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Seven posts in seven days! \o/ I am not a complete and total and not-a-single-example-to-prove-otherwise failure! It is nice to have proof of this sometime.

People have been asking for recs, and I have been cringing from those comments and ignoring them ::waves guiltily to y'all::

Back when I was doing the features writer gig and selling my soul writing about sunglasses shops and British pop stars, I swore to myself never to do reviews. For dance and theatre, I managed mostly; I covered the event, but walked a line that was probably visible only to me on this side of critiquing it. With books, I did write a couple for the kids' page but on the whole I steered clear. Because reviewing, to me, is Taking A Stance. And having enough confidence in one's opinion to state it publicly. In print, which means it's there forever, because ain't no editor going to agree to print a retraction to the effect of "In regards to review printed three years and two days ago, the reviewer wishes to change their opinion of the book based on blog posts from the author that indicate the sexism was, indeed, intentional".

I am not, however, the sort of open-minded person who manages to not have opinions about things until she is educated enough for them to be well-informed. I have Thoughts and Feelings about everything, and with vehemence and caps-lock! So I enjoy talking about books a lot; I just don't know where and how to go about it.

Because I am, for the most part, a terrible reviewer. I can write critiques of books I loathe, on the principle that everyone should be warned off reading them, and people will read spoilers of bad books without caring. When it comes to good books though, I am a spoiler fanatic, so my advice mostly consists of "This book, you must read it! It has a thing, which you will like, and I also really liked some other stuff, which we can talk about after you have finished it!" I suspect this autocratic and high-handed attitude came from having younger brothers who listened to mY "read this now" or "you won't get it yet, wait a bit" fiats with a meekness that I almost certainly did not deserve.

Books I am not certain about are the worst; I wish to warn people about their flaws, but what if I scare someone away from a book they would like, and the world is denied a Book Being Read which is sort of like not clapping your hands even though you believe in fairies.

I much prefer to talk about books to people after they have read them, so that we can squee over the good parts and yell at the bad ones, and my smart friends can dig up blog posts that explain what happened in that plot line that I could not understand.

So talking about books with friends is fun. But taking on the responsibility of reviewing or reccing is scary. And doubly and triply so when the recs are cross-cultural. Apart from my defensiveness about what the book and the rec might say about the culture, and how the reader might interpret the book, and if this is the One Book they are going to base their opinion of Indian women, or children, or elephants on, then what am I doing, flail, etc... there is also the problem of me really, really not wanting to be considered any sort of authority to be reccing in the first place.

Two nights ago I was having a pre-Jaimela get-together with some smashing lady-people, and I found myself asking Who or What Is That of every second reference to a book, author, event or song. I vastly enjoy being in the company of people who know better and more than me, since I find learning to be a lot more fun than teaching. Which is the reason I expect I will have a good time at this mela. As one friend said, it will be four days of practising active listening.

All of which is to bring me to the last Melawalas and Walis. People who do talk about books, and do it with a craftsmanship I can only admire from afar. Because while fests like this do tend to revolve around The Author, I much prefer centring The Reader's experience. And I'm very happy to find Indian readers talking about Indian books in places where I can find them.

Some of them, like Chandrahas Choudhury have published novels of their own (which I haven't read, so I ignore, and anyway, my fond memories of his reviews are the pre-novel Ultra Brown blogging days). A LOT of them are now professional reviewers for mainstream media. And that brings its own elements of collusive circle-jerking to it. Socialising in person with authors and publishers (and other reviewers) doesn't always 'taint the purity' of reviews, but I do find that sometimes passion gets diluted by prudence.

And I certainly don't agree with all their opinions and politics. Nor do I uniformly think that they are qualified appropriately for every subject they talk about.

But they do talk. And write. And do it regularly, and with skill, and with a love for reading and readers, and with a knowledgeable discernment of books.

Nilanjana at

akhondofswat and

kitabkhana
Supriya at

roswitha and LiveMint
Aishwarya at Practically Marzipan and

bluelullaby
Chandrahas at

middlestage

These are the people on my RSS feed reader who'll be there at jailitfest, some on panels, some running around chasing interviews in between attending them. I believe they are all on twitter, so those of you into that new-fangled instant discourse system, can probably get vicarious mela-baazi from their tweets. (If I had the power, I would deem the official hashtag for the fest to be #jaimela, for the dual pun of jhamela and jaimala, but alas, I am a voiceless prole.) You can also go through their posts, get some recs if you like.

Meanwhile, I am offline for the next week, in the company of people more bookish, opinionated and verbose than me, which shall be a nice change from quotidian existence. Inshallah I shall arrive at the correct ISBT to catch my bus, since I am not 100% sure if it's the Kashmiri Gate one or the Sarai Kale Khan one, and no one is answering the phones. But of course, why should they? Travel is meant to be an adventure, interspersed with anxiety and surprise.

If you never hear from me again, assume I have been kidnapped by a flying camel, and am off in some haveli somewhere, swathed in leheriya dupattas and being fed Bikaneri bhujia and kachauris every day. No need to send books, because after these four days, I shall probably need a break from them. Send Afghanistani singers instead, equipped with Khusraw bandishes.

I am more attracted to fiction. I am more moved by non-fiction.

There is this distinction between the two; while both can be educational, the escapism possible in fiction carries a different flavour in non-fiction. I have met news-channel addicts whom I would say have not been any more improved by the content of their attention than were it romance novels or murder mysteries. But in an unexpected, sudden confrontation with the world around you, it is knowledge that most equips you to deal with it, and non-fiction, in idealistic theory, carries truth pure as cocaine to infuse your veins with.

The craft of a journalist; that non-fiction writer in the trenches, is so often a crude and impatient means to an end. The event is all; what matter if the town crier has gone hoarse from the repetitive telling of it, or if the messenger has spewed you in spit?

Of course, it does matter, and so we have the attractive news anchors and the personable opinion-makers and the media conglomerates that command respect because of the number of dead trees they can move on the backsides of strategically naked female bodies. We've all seen the Times of India go from a decently proof-read purveyor of actual news to a rumourmongering pimp whoring its columns out to the most desperate to be talked about. By no means is it alone in its shoddy standards or sell-outedness, and mainstream media, by definition, tends to gravitate to the cause of the dominant.

And then, there's people like Dayamani Barla. Or

dayamani-barla, as I should say, because the lady has had a blog since 2009, posting both her own pieces and articles about her.

Barla is a journalist out of passion. She spends her own money on the travel and expenses required to get a story; money she earns as the proprietor of a chai adda--something she chose because she thinks of them as hubs for discussion of social issues. She is an adivasi who has watched big business strip her family of their land and rights, and she has educated herself in order to call out the wrongs being done. She writes in Hindi for papers like Prabhat Khabhar, having conciously chosen to stay local despite the higher profile jobs that are no doubt available to her thanks to the awards and recognition she has won.

