We’d like to mark the moment with a big thank you to all of you who believed in us, read our dispatches, liked and not-so liked them, commented on them - all of you who subscribed and engaged. You made us write - dare we say better and better - each month, as we imagined ideas and themes that spoke to the outspoken-ish nature of Outspoken-ish, wrote and rewrote drafts, brainstormed over visuals and layouts, before pressing that ‘Schedule’ button. 

We wrote about adulting, the pain women endure, and artists finding drama in trauma, the politics of joy and festivities, the unreal experience of being on Zoom for extended periods, the changes COVID brought and didn’t bring, the race to show the ‘real India’ on film and TV, among other topics. 

We waited to find out what spoke to you the most, what drew you in - that was real anticipation. 

We discovered each other too, T & I, as writers and women - how we do what we do, what we deploy to navigate our worlds and realities, what gives us joy, what we read, how we write, the nuances of being thrilled, seeking amusement, and feeling rage. For this too, we are grateful to you - you made our half-baked idea of “doing something together, let’s” very very real.   

As Outspoken-ish bids farewell, we ‘re not done of course. Just this year, T published a short story about loneliness, womanhood, and miracles in a special issue of the magazine Shuddhashar and an essay on unreliable, ethically dubious, and perplexing characters in the South Asian Avant-Garde. P interviewed Pico Iyer about his new book The Half Known Life for the LA Review of Books, a poignant and light conversation about the themes in his book and Van Morrison too. 

If you’d like to stay in touch with our work and know what we’re up to, T is completing a long writing project (‘a novel’). She also has two edited books out this summer–one on the relation of fiction and fact with storytelling and the other on contemporary digital literature.  You can learn more about her work by following T at: @TorsaG (Twitter), @torsa_ghosal (Instagram), and her website: torsaghosal.com. P’s recently wrapped up a non-fiction manuscript on the topic of compassion, slated for a 2024 release, and is already dreaming of her next book. You can follow P at: @derrindo (Twitter) and @poojapande08 (Instagram).

It’s the beginning of new endings and even newer beginnings, as we all continue to live, love and (hopefully) laugh in media res.

Until next time!  

Happy birthday to us, and many thanks to you, our subscribers. Here’s what you can expect from us going forward—

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But of course, if it means giving into the temptation myself, of attempting to write #writinglife memes, then maybe it all works out in the end? ‘The thing we get wrong about writing is the desk. It doesn’t exist. The desk is in my brain. It’s lodged between the colourful Pop-It thingie my daughter randomly kills time with. It’s floating somewhere between the clouds. The desk is actually in my shower’. (Okay, that’s too long for a meme).

In March this year, I did that ultimate being writer thing. I plotted the big, romantic escape into the hills to write. I got myself the room with a view (Woolf was right about that) that did not include colourful Pop-Its, but deodar trees, mountains, lush greens in bloom, dreamy clouds. Of course, I always knew some things can never really exit mindspace altogether - such as laundry - but there was more than just domestic thoughts creeping up on me (Woolf wasn’t right about that, I suppose?). To say that I missed the peeps back home doesn’t cover it - and I firmly believe we should all miss each other from time to time, it does us plenty good. It was more this experiential reckoning of an obvious fact: When I write, I am not some other exclusive writer being floating outside of myself; when I write, all of me writes. Turns out I am never completely disassociated from those Pop-Its.     

It comes as a surprise to many, if not most. During this time in March, I encountered several people in whose eyes I was just that - the writer being. Because which woman-mother-wife just plants herself far away from home, to write (cue another Woolf haunting)? I mean, this is not a work trip. Is it? I never knew how to answer that. Or rather, I saved myself the energy of getting into the philosophical meaning of work. Because somehow it would only add weight to the writer being - kyonki aise kaun sochta hai? Work means work only. It was infinitely better, I found, to discuss food instead. Or the abundance of spring that surrounded us all. One gentleman in particular, I remember, thought me a most peculiar creature - he would forever try and draw linkages between my yoga practice and my writer being. ‘It must be how you stay in the zone’, he concluded over lunch one day. I didn’t have the heart, or energy, to tell him how I’d spent the entire morning shuttling between finding the best spot to write and of course, the meme rabbit hole. (I believe there were hats involved too - which one can both protect from the sun and look good?). Instead, I listened to him talk about how, predictably, he’s always wanted to be one too - that writer being. (I think he practiced law).

I did my laundry that day.

What does staying in the zone mean when you’re a writer? All my life, and especially of late as a “bonafide writer” (i.e. published by “well-known publications”), one word that has been thrown at me again and again - to the point of frustration - is self-discipline. ‘It’s amazing how disciplined you are’, ‘I wish I could be as disciplined as you’, ‘I’m so envious of your discipline’, ‘I could never do it, but you, with your discipline, can’, ‘Two weeks to write? Only you can do it, you’re so disciplined’. I’ve become better at managing my annoyance at it - erm, slightly - and it has made me think about deeper meanings of discipline and how we don’t talk about it like that, but it hints at being in the zone, doesn’t it?

