
but I seem to think that the slow opening up, the slow pace of development was very good.
#
If we were to compare ourselves with Pakistan, we set out on the same trajectory on the same day,
#
the same moment in time. But look how far we have come and look what a mess Pakistan has made of
#
itself, of its society, of its economy. At the moment, its economy is in shambles.
#
I think the greatest good that came to us was our constitution. We took our time over that too.
#
It was not drafted in a hurry. Dr. Ambedkar and the framers of our constitution took their own time.
#
There was a lot of criticism at that time at the snail's pace in which it was being drafted.
#
But I think the thought and wisdom and the worrying that went into it is for the larger
#
good and the fact that it's a work in progress every time something is added to it. From the top
#
of my head, I can think of so many things that are given to us as a right that we are not always
#
mindful of. We had no suffragette movement. The voting rights were given to men and women from
#
day one. Women never had to fight for the vote. There is amazing maternity benefits.
#
We have no glass ceiling. In theory, in the law, there is no glass ceiling. We've of course had a
#
woman prime minister. But even otherwise, women can do anything. There is the Panchayat-e-Raj
#
system and the women's bill. That's all later. But the constitution itself guarantees you equality
#
for men and women. Maternity benefits. I was reading somewhere that our maternity benefits
#
are actually at par with so many developed countries. Norway, Sweden have very evolved,
#
very thought out maternity benefits. America, on the other hand, fares very poorly when it comes
#
to getting women back in the workforce. Our lawmakers very early decided that abortion has
#
been legal for a very long time in India. We've never had a row versus raid in India because we
#
decided that abortion should be legalized. Maternity benefits. If I'm not mistaken,
#
you get three months of paid service and more of half paid and then unpaid service.
#
Unlike America, we are not saying women, when they become mothers, should not enter the workforce.
#
We are helping them take time with the family and then enter the workforce when they want.
#
India even has miscarriage leave. How many countries do that? India has paternity leave,
#
less so, but it's there. India has this amazing thing of two years leave, which you can break
#
over the years if you are in a teaching job or something and you have a child taking a board
#
exam or you want to do renovations to your house, you can take leave and then go back
#
to your job. Your job is waiting for you. Unlike the US, if you take time out to be a mother,
#
you're not sure if the job is waiting for you. So I think we got many things right in our journey
#
over the years. So from your Groundhog Day to now, we did many things well.
#
Somewhere, we allowed the canker of communalism to take over. I don't say this just because I'm
#
an Indian Muslim. I say this because, and I think a lot of non-Muslims also agree with me,
#
that the one big issue we have today is the bigotry, is the hatred, is the communalism.
#
We are doing right on so many fronts. Yes, we could have done better. Yes, the economy could
#
have developed better. Yes, all of that. Again, I don't have the skills to analyze that or have an
#
informed opinion on that, on inflation and so on. I think we are largely doing well when we look
#
at ourselves, look at our education system. We have been providing engineers and doctors
#
to the world for a very long time. In the IT sector, we've been booming for a very long time.
#
There was talk of brain drain and so on. But that says that there was a wealth of knowledge here
#
that was being sent out to the rest of the world. Silicon Valley was sort of nurtured by Indian
#
talent. UK hospitals are manned by Indian nurses, Indian doctors. So there is all of that.
#
We've got it right on so many fronts. But yes, the one thing where we've not got our act together
#
is farmers' rights, tribal rights, minority rights. I think these are things that need more
#
thought. I think these are things that cannot be brushed under the carpet and glossed over by this
#
large talk of development and vikas. Vikas, they say sabka saath, sabka vikas. But it has to be not
#
just a slogan, it has to be a lived reality. There are schemes like the Manarega and other schemes
#
that are reaching out to the poorest of poor, which are giving employment and money to the
#
poorest of poor. There are gaps, there are chinks, there are cracks. Often things don't always make
#
it to the intended people. But the schemes are there and they are good schemes. They are talk
#
of social justice. They're talking of the last person, which is also by the way a very Gandhian
#
concept. The last person, the person at the end of the row. That is your target. You have to reach
#
the last girl, the last child, the last person. So I think we are a socially aware society and state.
#
I must share with you a very interesting conversation I had from a friend from Slovakia,
#
former Soviet Union. She's a friend who was staying with me and we were driving around
#
Delhi and I would point at various places and say, oh, this is a government housing society.
#
I pointed INA or Sarojini Nagar or the various societies and colonies and neighborhoods that are
#
for government servants, for bureaucrats or people in the lower rungs of the administrative machinery.
#
She was amazed. She says, you know, I come from an erstwhile Soviet Union country and we were a
#
socialist state. I don't remember any housing societies for governments. We lived in regular
#
houses. Our parents lived in, they were all working for the state, but their state was,
#
and then she ended up by saying, you guys are more socialist than us. You've been more socialist than
#
we ever were. And I don't think being socialist is a dirty word. I think we were a state that was
#
very mindful of the people who worked for the state. I think we gave them many benefits.
#
I mean, housing being one of them, of course. But this socialism that was there,
#
there is talk now of removing it from the constitution.
#
I think that was not such a bad idea that we were a socialist, secular, democratic,
#
republic. All of these were good things. There's talk of removing some of those words.
#
That is cause for Allah. So I completely agree with you about the
#
canker of communalism and how toxic and dangerous it is for us. And by the way,
#
I gave you a thought experiment and instead of being speculative, you were descriptive.
#
But thanks for that anyway. But while agreeing with you about that toxic canker, I actually
#
disagree almost about everything else in the sense that economically, I think keeping hundreds
#
of millions in poverty for decades longer than necessary was a massive humanitarian harm. I've
#
had many episodes on this. While the constitution is more liberal than our society, I felt it wasn't
#
liberal enough that it goes too far, not in protecting the people from the state,
#
but in protecting the state from the people. Many of our rights, like the right to free speech,
#
isn't really a right at all. It is so diluted by all the exceptions and by all the amendments
#
that happened. So yes, I agree with you about all the positive things in our constitution,
#
but many of them are diluted. And many of them were done away with it, like the right to property
#
no longer being a fundamental right. And I've had episodes about that as well. And it is with
#
reason that Ambedkar, in fact, I think in the mid 50s said that if I could, I would burn down
#
this constitution. That is how disillusioned he had become. As for the word socialist, it was
#
actually not in the original Ambedkar's preamble. It was added by Indira. And I think the word is
#
used in different senses. And one sense is a good for society, broad, general sense. Someone like
#
me, I put my economics hat on and, you know, I'll look at it as, you know, the public ownership of
#
all property, no private property and all that. And that's terrible. It's been a disaster everywhere.
#
But I don't think that is a sense in which you mean it. It's used in a very different way sometimes
#
in India, such as, for example, by the progressive writers movement, which you've used,
#
written about so much and which I admire as well. So we can speak about that. And even, you know,
#
you mentioned the maternity leave, I was, I used to edit a policy magazine called Prakriti. And I
#
had pieces by economists like Devika Kher and Suman Joshi, I linked them from the show notes,
#
that when the last maternity law came about, it actually hurt women more than it helped them
#
in terms of the job losses that happened because the incentives for companies changed.
#
So many of these well-meaning laws like all our labor laws and maternity laws actually hurt the
#
intended recipient, but they can make elites feel good. And I think we need to look a little deeper,
#
you know, even our education system. I think women's participation in the
#
workforce is dipping. I mean, we compare with Bangladesh, we don't fare too well.
#
There are varying elements too. I'm not saying that, but I was hoping to really look at the
#
better, the good things. No, no, I've had great episodes with Sharna
#
Bhattacharya and Amita Bhandari on women's workforce participation. And it's just really
#
depressing and it's multifactorial. There are so many causes. But anyway, you know, let's take a
#
quick- Yeah, but the state has tried to be a paterfamilas, which is not too bad. Yeah.
#
Getting it wrong sometimes. Yeah. But let us not turn this into an argument about economics.
#
I have so much to learn from you. I feel like this conversation has just begun.
#
So let's take a quick commercial break, recharge our batteries and then let's continue.
#
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 to showcase the work of students and vibrant community interaction.
#
In the course itself, through four webinars spread over four weekends,
#
I share all I know about the craft and practice of clear writing. There are many exercises,
#
much interaction and a lovely and lively community at the end of it. The course costs rupees 10,000
#
plus GST or about a hundred and fifty dollars. If you're interested, head on over to register
#
at indiancut.com slash clear writing. That's indiancut.com slash clear writing. Being a good
#
writer doesn't require God-given talent, just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what
#
you need to do to refine your skills. I can help you. Welcome back to The Scene in the Unseen. I'm
#
chatting with Rakshanda Jaleel and I will take you back in time. I will take you back in time
#
by about an hour and a half towards the start of the show. You were talking about how and a
#
very wise and important point that just for a family being wealthy doesn't matter. Kids also
#
have to grow up in an atmosphere where they can feel that they are reading books for leisure,
#
for no particular purpose. I couldn't agree with that more strongly because I think a lot of
#
learning that happens happens in a goal-directed way. Everything is goal-directed and that's a
#
terrible way to read and that's not really an education. And you were speaking about a much
#
broader approach to education and I think a lot of that education in a sense happens by osmosis,
#
when there is that mahal around you so to say. So I want to take you back to your childhood and
#
ask you about, you know, in that forming of you, the shaping of you, what was the kind of mahal,
#
what kind of books were you reading, what were your parents like, your grandparents like? Tell
#
me a bit about those things. Books were a very important part in our life, in our homes. I think
#
that we always had more books and furniture, definitely I can say that and it continues to
#
be so. You know, in the south of India you often notice that people take off their shoes before
#
they enter their homes, even in parts of Bombay I've seen it. I do that as well. Yeah, so
#
it was a bit like that in our home with English. We were all bilingual. We used English for our
#
day-to-day lives, both my parents as well as us, my siblings and I. But when we entered our home,
#
we left English behind like people leave their slippers at the door and we spoke in Urdu. Good
#
spoken everyday Hindustani, let's say. I think that made us richer because our everyday conversation
#
was peppered with bits of Shero Shairi, with the Qissas, with the references of stories,
#
with the references of films, with the fragments of, you know, it was it was
#
flavoursome, it was rich, it was idiomatic and it had cross references across literary cultures.
#
So, for example, if somebody was speaking very softly, you would say,
#
or if somebody was peeping from behind the door and trying to eavesdrop, then someone would say,
#
you know. So, the references to poetry, to not just Urdu poetry, but other kinds of poetry,
#
all of this, I think, made our spoken language, my siblings and I, that much richer. I think that
#
made our communication skills, I think, I would like to believe, that much more stronger.
#
So, first and foremost, this emphasis that was given, not in a diktat manner, but in a very
#
organic, very natural manner by my parents to mother tongue was important. And this is a lesson
#
I learnt as a parent that let the child be very proficient in the mother tongue, whatever it might
#
be, Tamil, Bangla, Urdu, Hindi, whatever, and let them pick up English as an effective language for
#
everyday use later. It does you no harm if your first language is your mother tongue and English
#
is an acquired, but good proficiency in that, but an acquired language. That was one thing.
#
You asked about books. It saddens me when I hear of homes where not, forget books,
#
but not even a newspaper is subscribed to. Books, of course, are not, but the father will pick up
#
a newspaper at the office and read, or they'll get their information on a Twitter feed or on
#
WhatsApp or whatever. So, why waste those, whatever, 200-something rupees that costs,
#
or maybe now it's 500, I'm not sure. So, whatever is the bill for your newspaper,
#
is that such a huge saving? Yeah. So, newspaper is one thing. Books are a distant dream in many
#
families. They will buy books that are prescribed reading, maybe in courses. Even that, now people,
#
I think, are taking Xeroxes. How much richer do you get by saving on this? Is this the first
#
economy that you do? Is this the only economizing you do? You will continue to order food from
#
outside. You will continue to eat out. You'll continue to go to the beauty parlour. You'll
#
continue to do whatever it is. You will not economize in your grocery bills, but you will
#
like to economize when it comes to books and reading material. I think the worst thing we do
#
is when we Xerox a book, even for, we are cheating somebody of their copyright. Yeah, we're cheating
#
somebody of their royalty. So, we don't realize, but it's a form of theft. It's a form of pilferage,
#
actually, when we, even for our prescribed books, we read a Xeroxed book. And the message and the
#
values we are passing on to our young is that it's okay to cheat and steal. Because you are stealing,
#
you are taking away somebody's royalty for that book when you don't buy the book. And instead,
#
you get Xeroxed and you're reading a bastardized version of an original book. That is one.
#
The learning that you get from outside the classroom, I'm not dissing classroom education,
#
it's very important. And it is the foundation, it's the bedrock on which a lot of your other
#
learning happens. But the education, the information, the knowledge that you get from
#
outside the classroom, from non-prescribed texts is very important. In my own home, I found an array
#
of reading material. My father read Shikar books, so there was always a stack of Jim Corbett's
#
Shikar stories on his bedside tables. There was a lot of Urdu detective fiction, Ibn Safi. He has
#
been made very fashionable because he has been translated into English by Shamsul Ranaman Farooqi
#
and it's been published in English, the English translations. And there is a lot of interest in
#
vernacular detective fiction. Suddenly in India, there's a surge of it. So suddenly, Ibn Safi is
#
a name that is cropping up. But in my childhood, these are books I remember seeing on my father's
#
a doctor by profession, reading a lot of crime fiction, a lot of Shikar fiction,
#
books on palmistry, books on a range of subjects. My mother was a librarian in our school,
#
so she not only had a very well-stocked library, extremely well-stocked and diverse for a school
#
library, but I think the high point of her life was the two book fairs that happened in Delhi,
#
the annual one, trade fair one, and one other book fair. And that is when she was at her happiest
#
because she had this unlimited budget from her school to go and buy new books. And what I learned
#
from my mother was the joy she got out of sharing a good book. I have seen her with a gleam in her.