"The corporate houses are simply ignorant of the concept of the subsistence economy of a tribal society that is rooted in agriculture and forest produce. The natural resources to us are not merely means of livelihood, but our identity, dignity, autonomy and culture have been built on them for generations. These communities will not survive if they are alienated from the natural resources. How is it possible to rehabilitate or compensate us?" (Source)

We are not anti-development, we are just demanding sustainable development. Development of our land on our terms. The government says that it will rehabilitate the villages and give us good compensation. But we say you can neither rehabilitate our history, our identity, our rivers, our mountains nor can you compensate the loss of our environment with your money. We are saying this development should include development of our culture, language, history, identity, rivers, mountains and the development of our people. We want development of our indigenous people living in their native lands. (Source)

There's a lot of hue and cry made about every impotently violence-filled threat raised against celebrity writers like Salman Rushdie. And I firmly believe that even the writers of badly-characterised, ahistorical, religiously-offensive fiction deserve the bodily freedom to do it in. But the disparity in a mass response seems stark especially on a day like today when the English speaking online world has decided to make it clear to all of us how very important U.S.-centric threats to online freedom are, in comparison to the many other issues of other nations which receive no such urgent, vehement response.
One of the mails I got yesterday on a social issues list I'm on was a petition asking for endorsement:

On 14th January, in the evening, a Police Mobile Van of Chutya Thana (Ranchi) landed at her hotel on Club Road, Ranchi, and started to harass her staff asking about her links with anti-social elements. The Sub-Inspector making the 'enquiries' had neither no written permission or order. The following day, when Ms. Barla, met SSP Ranchi, Mr. Saket Kumar at his residence to ask why she was being harassed in this manner, his response was that the allegations were being made on the basis of an complaint and the fact that she participated in the "Free Jiten Marandi Convention”, in which Varavara Rao was also present.

It's the kind of thing she lives with. And while I hope that coming to Jaipur will be a nice break for her, and that the festival has funded her attendance so that she can relax and bask in some well-deserved appreciation and bonhomie with kindred spirits, she is not the sort of journalist who ventures out 'into the wild' for a story and then returns to an urbane, cosmopolitan life of comfort. It is not poverty porn she peddles, but a nuanced, persistent outrage that comes from being a gadfly long accustomed to the flicks and flinches from discomforted asses of the hominid persuasion.

The reason why I got into journalism… [was] to get the voice of the people out. If you're thinking of change, you have to deal with these issues and not run away.[...]"You have to give away comforts in life as a woman journalist. [...] The pen is the way to fight against exploitation nowadays. It's my way to fight. (Source)

Out of this list of attending authors which three books would you vote for being put up for the annual benefit auction at

con_or_bust?

Each book would be autographed by the authors, with something like 'Thanks for supporting Con or Bust'

If the bidding goes higher than a certain amount, I'd accompany each with a series of commentary via post-its inserted into the book.

This would have to be limited to books that exist in English or English translation due to the majority demographic of the Con or Bust patrons.

I'm further reserving it to chromatic/non-white/PoC authors, since I really really don't want to be stalking William Dalrymple for an autograph. And I'm ruling out Salman Rushdie since I think access to him is going to be very tightly regulated.

And of course, it depends on which books are available at the bookshops I can get to 24 hours from now, to take with me to Jaipur, so -

Please to tell me your votes in comments!

(Anyone can vote, but do try to keep in mind the goal of raising goodly sums of money for Con or Bust.)

Overdue because my day has been... a roller coaster. And while the good parts were exceedingly good, the tiresome parts were horrid.

And I must sleep, so very briefly -

Publishers of small presses, who write the solicitation letters, and the forewords, and the press releases to get mainstream media to cover the books. And who act as gatekeepers. Or corporations, I tend to find them selfish and evil. As community businesses and non-profits; they are one of the most passionate, tireless advocates of ideology. Both good and bad, but one of the nicest things about being back in India is that the moral side I choose tends to have better covers.

Melawali is Urvashi Butalia, for getting together with Ritu Menon back in 1984 to set up Kali For Women - an Indian feminist press that has so many fantastic and important publications to their name that looking at their catalogue is like getting a capsule of second-wave South Asian feminism.

The two ladies split up a while ago, and went on to launch their own independent imprints. Butalia's is Zubaan. I have to say, this functional breakup and continued productivity makes me happy as a success story in a world where women are so often portrayed as unable to achieve anything due to infighting.

I'm not always in complete agreement with Butalia, especially when she theorises as a historian, but I just give major, major props for the mentoring and championing she does of women's voices.

Some years ago I published a book on Partition (The Other Side of Silence, Penguin India, 1998). At the time, I argued that it was important for us to remember our past, and not to pretend that it did not exist. While I still hold firmly to this belief, I am now concerned with another question: how do we remember our past? Or, how do we talk about a violent past in such a way that we do not further increase and exacerbate the cycle of violence?

To take a more concrete example, if we were to think seriously about attempting to include a more realistic history of Partition in our textbooks, to teach the young about Partition, how could we do it in a way that would remain true to the ‘facts’ – which include some very violent histories – while ensuring that the violence was neither legitimised, sanitized, nor passed on? Another way of putting it would be: how can we write non violent histories of Partition while ensuring that the violence is not glossed over? While I have asked myself these questions for considerable time, I have no easy answers to them.

(Source)

It's a wonderful thing when publishers cease to be gatekeepers protecting the profits of an obscenely rich conglomerate, and are allowed to be guides to authors finding their way to a public audience.

A few more pieces by Urvashi Butalia
Mona's Story in Granta
It's a Man's War in The Little Magazine

Wow, how do people produce long, link-researched blogs every day? Just four continuous days of blathering here is knocking me out cold for anything else. Although I did go out and get the zips to various things fixed. Yay! No more five rupee coins falling out of my pouch because it is upside down and thus losing me my bus fare.

Straight into the melawalla today because he puts into practise so many of the ideals I can only preach at myself so far.

But first, I will get this out of the way.

I have a cinematic crush on him. In my defence, I didn't realise the dude was 73 until I googled him for this post. This is because, when I was wee and impressionable, I watched Manthan, not realising it had actually been made before I was even born. Listening to that title track with the 'made by 500,000 farmers' credit still gives me goosebumps. I defy anyone to come out of that viewing experience not having a crush on Girish Karnad's Face of Earnestness and Smita Patil's Eyes. Which does make developing a thing for Prateik Babbar's eyes slightly messy, but that is the magic of cinematic crushes! You can have them on anyone, even dead guys, and not feel skanky or necrophilic.

Anyway! So Girish Karnad, this awesome, lovely man, is an actor of no mean talent. He's still around; he did a great job as the pragmatically corrupt cricket coach in Iqbal. But let's talk about how he became a writer. And not just any writer, but a Konkani lad writing in Kannada. And then going on to translate his own stuff into English. In the gentleman's own words, from this piece on him:

I wanted to be a poet, the greatest ambition in my life. At the age of 22, I realized I would not be a poet, but only a playwright. Then I almost wept. When I was about twenty I got a scholarship to go abroad. I was the first member of the family to go abroad and although the present generation won’t understand it and I am sure many of you who have been through it will also not understand how difficult it was to come from a traditional family and to go abroad because although everyone was thrilled that I was going to England, it involved lots of decisions. Will one come back? Will one stay abroad? Will one get married to a foreign woman and other problems like that.[...] I was very tense and I found ultimately and suddenly on the eve of my leaving for England, that I had started writing and writing a play rather than a poem and it surprised me for three reasons. One thing that it was a play, because I just said I wanted to be a poet. The second thing that surprised me was that I wrote in Kannada because I spent all my teenage years preparing to be an English poet. I wanted to go abroad and be in England, the country where Auden and Eliot lived and shine there etc. and it seemed to me there was nothing to do in India and, therefore, I trained myself to be an English writer. But when it really came to expressing one’s tensions it came off in Kannada and I suddenly realized that I wasted some years of my life practising writing. The third thing that surprised me was that it was a play about a myth, Yayati, from the Mahabharata. All these three things came as a surprise because I had just said, “one thought one was modern alienated from one’s background from one’s language.