Because when that happens, we all know how special it feels. Writer or not. How many times have I lost myself - thankfully! - because I was in the zone. It has happened on walks. During yoga (lawyer-writer might just be onto something!). While writing. During sex. Skygazing. In conversations. And in so many, many moments with my daughter - years ago, it was when we drew and painted together; these days, it’s often in conversations (she prefers the term ‘hang-out’). Writer being in the zone might mean an output that makes you beam - let’s admit it, anything beyond the soul-crushing blinking cursor on a blank page qualifies - but often there are less tangible outcomes on the other side of being in zones. It is different from losing a sense of time - though that does happen too - and it is the very opposite of drifting away. (Because that can happen washing dishes - indeed, it was the pandemic-lockdown revelation for me, urging me to invest in a good pair of dishwashing gloves, before we had the sense to invest in a dishwasher instead - though I do long for that kind of drifting off at times).     

So how about we look for it more mindfully in our lives instead of relegating it to that romantic space of creativity where the mood needs to be set, the ambience perfect, choice of beverage at hand (write drunk, edit sober, miss deadline, anyone?), and the process elevated and put on a pedestal to admire from afar?

I know it’s not easy. I have been guilty of it myself, having spent years probing, analyzing, and being awed by writer beings and their lives, rituals, trying to get at what makes them writers. Often asking them those hallowed process questions that I was certain meant something intensely unique: ‘Do you write at night?’ and everyone’s favourite ‘What do you see when you look out the window?’. And on this side of #writinglife now, I find myself amused (at best) enraged (at worst) at how much we’ve let the romantic idea dominate and take over the writer being in culture.  Not that I have anything against process, but process is process. Sure, I’m annoyed at being interrupted while writing, but I am also equally annoyed if that happens while in the process of going to sleep.

Speaking of amused, I was recently asked which font I prefer to write in. I thought it one of the better wide-eyed questions that get thrown at writers, and as my mind ran through potential responses - a) Wingdings b) I have decided to not write until they make a font in my name c) Meh, Imma moody about fonts - I read the room and went with what I felt needed to be said. ‘Whatever. It’s a job. I have a deadline’.

My follow-up for another day? ‘Why don’t we ask our accountants what music they listen to as they file our returns?’ (Speaking of, there’s a deadline around the corner nobody can afford to miss, writer or not, zone or not). Not that I’m making a case to romanticize accountants - even as I predictably fall into the creative-writer functional-accountant binary trap - but maybe it’s time?

Love,

P

—

Post script by T

I was at a writing workshop-cum-retreat a whole week this month, where we discussed, among other things, ‘process.’ Of late I have become interested in process. In that sense, my writing being seems to be moving in the direction opposite to P.’s!

I have been habitually chaotic as a writer. I never did seek desks or routines. I also took great pride in beginning projects close to deadlines and (usually) seeing them through. The problem is, however, I am getting sucked into more and more projects. All exciting but also all somewhat different. How to keep track? What to prioritize? Turns out, I need process after all.

There is little romance in process though. My most recent (two-day-old) process is keeping track of time I am devoting to a draft on an Excel sheet shared with a bunch of writer friends. Nothing looks less romantic but this process, somewhat shared and collaborative, also feels fun. In the end though, P is right: writing is writing, process is process. The goal is not to confuse the two, as always.

More from T & P

True to her July mood, P recommends other writing about not writing this month. Why I am not a Writer (super recco via dear friend, thanks much Jugni!) is also bite-sized, YW!

In season one of the Amazon Prime TV series Panchayat, when the protagonist Abhishek Tripathi is disgruntled at his posting in a rural panchayat office, his friend consoles him saying this is Abhishek’s shot at being “Mohan Bhargava from Swades.” The job would let Abhishek see and do something for the “real India.” The comment is self-aware and ironic since the friend himself works in a posh urban office, presumably for a multinational company, and earns five times the salary of a panchayat secretary. One of the things Panchayat establishes early on is that a guy like Abhishek, brought up in urban India, would not voluntarily take up a job in a village that is so off the beaten–or pucca–paths. Abhishek’s circumstances have forced him to go to the village Phulera. But, what the show is less clear about is its own gaze on the rural setting–how seriously Panchayat takes the idea of showing its audience the “real India.” 

A question I ask when reading stories or watching shows and films is what makes the narrative tellable? I will admit, as many readers of Outspokenish already know, I engage with art as an academic and writer would (occupational hazards!). So, tellable, in the way I think, refers “to features that make a story worth telling, its “noteworthiness.” Tellability (sometimes designated “narratibility” or “reportability”) is dependent on the nature of specific incidents judged by storytellers to be significant or surprising and worthy of being reported in specific contexts, thus conferring a “point” on the story” (Raphaël Baroni; italics mine).  