#
I hand over a new book to a student saying, read this, a new book has come. And that's something
#
I like to do with young people that I know. I don't have a library, but from my own personal
#
library, I like to share books. But I insist on having them back because I think you need
#
to respect books. Also, what I learned from my mother is never to lick your finger and turn the
#
page. She thought that was the height of bad manners. You don't leave spit for other users
#
to use. She also taught us not to write and underline and mark on borrowed books. If it's
#
your own book, by all means, make notes. But if it's a borrowed book belonging to a library
#
or to somebody else, do not make markings because it's somebody else's property.
#
So the respect for books, of not tearing books, of not stealing books. I mean, I can die a thousand
#
deaths, but I will never steal a book from a library. I cannot do it. It's just not in my DNA
#
to do that. So yeah, books were a very important part of my life. And my very middle-class parents
#
with their limited earnings made sure that we never scrimped on books. We may or may not
#
buy expensive branded clothes, footwear, this or that, but they never said no to us when we wanted
#
to buy books. A big part of our pocket money went into buying books. A big part of our outing were
#
the book fairs. In my growing up years, there were a lot of book exhibitions at places like Sapru House,
#
for example. I don't know if that still happens, but I remember my mother taking us to all of these
#
book exhibitions where we were encouraged to buy books. So I think children learn from their family
#
and from elders. I know a lot of mothers who buy books as birthday gifts for other kids,
#
but not for their own. Why? Because a book is usually cheaper than an expensive gift.
#
So the economics of it makes sense to buy a book as a birthday gift, but not necessarily for your
#
own child. And the irony of it is mind-boggling. If you think a book is good, why buy it as a gift
#
for somebody else's kid and why not buy it for your own kid? So start by buying books. Start by
#
having books around the house. I think that's important. And as parents, we need to do that
#
for our kids to do it. You know, the lockdown was a very difficult time for so many of us.
#
And I think our two favorite stores here in Delhi, Midlands and Fakir Chand and Khan Market
#
Midlands in Aurobindo, I think they did a yeoman service by having free pick and drop and free
#
home delivery of books. And it saw us through. My children and I were ordering books and they were
#
coming home, you know, by home delivery. And I think that made the long months of the lockdown
#
that much easier with reading material for us as a family. I think standalone bookshops need to be
#
respected because they are fighting a battle in this day and age where fewer and fewer people are
#
buying books. The bookstore chains, the big chains in the malls are still doing okay.
#
But the family-owned bookshops are, I think, the last of the Mohicans. They need to be supported.
#
They need our support by whatever means we can. Amazon Books gives you bigger discounts. So we
#
think it's okay to buy, if at all we buy books, we think it's okay to buy books from Amazon.
#
But I would urge you to go to your neighborhood bookstore, identify a bookstore in your
#
neighborhood, support their business because not just because it's a small business, but because
#
it needs our support and is doing great work. These community libraries that I see sprouting
#
in parks, I think these are a great idea. Don't throw away your books. Don't give them to Kabadi
#
Walas for a pittance. Instead, I see them in a lot of parks and community, you know, spaces.
#
You have a little covered bookshelf to protect it from the elements and you keep your books there
#
and you have it closed but without a lock. People can walk away with what they want and they can
#
replenish it with what they don't need to keep in their own homes. So like you have food banks in
#
some places, I think book banks is a great idea. If in our housing societies, in our neighborhoods,
#
in our parks, in our community spaces, if we were to have these book banks, I think we will
#
fill the lacuna of those homes that don't have books, that don't buy books.
#
I think these are things that are very doable at no great expense.
#
I'm feeling incredibly jealous of you, even mad at you because I am from Bombay and we don't have
#
good bookstores there. I come to Delhi, you have such good bookstores here and if I may say so,
#
Bangalore is even better. You know, Blossoms is practically my favorite space in the whole world
#
just because of that section of secondhand books at the back. It's just so beautiful.
#
And Bangalore does that Atta Galata festival also run by a bookstore, sponsored by a bookstore,
#
which is amazing. Which is amazing. One of my favorite stories from this podcast is
#
when I had a dear friend of mine, Sivesh Rai on the show and I'm not sure I remember the story
#
in all its details, but I'll get the gist of it right, that he had an early job and I think he
#
was in Baroda and his first salary was 7,000 or 8,000 or whatever and he took it to a bookstore
#
and he just gave all that money to that guy and said, sir, I want to build reading as a habit,
#
so you take this money and you pick me books which you think I should read.
#
And then that bookstore owner didn't just take random books, he spent a few hours and he actually
#
curated a collection for my friend and I find that's such a beautiful story. Very heartwarming.
#
One place where I think there is a dharm sankat that I am feeling now is when you speak of,
#
like I completely agree with you that back in the day,
#
Xeroxing a book would be a really bad idea, you're denying royalties. But today,
#
often what happens is now I buy a lot of books, I buy more than a book a day almost,
#
but when there is a book that I simply cannot get any other way, either it is not available or it's
#
more than 2,000 bucks, I will take the pirated PDF. I will just take it because I think knowledge
#
is important and whereas I will always pay if I can, if I can't then you know, what am I to
#
do? In one of your books, I won't name which one, it wasn't available on Amazon but it was,
#
there was a pirated version of it, so there you go. Do tell me because maybe I don't know about
#
this. It is what it is, I'll look it up and I'll tell you, I did download that particular one.
#
No, I agree. Where something is not available and you do need it, then of course, I mean,
#
you take a Xerox, you get a pirated version, whatever, because you do need to read that.
#
I agree, but I was making a larger statement about royalties and how we have no other, I mean,
#
those of us who don't have a day job, those of us who are full-time writers,
#
our only source of income is the pittance. We are not Chetan Bhagat, our royalty is not running into
#
lakhs and crores, you see. We get very modest sums of money, but this is a life we chose.
#
Nobody put a gun to our head and said, become a writer. This is a life we chose to live. These
#
were decisions we chose to make. At least speaking for myself, I chose to give up the
#
luxuries and benefits of a full-time job with all the PF and the medical and this and that,
#
and chose to become a writer. I'm a loose cannon. I can write on what I want, for whom I want,
#
whatever subject I want, but it comes with its pitfalls, which is namely money.
#
Money is scarce, especially in the niche areas that I work on. I work mostly on literary,
#
history, translations. Nobody is giving me a fortune by way of royalties. So the little
#
royalty I get, and it truly is paltry, believe me, it's nowhere close to a salary. Had I stuck to,
#
let's say, teaching, I would have been making X amount of money. I don't make a fraction of that
#
as a writer. Given the fact that I write many books, I'm fairly prolific, but it still doesn't
#
add up to a lot of money. So therefore, royalty, little though it is, matters to me. And not just
#
because it matters to me, but as a matter of principle, I think for any writer, royalty is
#
important, which is why people should buy books. I say this as a blanket statement, not taking into
#
account specifics that a book is not available or out of print or whatever. But by and large,
#
I think we should try and buy non-pirated books. No, no, I agree with you entirely. And at this
#
point, I will give an injunction to everyone listening to this, immediately go out and buy
#
Rakshanda's books first, but any books, just kind of buy them. Thank you. Here's my next question,
#
which is, I also want to know specifically about which books moved you, who were the writers who
#
influenced you, and also how was that experience, which I was not fortunate enough to have.
#
Unfortunately, I just read in one language, which was English, but you were reading in multiple
#
languages. So what was that experience like? Because it is really like inhabiting multiple
#
worlds, in a sense, if you have those languages. And also, I guess, reading multiple languages
#
would inform the writing you do in any one of them, which in your case is English. Absolutely.
#
So tell me a bit about, you know, how the world of literature takes shape in your head as you are
#
growing up. You know, cross-fertilization is very important, and cross-fertilization of ideas,
#
of literary sensibilities, literary cultures, across literary cultures, across genres is very
#
important. So speaking for myself, I mentioned the Shikhar stories and the detective fiction,
#
pulp detective fiction, no less, that I saw my father reading. But as I mentioned, my mother,
#
being a librarian, introduced me to a whole bunch of things. When I was in fourth or fifth standard,
#
I had finished reading the children's classics. So I'd finished almost all of the Oliver Twist and
#
great many of the Charles Dickens, and they came in those Macmillan and Orient Black Swan,
#
Orient Longman series, you know, the children's classics of the Dickens and other things.
#
I think my mother, in her wisdom, decided that I was becoming far too precocious and I was only
#
reading serious stuff. So she handed me mills and bones to read. And there is video evidence of that.
#
I found a video on YouTube where you're showing off that collection.
#
My collection of, my cherished collection of mills and bones, millsies, as they were called.
#
So those who don't know, mills and bone was a range of light romantic pulp fiction. And very
#
popular in India, mills and bone was the publisher's name, but the authors were different each time,
#
all in English. So my mother handed me, very unusually for a mother, she encouraged me to
#
read this light romantic stuff. So George it has and Barbara Cartland's. And for a librarian,
#
especially so, because she thought she needed to wean me off this very serious stuff I was reading.
#
So I understood the benefit of having light relief every now and then with the serious stuff I read.
#
I'd mentioned earlier, I think to you, that we would go for our long summer vacations and
#
spend large parts of our time with my grandparents in Aligarh. There again,
#
I had access to a very, very vast and varied, very eclectic collection of books, again in Urdu
#
and in English. I remember reading my first Albert Camus, the existentialist philosopher,
#
when I was in eighth standard, 13 or 14 I must have been. My mother gave me a copy of Camus
#
Exile as a birthday gift. Again, a very unusual choice, but I still remember
#
the shop in Connaught Place where she bought it for and gave it to me with her signature.
#
I still have it. From my grandfather's collection, I was reading, waiting for Godot long before I
#
read it as a master's student in English. I was reading Sartre as a very young person.
#
Abba, I called my grandfather, my Nana, he had a very eclectic collection and so there were
#
curry westerns in it, those cowboy sort of books, those James Hadley chasers sort of stuff.
#
It even had some light pornographic stuff, candy and other stories, I remember.
#
It had, of course, these existentialists and it had Northrop Fry, which is like T.S. Eliot
#
and all these other literary critics of the 60s and the 70s, who I would later read when I was
#
doing my master's in English, but at that time I was just skimming through it to understand what
#
is happening in the world of literary criticism. So the point I'm trying to make here is that my
#
own influences were very, very diverse. I was told that read, read, read. It doesn't matter really.
#
I didn't have to hide the James Hadley chasers and those light pornographic stuff. I could read it
#
out in the open because if you can keep it in your collection, then it's not taboo, then you
#
can't stop your grandchild from reading it because it's out there, you see. That was one thing. An
#
image that is imprinted in my mind is of my grandfather reading a lifafa, an envelope made
#
out of an old newspaper, turning it and reading it very closely with all the attention
#
at his command, reading it very closely. The sanctity of the written word is what I have
#
carried with me from having seen him. Here's a man who was a professor of Urdu at Aligarh,
#
a very well-known poet, a pro-stylist and essayist. He was given the Padma Bhushan Award
#
for his services to literature. He had a collection of over 30,000 books, which after his death,
#
we donated to the National Archives. Today, there's a Surur collection named after him
#
in the National Archives of India, housing his entire collection. Here is a man with this vast
#
and very rich collection of his own books at home, reading that lifafa made out of old newspaper
#
and reading it closely with great attention. Why? Because words have a sanctity. It doesn't matter
#
that this is an old newspaper which has made that lifafa. What matters is that there is a written
#
word. The other thing that I have always carried from me is the vast collection of dictionaries
#
he had, both in Urdu and in English, and the many animated discussions we had on the meanings of
#
words. Towards the end of his life, he would be sitting in an armchair and next to him,
#
there'd be a stack of dictionaries, not because he needed to consult them, but because he liked
#
to consult them. What he taught us, my siblings and I, is that never be too embarrassed or ashamed
#
to reach out to a dictionary if you think you're not sure of the meaning or you want to find out
#
the root meaning of a word. The importance of dictionaries is something that is, again,
#
imprinted in my brain and this is something I like to tell young people, especially to look
#
out for. Invest in dictionaries. Don't think that the dictionary that is there in your word program
#
on your laptop is sufficient. Have a physical dictionary handy because words, their meanings,
#
their root words are all important. Also, my grandfather used to say that, you know,
#
I don't understand this bored business. How do people get bored? If you have books to read,
#
how can you get bored? He said, if I'm marooned on an island and I have a dictionary with me,
#
I will never get bored. Truly, that's something that I enjoy. When I have nothing else to do,
#
I love to flip through a dictionary. Any random page, anywhere on M or A or P, I'll start looking
#
at words and I'll find it so engrossing. I think words have a sanctity, contain great joy,
#
contain multiple meanings. We just have to go looking for them. What a beautiful story about
#
reading that, Lifafa. And dictionaries are actually also history books. Yes. And it's
#
kind of a tragedy of the modern times that no one is really going to just casually pick up a
#
dictionary because there won't be a physical one lying next to them. You know, you can always do
#
define colon whatever in Google and you'll get the meaning. It's there on your word program,
#
on your computer. The serendipity of just opening to a page. Absolutely. The great serendipitous
#
joy of discovering words and meanings and related words. So when did you start to think
#
of yourself as someone who would write? Right now, my WhatsApp status is I write, therefore I am.
#
But I didn't reach this point. It's a tweak on I think, therefore I am. But I don't think I
#
reached this point. I don't think there was a moment of epiphany. I think I took a very long
#
time to become a writer. For a long time, I was perfectly content being an editor.
#
I worked in publishing companies. I moved to India International Center where I worked in
#
the publications division, first as sub editor, then as assistant editor of a magazine called
#
the IIC Quarterly. I was perfectly happy editing other people's writing and had no ambition
#
whatsoever to write. In fact, I had zero ambition. I was not the person wanting to climb the top of
#
the tree ever. I was just this willow, the wisp, happy to drift with whatever. I mean,
#
I was gainfully employed. I was not a burden on society or my parents. So I was earning my keep,
#
but I was not especially ambitious in terms of a career. I drifted from various jobs. But at some
#
point when I was at the India International Center, I had a boss who sent me off to watch a film,
#
and then she asked me to produce 400 words on it. And that was the first time I wrote something
#
after the tutorials and the essays that you're supposed to write in college.