And you know, so then he wrote Yayati (which unfortunately I've only read in English translation, never seen performed), and its really clear that he's taking this Greek Drama aesthetic and mashing it up with every single yagshagana he'd grown up seeing.

And after that he wrote Tuglaq. Which, ok, so I've been talking about the Aryan-Dravidian divide. And there's thing thing, right, where colonising languages like English go out and have stories written in them about people who don't speak it. But the more local languages are generally limited to the local landscape. So here was Karnad, writing about Muhammad bin Tughluq (that nutso, visionary ruler) who ruled North India with Farsi and Arabic and Turkish. Karnad started out using the historical research written by Ishwari Prasad, who was writing in English. And he wrote the play in Kannada.

And of course, Tuglaq would go on to be directed with historic success by Ebrahim Alkazi--staged at Purana Qila and translated to Hindi in what would seem its most organic setting. But Vijay Tendulkar did it in Marathi--and considering way religious rhetoric has shaped the Muslim Mughal North vs Hindu Maratha Shivaji and Peshwas et al, this bringing into the fold through translation a play that could only have been created with a pan-Indian cross-cultural syncretism says a lot about how art can sometimes serve as the best way to claim complex identities. It's something that's a characteristic of the navya literary movement in Kannada writing--where writers like Ramachandra Sharma have stories about Black Nigerians and White British characters told to a Brown Indian audience in Kannada. As someone who thinks in both Hindi and Marathi, favouring one over the other unevenly depending on topic and time, the choices he has made about language inspire me.

One of the other reasons I admire the man so much is that he went abroad (as a Rhodes scholar to Oxford, if you please), and came back. Salman Rushdie went to England and stayed there even before the fatwa made returning difficult for him. Amitav Ghosh teaches in New York City. Vikram Seth has a house in England. Anita Desai also in the US, Rohinton Mistry in Canada. These are all good, even great writers, who can write a book set in India and make it work well. But they are writing in English, and working with international publishing rates. I don't know how many of their books ever make it into a Telugu translation. But Karnad's plays do.

BR: This is my question as a fellow translator. You write your plays in Kannada and then take them into English. While translating, you take liberties with the originals and change a few expressions in English. But I don’t have to do that when I translate from Kannada into Telugu.

GK: It can’t be helped. English is not our language. A few idioms and expressions don’t exist in English. The changes are made to make the English readers understand the spirit. (Source)

Girish Karnad doesn't use any labels like 'post-colonial' about his work; the forms of activism he has been very ardently associated with is that of anti-communalism and support of artistic expression and free speech. But he does say: "I am happy to belong to a generation that had a Dharmaveer Bharti, a Mohan Rakesh, a Vijay Tendulkar and I. Together we can claim that we did create a national theatre for modern India."

And see, here's the thing. The 14th Bharat Rang Mahotsav is going on right now. (Which is all sold out, and thus I have been utterly unable to attend. Woe.) And whether the plays are in Marathi or Bengali or Tamil they are all marked with the Indian flag. And the sold-out audiences who are going to watch them are probably mostly from the communities speaking those languages. But chances are they are also theatre-goers who have also seen a Mahesh Dattani play, a Satyadev Dubey play, a Faisal Alkazi play. They might have seen a Thayyam performance. And that present is the result of the work Karnad and his compatriots did--that building of an idea of national theatre that isn't stripped to some homogeneous national archetype, but instead talks local while thinking global. Taking Brecht and Badal Sarkar to tell a story both from Kathasarilesagara and Thomas Mann. And coming up with Hayavadana. In Kannada. Which he can translate for himself, thankyouvermuch, into English--the language that might be the one he researches and teaches and interviews in, but is still the second, and not the primary language of of his creative heart.

(I would kind of love to be Girish Karnad when I grow up.)

Happy Makar Sankranti!
तिल्गुळ घ्या, गोड गोड बोला। (Thank you

mustela_nivalis for fonting me!)

I actually called my dad up yesterday, and was informed that sankrant fell on the 15th this year, because of mumblemutter obscure 'go look at a Kalnirnay calendar' reasons. Wikipedia tells me:

But because of the Earth's tilt of 23.45 degrees and sliding of equinoxes, Ayanamsa occurs. This has caused Makara Sankranti to slide further over the ages. A thousand years ago, Makar Sankranti was on December 31 and is now on January 14. Five thousand years later, it shall be by the end of February, while in 9,000 years it shall come in June.

This extremely amusing 'fact', is of course, marked [citation needed]. (I don't actually like tilgul much, and it was too fucking cold to go downstairs yesterday night to the neighbours' lori, but someday I would like to be in Gujarat for Uttarayan.)

Happy Pongal to you as well! Growing up in Delhi meant that Sankrant was mostly my parents calling up the mothership back in Mumbai-Pune, and Pongal wasn't even mentioned during the school assemblies. But all my Bharatanatyam gurus were TamBrahms so of course, it got talked about in class.

The North-South, Aryan-Dravidian divide really depresses me when it starts veering into the 'inevitability of English' rationalisations. I can't stand the chauvinism and bigotry that gets tossed around in North India, and I sympathise with the resistance to Hindi hegemony. But at the same time, I'm really not convinced about the argument that English is equally alien. It was always way easier to transliterate all the padams and varnams I needed to write down in Devnagri than in Roman, and raga and tala were easy to notate because its not like Hindustani and Carnatic are so wildly divergent. And there are so many familiar words in those padams. Shanmuganan! Vanajaksha! Balgopal!

Let's face it though. While Hindustani music has a syncretic tradition born of Muslim as well as Hindu patronage, the South Indian classical dance and music vocabulary hails from a pretty exlusively Hindu tradition. And all those Sanskritised words come from a high-class and high-caste vocabulary, helped along by the Brahminisation of the arts during the 20th century revival and disassociation from all those fallen women the British turned their noses up at.

I'm fascinated by the linguistic implications of the Dravidian and Indo-Aryan ethnographies, and I need to start collecting recs for readings so that I can inform myself more about the subject. I have a theory that sister languages lend themselves more fluidly to intra-translations, and that even languages with different roots, like Tamil and Bengali, can be considered sisters by virtue of a shared cultural heritage. But when it comes down to constructing some sort of shared Indian cultural commonality that supposedly unites these languages, we run up really quickly against some pretty ugly Hindu upper-caste essentialising rhetoric.

So the test of my theory will be if the subaltern writings in these languages work better in indigenous language translation, rather than in English. I experimented with reading a collection of Mahashweta Devi's stories in Hindi, and the style did, indeed, seem more organic than when I had read her in English.

But so many obstacles to this goal of talking with each other! Foremost is the upward mobility impulse that makes the lingua franca of global superpowers a more practical second language to learn, and thus enabling the one-way traffic of translation INTO English. Meaning there are going to be more people speaking Kannada and English than Kannada and Gujarati. Then, the barriers of economics that prevent native speakers of languages and dialects isolated by poverty and illiteracy from gaining the tools (education, money, time, space, energy, audience) to translate, which is why most often folk stories and oral narratives are found documented by some Oriental Studies academic from abroad.