For the urban Indians Abhishek is supposed to represent, the folks who have an Amazon Prime subscription in India, Panchayat may seem to offer a rare glimpse into village life, or “grassroots India.” The web series may remind them of that one time they visited a relative–a mama, a chacha, a pishi–in a downtrodden village. Life was so slow and simple there, the air was so clean. This confers a significance on the setting–makes a story set there worth telling. And to Panchayat’s credit, it does not–especially in the first season–overemphasize the idyllic aspects of village life. While the whole village tells Abhishek he will fall in love with Phulera once he takes in the landscape from the high vantage point of the water tower, when he does end up there, he remains unimpressed. Jeetandra Kumar who plays Abhishek is quite wonderful in the role of a perpetually frustrated, though not foul-tempered, young man. To him the village looks as bekaar from up there as it did from the ground. 

However, part of Panchayat’s “tellability” (and humor) also comes from the gap between the life Abhishek has presumably led in the city and the everyday life in Phulera. Episodes in the first season typically focus on a problem that is odd or idiosyncratic from Abhishek’s perspective, and again to the show’s credit, instead of depicting Abhishek as the harbinger of paradigm shifts (a la Mohan Bhargava from Swades), they characterize him as someone unwilling to go into much trouble for anything. He compromises and negotiates. Abhishek meets the villagers halfway, albeit reluctantly. Nonetheless, there is something in the style of the storytelling that seems to insist that the world of Phulera is a “foreign” milieu for an average India-grown boy like Abhishek, that there is a massive disconnect between urban and rural Indias, and this is what puzzles me. 

For me, Panchayat is a look back at much of my childhood and adolescence spent in a place called Chuanpur along Pakuria Road, a couple hundred kilometers from Calcutta. A kuchcha road connected Chuanpur with National Highway 12. There was a sawmill at the intersection of the National Highway and the dirt road, an eutrophic pond across from our house–a government quarter, and a gram panchayat office less than a mile away. A temple behind the government quarter blasted Kumar Sanu and Bappi Lahiri in monsoon, on the eve of jhulan yatra. There was a field we used to call “Chandmari Maath,” where soldiers (most likely the Border Security Force) practiced shooting, and my father and other staff of the electricity board played cricket. These sites engraved in my memory are too small to appear on Google Maps. I zoom in and find a vast nothing. 

I should find Panchayat “relatable.” After all, I have been in Abhishek’s place. Or to be more precise, if Abhishek married someone in the city and brought wife and child to his rural posting, that child would be me. My father, unlike Abhishek, was quite thrilled with his posting though, because it gave him on-site work experience, my mother not so much, and I was two when we moved to Chuanpur–had no opinion. But maybe because of my experience of living close to a “real” panchayat, I find Panchayat’s stance on the world it depicts–the show’s ethical orientation–confusing. The show follows Abhishek’s perspective and Abhishek goes from being a tourist-like outsider to an integral part of the village life over the course of two seasons. Integral only to an extent. Perhaps it would be more accurate to call him a mediating figure, a broker between the gaze of the urban audience (represented by the friend who visits Abhishek from the city in S 2) and the rural world. 

What is this brokering for though? Did we need this brokering figure to know there are places like Phulera in India? Is it meant to give us–Indians–culture shock? 

Hindi films and web shows are going through this phase of fixating on places like Phulera or whatever they think is “real India.” There’s Mirzapur whose blueprint, I suppose, is Wasseypur. There’s Bareli, Kanpur, and other tier-two cities in northern India. There’s also Dharavi. Taking pride in their portraits of these worlds, filmmakers and showrunners say we haven’t quite seen stuff like this on screen before. Reviews use the same terms. Real India. Grassroots India. It is true we haven’t seen villages and tier-two towns, at this frequency anyhow, on screen since the 1990s, when neoliberalization and other economic shifts prompted big budget Hindi films to showcase the diaspora. I am not sure if anyone who has spent any time as part of the desi diaspora thinks Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Ghum and Kal Ho Na Ho are realistic representations of the diaspora…I know I don’t. Such films are oblivious of the histories that brought Indians across classes and castes to the UK, US, Australia, and other shores. However, somehow, at the moment, there is a bit of an unquestioning acceptance of this “real India” trope when much of this turn toward “real India'' is the middle- and upper- creative class voyeuristically traveling through “backward” places and addressing one issue at a time, like the savior Ayushman Khurana plays in Article 15. And when I mention class I am not pinpointing the backgrounds of individual directors or artists but the viewpoints the projects bring with them. Electricity problem, water problem, dowry, casteism, sanitation issues, superstition. In rural India. Tier Two India. And, of course, no problem is insurmountable as long as there’s a hero. Abhishek in Panchayat is not a hero–which is why I watch the show–and yet, he seems to be the only one who wonders and asks why the village’s real pradhan–a woman (played by Neena Gupta)–gives her title and power to her husband. Rahul Desai’s glowing review of Panchayat Season One notes that Abhishek’s noble deeds are not byproducts of heroism but results of his selfishness. I agree but it still means the villagers need city boy Abhishek to cue new thinking. 