#
That was the first time I wrote a book review for our IIC newsletter. I still remember the film and
#
what I wrote about it. And she read it and she said, she grunted and she said, fine, now we'll
#
ask you to write more. So it started with that one film review. It was actually on Gertrude Stein,
#
whom I mentioned a short while ago, a rose is a rose is a rose. So there was a documentary on her
#
being shown at the IIC and for the IIC newsletter, I had to write this 400 word piece. So life has
#
been full of nice people and very serendipitous occurrences. That's how writing started with a
#
400 word review. Translations also happened like that. If I may share that story.
#
I had no thought in my head that one day I'm going to translate, even though I knew enough Urdu and
#
Hindi to read in those languages and write in those languages. I went for a routine meeting,
#
again, when I was at the IIC to the Sahitya Academy and I got talking to the editor of the
#
Sahitya Academy's journal called Indian Literature. This is Dr. Rao, to whom I'm profoundly and
#
endlessly grateful if he's out there listening to this. Sir, salaam to you. Dr. Rao opened his drawer,
#
pulled out a story and this was Mandir Masjid, a short story by Premchand.
#
The copyright for Premchand had just opened up and anybody could translate Premchand. He said,
#
mere paas yeh kahani hai, aur mujhe yeh kisiyeh translate karne hain.
#
Aapko dekh ke lagta hai ke aapki English toh theekhi hai, Hindi-Urdu aati hai. I said,
#
haan sir, aati hai, dono aati hai. He says, why don't you translate it for me and I'll publish it.
#
I said, sir, maine toh kabhi translate kiya nahi hain. He says, karke dekh liji.
#
So I took that story home and on my father's battered old Remington, I typed out the translation,
#
gave it to Dr. Rao. Dr. Rao published it October 1991 of the Indian literature issue and I was
#
like a person who had tasted blood. I just enjoyed that process of translating so much and
#
because the copyright for Premchand had just opened, I translated 13 short stories and the
#
timing is all in serendipity. That's how it happens. In 92, India was just opening up to
#
foreign publishers. Penguin had just started. HarperCollins had just opened shop in India,
#
HarperCollins India and they were looking for books to publish and translation was still very
#
new. Till then you had those Jataka tales and other things in translation but Indian literature
#
in translation published by big companies was still very new. You had your Jayco and
#
your smaller publishing companies but HarperCollins or a Penguin translating and publishing
#
translations from Indian languages was very new. HarperCollins without any fuss or any further ado
#
instantly agreed to publish this. In 92, my first book was published which was Premchand's
#
short stories that I had translated from Urdu into English and it was called
#
The Temple and the Mosque and Other Stories and like the writing of that 400 word book,
#
a film review, with this book I found myself on a career trajectory that I had not dreamt or planned
#
and today here I am with my WhatsApp status thing. I write, therefore I am. Beautiful, what a story
#
Let's talk a little bit about translation. I've had various translators on my show from Arunawa
#
Sinha to Dhanush Hussain to Ranjit Hoskote. Dhanush and Ranjit were relatively recent. I had Sarah
#
Rai. What a beautiful book she's written. What a beautiful book she's written and in fact that
#
first essay before you know the book wasn't out at the time we read our episode so she read out
#
a part of it at the start of the episode and really just you know lovely to be present there
#
and let's talk a bit about translation because it seems to me that something that most people
#
didn't get and I didn't get till I started thinking about it as translation is basically
#
an act of creation itself that languages are fundamentally so different that it's not just
#
ki word ka meaning you know translate kar diya aur ho gaya. You have to get the essence of what the
#
person is trying to say and then find a way to recreate that essence and recreate that vibe and
#
that feeling and it seems to me that this is particularly difficult between Urdu or Hindustani
#
and English because Urdu Hindustani that entire family is so expressive in many ways so musical
#
in certain ways and English is just really different the values of the language are so
#
different. Tell me a little bit about those challenges and how you thought about those.
#
Of course there are many many challenges but I think translations generally serve a bridge
#
between languages as disparate as let's say Hindi, Urdu and English. So think of languages
#
as the banks of a river, two banks not going to meet unless there is a bridge and that bridge
#
is translation that's the purpose. Life would be so much mehroom to use an Urdu word so bereft
#
we as readers of world literature would be so bereft if we had not read the Russian masters,
#
if we'd not read the Latin American novelists, if we'd not read the French symbolists I can go on.
#
All of these people have come to us you know Gorky and Dostoevsky and Maupassant and you know
#
you can go on all the Greek the Odyssey the Iliad all of this Homer we've read as in translation.
#
So imagine our world if we had not read this.
#
Yes there are losses but the gains far outweigh the losses the losses are inevitable the losses
#
are sharper and more significant in languages which are distinct and disparate.
#
But at least people like me and in our little fellowship of translators we often meet we often
#
talk and in our group we often say that some people agree that yes there are losses others
#
think that no we shouldn't be thinking of the losses at all. I belong to the school of thought
#
that says we have to work on the assumption that loss is inevitable but we move with that humility
#
of that acknowledgement of the loss that is my position on translations.
#
Let me give you some examples in English there is one broad word aunt and uncle in Hindi Urdu
#
in all our languages we have mama mommy chacha chachi tau tai so on and so forth you know
#
I don't want to take names because they were doing human service they were pioneers
#
but they also were working with many handicaps they were still saying aunt and uncle they were
#
still saying cot for khatia they were still saying unleavened flat bread for roti they were
#
still saying clarified butter for ghee when my generation of people started translating from the
#
early 90s we began to say what the hell I'm going to say ghee figure it out I'm going to say roti
#
surely everybody knows what roti is who doesn't let them figure it out I'm not going to say
#
unleavened flat bread I will not say it we started from that position we took small liberties
#
with time we began to not take liberties but we began to exercise greater control over our material
#
we began to show a little more confidence in our readers we began to say that listen when we as
#
first year English honours students as 18 year old straight out of college read Homer's Odyssey
#
nobody took us by the hand and took us into that world they just let us sink or swim when we first
#
read about the wine dark seas that Homer is describing I didn't know what a wine dark sea
#
was but I used my imagination to figure it out yeah so we as 18 year olds were reading world
#
literature in translation as first year undergrad students and we were loving it yes there were
#
things we didn't understand but we found our way around it why do we want to make assume that our
#
readers today the 21st century are idiots and they need bite-sized information so let us retain
#
as much as we can I am going to say khala jaan I will not say aunt at best I'll say khala jaan
#
in a glossary and they can look up the glossary otherwise let them figure it out from the context
#
that this is aunt now what kind of on material mother's side or father's side the glossary will
#
tell them so I began to do these little experiments another experiment I did and I
#
thought I was doing it for the first time till my friend Arunawa Sinha told me that the people have
#
already done it with the Latin Americans may I share that experiment with you of course please
#
everything um so I was translating this big novel by Intazar Hussain the Pakistani chronicler
#
of our times who died recently was shortlisted for the man booker and so on he has written with great
#
empathy about the partition about migration about building a new life and is I think a major Urdu
#
fiction writer of our times I had already translated many of his short stories but
#
it was my first jab at translating his long novel I signed a contract with Harper Collins
#
the editor at Harper Collins had not read the novel I myself chose to decided to not read the
#
novel I thought this was an experiment that I was doing till Arunawa told me that others have also
#
done it like this I would only read as much of the translation of the original Urdu as I planned to
#
translate on that particular day so man lije ke 150 pages ki agar novel hai toh ho maine pure 150
#
pages nahi pare the agar on that particular day I was only able to translate a para then I would
#
only read that para as I was translating it and resist the impulse to read the next page or the
#
next para and close the book and then when I picked it up again the next day I would read
#
the rest of it now this was an amazing experience because what translation does is that it gives you
#
a sense of power that I know this book I'm taking away that power that I have as a translator and
#
saying I'm no more and no less than a close reader yes I'm reading it but more closely than
#
a casual reader because I have to translate it so I have to know the exact meanings and the
#
layers of meanings but I will not know where this book is going I will not know its end so when I
#
was translating the last paragraph believe me I really had goosebumps because the book that I had
#
been with for so many months that was the first time I was reaching its end and reading its end
#
so there are these little experiments you do to push the envelope you know to see what else you
#
can do because I mean translation what is translation after all clearly we know what
#
it is not it is not an electronical exchange like a bank exchange you know from one bank account to
#
another account that it is not it is not just a transfer of vocabulary and meaning from one
#
language to another it is not that it is not merely also the transfer of one literary sensibility to
#
another it is many now we come to what it is I think it is capturing a voice it is capturing
#
an ethos it is capturing a sensibility now all this sounds vague let me give you examples
#
for people from the Indian subcontinent the smell of rain on parched ground is very special there's
#
a word for it and the English word is absolutely but when you say sounds like something that grew
#
in a petri dish you don't want to use the word at least I don't want to use when I translate who I
#
have been he uses the word very often not once was I tempted to use the word I think it's an awful
#
awful non-poetic word and also most English speakers won't know what it means many English
#
speakers won't even know it I instead chose to go with damp frig so I'll say moist fragrance I
#
know that petri chore is not moist I know that is not moist but it's a smell that comes with a sense
#
of moisture laden in it there is that there is another word sehra sehra is the word that is the
#
veil of flowers made to cover the face of both a bride and a groom now to an English speaker
#
how do you say and now books that are published in India are available everywhere Harper Collins
#
sends his books out penguin all of them you know so it's not we are no longer just writing for a
#
specifically Indian audience we know that yes our target audience is books here but these books
#
will be picked up and will be read by anybody anywhere so if I say floral veil covering the
#
groom's face a I make my sentence clumsy and awkward and very heavy and b I'm painting a
#
bizarre word picture what is a groom with a floral veil so I find it simpler to just say use the word
#
sehra and I leave it I give the meaning in a glossary if they feel that it's not immediately
#
obvious what I'm referring to they can look up because the sentence is like the tremulous
#
fragrance of the flowers from the sehra so obviously it's referring to a scent that is
#
coming from there but I'm not giving its literal meaning I'm using and retaining the word sehra
#
in it right there are many many such instances in intisar hussein there is a reference to a kite
#
with its string cut but katipatang right there's a film also by that name katipatang is a metaphor
#
it's a metaphor for drifting for aimless having lost its destination various things of being
#
slightly nostalgic of being woe be gone it's a sad image now when intisar hussein uses the word
#
katipatang his urdu readers know that this is a laden word he doesn't have to use too many other words
#
but my english readers may or may not know what it means so what do I do I still say a kite with
#
its string cut in my english but I provide a footnote now earlier we thought that translations
#
don't need footnotes because this is not academic writing and only academic writing requires foot
#
notes I'm saying that my job my brief as a translator is as much to provide a context
#
as it is to do a literal translation so while I will say cut kite or kite with its string cut
#
depending on the sentence I will give all of these extra layers of meaning in a footnote
#
out of 10 maybe two three people will say listen when I'm reading a translation I don't want to
#
be bothered with footnotes to those two three people I say skip over the footnote don't read
#
it the remaining seven or eight might say that listen yes this helps me I get a context when
#
Intazar Hussain is referring to the early Islamic history of cities like Cordoba
#
his urdu readers know what Cordoba means you know the lost glory of Islam but the english reader
#
will not will be confounded why is he he was talking about Buland city in western Uttar Pradesh
#
and suddenly he's gone to Cordoba what happened so I need to tell that english reader that when
#
he's talking of Cordoba the cat in Cordoba he's suddenly reminded of his mind is jumping
#
going back in time to the lost glory of Islam and I need to say this in a footnote I cannot
#
lumber up that sentence which is there in the original that's not my brief my brief as a
#
translator is to just translate that but increasingly in these 30 odd years of my
#
journey as a translator the brief I've given to myself also is that my job is to provide a
#
context so if you were to ask me how I look back at my journey and what are the losses and gains
#
and what is the one lesson that I have as a translator or as a as a person drawn from this
#
I would say that my journey has been from text to context I started out by
#
concentrating just on the text and thinking this is my job today I look at the context also
#
and I say yes my job is to translate the text as faithfully with as much fidelity as I can
#
but my job or my brief to use a legal term that I've given to myself nobody gave me that brief
#
not the publisher not the reader not the book reviewer but a brief that I gave to myself
#
is that I also want to well if not translate at least make accessible the context I think that
#
that gives an added layer to my reader that when he hears of the cat of Cordoba
#
suddenly springing up in Bulandshahir he needs to know where has this cat come from
#
you know and we don't need to make translated text exotic we don't need to glamorize them we
#
don't need to make them alien and therefore you know different we need to retain all their
#
peculiarities their whimsies their whimsicalities their absurdities their uniqueness we need to
#
retain them as they are we can't improve them we can't gild that lily that lily is already gilded
#
what we can do as translators is explain add another layer of meaning and I have chosen to
#
do them through footnotes and through long introductory essays now when I write or translate
#
even this collection of short stories which is my newest book Urdu stories earlier I used to write
#
a very modest one page two page translators note now I call them introduction you see and I think
#
my job is to write an introduction to write a long essay giving the context of that text that I'm
#
translating in fact your wonderful essay on the male gaze or Urdu almost stands out as a separate
#
you know not just something that is leading up to the book but as something beautiful and separate
#
on its own I love that phrase text and text to context and it goes well with the metaphor of
#
the bridge like you could argue that the language itself that you are using is like the road surface
#
of the bridge but the foundations which make it firm and standing in the water yeah they're
#
standing in the water and that's kind of the context you're giving and I'm really so so glad
#
that you spoke about how you won't refer to roti as unleavened flatbread or whatever it was
#
because that is such a pet peeve I have and I see it in novels coming out to this current day and
#
I don't understand it because like when I grew up reading all the Russian novelists like Dostoevsky
