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Sometimes I marvel at how we live in a time of such great progress.
#
At one level, when I look at the technological changes around me, it seems that the world
#
has changed more in the last 30 years than perhaps in any 100 year period in history
#
That pace is accelerating, I think that's a damn good thing.
#
But equally, we live in stable times where there is also much that hasn't actually changed.
#
For example, the India I was born in still exists.
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It is still more or less the same lines on a map.
#
I grew up with English as a link language that connects us to the world and also to
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the rest of India, and that is still the case.
#
The system of government we had when I was born is still with us.
#
None of our cities have been destroyed, though there has been much change within them.
#
I have never experienced war, and so on and on and on.
#
And then there are periods in history where within a few years, all certainties have vanished.
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The lines on a map have changed, your rulers have changed, the social order has changed,
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and even the official language of the state has changed.
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An old curse says, may you live in interesting times.
#
Well, my guest today has written a book on Delhi between the years 1803 and 1857, and
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my god, those times were interesting.
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At the start of the 19th century, the Marathas were a dominant force.
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But then the East India Company came to prominence, and the nominal Mughal rulers of Delhi became
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more and more irrelevant.
#
Persian, which was once a linked language within India, diminished in importance.
#
The social order was in constant churn.
#
Even the privileged elites were tormented by existential fears.
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Our shape as a society changed in radical ways.
#
I think of those times, and I'm like, wow, it must have been such a terrifying time for
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So many balls up in the air that you don't know which ones to catch, and any one of them
#
could be a bomb, so hey, don't let it fall.
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And yet, in this time of great ferment, art flourished.
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What a time, it must have been to be alive.
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Welcome to The Scene and the Unseen.
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My guest today is Swapna Little, a remarkable historian whose book, The Broken Script, I
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was talking about moments ago.
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The Broken Script is an incredible chronicle of a society in churn, a politics that is
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being reshaped, and individuals who contain multitudes, who are frail and flawed, and
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are also fascinating, and also, sometimes, great.
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Besides this, Swapna has written books on Delhi, is an expert in the old city of Shah
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Jahanabad, and conducts walks around Delhi, on which she has also written books.
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This was such a stimulating conversation for me, one of my favorites on the show.
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Swapna gave me much to think about, much to process, and while all her books are worth
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reading, I think The Broken Script is a masterpiece.
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It's nuanced and gripping at the same time, like the finest novels, and written with rigor
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and detail, which you may not even notice, but at the end of it, you'll feel like you
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have traveled through time and lived in that Delhi, some of which lives on in this Delhi.
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Fantastic conversation, but before we get to it, let me announce that after much hibernation,
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I have become super regular with my newsletter at indiauncut.substack.com, it'll be linked
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from the show notes, please head on over there right now and subscribe, it's free.
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And now for a commercial break.
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Please join us on our journey, and please support us by subscribing to our YouTube channel
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at youtube.com slash Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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The show is called Everything is Everything.
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Please do check it out.
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Swapna, welcome to The Scene in the Unseen.
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It's such a delight to have you here because I've, you know, loved your books, especially
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the Broken Script, and I want to talk to you a lot about, you know, about Delhi, about
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your life, about everything you've learned.
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But first, we must talk about cakes, because a dear mutual friend of ours, Nilanjana Roy,
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has this memorable line about you, and I'm quoting her with permission, where she said
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that we lost a great baker to history, right?
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And apparently you are an incredible baker, Nilanjana was waxing eloquent about your ginger
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bread cakes, I believe, and so on and so forth, so tell me a little bit about your passion
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Well, you know, my mother is a great cook, and she does all sorts of things, and she
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cooks, and she bakes, and stuff, so she was a great inspiration.
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She was a person who encouraged us to go into the kitchen.
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My sister is a great cook, and I am not a great cook in the sense that, for instance,
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I'm not an instinctive cook, I like, I'm as good as my recipe.
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If my recipe doesn't specify put salt, I might leave it out, and I need to know how
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much salt you need to put there, you know, to taste is not my scene.
#
Baking is that precise thing, it's a chemical reaction.
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And if you understand how that chemical reaction works, and what are the different components
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that you are adding in what proportion, and how you are adding them, so because it is
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something that I can grasp at that abstract level of what is going on inside that, and
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I follow my method precisely, I can, that is something I learned that I could do.
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So I kind of, at one point, very briefly, I was very into it.
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It was a period when, of course, I also was going through a bit of a crisis as far as
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the history bit was concerned, I said, oh, I don't think this is going to work out anymore,
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I can't be a historian, so let me do this.
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Delightful, and you know, and that distinction in cooking the two kinds of cooks is very
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I am only instinctive, but a mediocre cook as an instinctive cook, but following directions
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is really not my thing.
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But what, you know, what that leads me to thinking about, like after Nilanjana told
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me this, and I started thinking about it, and I was, of course, reading your books at
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the time, and I thought it all makes sense, because in your books, also, there is that
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meticulousness, where, you know, everything is in its place, everything kind of makes
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A lot of that, of course, I'm sure that the craft of writing prose, nobody starts off
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that way, but you know, that's where you got it, it's meticulous, it's beautifully arranged,
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everything makes sense, and there is also a lot of complexity and nuance in, for example,
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especially in the broken script, which fits in beautifully, it all makes sense, and I
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imagine that's a little bit like baking, and I imagine that at some level, it comes down
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to something that is inherent in a person.
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Like when I think of what is inherent in me, the core thing which took me many, many years
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to realize is that I love to learn new subjects by going to first principles and then figure
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it out from there, and in your case, it just seems to me that a core skill is definitely
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that way of meticulously diving into something, organizing information, so am I like reading
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too much into baking and history, or is that who you are?
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I think you're quite right, that is what I am, because again, if I look back at, say,
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my school years, there were some subjects which escaped me simply because I had, in
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retrospect, I had bad teachers.
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You know, I can't understand math until you tell me why.
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You know, I can't just say, okay, this is a formula, you use it.
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No, I want to know why that formula.
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What does it actually mean?
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What does this, let us say, 2ab or whatever, what does it actually mean?
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So that is very much, I think, according to me, and history is about logic, about figuring
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things out, getting to an explanation for what happened, and based on what you have
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So yeah, I guess this must be, you know, it's coming from the same place, I think.
#
What are your other sort of passions which people may not know about?
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Because everyone will have this, people who don't know you personally will have an image
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of you as someone who's written these rich and wonderful histories, you've written about
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Delhi so well, but one side of you is, you know, the baker toiling away with secret formulas
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and making incredible gingerbread cakes.
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What are the other kind of passions or rabbit holes that you've been into in your life?
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Actually for me, for myself, I think history has been for so long that passion, that you
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ask me and that's where I go in right away, but old Hindi film songs, there's something
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I share with my sister, this love for old Hindi films and it's, you know, that kind
#
I read humour, I read detective fiction, for instance, I mean, the really old fashioned
#
sort, I mean, not necessarily historic fiction, but old fiction.
#
So when I was very young, you know, the Dorothy Sayers, the Agatha Christie, these were things
#
that I grew up really reading and so those were little things, but history has been dominating
#
my life for such a long time now.
#
So it's a pleasure and a hobby and everything.
#
You know, you mentioned your sister twice, I must tell my listeners at this point that
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her sister is Madhulika Little, a very fine author of historical detective fiction.
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I remember reading an Englishman's Cameo many, many years ago, wonderful book, she's created
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this great detective called Muzaffar Jung, you must check out.
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And I must recommend to you as well a book, there's a book by Martin Edwards called The
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Golden Age of Murder, and it is about exactly that era that you're describing, Agatha Christie,
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So it's like a beautiful, like what you've done for Shah Jahanabad, you could say Martin
#
Edwards has done for that genre of crime fiction.
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So I will now appeal to the historian in you to turn your gaze inwards and take me back
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to Mira, take me back to your childhood, you know, if you are to treat yourself like you
#
treated Bahadur Shah's Afar and Shah Alam too and so many others, where should we start?
#
Tell me about your childhood.
#
My childhood has been very interesting in one way, though not atypical of many other
#
My father was in a transferable job, and I have grown up in a large number of places,
#
mostly in North India, and I've been to nine different schools.
#
So it was a very peripatetic childhood, down, really big downside of that is I don't have
#
school friends, because in those, you know, when you're that age, you've been best of
#
friends for one year, and then you move on.
#
You go to a new place, and it was not very easy, and it is not very easy at that age
#
to keep up with old friends like that.
#
And remember, these are the days when you were actually only writing letters.
#
So it was, so I don't have school friends.
#
The other thing was that I had such a range of experiences.
#
I was for a while, I started off in a convent in Assam.
#
That was my first school.
#
Then from there, I was abruptly transferred to Madhya Pradesh, where I went to a Hindi
#
And this was the first time I was actually learning Hindi.
#
And in our home, we didn't speak a lot of Hindi, because it was not a mother tongue
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that my parents shared.
#
So therefore, I was like suddenly, you know, brought here.
#
So this kind of went on, and I've been to school in Assam, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya
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My last school was in, or the school before the last was in Srinagar, in Kashmir.
#
And two months before my board exam, my father was transferred again, and we came to Delhi.
#
And there was no thing, you know, my parents were not like, okay, wow, you have your boards
#
coming up in two months, we must stay here for, no, we are moving, we are moving.
#
So I moved to a new school two months before my board exams.
#
So it made me very kind of adaptable, willing to adapt, shall we say, and, you know, ready
#
to take on whatever comes.
#
So I think that has been a lot of what has gone into who I am.
#
Again, as I said, this idea of not having school friends, I think that has impacted
#
I again, even today have very few close friends.
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Because I guess a lot of people, the first friends, we make up people in school, and
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they kind of stick with you.
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People you meet through work and all is fine.
#
So that kind of, that made a difference.
#
I think actually, in a sense, you and I are still in a relatively lucky generation, that
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we are sort of the bridge between the pre-internet world and the internet world, where you can
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move from communities of circumstance to communities of choice.
#
Like when I think of myself, I am not in touch with any school friends, and I lament that.
#
But most of my friends are actually friends that I met because the internet connected
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all of us, and these are communities of choice.
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And otherwise, I have always kind of, in every physical location I was at, I just
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felt a terrible misfit, and you know, being extremely introverted doesn't help.
#
So have you made a lot of friends through the 2000s onwards, once the internet came
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Yes, definitely in the last 10 years or so, where I have been active on social media.
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Because being such a, I am a very introverted person, I meet very few people physically,
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and even today, this is something that people will find a little unusual, is that I am actually
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more comfortable interacting with people, say, on Facebook or something, having conversations
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on Facebook, on things, rather than actually meeting them in person, because then I will
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You know, it's just, and you're quite right about that, you know, you find people who
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are like-minded, you have these conversations, and it's great, I mean, I enjoy that immensely,
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and I value those relationships a lot.
#
But also, a lot of them, I don't see them turning into something, I don't think that
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necessarily it becomes more meaningful for me to meet those people in person, or to have
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a coffee with them and all that, it might, it might, but a lot of the time, you know,
#
it doesn't occur to me that that's where it should lead.
#
So right now, there is this unusual situation that there is a basement studio in Malviya
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Nagar where there are two terrified introverts trying to have a conversation, but I think
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we are kind of managing just fine.
#
And it's very interesting, you should say that you don't have to meet someone in person
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to have that connection with them and so on, and I've noticed that as well, that you can
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form deep bonds without meeting someone.
#
And there are sort of, I think, two parallel sort of tendencies here, and like one instinct
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is that you must meet people in person because otherwise we can just get lost inside our
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own heads, and I will often lament that I will go to a cafe and there are four friends
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sitting with each other staring into the black screen in their hands and not actually communicating,
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and what is the point, and something is being lost there.
#
Equally, I feel that, you know, that there is a richness to interior life that also has
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great meaning and you don't actually have to go out and go through the social niceties
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and you know, I mean, to go out, you have to dress up, you have to take a shower, you
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have to shave, which I haven't today because it's Delhi and it's too cold, I'm sorry.
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And yeah, and all of that can be terrifying.
#
Tell me a little bit about, you know, your sort of interior life during this period when
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you're moving so many schools and all of that.
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Are you in a house where there are lots of books around?
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You know, are you a daydreamer like I was, and I think many introverts are.
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So give me a sense of that.
#
I was, so for instance, I was an only child to live, I was about five and a half.
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So that by itself meant I was very much on my own and quite happy to daydream a lot of
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the time, and books that I could get hold of, and of course, all, I think children of
#
my generation, we were precocious readers because we were let loose in a house which
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had lots of books unsupervised, you picked up all sorts of things which were not age
#
appropriate and just read, right?
#
So you dipped into all sorts of stuff and you just kind of read it.
#
For me, I remember there was a time when I was going through, I was very interested in
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classical Urdu poetry and classical Urdu poetry because it has all those layers that
#
you need to kind of just, just think about to meditate on to just to get at what is
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this. And so I used to go for long walks and I used to just, you know, play those
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verses in my mind and just think about them.
#
So that kind of time spent just thinking, I think that's very important for me because
#
and very often when I'm writing also, I will get up and I'll just walk because you need
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to get, for me, thinking means I need to get moving a bit.
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So I need to walk, I need that little bit of pacing is required to get the thought
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processes going. So alone time is my default.
#
Do you remember any verses from that time that made an impact on you that you played
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There is one particular Ghazal of Ghalib, which I often kind of demonstrate to people
#
when I talk about what a Ghazal is.
#
So that is a Ghazal, which is quite well known.
#
And one of the couplets that is often recited is,
#
So this is a very standard kind of trope saying that these wonderful, you know, you
#
have such lofty ideas of philosophy that you are now spouting, that if you were not a
#
drunkard, we would have imagined you a vali as a sort of a teacher.
#
So Ghalib is the master of making fun of himself.
#
So this, of course, people have forgotten that this is a humorous thing and people
#
recite it as something very serious that Ghalib is saying that he thinks himself very
#
wise, but he also drinks, so he thinks that he can never be seen as a teacher.
#
But actually, it's a humorous comment on what goes just before.
#
And that particular, the particular couplet which goes before this is something which
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he says, and that's a very profound Sufi thought, he says,
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Which means, who can see God?
#
If there was even a hint, if there was a hint of duality in him, in God, we would
#
have seen him somewhere, which means that God is one and therefore we can't see him
#
If there was a duality, if there was something to see out there, then you would
#
have seen that something, it would be two, but there's only one.
#
So you are God, you can't see.
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So therefore there's nothing to see.
#
So he makes this very profound statement and then being Ghalib makes fun of himself
#
by following it up with this, that all these wonderful profound things that you are
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spewing, if you were not a drunkard, we would have, so, you know, to get into this
#
poetry, to understand it, this is just one example that came into my head, but there
#
are many, many more, which each verse has these different layers and.
#
And I'm just thinking aloud, but I'm thinking that, you know, you've like, there
#
is text and there is context and you've suddenly deepened my appreciation of the
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shared that you read out, you know, by giving the context, by explaining that he
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meant it in a humorous way, don't take it so seriously and so on.
#
And I wonder then whether for anyone who loves art and interest in history is
#
natural and almost necessary to appreciate the art fully, because where
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else can you get the context from?
#
Like in your case, and obviously it's a chicken and egg thing and one can't
#
draw straight lines, but would you say that part of your curiosity, which drove
#
you into these worlds and into these people's lives, it was also that sense
#
that their work became more edgy as it were, since we were talking about
#
technology just a while before this became more edgy, more, more vivid once
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you knew more about them.
#
I mean, I am one person who does approach and particularly my only entry to
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Urdu literature has been through the lens of a historian.
#
I mean, at one level I was already, you know, you listen to ghazals and
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things like that, but it was actually studying some of those commentaries
#
on ghazals, on a little bit of writing on what this is, learning the language
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a little better, that I began to understand the actual depth of all of this.
#
And much of it, and I feel very sad that a lot of this just passes people by.
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So in fact, you know what, I was, I was giving the example of this one ghazal
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and because it has so many of the very, very classical examples of what a ghazal
#
is, it epitomizes those that I often use it to explain.
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And I think that people deserve explanations.
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You know, when I lead a walk and I lead historic heritage walks, I, I go into all
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of this because I think that this complexity is something I want to share
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with people. And I want people to, I want to encourage people to look at things in
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that, in all their complexity.
#
And of course, yes, it's a very important part of why I study history and why I
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want to look at the world through the lens of a historian.
#
I'm also sort of fascinated by that sense of not just liking a ghazal in an
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instinctive way, but also learning to appreciate it.
#
Like in The Broken Script, you speak about this really interesting transition
#
where in the first part of that period that you write about, you essentially learn
#
about poetry through an ustad, you'll go to an ustad, he'll adopt you and he'll
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teach you. And then that begins to change with the printing press.
#
You, you know, you mentioned Qadir Bakh's Sabir's Taskeera, Taskeera with those
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newsletters is sent out.
#
And typically a Taskeera would have, you know, just a reproduction of many poems,
#
perhaps, which were recited at a Mushaira.
#
And what Sabir did, though it is also alleged to have been ghostwritten by
#
Imam Bakh Sanhai, Sanbhai, as you say, I hope I'm pronouncing these right
#
apologies if I'm not. What's really interesting here is that these particular
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Taskeera's newsletters are not just going straight to the poems.
#
They have this long introductory essay about how should shairi be done?
#
What is a kind of meter? What are the kind of sounds you aim for?
#
Et cetera, et cetera, which I, you know, found really very interested in.
#
Like, how do people learn this stuff?
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How do we learn this stuff in the modern age?
#
And one could say it begins with osmosis.
#
And then when you get deeply interested, then you have so many resources today
#
to figure out that it is almost poignant to think that in that age they were,
#
you know, either you find an individual Ustad or later maybe you come across
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one of these and so on and so forth.
#
But, you know, that's perhaps a digression.
#
But a question before that, you've also spoken about
#
the orality of Urdu poetry and how it was largely an oral tradition.
#
And it just so happens that people would, you know, write them down
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and have newsletters or bring out collections.
#
But it was mainly meant to be recited.
#
And my attraction to Urdu poetry, which I know very, very little about.
#
But what always strikes me first is just at the visceral level of sound,
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that it sounds so incredibly beautiful.
#
And that is really not true of a lot of English poetry.
#
The one could argue that English itself is not such a musical language.
#
Is that something that kind of drew you into it?
#
Like when you were getting into ritual poetry as a kid,
#
when you were absorbing all of this, was it like a multilingual exposure?
#
Or did you come to these languages later on?
#
Though probably before Urdu, my introduction to the Urdu ghazal
#
was Hindi film music, because there are great Urdu ghazals, which have been nice.
#
I mean, I would not say great, because in the classical terms,
#
they may not be the best.
#
But, you know, a lot of some familiarity with what a ghazal is.
#
Came at that level when listening to these songs.
#
But I grew up in schools where we were taught Hindi and the Hindi curriculum.
#
And I grew up, a lot of my formative years, middle school years,
#
were in Madhya Pradesh.
#
And there you have some serious Hindi.
#
So all the dohas and other kinds of of poetry, we were introduced to.
#
And you are quite right.
#
The emphasis on the sound of the poetry, of the the meters that I use,
#
the rhymes that I use, the cadence and, you know, all those things that go into
#
the writing of many of these Indian forms of whether it is in Braj or Avadhi or whatever.
#
And in Urdu, that is a very essential part of that poetry.
#
And even today, for me, poetry, and I've never taken to English poetry.
#
I must confess that I haven't read much English poetry.
#
Of course, school, etc., one had to go through.
#
But it's never appealed to me at that level.
#
For instance, I am not a religious person at all.
#
I have no sort of feel for a lot of the bhajans and, you know, the again,
#
the religious, whether it's a qawwali or whatever.
#
But it appeals to me so much on the level of just the musicality of the words
#
and the kind of, of course, the content also, how it's what it says.
#
But all much of Indian poetry is meant to be recited.
#
It's meant to be sung to the extent that which I remember going through a letter
#
of Ghalib's in which he's writing to the Nawab of Rampur, who's a patron of his.
#
And by patron, I mean, he does all sorts of things for the Nawab of Rampur.
#
He looks at his verses, gives advice on verses.
#
He also, on occasion, sends verses.
#
He sends a verse, a ghazal, a full ghazal, not just a couplet, but a full ghazal.
#
And he says that this should be sung in such and such raag.
#
So when Ghalib is writing, he has one eye on how is this going to fit, you know,
#
the raag that this should be sung in.
#
So that is an amazing thing.
#
Even today, actually, we say,
#
And by shayar kehna doesn't mean just reciting.
#
It means writing that, you know, I mean, what we call writing.
#
So that is a very important part and was a very important part of the Urdu ghazal,
#
saying that, how does it sound?
#
And I'm so struck by just what singer-songwriters do, because in any language,
#
you know, what a singer-songwriter is really doing is you're combining two musics together.
#
One is a music of the words, because always words have sound and that is a music of its own.
#
And then you're making it work with the music music.
#
And great singer-songwriters just make it, you know, seem so effortless and so easy that it's
#
and I got reminded of that when you spoke about Ghalib saying that it should be in this raag and so on and so forth.
#
So tell me a bit more about, you know, who were your sort of influences in terms of who were you reading?
#
What were your sort of favorite books growing up?
#
And, you know, do you sort of remember a journey into the kind of reading we do as kids when we are just entertaining
#
ourselves and we're enjoying and we'll pick up whatever and read to a point where you realize that, like,
#
wait a minute, and then you just, you know, get more seriously into something, maybe disappear down a particular
#
rabbit hole, et cetera, et cetera.
#
I had, you know, all sorts of stuff.