What goes unsaid and unacknowledged in these films and shows, beyond the most basic forms of class friction, is that much of the “evils” the stories showcase via villages, slums, and brothels are on display in urban- and middle- class households in the heart of the polite society, both in India as well as the Indian diaspora. The number of women who cede control of their lives and finances to their husbands, undermining their own agency willingly or unwillingly, is fairly high in Indian cities and the diaspora. So, the pradhan of Phulera is hardly anomalous. Social divides between urban and rural India, between genteel and seedy neighborhoods are not as wide as the cinematic and televisual portraits project them to be in order to justify setting stories in smaller villages and towns, “telling” their stories. 

There are differences in access based on class-caste and geopolitical advantages separate Delhi from Phulera, Calcutta from Chuanpur, but the social drama plays out much the same way (I mean, in California people are celebrating “sacred thread” ceremony, proclaiming their Brahminism. What can I say?). Anyone who has grown up in India across regions, classes, and castes has seen the “real India” already. If someone grows up insulated from the congestion of slums and the stench of sewers in India, never walks on pot-hole riddled roads, then what they experience is “real” too–they experience what money can do in India, how far it can shelter one from certain elements while leaving them exposed to others.  

There’s a scene in Gully Boy where Murad (played by Ranveer Singh) talks back (well, unexpectedly raps) to “slum tourists” wanting to see his house. The scene, I imagine, intends to take a dig at the idea of “poverty porn.” Gully Boy is not your Slumdog Millionaire, the scene seems to suggest. And yet we–the audience–are seeing what that tourist came to see in Dharavi. Some of us have lived in houses like Murad’s, some of us have not. Then, is Gully Boy, inspired by the lives of two Indian rappers, one coming from a slum in Andheri and another from a chawl in Kurla, “exploitative”? I don’t have a straightforward answer because “exploiting” and “selling out” in art depend on how a story is told, and Gully Boy does not treat slum dwellers as other worldly curiosities, unlike Slumdog. Yet, I do think that part of Gully Boy’s tellability comes from the fact of poverty–it becomes a story worth telling because someone growing up in Dharavi has the angst, swag, aspiration, and talent to rap, apna time ayega. Shocking. 

Is it?

A friend born and raised in Sacramento once told me that she’d heard of a tour company taking visitors from America to the Taj Mahal and then, immediately after, to a slum. My friend explained they do it so the visitors feel uncomfortable–like, if you are admiring Taj Mahal, then you must go see a slum, the latter is the “real India.” I laughed. Taj Mahal is “real” too, I said, and I thought of the heat and the crowds in Agra, around the Taj Mahal area. Very real, too. 

The point I am getting at is: it takes a touristy view of India to say that a section of the country is real, and another is not. And if we note the kinds of stories whose tellability depends on problems of so-called “real India '' we see how these magnify a hypothetical disconnect between urban and rural values, mistaking appearances for reality, like an outsider would. The richest and the most powerful in India are as parochial as they come. Aishwarya Rai married a tree because she is mangalik. In Panchayat, rumors spread about a banyan tree chasing the villagers. Both are very real India. 

<Warning: Panchayat S 2 spoilers ahead>

The contemporary milieu that films and TV shows built around “real India” are too busy circumventing is one plagued by communalism and sectarianism. The most politically powerful figure sitting in Delhi identifies as coming from peechda jat (backward caste) while several activists and leaders from oppressed castes fighting for social and economic justice are identified as anti-national. Happens in real India. But Panchayat’s mentions of community and caste distinctions are fleeting. The pradhan’s family and Abhishek’s are from the same caste. That’s all we know and it’s a running joke that the pradhan could marry off his daughter to Abhishek because they come from the same birādrī. There is little mention of how national political sentiments trickle into a village like Phulera, except when in season two, the show plunges into sentimentality about the plights of soldiers in Kashmir. The episode reminded me of the comedian Kunal Kamra’s viral punchline: “Siachen mein hamare jawaan lar rahe hain” (“Our soldiers are fighting in Siachen”). The punchline pokes fun at “patriots” who say since our soldiers are fighting in Siachen (and elsewhere along the border), willing to sacrifice their lives, we should not complain about minor inconveniences like demonetisation. 

The topic of soldiers fighting in Kashmir or anywhere for that matter came up only marginally throughout the second season of Panchayat. The show had no political or ethical stance on J & K at any point as far as I can recall. Then, what made the showrunners decide to locate a soldier’s predicament in Kashmir center stage in the finale? What made them think the material in the episode was worth telling? 

Most likely they thought it would be significant and shocking for an audience to learn that the soldiers in the Indian army fighting in Kashmir come from small villages like Phulera. As an audience, even if I pretend for a moment I didn't know this, I am still left with the question of ‘so what’? Is the show critical of the fact that wars and military campaigns draw the blood of the disenfranchised? Well, then, why are its characters hyping up how the soldier’s parent can live with his head held high? Or, is the show suggesting that the urban youth should also enlist in the military instead of confining themselves to arm-chair debates on nationalism? I would be inclined to accept that the show was simply ‘observing’ a fact if they did not stretch the fact into a story lasting a whole episode. 