#
and Tolstoy and all that nobody would translate Samovar for me you know when I first read that
#
word but perhaps as an 80 year old I must have thought oh this must be the Russian samosa and
#
then you read a little bit more and you realize that no you realize what it is and I really like
#
the approach of Junot Diaz for example where I forget in which of his books but there's just
#
a glossary at the end and the text is full of the authentic language that there is so the committed
#
reader can go to the glossary but really a lot of the time you don't need to because you get a sense
#
of it from the language itself that's the beauty of the prose tell me a little bit about the processes
#
that go into both translating and writing you've done tons of writing you've got a book of short
#
stories you've got this wonderful sort of a book of essays as well tell me about how they're
#
different and tell me about how they those processes are because when you were speaking
#
of that experiment you carried out where you're doing you know just you're you're just reading
#
what you're doing that day you're immersing yourself in it finishing it moving on the next day
#
it strikes me that that translating might also lead to this beautiful meditative process of
#
discovering a kind of flow where you're just lost in it and it's just so beautiful for its own sake
#
and as far as writing itself is concerned I imagine that I think all writers that I know
#
just don't find it easy it's really tough you need discipline you need to sort of really work out so
#
much else it's not just about sitting down and inspiration strikes and you write it's so much
#
hard work so tell me about these two processes and what they are like and what they mean for you
#
okay so I think yes it's hard work yes it's a lot of work but I think I'm blessed in so far as I
#
can't remember a time when I've suffered from prolonged writer's block maybe it is because I
#
do different kinds of writings had I been just a fiction writer I would have relied only on my
#
imagination I have written some fiction yes I've written a collection of short stories called
#
release and other stories that's been my one jab at fiction mostly I write non-fiction but I do
#
different kinds of writing so I think my mind doesn't get jaded or doesn't constantly need an
#
external stimuli the text or whatever I happen to be working on is enough stimulus in itself
#
I will be writing an op-ed one day the Indian Express or the somebody will call me up and say
#
listen so-and-so's passed away we need an obituary by the end of the day so there I will be writing
#
an obituary or I'll be writing an op-ed on something it could be the hijab row in Karnataka it could be
#
the thing that happened in Iran recently you know with that so it's different kinds of things so
#
there's an op-ed one day there is a piece of translation one day there is a very political
#
piece for the wire one day it is my own literary you know what I was trained to do is to work in
#
literary histories in my 40s I decided and I must tell you for no particular reason to do a PhD
#
I was in a job I had a family a home to run children to raise all sorts of things and I
#
took time out to write a PhD on the progressive writers movement that is a literary history
#
so that is what I trained myself to work on today all these years after having finished the PhD I
#
continue to mine that subject I continue to go back to it and revisit it so I look at literary
#
history which which essentially very very simply put means I look at the intersection of literature
#
and history so let's say there is a real historical event such as for example the Jallianwala Bagh
#
or the partition of India the creation of Bangladesh the great Bengal famine the first world
#
war these are all real historical events and I've turned them and used them as pegs for my books
#
so I have a collection of essays on Jallianwala Bagh or poetry and prose writings responses to
#
the first world war in Urdu Hindi Punjabi whatever so I'm doing different kinds of things
#
and therefore I think my stimulus is coming from the sheer variety of work I have
#
I've never had a time when I've had to sit at a desk and scratch my head and say okay I have a
#
blank screen staring at me never fortunately had that problem in fact I don't always even need a
#
desk I can write anywhere and I can write with interruptions the doorbell is going the courier
#
person is there the cook is asking me what is to be cooked I'll tend to all of that and I'll pick
#
up my sentence where I left it and go back to writing yeah well that's a great mercy yeah so
#
I don't understand a writer's block at all but again I'm if someone were to ask me why that is
#
I think it's because I do different kinds of writings maybe if it was just fiction I was
#
doing or creative writing or some form of if I was a poet maybe I would need that inspiration
#
here a lot of my work is just plain and simple hard work you know it's it's grunt work many times
#
so and it requires it takes it demands different things from you a translation will require
#
a very close reading of a text of somebody else's text that you are working on the footnotes and
#
the other things are your own part your inputs to it but essentially it's somebody else's text
#
literary criticism will require your inputs again of a text but not in a way that a translation
#
requires the demands are totally different an op-ed which is a political political piece
#
will require your understanding of what you've read or which has happened around you again not
#
as a knee-jerk response it's not that there is a hijab row happening in karnataka and you write a
#
piece that also requires some background reading you look up a judgment you look up a news report
#
so there's a fair amount of cross-referencing you do there's a fair amount of research you do
#
there's a fair amount of back background reading you do so I've learned over the years that different
#
kinds of writings in my case the different kinds of writings I do make different demands of me
#
and I think I'm throwing up many balls in the air and I'm catching different balls at different
#
times and I think that keeps me my mind occupied and that keeps me occupied in a way that I
#
have fortunately not reached a saturation point and I cannot say that I'm bored I cannot ever say
#
that I get up in the morning and say oh gosh I hate my life I fortunately have not reached that
#
point because there's so much variety in what I read which goes into my writing and what I write
#
beautiful my next question is about urdu but before that you mentioned the lovely
#
word mehroom a while ago and I'll link to the song by my friend Raman Negi which was called mehroom
#
which was actually recorded in this very room you and I are sitting in so that is some coincidence
#
there so you know in your book at one point you write the following words about amir kusro who
#
of course lived in the 13th century and you're right according to a popular anecdote amir kusro
#
was given a set of four unrelated words and challenged to string them together from these
#
everyday prosaic words he produced the following four line words verse which you've translated
#
as I took pains to cook kheer even burned the wooden wheel a dog came and ate it up while you
#
sat playing the drums top court and what I loved about this and what struck me about this is these
#
are 13th century words it is a he's using delightfully simple language and he's using
#
delightfully simple language that I sitting today can be moved by and can appreciate 700 years later
#
which tells you about what a remarkable living language this is equally there is another trend
#
that I see and I ask Danish about this also because in the context of his doing all the
#
Dasangoi stuff that he does equally I will often find that while reciting a piece of words
#
the language will sometimes be so difficult that the poet or the Dasangoi or you know whoever
#
is reciting it will actually explain individual words while doing it and I get it because all
#
those words are remarkably beautiful they condense a lot of meaning and you know just a syllable or
#
two but at the same time there is a danger that it can become inaccessible and you see these sort
#
of these different directions that on the one hand it's a beautiful joyful living language which
#
you know can speak to so many of us and on the other hand there is almost this high literary
#
tradition which takes you to a place you can't otherwise go yes but that does affect sort of
#
the accessibility of it and so on and so forth and and I don't know if it's related in any way but
#
you once mentioned in one of your essays that after partition the Urdu short story writers
#
thrive but the Urdu poets didn't quite quite thrive so much and I wonder if that's related so
#
I don't want to necessarily ask a question on these specific aspects of the language
#
but I want to kind of understand the evolution of Urdu and whether it is in danger because as
#
you alluded to earlier it has also been a target of politics where quite bizarrely Hindustani or
#
whatever you call it was you know sought to be divided into Urdu which is for the Muslims and
#
some Shudh Hindi which is for the others and who don't nobody even speak Shudh Hindi so give me
#
a sense of how Urdu has evolved you know through all these years and as we speak today this evening
#
or is it tomorrow I'm getting confused maybe tomorrow there is a very interesting talk being
#
given by Javed Akhtar here in Delhi at the India International Center it is called Urdu and Hindi
#
the Siamese twins and he's talking to Alok Rai who's written a great book is talking to Alok Rai
#
yes I'm looking forward to that conversation very much I think these divides which are
#
not new the Urdu-Hindi dispute goes back to over a hundred years with champions of both languages
#
turning the literary scene into an akhada and the Urdu-walas and the Hindi-walas have been
#
turned into wrestlers in a pit with each party saying we are stronger and so I think instead of
#
a wrestling pit had it become a kinder gentler space more accommodating of each other more where
#
both would benefit from each other where both come from common stock where both as Javed Akhtar's
#
title of the talk suggests Siamese twins if not Siamese twins I like to use another expression I
#
like to say that they're born from the same mother they are siblings born from the same mother
#
so yes they have common commonalities and they have differences I don't think we need to go
#
looking for commonalities differences we need to cherish both languages and go for what works with
#
us instead of making it pure I'm confounded completely by the amount of energy that the
#
mongers of hate and divisiveness and otherness choose to expend on weeding out for example
#
there is a campaign underfoot right now these days it has been there but is gaining momentum
#
of weeding out Urdu words from all police work and judicial work and replacing them with
#
Hindi ones now for a very long time Urdu words like so many of them I mean they have been part
#
of the vocabulary of the whether it's the beat constable or the SHO or the whatever as you go
#
up the ladder of the police force similarly in the judicial judiciary be it the lower courts
#
or up till the high court there are words that have been part of the nomenclature the usage and
#
so on now to link it to hyper nationalism of a certain kind the jingoistic hyper nationalism that
#
we were earlier talking about to link it to that and to say the use of Urdu in judicial work or
#
police work is somehow anti-national is to my mind absurd to replace it either with inaccurate
#
or difficult to comprehend new words is just excessive this energy can be put to better use
#
there are very many ways than all this zeal can be put to so why do you want to reinvent the wheel
#
and put all your energy in that and what harm is a word like or all of these words doing to you in
#
real words this kind of what shall I say pouring of hatred the fact that is spilling over and
#
affecting languages and literatures is to nobody is good you know so I would much rather that we
#
focus on communication if a certain word has come into currency and it is accessible and
#
understandable we focus on that earlier on in the conversation I referred to the great role of the
#
Hindi films Hindi cinema from coming out of Mumbai that has taken Urdu Hindi and taken it to
#
the nooks and crannies of the popular imagination Panwari ki dukhaan chahein wo Madras mein hai chahein
#
wo Kashmir mein hai Ladakh mein hai Arunachal Pradesh mein hai agar wahan gana baj raha hai to
#
wahan pe rehne wale log chai ki dukhaan ke paan ki dukhaan ke wo gana sun rahe hain
#
and Hindi film lyricists be it Sahir or Gulzar or Javed Akhtar have done amazing words
#
one that I can think from the top of my head ek song hota tha Goya ke chunanche
#
ab yeh bada idiomatic Urdu ka expression hai aapne isko ek Hindi song me daal diya to
#
jisko nahi bhi pata usko ek naya love seekh raha hai does knowledge do you harm if you learn a new
#
word gumshuda yeh bhi ek gana me use hota hai as a refrain maybe you didn't know what gumshuda means
#
you know gum but you don't know shuda so but you figure out what gumshuda means from the song
#
if you're learning a new word does it do you harm does it take away from the existing stock
#
of words you know in other languages so this this the the thinking behind this kind of
#
weeding out of saying don't use these words is it coming from a place of inferiority
#
is it coming from a place saying that no this is going to make my language poorer
#
what explanation is is is it for for this kind of thinking I think cinema Hindi cinema has done
#
amazing work to keep certain words relevant to keep certain words in currency as recently as
#
student of the year which features very young people then a very young alia bhat and so on
#
there was a song about gori and pangat and so on now when was the last time a city-bred child
#
saw a gori going to a pangat but songs have managed to keep certain words in currency
#
kya yeh buri bhaat hai isse kya nuksaan hota hai isse aap aur main kya gharib ho jaate hain
#
isse 12 13 14 saal ka bacha jo gori aur pangat ka zikar sun raha hai
#
jisne na gori ki samaj hai na pangat ki samaj hai are they poorer by it I don't think so
#
so aap isko context mein dekhiye aap yeh samjhye ki isse aapka nuksaan kya ho raha hai aap keyuu
#
blindly khilaf hai kisi cheez ke kyun ki aap se kisi ne kaha ki ki aap se WhatsApp forward aaya
#
ya apki neighbourhood shahkha wali aadmi ne aap se kaha ki yeh shabd ka preog karoge tu tumpe
#
nuksaan hoga kya nuksaan hoga why don't you think for yourself and see aap ek aur zaban
#
You will remember when we went to satellite space, Mrs. Dixit asked an Indian astronaut,
#
one of us, who is from that generation, who had seen it in the distance, this clip came to our mind.
#
Mrs. Indira Gandhi, in her tinny voice, is asking,
#
How does India look from there?
#
And that comes the reply,
#
India is the best of all.
#
Is there a problem with this?
#
What is India is the best of all?
#
It's a fragment of a verse written by Muhammad Iqbal, the Urdu poet.
#
Now today, it's fashionable to dis-Iqbal.
#
In a school assembly in Pilibeet, a prayer of Iqbal was recited by the children.
#
The FIR was registered on the principal and teacher who conducted the assembly.
#
How did you get the poem of the one who proposed the father of the two nations theory to be recited?
#
Is this how far we have come?
#
Iqbal is bad, everything written by him is bad.
#
But when the Indian astronaut says that India is the best of all,
#
we all feel proud, we all feel happy.
#
And I doubt if it was a rehearsed thing, or even if it was a rehearsed thing,
#
it was so appropriate for that instant, for that occasion.
#
How does India look from there? India is the best of all.
#
I think it's beautiful.
#
So if poetry, or verse, in any language, in Kannada, Tamil, Urdu, Hindi,
#
if poetry has this power, this ability, to fill you with the ocean in Gagar,
#
it can say a lot in a few words.
#
Now what language is it in? Do you have any objection to it?
#
So I think there is a mistake in your thinking.
#
You know, you and I in protest should form a heavy metal band called Vakalat Nama.
#
And our first album should be called Gumsuda.
#
We will show them. The personal is political, alright.
#
Can you play any instruments?
#
Unfortunately, I can't. I'm tone deaf.
#
I can't play an instrument. I can't sing to save my life.
#
Oh my God, there goes the plan.
#
I have decided to learn an instrument this year, so I'm announcing it on the show.
#
Let us see if at the end of 2024 I manage.
#
I'm sure you'll be a great success. I wish you all the best.
#
But you know, I asked you about Urdu literature,
#
and we sort of took this digression into Urdu-Hindi politics.
#
So I will come back to Urdu literature because I will not let you get away with the subject that,
#
you know, you wrote a book about your PhD thesis, of course, the progressive writers.
#
And what strikes me when I hear what you say about them and I read what you've written about them is that,
#
like one, it was a really diverse group of writers who were writing in Urdu, Hindi,
#
and eventually so many other languages.
#
And two, that there was a sense of this common cause that everybody gathered around.