#
I went through my innate plight and phase when all those, all the detective, the five find outers and what all,
#
you know, and there were there were many takeoffs from that you had and I have a, you know, my mind really goes
#
blank when I look at names, but I don't know what all, there were all sorts of similar of a similar genre.
#
And then, of course, you had your, you know, the more classic children's stories that we were all, you know, given to
#
read and I used to, and I'd read all of that as well.
#
So Charlotte's were, what are the ones that come to mind, you know, many of these sorts of books.
#
And we used to have this very interesting, the USSR publications, that's a generational thing.
#
A lot of Soviet books used to come out.
#
They used to be very beautifully produced in many ways.
#
They had their own Denisomenes.
#
I never came across that, I must tell you.
#
Yeah, there was a Soviet Denisomenes and then there was this one.
#
So they used to, but they used to come out with also very interesting things.
#
For instance, I remember I read this, these books on science.
#
So I remember there was a two volume thing and I think it was by Perelman, it was called, what?
#
Physics for Entertainment or something.
#
So something like that, kind of really a little outside the, you know, what you would imagine reading for entertainment,
#
but it was very entertaining.
#
And, you know, and when I look back at that, I realized that I could have had a really great interest in science as well.
#
As I said, I probably had bad teachers because I loved that book, because it explained things.
#
Why does this work like this?
#
So I went into all of that kind of stuff also, these science things, et cetera.
#
But again, it was not something that I could relate to in the classroom and ultimately just kind of fell out of that.
#
So I have been, you know, since then, just.
#
And, you know, you came to Delhi and then you went to Stevens and all that.
#
And I'm wondering if this background, this dual aspect of one traveling around a lot and seeing all these cities and towns and et cetera, et cetera,
#
and the second aspect of being immersed in languages other than English, whether these gave sort of added layers to the way you perceived the world or understood the world
#
compared to many of the people around you who, like me, might well have been, you know, English speaking only.
#
And you've just been in one place and you haven't really seen so much.
#
I think it has, for instance, it has made it easier for me to go into research.
#
And the thing with language is that every new language you learn is a little bit easier than the last.
#
And it's been very interesting because I've seen my children learn languages and they grew up in multilingual settings, too.
#
And how children absorb language.
#
And it's quite similar to how adults do it, too, which is we always think of we in our heads, we translate from something.
#
When you're talking about when you're trying to compose a sentence in a particular language, which may not be the language of default,
#
you structure it according to some parameters that you know.
#
So, for instance, I learned Bengali as an adult.
#
And while learning Bengali, one of the things I realized was that the sentence structure is pretty similar to Hindi.
#
So if I translate it from Hindi rather than from English, it will help me much more.
#
So, you know, so that that is something that you learn.
#
So that's that's what I'm saying, that each new language you learn becomes easier because you can relate it to something that you already know.
#
So, so in that sense, yes, of course, definitely.
#
But yeah, it I think knowing those languages has been useful.
#
I started when I started learning Persian, I started learning Farsi for a little while because I thought my many of my sources might be in Farsi.
#
But I did start learning Farsi and I realized that so many modern Indian languages actually have words from Persian.
#
So that was a eye opener for me because I already knew Bengali by then.
#
So I for the first time, I realized how many Persian words are there in Bengali.
#
And I was quite amazed.
#
Very, very basic ones, things like Balish, which is Balish is from Persian.
#
Nalish, of course, is from Persian.
#
Even something as simple as Jinish, which is thing, is from Jin's, which is thing in Persian.
#
So very many words are there in which which I'm sure a lot of Bengali speakers don't know.
#
Yeah. So if a Pash Balish really gets banged out of shape, you could easily say Pajama or Pash Balish.
#
I'm half Bengali, so yeah.
#
So so it was it's very interesting to have that.
#
So when I started learning Farsi, I said, OK, a lot of the vocabulary is sorted because these are all there.
#
It's in Urdu or it's in Bengali.
#
These are already words that I know.
#
And how is it structurally?
#
Like, is it similar or?
#
It's not not really anything that I can relate to easily.
#
But the the grammatical structure is very uncomplicated.
#
A lot of the bugbears of people who are trying to learn Hindi, for instance, the gender, the thing, all that is not existent.
#
Gender as a grammatical thing does not really exist in Parsi, which is which is amazing.
#
And I talk about that a little bit in in about when I when I talk about Urdu literature and how that imports that.
#
Yeah, we Bengalis get Hindi gender and Hindi always wrong.
#
I did this fascinating episode on languages with Peggy Mohan.
#
And one of the mysteries in my mind was cleared up by that.
#
And the mystery was that when I would listen to cricket commentary, I would wonder some people are always speaking backwards.
#
So specifically, Sanjay Manjrekar and Rameez Raja would always say things like beautiful cover drive was hit by shore of Ganguly, right?
#
And therefore, I would say, yeah, backwards, you know, sort of Ganguly hit a cover drive.
#
And then, you know, through Peggy's book and talking with her, I realized that Marathi and Urdu, which is a native languages of these fine folk,
#
the structure is like that, that sometimes you end up speaking backwards.
#
So what they're really doing is that they're just using that structure and speaking like that.
#
And I actually love that because it adds a richness to, you know, to expression and to what they say as well.
#
Absolutely. And I saw a lot of that in my daughter's attempts to her first language is Bengali, because that was what was spoken in the home more.
#
And she spoke to me in Hindi.
#
And I could see that she was in her own mind translating a lot of Bengali into Hindi for my benefit, because she was in her mind.
#
She thought I did not understand in Bangla, so I had to be taught in Hindi.
#
So how many languages do you know?
#
I guess my first language was English, because that's what my mother spoke to me.
#
I learned Hindi soon enough because my father, my father was, my father is from UP.
#
So he grew up learning Urdu, English, and then, of course, Hindi, because he joined the service, the police service in Madhya Pradesh.
#
So I had to learn Shuddh Hindi also.
#
So, but for me, Hindi Urdu is not really distinct in that sense.
#
So that's what I learned.
#
I went to school in Madhya Pradesh.
#
So I learned a very tate Hindi, very, very, they were very particular about not getting in any of these Persianized words.
#
Like give me an example.
#
Darwaza, you could not write Darwaza, you had to write Dwara, right?
#
So like it was like that.
#
So I learned that Hindi also.
#
And if necessary, I can speak some of that if push comes to shove.
#
So that I learned then when I was doing my MA and MPhil in JNU, because I was doing history.
#
Now in any halfway decent university, if you are doing a higher degree in history, you have to learn languages.
#
So if you are studying ancient Indian history, you do Sanskrit, if you're doing medieval Indian history, you do Persian.
#
And I was doing modern Indian history.
#
So the rule was you had to pick a language which was not your own mother tongue from among modern Indian languages.
#
And you were taught that.
#
So I asked around and I said, what should I do?
#
So the center itself offered Marathi, Tamil and Bengali.
#
You could go to the School of Languages if you want to do, but I wanted to do something in the center.
#
And I was told that Bengali was the easiest for a Hindi speaker to pick up.
#
So I said, okay, I'll go for this.
#
And I actually learned it quite well.
#
I took the language classes seriously.
#
So I learned how to write it and of course, read it.
#
And then just as while I was doing this, shortly after that, I got married to a Bengali.
#
And we lived in a house where his parents were there, they were household staff, all speaking Bengali.
#
So I was kind of immersed in this, hearing it all the time.
#
So that made it very easy for me to keep in touch with what was going on.
#
And reading comes from practice and I was out of practice for a long time.
#
But very interestingly, a few years ago, by few years ago, I mean, literally two or three years ago, I picked it up again.
#
Because there were a lot of papers that I were at lying at home, my husband's great grandfather's memoirs, which I decided to read all in Bengali.
#
And then I got back to reading Bengali again and pick up a dictionary to help you along with words.
#
And so I've gone back to that.
#
Urdu I learnt because when I started doing my, I decided to do my PhD, which is another backstory to that.
#
But when I started working on Delhi in a serious academic way, then I decided that I had to learn Urdu because a lot of the sources would be in Urdu.
#
And then I learnt Urdu.
#
Urdu, since the language is something we actually know, you know, obviously vocabulary comes with reading more, but the language we know.
#
I learnt the script in, this is the late 90s on the internet.
#
There was this, I don't remember the name of this website.
#
Somebody had, you know, somebody I think sitting in England or something had decided to make this kind of a few lessons on the internet.
#
And you can imagine this was not terribly interactive or anything.
#
This was just a, but it was quite well explained.
#
And I just kind of learnt the script there.
#
And then I went to, I think I went to the Ghalib Academy and I spoke to the bookshop guy there.
#
I said, give me some readings, which are simple, but not children's please.
#
It doesn't necessarily need children's books, but you know, something, short essays or something like that.
#
And then I just kind of learnt.
#
So I've kind of self-taught when it comes to Urdu.
#
Farsi, I started to learn and dropped out of that because I thought at that time it was not very imperative, but I do intend to pick it up and go back to trying to learn Persian because it's not very difficult as far as sentence structure and all is concerned.
#
And I already know a lot of the vocabulary because they're in Indian languages.
#
So, and it's very useful when it comes to trying to understand medieval Indian history in some fashion.
#
As every Bengali asks in the afternoon, Pash Balish Kothaye.
#
So let's take another digression.
#
I want to double click on Urdu itself.
#
Like, tell me a little bit about in your studies, the way you've seen the language evolved because you've been, you know, you've described in your book.
#
How it was spoken in the 18th century and how it gradually kind of changed from there.
#
Insha'Allah Khan insha'Allah wrote Rani Ketki ki Kahani, where he's, you know, taking the Persian and Arabic words out of it.
#
And later, of course, it becomes this political project to separate Urdu and Hindi and take them in different directions.
#
And I will often randomly read something that, you know, could be from centuries ago, like Ameer Khosrow or whatever.
#
And I will understand every word.
#
It will just make complete sense.
#
And that, I think, is something remarkable about the language.
#
But equally, sometimes I will, you know, somebody will tell me this great share and I won't know half the words.
#
And I'm like, sounds beautiful.
#
Lekin samaj kuch nahi aaya.
#
So tell me a little bit about how the language has evolved through all of this time and kept its character because it has been a sort of a revival in recent years with Rekhta and whatever has been happening.
#
So give me a sense of that, because I often find it hard to sort of distinguish what is even the difference between Urdu and Hindi.
#
Because if you take out those Shudh Hindi words like Dwara and etc., etc., I mean, I don't know the difference.
#
So Hindi, as we know it today, is not a very old thing.
#
I mean, you know, basics and structure, etc., is what we, maybe a hundred, two hundred years ago would have been, what we are used to hearing as Khadi Boli.
#
It's the language which is spoken around Delhi and this area.
#
And languages, of course, you were talking about Peggy Mohan and she's the person who has explained this so beautifully, how languages develop, how contacts happen, etc.
#
And Delhi was definitely a place where a lot of, there were so many different influences.
#
And it was but natural that this Khadi Boli would get words from wherever.
#
And of course, because it became the capital of the Delhi Sultanate, followed by, for a long period, the Mughal Empire, that you have words getting imported into this language.
#
It happens. Why does Bengali have so many modern Bengali, why does it have so many Persian words?
#
Because at the time that this modern Bengali was taking shape, Persian was the link language.
#
People don't often, I love to explain this to people because, you know, sometimes we don't think about, you know, we've had these big empires which have been incorporated so many different regions of India and we have so many different mother tongues.
#
Today we have English as a link language, but earlier it was Persian, right?
#
We've always needed a link language and it was Persian.
#
So when you talk about people like, you know, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, new Persian, it's no big deal.
#
Educated people from the deep south to Kashmir, whatever, many of them learned Persian simply because, like, people learn English today.
#
It's the language of the higher administration.
#
It is the language of high culture.
#
So, and of course, those words trickle down into the spoken language.
#
I think what happens is that we sometimes find it difficult to, we should make a distinction, at least conceptually, between languages as they are spoken and languages which get then accepted into literary languages.
#
So when you are talking about, you'll often hear people talking about the emergence of Urdu poetry with the Diwan of Wali, Dakhani, whatever, you know, those kind of 16th century, 17th century.
#
But the language itself, the spoken language has a much longer history and it's kind of coming down and evolving and getting these new words, etc.
#
The breakthrough moments happen when a language then gets elevated to a literary language and then you have Urdu.
#
But that also, as I have explained in the broken script, is actually Hindi and people themselves call it Hindi.
#
And it has many different and people at that time are also aware of the fact that it is a language that is very mixed and it has words from all sorts of sources.
#
And it's entirely up to an individual how many, what kind of vocabulary they use.
#
So, Ghalib, for instance, uses a lot of the Persian element in his vocabulary is very strong.
#
And it's very interesting that people take so much from Ghalib's Ghazals, they are much more widely recited, etc.
#
Whereas they are really difficult to understand because he uses such a heavily Persianized style, not to talk about the other elements of his poetry, which is the very complex layers and imagery and all that.
#
The language itself is so difficult, whereas if you read his letters, they are significantly simpler and much easier to grasp.
#
And there are many other poets whose poetry actually is not such a heavily Persianized, doesn't use such heavily Persianized languages.
#
And then you have people, a linguist like Insha Allah Khan Insha, who has a great grasp of languages, who decides as a completely literary exercise.
#
I will write a work which will use no Arabic and Persian words.
#
And he does it as a literary exercise.
#
And he writes Rani Kehti Ki Ki Kahani and I often quote from Rani Kehti Ki Ki Kahani examples to show what the language which he said is a language which is Hindavi.
#
It is Hindavi without Persian and Arabic actually sounds like and it sounds nothing like the kind of Shuddh Hindi that we today recognize as Hindi.
#
Can you give me an example?
#
So many of my things are actually on Facebook posts.
#
All my first my Facebook posts are all public and I write a lot of history on it.
#
So, Insha Allah Khan Insha decides that he is going to write this book.
#
It is actually Dastan Rani Kehti Ki Aur Kuwar Bhan Ki.
#
So it's a it's an epic, romantic epic, which he is writing and he starts off and this is what he writes.
#
Ek din baithe baithe ye baat apne dhyan mein chadi ki koi kahani aisi kahiye ki jisme Hindvi chhut aur kisi boli ka puth na mile, tab jaake mera jee phool ki kali ke roop mein khile, bahar ki boli aur gawari kuch usme na ho, Hindvi pan bhi na nikle aur bhakha pan bhi na ho, pas jaise bhale log achche aapas mein bolte chalte hain.
#
Ab baat kaan rakhe, aankhe milake, sanmukh hoke, tuk idhar dekhiye, kis dhang se badh chalta hoon aur apne phool ki pankhdi jaise hoton se kis kis roop mein phool ugalta hoon.
#
Kahani ke jeevan ka ubhar aur bolchaal ki dulhan ka singhaar, kisi desh mein kisi raja ke ghar ek beta tha, uske maa baap aur sab ghar ke log kuwar udhay bahan karke pukarte the.
#
Sachmuch uske jeevan ki jyot mein sooraj ki srot aamili thi, uska achha pan aur bhala lagna kuch aisa na tha, jo kisi ke likhne aur kahne mein aasake.
#
It is Hindi. It is Hindi. It is something that you can understand very easily. It's not Sanskritized.
#
And this gives you quite a good idea of the kind of language people spoke.
#
So, you know, he deliberately puts aside Persian.
#
So Persian, because it was this link language, I think often in Urdu also, the idea that it has greater cachet, so to speak, if you use a Persianized style.
#
So that had become fashionable.
#
And ultimately, of course, all this gets frozen with the coming of print, the coming of the East India Company's cultural efforts like the Fort William College, etc., where they start to, you know, the production of colonial knowledge.
#
There are these languages and because they see also India through the lens of communities, religious communities, etc., the idea that a Persianized style is a Muslim style and, you know, all those kind of things that we have rather uncritically then taken.
#
But in a sense, what I'm saying from the linguistic point of view, I think from the literary point of view, at least, these kind of froze these categories of what is Hindi, what is Urdu, etc., and Hindi necessarily has to have a very Sanskritized base, which was not there according to Insha, this is Hindi.
#
Like, you know, that could happen with language or, you know, historians have written about when, you know, the British came here, the early interlocutors were the upper caste Brahmins, so they got a particular vision of that, quote unquote, religion from them and then in their minds, that was a whole game.
#
And then that is what is printed everywhere till actually even the local people begin to believe that.
#
And so I'm kind of wondering how much the British gaze ends up affecting reality in the circular way, like in your book, I noticed various examples at one point, you have Metcalfe talking about, you know, when it came to the cow slaughter battles and at one point,
#
you write that he conjectured that the insolent, overbearing character of the Muslim would urge him to disobey this proviso and induce him to seize the first opportunity of publicly insulting and infidel by the exposure of the slaughtered carcass.
#
And this is when people are saying that, you know, they used to slaughter both goats and cows and the Hindus are saying, please don't slaughter the cows.
#
And he's saying, listen, if I ban it, the Muslim will then, you know, go and slaughter, and that's such a stereotype.
#
And there are so many other examples of these stereotypes, like Metcalfe's views on palace morality, for example, that in the palace, they're all this salute and they're, you know, all this incest is happening and there's so much action and blah, blah, blah.
#
And it almost feels to me that the British come with this sense of themselves as superior culturally and intellectually superior.
#
And then they try to figure out this deeply complex world and of course they can't because it's deeply complex.
#
So they take really simplistic narratives, whether it is about religions like, you know, Islam and what the Muslims are like, or whether it is about Hindus and how society is structured.
#
And I'm thinking that that would also that could also then go to the languages and then how do we record things?
#
The act of recording it then propagates that narrative and that narrative can take over reality.
#
So is there something to that?
#
I mean, if you're talking purely in the terms of the languages, for instance, print brings about this huge revolution of whereas of an intervention in a culture that is largely oral.
#
And it's not just in the case.
#
So one of the things that happens, for instance, is that once things start getting printed down, then you have a standardization, say, of of spellings.
#
And that's not something that is confined to Indian languages.
#
This happens in Britain, etc.
#
Also in Europe, in Europe, also Shakespeare, for instance, is the name Shakespeare is spent in so many different ways in various places.
#
People used to just kind of approximate, OK, this is what it sounds like, write it down.
#
Right. And it's spent many different ways.
#
So that kind of canonical development.
#
OK, this is this is it.
#
This is the correct way.
#
This is the correct way that that begins to happen with the proliferation of print and who is directing that, who's in control of that print process.
#
And, you know, Fort William College, for instance, is one of the print comes, technology comes to India somewhat late.
#
Lithographic print technology really begins to take off in the 19th century.
#
And that kind of actually does freeze a lot of things.
#
Also, things like styles, right.
#
So when these people in Fort William College, for instance, are taking, you know, some examples and they're making textbooks for their own.
#
They're making textbooks for their own employees.
#
This young boy comes in from Britain, who's had a public school or whatever education.
#
And, you know, you want to suddenly turn him into an administrator in India.
#
And you say, you have to learn Persian, you have to learn some local language.
#
And the examples of these local languages that they are taking are, again, from that very narrow class of, you know, they'll take a Ghalib rather than somebody who is a little more plebian, shall we say.
#
Yes. So which samples get chosen, how they get labelled, I was always I was very interested to see when I was growing up again, the Hindi curriculum that we had.
#
It is amazing that you have the Dohas and all that.
#
How do you trace the genealogy of Hindi?
#
So we had Rahim Ke Dohe, you had things like, you know, your Kabir and Soordas and all of that was as legitimately seen as the the ancestors of modern Hindi.
#
And therefore, we got to study those, right.
#
Why don't we study Ameer Khusro?
#
You know, that also can be legitimately seen as a proto-Hindi, right.
#
But what we choose to study as this is where Hindi comes from, very different.
#
Rani Ke Githi ka kahaani, I don't think was ever part of something that I was introduced to as this is Hindi.
#
And do you think when you sort of have, because of all of these political reasons and so on, when you have a top-down imposition almost of a certain kind of language, like this sort of Shudh Hindi,
#
like sometimes when I'll see a TV presenter speaking in this kind of Shudh Hindi and I'll be like, wait a minute, nobody speaks like that in real life, kya kar rahe ho, you know, and yet they will do it.
#
And then you begin to wonder whether if it is forceful enough that people actually begin to speak like that, like does that happen?
#
Do languages also change because like one, the act of recording it, like I'm just sort of thinking aloud, but I'm saying if there's a particular word and you fix a way of spelling it in some ways, you've kind of carved that word in stone now.
#
That word is, you know, maybe there are possibilities for that word which no longer exists because you fixed it that way.
#
And maybe the other possibilities open up or maybe there's a part dependence and whatever, what are your thoughts?
#
I think one thing that, again, I look back to how I learnt languages.
#
I was talking about the fact that in my school in Madhya Pradesh, in various schools I went to, Hindi, there was a very Shudh interpretation of Hindi and therefore I learnt to write that kind of Hindi and speak it in the classroom.
#
But I then lead a dual life because outside and in my house, my mother didn't speak very much Hindi because she was growing up in Bengal.
#
So she didn't see herself speaking, but she did speak quite a bit of Hindi and her Hindi was actually very heavily influenced by her mother's Urdu, which was from Lucknow.
#
So the spoken language that I spoke was very different from the language that I wrote in the classroom.
#
So I think to some extent we all lead these kind of lives at very different places.
#
But yes, certainly the literary language does change.
#
And that is why, you know, through events like Rekhta and all, when you see that this huge amount of popularity that is there,
#
it is there because at some level people still, at least at the spoken level, this is the language that people identify with in large parts of where we are now, North India.
#
And of course, Bollywood has had a lot of impact on that also, or Hindi films, not Bollywood, Hindi films in propagating the love for that kind of language.