The last episode in Panchayat makes the most of the surge in arm-chair debates on nationalism without adding anything much to these conversations or challenging the conversation. It does not have anything complicated to say about nationalism and social values, nationalism and the rural economy. It has little to say about unemployment rates in India that force graduates like Abhishek to reluctantly work for the panchayat or the rural youth to enlist in the army. Abhishek’s plight is made out to be related to him not taking his college education seriously (he keeps saying “I should have studied harder”).    

Panchayat embodies what I think of as a “new provincialism.” The “new provincialism” in Indian entertainment pretends to be cutting and biting…a far cry from the escapist entertainment of the ‘90s and early 2000s, but truth be told, these new provincial shows are escapist too. They just happen to be set in brothels, slums, and villages. A majority (though not all) of the “new provincial” fare refuses to treat these settings as extensions, rather than the crummy “other side,” of the ordinary, urban world the OTT and multiplex audiences supposedly inhabit.     

Love,

T

Postscript from P

The thing about gaze is it never ceases to be. No matter how mindful, aware, conscious, guilty, I can be of my privileges as a Netflix subscriber in a country that does not know or care for its existence - let alone fathom spending actual money for a subscription that offers… what? Entertainment? But I get that on Facebook… for free - it will invariably bleed into the corners of the screen of whatever it is I’m watching. I will continue to question who gave authority to so-and-so for staking claim on the real India, all the while ignorant of the echo chamber I willfully inhabit, and remain naively dismissive of the audience it’s meant for.

Who ultimately are looking to be entertained. Which is why the primacy of feel-good - and the definition changes currency according to the flavour of the month, like a certain brand of nationalist pride is so in these days - dominates everything else. Even its tellability, as T puts it. 

So, even as my kickass colleagues in Khabar Lahariya choose '90s Bollywood song and dance again and again for their daily, weekly, monthly fix - none of the OTT platforms hold any sway for them in rural, last mile northern India - I mostly try and stay away from anything that’s being called “gritty”. And I find myself drawn to the feel bad/it’s all so grey/the-world-is-broken-but-it-can-still-be-worth-living-for kinda stuff. 

Like Zee5’s recent newsroom drama The Broken News. In its refusal to offer well-rounded closure, in its interrogation of truth and lies and the narrow no man’s zone between them, and in its portrayals of edit meetings in TV news offices, it felt pretty real.

More from T & P

Speaking of acclaimed portrayals of real India, check out P’s rant on the grittiness of Paatal Lok, developed with her friends at KL.

T’s story “Camp City” won Berkeley Fiction Review’s 2022 Sudden Fiction Contest and appeared in the magazine’s latest issue. While “Camp City” is only available in print right now, here’s another “real India” short story by T available to read online.  

Photograph by Balaji Srinivasan via Unsplash

Who’s got the dibs on “real India”? Those who tell stories of rural India? (As if that’s a monolith). Those who turn their noses up at fiction and feverishly seek secrets and untold truths in ______ (Insert Purani Dilli, Kamathipura, what-have-you), as if the cameras used for making documentaries aren’t tools in the hands of flawed human beings with cognitive biases, just like the rest of us? 

Do Zoya Akhtar’s upcoming re-imaginings of Archie’s comics rate poorly on the real India check? What about her portrayal of Dharavi in Gully Boy? The fact that it wasn’t Gali still irks me, but the plushness of that 1% wealth she’s got a grip on is some of the most it-happens-only-in-India stuff I’ve ever seen. (After Ketan Mehta’s Mirch Masala, I’d argue, which plays out almost like a fantasy to my now not-so-naive eyes!).

So yes, it’s complicated.

Because for every real India we see on the screen, there is an equal and opposite real India. And even then, both are perhaps ultimately, unreal.   

This month’s dispatch of Outspoken-ish, led by T, explores the question via shows such as Panchayat, Anubhav Sinha’s films, and other visual cultures developing around the idea of “real” India.

In your inbox soon.

-P.

From among the multiple jokes that missed their mark at this year’s Academy Awards, or hit suspect new ones - what was that men-are-pieces-of-meat sketch and why did it feel like it went on forever? - the one Amy Schumer cracked about King Richard landed powerfully for me in the moment. And more so when I watched the movie recently - during a scene when Aunjanue Ellis who plays Oracene, the mother to the Williams’ girls, confronts her husband who’s been controlling the lives and life paths of two of their daughters whose striking talent as tennis athletes is now bringing them close to that phase on the other side of which lies unprecedented fame and success. It is to Ellis’ credit as a performer, besides the writing and direction, that this one scene turns around the entire premise of the movie. As she makes evident in the telling of it, she too has always been around, doing what she can, not only for Venus and Serena, but all her daughters, and also for him. It is the scene that holds to account and lends perspective to every other scene that has preceded it, and all the ones that follow. All the many, many scenes that linger on Richard Williams. Richard Williams as he’s beaten up - yet again. Richard Williams as he’s mocked - yet again. Insulted, humiliated, rejected - yet again. And yet he remains the Richard Williams whose conviction in the potential of Venus and Serena never falters. The father who could never take his own father’s love for granted, who swore to always be there for his daughters. Who abandons mealtimes and rarely sleeps so he can hustle some more, in his bid to land Venus & Serena a coach. The intense believer, whose visions could be mistaken for insanity in any other time and place. Only he sees what the rest of the world will eventually see - how two black girls from Compton, a ghetto rife with drugs and guns and crime, are destined to shatter records in a sport dominated by the spirit of, indeed birthed in, white middle class exclusivity. It is what makes Richard Williams the classic tragic figure, worthy of this epic retelling. As we witness his blood and sweat and tears, we know we’re in the presence of greatness. He is, after all, King Richard. 