I need far more knowledge about the history of language wars and their effects on this country before I can find a comfortable position to support in the 'make Hindi the default national language of bilingualism rather than English'. My quest to find South Indian writers translated into Hindi is pretty nascent, since even were the books to exist and I were able to acquire them, I need to read a lot more, and get my Hindi reading skills and vocabulary up to a level to be able to appreciate what I'm reading with as much ease and sophistication as I can bring to English.

But there are certain translations friends have offered to lend me that I've shied away from. They are there in English, but I want to wait. It's sort of like the way I didn't go see Ang Lee's Sense and Sensibility in the theatre, because I hadn't read the book yet. And though I watched it later, on a small TV screen, I'm glad I did it after having imprinted on its original medium first. I don't know for sure that reading Aandal in Hindi will be more sublime than reading her in English, but I do know that the Roja and Saathiya songs worked in Hindi where they just didn't in Bombay Dreams.

Today's Melawali, therfore, is a lady whose novels I have yet to read, but whose work I desperately want to exist in Kashmiri and Assamese and Maithili translations, so that those agitating for land rights and water rights and forest rights and the right to human dignity can read her in the language of their mothers. Bama Faustina (born as Faustina Mary Fatima Rani) in Puthupatti, is a Tamil Dalit Christian who gave up a job teaching in a convent school, and ended up writing what are by all accounts fierce, feminist novels. In a 2003 interview with The Hindu she says:

"Karukku" was radical because I have used the local dialect of the people and not the formalised text. This is a departure in Tamil literature.[...]I don't think of it as a burden already in Tamil literary world this has been categorised as Dalit literature and I don't mind. [...] Dalit people welcome me. They are curious to read my writings and for the younger generations, specially women I am a role model. But there are many who don't like me because I am writing about discrimination, oppression. This is a kind of fighting through literature and they don't like it.
I identify myself as a Dalit woman writer...There are many writers available to write about other issues but few for Dalits and there are many issues that have to be tackled. If and when Dalits are respected and treated as equal human beings then only can I write about other things.

I'm reading a short story of hers now; Scorn, by Bama Faustina, translated into English from the Tamil story ‘Ellakaaram’ by Sarsa Rajagopal and Antara Dev Sen. I am really looking forward to seeing her at the jailitfest.

In my fantasies, we could have panels with interpreters seamlessly allowing Bama Faustina and Shanti Yadav and Amita Bharathi to talk about Savitribai Phule's poetry. But failing that, at least a chance for some young girl learning her क-ख-ग-घs or alif-beys to be able to read all four women out loud to her mother and aunts and grantparents, who don't have to watch the books that the first generation in their family can read, take that voice away from their tongue.

I once had the opportunity to visit Javed Akhtar's house. (For reasons that you would have to get me very drunk to talk about. And I don't drink.) I noticed a handwritten sign on a door leading to a bedroom; it was something he had put up for his mother. The sign was in Urdu, and during our conversation about it, since I didn't know what it said, he mentioned that he doesn't read Devanagri at all.

Sitting there together, talking in our own languages, we could understand each other. And when I first saw 1942 - A Love Story, those lyrics sang their way straight into my soul. 'Pyaar hua chupke se' is one of the songs I instinctively reach for when I am thinking about that breathless quiet of discovering that you are in love. "Arre O Samba, kitne aadmi the?" is one of the most classic of all Hindi film quotes.

But if you went by the script the dialogues for Sholay were written in, it should by rights be called an Urdu film. And a vast majority of the viewers of Sholay, or Deewar, or Seeta aur Geeta would not be able to read the words in the textual language they were written in, though the oral understanding is perfect.

Of course, a great many people who can appreciate the poetry of lyricists like Javed Akhtar and Gulzar cannot read at all. That's one of the beautiful things regarding the visual arts -- the lyricists and script and screenplay writers can share their literature regardless of literacy.

And in the process, they foster a syncretism that spills over in subtle and profound ways. While Sanskritised Hindi has become the Hindu (and upper caste) language, and Urdu has been stereotyped as the language of Muslim madrasas, every bhagwan-kasam taking hero and sindoor-wearing heroine sing in words that refer to khuda, and ishq, and ibaadat. I heard a Bharatanatyam dancer recently talk about a Mira padam she was going to do, and say, 'some words are just not translatable in English', in reference to the concept of junoon. She later remembered Meera's own word--unmaad, but it was interesting that junoon was the more instinctive choice.

I've found someone to lend me a transliterated copy of Manto's stories, so that I can read Toba Tek Singh in the original before the panel about it. The politics of what gets transliterated and in which direction, and the communal rhetoric surrounding the promotion and imaging of Urdu and Hindi both in India and in Pakistan is complicated and depressing. And Hindi films are as much an example of hegemonic and assimilationist trends as anything else ripe for critique.

But they help language transcend both barriers of script and literacy with such a powerful force; feeding life-blood what seems sometimes to be a linguistic culture under threat. We may not be able to read fluently in Urdu, Hindi, Punjabi, Avadhi, Bhojpuri and Maithili, but khuda ki kasam, we can sing in it when the antakshari demands it of us.

Gulzar is a fine filmmaker and scriptwriter; and his words have a lightness of touch that turn from thoughtful to playful in a heartbeat. He holds the soul of a linguistic culture in the palm of his hands when he writes lyrics-- from the Rajasthan of Rudaali and the Punjab of Maachis to the U.P. heartlands of Omkara and the Mumbai of Kaminey

Every now and then I think of attempting a translation of songs like the ones from Dil Se to try to share some of the magic that has left the words etched on my soul, but its too daunting, to try to find words for the cultures and the religions and the mythologies and metaphors that Gulzar weaves together like a Benarasi sari.

Even a song as simple as the one he did for Bandini, and I can only attempt the sthai:

Take away my body so white
and give me a skin the colour of night
So that I may hide in its dark embrace
and go to meet my heart's delight

Irshad, Gulzar Sahab. Kya baat hai.

ETA: Ahahaha, I attempted a full translation. Over here on

forkedtongues

I am going to try to post every day leading up to the Jaipur Lit Fest, and I am going to try to do the post-colonialism data mining thing. Let's see how it works out.

I spent a LOT of time today ignoring important things on the practical to-do list (stuff like: get phone functional) and instead did repetitive iterations of spreadsheets. Which evolved into a form. I spent a lot of time trying to refine the criteria on that form. Trying to get it to do what it needed (make efficient data input possible) in a way that was informative, and inoffensive.

It makes me appreciate the work statistics gatherers and survey-makers of the people-interacting variety must put into their design process. I think what really made the complexity of trying to find appropriate labels hit home was this quote from the U.N.'s ethnocultural statistic's page:

The specific ethnic and/or national groups of the population which are of interest in each country are dependent upon individual national circumstances. Some of the criteria by which ethnic groups are identified are ethnic nationality (i.e., country or area of origin, as distinct from citizenship or country of legal nationality), race, colour, language, religion, customs of dress or eating, tribe or various combinations of these characteristics. In addition, some of the terms used, such as “race”, “origin” or “tribe”, have a number of different connotations. The definitions and criteria applied by each country investigating ethnic characteristics of the population must, therefore, be determined carefully and with the involvement of or consultation with representatives of the groups which it desires to categorize. By the nature of this topic, these categories and their definitions will vary widely from country to country; therefore, no internationally accepted criteria are possible.

Because of the difficulties of interpretation which may occur, it is important that, where such data are collected, the basic criteria used should be clearly explained so that the meaning of the classification will be readily apparent. It is also suggested that the primary classification consist of only a few broad categories, leaving open the possibility of a more detailed breakdown for important tribal or other groups where these are relevant.