#
I can't imagine, I don't see a lot of new movies, so I don't know whether any of that language that Shudh Hindi has, in fact, Shudh Hindi was often used in films also as an object of derision.
#
You know, some character who insists on speaking very Shudh Hindi is somebody to be made fun of.
#
It's always in a humorous context that you have those kind of, you know, these are caricatures.
#
Yes, some caricature rather than, this is not how normal people speak type.
#
So it has not happened yet.
#
Yeah, no, is it something unique to us that, you know, what you earlier referred to as quote unquote literary language, right?
#
That sort of this artificial way of talking and writing.
#
Are we kind of then, you know, an outlier because in the, like, in English literature has never been like that, that broadly artists have communicated in the same kind of language they hear around them.
#
That's what Shakespeare did.
#
In fact, you know, he, iambic pentameter is what, that's how we all speak, you know, let's go for a cup of coffee, which is actually a tetrameter.
#
But that's how we all speak.
#
He took the rhythms of everyday speech and put that in his art and at least in the English language, which is the only one I can speak of, all art has always been really closely aligned to the language of everyday life.
#
And something that wasn't would simply not succeed at any level.
#
I think, and I'm not a literature student, so it's very difficult for me to sort of articulate it.
#
But a lot of our writing has been poetry, which has very, I've discussed in the broken script something about Urdu poetry and where it comes from and the very, very limited scope it provides.
#
Well, that's a bad way of putting it.
#
It has some very definite rules that you have to follow.
#
So those kind of, drawing those lines like that, then makes it almost, of course, that it does not to say that there has not been great poetry written by Mir, et cetera, which is very close to what people, how people speak.
#
But yes, there was, you know, the kind of people who are taken as, again, I think the idea that the way histories were written of Urdu literature, which were again very much a process of European knowledge or British colonial knowledge of understanding Indian literatures, trying to understand the history of Indian literatures, et cetera.
#
And what is correct and what is not correct tended to favor a more modern, a more Persianized style, where Ghalib becomes your ideal.
#
And the earlier verses of, say, Sauda, et cetera, and those which are not Ghazals are somehow considered less important in some way.
#
So it becomes a very peculiar, this selection process is what kind of, again, freezes these things.
#
So, but there is, of course, then I'm going away from this progressive writers and how things start moving in that direction from Lahore, et cetera, saying, no, poetry also should be what people experience.
#
No use talking about cypress trees in Persia, nobody seen cypress trees here, forget about them, you know, so that kind of thing, you know, always, which is also wrong, because there, there are some rules there, there are some conventions there, which means something, it's not all formal, but sorry, I'm putting this very badly, but yes, it is, these are things that are, it's a very complex process, how this happens.
#
You're being very lucid, kindly don't say I'm putting things badly, if you're putting things badly, what do the rest of us do?
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I often think of, you know, how so much of history, so much of what has happened, you know, with the benefit of hindsight, everything looks inevitable.
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But actually, these random accidents of history take you in a particular direction, and then there is a part dependence.
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And, you know, and then the historian can sometimes kind of say that, oh, these were the different parallel streams that were going and maybe something else could have happened and the whole world could have been different.
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And is there something like that with language as well, like when you read Ghalib and when you read these other poets who you speak of for writing in a more everyday idiom or writing more colloquially and all of that, do you feel that there are
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other directions that could have happened? Like, for example, let's say the second Anglo-Maratha war, let's say the East India Company loses it for some reason, right? Little accidents of history here and there, contingency, anything can happen.
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You know, do we evolve in a different direction then? So, you know, are there, because
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with my limited knowledge, when I look back, I know absolutely nothing, I can see the languages as they are today and I assume that it must, it would have been this way.
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It was inevitable or what else could have happened? But are there actually other directions that were possible?
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Yes, I mean, certainly this Hindi-Urdu divide is very much a part of the colonial understanding of Indian society.
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And Indians didn't think of it this way, as this, that these are two languages, one is Urdu, one is Hindi.
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And if that colonial intervention had not taken place, and that happens at many different levels, not just of language, but of the understanding of Indian society as something, the two-nation theory.
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Basically, the British are the ones who firmly believe in this, that there are at least these two major nations in India, the Muslims and the Hindus, and therefore, their culture is different, their language is different, everything is quite distinct.
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Quite distinct. So that understanding of Indian society, you know, I'm very interested in historic architecture as well. And the idea that mosques have domes and temples have shikars is something that's a British colonial idea.
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Our ancestors didn't think that way. When they put all these, merely put all these domes on top of temples, they are not thinking that they are making
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Islamic architecture. They didn't think of a category called Islamic architecture. They thought about a dome as a dome. Dome is a way of covering space. It's a useful way of covering space because it eliminates the need to have multiple pillars.
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So great, new technology, let's use it. And that's what it was. And the British come and say, dome, Islamic architecture, shikar means
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Hindu architecture, right? And as a result, the very interesting thing, because that feeds into what you were saying, when in the 20th century, some of these temples are rebuilt or additions are made to it, then domes are not used, shikars are used, because by then we guys have internalized that colonial
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lesson that actually shikars are the only acceptable way of making a temple, because that's Indian, that's Hindu, and a dome is Muslim.
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Isn't it? I mean, you know, completely uncritically, you've just kind of, it's become so internal to you that you don't think about it. You've completely pushed aside your own legacy
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as in what your grandparents were doing. And now this is how you think and this is how you interpret
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a long tradition of culture. You have completely upended it.
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And it's a revelation for me. I mean, I learned this just now. In my mind, dome, Islamic architecture, it was just like kind of obvious. And all you asked me to do was examine that for a moment. And then obviously it falls apart. It's just a technology, you know, it's just a way of
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covering space, like you said. And, but once you make the narrative, then that narrative becomes a reality.
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Yeah, it does. Let me give a very concrete example. There's this, there are many such examples, but there is this very well-known temple in front, right in front of the Red Fort.
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It's called the Digambar Jain Lal Mandir. This dates from the time of Shah Jahan, because even in Shah Jahan's time, the Jain merchants were very, very powerful and influential, and they were given prime land right in front of the fort.
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And this temple has, if you look at its older parts, the older parts of the temple, there are these round, onion-shaped kind of domes, and then there's this vaulted roof, which is a very kind of Mughal thing, right?
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So you have all of these domes, etc. And then in the mid-20th century, they made additions to it and they made it into a shikar. So these towering shikars are actually the new construction, which comes in the colonial period or even after that.
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So this is something that has changed in our way of thinking.
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Yeah, and a completely unrelated example, I don't even know why it came to mind, but that association of blue as a color for boys and pink as a color for girls.
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And apparently, it was the other way around in the 60s, that, you know, pink was boys, blue was girls, if I remember correctly, and then suddenly some random thing happened and it just flipped, and here we are with, you know, boys wearing blue.
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Yeah, so how these trends, today we would, I think this is how we would, you know, something trends and then it makes this whole change.
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Yeah, I think today what happens is that the market is so fragmented, the mainstream has collapsed, and all these trends are so short-lasted that they don't have that kind of part dependence that your entire culture changes because somebody said, hey, dome is Muslim, so you know, you cannot have it on a temple.
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So we'll come back to language and architecture and poetry, no doubt, but let's go back to your life, you know, tell me about the architecture of your life and you were building it, you know, so you went to Stephens, what were your college years like and how was your conception of yourself developing, you know, in that journey from Stephens to JNU and then, you know, what did you want to do?
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I, so in my mind there was this idea, and I think my father had something to do with it in pushing me in this direction, civil services exam dedu, he had done the same, he was a IPS officer, so he was quite like, you know, do the civil services exam, since Stephens is a good place to join, history is a good subject to take.
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History I want to take on my own because when I was in class 11 and 12 in Srinagar, I was in Kendri Vidyalaya, and I had this absolutely brilliant teacher, and how much school teachers impact you, I think, she was great, she really made me, as I said, for me understanding what this whole thing made, Mrs. Call, and she was absolutely wonderful, and what happened was that I began to love history.
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At that point, I said, let's take history, I'll enjoy this, and then when I started studying history in college, it was a revelation, because it was so much more interesting than what was taught in school, because, I mean, of course, an individual teacher could enliven it to some extent, but, you know, the basic texts and all were like, you know, they had to tick their boxes and make sure that you understood all the dynasties and the rulers and their dates of whatever.
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It was that. A lot of, I'm sorry to say, but even today, a lot of the testing that happens in our schools, history, my children never liked history in school, because, however interestingly, the lesson may be laid out, or how interesting a teacher might want to make it, our examination system is such that it tests you on trivia, not on your understanding of a subject, on how much you can memorize of it, and there's a hell of a lot to memorize in history, if you are
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able to come to it. So, you know, that is something that has unfortunately not changed. But anyway, then I came to college, and when I started attending those classes, they were fabulous, because this was a different kind of history that I was looking at. And by the time I was through with three years of that, I said, no, this is what I want to do. So, then I went to JNU to do MA. My father was still a little hopeful that maybe I will do the civil services exam. I sat
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down with my parents to say, okay, I'll do it. But my heart was not in it, and I just did not give this. The second time when I gave it again and got through to the main, I said, no, I'm not giving it. I don't intend to do this. So, that was it. And then I went on. And so, all of my college years, I was, again, a very introverted person anyway. I was not somebody who hung out with a lot of
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people. But I did enjoy it. I read about myself in the library. I read history books. I enjoyed that. And that was pretty much JNU as well. JNU was fun, because I'm a bad exam taker. I don't write exams well. And JNU gave you the freedom, because a lot of the assessment was on tutorials, and that was what I enjoyed, writing the essay, talking about it, that kind of, it really suited me.
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So, I, JNU, MA, then I did my MPhil, and started doing a PhD. Because by that time, I had said, okay, I'm going to teach. And I started doing my PhD. By that time, I was married. And then a couple of things happened. One was, I had two children very close together, and my mother-in-law was very ill.
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So, for a while, there was a, I was not making a lot of progress, got disheartened, abandoned the PhD, dropped out of it. But then I came back to the academics after a little bit. And that happened through Delhi. Because I was doing, at that stage, I had no intention of working on Delhi. I was doing, my MPhil had been on the opium trade.
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Of all things, in central India, in Malwa. So, I had worked on that. One thing that was amazing about all my teachers, and this was JNU at that stage, they were so open to, you know, you have this, I hear stories and these nightmares of supervisors pushing you into, you know, you have to do this and, you know,
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my supervisors never kind of even thought that this was something that it was up to them to recommend a subject of research to me. It was entirely my, up to me to decide what I want to do. And that's what I picked up. Anyway, so I was working on that. Then I started a PhD, which was on the tugs, by the way. You know, the Sleeman and so on and so forth. And I started working on that. But then I dropped out of it.
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And I came back to academia because of an interest in Delhi, which began with walks.
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I'd done an episode with Mukulika Banerjee a long time back, and she told me that when she was trying to figure out what to do for a PhD, and whether she should do a PhD, the advice she got, which made an impression on her, was that, is there a question that keeps you awake at night? If there is an answer that question, do your PhD on that? Otherwise, don't do it.
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And it feels to me that when you talk about your love for Delhi, which is just like so transparent in your books, and it's so kind of inspiring, it made me feel like go out and take a walk myself. So was it kind of like that, that it wasn't a PhD, degree, this is a good subject, I can do this? Was it more like that you were already so much in love that it just flowed, it was easy?
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It's actually very funny. It's a funny story, because as I said, I had dropped out of this PhD. The thugs was a thing that I really was into. It was something, again, I thought that I had something to contribute there. And I will pick that up now. I think that's going to be my next project. I'll pick up that research and write it. But I had dropped out of the PhD. I had not started on a teaching career as yet, because I was on a, this, UGC has this JRF, so Junior Research Fellowship.
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They pay you something for research. And of course, you don't get a full time job while you're doing that. So I was quite happily going on there. And then this, according to me, and it's very interesting, you know, when you're young, when you're in your 20s, a disruption of two years or three years, you feel that like your life is gone, right? It's over, you're over the hill. It's very interesting.
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Can I look back at me then? That why is it that at, you know, what, like 28, 29? I thought, no, I can't do this anymore. I've not started teaching yet. It's not going to happen. You know, but I got so disheartened that I abandoned it. And then I sort of, as I said, I was not really doing very much.
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And then when I was, this was in the late 90s, that I attended a series of about three or four walks, heritage walks, which were organized by the Habitat Center. I think this was 98, if I'm not mistaken. And these were amazing. They were interesting because, you know, I was interested in the monuments of Delhi even before that. I must digress here, go back a little bit.
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So when I was in college, I was a newcomer to Delhi. And I started, after a while, particularly, I think in my MA, I started visiting various monuments. Lalkila, Puranakila, the major ones. I remember Savdachang's tomb. Savdachang's tomb, I remember I went with my boyfriend and I said, let us go. And I used to drag him along to all of these. I don't think he had very much interest in them. I dragged him along.
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And that's when I realized that many of these monuments were used by courting couples. So, but anyway, I was interested in this. So when I, you know, suddenly, and then of course, this is much many, some decade later, that I suddenly see on the calendar of the Habitat Center saying that they are organizing these heritage walks. I think one was in Mehrolli, one was in Tughlaqabad, etc. And I said, wow, I'll go for these. And I went and it was great fun.
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And I enjoyed that very much. And then the lady who used to run the programs department in the Habitat Center, Arshia Sethi, she was known to my sister, to Madhulika, and she said, Swapna, you also are a historian. You should do a walk for us.
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And I said, you know, historians don't, and you know, it was a fact. At that time, even though I was studying history, say, in, in Delhi University, I was in Stephens and North Campus, you know, our teachers going and exploring monuments or kind of, we studied art and architecture in an abstract way in our books, but to actually go out and relate what you're seeing to what you're reading was not a thing. So she said, no, no, you can do it. You read up a bit and you'll be able to do it. And I did that.
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And I remember the first, my first walk I did was in Chandni Chowk. So I led this walk. And I started then. So this became a thing in the sense that Habitat Center had this fugue. And, you know, heritage walks were not particularly popular. They used to put them on their calendar and have two a month.
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But it was the same 20 people we, by rotation, did the, led the walks and attended each other's walks also. It was only after two or three or four years that this, by the early 2000s, it is becoming popular.
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But anyhow, so I became interested in leading heritage walks in Delhi and trying to do a little bit to also see,
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we wrote to the ASI about the condition of some monuments and stuff like that to try and rectify some of that as well. So it was, that was a major motivation as well. And in that process, I started reading up a little bit about Delhi.
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And once I started reading up about Delhi, then came this question, because first of all, I'm familiar with, every historian, I think, has their comfort zone. And my comfort zone is the 19th century.
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I'm just, the company period, etc. is something that I understand. The Malwa trade was also there. The thugs were also there. It's just an era I'm comfortable with. So I said,
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look at what's happening in the 19th century in Delhi. And this was, again, the question that keeps me awake at night. What was this era really like?
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Because it was just so contradictory, all that you read. There were so many cliches surrounding it that I said, I want to answer this question. But I mean, you've read the book, so you know some of that. But so I said,
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you know, this is very interesting, and I'm enjoying reading all of this. But I really want to investigate this a little further. I want to write a book.
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By that time, remember, I'm not thinking of a PhD or anything. I've given up on an academic career altogether. I wanted to write a book.
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So what do I do? I'm familiar with the National Archives. I've worked there for my earlier project, etc. I go there. I, for the first time, go to the Delhi State Archives. And wherever I go, I'm asked, Madam, aap kahan se?
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Delhi State Archives, aap kahan se?
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Kahin se nahi. I'm from Delhi. I have a MPhil degree. I want to write a book. I want to do historical research for that.
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Madam, aap kisi newspapers hai? Nahi, nahi. Koi newspaper nahi hai, koi university nahi hai, kuch nahi. Toh aap kisi gazetted officer se chithi likha lijiye.
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Pure bureaucracy. Your bona fides have to be established by some external authority.
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So after a while, this was getting a little too much, you know. I said, okay, if a thappa is required, then I'll get a thappa.
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Then I went to Professor Narayani Gupta because she'd written on Delhi, right, preeminent historian of Delhi. And I went to her and I said, Madam, I want to do a PhD with you.
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And she said, come to Jamia. She was in Jamia and she said, please come, but I will not be your supervisor because I'm going to retire in five years.
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And if you've not completed your research by then, it'll be very difficult for you to then switch to somebody midway.
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So then I went to Jamia and I enrolled for a PhD because I wanted to write a book.
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And I had two supervisors. One was Professor Azizuddin Hussain, who was the head of the department at the time, and Mukul Kesavan.
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And what was lovely was that Mukul did most of the everyday supervising and he understood that I wanted to write a book.
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I didn't want to write an overly academic. So right from day one, that was the aim to write a readable book.
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And he understood it so well. And Mukul was a wonderful guide because he asked all the right questions.
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That's what you want from a PhD supervisor. Your research is your own.
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You know, they can't really contribute very much because you're the one who knows best where to find the sources, what there is, read them, analyze them,
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but to discuss them with you and always ask you, question you because you have blind spots in your research.
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So that was a great experience. In retrospect, that was one of the best things that could have happened to me to enroll in Jamia for a regular PhD
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because that gave you the rigor which was required. It also gave a deadline to somebody who's very good at procrastinating as well.
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So if such a big project to have that deadline pushes you. So I think it worked out very well.
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I mean, I'm again thinking of the accidents of history. I'm saying thank God for Arshya Sethi.
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Thank God for Narayani Gupta and you know, all the part dependence that kind of led you here.
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Though I think there are people who would disagree with me and say a curse on them because where are the gingerbread cakes?
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Think of what we could have been eating. So I have a sort of a bunch of questions based on what you just said.
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It's, you know, like a historian, I'm going to like mine this territory a little bit.
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And the first of them is when you mentioned that you started reading books on Delhi and so on and so forth.
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So what kind of books were there and were there questions that you had that the books weren't getting at
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which made you feel that you have to now step in and kind of do your bit.
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And just in terms of writing style or accessibility, were there models for you?
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Was there someone that you read and said, that's what I want to write like?
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You know, I read all the because I was approaching this from the point of view of somebody who is doing research for the purposes of a walk in a particular precinct of Delhi.
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So some of the Delhi has a whole a lot of books written on it.
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And some of them are the very typical kind books type of things also because there are some iconic, you know, seven cities of Delhi and similar sort of things.
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Then there are the works of Percival Spear who wrote about Delhi.
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Narayani Gupta's book on Delhi between two empires.
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That was that is the major book on the 19th century and so on and so forth.
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You know, even Frickenberg had this collection of essays which were on various different parts of Delhi.
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And then there were books which were like, you know, specifically on walks in Delhi.
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There's this very, very popular book.
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I think it's still in print Barton and Malone, Old Delhi Ten Easy Walks.
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You know, so those are the kind of basic things I started building on.
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But, you know, because my interest was in the 19th century, I started looking for some of the 19th century work on it.
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And that is when actually I realized that a lot of that work is in Urdu.
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And that's when I learned Urdu.
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This was before my PhD began.
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I said, if I want to read those, I have to understand Urdu really.
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So that's when I learned Urdu.
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In fact, in a way, it was good that I had that free time.
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If I had, you know, gone straight from an MPhil into this kind of PhD would have been difficult for me because there was a lot of groundwork.
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It took me seven years to do my PhD.
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But even before that, there was this groundwork of learning Urdu, of reading.
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And I read about Delhi.
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I read its poets like Caleb.
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I was talking about, you know, reading his poetry, you know, pondering over each share to try and understand what does this mean?
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What does he think like? How does he, you know?
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So that kind of groundwork in the Urdu literature, which was there, very rich at this period.
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And it's when I started reading that Urdu literature that the question formed in my mind.
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Why is it that these, you know, all these people have these very, very contradictory views on what Delhi in this period, which we call the company period,
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where the East India Company is ruling Delhi, but at the same time, the last Mughal emperors are also on the throne.
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And it's a period that is characterized in such contradictory terms.
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Some people call it a sort of a twilight of the Mughals and a period where this is this point of high culture
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and all this poetry and these great poets like Momin and Zog and Ghalib and Zafar and all that.
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And at the same time, there are people who are talking about the Delhi College.
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And there are some who write as if there is no British presence at all.
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This is only this great Mushairah is happening and all that.
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And on the other hand, there is actually a lot of other stuff that is happening, which is the modern stuff.
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This is and that gets completely ignored in some of the Urdu literature.
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So then I was interested to know what was Delhi really like in those days.
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And I started, you know, then saying, OK, now I'll have to go and dig this out for myself.
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And that sort of that that gave me the cue as to what I was going to do for my PhD.
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And I again, I'm I think for those who are doing PhD, who are enrolling for PhD programs,
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I'm very grateful to Jamia that they took me on a project, on a proposal that was so wide.
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You know what I called it? I said the culture of 19th century Delhi.
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You know, I left it wide because I didn't know what was going to come.
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And that's the really the loveliest way to approach a research project, to say, I don't know what I'm going to find.
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So I can't even begin to frame this properly.
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I'm just going to go and start reading and I want to see what I can find.
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And then I will come to a greater.
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And I don't think a lot of places are that flexible.
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You are supposed to lay out, you know, where your sources are, what you have, what are your.
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You know, I didn't have much of that figured out.
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And they still let me in.
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And I had a very satisfying time doing that PhD.
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And as it turned out, it led to a beautiful book in time.
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I this is this is my baby.
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I mean, this is the book I always wanted to write.
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A lot of other books came in the, you know, meanwhile.
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But this was the book I wanted to write.
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So so I think it worked out very well.
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And so I'm really grateful to all these people, all these institutions that have given these wonderful opportunities for me to pursue what I love.
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You know, you brought this baby into the world.