#
You know, there was this sense of mission, this sense of excitement.
#
You know, what Premchand says in 36, where he says we must redefine what is beautiful,
#
the meaning of the word and all of that.
#
You know, the way it comes together in London of all places, you know, Sajjad Zaheer and, you know, the Majlis.
#
So tell me a little bit about, you know, how this movement came about.
#
What is that common cause that they all embraced?
#
What was the relationship to authority?
#
And, you know, everything that he was saying about cinema really also comes out of here, doesn't it?
#
That it's really these progressive writers who go to Bollywood in the 40s and 50s
#
and they're writing these beautiful lyrics and these films and all of that.
#
And we can talk more about that as well.
#
But just tell me about this whole progressive writers movement,
#
which is inspiring for various reasons because we don't have anything like that.
#
Like, forget the particular cause.
#
I don't see people gathering around any cause today.
#
Everyone is atomized and, you know, peering inside.
#
First of all, let me congratulate you on your amazing research in my work
#
and the extent and the detail with which you have gone into the various things I've written.
#
And the fact that you can quote from Premchand's inaugural address to the PWA.
#
But if you will permit, let me first explain a little about what the progressive writers movement
#
and progressive writers association was for those of your readers, listeners who may not have heard of it.
#
So, you know, the seeds of progressive writing go back to my mind to 1857,
#
the first what we now historians call the first war of independence.
#
There was a burst of political energy that came out of the events of 1857,
#
the mutiny or the first war of independence, whatever you want to call it.
#
Literature, not just Urdu literature, but literatures of India, at least upper India, let's say,
#
because those are the literatures I've read and studied.
#
I only have a sense of what was happening in Marathi, in Kannada, in Tamil and Telugu and other literatures.
#
But my sense is that the literatures of upper India were greatly affected by the by 1857.
#
And this energy, this political energy that comes out post 1857 changes literature.
#
So if till that point literature was about escapist fantasies,
#
it was about Afsanas and Dastans and, you know, escapades into worlds of the imagination.
#
If the Ghazal was all about beauty and romance and so on, we see changes, very dramatic, noticeable changes post 1857.
#
Even the Ghazal, which is an amatory ode, which is still using even today, it continues to use a certain kind of vocabulary,
#
but camouflaged and hidden in that time honoured vocabulary are new concerns.
#
There's more agency to use a modern word.
#
The Bhut, the Sanam, the Kaafir, which are age old metaphors in Urdu poetry, post 1857 began to be used for the foreign power.
#
So Bhut, Sanam, Kaafir was not just the beloved or the opponent in love,
#
but it began to be used for the colonial powers, for the English powers who are the oppressors.
#
So we see a change in while using the same vocabulary.
#
We see the intended targets changing.
#
We see greater political consciousness.
#
We see it in poetry and prose, which is still finding its feet.
#
By the turn of the century, we have didactic novels being written by Harley and others.
#
We see greater social consciousness.
#
By the time of Premchand, we see a very socially engaged, socially purposive literature.
#
Premchand is already writing before the progressive writers movement comes around.
#
So we have novels like Godan, Nirmala.
#
We have a talk of social justice.
#
We have talk of exploitation.
#
We have talk of the Dalits, who are at that point being called, Gandhi is calling them, untouchables.
#
So we have a writer like Premchand talking about the poorest of the poor, the most marginalised.
#
We are talking about the differences between rich and poor, talking of a variety of social evils.
#
You know, Thakur Kaku and that kind of stories being written.
#
We also know that Premchand is influenced by the social realism of the Russian writers
#
because literature is being made available to us in translation.
#
A lot of Russian literature, world literature is coming to us in translation through English, through Hindi, through Urdu and so on.
#
All this is happening at a slow and steady pace.
#
This is, it's not dramatic.
#
It is not as though the Russian revolution brings a certain communist ideology and plants it into Indian soil
#
and this dramatic flowering happening of socialist or communist thought.
#
I don't see it like that.
#
I see it as a lot of things happening in Indian soil caused by circumstances and situations in India.
#
Yes, influenced to some extent by texts and translations coming from Soviet Union,
#
bringing the ideas of socialism, of communism, of egalitarianism and the idea of change.
#
That if the Russian revolution, the October revolution can happen there,
#
then post 1919, the Indian masses are also beginning to be made conscious of the fact
#
that if it can happen there, then it can happen here too.
#
If peasants can rise up in revolt against their czar, then it can happen here too.
#
And it's not just the Russian revolution.
#
Ideas are coming from Europe, from America, from all over.
#
In 1932, something very remarkable happens.
#
A book comes out in December 1932 called Angare.
#
It's the first of its kind anthology written by four young people.
#
Comrade Mehmood Zafar, Dr. Rashid Jahan, a woman, Sajjad Zaheer and Ahmed Ali.
#
Angare is considered blasphemous, sacrilegious and within two, three months it is banned.
#
By March 1933, it is banned.
#
And the colonial government is convinced by Indians themselves that a book like this should never be published
#
because it is against religion, it's against morality, it's against society.
#
But Angare, as its name suggests, meaning flaming embers, contains embers of a change.
#
Many of these young people, the four names that I mentioned, of whom the most prominent is Sajjad Zaheer who goes away to London
#
and with a group of other fellow young people including Mulk Rajanand and others,
#
draws up a manifesto of what he calls, of all of them, called the Progressive Writers Association.
#
He comes back to India and in April 1934, the first of its kind literary gathering happens in Lucknow in a hall called Rifai Am Hall.
#
This is called the Progressive Writers Meeting and this is the first all-India Progressive Writers Meeting.
#
Prem Chand, who is going to die a few months later in that year, he comes and he addresses the inaugural meeting.
#
The one you mentioned, that is part of his very famous inaugural speech.
#
He comes and he says that we will have to change the standards of beauty.
#
We, meaning the writers community, will have to change the standard of beauty, the definition of beauty.
#
All this while we have thought beauty lies in a moon-like maiden with almond eyes and long hair and milky white complexion.
#
No, beauty is also in the sweat on the forehead of the woman who is working in the field and nursing her baby and then goes back to tilling that field.
#
She too can be the fit subject of literature.
#
So he is addressing and he is a man of great respect at that point.
#
His novels, his stories are read widely.
#
And at this first All-India Progressive Writers Association, which is attended by writers who come as delegates, which is all very new and unusual.
#
Think that they don't have money, funds or any institutional support.
#
But this group of young writers led by Sajjad Zaheer, Rashid Jahan, there are a whole lot of other young people who are part of this fledgling movement.
#
They just shoot off postcards to people.
#
They send letters to Premchand, Maulana Hasrat Mohani, Abdul Haq, Sarojini Naidu.
#
And those who can come, they come at their expense and attend this meeting.
#
Those who cannot come, they send a letter of solidarity and support.
#
They send a letter to Rabindranath Tagore.
#
So this way, a great movement comes together, very organically, with no great expense, with no great, as it were, planning.
#
There is a manifesto, yes, that is read and passed at this first meeting.
#
Briefly, in that manifesto, it says, let us not look at the past.
#
If we are nostalgic, we will be regressive because we will go back.
#
Instead, let us be progressive. Let us look forward.
#
I am telling you in very simplistic terms.
#
I am trying to give a very distilled essence of that manifesto.
#
But essentially, what the Progressive Writers Movement and the Progressive Writers Association is doing is,
#
it's saying, let literature hold up a mirror to society.
#
And in that mirror, you should be able to see the good, the bad, the ugly.
#
Whatever is in your society, whatever is in your society, should be visible in your literature.
#
If there is unevenness in society, there is corruption, there is exploitation, there is weakness, there is good, there is bad,
#
all of that should be visible in your literature.
#
Premchand was already doing this work. Premchand and other writers like him were already doing this work.
#
But through movement, through association, it becomes firm, it becomes strengthened, it gets a direction.
#
And then all the delegates who have come from different parts of the country,
#
and we know that there are delegates who are writers from Marathi, Tamil, Telugu, Udia, Bangla, Hindi, Urdu.
#
It must be said that the great many of the writers in the early days of the Progressive Writers Movement are Urdu writers.
#
Why? Because Urdu is pretty much the lingua franca in the 30s at that time.
#
Urdu is spoken both north and south of the Vindhyas, in Dhaka and in other places.
#
Urdu is even Gujarat. Urdu is spoken, written, read.
#
So yes, the great many, the engines who are driving this movement are Urdu writers,
#
which is not to say that they are only Urdu writers, they are Hindi writers, Bangla, Marathi.
#
And soon, branches begin to sprout all over India.
#
The Progressive Writers Movement has branches in different states and different writers.
#
The PWA of Bombay is very active in Gujarat.
#
There are linkages with the Communist Party of India.
#
We should not shy away from admitting it, but it is not a front of the Communist Party.
#
Yes, there are linkages. Yes, there are many people who are communists, who are members of the PWA.
#
But you can also say that there are many people who are part of the film industry,
#
who are members of the PWA, who are also communists.
#
So see it as circles, circles with overlap.
#
So you have people working in the film industry, like Prem Dhawan and others,
#
like Sahir, like Majruv, like Kaifi Azmi, like Ali Sardar Jafri.
#
They could be working as lyricists, like as story writers, as dialogue writers,
#
in some cases even technicians, people who have left-of-centre sympathy.
#
They are members of the Progressive Writers Movement.
#
And they are also members of another movement that from the 40s becomes very powerful,
#
which is the IPTA, Indian People's Theatre Association.
#
This is a time when you don't have to be either or.
#
It's not that if you are a PWA member, you can't be a member of IPTA,
#
if you are a PWA member, you can't be a member of anything else.
#
There is a loose fellowship, there is a loose sense of belonging.
#
Some people are full-timers, they are members of the party,
#
they work in films, they write, they are poets.
#
There are some people who I call fellow travellers,
#
in the sense that they are working together, but they are not communists or socialists.
#
They may have left-of-centre sensibility,
#
but it is not necessary that they are party whole-timers,
#
or they have read party texts, or they have read communist tomes and texts,
#
or they have a very nuanced understanding of communism or socialism.
#
But they believe that justice is needed in the society,
#
they believe that the distances in the society need to be read,
#
they believe that inequality needs to be minimized,
#
they believe that even though I am not a worker myself,
#
even though I am not a farmer myself,
#
I should have a common cause.
#
Even though I am not a woman, I want to talk about women.
#
And this is a very big thing.
#
This is the first time, at least in recorded literary history,
#
at least in India, where a bunch of people are saying,
#
Men think it's okay to speak about,
#
Premchand has already been writing novels like Nirmala and others,
#
where he has talked with great empathy about women, about women's lives,
#
about young women being married off to old men.
#
So all this is happening.
#
But progressive writers say that we have to see very closely
#
what is happening to people who are less fortunate than us.
#
We, to use a modern expression, have to find a common cause
#
with a whole bunch of isms.
#
It could be feminism, it could be anti-imperialism, anti-colonialism, anti-fascism.
#
Remember that fascism is on the rise in Europe.
#
The First World War has already gotten over.
#
The Second World War is brewing.
#
So in the 30s and the early 40s,
#
when the progressive writers movement is taking shape in India,
#
fascist forces are rising in Europe.
#
And the Indian writers are not blind and unaware of that.
#
They are very conscious of what damage fascism can do
#
and the forces that are strengthening.
#
So they are cautioning Indian readers, Indian writers,
#
that this is happening elsewhere.
#
Let's be watchful, let's be mindful.
#
So they are making common cause with all of these isms.
#
And then they are adding a lot of things that are peculiar to India.
#
For example, they are talking of zamindari abolition.
#
Premchand has already talked about the lifestyle of the zamindars
#
and how there is a disconnect between the zamindar and the worker and the farm worker.
#
So we've already had writers cautioning us about agrarian unrest,
#
about the caste system.
#
And Gandhiji has come back to India by now.
#
Gandhiji is talking about untouchables.
#
Gandhiji is talking about social justice.
#
All of this is getting picked up and amplified by the writers of the PWA,
#
the Progressive Writers Association, in all the bhashas.
#
Because my work is largely in Urdu and in Hindi,
#
my frame of reference comes back to being Urdu and Hindi.
#
But I know that this is happening in Marathi, in Telugu, in Tamil, in Bangla, in Udia, in Assamia.
#
It's happening in all of the bhashas.
#
The Progressive Writers, some who are formally part of the PWA,
#
somehow organically have come back from the land.
#
But their concerns are the same.
#
Even if they haven't heard the name of the PWA,
#
even if they haven't gone to Mumbai to see what is happening in the PWA,
#
even if they haven't heard Premchand's inaugural address in Lucknow,
#
but in a very organic, very native way, to use a word which is loaded,
#
in a very native sense, they have an idea that this is happening
#
and we need to speak up about this.
#
So the Progressive Writers Movement is both the organised part and the unorganised part,
#
which is the fellow travellers or those who've gleaned this understanding
#
of change, of a new kind of literature that needs to be written on their own.
#
Some of it has come from the folk.
#
The same thing happens in folk as well.
#
Not just today, but for centuries, for hundreds of years,
#
folk songs, folk stories have been telling you the difference
#
between the right and wrong, the big and small, the rich and the poor.
#
The same thing has happened in the jatak katha as well.
#
So these things are with us, they are part of our heritage.
#
The PWA is giving form and shape to a lot of concerns
#
that are around us, that are brewing, that have been brewing for centuries around us.
#
The only difference is that here is a movement, the first of its kind,
#
that brings so many people together. Why?
#
Because essentially there is nothing in that movement
#
that any right-thinking person can disagree with.
#
Who will say that feminism is wrong?
#
Who will say that land ownership should not be abolished?
#
Who will say that we will not talk about nationalism?
#
Who will say that we will not raise our voice against anti-imperialism?
#
So in the early days, there are shortcomings,
#
we can talk about them in the future.
#
There are some shortcomings, there are some rigidities
#
that crystallize in the future.
#
But in the early days, when this is a bright, gleaming, shining, new movement,
#
it is full of good people with good ideas, with good intentions.
#
And why does it become so pan-Indian?
#
Why does it become such a pan-Indian thing?