Bold emphasis mine, because of how true this is. ('Race' is so important when talking about US and Australia but is a meaningless term in a South Asian context where half the Indians are likely to call themselves Caucasian.) In some conversations saying Indians vs. NRIs suffices, and in others, saying POC vs White. Because those conversations have already been contextualised by way of geography and linguistic commonality and agreed upon definitions and previous shared knowledge of the underlying complexities we are choosing to set aside.

But in a conversation that people from across the globe are invited to, textual short-cuts end up becoming detours into 'but what does that even mean' debates. And arguing about where the boundaries exist takes over the goal of discussing why those boundaries need to be talked about.

My inability to satisfy my own standards, much less anyone else's, led to me self-pityingly wailing to a friend in chat:
1) is the idea of demographically breaking down the jaipur lit fest stupid?
2) is it stupid to think the sourcelander vs hyphenate desi dynamic is relevant to this analysis?
3) is it stupid to want some way of separating out white people from globetrotting multi-culti POC from regional language writing indians
4) is it stupid that after 5 fucking hours I am unable to find a language to do it by?!

My friend gave me a lot of good advice, but we were still unable to find a good solution. So ultimately, I let it go, and will qualify my form with a personal meditation.

Last year thanks to a rather melodramatic argument between William Dalrymple and Hartosh Bal there was a public discussion around what the Hindu, in its overview of the controversy maintained was the basic question: "But has that original idea, to showcase writing in India both in the Bhashas as well as in English, been overtaken by the ambition to make Jaipur the greatest literary show on earth and therefore take the international literary celebrity path while lesser Indian voices go unheard?" So this year, my first of putative attendance, I took a look at the list of speakers. And I saw that of the names I knew only through osmosis, the proportions were skewed towards the celebrities, the White, the Western. It is true that an experience as dense as this is as much about what the participant brings to it, and chooses to make of it.

And that is why I am choosing to make this an experience of questioning. Both of the festival, to see how its stated goals are measuring up, and of myself, and process of reworking the creative landscape around me to centre around identities either more similar to or more disenfranchised than my own. Decolonisation is a part of it, so is scanning the Indian authors section at Teksons and realising how few of those last names are recognisably Dalit, or Harijan. So is sorting out how many opinions I read about Kashmir or Palestine are coming from people still living there. So is struggling reading a Bengali writer in a Hindi translation as well as an English one, to determine if the flaw lies in writer, translator, or the barriers of alien languages. So will be noticing how often the men speak on a panel, in comparison with the women.

Here's my form. Before the 20th, I'd like to be able to have at least basic information about the 260-odd attending speakers entered into it. If you feel like helping me, I would be very grateful, though I understand that not everyone enjoys mindless copy-pasting into boxes the way I do. If you have criticisms or suggestions for future such attempts (since I won't be able to edit the current form), let me know. I'm not expecting any of the speakers themselves to stumble across the backwaters of my blog here, but on the off chance that someone does-- hello, and do accept my apologies if I have misidentified you in any way, I'll fix it as soon as I know my mistake.

I also had thoughts about posting about some of the speakers whose work I am familiar with, but this post is already too long for anything detailed. So today's Mela-wallah (or walli in this case) is, appropriately, a Jaipur girl. Ila Arun is also, as I discovered today from her bio, a dramatist and scriptwriter for stage and screen. For me she is more familiar as a singer and actor; she and Madhuri played no small part in teaching teenage me to appreciate raunchy traditional female sexuality. What makes her Man of the Mela for me though, is Vote For Ghagra, from the eponymous album she produced (I suspect she is one of the main lyricists, though I haven't been able to verify this). Because she's laughing at the stereotypes even as she revels in them. Stereotypes of exoticised vs unsophisticated, of turbanned patriarchal men vs. veiled, coy women, of miniskirts vs. ghagras, of seduction vs. violence... she puts on her goggles and her ghoonghat and says fuck this shit, lets talk about when my ghagra will ghoomo in dilli shahar. And that's the kind of spirit I'd imagine the Chipko movement women fighting with, or the anti-arrack ladies over in Andhra, or the Gulabi gang. Her music and her voice... you know when they say 'voice of the people' I don't think the meaning is a cause or average representation subsuming individuality. I think it's meant to describe an extraordinary personality and vivid character jumping up with the power of tradition and heritage and roots and community behind her to say "yo, we the fucking people".

Words as playful chhedkhani to power. (A fine place for a woman's voice to be kept in, I think. I vote for the nauvvari.)

Words have been hard to find for me lately. Unfortunately, most of the things I need to do require words. As a result, I have spent a great deal of time entering numbers in spreadsheets to catch up on my expense tracker. Unsurprisingly, the resultant depression does not make for a satisfying change from contemplating my utter inability to get words out of my brain and onto some form of communicable medium.

So of course, it seems entirely logical for me to go to Jaipur for the lit fest to check out that exotic specimen - The Writer!

Well, alright, maybe it is not logical, and I will probably have to undergo at least one session of 'woe all writers are either too pompous/irritating/wrong to listen to OR too glorious/intelligent/witty to sustain the presence of my miserable carcass in the same corporeal universe'. In which case I shall have to go sit on the desert sands and commiserate with a camel. (Note to geographically-minded objecters: yes I am aware that there are no sand dunes in Jaipur. I am also aware that the going rate for camel-commiseration, especially during the tourist season, is well beyond my means.)

But speaking of means, the festival itself is free entry, and I have managed to dig up a family relative who is kind enough to let me stay with them, and if I bring enough bananas and santras and glucose biscuits and kurkure with me then I can skip the no-doubt overpriced lunches that the venue will provide.

I have been trying to persuade other friends to come along, but apparently they have either been to previous years or have fruitful productive lives that keep them otherwise engaged. (Being a sporadically-employed vella-useless freelancing-walla can be disruptive to maintaining social face, I have found.) However, my dear friend the Intrepid Book Reporter is going, and though I am sure she will be busy asking Penetrating Questions of Mohammed Hanif and other ~~hotties~~ luminaries, I will not be entirely alone and untalked-to. (And perhaps if I am very nice to her she will let me use her press pass to sneak into the Ustaad Eltaf Hussain Sarahang concert. Hindustani from Afghanistan! I suppose it should be called Afghanistani shastriya sangeet? And look, they spell it 'Amir-Khusrow'! I wonder if he will sing any of the Hindavi bandishes, or just the Farsi ones.)

Anyway! I was trying to think of a motivating Plan of Action so that I make Full Use of the Opportunity. So I started making a list. Also, a Spreadsheet. Because mindless data-entry is an excellent placebo to a concience guilty about being useless.

However, I have not read/heard/watched many many writer-type people who are going to be speaking at this event. And though I had a momentary dream of reading at least a book by each of the authors whose panels I want to attend, it was squished by the practicalities of access (to books) and ability (to read). Then I thought I could do a post each day starting from tomorrow talking about the writers I do know, but besides my aforementioned Lack of Words, there is also the fear that it will just devolve into frivolous gossip about Javed Akhtar's tweets about the kolaveri song.