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Fine, it's your baby, but we will all also love it and we will also spend time with it.
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My next question is, you know, earlier you referred to how when you were at Stevens, if you're studying architecture, you're studying it at an abstract level,
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you're learning theories and this and that.
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And then the transition happens where you actually go out and you see the monuments for yourself.
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And in a similar analogous sense, I'm thinking that when we engage with history, when we read anything, you know, even when I read your great books or the best possible books of history that they are,
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you know, at one level, it is something that is in my head.
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I'm not really inhabiting that space.
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And I'm thinking that as a historian, for every historian, there must be a moment where you do enough research, enough research, read enough letters from people to people and their languages.
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And at some point, it kind of becomes real and you're there, you know, and then you inhabit the world much more deeply, if in an imaginative sense, but much more deeply than otherwise,
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where you're not on the outside looking in and seeing everything, but you're inside, you feel it, you feel the mahal, you feel everything.
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Did that, did that happen to you?
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You know, I think it never happens, at least to me, it never happens because I'm always somebody outside looking in.
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And in fact, I feel that you should not be very invested in your subject.
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There are no person in that long cast of characters that I have in the broken script that I'm invested in, not in Ghalib.
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I can see all the flaws in his character that are there, not in Bahadur Shah Zafar, though I feel a lot of empathy for him.
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You know, you are ultimately somebody who is, and I cannot begin to, you know, sort of understand some of that.
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But what I can understand is, first of all, my own craft, what I'm doing, which is a historian, all knowledge, all knowledge.
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And I'm not only talking about historical knowledge, and this is something that I think people don't understand enough,
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whether it is scientific knowledge or any other kind of knowledge or historical knowledge, is the best explanation that we have,
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given the theories that have been propounded, given the kind of information that we have currently, right?
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So all knowledge is, it's provisional. It's the best explanation that we have.
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And every field of knowledge is the explanation of some aspect of our reality. And therefore, it is not fixed.
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The problem comes that when, there's a problem with history. Physics is the study of a particular reality.
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Nobody is saying physics is that reality. History, unfortunately, we use the same word for the past and for the study of the past, right?
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So there is this, I've come across this a lot in popular, in a lot of popular, in people's thinking, who have not thought about history very much,
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think that what I'm doing is I'm writing the past. I'm revealing the past. I can't reveal the past. I have only very fragmentary knowledge of it.
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So what I can do is I can give the best explanation that I can find, which has the least number of contradictions, because contradictions will also be there.
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Even in scientific theory, there's always that off thing which you cannot explain. And you hope that sometime later, somebody will be able to explain that.
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Either that explanation will be such that it will completely overturn all that you have thought that was there, or it will be somehow accommodated in the existing theory.
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So that is something that happens with history also. You are ultimately creating the best explanation there is.
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So all the kind of conclusions that I come to are all based on my reading of a certain kind. And there is, of course, I can't make it up.
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Those are the facts. It's the best explanation that I can give, giving that bunch of information that I have.
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So to that extent, I'm very aware of my own place in that thing. I am not revealing the past. I cannot, to that extent, suddenly one document comes up and this is what it was.
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Because whatever it was, if it's Ghalib writing about Fraser's murder, he'll write it in a very different way, from the perspective of Skinner, it's a very different event.
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And from the eyes of Mirza Khan Dag, who is Shamsuddin's son, it's a very different event.
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So that whole idea that writing history is somehow recapturing what really happened, it's a very complex thing.
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And I'm not, it's something that, of course, then also gives a handle to those who say, you know, anybody can write history and it all depends entirely on what you think and what I think and, you know, every position is invalid.
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But that is also not what I'm saying, because again, there are some rules to be followed and there are, as I said, that those explanations have to do with empirical fact as well.
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If The Broken Script is ever a web series, and it should be because there are so many great stories, a Fraser murder would make an incredible season, because there are just so many layers within that, so many different strands and it's just fantastic.
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And I'm wondering this, that, you know, when today, especially you were speaking about academia, and in academia there is the tendency across fields, not just literally across every field, that you get pushed into narrower and narrower silos.
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So you're studying cotton production in 1654 in New Guinea, you know, and a lot of that appears to, after a while, have no relation with the real world at all or increase our understanding of it.
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And here, I guess, one, it helped that you were actually trying to write a book and you just needed the PhD for access and two, that you were lucky enough to, you know, have all of those people, Narani Gupta Mukul Kesavan helping you out in that.
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But also there must have been, like, everything that you read would have come from some lens or the other. All those lenses exist, sometimes they overlap.
#
And your desire, obviously, because you were not satisfied with the picture that they painted of that world and that life, you would have to go beyond the lenses.
#
And here, I, and I'm just thinking aloud here, but I find that there are two different imperatives that seem to come into play.
#
And one imperative is that you want to cast aside every single lens and just let the facts speak for themselves and be as objective as you can.
#
But the other imperative is that you also have to be true to your own curiosity and therefore to your own person.
#
And even the fact that you choose to focus on and delve into are actually, you know, reflecting something that is you.
#
So in a sense, only you can write the broken script. Anybody can write about that period, but only you can write that specific thing.
#
So how does one sort of deal with this? That on the one hand, you want to be objective, you want to be fair, if we can use that term on the cast of characters that are out there.
#
But at the same time, you know, you also have feelings that are invested. You also look at it in a particular way.
#
You also are tempted to pass judgment on certain characters one way or the other.
#
Yeah, it's the it's the process of writing. And you get if you start to think a little bit about how you write that that really gives away so much as to where your inclinations lie.
#
Who are you judging in what way, et cetera? You know, it becomes very clear after a while because that's how you write.
#
But what I mean, my my own style of writing, what I try to do is I've never been tempted to write fiction, even historical fiction.
#
And because that's it's just not something that I can do.
#
But writing history, if you write it in a way that it's not only just presenting facts, but it's about how you string them together, how you you give people's views.
#
You know, I talk about what Ghalib writes about a particular incident, for instance, I give the background of Ghalib.
#
So historians are all are always looking at sources critically. They're saying, OK, who wrote this?
#
Every every statement say is not taken on face value. It's who's writing it.
#
What is their context? What is their agenda here? Who is it written for? Who is the audience, et cetera?
#
All those things come into play. Through my writing, I hope I try to explain some of those ones and which all of my characters,
#
I do try to talk about where they are coming from, what their place in a system is, what are their what are their motive, possible motivations.
#
I think those kinds of things have become very important.
#
And that is something that a historian, I think, if they're doing their job well and honestly have to reveal some of the process.
#
Now, straightforward writing a PhD is very easy to reveal that process of how you have examined some things and how you've come to that conclusion, et cetera.
#
It's much more difficult to do it in a book like this where I'm telling a story.
#
But then I try and do it through this means.
#
I do I do use a lot of quotations from people, what they said, how they said it, et cetera, and then try and put that together.
#
So, yeah, it's it's something that has come with practice, I guess.
#
But the other thing, which is very interesting, and I have found this.
#
That when you when you read a few things, you know, I've read maybe five or six texts and some idea has come into my mind that this is what the world is like.
#
Right. This is what this world is like.
#
It's when you sit down to write and try to string this together, if you're not just bringing together, you know, I've seen books written like that, where there are people I just, you know, pasted information with no structure.
#
When you start to structure it, when you start to structure your narrative, and I have used in my PhD, I did not use a chronological scheme.
#
I used a thematic scheme for various reasons. But here I wanted to tell a connected story.
#
It's challenging because I go off into I do go off into digressions, for instance, the culture and language and all went off into one.
#
But I broadly wanted to keep a chronological.
#
And when I started putting things in a so it's how you arrange things when you start to add completely.
#
I mean, innocently of what you may have imagined, you when you start to arrange it, when you start to write and structure a lot of things that were sounding plausible then are not sounding plausible now, because once you started to explain yourself.
#
And therefore, I think writing is great exercise for any kind of intellectual activity.
#
When you actually start to write it down, then things which were in your head sounding very good, probably not sound that good anymore.
#
Or you have to think a little harder to say, no, but this is not this logic is not working.
#
So think of some other explanation. How did this happen?
#
And I think that is a very important part of because, you know, when you're talking about historians passing judgment.
#
If you look beyond the very crude way of putting that, we are evaluating.
#
Given this fact and given that fact on balance, what is probable?
#
You know, so we are all the time judging, in fact, in that way.
#
So, so, so this, this is, I think this is a craft which.
#
It's a process of reading history, learning history in the classroom, discussing this experience writing.
#
I've learned so much from people who supervised my writing.
#
One early experience that was when I was doing my MA, I had this wonderful teacher who went and who was later Vice Chancellor Shantiniketan.
#
But what a brilliant writer, a person who managed to write a book called The Financial Foundations of the Raj.
#
You can imagine the topic suggests that it'll put you to sleep.
#
It was so wonderfully written.
#
It was just it was gripping and fabulous.
#
So, you know, people like that.
#
I remember writing some tutorial for him and we used to take a tutorial.
#
We used to have these discussions, right, in small groups, groups of four or so.
#
And I came across this fabulous fact, which I said, you know, I heard this.
#
He says, so what is there to make such a song and dance about this?
#
You know, what does it mean?
#
What is its bigger significance?
#
Why should we be excited about this?
#
And, you know, it's that kind of rigor when people start asking questions as to the writing process.
#
Not that it is not an important fact or it's not an interesting fact even.
#
But what is its place in the bigger scheme of what the story you're telling?
#
Ultimately, we're all telling a story.
#
So, you know, when I look at my research, I always have so many interesting little stories here and there and all that.
#
But we never found a place in the book because they would have mentor.
#
And then, you know, you have to keep it at a manageable length.
#
You have to make sure that you're you know, you can't have too many of those things just because I found this interesting.
#
It has to wait for another place, I think.
#
So, I think that writing is a very, I think it's an underestimated skill, how you write.
#
Because how you write is also about how you think.
#
You know, if you are being pushed to write well, you are being asked to think properly and, you know, with a little bit of discipline and stuff like that.
#
In the writing course I conduct, there are two quotes I always share with my students.
#
One is by the great economist and author, Deirdre McCloskey, where she says that, you know, don't wait to do your writing till you do your research.
#
Writing is a form of research.
#
And Joan Didion famously said, I don't know what I think till I write it down.
#
So, I couldn't agree with that more.
#
And, you know, just an aside, as far as all those extra stories are concerned, I think we live in an age where the scarcity of space no longer really applies.
#
Even if a physical book has to be a certain, you know, length or whatever, start a newsletter, put it on a website, do something.
#
Because I think people like me would certainly find it of value.
#
And that interesting thing you mentioned about how you take a new fact to your teacher and he's saying, so what?
#
Reminds me of something Amitav Kumar just said in an episode, which isn't released at the time of recording, but it will be tomorrow, in fact, where he said that there is a situation and there is a story.
#
You know, a situation by itself is bland.
#
There is nothing there.
#
But then when you tell a story around that situation, then it kind of comes alive.
#
And I want to ask you now about craft, because before this, we were discussing technology and you said you one day you found this floppy disk at home.
#
And that floppy disk had your MPhil thesis and you said, I don't want to read it because, you know, it will surely make me cringe.
#
And obviously, when we start out, we don't know how to write.
#
We are getting facts in our head.
#
We are getting thoughts.
#
We are putting them down on paper.
#
And then along the way, we learn to do that.
#
And it seems to me that what you have done so well and it's not just in the structure like the structure of the book and script has that the thematic divisions into those five divisions.
#
But and then within that more or less chronological and that works beautifully and structurally also the short short chapters in each of them just keep you rolling along.
#
And I love all of that.
#
But I want to ask more about your actual pros and storytelling, because what struck me is that you sort of balanced the sort of the two imperatives of a popular historian,
#
which is that you're telling a story that's accessible and that, you know, keeps you turning the pages.
#
And at the same time, you know, there is obviously great rigor.
#
Like I spent some time looking through the footnotes also and feeling incredibly jealous.
#
I want to read all those bars in those newsletters of the day.
#
So how did you arrive at that?
#
Because I would imagine that for a young writer starting out writing history, it must be such a dilemma that balance between accessibility,
#
telling a compelling story and that desire to put in every fact that I know and just to kind of, you know.
#
So actually, academic writing predictably is different.
#
You know, it has to be because you are positioning yourself with what has gone before, you know, that kind of thing.
#
There's a you're talking to an audience which has speaks the same language as you do in terms of conceptually.
#
They inhabit the same space.
#
So so so so that is is different.
#
So because I write from the get go, decided that all my published work at least would be for a general reading public, not for academia.
#
So I have been impelled to write in a way that is accessible.
#
You know, I think I think it was helped by the fact that even before I did this kind of writing,
#
even before my first book came out, I had been doing heritage walks.
#
That is a that is an aspect of my history, which is very, I think, relevant.
#
Because I used to do these heritage walks, which were basically about going to a historic site,
#
a historic neighborhood, talking about its history, about its monuments, about its life today to a public that was often quite diverse
#
and certainly had no almost no background in history.
#
So then you you want to talk about what are the kinds of things that they would be interested in?
#
How would they you know, how to present the past to them?
#
Your understanding of the part, as you said, you know, cotton production, whatever it is, may not be something.
#
So it is this the the process of telling that story in an engaging manner.
#
Talk about history, but relate it to, you know, the kinds of things that it's not easy because one of the things that I have followed
#
and I've seen some historians doing this now, going into a sort of a more speculative mode, and I don't do that.
#
I am not I don't go beyond what my sources tell me.
#
The way I place those sources, et cetera, may tell that story, but I let the sources do tell their story.
#
I don't speculate at that to that extent.
#
So when you start to do that, I think that was great practice to be able to convey that to somebody who I know does not understand
#
Marxist theory or popular schools of history and stuff like that.
#
But just to give them an idea of what how we should look, you know, what are the things in the past that are interesting
#
and to be able to adapt that to two different audiences.
#
I remember once I did this walk.
#
Qutub Minar is one of my favorite places.
#
And once I think there was this organization which said, could you walk to a walk for children on World Heritage Day or something like that?
#
It was. And I said, Yeah, sure.
#
And I love taking children out.
#
But when I went there, I realized there were some of these children were really tiny.
#
I mean, they were like five years old and seven years.
#
I said, My God, I can't talk about any history to them because they've not even started studying this thing in school.
#
So what am I going to do?
#
You know, not one name that I may name will have any impact.
#
So then I just took them to the distance is touch this stone.
#
What is this? Was this easy to cut?
#
Was it easy to carve? Look at the water that they made.
#
What were the materials that they use?
#
This what are the what are the shapes?
#
You know, how old is this?
#
You know, no dates. How old?
#
How many stories is this?
#
So you have to do to try to place yourself in the shoes of your audience.
#
What do they know which will help them to grasp what you're trying to see?
#
That that is what has been.
#
I think this is the walking has been very helpful.
#
And that exercise, like especially the specific exercise when you tell the children feel the stone or tell me how many stories is it?
#
By having to do that, are you also forced to look at that same thing in a different way that you had in before?
#
And that's why I think the fact that I went to walks with conservation architects,
#
I went with all sorts of people who had their own views and expertise on these areas that that really helped a lot.
#
And I think we can interdisciplinarity.
#
I think with all of us, I mean, interdisciplinarity is a very narrow way of putting it.
#
But it's the whole idea that you can benefit from so many different areas where people work and how they look at it.
#
And as I said, we all have our different takes on a particular place.
#
So it's it's great to be able to do that.
#
But yeah, history, I learned a lot about the history of architecture in that process,
#
which was not something that I saw myself as doing.
#
And again, I think that what it did was this is something that I haven't explicitly explored in my writing,
#
but I intend to do it someday because I think understanding history is helping me to understand the history of art.
#
The history of art and architecture has been a very specialized field, right?
#
There are historians of art and architecture.
#
So I am now starting to say this in history forums when I'm telling fellow historians
#
that the history of art and architecture is too important to be left to historians of art and architecture.
#
I think we need to get into it, because when I look at the Qutb Minar complex,
#
it tells me so much more about not about how art is evolving, about the kind of social systems that fostered that.
#
What is the politics of this Qutb Minar?
#
Who built this? Why did they build this? Why did they build this?
#
If there's an inscription, why did they write it like this?
#
What are the other texts that go with that?
#
So, in fact, I use this.
#
So I'm developing this a little bit more contextually now in the course of I do teach a short lecture here or there as part of courses in the intact Heritage Academy and all that.
#
And I'm trying to tell people and the heritage space is one where you'll be surprised to know very few historians are participants in this heritage space.
#
So the heritage space today, whether you're looking at the kind of cultural products like heritage walks or all sorts of events and things around heritage,
#
or you're looking at the conservation of buildings, the conservation of sites, the protection of sites and all that.
#
There are so few historians which are involved in this.
#
These are conservation architects, they are art historians, there are tech people.
#
Tech people seem to abound in the heritage space, right?
#
And what I'm trying to argue for is bring more historians in.
#
We have a way, we may not have thought about it immediately, but encourage historians to look at these places because they will have very many different things to say.
#
Because they look at the historical background.
#
They are not looking at it at a building in isolation.
#
They are looking at it within the context of a lot of other stuff that is going on in that particular period when this was made or altered or whatever, which somebody else may not have access to.
#
So I think I have done brilliantly out of this.
#
It's been lovely for me. All these accidents happened.
#
The fact that I became involved in walks, became involved in buildings, interested in how they're protecting them and being a historian has been absolutely fabulous.
#
It has helped that I did not have to earn a living.
#
I think that's something that we should be thinking of.
#
I had the luxury of being supported by my husband.
#
And we have this partnership where I do things and he does things.
#
We do what do things we love.
#
But this is something that I really have been and I see that I can share my experience with a lot of other historians.
#
And I'm looking at historians and saying historians can find other things to do except academia.
#
Academia has been the default.
#
If you are somebody who's interested in history and research in history, et cetera, that's one thing that's open to you.
#
You can go and become a teacher.
#
But I'm just again, this is what I've been telling historians that you have to assert yourselves in these fields and say that we have things to say about buildings.
#
We have things to say about heritage.
#
We should be participants in this.
#
So trying to get some of that message across.
#
No, that's really resonant with me.
#
And let me double click on an aspect of that.
#
Like I keep thinking about, you know, how form and function are so interlinked, how the form of how we live can really change the manner in which we live.
#
For example, you know, where do you stay?
#
Do you stay in a chawl or do you stay in an apartment building?
#
And the sort of the social interactions that form are completely different and you cannot displace one sort of family from one into the other immediately because it just changes everything, uproots everything.
#
You know, just that whole Indian style old houses where there's an open courtyard in the middle and then, you know, the joint family collects itself around.
#
So I want to ask you to sort of elaborate on that in terms of architecture, that what are the sort of insights that you have gotten from what might appear to be these static,
#
that just happen to be there.
#
There's nothing, but they're full of stories and historians like you are obviously learning to tell those stories and see what is really happening.
#
So, you know, do you have any insights from examples of that to share?
#
So one is an example which I have from my from one of my favorite sites, which is the Qutb Minar.
#
That's a place that has so many layers.
#
And it's interesting when people ask me, you know, will you lead a walk for us?
#
And then we start discussing where and I said, go to the Qutb Minar.
#
I said, no, no, no, no, no.
#
You may have seen it, but you've not seen it.
#
But anyhow, there it's very interesting that you have the so-called Indo-Islamic architecture developing there, right?
#
So you have the very first experiments with the arch.
#
Arch making was not known in India before these Sultanate guys brought it to India.
#
So they come here and the very first arch that is made is made as an exercise in jugad
#
by Indian builders who are being given some vague instructions by their Turk clients.
#
Now, these are these Turk soldiers who have arrived.
#
They themselves have no architectural knowledge, but they know that an arch looks like this.
#
And they are explaining this to these builders.
#
And these guys, they don't understand what the hell they are talking about.
#
So instead of making a proper structural arch, they make what is known as a corbelled arch, which is a false arch.
#
It's made of it's a little difficult to explain it.
#
But a true arch has this structure with the keystone on top, et cetera, which is very structurally sound and strong.
#
And they make a false arch by piling stones in sort of an approximate shape is jugad.
#
It takes like a good 75 years or more before the first true arch begins to be seen in the architecture.
#
Why does this long period elapse?
#
The very first impulse you can understand very easily because these are soldiers who are trying to explain to builders.
#
And they don't even speak the same language very literally.
#
So it's a huge communication gap there.
#
But just as a few years go past, the Sultanate is becoming bigger, more influential.
#
A lot of people from West Asia, Central Asia start migrating into Delhi.
#
Among them are the architects, builders, designers also who could very easily correct these guys and say,
#
This is going to fall down.
#
Please, this is how you make a proper arch.
#
Why doesn't it happen for so many decades?
#
And that, as a historian, tells me something very interesting.
#
It tells me that the actual construction trade, the building, the actual the contractors,
#
who you would call contractors today, who are actually doing the building,
#
are dominated by the Indians who have that long tradition of not arch making.
#
And they will not let these outsiders dictate to them what their process should be.
#
It takes them a long time to themselves get convinced.
#
And this will stay to adopt that technology.
#
They will not be dictated to by these outsiders.
#
And I tell you why that is significant.
#
Why that fact is significant?
#
Because we, again, we blindly follow our colonial historians who have looked at this.
#
Okay, now Islam comes in.
#
With Islam comes in Islamic culture and Islamic architecture.
#
And from this period, after a very brief period of this little experimentation,
#
then you have Hindu architecture is replaced by Islamic architecture.
#
What does that Islamic architecture even mean?
#
You know, the people who are building, who are the people who are building?
#
Just look at this carefully.
#
Another very interesting example from the Qutub Minar,
#
and that just clarifies what I'm saying about the building trade
#
actually being in the hands of a certain kind of people.