But there are no crowns (even of thorns) for Oracene. She is a woman, a wife, a mother, who keeps the house running, holds a day job as a nurse (we only see her nursing when she tends to Richard’s wounds who has been beaten up yet again by the local goons), and somehow finds the time to craft exquisite hair braids for Venus and Serena, all the while teaching them about historic black women, a space they are meant to occupy. We never see the back-breaking toil that goes into it all - the blood, the sweat, the tears. Until that confrontation scene, there is no pause for the viewer to reflect on how exhausting it must be, staying married to King Richard. 

And even that scene, I know, after it’s poignantly played out, is a token gesture. A box to check. For those of us who would critique it, pat can come the reply: ‘Well, she does get to speak about her struggle and frustration. And besides, it earned Ellis an Oscar nomination.’ Yes, for Best Supporting Actress, for a movie in which she plays a character who is literally supporting everyone, including the manic King Richard, a role that of course got Will Smith the Oscar for Best Actor. 

I get it. The system is rigged. I understand. I can rant all I like, but I’ll also take it, even if grudgingly. Glimmers of visibility, even if they’re rendered in overly dramatic or obvious ways like a scene where we spell it all out, do work. At least they’re passing the mic and all that. For every 100 viewers who saw only King Richard, there are probably two who saw Queen Oracene, at least in that moment. And, if we’re feeling hopeful, there is probably a 1-in-100 chance that they also saw Queen Oracene outside and beyond that one scene. That it lent the whole project perspective, setting everything into context and in proportion. So if we do the Math, we should eventually get there. In another gazillion years. Right? 

In Homing Instincts, a book on early motherhood by writer and founder of Vela magazine, Sarah Menkedick breaks down the labour of those we politely refer to as homemakers: ‘the feeding, the nurturing, the staving off of chaos, work not measured in hours, miles, words, or dollars’. The ‘essential ground-level work’, she says, and adds the crucial qualifier, ‘work that doesn’t count as such’. It’s why Menkedick finds herself typing emails with one hand in the first month of her motherhood, as she nurses her baby, whose head is safely placed in the mother’s football hold, in a bid to ‘rejoin the ranks of multitaskers’. Again and again, the women who can, choose ‘work’ in the false ‘work-home’ binary we’ve constructed as a culture, because that culture only really sees you working, when you’re ‘at work’.  Doing the work that counts as such. What Ratika Kapur’s titular character in the sharp, enjoyable novel The Private Life of Mrs. Sharma, describes as ‘work-busy, which is totally different from being house-busy’. 

How we look upon the very real labour of women - or rather how we do not - in a way that it doesn’t hold weight, and is rendered hidden, invisible, finds strong manifestation in our understanding of mothers and motherhood, those hallowed, romantic ideals in the Mother’s Day month we find ourselves in. It is nature’s tragedy in a sense because it starts right with pregnancy - a body we often romanticize and/or worship, seldom giving thought to the very intense labour and churnings that are in constant motion inside the woman’s body, because we cannot really see it on the surface. And as a culture, we shy away from the precise details of what’s actually going on because it’s well, TMI. The cultural blindspots vis-à-vis women’s labour, as a result, I could argue, begins right then, and only worsens and intensifies from there. According to a Lancet study, women In India perform unpaid care and healthcare work within their families to the tune of USD 38 billion a year, as against men whose contribution is USD 9.6 billion. In the informal workforce sector, this invisibilizing is turning literal with the shrinking of women in this economy through the pandemic.

No wonder then, that the camera doesn't see Oracene’s sweat and tears in King Richard. No wonder then, that she’s not glorified to the point of royalty.  

But are we, all of us invisible women, seeking glory? The obvious, and I’d say tempting, response is yes. A resounding one, at that. Isn’t it why our mothers seek out the melodrama in their daily lives, why they obsess over the women in the afternoon soaps, why they rant about the chores of cooking, cleaning, keeping house, all those grunts and heavy sighs in the kitchen whose only objective is to draw attention? It’s another version of Oracene’s outburst, isn’t it, which also plays out, not coincidentally, in the kitchen? For years, the woman has watched how simple it is for the man, to simply breeze in through the front door after a ‘hard day’s work at the office’, expecting chai. While she needs to make it all visible, herself, her labour, her never-ending work. Nagging and assuming the martyr position has been a tried-and-tested method of doing just that. It’s not unlike what the actress Taapsee Pannu, who’s unarguably been playing the central character in film after film, declared in an interview, in a nod to grand slow-mo entries men have been getting since forever in mainstream Hindi cinema ‘I want to be the hero from the first frame’. 