And my list is rather ideosyncratic and incomplete so far:

I will not heckle Salman Rushdie about (a) his asinine comments about indigenous Indian language writing (b) his dismissal of all Islamic critiques of his work as fundamentalist haters (c) the gender issues in his books (d) how he could possibly write such a Terrible, Awful No-Good Horrible 'sequel' to Haroun.
I will also not take a print-out of every single piece of thoughtful negative reaction post I have read regarding 'tiger mother' and hand it to Amy Chua with a paraphrased xkcd graphic telling her 'The Internet thinks you are Wrong'.
I will (probably) not ask William Dalrymple why he thinks he is the best person to be chairing a discussion on 'The Future of Palestine'. I mean really.
I will Conspicuously Avoid Deepak Chopra and Richard Dawkins on the grounds of 'JFC you make my side look bad'.

So dear corner of the internet wot reads me, please tell me what to do!

Here is the list of attending speakers.
Here are the programmes for the 20th, the 21th, the 22th, the 23th, and the 24th of January.

Tell me which authors I HAVE to read or avoid their panels entirely because of spoilers. Tell me who are pompous windbags who never let any other panellist speak. Tell me which panel you'd like to go to most (and why). Tell me if it's a ridiculous idea to think of asking every non-white person for an off-the-cuff list of 5 books they'd call Postcolonial Fiction.

Two things.
One: The author of the story I recced is not desi, as I had guessed her to be.

lionpyh commented on my rec and said so before the reveal, but I chose to screen her comment to preserve authorial anonymity. She later made a post talking about the dilemma my presumptious misrepresentation (my words, not hers!) placed her in.

I do feel bad for jumping the gun and placing her in that awkward position, but I don't regret making the rec. I do agree that I will need to edit it to point out that it does not (in my book) qualify as desi fic after the author's identity reveal. Whether it's still 'post-colonial' is a more complicated question; along the lines of can straight authors' work be called 'queer fiction' or male wriers' 'feminist fiction' based on subject and treatment.

I had a lot more to say on the subject; I have a draft post I've been poking at for a while. But instead, I'll say that I reread that story and still loved it, and then I talked with the beta of that story and asked her how much input she brought to it. And that led me to thinking about the relationship between authors and their cultural betas.

Two: I recently betaed two stories as I guess you would say a 'cultural beta'. Both stories were written by non-desis. I could get into the identities of the authors and the differences I thought those made to their approaches, but since I don't have the energy, I just want to finish saying the main thing that I need to.

I have been left deeply, jarringly unhappy with the process of being such a beta, though working on those two stories were two very distinct experiences. One merely left me thoughtful about the role and responsibility of a native informant in interacting with an outsider seeking to write an unfamiliar culture. The other left me angry, hurt, and resentful of the time and effort I gave, and inclined to retreat further inside a community comprised of writers and readers more like me.

Anyway. This isn't a very coherent post since I'm leaving out a lot of things I can't find the energy to articulate, but those are two possibly separate, possibly connected things that I needed to say.

Woe. I just finished reading a book that came HIGHLY recommended by two people whom I trust, and which I had looked forward to reading for forever, since who does not want a brilliant new South Asian writer to fall in love with, I ask you?

And not only did I have to push my way through reading it (with copious pauses to refresh myself by way of some fanfic), but in the end I was left with... nothing. It did not come together in the end; there was no concrete flaw of writing I could dismiss it with; I was just left baffled and indifferent.

And now I feel stupid and lacking in some exalted literary quality that gives me the taste and class to appreciate this book. While at the same time, of course, feeling guilty and Letting Down the Desi Side--therefore not naming it, since I would not want my negative reaction to be the cause of someone choosing to not read it.

This is, of course, the sort of madness that leads one down the dark and maniacal paths of hunting up those devilish delights that are snarky, nasty reviews, that make you feel less of a worthless reader for Not Getting It. (The flipside is the smug superiority that comes when you stumble across reviews that attempt to snark on, for instance ~~Austen~~ ~~Sea of Poppies~~ your Beloved Book of choice.) To be sure, true cackling comes from an assurance of knowing you are right, which is why its more fun to read rants about Books you Hate or Despise or Disdain, rather than Books You Went On A Date On And Feel Bad About Dumping, Especially Since Everyone Else Thinks They Are Perfect.

It's worse when you can't measure up to the standards of your friends, yo. Anne Rice going ape about interrogating the text from the wrong perspective on Amazon reviews I can ignore, but few things can compensate for giving a book two stars in the face of the shimmering four star reviews your galpals have given it. It is more squirm-inducing than the feeling of looking like a behnji when everyone else is jholawallah chic. Looks, after all, are only skin-deep, but book appreciation reflects on the True Integrity and Discernment of One's Mind.

Somewhere, in the deep dark recesses of my soul, is a ten year old child who thought that being a grown up meant reading every fat book on the higher bookshelves, including Moby Dick and getting every complicated piece of prose that other adults deemed worthy, including the poems of T. S. Eliot.

Somewhere, the spectre of an literary rasik, saying, 'you don't get it?!' haunts me like an English teacher who is going to scrawl a big red FAIL over the meshes of my brain, which, like Scarlet O'Hara's have been deemed too coarse.

I was recently persuading a RL friend to take up blogging (instead of wasting long, thoughtful emails or a rather recalcitrent mailing list), and was mentioning how I preferred Dreamwidth to wordpress or blogger even though it didn't seem like 'a real blog'. (Mostly because of the threaded comments.) Except she asked about scheduled posts, and in the process of telling her 'they're on the way...sometime', I had to explain I am currently rather frustrated by DW because it only works for me as long as I don't ask questions. The minute I need to know something I don't already know, I get lost in the bare bones and mostly unhelpful FAQ; I consider it a bad sign when instead of relying on a site's own internal trail of help links, I am choosing to first google my question.

I was poking around to try to find out an estimate of when stuff was going to happen, and look what I found - A Roadmap! It hasn't been updated for a while, I guess, which is why Site Launch hasn't been marked as achieved, but it made me laugh a little, looking at all those projects they had targeted to finish by 2009.

So, lack of draft posts is irritating, and on behalf of a friend, the lack of being able to migrate content from one DW journal to another is irritating, and not having a GMT-based time zone setting is irritating, and because I'm feeling petty, the whole 'happy holidays' promotion is irritating because I'm just grumpy in general about internet sites that are used by a global customer base but which can't help but focus on their Christian-centric view of what the big 'holiday' season is. (Let's not get into the whole 'Christmas is secular' thing here, ok? I have enough pissed off Jewish friends who can speak on my behalf.)

Anyway, since misery loves company, I figured I would ask you lot about what, if anything, irritates, frustrates, or just baffles you about dreamwidth.

(Note to anyone desiring to jump in and defend dreamwidth: you don't need to. I use it because I like it, I'm not going anywhere, and I suspect that will be the case with any commenters here. Whining in public about a less than perfect product is not an attack on the hard work and enthusiastic generosity of all the lovely volunteers who have spent time making it better.)

So a friend said one of her friends was asking her whether a smirk was always a negative thing, and she said, no, it has a long hallowed Harlequin Hero history.

To which, I went, waitaminute.

Because my memory of Mills & Boons (dim and distant, given that I only read them when they were being passed around in class for the saucy bits) was that the hero was granite jawed and smouldering, but he didn't smirk. Certainly not at the heroine.

"But they smirk in chick lit!" my friend said.

To which I said, of course they do there, because they are more sarcastic, and also because the heroine is more snarky herself and there you have the difference between chick lit and romances.

Except both of us are ~~talking out of our asses~~ theorising with insufficient data, because we haven't read enough chick lit or Harlequins, so I told her this was a question for.... the Internet!