#
So the Qutub, this mosque is built in the late 12th century.
#
In the middle of the 14th century, you have the Qutub Minar damaged by lightning.
#
And the then emperor, Feroz Shah Tughlaq, orders its repair.
#
Now there's an imperial inscription which says that Feroz Shah Tughlaq,
#
and it's in Persian, and it talks about how this was ordered, etc.
#
Now the builders themselves have left their own mini-inscription on the site.
#
And that's in Sanskrit.
#
And that Sanskrit inscription says this tower was, it is authored by,
#
it is authored by the builders themselves.
#
So they say that this was hit by lightning.
#
And the emperor Feroz Shah, he ordered this repair.
#
So the measurements were made and the work was begun and it was completed.
#
And these are the builders.
#
And they name their names, Nanna and Salah and all that.
#
And they say the work was accomplished by the blessings of Lord Vishwakarma.
#
They see their work as something that is a long tradition of their profession.
#
These are professionals.
#
Whether they are building the Qutub Minar or a mosque or a temple,
#
everything they do is with the blessings of Vishwakarma.
#
You cannot begin to understand this kind of culture and the complexity in these simplistic terms.
#
And then we take these so very, so simplistically from the colonial
#
and we continue to read these colonial sources, right?
#
Because they are in English and they are accessible.
#
So, you know, there you go.
#
So I think these kind of things can only, if you're a historian,
#
you can begin to even think of these in bigger, because you question these
#
and say how is it that you suddenly have an overnight Islamic architecture?
#
You know, all these things.
#
And I think art historians are not adequately grasping some of these issues,
#
not grappling with the complexity that it deserves.
#
Because, yeah, you can't just look at the evolution of art through time.
#
You have to look at society, you have to look at politics,
#
you have to look at the whole shebang, as it were.
#
And you mentioned colonial sources.
#
So I will, you know, segue neatly to a question about your research.
#
You know, how do you research for all of these books?
#
Because, you know, one, of course, you said you learned Urdu
#
and you even tried to learn Persian for a while
#
because you felt that that would be handy.
#
So what was that process like?
#
Like, what kind of sources do we have?
#
How much of it is kind of accessible?
#
What was that whole grind like?
#
Because today when you've done the book, you sit back,
#
I can just flip through the footnotes
#
and I get a bird's eye view of whatever you've done.
#
But you are discovering one thing at a time in a linear kind of way.
#
And a lot of the research that lies ahead of you is unknown unknowns.
#
You may not even know what is there.
#
So tell me about that process for you.
#
As I said, I am a historian who's, for one reason or the other,
#
been very comfortable in the 19th century.
#
And a lot of the very important source of material for the 19th century
#
is actually British government records.
#
One thing that the British did really well was bureaucracy.
#
Everything in three copies of every document, right?
#
Every letter properly recorded,
#
filed away in the appropriate department, et cetera.
#
And we have inherited that big archive.
#
So that's a great place to begin.
#
It is a great place to situate some sort of a basic structure
#
of what is going on in a place like Delhi,
#
which is, as I said, ruled by the British East India Company.
#
To know the British structure,
#
the kind of issues that they were dealing with,
#
and they necessarily have to then correspond about it,
#
really helps because all those letters and all are all filed up.
#
Now, I have a very systematic, if tedious, way of working,
#
which is I start at the beginning.
#
So I start from the early...
#
I started reading early 19th century records.
#
And in those days, there was nothing online, of course,
#
So you have these various lists of files.
#
You know, there's a very nice indexing system
#
which tells you about what is there in each file, right?
#
But I did not go about it that way.
#
I actually read or tried to read every single file
#
that was produced as a form of correspondence
#
between the Delhi government,
#
the government in Delhi, and the government in Calcutta.
#
So every letter that was written, I tried to read every letter.
#
And they run into thousands.
#
Because, as I said, I start with a position
#
where I don't know what my frame is,
#
what are the things I'm looking for.
#
So until the letter tells me that this is something that is interesting
#
that is happening at this point, which somehow has been missed.
#
How do I know before I do my research that it's there?
#
So I actually read everything, right?
#
And I took notes and every single listing.
#
So it gives me sort of a structure.
#
So that was my starting point.
#
So I read an incredible number of documents in the official archive.
#
And then I went into also simultaneously,
#
this was happening to an extent simultaneously,
#
I was reading the Urdu texts and I was reading poetry
#
and letters and all of that.
#
That literature I was reading.
#
But yeah, so this is how you read it.
#
But of course, as I said, colonial texts,
#
every source that you read,
#
whether it's a colonial text that is produced
#
or it is a letter by two people in an individual capacity or it's poetry,
#
everything is put in the context of a critical inquiry to see.
#
And I don't think it is even possible to do that kind of research anymore
#
because now you are being pushed to online searches
#
and you have to, you know, you can't say that I will start ordering
#
one file after the other, after the other.
#
You have to say, okay, this file.
#
And if someone wanted to sort of recreate the research
#
that you did and do it all over again from scratch,
#
would that be possible to do online
#
or would you need to figure out credentials access?
#
You would still need to go to many of these archives
#
because a lot of things are being put online,
#
but not, but there's a huge number of documents
#
which are still not there.
#
So you have to go and look at them and have to access them that way.
#
So before we take a break, a final question before the break,
#
that how do you organize all of this information
#
because you're taking in huge amounts of information.
#
Now, no doubt you are building narratives in your head
#
and stories are coming into place as you do that.
#
But those I imagine at the start would be kind of impressionistic.
#
But you have tons of information.
#
You could look at it chronologically.
#
You could look at it according to the source.
#
You could look at it according to the issue or the theme or whatever.
#
So how do you organize it?
#
Were you using any kind of new or primitive technology for this?
#
You know, what did you arrive at as a best working method?
#
I used the good old index card.
#
We had these little ruled cards from my time in JNU.
#
You know, we started from the first seminar papers that I wrote, et cetera.
#
We had these little index cards, four by six ruled ones,
#
and we used to get them in big stacks.
#
And I used to take these.
#
And I am a very, very, very note taker.
#
I'm an efficient note taker.
#
So I don't go overboard with the amount.
#
And you know, you have to write all of this by hand, by the way.
#
So I was taking notes by hand.
#
So you write them in those index cards.
#
And those index cards are really great because you can shuffle them whichever way you like.
#
So, you know, you get, okay, today I'm looking at a particular thing,
#
so I can, you know, just pick out those which it's tedious, but it can be done.
#
But writing them in the index cards, that was, I think, a great way of organizing it.
#
I mean, despite the fact that you can now do these searches,
#
you know, within your typed up notes and all that, I think just to give you a look,
#
you know, sometimes you need to look at things which you are not searching for.
#
Because when you're searching for something, you already have something in mind.
#
You need to be surprised.
#
And when you start, you know, the kind of, for instance, one of the things that,
#
one very important thing that I think was something new I said in the broken script
#
was about the evolution of Urdu poetry, or not so much the evolution,
#
but some of the questioning that was beginning to happen in the 40s.
#
And the fact that the Mushaira, etc. had actually declined.
#
And that was something I could not have got until I arranged my readings
#
in a particular manner, which was chronologically.
#
Until you organize it chronologically, you can't see that pattern.
#
And a lot of histories of Urdu literature have not looked at it
#
because they've not really looked at that chronological evolution and pattern
#
to the extent that they should have.
#
So, you know, it is those kind of, it's how you organize your material.
#
It makes a difference, I think.
#
And I wonder, even here, does the form in which you're doing your note-taking
#
also influence the way in which you think?
#
For example, I would imagine if you're doing the laborious task
#
of writing one index card at a time,
#
before you begin the writing, it forces you to compress the information
#
that you're taking in to get to the essence of it.
#
So, already your act of writing the book, in a sense, begins with writing that index card.
#
Yes, yes, absolutely. I think that's very right because it does.
#
And there's some amount of filtering that is happening
#
because you're thinking, okay, this is something that is...
#
But then, you know, I have this shorthand also of, in the sense,
#
not shorthand literally, but like, you know,
#
while I'm taking what I think currently is important in this for my purposes,
#
if there's something else that is interesting there,
#
I just make a brief note, also talks about, you know, this,
#
or this letter also talks about this.
#
So, I may not have in detail written down that,
#
but it's there in that note there, that if I need to come back to this,
#
go back to this if you want to look at this.
#
So, those kind of little side notes are bound in my note-taking also,
#
which prompts me to come back if I'm looking for something else this time.
#
I'm almost feeling in a state of panic just hearing about that system
#
because I'm thinking, say, you're researching a particular thing,
#
like Rekhti, for example, you know,
#
and there is something that mentions it in a side way.
#
So, you write it on the side of an index note, also mentions Rekhti.
#
But then later you remember that you wrote it somewhere,
#
but how do you find that precise index card?
#
Like, I would just die and give up the book and just, you know,
#
It's painful, it's painful.
#
And, you know, all of us have this nightmare
#
where you have this absolutely brilliant piece of information
#
and for some reason you did not write it down right there on the footnote.
#
And you are, and it's very important to have that footnote.
#
So, it's happened to me.
#
It happens to me now and then and it's very frustrating
#
and you just have to, you waste a whole lot of time doing this.
#
But you have to tick that box because otherwise, you know,
#
then you're damaging your own credibility.
#
You can't get back to that.
#
Your footnotes are the best here, India's best footnotes.
#
On that note, let's take a quick break and we'll talk more on the other side.
#
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just a willingness to work hard and a clear idea of what you need to do
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Welcome back to The Scene on the Unseen.
#
I'm chatting with Swapna Little about Delhi, about her life,
#
about a bunch of things.
#
And what I want to kind of now get into is I actually want to talk
#
about that period of Delhi that you are obviously so fond of,
#
1803 to 1857, your beautiful book, The Broken Script, is about that.
#
And before I start asking,
#
how did you get into writing?
#
And before I start asking specific questions in a kind of chronology
#
of the things that went down,
#
a number of themes really interest me.
#
And one of those is that I want to kind of understand certain general
#
aspects about how people live their lives.
#
And I want to start with leisure.
#
Like I want to understand what did people do.
#
Like I was struck by this interesting description in your book about how
#
when Archibald set on visits Jahangir at one point in time,
#
you write that he presented him, quote,
#
a musical box, a backgammon board, a table, two glasses and saucers
#
with a view to providing him the means of innocent amusement,
#
And I forget which of Ira Mukhoti or Parvati Sharma told me this,
#
but one of them did, pointed out that many of the Mughal princes
#
of an earlier age, not this age, but two, three hundred years before this,
#
died of alcoholism, like an alarming number.
#
And my postulation was that if you have an addictive personality today,
#
there are so many things you can get addicted to,
#
you know, including social media and notifications and all of that.
#
But there might be a particular time that if you're a prince somewhere,
#
what do you get addicted to?
#
You can't watch Netflix all day because it isn't there.
#
So alcohol is the only way out.
#
But to come back to the 19th century, you know,
#
musical box, backgammon board.
#
And this is obviously for someone who's very elite.
#
But give me a sense of what was the texture of the day
#
of a person living in that age?
#
And you might even have to break this into two answers because one is,
#
of course, the very small number of elite people who had the means
#
to do whatever they wanted.
#
And, you know, otherwise, if you're just a normal...
#
It's an interesting question.
#
This whole thing of backgammon board, et cetera,
#
these should be interpreted in terms of the kind of,
#
you know, exotic curiosities that a prince might be interested in.
#
So the Mughals were very interested in these interesting things
#
And these later Mughals, even though their means were much shrunken,
#
were again very interested in these kind of gifts that they got.
#
For an elite class, literary activities,
#
particularly I'm talking about men, literary activities,
#
the Mushaira, that kind of...
#
The Mushaira is a gathering of poets,
#
but it doesn't really then again also begin to capture what that means.
#
It means you can sit down and you can listen to,
#
you can recite your poems, you can have feedback on them.
#
It's a seminar happening that way.
#
And you discuss them, you listen to other people.
#
It's that kind of thing.
#
There was a lot of physical activity.
#
The physical activity was physical accomplishments,
#
being a good swimmer, being a good archer.
#
These were doing bodybuilding.
#
These were pursuits that were respectable pursuits.
#
A gentleman should do all of this.
#
So you have all of that kite flying,
#
pigeon flying, rearing pigeons.
#
So for instance, the royal family were very into all of this.
#
So that is a very important part.
#
So it's not enough, particularly in the Mughal royal family,
#
a lot of them were actually musicians themselves.
#
They did receive training in it.
#
So these are kind of leisure pursuits.
#
And of course, some of these are more democratic also
#
in the sense that swimming, everybody can leap into the Yamuna
#
and swim if you can avoid the...
#
There are these crocodiles and alligators and things there
#
which you have to look out for.
#
So you can do all this.
#
And some of this would have been interaction across...
#
And by the way, there were ustads in swimming also.
#
So you could have an ustad who would have several shaggels
#
where they instructed in swimming.
#
So those were the kind of everyday pursuits.
#
But I was talking about the orality of a lot of literary production.
#
And that orality meant that our thing of reading a book,
#
it's a performance thing.
#
So you have Dastan Goi traditions.
#
Dastan Goi, Kissa Goi happening on the steps of the Jawa Masjid
#
There are these performers who gather a crowd around them
#
and they will regale them with...
#
Interestingly, and Dastan Goi is of course all stories that they are telling,
#
but things like, for instance, newspapers.
#
Newspapers were expensive.
#
So even if you can read, and there were literally
#
the population, proportion of people actually,
#
literature is rather small.
#
But even if you can read, it's an expensive thing.
#
So you borrow from people.
#
But there are people who actually make it a profession
#
to cater to the non-reading public also.
#
So there was this guy who I came across in a document quite by chance
#
who used to actually go and subscribe to various newspapers.
#
And he wrote down compilations from these
#
and went and read these to his clientele.
#
So an early aggregator.
#
Yes. And he went and he read this out
#
to people who wanted to listen to the news.
#
So there is this new service which is developing.
#
So it's a very interesting life that you can see.
#
Delhi was a fascinating place, I think.
#
Tell me about the lives of the women.
#
Lives of the women typically are very difficult to access
#
because the kind of, for this period, you find very little,
#
you find things like poetry written by a few women,
#
which in its content, there's not a lot of it around.
#
Nobody, I have not come across any full-length divans
#
just in the Tazkira's some mention that you come across.
#
And it's not, I think, qualitatively very different from any other kind of poetry.
#
A lot of the so-called women's voice is actually available to us
#
from sources that were produced by men.
#
Rekhti poetry actually is written by men.
#
And it's a caricature of what?
#
It's a caricature of how women talk, how women behave,
#
what are their, sometimes these are value judgments on their sexuality
#
and all of those kind of things through the eye,
#
not only through the eye of men, but for the consumption of men.
#
So I know that work has been done on Rekhti as the voice of women,
#
but we must keep in mind that this is to some extent a caricature
#
because the actual lives of women are quite difficult to capture.
#
There has been, you know, even later works in the later 19th century,
#
there have been works which are more self-consciously about recording women's,
#
you know, things like customs and all of that kind of stuff.
#
But again, that becomes a sort of an anthropological view
#
which concentrates too much on how women are different from men.
#
You know, how they have a life and a language that is different,
#
the Meghamati's Ubaan and all of that.
#
But that also, again, is all written mostly by men.
#
So my period, I mean, there's a lot of women's writing happening later,
#
but that's not part of what I was looking at at this period.
#
I'm also curious about how people learn in the most general sense possible.
#
Like, you know, we have this caricature of learning now
#
that all learning must happen in this form that was, you know,
#
kids of the same age go to school together,
#
they're learning the same subjects, history, geography, whatever,
#
you go till 10th standard, you do whatever.
#
It's a format that was made to create workers for the Industrial Revolution,
#
perhaps in India, clerks for the British Empire.
#
And I think it is incredibly outdated and it's an artifact
#
and it's like absolutely sort of outlived its utility.
#
And then when I read the broken script, what struck me is that
#
this is actually an age of great learning, of great art.
#
And while there are madrasas and while there are some traditional schools,
#
you know, we'll speak of the Delhi University later,
#
the higher institutions that come about,
#
but I'm also interested in all these informal ways of learning that are forming.
#
Like, you've written about how Saeed Ahmad Khan,
#
he's learning in all of these different ways,
#
including from a woman who comes in a veil and kind of teaches him.
#
And then he loses touch with learning for a while.
#
And then when he's 30 years old, you know,
#
he decides he has to learn things again in a systematic way.
#
And there are three subjects he's interested in
#
and he finds three individual tutors and learns in it.
#
And I feel like there's a great analogue in it for the modern age,
#
where those of us who kind of went through education like automatons
#
or we ticked boxes and we didn't learn anything,
#
we today have the freedom to go online and do an online course by an individual
#
and actually pick up that learning in that way.
#
So I'm just kind of just fascinated by that whole ecosystem of learning.
#
So I want to ask that basic question.
#
How did people learn about the world?
#
If you wanted to improve yourself, how did you go about it?
#
That is actually one of the important parts, I think, of the book
#
to talk about this kind of...
#
And you know, one thing, one kind of very much there in the book
#
which is related to this, which is that very often
#
when we think of what has made modern India
#
and we look at a lot of...
#
We're looking at them through a Western lens.
#
And particularly, I think it becomes important...
#
I'm sorry, this is a digression from what your actual question was,
#
but I think it needs to be said that today we are very happy to say,
#
you know, oh, this is colonial.
#
It's a part of colonial knowledge.
#
We should get rid of this and get back to our pristine Indian whatever.
#
What we forget is that a lot of what is colonial knowledge,
#
this colonial modernity that we are seeing around us,
#
is actually produced by Indians, right?
#
And it's the Indians who have a very...
#
And in Delhi, particularly, you see a great tradition of learning that is there.
#
And this, as you very rightly put it,
#
it's a system where it gives a basic grounding in the three Rs
#
and some of your basic texts of logic and whatever, whatever.
#
You have these rhetoric and these are traditional systems which are there.
#
And it's very similar in the West as well.
#
But then you have the freedom, as you grow older,
#
or to completely then follow your inclinations and say,
#
I actually am interested in medicine.
#
So I'm going to find out some Hakim who I can find,
#
and I'll go to him and I'll say, please teach me.
#
And if I can convince him that I'm sincere and I'm going to work hard,
#
and then they will take me on as a shagird,
#
and then they will coach me and I will study and I'll learn.
#
So that is for somebody like Syed Ahmed,
#
who was obviously a bright child, but also in a very privileged position.
#
He was probably a very spoiled child at home,
#
and he was allowed to do...
#
He could slack off when he didn't want to study,
#
and then he gets a job,
#
and he gets a job because he's got good connections, of course,
#
because that still works in the company.
#
So he gets a job in the judicial service, and he works.
#
And then later he says, okay, but I'm interested in archaeology.
#
Let me study a little bit of that,
#
and I'm interested in astronomy and a little bit of that and some medicine.
#
He practiced medicine for a little while.
#
So all of that can happen.
#
And it is a very robust system, I think,
#
because it does produce these wonderful people.
#
And I've listed a few of these very interesting people
#
The English education that they eventually get
#
helps to give them the means to address a larger audience.
#
I've talked about Master Tam Chander.
#
I've talked about Mohanlal Kashmiri.
#
And these are people who contribute immensely
#
to the development of this modernity that I'm talking about.
#
But they are rooted very strongly in the Indian tradition.
#
For them, this is the Indian tradition,
#
that you evolve by learning new things,
#
adapting them to what you already know,
#
building upon what you know.
#
And it's a wonderful thing that is happening because they are...
#
And as I said, they are not closed minds.
#
For them, everything is knowledge.
#
You just soak it up and take whatever you like.
#
So that kind of learning is definitely a very, very important part
#
of how you develop, you learn through these particular ways.
#
And yes, the parallels with what we have today are there again to think that...
#
And the British can't comprehend it at that time.
#
How can you have no discipline in your classroom?
#
You know, you can't go off tomorrow if you suddenly lose interest in this,
#
and you go and do something else.
#
You know, every child should be done,
#
and there should be classes and monitors and specific hours laid out.
#
And they find it quite difficult also,
#
because there are people who go off and do other things,
#
and they are concerned about absenteeism.
#
And when they establish the Delhi College,
#
then they are quite concerned with how some of these things are working out.
#
But it takes a little while for this to settle down.
#
And then, of course, because they are the rulers,
#
that's how our education system develops from then on.
#
And I'm also fascinated by the Delhi College in the sense that
#
there is a sort of historical accident or contingency which you describe
#
where a gentleman named Fazal Ali leaves this huge endowment for them.
#
But his condition is that, hey, you've got to teach it in the local languages,
#
in Urdu, in Persian, etc.
#
And the Delhi College people, however, want to teach Western knowledge.
#
So what happens is that you have all of these languages,
#
but the knowledge being taught on them is not the traditional knowledge
#
that has evolved in those languages.
#
Instead, it is a Western knowledge,
#
and suddenly you have to translate Adam Smith to Urdu
#
or whatever it was that they taught.
#
And I find this incredibly fascinating,
#
because it's like this crazy confluence of two worlds,
#
and you begin to wonder what's going to happen,
#
who are the minds coming out of this.
#
Can you tell us a little bit about this whole institution and what happened?
#
It's a very interesting thing, because this is really Macaulay before Macaulay,
#
because one of the formative influences in the Delhi College is Trevelden,
#
who is Macaulay's brother-in-law and a formative force there.
#
And he and the people he brings in,
#
ultimately their idea is that the only knowledge worth having is Western knowledge,
#
and the only medium through which you can gain it is English.