#
Why does it spread so quickly?
#
Because there is something for everybody in it.
#
For women, for men, for old, for young, for the marginalized.
#
There is something that everybody can get out of this.
#
It is touching the lives of everybody.
#
And I think that is the reason for its sudden mass appeal,
#
why it spreads from the 30s to the 40s.
#
It's like a raging fire that is spread across India.
#
And the film lyricists about whom we keep mentioning,
#
both you and I are mindful of the impact they have had
#
on our popular culture, on our popular consciousness.
#
Many of the film lyricists are picking up and amplifying
#
these progressive ideas through their songs.
#
The cinema of the 40s and the 50s is talking of progressive ideas.
#
So at this point I must tell my listeners that you mentioned Rashid Jahan,
#
one of the writers of Angare.
#
You've written a great book on her called A Rebel
#
and her cause, the life and work of Rashid Jahan.
#
So that is one more book that my listeners can pick up right away.
#
Yes, please do. Go out and buy it.
#
It's a book written with a lot of love.
#
I just adored that book.
#
Yeah, so everyone must buy that.
#
Here's my next question.
#
I feel that artists everywhere face this dilemma
#
that how much do you turn your gaze inwards,
#
how much do you turn it outwards.
#
For example, in Kashi Ka Asi,
#
Kashi Nath Singh has this memorable line that I often quote
#
and I'll give the family-friendly version of it on the show,
#
bhaar mein jaye duniya ham bajaye harmoniya.
#
And that's kind of one way of looking at it.
#
But what is apparent with the progressive writers' movement
#
Not just across social classes and caste and gender and all of that,
#
but even across nations.
#
Like something happens far away, like you mentioned in 1961,
#
And Faiz writes about him, Saher writes about him.
#
In fact, I'll quote these English lines from Saher
#
after translation for my listeners
#
and maybe you can share Faiz's Urdu as well.
#
Tyranny has no caste, no community, no status, no dignity.
#
Tyranny is simply tyranny, from its beginning to its end.
#
Blood, however, is blood. It becomes a hundred things.
#
Shapes that cannot be obliterated.
#
Flames that can never be extinguished.
#
Chants that can never be suppressed.
#
And again, sort of speaking of the universality of the human experience.
#
It doesn't matter if something happens somewhere else to someone else.
#
It kind of concerns all of us.
#
And how does one think of sort of the balance between these two?
#
Because a danger in this sort of approach
#
is that it can shape towards activism,
#
which can actually dilute the art itself.
#
You know, Milan Kundera famously warned against,
#
you know, if you bring too much politics into art,
#
it becomes activism and doesn't remain art.
#
And all of these people did so much great work.
#
And that is at the same time speaking of the world
#
and speaking of the human condition.
#
So what do you feel about this particular
#
sort of the difficulty of maintaining this particular balance?
#
And why did that movement dissipate?
#
Why did it kind of fade away?
#
You're actually asking me a bunch of very complex questions.
#
I'm so sorry for bunching them together.
#
They are complex, they are interesting and they deserve long answers.
#
I'm not sure I'll be able to do justice to all of them.
#
I'll see how many I can remember.
#
The one was about cosmopolitanism.
#
I think the progressive's greatest contribution was that they were not insular.
#
Yes, they were talking about purely Indian things,
#
but they were also willing to look outside of India.
#
The common cause that we are referring to is not just about
#
what is happening within the borders of this country.
#
So it is not just the Telangana movement
#
or the naval mutiny off the coast of Mumbai or things like that.
#
They're talking of those things also.
#
But they're also talking about Asia and Africa,
#
the awakening that is happening in Asia and Africa.
#
With independence of India,
#
we see a similar awakening in other parts of the world.
#
The people in other countries which are either colonized
#
or which are enslaved in some form or the other,
#
they are saying, let's throw off the yoke of tyranny,
#
the way India has done it.
#
So many, it's like a domino effect.
#
In different parts of Asia, in different parts of Africa,
#
country after country is standing up and saying we want to be sovereign.
#
You mentioned Patrice Lumumba,
#
the first democratically elected president of Congo
#
Now this happens in 1961.
#
And you might say that we've got enough on our hands.
#
There's so much happening in India.
#
We've just had one war. We're preparing for the next war.
#
How does it matter to us if some small country in Africa,
#
the president is assassinated?
#
But no, the Indian progressives are writing in white heat.
#
They are saying that, listen, this is the murder of democracy.
#
And this is what I like.
#
But remember that by the 60s,
#
the progressive writers' movement is not even as strong
#
as it is during its high noon of the mid to late 40s.
#
It is a weakened force.
#
But even so, even though it is weakened,
#
even though it has a lot on its plate,
#
it has many things nibbling away at its skirts and weakening it,
#
we'll come to those forces also in a bit.
#
But even so, we have writers like Sahir, like Faiz,
#
the wonderful poet from Hyderabad,
#
using this instance of the assassination of Patrice Lumumba
#
The share that you quoted in Urdu, I think it is as follows.
#
Now, there is no mention of Patrice Lumumba in this,
#
no mention of Congo, no mention of Africa.
#
But you know the context.
#
I come to the context again and again
#
because context often defines a text.
#
This has been written at that time.
#
The same Majroor Sultan, sorry,
#
Maqdum Mahiyuddin also writes a poem of Hyderabad,
#
So what is happening in different parts of the world
#
Faiz wrote that beautiful poem
#
about the Rosenberg trial in America.
#
Now you might think that with so much happening in Pakistan,
#
why is he bothered about the Rosenberg trial in distant America?
#
So those of us who were killed on this dark path that we set out on,
#
it's about the murder, the killing of the Rosenberg couple.
#
And it's about the witch hunt of the communists
#
that is happening in America.
#
So the point here is that we have a literary movement
#
that is showing the way to tell people to not be insular.
#
I am reminded of a conversation I had with Shashi Tharoor
#
I was doing a Q&A with him,
#
and he said that his parents' generation
#
was actually more cosmopolitan, more outward-looking,
#
And I think it's true that we are more globalised,
#
which is not to say we are more cosmopolitan
#
or we like to think that the world is a village.
#
But are we adopting the concerns and the dilemmas
#
and the problems of the village?
#
We still want to clutch our own hurts, our own sorrows,
#
our own sense of being hurt, our hurt sensibilities.
#
How mindful are we of the rest of the village
#
which we claim as ours?
#
We love to use expressions like
#
it takes a village to raise a baby,
#
or the world is our village.
#
But what is happening in that village
#
if somebody has been hurt in that village?
#
Are you today willing to make common cause?
#
Are you today willing to be like Sahir
#
and speak up for the murderer of Patrice Lumumba?
#
Because you are saying,
#
I have big problems of my own.
#
So the dichotomy and the irony I see here
#
is that we are consumed by our own worries,
#
by our own anxieties, by our own hurt sensibilities.
#
And we are not willing to extend that hand of friendship,
#
of solidarity, of sympathy with others who have been hurt
#
or are marginalized or pushed in other ways.
#
How many of us found solidarity with the farmer's strike?
#
You know, for us in Delhi, it was a big thing.
#
I don't know if it affected you to the same extent in Bombay.
#
I know there were marches and so on.
#
we had the farmers camping at our doorstep for a year,
#
over a year, till those draconian laws were eventually repealed.
#
So those farm laws were affecting many of us, not all of us.
#
Those of us who were affected by it were consumed by the anxiety
#
that these are the people who bring food to our table.
#
When they are affected,
#
how many of us are extending a hand of friendship and solidarity
#
or saying we are with you?
#
A great many of us were blithe with this regard.
#
You know, we bought the larger narrative that was peddled to us
#
that they are somehow dangerous people who will come and upset
#
our pretty comfortable lives.
#
So there were very many of us who thought that
#
they were some sort of threat to civilized society.
#
So I think these larger narratives that are peddled
#
There was a time when the poet was the public intellectual,
#
We have a Sol Gulzar, we have a Javed Akhtar
#
who raises his voice about the pandemic,
#
about the farmers' rights and talks and writes poetry about them.
#
But by and large, it worries me that there is a blithe disregard
#
even amongst our literary community.
#
We will write a novel that will become a bestseller
#
about people who work in a company that becomes,
#
you know, turned into three idiots
#
or a Chetan Bhagat novelist filmized
#
and its rights are sold for crores of rupees.
#
But certain issues are still considered, you know, no man's land.
#
I'd be very happy to see a film made or an OTT platform
#
picking up farmers' struggles or other things.
#
Certain issues are fashionable.
#
So you have a Gangs of Vasipur or you have a story about,
#
you know, the smaller towns that are now becoming,
#
you know, a Dahar or Kathal, which is picked up by OTT platforms.
#
You have a slice of small town India being served on an OTT platform.
#
But we are still choosing them.
#
We are choosing things that are picturesque, that make nice stories.
#
You've lamented that one no longer sees great fiction in Urdu.
#
Tell me about the trajectory of Urdu literature through the decades.
#
Is it kind of related or simultaneous with the sort of the dissipation
#
of the whole progressive writers' movement?
#
Is it because there was a sense in independence that,
#
oh, you know, the big battle has been won,
#
and now we can sort of chill and take it easy?
#
And also tell me about sort of the ecosystem around literature
#
in each of these languages, because to some extent,
#
the arts would also depend on what is happening in society.
#
If, you know, one, there is the whole politics against Urdu,
#
two, I am guessing more and more English has become the big language
#
which everybody wants to learn for instrumental reasons.
#
A lot of the publishing industry may then, you know, privilege that.
#
So give me a sense of the ecosystem around literature,
#
the publishing, the writers, the artists.
#
Give me a sense of how that has played out through the decades.
#
First, let me just correct my statement which you have interpreted
#
to mean that I have said that no great fiction is being written.
#
I am not saying that in Urdu.
#
I am saying no great novel has been written in recent times.
#
My bad, my bad. I think I must have read it in an article actually.
#
I was picking up from what you said.
#
I will not say that no great fiction is being written in Urdu.
#
Yes, it is true that we have not had a major defining, definitive, epic,
#
iconic novel such as, for example,
#
Aak Ka Darya Baako Ratulain Haider in recent times.
#
And it is very bewildering for me, and I have many, many theories about it,
#
A lot of fiction, as in short stories, is happening,
#
and a fair amount of it is happening in different parts of the country,
#
wherever Urdu is flourishing, in Aurangabad, in Hyderabad,
#
in different parts of Maharashtra where Urdu is very...
#
Rehman Abbas from Bombay is doing amazing creative writing.
#
He has, in fact, written a couple of novels,
#
so I won't say there is nothing.
#
Rehman Abbas from Bombay has written some very good novels also.
#
Other writing happening, such as Zakiya Mashadi from Patna,
#
SM Ashraf, who is a retired income tax commissioner.
#
So there is writing happening in Gujarat, in different parts of Uttar Pradesh.
#
I won't say there is no fiction at all.
#
It's of a different kind.
#
We can't stick to one yardstick and say everything has to match up to a Manto,
#
to a Ratulain Haider, to an Ismat Chokhtai.
#
The literary canon changes with time, and the yardsticks of fiction change.
#
Styles of fiction change.
#
So I've just brought out a collection of Urdu short stories,
#
best modern Urdu short stories.
#
It just came out in December 23, published by HarperCollins.
#
It's called Urdu Best Modern Stories.
#
The concerns are changing.
#
The ways of writing is changing,
#
which is not to say good writing is not happening.
#
I'm not saying that at all.
#
I will also not say that literature is being written in isolation of society.
#
The stories I've picked up for this collection reflect society in some way or the other,
#
not all, because not all writing must be socially engaged.
#
If we were to go back to the reasons why the progressive writers' movement
#
did not decline or peter out or die,
#
but it kind of lessened and diminished in importance from its high noon in the 40s,
#
was in a purely literary sense the rise of another movement,
#
which was happening as this movement was going up.
#
The other movement, which is called modernism, was also gaining ascendancy.
#
And this modernism, you might think modernism and progressivism are the same things,
#
but no, they occupy two ends of the literary spectrum.
#
Modernism was, in Urdu it's called Jadidiyat.
#
It was saying that it's okay for a writer to talk of his hurts, his concerns,
#
his anxieties, his dilemmas, his disconnect from society.
#
And what he writes, what he says may or may not make sense to you,
#
but it's perfectly legitimate and okay for a writer to talk of that,
#
his sense of angst, his dislocation.
#
And he can evolve as obtuse, as obscure a set of images and metaphors as he wants.
#
And he need not write socially purposive, socially engaged, socially involved writing.
#
He can talk of himself. He need not write of society.
#
So Jadidiyat and progressivism were at loggerheads.
#
And in the 50s and by the 60s, we begin to see that progressives are occupying one end of the literary spectrum
#
and the modernists, the jadid parasat are occupying the other end of the spectrum.
#
which makes sense to me.
#
This is Sheharyar, who was both jadid, who was both progressive.
#
Let me quote from memory a very small poem by Sheharyar,
#
which I see as an example of how you can be both jadid parasat and progressive in some cases and be so successfully.
#
It could be just a regular night, or it could be a swarming of dark forces coming together of some forces which are inimical to you, to society.
#
What is sitara? It is an emblem of hope.
#
What is seeing with your eye, holding with your, touching with your hand?
#
What is all this? This is, it could be an activist suggestion that touch it, hold it, see it, so it is real.
#
Now, what is happening in a purely literary sense is that the jadid are saying,
#
I am going to evolve my own vocabulary.
#
Here, in the case of Sheharyar,
#
There is no mention of any one dark force.
#
But to me, it seems clear that the subtext is that, you know, there is something happening.
#
There is something on the horizon and it is up to you whether you want to touch it and feel it and make it real or you don't.
#
So the jadid parasat are saying that I will talk of my hurts, my sorrows, my anxieties in my own way.
#
The progressives are saying, no, you cannot afford to be oblique and obscure.
#
Talk about the dark forces, name them.
#
In the process, what you were earlier alluding to, there is a charge of propaganda.
#
There is a charge of sloganeering against the progressives.
#
One charge and in some cases justifiably that is made against the progressives was that they were becoming very strident in their propaganda, in their sloganeering.