So while I get it, and I’ll take it, does it really help understand how real the labour is? Its pain and challenges, and maybe also, dare-I-say-it, its rewards?  

How about seeking, crafting a new language in culture then that is beyond handing women glorious crowns of thorns? What are the other ways that can make us the protagonists of stories that have thus far either simply missed our views, or missed the point? Queen Oracene can’t or needn’t or rather shouldn’t just be the female response to King Richard after all. Surely, there must be ways to do this beyond the romance of tragedy? Do we always need to become mythical creatures, superheroes, larger-than-life figures, invoke cult tragedy, in order for people to pay attention? 

There is the new redemption genre of course, which is seemingly attempting just that. Putting back into centre all those misunderstood women on the patriarchal peripheries, setting the record straight. But if this route tones down the over-the-top martyr’s glory approach in the name of realism, it also goes the other way by offering narratives that come across as reductive. It’s food for thought for another edition of Outspoken-ish perhaps but TBH, Pam and Tommy is an exercise in skewed reduction, in much the same way that the ‘I need to test you for Covid with my tongue’ Oscars joke was, whose premise seemed to be ‘look what happens when we turn the tables’. (What happens exactly though? Now we get to be the creepy harassers? Score for feminism?).

While there might be a dearth in current culture, and until we wait, there are also always finds. Such as Kevin can F Himself on AMC (Prime Video for India), which does a striking job of rendering the psychological, emotional, mental labour of Allison visible in ways I haven’t encountered before, at least not outside of books. It also finds the spots of joy in its wonderful portrayal of a sisterhood-in-the-making. Closer home, The Great Indian Kitchen, manages this feat powerfully, in its repetitive monotony of shot after shot that foregrounds the woman’s labour. 

Perhaps the on-screen Nimisha (The Great Indian Kitchen) and Oracene can collaborate with Jada Pinkett-Smith - the invisible woman at the centre of that slap controversy, on which reams were written focussing on Will Smith. While yet another woman’s invisible pain and the labour of invisibilizing it all in her struggles with navigating fame vis-à-vis alopecia, went unnoticed. 

A new-ish fact emerging in hot-as-hell May (so hot and arid the locals have a sub-term for the summers-within-summers - nautappe or nine days of heat) at Khabar Lahariya - India’s only news platform run by many women from rural, marginalized communities - gives me hope. We hear about the current generation of women refusing marriages in villages where the water tables are low, because it seals their fates as lifetime water-fetchers and carriers. Walking several kilometers through the heat and the dust of the northern Indian hinterlands, they are pushing aside their destinies as invisible women. 

Postscript from T

I was thinking about the (in)visibility of women’s labor while watching the short film anthology Modern Love Mumbai, released this past week on Amazon Prime. Modern Love Mumbai, similar to Modern Love, adapts stories from the New York Times column of the same name. I don’t remember reading in the credits which films are based on which personal essays, and so, have no way of telling what exactly was adapted other than perhaps the column’s general vibe (?!). 

The six films of Modern Love Mumbai run the full spectrum, I thought, in their approach to women’s labor. The first three, also the strongest, linger prominently on women’s physical and emotional labour. In Raatrani (directed by Shonali Bose), there’s a scene in which Laila (Fatima Sana Shaikh) has to deal with the roof of her house falling at a time when her ten-year-long marriage has also just crumbled. The camera follows Laila as she overcomes the physical and psychological hurdles to keep it together. The short film would be stronger without some of the overbearing expository dialogues and soliloquies (delivered spiritedly by Shaikh); Raatrani still was an excellent watch because of the places and moments on which it lingers. The next film, Baai (directed by Hansal Mehta), focuses on a grandmother-grandson relationship. Although the grandson gets more screen time and it is his perspective we follow, the two most remarkable scenes of the film are between the grandson and grandmother. Baai (Tanuja) does not get too many lines of dialogue, but her presence of mind and compassion are established. When she is bedridden and frail, we still know we are in the presence of a formidable woman. Mumbai Dragon (directed by Vishal Bharadwaj), my favorite in the anthology, shows the Chinese-Indian community in Mumbai, and tracks the turbulent emotional life of Sui (Yeo Yann Yann), a widowed mother, overseer of the Kwan Kung Temple, and keeper of the family’s various recipes… This film, too, has some long winded expository stretches, but they receive a quirky treatment, and sentimental attachments are portrayed with a mix of humor and tenderness that works. All this brings me to what I thought was the weakest film in the anthology: Cutting Chai. Cutting Chai’s treatment of women’s desire and labour is…well…confusing. 