#
And therefore English has to be taught,
#
but however since we have a problem right now,
#
people don't know English, so let us start with the knowledge,
#
and then we will put in the English etc.
#
One, there are two problems.
#
One is of course that there are limited resources,
#
and then there is a so-called inherent traditionalism among the upper classes of Indians.
#
It is quite a fallacy because people are actually quite open to new ideas.
#
But this idea that we will not be able to sell this,
#
so let us start with a conservative kind of view,
#
but with the ultimate aim that we will have Western knowledge through English.
#
Fazl Ali, who was a prominent member of the Delhi elite,
#
but was also the Prime Minister of the Nawabs of Awadh.
#
He makes this huge endowment, and he gives it,
#
he says I want to invest it in Delhi for education,
#
and for education in Persian and Arabic and stuff,
#
so Oriental learning as the British used to call it.
#
So the British tell him that, you know, look,
#
the sum you are giving will not probably set up a new institution,
#
but if you contribute it to the Delhi College, and he contributes it.
#
And because the terms are that it has to be Oriental learning,
#
they have to give out scholarships for the Oriental section,
#
they have to appoint teachers for the Oriental section,
#
but then they go behind that and actually push what is a curriculum,
#
which is a Western curriculum.
#
So very soon they start becoming proud of the fact that students
#
from the Oriental section are as good at science and whatever,
#
these new subjects that are being as the English section.
#
But there's another thing that I'm interested in saying.
#
Because the Oriental section, the medium is Urdu.
#
The medium of instruction is Urdu to fulfill the Oriental character, right?
#
The students themselves are increasingly much more interested in learning English.
#
So there are these idealists, there are people like there is Master Ramchandra,
#
who is a brilliant mathematician, an acclaimed mathematician,
#
but his passion lies in the dissemination of science at a popular level.
#
And he believes that you have to write in Urdu to address a larger audience,
#
and therefore all advancement has to be made in Urdu.
#
You know, you have to teach in Urdu.
#
But the interesting thing is that people are actually interested in learning English,
#
because ultimately for the average student of the Delhi College and his parents,
#
the main aim is to get a job in government service, hopefully.
#
And for that, English is best.
#
So it's very interesting.
#
There may be all sorts of, the British are trying to push this,
#
because they think that, you know, Western knowledge will open up minds
#
and make people more accepting of British rule.
#
And people like Master Ramchandra and all that are thinking that this will be progress for Indians,
#
because they're learning new knowledge they are absorbing and all that.
#
But the average student wants to learn English.
#
So it's not about Western knowledge or whatever.
#
As long as you have the medium, which will help you get a job, that's what's most important.
#
So it's a very interesting, I think sometimes things don't change that much.
#
And very often you realize that these are things that you can identify with so well.
#
And it's an interesting, you know, how the center of gravity has shifted from Persian to English,
#
in a sense by now that everyone aspires to learning English.
#
I want to ask you a bit about Master Ramchandra, because when I was reading the book,
#
I thought that if you go to Swapna's house, her wifi password must be Master Ramchandra.
#
Because you love that character so much.
#
And he's such a fascinating character in the sense that I think he wrote about minima and maxima and algebra,
#
how you can, you know, translate calculus and make it more explicable that way.
#
And a hardcore rationalist who would speak out against, you know,
#
traditional wisdom and all the danger that they caused, where I have to say I completely agree with him.
#
And also a man who bizarrely converted to Christianity in 1952,
#
which surprised everyone because they thought, this is a rationalist, what is he doing?
#
And I want to ask you a deeper question. I mean, it's a two-part question.
#
First part is, you know, tell me more about this man and where he came from and, you know, what's happening there.
#
But also the deeper question that kind of struck me is that many of the characters in this,
#
and it's almost like a glimpse into the human condition,
#
that many of the characters in this are remarkable people just taken for what they are doing,
#
you know, what they are achieving, you know, Ramchandra or Ghalib or Bahadur Shah Zafar or just everybody.
#
But at the same time, you see all of them in a sense as victims of circumstance.
#
You see all of them playing these different kind of games, adapting themselves to suit the situation.
#
You know, there is that saying, where you stand depends on where you sit.
#
And where all of these men end up standing is where they are sitting.
#
You know, Zafar becomes emperor at the age of 62.
#
And you describe so well that during the reign of his father, Akbar II,
#
he's constantly plotting against his father, constantly trying to bring him down.
#
You know, all that politicking is happening, it's constant.
#
You see what is happening with Ghalib, for example, that sense of entitlement,
#
that, you know, I must get the stipends I'm supposed to get and blah, blah, blah.
#
Then he's running away from debtors.
#
He's making pacts where they are useful, sometimes with the emperor, sometimes with the British.
#
And for me, it's very easy for me to separate art and artists.
#
So I'm not passing judgment on any of them.
#
They are human beings responding to incentives to the circumstances.
#
And Ramchandra, in a sense, when I think of, you know, the conversion to Christianity at one level,
#
You know, the dominant power is the British and he's going to do this.
#
But then when I think about that, how before that he's a rationalist,
#
and I'm like, I get that also because he is in the Delhi College
#
and this is a niche where he can thrive.
#
And one doesn't know what a man truly is.
#
And of course, in the end, you have the work left and we can all marvel at Ghalib.
#
So what is your sense of this?
#
What is your sense of this?
#
Because every single character and this is really, you know,
#
the magic that you've created that you've made them so three dimensional and come to life
#
that one can actually feel the dilemmas and the ways that they behave.
#
So what is your sense of this then that, you know, these are such flawed, frail people.
#
It's a very, very difficult time for individuals because so much is changing.
#
I mean, the language, the language in which your parents got their education
#
is no longer the language anymore.
#
I mean, can you think of anything more, you know, sort of, it's not the main, you know, it's been displaced.
#
You thought you were privileged.
#
You know, if you grew up learning Persian, you are settled.
#
And now suddenly it's English.
#
And more than that, the kind of education that is being imparted now,
#
you are talking about all sorts of new things in science and, you know,
#
a lot of your traditional wisdoms are being overthrown.
#
You're going to a college which is not teaching you the fundamentals of the religion.
#
What could be more shocking than that?
#
And by the way, this is something that, you know, there's this interesting thing that languages,
#
for instance, were taught in India before they were even taught.
#
You know, the vernacular was not taught in Britain either, right?
#
They taught Greek and Latin and stuff.
#
Nobody thought that English is something that you have to be taught.
#
You know, that's something that you speak.
#
It's not, you don't teach English.
#
But so it's a period of great change and upheaval.
#
And all of these people have to grasp that reality.
#
And it's not only these levels of what you have to learn,
#
what you have to teach is changing, but also your position in society.
#
People who were, Ghalib always has this problem.
#
He says that my ancestors were people who lived by the sword.
#
And what he's actually saying is he has this noble background.
#
His grandfather and father were soldiers.
#
They were patronized by various ruling powers, et cetera.
#
And he suddenly left high and dry because the company,
#
neither does it need any soldiers anymore of that caliber.
#
Leaders of men it doesn't need.
#
It needs, it has its own leaders.
#
And it does not care to hoots for poets either because, you know, it's not interested.
#
That's not its cultural project.
#
So now where does that leave him?
#
But there are these other people who are much more in the system like Ramchandra.
#
He has a niche in the Delhi College.
#
He manages to direct to quite an extent the literary program that it has,
#
the translation program, the development of a curriculum in Urdu.
#
He of course also does original research and writing.
#
So that is very much there.
#
But he also unfortunately then suffers from a lot of these pulls and pressures.
#
His conversion to Christianity is never really explained adequately.
#
I mean, of course, there are the kind of usual sort of writing which is not very helpful.
#
You know, he had this great revelation.
#
You know, what happens with every convert that there are these stories that develop around them
#
that, you know, suddenly the light was revealed, you know, which are not helpful at all,
#
which doesn't really tell us about what these things are.
#
But what one can imagine is that a man like that is constantly under pressure
#
for his very radical views at that time to say that I'm a rationalist
#
and I'm, you know, a curse on these mullahs as well as a curse on these pundits for the falsehood they are spreading.
#
As well as a priest to start with till he converts.
#
Yeah, so in that day and age to hold and publicly express such views makes you a socially a pariah.
#
And he probably just at one morning he woke up and said,
#
look, I'm tired of being an outsider everywhere.
#
I want to fit in somewhere.
#
And at that stage, what he feels is that the most rational choice then for him is to become a Christian.
#
Because at least in his practice, then he doesn't have to go with all these customs of
#
you know, then I cannot, you know, all the kind of ritual that his
#
social situation demands of him, at least that is, it liberates him from that.
#
So that's the best explanation that I can probably offhand give you.
#
He doesn't give any of that kind of explanation himself.
#
But from a very, very rational point of view, I would say this,
#
that Christianity may not be in its in its doctrine any more rational than any other.
#
But at least in its practice, it liberates you from all those cast and thing rules and all that that you have to otherwise follow.
#
So that may be one situation.
#
But he is also a very troubled man because particularly with 1857,
#
he's hugely disillusioned because he realizes that and of course,
#
he must have felt at some level even before that,
#
the kind of racial discrimination that Indians faced on a daily basis.
#
But it's kind of thrown in in sharp relief after 1857, the violence that comes about.
#
And of course, the fact that that beautiful world, the intellectual world of Delhi before 1857,
#
where he was part of the Delhi College and all that breaks apart.
#
So it's it's quite sad for him, actually.
#
In our web series, he would be such a great character as well.
#
Like such rich characters you have created.
#
I don't know how you kind of focus on the current day and the current age when history is so great.
#
To go back to the theme of what life was like in those days,
#
I also want to ask about the media, right?
#
Because through this period, the media actually evolves a hell of a lot where the printing press comes in
#
and then there are newspapers and akbars and so on.
#
And I was fascinated by this.
#
In the Delhi Urdu Akbar, Mohammed Bakar took it over in 1853
#
and you reproduced a part of his editorial and I want to read it out before I get to the question.
#
These are Mohammed Bakar's words in 1853, right?
#
Quote, the main object of producing and publishing a newspaper is a teaching and preaching of subjects
#
which are useful for the human beings and the common welfare.
#
The intention is that the common people should imbibe virtues and chanvices.
#
They should feel ashamed of their bad conduct when they read the newspaper and as a result fight to give it up.
#
Therefore, the manager of the newspaper should first himself strive for laudable manners and agreeable qualities.
#
If he wants to teach something to the common people, he should practice it himself.
#
As far as possible, therefore, he should acquire knowledge of the arts and sciences
#
and ponder over questions of morality and never indulge in satire or foolish pretter.
#
This should also be the attitude he should encourage in his correspondence.
#
As far as possible, the manager of a newspaper should investigate
#
whether the reports of the correspondents are true or false.
#
Otherwise, a standard of the paper will be brought down and it will lose its reputation.
#
The readers will then begin to cast doubts even on the true news, drop quote, right?
#
Immensely enlightened for 1853 and it strikes me here that, you know, there are two things that I noted here and one is the sense of purpose.
#
And today we might redefine the sense of purpose slightly and say that it is, you know, don't bring virtue into it.
#
You're just reporting the world as it is. But I'm still impressed by that sense of purpose.
#
And the second thing, you know, which applies totally to this current day is on the tonality of the discourse
#
when he says that, you know, never indulge in satire or foolish pretter.
#
And I think one of the, you know, the great beans upon us in modern social media is that everybody is snarking on everyone.
#
We are too busy making fun of people to engage in dialogue.
#
And there is a sense that, hey, you know, it must have been happening then because this guy sees it.
#
And he specifically warns against it and says, don't do this. We've got to be above this.
#
And this is obviously, I would guess that this is possibly the best kind of expression from that era.
#
Obviously, selection bias. Everybody's not like this. All kinds of things are happening.
#
But the other thing I also noticed is where you point out that in many cases, half of a newspaper would be given to global news.
#
What is happening in Afghanistan, what is happening in Turkey, etc., etc.
#
Which also kind of amazes me because I'm just trying to think of the news cycle.
#
How is news traveling? You know, when Walter Lippmann wrote the great book Public Opinion in 1914 or 1918, whatever,
#
the end of the First World War, he wrote about how when the World War I started,
#
people on a particular island did not know that they were at war with each other, the French and the English, for two weeks.
#
Because that's how long it took the news to percolate down.
#
And equally, after the war ended for a few days, people kept killing each other, even though their nations are at peace.
#
And that is the 19th, that is the 20th century. And this is the early part of the 19th century.
#
You've got global news, you've got this hunger. So tell me a little bit about all of this.
#
It's very interesting. But Delhi, of course, being not only the capital of various empires over centuries,
#
was also a very important trading center. It's been historically, right?
#
And trade networks were great conduits for news also.
#
And people who are in trade, for them, it makes business sense to be aware of what's going on.
#
What is the latest news? And in fact, the earliest akhbars we have, which are in Farsi,
#
these Persian akhbars are really the newsletters which are written for the benefit of basically business patrons
#
who will pay for news to come from Delhi. Maybe you're in Rajasthan somewhere or wherever.
#
You are somewhere, you have business dealings. You need to know what's going on in Delhi,
#
because a decision that is taken in Delhi will affect your business.
#
And if you get that information a little bit in advance of everybody else, it will benefit.
#
Or if you lose out on important news, that can affect you adversely as well. So you want news.
#
So you subscribe to newsletters from various corners. And there are people who make a living out of creating these akhbars.
#
So these akhbars are literally just narratives of this was happening at the Mughal Darbar,
#
the emperor gave this order, so and so said this, so and so brought this information.
#
So there is this information that is being produced and the akhbars are being produced and passed back and forth.
#
So in fact, we have a great selection of these Persian akhbarat also, and I've used some of them.
#
A great collection has been published also. So I used that. I mean, I didn't look at the original version once,
#
but I looked at these translations. So those are great for kind of like just information collecting.
#
So they collect information and send them out. These are the akhbar navices who do that.
#
What happens? So the interest in outside information has its roots there.
#
And there's a lot of discussion of this is happening and that is happening and, you know, all over the place.
#
But there's another aspect of it which may not occur to us. The balance.
#
City news is there, but it's relatively, it's there.
#
But again, the thing is that if you live in a city which is within the walls, barely a lack of people,
#
what information do you have that you're not getting on a daily basis from your little gossip networks?
#
You don't want city news. You know that already. So what you get is news from outside. That's what is happening.
#
Of course, there are the new things that start happening in these newspapers is more discussion,
#
the editorial content. And that's what that's the modern part of the newspaper, which Mohammed Barker and all are.
#
He's an alumnus of the Delhi College. So he's he's very much a part of that.
#
The new knowledge that is coming up and he talks about social reform.
#
He's also putting his neck out there and talking about widow remarriage and, you know, all of those kind of things, expensive weddings.
#
So these big fat Indian wedding was also a thing in those days because he's writing against, you know.
#
So the idea there's a sense of permission of reform is very much there in Mohammed Barker also.
#
So there's this idea that the newspaper should also serve this purpose.
#
Yeah. And you mentioned how in 1941, they had a special issue, 1841, they had a special issue on widow remarriage, right?
#
Where different people are giving different arguments and that sounds so wonderful.
#
And, you know, if you look at the history of Western journalism, you'll find that in the 19th century, the first half of the 19th century,
#
especially what is happening is that there is a lot of tabloid journalism.
#
There's a lot of gossip that is dominant. That's what people want.
#
And you wouldn't be surprised. That's human nature. You still find that today.
#
But there wasn't was there some of that as well or or the utility considerations with which it started that businessmen are getting information,
#
you know, that that kind of shaped it more.
#
So one of the things, of course, every newspaper I'm imagining also has to look at its circulation.
#
It has to look at the bottom line. Are we selling newspapers?
#
And therefore, it's very interesting to see how this sense of, you know,
#
I need to do something for the greater good and uplift people through my writing and all that all.
#
That's all very well. But you have to also give them the gossip and this thing that they need.
#
In that day and age, the biggest gossip is what is happening in the court.
#
So the Mughal court is the made it's a very big fount of gossip that is coming out.
#
OK, this is what happened. This, you know, there's a lot of commentary on what the princes are doing and some amount of moral judgment.
#
Also, they are too, you know, interested in just pigeon flying and kite flying and cock fighting and all of that.
#
So so that kind of comment. But but it's just entertainment to hear what is going on at the Mughal court.
#
What some important judgments with the magistrate is passing or what is happening in the resident or commissioner's court.
#
Those kind of things are also part of the general news that people want to hear.
#
But there's one very interesting thing to sell the newspaper, including poetry in it.
#
So often poetry is included. Often it is Bahadur Shah Zafar's poetry.
#
So that fulfills two aspects, people's curiosity about what the emperor is doing as well as poetry.
#
So poetry was something that was an easy sell. So somebody like Master Ramchandra in the Delhi,
#
he brought out a few journals and one of them was he contributed to the Delhi College Journal as well.
#
And this journal, which deals with current affairs as well as science stories and stuff like that,
#
also includes poetry from the emperor and stuff like that.
#
And that's clearly a marketing exercise. You know, if you include poetry,
#
people may not be interested in the science or whatever esoteric topics that you might be talking about,
#
but they'll buy it for the poetry. So so those kind of considerations are definitely there in the newspapers.
#
I'm utterly baffled by this. And I think it's so beautiful that newspapers should sell more because it publishes poetry.
#
Like, you know, hey, where did we lose that? Why did we lose that? Let's have more of that.
#
And my next question actually, you know, takes on from there.
#
Now I want to figure out in terms of the consumption and production of art, what did that era look like?
#
Right. Today we are suffused by art everywhere. I can just pick up my phone and consume it.
#
And I can produce it also just as easily with the means of production in my hand.
#
What was it like in those days? If you had an artistic impulse, what would you do?
#
We've already discussed about how a budding poet would try to find an Ustad. Initially, it's one on one.
#
Then the printing press comes in. That makes a big difference.
#
You're suddenly disseminating either your books or newsletters with varied poems to a bunch of people.
#
You speak about how Karimuddin, who had a printing press, he wanted to publicize it.
#
So he started this fortnightly Mushaira, rented a house for it.
#
And he would send out a newsletter of all the poems read out in that particular place.
#
And, you know, biggies like Ghalib and all never graced his chambers.
#
But, you know, all of that was happening for a while.
#
So give me a sense of what is that ecosystem like?
#
Like, you know, there are two ways in which it can develop.
#
And one is that an artistic ecosystem can sometimes be just a close circle of elites and they're not accessible to the world outside.
#
Or it can be something that everybody can participate in and jump into.
#
And it seems here that acceptability is not really the issue because the newspapers are selling more because they're publishing poems.
#
There's something really good going on there.
#
So what was it like both for someone who loves art and for someone who wants to be an artist?
#
It's a period of great upheaval, actually.
#
Because the traditional system has up till that point been that you have wealthy patrons who will support an artist.
#
And whether you are a painter or you are a poet, you are a musician, you are looking to that kind of rich patron, royal patron.
#
So that was the very simple standard way.
#
And that continues for a bit.
#
It continues during this period, particularly since the Mughal court is still around, though much reduced in its means.
#
So, you know, the ability to support even one or two poets is kind of hard.
#
So those limitations are there.
#
So there is this new regime which now potentially has the means, but its tastes are varied.
#
So painters, for instance, get immediate patronage.
#
So all these, you know, with the collapse of the Mughal court, the shrinking of the Mughal influence and resources,
#
many of the painters had already in the 18th century moved to a lot of regional centers.
#
And now the East India Company officials also commission them to make so-called company paintings.
#
You know, we have this whole genre of painting that comes up.
#
The poets are left a little high and dry because there's nobody really to patronize them
#
because, you know, British company official can admire a beautiful painting.
#
What does he know about the sophistication of Urdu poetry, right?
#
No matter what may have been said about, you know, there's been this whole debate about the white Mughal and how culturally this thing.
#
I think that's an exaggeration.
#
The average British official, their language, et cetera, you know, they were not into this to a large extent.
#
So you have to now, now what?
#
So the poetry moves from something that could potentially be seen as you're defining yourself.
#
That's what you do to something that you dabble in.
#
So while there are, it's a democratization of the process of producing poetry.
#
A lot of people are now producing poetry.
#
I'm a Baba, but I may be Kusher, right?
#
The world of Zork and Ghalib and all is not that.
#
You are a poet because you've spent your life just doing that.
#
So that is what kind of changes the idea that you cannot count on this as being a living.
#
It's not a thing that you can do.
#
You can just about dabble in it.
#
So that change, unfortunately, happens.
#
Karimuddin's experiment is a very interesting one.
#
And he's just opening this window to this possibility that you can get patronage for.
#
And not only he, but the newspapers which are publishing the poems and all that.
#
I don't know whether they're putting any royalties.
#
But the whole idea being that patronage of poetry, poetry should move from these traditions
#
because this traditional system is now collapsed because these new rulers don't patronize poets.
#
So then how do you support poetry or good poetry, right?
#
So it's an experiment in trying to figure out ways in which this can move from the court
#
and from these small Mushairas, etc. to a wider public sphere, how poetry can move from that.
#
And so that's how Karimuddin's experiment comes.
#
It fails for various reasons.
#
But it's an interesting period, an interesting moment in time.
#
Before we get to specific chronology and start talking about the dynamics between the Mughals
#
and the East India Company and the Marathas right at the start of it,
#
final general question, and this is about a subject which, of course, is a great passion of yours, food.
#
Now you have, in your great book on Chandni Chowk, you've spoken about going there.
#
And, you know, there is daulat ki chaat and naan khatai and the zeeparatha wali gali.
#
And there are all those foods which we associate so deeply with that particular place.
#
But I often wonder what people actually ate in the 19th century.
#
You know, I've done an episode on Indian food with Vikram Doctor.