#
And in the process, maybe literature took a hit.
#
Maybe good poetry took a hit because what was being churned out, not by all, but by some progressives, was in the nature of sloganeering.
#
And it was not good literature.
#
It was not good poetry.
#
And so they allowed ideology to override the demands of literature.
#
So it's a fine balance that the poet and the writer actually have to make between ideology and literature.
#
Some are able to do it very successfully, like the share you and I quoted from Sahir written for Patrice Lumumba.
#
It was written for Patrice Lumumba, but it is still quoted.
#
And I actually feel, even though you mentioned the importance of context while talking about it, that out of any context, it is also incredibly powerful.
#
But that is the test of good literature.
#
It rises above its time and circumstance and speaks and continues to speak.
#
This was written during a time of great oppression in Pakistan, but it is not about Pakistan.
#
In Delhi, when teachers sit on a strike against the vice chancellor in Delhi University, they say,
#
And when the workers in a factory in the outskirts of Delhi sit on a strike against the management and sing,
#
they are not talking about the Pakistan affairs.
#
They are talking about the Haryana and Gurgaon of their times and what their management in Gurgaon are doing against them.
#
And that is the test of good poetry, that it is not confined to its time and space, that it will continue to speak to you years later, even when the context has changed.
#
Why? Because tyrannies didn't mean injustice is injustice.
#
It can take different garbs, it can speak in different voices, but if something is unjust, it continues to be unjust.
#
If the rich have more power than the weak and the poor, then that injustice, that inequality remains so.
#
Fifty years later, it will remain so.
#
And I am reminded of the resurrection of faizs, hum dekhenge in recent times.
#
Hum dekhenge. Lazim hai ki hum bhi dekhenge. Yes, yes, yes.
#
It was written jab budh uthwaye jayenge. So it seems to be about jab is kaabe se sab budh uthwaye jayenge.
#
There were some people in India who created a controversy where none was there and they said this is a very Islamic poem and it should be banned.
#
The reference to the Buddha and the Kaaba is because he wrote it when he was imprisoned.
#
And he thought all these references to the Buddha and the Kaaba will pass through the censors who were reading his poetry and they'll think,
#
But the Buddha and the Kaaba and all of those seemingly Islamic references are actually to injustice, to the paving of the way of a more just society.
#
So I think these are red herrings that people get swayed by and they refuse to see the context.
#
Again, we go back to the context that is often more important than a text.
#
And so this poem is a wonderful example of that.
#
Once upon a time, if you were sort of a creative person, you love storytelling and Urdu was your first language,
#
it would be natural for you to want to be a writer in Urdu and all your incentives are driving you there.
#
Today, we live in a time where like first of all, many of us then as now are multilingual.
#
But you also live in a time where a storyteller doesn't just have one medium to tell a story.
#
And even within a medium, there isn't just one form to tell a story.
#
Today, what blogging made possible was you can write 80 words, you can read 8,000 words, you can read 80,000 words.
#
You don't have to do an 800 word article. No filter, no gatekeepers. You don't have to be with the news cycle.
#
You can write exactly what you want. And so there is that freedom there.
#
Today, young creators are jumping into YouTube, TikTok.
#
TikTok unfortunately got banned, which I thought was a tremendous tragedy
#
because there was such an outpouring of creativity happening there across our towns and villages.
#
Again without filter. And it was just beautiful.
#
And by the way, you spoke of WhatsApp University earlier.
#
Let me tell you that I teach an online writing course.
#
And when I discovered TikTok, I was so happy with it.
#
I thought I put together a course called TikTok in Indian society to sort of share some theories
#
and what it revealed about how we were changing.
#
And the only possible way to teach that course was on WhatsApp.
#
Because I would have to share hundreds of vertical videos.
#
Or you can't call on Zoom. You can't do anything.
#
So that was actually, literally, WhatsApp University.
#
But to get away from the digression to my question,
#
today a creative person has many, many avenues.
#
You can make a reel. You can make a short film on YouTube.
#
You can write a blog. You can write a newsletter. You can do everything.
#
The whole ecosystem for a creative person has changed.
#
If you want to protest also, you have more new creative ways of protesting.
#
Which I think also affects the structure of movements.
#
Because today anyone can enter a movement at low cost just by tweeting.
#
And that leads to a lot of performative behaviour.
#
But that's a different matter.
#
So give me a sense of that landscape of how Urdu literature has changed.
#
Has it been adversely affected by this?
#
What was Urdu publishing like in 1930, 1950 and 1970?
#
Is that a possible reason that people have stopped writing great novels in Urdu?
#
For example, as you pointed out, everyone should obviously pick up your new collection.
#
As you pointed out, there is a lot of work happening.
#
But give me a sense of those incentives.
#
Because it seems to me that if I'm a young writer in Urdu, today I have like a thousand options.
#
Unlike, say, 1930 where a book is considered at the pinnacle of everything and so on and so forth.
#
Let me address two things here.
#
First, the literary ecosystem itself.
#
Then I'll come to the Urdu one separately because I see them as distinct.
#
Writing in English offers you that many more options.
#
Writing in Urdu offers you that many fewer options.
#
Why? Because of the medium.
#
But we'll come to that in a bit.
#
I go to universities and colleges and speak to young people.
#
There's a hunger to write and to be published.
#
Everybody is in a hurry to write.
#
Of course, my first piece of very ageist advice is read, read, read, and then start writing.
#
That is seen with some skepticism because everybody wants to be published.
#
To that I say that when I was young and in my generation, if you wanted to be a writer,
#
the one option that was easily and freely available to you was writing your own diary
#
because that was one thing you could do because you were not dependent on anybody.
#
That is where you wrote innermost thoughts, where you learned to formulate ideas and put them into words and so on.
#
Otherwise, there weren't that many options.
#
There was a school magazine or a college magazine, but that was so passed through the school editor, this and that.
#
Young people today are blessed in that they have any number of options.
#
As you say, a lot of it is performative.
#
You put out a post on Facebook, on Twitter, on hundreds of options that you have, Snapchat, this, that, whatever.
#
It suffers from a built-in inadequacy, which is the lack of a filter, which is both good and bad.
#
It is unbridled freedom of expression.
#
You put it out there, you let it hang out there in public, which is all very good.
#
But in the process, there is no quality control.
#
Here we are not even talking of political correctness, rightness and wrong, about something being outright offensive.
#
We are not even going there.
#
We are talking of the nuts and bolts of writing.
#
There is nobody to tell you.
#
I read very badly formulated, badly written, grammatically incorrect, gross sounding ideas put out there.
#
A formal print medium had these checks and balances.
#
There was an editor who looked at your writing, who fixed your writing, who, at least if nothing else, took care of the grammatical major bloomers.
#
Now there is no one to do that.
#
You know, this comes with pros and cons.
#
We are still talking of English writing.
#
I'll come to Urdu writing in a bit.
#
Here, when you put it out there, the lack of filter works for, well, it's freedom of expression.
#
The vortories of freedom of expression say the idea is to put it out there rather than be worried about niceties.
#
I'm not entirely sure what good it does.
#
I am old fashioned to the extent that I believe that what you need to say needs to be said in as felicitous a manner as possible for it to be effective communication.
#
Communication is not just a barrage of words.
#
Communication, to be effective, has to serve certain purposes.
#
It therefore must have certain criteria.
#
Those criteria are accessibility.
#
What I'm saying cannot be gibberish for it to be communication.
#
I need to be comprehensible.
#
Often a great deal of this blog writing or tweets or posts or whatever, they come under the broad category of gibberish.
#
Because nobody has thought it through.
#
Because nobody has thought of, you know, putting some time and effort in what it's verbal diarrhea.
#
What we don't need is verbal diarrhea.
#
What we need is something with some amount of nuance.
#
So either the checks and balances have to come from you yourself or then don't pass it off as serious writing.
#
Then just see it as I'm letting it all hang out there.
#
If you have ambitions of being a writer, you will need some rigor.
#
You will need somebody.
#
In Urdu, it's called isla.
#
The greatest poet used to make his isla.
#
People used to go to Ghalib to tell him to make his isla.
#
Which means whatever poetry, and in poetry in Urdu, there's always been a tradition of mentoring, of being an ustad.
#
So the ustad's job was to tinker, to tweak, to take away some flab, to remove excess,
#
to suggest brutally or kindly, depending on your temperament, what is wrong with this,
#
of just maybe adding a word here or there, you know.
#
So the isla had its own qualities.
#
You learned from the master, from the ustad.
#
This is a general thing about communication, that we all need some isla.
#
At least in our formative years, young people, when they're starting out,
#
if they're just putting it out there, it's different,
#
but if they have some ambition of becoming professional writers or serious writers,
#
they will need mentoring, they will need somebody to read what they have written
#
and to tell them that this is wrong, this is right.
#
This is a general thing, we come now to Urdu.
#
I don't see the same sort of writing happening in Urdu on social media.
#
Yes, on my feed, I get a lot of posts where I'm marked or flagged about writing in Urdu.
#
Even iPhones now have Urdu script, so you can actually write a tweet in Urdu,
#
using the Urdu font, and put it out there in Urdu.
#
I did write it, but how many people will read it?
#
to also read and benefit from the import of these words that I'm putting out there.
#
So that two-line share, instead of writing in Urdu, I will use Roman.
#
You asked, your question was specifically about Urdu writing.
#
It's neither dead nor dying. It is happening, it's happening in pockets.
#
What is remarkable and very interesting is that we have very few whole-time Urdu writers.
#
There was a Christian Chander amongst us who was a full-time writer.
#
He did not have a day job while he did something else and he wrote.
#
He just wrote. He wrote in Urdu, he earned his living from writing in Urdu.
#
Over the years, fewer and fewer instances of people who are whole-time writers in Urdu.
#
We all have writers who do something.
#
There was a Kuratullah and Haider who was a full-time writer.
#
There was an Ismat Chuktai who earned her living from writing, be it for films, scripts or novels or short stories.
#
That generation is now almost gone.
#
I can think of very few people who earn a living, Frugal and Spartan though it might be, only from writing.
#
Almost all have some sort of day job or some sort of other source of income, and then they also write.
#
This is also maybe one of the reasons, of the many reasons, one of the reasons why we don't have major big novels.
#
Why? Because novels require time and a certain amount of effort.
#
Rehman Abbas is of course an exception who is writing novels and good novels.
#
There are some others also.
#
It's not that Urdu novel writing has become extinct, but we see more short stories.
#
We see more poetry being written in Urdu because short stories take less time to write, poetry takes less time to write.
#
These are all people who have day jobs.
#
Somebody is a police officer who dabbles in poetry.
#
Somebody works in the railways and does this.
#
Somebody is a university teacher and does this.
#
So that is the profile of the Urdu writer.
#
I think the profile of the writer has changed.
#
They all have some sort of jobs and they also happen to be writing in Urdu, be it poetry or prose.
#
That is the one very significant change I see.
#
But I will not say that it is dying or is dead or it is flourishing in pockets.
#
That is the best way to put it.
#
And has it been a recent revival because of Rikta and so on?
#
Of course, there is a revival of an interest in Urdu per se.
#
I do not see it as immediately reflecting in modern contemporary writing in Urdu.
#
I do not link the existence of festivals, lit-fests and the greater prominence being given to Urdu in lit-fests.
#
I am going to Kala Ghora in Bombay where my two sessions are both circling around Urdu in one form or the other.
#
So it is not as though the festival per se encourages the writing of Urdu, no.
#
But festivals, literary festivals are making the space for work in Urdu.
#
So I do not think that the festival is encouraging writing per se.
#
It is not that they have sponsored me to write in Urdu.
#
No, nobody sponsored anybody to write in Urdu, as far as I know.
#
Whatever writing is happening is happening on people's own initiative.
#
But certainly the space being given by lit-fests, whether it is a JLF having a book launch of an Urdu book,
#
the instance of two major literary awards given to works of translation from Urdu recently,
#
means Khalid Javed's book, which was written in Urdu, which was translated into English, got a major award, the JCB prize.
#
So all of these awards, many of them which come with handsome cash awards, being given to works of translation,
#
A, that in itself is remarkable and not works written originally in English,
#
All of this is very, very heartening because we see this as an interest of an interest in Urdu, a revival of an interest in Urdu.
#
This revival of interest is not linked to a generation of jobs for those who know Urdu.
#
That I am not able to see.
#
I don't see suddenly the government opening up jobs for those who know Urdu,
#
be it as broadcasters or be it as university teachers or whatever.
#
I am not able to see that.
#
But I am definitely able to see a very pronounced interest in Urdu per se,
#
be it in the singing, be it in the dastan goi, be it in more ghazal programs, be it even in panel discussions,
#
be it in anthologies such as mine.
#
You know, 30 years ago in 1992, when I first published with the Premchand stories that I alluded to, it was a flash in the pan.
#
Now, the same Harper Collins that 30 years ago did my Premchand stories has done this new book of mine again.
#
And in this interim, in these 30 years, I see that much more interest in Bhasha literatures.
#
And speaking of Urdu in particular, book review editors.
#
It's a cumulative thing.
#
Don't think it's just any one thing.
#
Everything comes together and adds to that interest.
#
A book review editor in a newspaper or a magazine will make the space for a book review about a book in Urdu or about Urdu or translated from Urdu.
#
So when you read a book review in a Hindu newspaper or in India Today or Outlook,
#
you're traveling by plane and you come across an outlook in the plane.
#
You read that and you say, oh, there's a new book about Urdu that's out.
#
So book reviews are one thing.
#
They don't directly impinge on sales.
#
It's not like a book review means 2000 copies sold.
#
Lit Fest organizers, if they have a session for you or if they have a book launch for your new book,
#
which is about Urdu, and they agree to launch that book at a JLF, you get a sudden Philip.
#
So lit fests, all of these lit fests.
#
And if it happens in way out places like I went to the Kalinga lit fest in Orissa in Bhubaneshwar.
#
Now, if in Bhubaneshwar we are talking about Urdu, I think it's great.