::beams on the Batsignal::

The Smirk as Acceptable Alpha Hero Symbol: Differences between male protagonists of romance and chick lit. Discuss!

(Bonus question: Is 'sharing a smirk' poetic or bad writing?)

Ustad Sultan Khan died yesterday.

Of course, I loved Albela Sajan and all, but his sarangi was something else, man.

I remember a performance in Kamani seven years ago with him and Zakir Hussain and Faisal Quereshi. He was so gracious letting Zakir be the star, and yet playful when it came to the music.

A Gangaur song from the Ustads. It moves me to tears; something about the cultural memories this stirs up. The sarangi, like the shehnai just pushes really powerful emotional buttons.

Ustad Sultan Khan - Mitti pao hun.

So, yesterday I and a couple of other friends conclusively established that one of our mutual friends is a meth addict who has been using for several months, and one who does not right now want to acknowledge there is a problem, or talk about solutions.

I'm... two oceans and three continents away. So there's fuck all I can do to help.

Except talk to her, I guess, and talk to whomever else is actually around her whom I can reach.

And I don't have any personal experience with substance abuse of any kind, nor have I known anyone who has personally beyond smokers and occasional pot smokers.

I'm googling, following up on whatever information I can online.

But if any of you have any experience with this at all--either as recovered addicts, or people who've cared for addicts and helped them recover--I would be grateful for advice.

I know my friend pretty well, and have always before had the confidence to know the right way to help her when she needs it, and accept her as she is when she can't take it.

But talking to her yesterday was like talking to a ghost, and don't want to make things worse for her out of my own ignorance. She is not the person she was, and I am unsure of how to talk to this defensive, blithly denying person.

(On the off-chance that you've actually bothered to come and read my blog, kiddo, I'm posting here publicly because like I told you yesterday, I'm fucking worried about you, and I want to figure out how I can be of some help to you.)

You know how sometimes you read something, expecting it might be a slight chore, and then your brain has to take a moment to catch up with your heart because you had not realised there was a hole in it that has just been filled by this thing you just read?

Yeah.

So desi sci-fi. I've read some, though not as much as I should for a representative sample, because of childhood disappointments when comparing Dilip Salvi to Isaac Asimov. I shunned a lot of desi writing in my early adulthood; resenting it for not meeting the standards my colonised palatte had set for it, not realising the jury was rigged.

I'm more forgiving now, and more eager to see a world that matches my own brown, Indian one, regardless if the craftsmanship is not as slick as what I was weaned on.

In that context, when I was pointed to Sultana's Dream, I was charmed by this feminist utopian sci fi novella written in English over 100 years ago by a Bengali woman called Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain. The story seems a little naive (but then what utopia isn't?) and the feminism a little dated (but imagine how many boundaries her imagination would have had to break to reach to that point then?), but the joyous celebration of women and what they can do made it a fun read.

It's one of the perils of women's writings--their obscurity not only hides them from the mainstream male gaze, but also from their own literary descendents. People talk about Jules Verne and Tolkein as forefathers because they have been read since they were published--the lines of influence can be clearly traced. But women have often had to reinvent the literary wheel--each generation having to carve out its own space, and then, perhaps, having the resources to look back and discover; someone was saying similar things back then, too.

I don't know if

vandanasingh or Manjula Padmanabhan or Priya Sarukkai Chabria have read Hossain's short story, as they have set about contructing their own versions of feminist Indian sci fi.

But today I read a story that was written by Rokeya Hossain's textual granddaughter.

It's fanfiction, set explicitly within the fannish context of a story written for someone's prompt, but there are plenty of other posts that have already established the ridiculousness of segregating 'fanfic' from 'profic' on the basis of genre, so I'm not going to get into that here. I do actually, hope that this story will be picked up by a print publisher and distributed to a wider, or at least different, audience than the online fannish one, because it deserves to be read on its own merits.

Fifty Years in the Virtuous City can be read on its own; like Neil Gaiman's "The Problem of Susan", there is enough heft in the world building to satisfy a reader who does not get the references that reward all the metatexuality. As a stand-alone, this reads as a quiet, poetic story of two women scientists and the challenges they face to build a world shaped in their image.

But read as a response to Hossain's original, this story coalesces into a deep pool of historiographical literary commentary.

The writer, you see, has lived the life Hossain could only imagine, and can therefore strengthen the warp and weft of her humourously fantastic world by weaving in the threads of hindsight and experience. Her approach to academia is painstakingly honest--the writer knows that women in power do not change the fundamental nature of politics and bureaucracy.

‘Can you imagine Suhela as an administrator?’, she asks Chaitali, who has come by her rooms that evening to find her still sorting through the intra-university mail.

‘Straight out of the Arthashastra,’ says Chaitali, who knew her in undergrad at Razia.

‘What do you bet that she has spies?’

‘Maybe I am one of them,’ says Chaitali, raising her eyebrows.

‘The fraudulent disciple! With a knife at your ankle. No, it doesn’t bear thinking of. But – no, really,’ says Amrita, scanning a paper in disbelief, ‘this is marked VERY URGENT, and it is to tell me that there’s a leak in the roof of Choudhury’s office. I wish people would use the system properly.’

Can you see why I'm so gleeful? It takes the nonchalance of a 21st century product of co-ed academia to joke about paperwork, but to make a reference to Chanakya requires a connection to a specific shared historical past.

Hossain herself was still struggling to find an audience. Although she wrote other stories in Bengali, this one was written in English, and in 1905, I suspect the readership of The Indian Ladies' Magazine was too select and Anglicised for the sort of integration of code-switching that this story does.

Hossain's imaginary world is called Ladyland; this story translates it (back) to Naaridesh, and gives it a geographical context that restores the geo-political tensions present in the past the story was written. Written today, the author knows that "the Republic is under constant threat from the Trucial States and the Ingrej", that during its formative years there will be rumor of invasion from Andhra Pradesh.

With a post-colonial pickaxe, this writer demolishes the self-effacement that had Hossain's protagonist defer to a Sister Sara and a deracialised, deculturalised Queen and Lady Principal. When the war happens--and it is ugly, because this writer's feminism knows the futility of flinching from the brutality of struggle and resistance--there is an invasion from the Ingrej Robert Jennings. This story celebrates the intersectionality of Hossain's identity as a Muslim, by building a world replete in the words and laws and customs that the author could not herself infuse her world with.

The first steps we take to place ourselves at par with our colonisers often imitate their flaws, and we write our own unassimilated selves out of those stories, having had no examples of how to include them. That's why I love this story so much--because a young desi author is restoring to a long dead woman the voice that it has taken a century of nationalism and anti-imperialism and subaltern studies and anti-communalism and, of course, feminism to find.

I know I sound all dry and academic, in this theory-based recommendation. I'm sorry. I love this story with an enthusiastic squeeful heart--I love it for its femmeslash. I love it for its older women, who are still loving and active. I love it for science. I love it for its humour. I love it for the meticulous poetry of its images.

Amrita herself should not like to be compared to a flower or a fruit, an animal or a bird, and she turns this problem over sometimes in her mind, what Barnali’s beauty is like: if she solves it, she can forget it, and go on to something else. This is how her mind works: turn the thing over, turn it over, pry, catch at its seam, pry, crack it apart, work the kernel out and pick up the next. After she decides that Barnali’s beauty is like an electric light in glass – the slenderness of the brightening and dimming filament, the clarity and fineness of its casing, the perfected minimalism – she ceases to be distracted, or attracted. Once categorised, the thing is safe.