#
I've done a long episode with Pushpesh Pant right here in this very studio.
#
And something that we know by now is that most things that we eat today didn't, you know, came from outside.
#
They came in the Colombian exchange or they came, you know, after we were colonized and especially.
#
So there is, it's very hard to make a sense of what is Indian food, what is not.
#
And I'm always fascinated by this, that in any given age, what is it that people find tasty?
#
I'm guessing there are the sort of the constraints of what is available locally and what can be had.
#
And so give me a sense of, you know, what did people eat in those times?
#
What were meal times like?
#
You know, was it just sustenance or was it a sense of joy and delight that you and I would have today when eating the wonderful food of, you know, that time?
#
Well, I must confess that I haven't really examined this from a rigorously academic point of view because it just so happens.
#
I think that while reading through various sources and Ghalib's letters, for instance, are a very interesting source for that kind of commentary.
#
He has strong views on Tarka and Baghar.
#
I haven't, you know, I did not come across enough to really go into it or did not, you know, those patterns didn't leap out at me.
#
So, but, you know, of course, again, where your social class is, et cetera, makes a huge amount of difference in that.
#
And I must say this, this one very particular Tazkira of poetry, which talks about some poet and he is, I don't remember what his caste actually is,
#
but this Tazkira writer says that, you know, his poetry just like, so Tazkira's are anthologies and these are quite indiscriminate in the sense that this is not very carefully chosen.
#
Tazkira writers typically pick up a large number of poets of their time or just before that, depending on what their focus is.
#
And they just kind of give us a short biographical note and a selection of that person's poetry.
#
It's just a kind of compendium, a directory of poets.
#
So he writes about this particular poet and he says his verses are as bland as the food that is eaten in his caste by his caste.
#
That's pretty savage literary criticism.
#
Very savage. So, you know, so there is this whole thing of, you know, caste based restrictions on what you eat and all that.
#
One other, I must tell you this very other very interesting tidbit, which I don't think I included in my book.
#
I don't know. I should have probably slipped it in somewhere.
#
But, you know, when the revolt of 1857 breaks out and there are people looting shops and all that, that's happening in a big way.
#
And the contents of some European shop which have been looted, which has got lots of liquor, comes in.
#
And it is taken to Bahadur Shah Zafar and said,
#
So I think there are two large consignments or whatever it is.
#
Where, you know, alcohol will be used for the soldiers who are getting wounded and all that for use there.
#
And the others send them to various Kayas who are in my employee, send it to them.
#
So there is this whole this, you know, that the Kayas are those who will, you know, consume this alcohol.
#
So these kind of things are there.
#
Ghalib, of course, is a great, alcohol is a very interesting factor here because here the reception of imported things becomes very important
#
because he likes gin and he drinks this thing called Old Tom.
#
Old Tom apparently was quite a sweet gin.
#
And he has a sweet tooth.
#
He likes, I think, mangoes for the same reason also because they are sweet.
#
And then he has this bit of a crisis because after 1857, all of these things are very expensive and he doesn't have money.
#
So he can't get his usual gin and he's getting some country liquor, you know, which is awful.
#
And then he discovers liqueurs and he loves them.
#
He writes in a letter to a friend of his, he says, these are better than mangoes.
#
I don't know what liqueurs he would have got, but he just mentioned it as liqueur.
#
So they are very sweet, obviously.
#
And of course, when you read this thing about eating, I don't know whether he just ignores the roti aspect of it or whatever, but it all is about meat.
#
This shorba, that kama, whatever, he just completely ignores it.
#
You give me enough of that.
#
The sabzi is completely beneath him.
#
But there are people better than me who have done research on this aspect.
#
So let us test your knowledge of the 19th century now.
#
Something happened in the middle, in the early part of the 19th century, which caused a boom in the American Midwest, where a bunch of companies sprung up to produce a particular thing.
#
In the early 19th century?
#
Sometime during that period.
#
Towards the middle, in fact.
#
And there is a key word which you mentioned a while ago.
#
In those days, malaria was rampant.
#
American companies came up to produce ice because for gin and tonic, gin and tonic is best had with ice.
#
So you mentioned, just to tell the full story for my listeners.
#
Basically, the way to fight malaria was you take quinine as a precautionary measure.
#
It saves you from malaria, but quinine by itself cannot be had.
#
But you can make tonic water out of it and then you can make everybody have it, incentives by having gin and tonic.
#
But gin and tonic needs ice and therefore that's where, for some reason, I don't even know why they had to go all the way to America to get people to manufacture ice.
#
But that is kind of what it is.
#
So just, you know, think of all the things we take for granted ice.
#
Who would have thought that it's scarce?
#
Yes, ice used to be made in Delhi.
#
There were ice fields in what today large parts of New Delhi, you know.
#
There were ice fields which used to be very laborious process of ice being made on cold winter days and then being packed in straw and stuff like that.
#
So it was just a fascinating story on its own.
#
Mirza Ghalib, by the way, it was Arhar Ki Daal, which he praised.
#
So if anyone listening to this is a fan of Ghalib, instantly go out, put on his guzzle and, you know, have some Arhar Ki Daal.
#
Let's sort of talk about, you know, the narrative of what is happening during that time.
#
Because one of the ways in which the time is painted is that hey, the Mughal dynasty is dying away and Bahadur Shah Zafar is a lame duck at the end of it.
#
And basically it's East India Company.
#
It's all British and et cetera, et cetera.
#
But as you've pointed out, I'll also link to a wonderful talk you gave in Bombay on justice that actually that's not it.
#
Actually, there is a very rich culture, a very rich sort of rich traditions of the arts and all of that, which are alive, which are thriving during that period and time.
#
And 1857 creates a completely dramatic rupture to everything.
#
But otherwise, it is not so cut and dry that it is a decline of, you know, one kind of culture and the rise of another kind of culture.
#
So, you know, take me back to the beginning of this, because a lot of it is also kind of political in the sense that there is this uneasy period at the start of this period where, you know, a few years before your narrative starts, Shah Alam II comes back to Delhi.
#
And he's, you know, welcomed by, I think, Dalitrao Sindhiya and welcomed and put on the throne.
#
And the thing is, even if he doesn't have actual power, there is symbolic power there.
#
And there is, more importantly, legitimacy in the eyes of the people if you are with the emperor.
#
And eventually, you know, the second Anglo Maratha war, East India Company takes over.
#
And then whoever the Mughal emperor becomes a puppet gets a stipend from them and, you know, can't do anything without the approval of the resident, as it were, which is such a sort of a great term.
#
So tell me a little bit about the shifting sands of that period and all the negotiations that everyone is having to do around the politics, because the artists and the craftsmen and everybody are also having to adjust to this new reality, as you pointed out earlier.
#
One of the things that I start off when I talk about the broken script and why I looked at this period is, you know, you cannot look at culture separated from politics.
#
Everything works together. And it's very important to understand the politics of the time to talk about the culture of the period.
#
And so my book, my PhD was the culture of the 19th century. It was always culture with a small C.
#
You know, I'm not talking about dance and music.
#
So the political culture is very, very interesting because the Mughal Empire had long gone.
#
It is not that the British replaced the Mughal in 1857 or even 1803. Mughal Empire had long gone.
#
It was a very, very reduced territories, even many other powers have risen.
#
The Marathas you've mentioned, the Sikhs, the Jats, the various provinces of the Mughal Empire themselves were now independent.
#
What had survived was the name and symbolic authority of the Mughal emperor.
#
That was currency that was very valuable.
#
And in fact, one very important aim of the British in making their progress through the Dwaab was to capture Delhi,
#
to capture the control over the Mughal emperor in whose name they can then now claim to rule Hindustan.
#
So that currency is important. So the Mughal emperor is in that sense a puppet.
#
Not even a puppet, he has to do just what, you know, he is a puppet because he just is a rubber stamp.
#
However, it is very interesting to see that these Mughal emperors, who we see as people who are powerless,
#
and you know, the British built up this popular narrative of these people being decadent, out of touch,
#
incompetent, etc., and which we kind of use again to justify how the Mughal rule declined,
#
how the company came in and why the company had to come in.
#
And it was good that the company came in because these people were decadent and declining and whatnot.
#
Which kind of ignores the kind of sort of other aspects that are related to the decline of the Mughal empire
#
and the rise of various other kind of powers.
#
These are processes in history which are not so simple as, you know, Adhursha being weak and incompetent or whatever.
#
But what I'm trying to say is that in that narrative, which paints these people in a particular manner,
#
what you forget is that these were people, whether you're looking at Shahalam,
#
my book doesn't deal with Shahalam that much because that's got the end of Shahalam's life,
#
but Akbar II, Bahadur Shah, Zafar, these are people who, within their constraints, it's a very constrained position,
#
they do quite a good attempt at trying to leverage whatever symbolic power they have into actual power.
#
And it's not easy for them because they've been continuously sidelined because of the way things are.
#
Once the British Isnya Company defeats the Marathas, there's no challenge to it.
#
It's the supreme power and it doesn't increasingly think that it needs the Mughal emperor anymore, even as a puppet.
#
So in that situation, the fact that they are jockeying for power.
#
One very simple example I give, which is that Akbar II, I think this is something that is known quite widely,
#
sent Ram Mohan Roy, the Bengal reformer, as his emissary to Britain.
#
There were various points that he wanted to make about some agreements that the British had promised him,
#
which they were going back on. So he sends this guy to go there.
#
What is less well known is Bahadur Shah sends an emissary as well, and this emissary is George Thompson,
#
who is an anti-slavery activist in Britain and in America, who comes to India on the invitation of Dwarkarnath Tagore.
#
And Bahadur Shah then sends his wazir there to talk to him, invite him to Delhi.
#
He comes to Delhi, talks to him. He's given the brief, go and argue for me in England.
#
You can just imagine the kind of portrait that is painted of Bahadur Shah Zafar sitting around.
#
The most well-meaning narratives are those of him sitting and writing these poignant poetry and looking at his ujra dayar or whatever it is.
#
The fact that he's not like that. This guy is proactive. He wants to do something. He's aware of what's going on in the world.
#
He knows that somebody like Ram Mohan Roy is after all an Indian. He will not have the kind of weight that he wants over there.
#
He looks at this guy who's reputed to be a great orator. He's had some success with the anti-slavery movement.
#
I think these are things that you need to look at, and that's what I wanted to show.
#
Let us look at things a little bit more in a more nuanced manner. Who are these people? What do they do?
#
So that's the kind of stories that I wanted to tell through this book.
#
It's very difficult to get away from these pervasive and a lot of the Urdu literature I read of this period also.
#
It's not literature which was produced in this period, but it was written after 1857
#
as these very poignant memoirs of that era. They reinforce these stereotypes of a decadent and ineffectual and failed politics.
#
Of course, ultimately the British colonial rule is a juggernaut that they are crushed under.
#
But that doesn't mean that they are not doing anything or they are out of touch or they are completely incompetent.
#
They are not. They are doing all that they can in some ways to counter this.
#
And I think the ways in which they engage are very interesting.
#
It's absolutely fascinating and especially the way, I mean, Bahadur Shah Zafar was a player.
#
He was playing the game. And from long before he became emperor, he's trying to, you know,
#
because there was a whole battle about he wasn't Akbar II's chosen successor.
#
Akbar always wanted some other son with this one or the other to kind of take his place.
#
And Zafar is always, you know, negotiating with the East India Company, playing his own little games and all of that was kind of fascinating.
#
And even, you know, we were discussing earlier how people respond to the incentives.
#
And you think of Raja Ram Mohan Roy as such a great reformer, a man of great dignity and all of that.
#
But you point out in your book, you reproduce that little letter that he writes to Bahadur Shah Zafar where he's completely obsequious.
#
And he's like, nobody should call me Raja. You are the real Raja. You are whatever.
#
And he's, you know, he's taking that tone. And at the same time, behind his back, he's also reporting to the East India Company exactly what's going on.
#
And you see Akbar at sometimes behaving with dignity and pride and being a leader.
#
And at other times, like one thing that struck me was, you know, at one point when his stipend was withheld, you know, you're right.
#
Akbar's reaction was pitiful. In a conference with Metcalfe, he called himself a fool. He called himself a wretch.
#
He pulled his own ears in token of deserved punishment and humiliated himself.
#
He offered to ask pardon of Metcalfe in public with his hands together in a posture of supplication.
#
Akbar's humiliation was complete. There was no pretense left as to his real position vis-a-vis the company and his officials.
#
And these are very poignant stories because you see this man in a pitiful state.
#
And I don't think there is anyone with any honesty who can say that he himself would not have done the same thing in that position.
#
Right? Because, and especially stipend being withheld, other people are also dependent on you.
#
And I was trying to figure out, you mentioned the stipend at the start when the first resident offered to I think Shah Alam II was 90,000 rupees.
#
So I tried to kind of convert that. I can't figure out a way, maybe some listener can figure out a way to convert it into current Indian rupees.
#
But for the dollar it would be 28 times that much and therefore about 25 lakhs out of which his solo portion would be about 16 lakhs.
#
So it's kind of interesting to think about that and all the politics that went over just at stipend where in the public,
#
you know, the British, the East India Company is maintaining the Singapore, the emperor is the emperor because he does get some legitimacy.
#
And how that completely begins fading away till by the end they don't really give a shit about the emperor.
#
They don't care at all. So it's a very, it's a, it's a sad story.
#
But I think the process is very important to understand how this happens, how this unfolds, because you can't just, you know,
#
the thing between the cusp of British and Mughal rule is a very, it's a gradual process.
#
And it's very easy to also, I think one thing that needs to be said is it's very easy for us to, or rather very simplistically easy for us to say that,
#
you know, these are people who did not fight for India, the independence of India, you know, against a foreign power, they are compromising with the foreign.
#
You know that the idea of India, what is India, what is foreign, what is, you know, from a Delhi person's point of view is a Maratha ruler less foreign.
#
It's only this whole appreciation that colonial rule is somewhat different actually comes with,
#
Mohammed Baqir is the first one to express it and that's during 1857.
#
Yeah, no, I mean, in that, but was there ever the conception of being free of the British or was that conception,
#
or were they just another sort of foreign invader like, oh, the Marathas came and the Jats came and, you know, the Mongols came and etc., etc.?
#
Well, the Marathas actually ruled Delhi. They were not just invaders, they were actually the administration of Delhi.
#
So that, that was, they were, you know, sort of a power and they were replaced by the British.
#
1857, of course, they are kicked out for all about four months, but they are seen as the rulers.
#
But the idea that they are qualitatively different comes with the appreciation of what Dada Bhai Naoroji would later articulate as drain of wealth.
#
When Mohammed Baqir in a newspaper report in 1857 in the height of the revolt says that these people used to collect the money from India and send it outside.
#
And that's a decade or two before Naoroji speaks of it.
#
So to be able to grasp that fundamental difference, the Mongols may have originally come from wherever they came.
#
Marathas may have come from wherever they came, whatever, but they collected revenue, they spent the money here.
#
They stayed here. They had nowhere else to go. They were not, they didn't have, you know, Marathas was somewhat different that way, but not in Delhi.
#
Delhi, they were not just extractors of revenue. They were actually ruling.
#
So, so you have this whole idea that colonial rule is different. That appreciation actually begins then. That's amazing.
#
But before that begins to happen, it's very premature for us to talk about, you know, what is patriotism?
#
Yeah, I sometimes think we've sort of normalized this current nation state with these lines on the map and all of that.
#
But that we've survived 75 years is, you know, there aren't that many nation states really who kind of survived that long.
#
And if you just free the imagination a little bit, you know, it need not be this way, you know, and it would not even have been in the imagination of someone in 1820 or whatever.
#
Right. So tell me a little bit also about then the dynamics of Hindu-Muslim relations, because what we do see after 1857 is the entire Muslim elite is gone.
#
The sort of the Mughal dynasty is like officially finished. Everything goes to dust and there's a change there. There's a fracture there. That's changed forever.
#
But how are things sort of playing out in those sort of the 54 years where the East India Company was there and the Mughal Empire was a vessel.
#
But you had this large Muslim elite. But as you pointed out, you also had a mercantile class, which were which was Hindus and Jains.
#
And they were also not really scared of asserting themselves, like when it came to the demand for the, you know, the banning cow slaughter.
#
Yes, Delhi was an interesting city because for most of the period that I research of this part, the population was kind of 50-50.
#
Muslims were a little less than 50 percent and Hindus and Jains were a little over 50 percent.
#
Now, traditionally, the Muslims had been more of the service class, the service elite, the landowning elite.
#
And the Hindus and Jains had been more of the mercantile class, also the service class, but the service class not as soldiers, but as clerical staff, etc.
#
So guess what happens? The landowning elite are badly hit by the decline of the Mughal Empire and the East India Company really hits them hard.
#
Soldiers, as soldiers also, they get hit because the wars have stopped.
#
And in any case, the company is not employing that many anymore.
#
So they are hit badly, whereas with the ascendancy of the East India Company over all its other rivals, war comes to an end and therefore trade and commerce and agriculture picks up.
#
So mercantile fortunes are rising.
#
So it's just a matter of who preponderates in what sphere.
#
As far as Hindu-Muslim relations go, the Mughals were very interesting because particularly from Akbar onwards, they have been evolving a sort of...
#
They see themselves as being emperors in a country which is multicultural, has all sorts of people of all sorts of faiths, and they see their role as trying to keep the peace among these.
#
And this is a strongly articulated ideal of Mughal rulership.
#
And I've elsewhere explained about the Red Fort, for instance, which has these explicit things of justice and equality and peace among different kinds of people.
#
That's a very strong message that the Mughal Emperor wants to give out.
#
The Mughal emperors themselves are very complex because they are, of course, equally descended from the Rajputs, right?
#
And one very important thing which I came across in one of my sources, not one of my sources, a couple of my sources, one was the Palace Diary and one was another later source.
#
The Mughal emperors and their immediate male family members had given up circumcision, which isn't essential of Islamic practice.
#
And that tells us a lot about how the Mughals saw themselves, where they placed themselves on this thing of, is my Rajput heritage, my Islamic heritage.
#
So those binaries of seeing themselves as Muslim emperors vis-à-vis a large Hindu population, it's not there.
#
They see themselves, more than that, they see themselves as functioning, as people who are keeping the peace between different communities, making sure their balance.
#
They evolve a court culture which, for instance, fosters different, patronizes different religions, patronizes.
#
So festivals are celebrated at court.
#
You know, Diwali is celebrated, the Shera is celebrated in the court, which is the formal aspect, and in the household also, because a lot of the women are celebrating these, right?
#
So it's happening in the palace also, but in the court also these celebrations are happening.
#
They are being patronized.
#
So an employee goes to a pilgrimage to Haridwar or whatever.
#
He's honored with a shawl or whatever.
#
So all of these things are happening.
#
And also you have, which does not say that there are not differences of opinion.
#
Someday, Muharram is falling on the same day as some Hindu festival is happening.
#
On the procession, there will be some dispute between people.
#
You know, all that sort of thing.
#
And the British and the emperors used to kind of use their moral authority as leaders, as people.
#
And you know, this whole court culture that I'm talking about was also done in a way to kind of say that, look, we are also a part of this culture.
#
And if I'm telling you that you postpone the Shera celebration for a day or I'm holding my court tomorrow because today is the 10th day of Muharram,
#
so you know, please understand that I'm doing this in good faith, not as I'm wanting to impose my authority as a Muslim on you because I believe in Islam more.
#
So you know, those kind of things, that kind of adjustment, that idea of the pool walo ki seh, how it develops, that festival that develops,
#
which is a festival of communal harmony, which is still recognized as such.
#
So these are things that they are doing.
#
And I think what the East India Company fails to do is to, it also wants to obviously maintain peace and have everything go well.
#
It fails to make that emotional connect because, you know, all these court practices that I'm talking about for the Mughals,
#
for this, this was a very important way of establishing that authority to be able to mediate peace.
#
Whereas the British see themselves just as umpires and say, let me see, let me look at the precedent.
#
Yeh hua hai, nahi hua hai, toh aap me haan bhi bad kar dethne. You know, whatever.
#
And you know, so I think their aim is the same, but they are less effective.
#
A major change comes with 1857. 1857, the revolt breaks out, the Mughal emperor is, and this is a wake-up call for the company
#
because for the first time they realize that they have been thinking that he is irrelevant.
#
People don't care about him. Now we can sideline him.
#
And here you have the soldiers from all over the North India and Central India rising up and coming to Delhi because they want the Mughal emperor to lead them.
#
That's scary for them. I mean, you think about it.
#
So they very early on decide the aim is to get rid of the Mughal emperor once and for all.
#
No puppet, no nothing, no symbol. Get rid of him.
#
So for that reason, and that's my reading of that, they decide that whatever happens, they are going to hold him responsible as the leader of this revolt.
#
He's not. I mean, I've explained how he's really caught up by circumstances.
#
The soldiers come and they almost bully him into becoming their leader.
#
His art is not in it, but they have decided that he's going to be held responsible for a Muslim conspiracy.
#
You know, he's the leader of a Muslim conspiracy.
#
And therefore it leads them then to take a disproportionate, they hold Bahadur Shah leading the Muslims as the cause of the revolt.
#
All blame is laid on them.
#
And therefore the kind of policies that are followed, there are very discriminatory policies against Muslims specifically, which ultimately lead to two things.
#
One is an actual divide because there is some amount of bitterness there.
#
Many Hindus also thinking that this is one way of self-preservation, they conveniently say, yes, yes, that's right.
#
It was only these Muslims who were responsible that we were not, we were okay.
#
So they take advantage of that narrative to save their own skins.
#
But at the same time, Muslims feel very bitter about it.