#
If in Kochi or Kerala or Coimbatore or Madras, we are talking, we are having a Dastan Goy performance.
#
If 50 percent of the words you don't understand, but you understand 50 percent and you're soaking in the ambience of that Dastan Goy.
#
Everything leads to a larger good.
#
It's true that they are not able to understand every word of that Dastan Goy or every word of that Ghazal concert.
#
If the import is reaching you, if it is creating a mahal, if it is creating a certain fiza in which you can partake of the
#
sense, the largest sense of what that singer is singing or what the Dastan Goy is reciting, good.
#
And why am I working via English?
#
Because I'm perfectly fluent in Urdu, but you and I are having this conversation where I occasionally lapse into Urdu.
#
But by and large, this conversation is in English, even though I'm talking about Urdu.
#
So people like me are also using English as a bridge.
#
If I go to a Punjab or a small town in Uttar Pradesh where I think my audience will understand me better if I speak in Hindustani,
#
then I will seamlessly switch into Hindustani and start saying the same thing that I'm saying to your listeners right now in English.
#
I will start saying this in Hindustani because I will feel that maybe they can get a better sense of what I'm saying.
#
If I'm speaking in a language, they understand and maybe they don't understand me entirely in English.
#
But when I go south of the Vindhyas, maybe I'll speak entirely in English and use fewer Hindi words or Urdu words or fewer direct quotes from Urdu poetry
#
because I feel my audience will understand what I'm saying.
#
And I always enjoy going to the southern states and speaking about Urdu because again I feel that one is opening a window here.
#
And the layer is that I agree with you that there is a danger in people just putting whatever they feel like putting out there.
#
There's a lot of rubbish out there.
#
But there's this phrase called Sturgeon's Law and Sturgeon's Law says that 95% of everything is crap.
#
And it is just that we have more of that 95% in our face today, but that is just the way it is.
#
However, I actually encourage my writing students to write as much as they can because you learn by doing.
#
If you write clearly, you begin to think clearly, writing aids in your thinking.
#
So I think it's like going to a writing gym.
#
So I feel that yeah, the vast majority of stuff will still be crap.
#
But there will be a few who by constant iteration, by going out there, by writing again and again, will just automatically become better.
#
Like the way I think about it is and these are offhand numbers I'm throwing.
#
But assume in the past out of every thousand people, five would become writers.
#
Today, I think out of every thousand people, 15 can become writers if a hundred of them start blogs.
#
So obviously, we'll still have a majority of crap.
#
But I think the only way to sort of, you know, become better is to do something again and again and again.
#
So in that regard, yeah, but not at the risk of dumbing down, not at the risk of encouraging mediocrity.
#
Everybody doesn't have to be a writer.
#
Yes, you need to be coherent. You need to be, you know, you need to be comprehensible.
#
You need to be accessible.
#
What you're saying and writing needs to be understood because that is the basic rule of communication and needs to be said in as felicitous a manner as possible.
#
So we are not encouraging the vast population to become writers.
#
That is not our job. Who will be a reader then?
#
There need to be readers as well, just as there are writers.
#
The other thing I feed is that my worry here is that if everything gets published and there's a lot of vanity publishing happening,
#
even mainstream publishing houses have a dedicated wing for vanity publishing.
#
They may call it by any fancy name, but essentially it is vanity publishing, which is I pay you money and you publish my book.
#
In the process, we have done away with a filter, a very important filter,
#
which is that what appears in book form should be something which should have some merit, some value, something that somebody gains from.
#
So many times we are seeing things that have no business being out there on our shelves.
#
Again, you can well you can play devil's advocate and say who decides who decides the merit of a thing.
#
You know, is there a weighing scale? Is there a is there an instrument or tool whereby you do that?
#
But as as as as you do writing workshops, I often speak to young people.
#
I think I'm not going to encouraging encourage writing, even as you say that, you know, you will fall and then you will rise and then you will correct yourself.
#
That is that in the best case scenario.
#
But more often than not, what happens is that we are encouraging mediocrity.
#
We are encouraging banality.
#
And I think those are major sins in writing, at least, you know, the way I think about it is that I'm not encouraging everyone to write.
#
I'm just saying I won't discourage anyone from writing and everything finds its own level.
#
So like you correctly said, those values of accessibility of being vivid in your prose were helping people relate to that.
#
If you don't have those values, you won't get any readers and you'll either you'll stop writing or you will inculcate those values to get more readers.
#
Which is also good for me. But I just feel that.
#
And as far as filters are concerned, I think the great, great modern situation we find ourselves in across fields is that the mainstream is crumbled and the filters of the past are irrelevant anyway.
#
Like a couple of years back, I was part of the JCB Literature Prize Jury with Sara Rai and others.
#
And we lamented the quality of the books that came to us because there was so much rubbish that we had difficulty putting a long list together.
#
I mean, it was just unspeakably bad.
#
But then the point is that, you know, I've had some 2400 writing students so far in the last three years.
#
Many of them have started newsletters.
#
Many of them, a couple of them have written books as well.
#
And I just feel that, you know, may a thousand flowers bloom.
#
You want. So I'm not going to go to a non-writer and say, hey, block shuru karo, you know, that's rubbish.
#
And I realized that a lot of the people who want to write, some of them will turn out to be mediocre.
#
But I still encourage everyone to start.
#
And this is, you know, especially true for its women who need this encouragement the most,
#
because so many women are filled with this imposter syndrome and they will convince themselves that they can't do it before they even try.
#
So I would rather err on the side of getting too much writing out there than sort of getting too little.
#
I've taken a lot of your time today.
#
Three final questions to sort of end with.
#
And one is that there's a quote I love and I ask all my guests about it these days.
#
It's almost become a cliche.
#
Annie Dillard once said, the way we live our days is the way we live our lives.
#
And that has sort of really stayed with me because when we are young, we think of our life in grandiose terms.
#
And I think as one gets older, one realizes that no, ultimately our life boils down to just a collection of all our days.
#
So you want to think about how do I want to spend my time?
#
What are the things that matter to me?
#
What is the stuff that I want to be intentional about, et cetera, et cetera.
#
So tell me about your typical day and your ideal day.
#
Okay, my typical day is a day where I have done some good writing and so is my ideal day the same.
#
A typical day would, I get up very late in the day.
#
I'm not an early riser.
#
And if there's one thing I could change about myself, I would love to be one of those people who are up bright and early and go for morning walks.
#
I'm afraid I don't do that. I am lazy.
#
Yeah. And so I would love to be more energetic and more athletic and more sort of outdoorsy, which unfortunately I'm not.
#
An ideal day, I think, would be one with some good food, some good company, a para or two, or even a line of good writing, either my own or somebody else's, that stays with me.
#
And yes, going to sleep with the thought that my loved ones are okay.
#
Beautiful. My penultimate question is, if I ask you to look ahead, if I ask you to look at where this country is and where it is going,
#
and we've spoken a bit about that in the course of this conversation as well, what gives you hope and what gives you despair?
#
We talked of them actually all through this conversation.
#
There is a lot of despair. There's a lot of frustration, helplessness, sometimes flashes of anger, sometimes rage also,
#
because I feel so invested in the world I live in, in the country I live in, the country that is my home.
#
I am so invested in it that I feel anger and helplessness and all of that.
#
We talked of that and I did talk of the one big fly in the ointment that I see,
#
which is the bigotry that I am now increasingly seeing growing around me, communalism that I see growing around me.
#
So those are things that fill me with a lot of despair.
#
But every now and then there will be a voice of sanity.
#
Every now and then there will be somebody, often strangers, often people that you don't know.
#
In fact, more often than not, there will be strangers.
#
When this bully-buy thing happened to me last year, I got emails and messages.
#
I don't know how they found my emails. I don't know how they found my phone numbers.
#
I got text messages from completely random people.
#
And it is these that fill you with hope.
#
There is goodness in this world. It would be a very dark day when one has to say that the goodness has leached out of our lives.
#
I don't think the human condition is such that all goodness, all decency, all grace, all the ability to show grace under pressure will go out of our lives.
#
No, I don't think it will. I don't think that despair can fully overwhelm me ever, totally.
#
Well said. It's like, to paraphrase from the earlier poem, kiss the star to keep the darkness away and not before the darkness comes.
#
My final question and a much happier question, I'm glad to say.
#
It's a custom of all the guests who come on my show right at the end to recommend for me and my listeners books, films, music that mean a lot to them and it makes them so happy they want to share it with the world.
#
You're even welcome to read out anything that you want to read out that comes to mind, but just art that makes you happy.
#
You know, this is a question ideally that needs a little bit of reflection and I'm not carrying any material with me that I could read from.
#
But off the top of my head, and this would be a very strange example to give for somebody who's been talking about Urdu for the past couple of hours,
#
but the one book I recommend, the one that I like, that I pick up and read, the film too that I pick up and read is Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice.
#
Just the other day I was watching for the nth time, I don't know which version of Pride and Prejudice on Netflix and there are many, many versions of the film made.
#
The novel continues to give me delight. I love that woman Elizabeth Bennet. You know, she's feisty, she's fun.
#
So I like Jane Austen. I like many of her novels. I read them when I was very young, in school I think.
#
Then I read them again as an undergrad doing English honours. We had Mansfield Park in our course.
#
And then I read them again and then as a mother I gave a copy of Pride and Prejudice to my daughter to read.
#
I'm happy that both my daughters love Jane Austen almost as much as I do.
#
So I realise it's a bit unorthodox choice of a favourite novel or a favourite writer to be handing out to your listeners after having talked about Urdu literature for the past many hours now.
#
But yeah, from the top of my head, she's one author that immediately comes to mind because of her ability to what she called to write on that little inch of ivory.
#
And the fact, what we've been talking about actually, that literature, good literature, rises above its time and circumstance and speaks to you.
#
So she is not talking about the village or the city in England alone or that society.
#
But she's talking about the human condition and she's talking about human frailties.
#
She's talking about human strengths that are not confined to that time in England alone.
#
I think it talks of society, of people. That is why they were called novels of manners.
#
When we talk of Urdu poetry, I enjoy dipping into the Diwan of Mirza Ghalib.
#
For Ghalib, it is said that he has written something for every moment of a human's life.
#
In one of his own share, he says,
#
That this too lies in my heart.
#
And I think he sensed that the poet's job is to really interpret the human heart.
#
So I always have a Diwan-e-Ghalib handy somewhere.
#
And I love to read things that I know by heart, but to just see it written on a page brings enormous pleasure.
#
The other thing I like to have handy, usually somewhere near me, is fares.
#
I lived for a year abroad and in that one year, I'd taken along selected works of fares.
#
And that was like my Bible. I would take it out in that distant, cold country.
#
When I was miserable and homesick, I would just read a lot of fares to myself.
#
That always gives me great pleasure.
#
Oh, many, many. We quoted today.
#
Another that I like very much is
#
There is a two-collection volume of poetry called Hindustan Hamara.
#
It was edited by and put together by Janisar Akhtar, a fine Urdu poet, a progressive poet,
#
today regrettably known only by a few as the poet Javed Akhtar's father.
#
But that is not his claim to fame. He was a fine poet in his own right.
#
And this collection, this anthology that he's edited is beautiful.
#
I use it all the time for the columns, for the writings, the different kinds of writings I do.
#
Hindustan Hamara has been very intelligently put together with a fine way of drawing up the list of contents subject-wise.
#
So let's say you're looking on, it's about India, as the title suggests, Urdu poetry on different aspects of India.
#
So there's politics, there's society, there is a whole bunch of things like
#
So there'll be poetry on
#
So there'll be poetry on the seasons.
#
There'll be poetry on cities, Bhopal, Agra, Aligarh, Bombay, different poetry written, Bengal ka Jadu, that kind of thing.
#
There'll be poetry on political milestones, Gandhi's first non-cooperation movement, Gandhi's second non-cooperation movement, independence, partition, the first 25 years of independence.
#
So there'll be political events, there'll be social events, there'll be poetry on culture,
#
our religious leaders, our political leaders, so there'll be poetry on Gandhi, Nehru, this, that.
#
There'll be poetry on our religious figures, on Mahavira, on Buddha, on Nanak, on Ram, on Christian.
#
So much poetry has been written.
#
Taken together, what this two volume tells me time and time again, and why I mine it time and time again,
#
and there is this collection of essays that I'm currently writing for Simon and Schuster.
#
It's called In the Mirror of Urdu.
#
I keep using this book and other such sources to make one large point, which I express in different ways,
#
which is about the Catholicity of Urdu poetry, which is about not one or two or three, but multiple strands that run through Urdu literature,
#
and more specifically Urdu poetry, that the Urdu poet, not just now, not just the contemporary poet,
#
but for centuries, for hundreds of years, has been concerned about many things.
#
And it is so wrong, it is so erroneous and completely distorted view to see Urdu as A, the language of Muslims,
#
or Urdu poetry to be just romantic poetry.
#
I have nothing against romantic poetry.
#
I love romantic poetry, but Urdu is not Urdu poetry, is not just the poetry about love and romance and loss and longing.
#
It has a whim and vigor.
#
It has political muscle.
#
It talks of a myriad concerns, and it does so in different voices, in different ways.
#
So Janisar Akhtar's Hindustan Hamara is also available in Devnagari script.
#
I would urge people to keep a copy handy at home.
#
Marvelous. Thank you so much for spending so much time today.
#
It's just been a privilege, and I'm sure I'll learn a lot when I hear this episode again.
#
Thank you very much for having me on this.
#
Thank you for listening to this episode.
#
Please share it with anyone who you think might be interested.
#
Head on over to your nearest bookstore, online or offline.
#
And ideally offline, because that's what Rakshanda would prefer.
#
And pick up all her books.
#
I just love all her work. They're all linked from the show notes.
#
You can follow Rakshanda on Twitter at Rakshandajaleel.
#
You can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
#
You can browse past episodes of The Scene and the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
#
Thank you for listening.
#
Did you enjoy this episode of The Scene and the Unseen?
#
If so, would you like to support the production of this show?
#
You can go over to sceneunseen.in slash support
#
and contribute any amount you like to keep this podcast alive and kicking.