I love it for passages like that.

(I should say that while I am 99.9% sure I know the friend who wrote this, it is possible that I am wrong, and that perhaps the writer is not even desi. In which case, I would heap even more accolades on the writer.)

(And for those who are fannishly inclined,

dark_agenda's Kaleidoscope Exchange has a wealth of enjoyable fanworks to offer.)

ETA (6/1/12): Soon after writing this rec, I learned that the author was not desi. I have made a follow-up post here that discusses a few of the repurcussions of that reveal. I still stand by the rec, though.

One of my favourite picturisations from one of my favourite movies. Because they look back at you. That's what it's like being on the inside of making something. And all the people. All of them, can look back at you, as they stitch and hold the booms and throw the fake snow.

Yeh Zindagi Bhi from Luck By Chance

(Sorry, had to private that last one, due to internal squick factor regarding whining where people can see you.)

So here's my most immediate story - I talk to someone and they ask, tentatively, if I've ever been treated improperly by a teacher.

My breath catches, and the weight of history materialises in a lump inside my stomach, but I know what to say.

"Yes." (Yes, yes I know, yes I already believe you, yes, talk to me because I want to listen because I am already angry and on your side, yes, you're not alone.)

Here's a story from around five years ago -

There's a 'diversity' meeting in a department where I am a student. A bunch of concerned or coerced white students, the straight white male department head, one or two other of the miniscully small body of students of colour, and me.

After some various desultary discussion, the department head makes a long pronoucement, talking about all the efforts the department has made, and back-patting himself for it. He then goes on to talk about how good diversity is for the department, and how lovely it is and all the positive things that happen and that 'we' can get when 'we' take the benefits of diversity.

When he seems like he's winding down, I point out in what I am sure is an unfriendly and impolitic tone, "Yeah, but diversity isn't all great for the people in power. They have rational reasons to resist it because they want to cling to their power. Racism isn't illogical - it makes complete sense for someone benefiting from a heirarchy to keep supporting it."

There's that sort of discomforted silence in the room which happens any time someone has broken the implicit accord to keep things 'civil' and 'comfortable', and then my teacher, that straight white man, says to the gathered students, "You know, I want to acknowledge that bad things have happened to people of colour, and so sometimes they speak from a place of pain and anger. They have a right to be angry. And thank you, Deepa, for sharing that anger with us."

I don't say another word the rest of the meeting.

Later, when I am on my way to a class, my teacher is passing by, and he stops, and thanks me again, for being angry, and how those students needed to hear that.

Here's one more story - an online friend made a filtered post, about her boss at work. And in the comments, someone talked about emotional abuse, and manipulation. And posted a link to a blog post that talked about how it worked.

I clicked on the link. I read the post. And then I had to stop, and figure out why I was crying. Because the post talked about specific things that people chose to say, things I thought were small, inconsequential, the sort of thing you wouldn't think to notice in a conversation with a teacher. Things that claimed superior knowledge of your emotions. Things that appropriated your opinions for their own agenda. Things that sought to make you dependant on their approval, and doled out appreciation and rejection in order to manipulate what you gave to them.

Things that are, in fact, when you find the spectacles to put on that reveal the monsters under the bed, part of a Big Fucking Pattern.

There's one more story. About a teacher from a time I didn't have those spectacles. I still have a scar on my wrist to remind me about that time. That story, I don't talk about. But now I know which category to file it under.

We don't often get told these stories - growing up, along with the 'your parents know best' and 'respect your teachers' and 'authorial figures deserve reverence' narratives. Sometimes we're lucky enough to have the 'bad touch' conversations, but its even more rare to find people to have the 'words people can fuck with you with' conversation. We don't see it on shrieking billboards -- 'your admiration and love for your teacher was not the equivalent of wearing a short skirt, and in both cases, there is no such thing as asking for it'.

And oh my god, how grateful I am to you, and anyone else, who by mentioning the minutae of manipulation, has given me a fucking context, a NAME, to see what is happening, and call it for the abuse of power it is.

So that when a friend says, "maybe I'm overreacting, but..." I can say, NO. No you are not. Let me tell you a story about myself.

Because these stories--yours and mine--they are TRUE. And when we stitch them together, we can turn the scraps of our shredded trust and violation into something bigger than the individual frailty and failings we think caused it to happen. A quilted narrative that large--it proves that the problem was not us. It was never us.

(If you have stories to share, or links that helped you, I would be grateful to have them to pass on to my friend.)

And padwa and bhaidooj badhai while we're at it!

Rangoli courtesy

esperante and her motley subversive JNU crew. All green bits by me, who fought for them against the hegemony of structured traditional rangoli.

Not photographed: Kaaju ki barfi, courtesy the local auntie brigade. OM NOM NOM.

My brother, who is currently in whitelandia, linked me to this article about college expenses in the US, and we both snickered at the amounts being cited. Like $200 for food per month. When I was in the US, I was spending around $80. And borrowing all text books from the library or other students. (And I still have unpaid student debt.)

As he says: "It seems there are some minimums (especially of estimated living-style expenses) that even "progressive" Americans don't think below, or can't imagine / conceive below. Indians just have a whole different economic universe with its own laws of physics, so we're aliens coming to US earth saying, wow, so much dirt, we can cold-fusion it to pay rent."

Recently I met a white expatriate who had taken the metro for the first time in Delhi, and was enthusing, 'It was really good, it's just like in the West, finally!'

Which made me wonder, is there anything anyone has ever heard it being said of, 'Oh, it's really nice, we've finally got this thing like they have in the East!'

I've heard it about foodstuffs, like 'Oh, I can finally buy litchees at my organic fair-trade co-op', but not about anything infrastructural or cultural. And this dispite the fact that in many ways, USian cities are backwards compared to Indian ones - no PCOs to make calls from at every corner, for people just arriving in the country, no kirana stores within walking access where you can get milk and eggs and rice from, and most horrific of all - NO AUTORICKSHAWS!

I suppose Singapore and Hong Kong might be more likely candidates for the favourably compared-to categories? I still think a city that doesn't have a mochi on a corner accessible enough to limp to with a broken chappal is a city that can't be held up as an urban centre of model development.

Kabhi Kabhi Mere Dil Mein, Yeh Khayal Aata Hai...

Pre-Mela Day 7: Books Are For The Reader (Melawale: the Book Bloggers)

Pre-Mela Day 6: Sadvachan; speaking truth IS power (Melawali: Dayamani Barla)

Books for Con or Bust: A Quick and Dirty 'Poll'

Pre-Mela Day 5: Those Also Serve Who Edit the Copy (Melawali: Urvashi Butalia)

Pre-Mela Day 4: Homelands and Heartlands (Mela-walla: Girish Karnad)

Pre-Mela Day 3:'Speak Sweet and Eat Sesame' would sound better in Bengali (Melawali: Bama Faustina)

Pre-Mela Day 2: Heard in Transliteration (Man of the Mela: Gulzar)

Pre-Mela Day 1: Mapping Identity (Mela-walli: Ila Arun)

Crowdsourcing my schedule

[insert unwritten essay about cultural betas, writing by outsiders and native informancy here]

Plumbing neuroses, one book at a time

The Dreamwidth Whinging Post

The smirk that launched a thousand ships?

Albela Sarangi

Help from and for Meth Addicts

Sci-Fi, Desi Ishtyle

Here, have a song instead

Patterns of Abuse

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