#
So Ghalib says that the mosques are being demolished and the penance on the temples, they fly high.
#
So there is this bitterness, the feeling of victimization that comes in to the Muslims at that point.
#
And the British realized for the first time that this is a good thing.
#
If these people can be kept separate, because 1857 shows that when everybody comes together, they can be a serious threat.
#
If you can, you know, the cliche that we have divide and rule, 1857 just shows it that the British for the first time,
#
that if you can do that, if you can continue to exploit this sort of feelings of, you know, feeling victimized either side, then it would be a great idea.
#
If the British came up with divide and rule, you Swapna Little as a baker should come up with divide and eat.
#
That's what you do to a cake.
#
You know, you mentioned how the British were totally sort of disregarded the local customs, did not get the traditions at all.
#
And you've given a great example of this where in 1832, you know, two British officers with two ladies entered the Diwani Khas and the emperor wasn't there.
#
And they are, you know, sitting on the crystal throne, which otherwise the emperor uses and would have taken a selfie if cameras were there.
#
But unfortunately not, and et cetera, et cetera.
#
And, you know, and one officer comes and says, hey, you can't do that.
#
And this guy slaps him and pushes him away, as he later says.
#
And this is sort of one really overt example of how they don't really give a damn about local sensibilities.
#
But there are other examples of this throughout.
#
For example, one of the great battles that you point out that the emperors have, Rashal, Amtu and Akbar both face and even Zafar later contends with is that I want to choose my son who succeeds me.
#
And the Western system of inheritance is primogenitor.
#
The older son gets everything which the British are happy with because in this case, in Akbar's case, I think the older son is Zafar.
#
He's pliant. He's controllable.
#
The younger one Jahangir is kind of all over the place.
#
But so they have their reasons for doing that.
#
But at the same time, it is a custom that has come down for a reason for such a long time.
#
I had a great episode with Timur Quran where we spoke about the history of the Middle East and how it made like, you know, circa 1000 AD, the Middle East actually had more progressive social laws in Europe in practically every sense.
#
And one of them was that you don't have the brutality of the entire property going to just one son.
#
But, you know, it was divided among extended family, among the sons, among the daughters, even though daughters got half of the sons.
#
But it was kind of like that.
#
And the British in their sort of this imperialistic mindset where they are rulers and subjects must obey simply do not get those nuances.
#
And I think in this one critical way, they are just so different from anyone else who came.
#
You know, like you've pointed out, the Mughals came and they really integrated to the extent that to, you know, to say that these later Mughal emperors were not Indian is just absurd and bizarre.
#
They integrated completely.
#
You know, but the British always, you know, had this condescending attitude, kept themselves apart.
#
And give me a sense of what this was, you know, how this was kind of playing out, because I would imagine at some level.
#
Fine, you can't you can't change the customs.
#
Customs come in a bottom up way.
#
You can't just change them with top down dictates.
#
But at another level, if you're brutal enough for a long enough time, you actually can.
#
There are things you can rupture and fracture and which are hard to repair.
#
I think one of the things that changed, the Mughals really showed how a culture of ruling, a culture of rule and culture of, you know, that kind of could be based on everyday cultural practice.
#
Right. And that practice could be taken from all sorts of sources.
#
And therefore, while you recognize that there are people with different beliefs, different cultures, how you can participate in that and how you can use those to build up a sort of a common culture, right, that composite culture.
#
That's again another cliche that we use, but it's very useful category to use because the Mughals really what they're doing is forging this composite culture, the idea of a composite culture.
#
And in our food loads language, it is there, it is a life.
#
And it's a conscious decision by them.
#
Akbar is one of the path breakers in that.
#
But it's being done at an everyday level at such a, you know, on such a conscious level.
#
The British approach is somewhat different.
#
First of all, not specifically in Delhi, but at a larger level, they are defining Indian society into these independent categories of what is a Muslim, what is a Hindu and, you know, forget about any in-betweens or anything, none of that.
#
And each of them, their practices are very distinct and different and they are mutually antagonistic.
#
So it is a culture of that with the British on top.
#
And the idea that your functions as a ruler is not to get involved in this messiness of the culture.
#
Leave the culture alone. You have to be impartial.
#
So you see these British officials, they refuse to participate in.
#
So, you know, they don't go for the pool.
#
They don't go for, you know, there are people who come to wish him happy Holi.
#
Which is a very ungracious way of, you know, the Mughal emperors would happily, you know, go ahead and do whatever, participate in whatever is happening because these are all your subjects, right?
#
So that thing that, you know, we are, that administration has to be above this.
#
Governance has to be above all of this.
#
So I think that political culture, it's a very different kind of political culture.
#
And I think at some level we have lost that because this, to have culture, religious culture, everything informing your political culture at the same time being inclusive.
#
I think that was an amazing thing that the Mughals had managed to, by and large, I think, achieve.
#
And that's what I think the British just overturned.
#
You know, earlier we spoke about or I spoke about accidents of history and part dependence.
#
And when I think of 1857, that is like such a sort of stark illustration of that in my mind because we can think of the 1857 mutiny as the first war of independence as if it's a good thing.
#
But equally it led to some, its failure led to some absolutely terrible outcomes in terms of the British Empire actually taking over the way they did and the whole divide and rule thing and even sort of the destruction of Delhi in a sense.
#
Like at one point you write in your book, Observers noticed in the months and years after the revolt that the character of the city appeared to have changed.
#
Ghalib complained in 1864 that the city was a camp, no palace, no nobility, no chiefs of the surrounding principalities.
#
What an effect he was mourning was a passing of the elite of the city that he knew.
#
What was even more noticeable was the absence of the Muslim elite.
#
The government particularly picked out the Muslims for punishment irrespective of individual involvement in the revolt.
#
As a class they were treated more harshly.
#
And you've of course spoken of this angle just now about how the Muslims were treated and the divide.
#
But I just wondered that assuming the 1857 revolt doesn't happen for some reason, that it is dipped in the bud before it ever reaches Delhi and all of that, how do you see things playing out?
#
How do they kind of play out differently?
#
And I know that many serious historians will scoff at this kind of alternative histories and etc etc.
#
Nevertheless, because in your book it seems like that there is a clean narrative of how things are progressing till then.
#
And some of it is very sad because you know that the emperor is just totally declining, might as well be irrelevant.
#
Zafar's successor would have had no powers at all. They wouldn't even have called him emperor I think is what they decided.
#
So in that sense there was a decline but at the same time the sharp divide and rule policy for example, sorry to use the cliched term again,
#
but that may have played out differently. The whole game could have been completely different. So what is your sense?
#
You may well be true, may well be right because the changes would have been more gentle certainly.
#
This whole demonization of Muslims that happens is in many ways just a fallout of 1857.
#
The British already have this baggage that they carry. From the crusades they have been carrying this of this Muslim who is ferocious.
#
It's a demonization that is there in their wider culture which they apply in India as well.
#
So to some extent that is happening but the practical kind of playing out of those prejudices which happened because of 1857,
#
which is a very unfortunate thing in the long run and so I think that whether that would have happened in that particular manner,
#
that is what I am thinking of, might have been different.
#
It might have been a more gentler sort of slower.
#
The question is not what the British think, of course that's relevant, but also what people's experience in that immediate this thing is.
#
That it's these Muslims who are violent and they are the ones who rose up and they are the ones who butchered these innocent women and children.
#
Women and children trope is very big in the so-called mutiny memoirs that are written by their scores and hundreds.
#
So that thing which gets highlighted and internalized.
#
I mean we've been talking in other contexts about how these things get internalized.
#
I want to bring you to the present day now. We started this conversation or it's been so long I don't remember.
#
Maybe it was before the conversation started that we were chatting about the deepening interest that people have in history,
#
the interest in all of these walks, revival of Rekhta, popular history authors like yourself doing so well.
#
I've had so many of them on this show from Manu Pillay to Iram Mukhati to Rana Safi, Parvati Sharma, they've all been here.
#
And I'm contrasting this with also sort of the shallow sense of history that has otherwise entered our politics.
#
That on the one hand you have individuals who are paying attention to the city around them and they want to know more,
#
who are paying attention to the language in their lives and they want to know more and they are going deeper and there is a deepening there.
#
But equally what you see is that in the political sphere everything has now come down to narrative battles where you want to tell simple stories,
#
politics needs and others so these simple stories have to create an other and history is therefore, quote unquote history is weaponized for this cause.
#
And you of course are a historian. So on the one hand one aspect of it would make you very happy that you have fellow history lovers who can also have Ramchandra as their Wi-Fi password.
#
But on the other hand, you don't look at the times we live in that you wonder that does truth matter anymore?
#
You know, what are we to use the past for?
#
Yes, this is something that of course, it's very, very difficult to grapple with this because in this whole story what gets lost is this idea of,
#
again coming back, I started this with this, what is history? Is history the actual past?
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So when I forward you one little this thing about I'm revealing the past, you know, so all of these things, it's very interesting how they talk about, you know, this is the actual past.
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This is what historians will never tell you, but this is some revealed knowledge which has come to the WhatsApp forwarder who is forwarding this to you.
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But this whole idea of the past is there somehow as a repository which, you know, select people have insight into and control over,
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which they may choose to show you or may choose not to show you and keep hidden away until it is suddenly revealed by someone.
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You know, that idea of it makes complete nonsense of all we know of the craft of the historian, how we put together things, how we research things, how the conclusions that we come to, why we have differences of opinion?
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Why there are so many differences of opinion, which means somebody must be telling a lie.
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You know, that is the thinking because truth is absolute and there can be no scope for uncertainty.
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You know, you're either telling a lie or you're deliberately hiding things or you are incompetent and ill-informed or something or the other.
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It has to be some. So, you know, this is where conspiracy theories can proliferate because there are villains everywhere and nowhere more so in these historians who can't.
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So I'm very amused at, you know, these arguments that are made that there's this conspiracy of historians to hide certain things.
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I mean, can you get two historians to agree on one point?
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You know, are we conspiring?
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Two historians who can't, who will argue about everything.
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How can we conspire together for some things as fundamental as hiding things from a general public?
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Yeah. So, you know, it's I don't even know where to begin on this because it makes me very sad.
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And I and there is a whole lot of pressure on historians.
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I mean, nobody puts, of course, science also, medical science, for instance, is COVID revealed.
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How much medical science was under pressure, you know, of this fake news and all sorts of conspiracy theories which were being put together.
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But historians have been facing this for a long time.
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This, you know, these historians don't know what is what.
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Let me tell you what is the real history, the true history.
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And I look at some of this stuff, which, you know, cycles back and comes into my social media feed and all that.
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And I said, oh, my God, what is this?
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And, you know, and I really don't have an answer to that because I think we have come to a stage now that far from I think we cannot even teach history in a meaningful manner in our schools and colleges
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because we are again getting we have very odd takes on colonialism, for instance, as if you're studying colonialism, then you are for colonialism.
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Whereas you should study colonialism if you and you'll understand why you shouldn't be anti-colonial, you know.
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So it is I mean, I don't know.
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I had hoped at some point, I think in my career that, you know, we would be developing a greater sense of history.
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And but I think we're going the other the other direction where we are.
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We are absolutely failing to understand what history is about.
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You mentioned earlier that when you were in your late 20s, that two year break that you had from academia, it seemed like such a long time to you.
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It seemed like something so momentous had happened.
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And that, of course, happens to all of us in our 20s, that time is so compressed that we think that someone who is 50 is really, really old.
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And the past also seems really far away.
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But I can, you know, you and I sitting here, we are about as far away from our birth as the First World War was from our birth.
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And at the time, it seemed like such a distant, you know, prehistory almost right for us.
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And I guess that, you know, obviously, just getting older, living life, one's lens changes, you pull back a little bit.
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But especially for you, that must be the case because you've delved so much into history.
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You know, you've covered a 50 year period where so much changed, 1803 to 1857 in your own life, which I'm guessing is around the same period.
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Yeah, yeah, that it must sometimes seems that the years have gone by in a flash, whatever happened, right?
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So when you apply that narrative lens, that historical lens, where you look at all the events of the past, you know, a lot of what is happening in the current day is an echo of what has already happened.
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You know, in your book, you've written about how the Hindus said, hey, no cow slaughter and all of that.
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You know, I've done episodes with Akshay Mukul, who's written the great Geeta Press book.
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And I realized from his book that in the 1920s, a hundred years ago, issues like love jihad and cow slaughter and all that were live issues back in the day.
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None of this is new. We have been here before.
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These strains have been in our society.
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And it is now that the strain has become dominant in a sense that, you know, that political moment has also come.
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So one really negative way of looking at it is that here the arc of history doesn't necessarily have to go towards justice or progress or liberty or anything, that across the world, authoritarianism is winning and we are kind of screwed.
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And these ruptures are there and our society is fractured forever.
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And it was always going to be like this.
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That's a negative way of looking at it.
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A positive way, if you step back a little bit more, could be to say that, you know, there are ebbs and flows in the affairs of societies.
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And none of this is new and this will also pass and et cetera, et cetera.
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So, you know, you have a much deeper and wider view of this than I do.
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So what are sort of your thoughts?
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In the long run, we are all dead.
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You're quoting an economist now, well done, multidisciplinary John Maynard Keynes in the bath.
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But seriously, you know, it's very small consolation to somebody who's living through a reality which is difficult and personally very negatively impactful on their lives to give them that consolation that,
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And so the insights as a historian, when you see these and of course you see these as long historical processes and historical junctures.
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And of course, one of the things that we learned as historians is that we need space.
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We need distance to be able to look back on a period and say what this period was.
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So that distance, we'll have to now look back and say, where were we going?
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But what I regret is that people should be going through this.
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This ideas of hurt and injustice and sometimes I am very amused at some of the, amused in a sort of, I don't know whether to laugh or to cry at people who are deeply offended by wrongs that were done centuries ago,
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Which their ancestors moved on from, you know, and nobody bothered about this for centuries, nobody bothered.
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You know, there were people who were demanding that the Kutub Minar, there's a mosque there which was built on the remains of several temples and therefore those temples should be revived now.
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There was some sort of movement that had begun there some time ago.
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And I said, you know, when the Marathas ruled Delhi, nobody came to the Marathas and said, now you're ruling here and now we want that temple to be built here.
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Nobody thought about it because it's gone.
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It's been gone for centuries.
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Who's bothered about it?
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When the British came, nobody raised this issue.
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For so many years, nobody's raised this issue.
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Why is this being raised just now?
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So the past, what we, there is this imagination that these are, the past is an imagined space.
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So, you know, I really look back and I, for a historian, it's very painful.
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Three final questions and hopefully none of, actually one of them, actually this immediate question might be a bit depressive, but the last two are fun.
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And this is really about Delhi, that if I ask you to just take a sky high view and look at Delhi through the centuries even,
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and give me in your words, because you're so good at painting word pictures, I know you can do this, a time lapse of how Delhi has changed across time and how that makes you feel.
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Because on the one hand, you can look at this beautiful process of more and more people coming together,
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agglomerating migrants from everywhere, mixing this wonderful kichri of cultures, you know, economic progress, technological progress and all of that and say that, hey, this is great, we're in a good place now.
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On the other hand, you could just see time and again, because there have been so many cities here, that time and again a city being built and wiped out, built and wiped out,
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not just in its buildings and its roads, but also culture and heritage and all of that just kind of, you know, fade away in that sense.
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And, you know, and one doesn't know how to make a value judgement about that, because you had great monuments, but what is a monument without people and without utility?
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So is it a good thing or a bad thing that they're replaced with cookie cutter apartments, which all look the same, but in which people can sit and watch Netflix in air conditioning?
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So I don't know, but without, you know, so what is, you know, when you think of Delhi through the centuries, how it's changed, what are sort of your, and how it is changing?
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You know, what are your feelings? Paint me that picture.
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One of the things that sort of, that is the defining feature of Delhi is power.
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Delhi rises to prominence under the Delhi Sultanate when it becomes the capital of an expanding empire.
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Before that, it's a blot, just a small spot which nobody really bothers about very much.
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Chauhan is of course also a root for Majmer, by the way. Prithviraj Chauhan, which we make so much of, is not a Delhi emperor.
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But so everything has been dominated by power.
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Those cities being built, abandoned, they were not so much destroyed as abandoned, as a new emperor wants to make his own mark and therefore settles another city.
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But each of them actually draws upon this aura of power that the city already has.
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So everybody is very conscious of their history as being part of a larger and longer narrative.
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Even the British, when they decide to change the capital and move from Calcutta to Delhi, are doing this because they want to, they're at a crisis.
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The national movement is getting out of control now.
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Curzon was the last straw and they have to do something that's really, you know, some damage control here.
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And they decide the best way to do it is to restore Delhi as capital because that will, they see this as this will be something that is popular
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because people of India still associate Delhi with the capital of India. So that power really defines it.
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And today also, you know, when India becomes independent, there is no question about it. You will continue, Delhi will be the capital.
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So that power really defines Delhi in many ways.
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And I think Delhi's past lives on in, and of course we are not immune from this globalization in its absolutely the worst ways where every city looks pretty much the same.
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And there have been from time to time this call that we are making, we should make Delhi world class. Why should we make it world class? We make it Delhi class.
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You know, this anonymous sort of development of that should happen because this is the modernity that we want to implement.
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But I think still there is, even if from a very romantic place, this idea that Delhi is history.
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So I think a lot of the heritage walks, people coming for walks and all that, and I see there's a huge popularity for these kind of things.
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There are, heritage has become something that people like. And I'm not saying, and of course part of it that is about, you know, manufacture.
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All of it is manufactured past. But there is this whole romance of Delhi also.
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There's a picture of Delhi as this great capital, this with a lovely, with a wonderful culture and all that.
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And seeking to at a popular level, reviving that those cultural spaces, the Rekhta and all of that is part of that revival of Urdu at a popular level.
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I'm not saying that there's any great progress being made in learning the language.
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Yeah, it strikes me, you know, buildings may come, people may come and go, but this spectre of power continues, you know, to cast that malicious shadow.
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And this power is actually the one perfect word. If you had to create a word cloud of Delhi, that is like the perfect word.
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But now we shall move on to more positive things. And I want to ask about you that, you know,
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you've mentioned about how you were drawn to history and you fell in love with the city and et cetera, et cetera.
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And you've done all that you've done. But how has, how has the way that you define happiness in the way that you define your own sense of purpose,
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how has that evolved? Because when we are young, certainly when I was young, my idea of what I wanted to do in life was specific things,
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et cetera, et cetera. And as you grow older, you realize that a lot of that, it's about how you spend your day.
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It's about, you know, what are you intentional about, all of those things. So what, what is your journey?
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You know, it's very odd, but in many ways it's very boring, I'll tell you, because I haven't the ultimate thing of what gives me pleasure
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and what I want to do with myself, what I want to achieve in life has not changed for a very long time.
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With a very small blip in the middle, I wanted to study history. I wanted to do research in history and I wanted to write about it.
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That was the long plan. For a while I thought I'd do it as a teacher. Then I found other ways of doing it through intact,
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through my own research and writing, my war heritage walks or whatever. It's been, so that has not changed. It's remained unchanged.
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The fact that I will read history, I will write history, I will, I'll spend my, my happiest days are spent when I'm reading some history books,
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some document, doing a little bit of writing and all of this, whether I'm talking or giving a talk somewhere or leading a walk and it all somehow fits in into the same thing.
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So really, and you know, I don't see long term goals. I never have. I only looked at, okay, what am I going to do now?
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What's the next project? Thank you. I'm done with this. They're not next. So in that sense, I'm like, it's quite flat.
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No, no, it is not flat at all. Thank God you are, you know, playing this long game and giving us all these wonderful books.
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We haven't spoken much about intact, about walks. There's a lot to talk about, but we're running out of time.
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But I'll take this opportunity to tell you that you absolutely must come on the show again one day.
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But for now, my final question to you would be a custom question that I end all my shows with,
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where I ask my guests to recommend for me and my listeners books, films, music, art, anything at all that they care about passionately.
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That means a lot to them that they want to share with the world.
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You know, I just want to, I'm going to be a little maybe a little different here.
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And I'm going to say there is a whole wealth of literature, wealth of historical,
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other kinds of things which are sitting out there in the Urdu language, in the Persian language.
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Let's not forget Persian was the major language of higher learning in India for a long time.
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We talk about Sanskrit. Yes, that was a long, long time ago.
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But in the not so recent, not so far long ago, it was Persian.
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And these are languages that we have very little. There are people who are, Persian we are largely divorced from.
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Urdu also, the actual knowledge of it is shrinking.
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And as a result, we are separated from a whole culture of learning.
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And I'm not talking about culture with a big C.
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I'm talking about a culture at a very basic level, what we were.
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A lot of that is written in Persian. A lot of some of that is written in Urdu also at a later time.
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But Persian, I think we need to go back to those languages.
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And I'm not talking about it in a romantic way, just to recover what we were.
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And I think this is something that I want to do more of myself.
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And I would say, let's give it a little bit of thought as to how we can get back to those things.
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I mean, you know, as I said, my mind goes a complete blank if you're talking about books and things and all that.
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But I'm just going to leave it with that.
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Very wise words. Swapna, thank you so much for coming on the show.
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It's just been absolutely wonderful. And I've had a great time talking to you.
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Thank you, Amit. It was such a great pleasure. And I don't know how the time has passed.
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We've just been chatting and it's lovely talking to you. Thank you so much.
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You can find Swapna on Twitter, though her Facebook and Instagram are linked from the show notes.
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But you can follow me on Twitter at Amit Verma, A-M-I-T-V-A-R-M-A.
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You can browse past episodes of The Scene in the Unseen at sceneunseen.in.
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Thank you for listening.