Cutting Chai (directed by Nupur Asthana) follows a woman struggling to write as her husband and child constantly demand her attention. The film establishes the level of cognitive and affective labor she is expected to put in. And then, when she protests, she is told by the husband that if she had a book in her, she would have written it already. The film, however, takes several U-turns after that. These turns do not make the film unpredictable as such but non-committal. In the end we are left with a somewhat cliched ‘everyone has to adjust a little’ variety of feeling. I wondered if the writer or the director of this film is one of those people who says, ‘I think women are great and very important. I am a woman but you know, I am not an activist type. I am not a feminist.’

More from T

T’s interview with author Naheed Phiroze Patel about her novel Mirror Made of Rain was published in Electric Literature. 

T’s poem “Stray Ghazal” appeared in the anthology They Rise Like A Wave: An Anthology of Asian American Women Poets. 

More from P

Momspeak, P’s 2020 book on motherhood offers a more detailed view of the invisible labours of motherhood and parenting, you can order it here. 

Image by Belle Malouf at Unsplash

Summer is here. In Northern California, we are inching closer to the 100 F/37 C mark. Heatwaves have, of course, pushed India over the mark already. There was this viral video from a few weeks ago showing a woman in Sonepur baking chapatis on a car’s bonnet under the blazing hot sun. Even watching the video, I could feel Loo winds on my skin. Many years of my childhood were spent in the Murshidabad district of Bengal where the summer’s heat could be particularly unbearable. I carry the memory of that time in my body, so much so that I wrote a short story set in Murshidabad with the summer’s heat serving as the overall vibe…

From a very hot Delhi, P. takes the lead for this month’s newsletter. She is going to write about the less visible and invisible labours of women using the movie King Richard as the jumping off point. You can expect thoughts on the workforce, motherhood (the month of Mother’s Day, remember?!), the labour of parenting, and much more. Also, hot takes on how societies and cultures (wrongly) portray women’s labor.

Coming to your inboxes soon!

In the meantime, stay cool and hydrated, dear friends!

Love

T.

If I were to write a personal history of literacy, it would probably start with translation. In the English-medium school I attended, the literature curriculum primarily focused on British stories and poems–a relic of the colonial era. Through the school years we were taught everything from “Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man” to Shelley and Keats. However, once I came home from school, I would learn these texts with the help of my parents, both of whom were much more at ease in Bengali and Hindi than in English. So, it was commonplace for my father to gloss words from my English language textbooks in Bengali. I developed the habit of looking up English phrases and expressions in an English to Bengali dictionary. In a sense, then, my relationship with English was founded on translation. And yet, as I kept studying the language in school, I acquired a level of fluency that outpaced my fluency in my mother tongue, especially when it came to more formal written expressions. 

I recall my father looking at me with concern and bewilderment when I chose Bengali language and literature as an elective subject in college while majoring in English. Choosing an elective subject in our university system was like declaring a secondary academic discipline and the coursework spanned two of the three undergrad years. ‘You don’t have a good enough grasp of Bengali to make it through the Calcutta University curriculum,’ my father had said. He was right–the curriculum was difficult, mainly because the university syllabus included a host of medieval and seventeenth-nineteenth-century texts that used the language in ways unfamiliar to me. 

I did alright in the end. Not by mastering aspects of Bengali syntax or new vocabulary over the course of the two years, but by relying on translation. In Calcutta university, we had to write long, essay-type answers during timed examinations. I recall my examination experience as a practice in rapid translation. I would start writing sentences in Bengali and phrases in English would come to my mind, especially when I was trying to express more abstract ideas, and then I would rack my brains to find suitable replacements for those ideas in Bengali. 

The practice of going back and forth between languages is perhaps the truest encapsulation of my syncretic relationship with both Bengali and English. This going back and forth was not simply confined to words and phrases. Rather it included entire texts. I have a distinct memory of calling up a friend a day or so before my Bengali exam in college and asking her to summarize for me what happens in Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s novel, Kapalkundala. Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay’s Bengali was removed from the more colloquial diction known to me. I was very interested in that difference but I had also become interested in drifting, using the Bengali syllabus as a guide. I read way more charyapads (mystical poems composed around the tenth century) and padabalis (poetry about Radha-Krishna written between fifteenth and seventeenth centuries) than prescribed in the curriculum, because I was interested in reformist attitudes to faith, though I couldn’t put this so succinctly back then. And, even though Kapalkundala was on the syllabus, I spent a great deal of time reading Chattopadhyay’s another novel, Durgeshnandini. I had this vague ambition of emulating my father who had read all of Chattopadhyay’s novels during a bout of illness in his teens. He’d also read all of Sarat Chandra Chattopadhyay’s corpus. He did not think I would be able to complete either and I was set upon proving him wrong, as one does. It is a path I have now abandoned. 

All this meant, I had skimmed Kapalkundala hurriedly before exams, instead of giving the time a novel like that demanded, and a few days before the exam I realized I had not understood the novel in any deep way because I did not even understand the language. So, I called my friend asking her to translate a form of Bengali into another for me (thank you, friend). During the exam, I decided to elevate my less-than desirable understanding of character and plot of Kapalkundala by writing beautifully about the various themes in the text, and for this, I drew upon my knowledge of postcolonial theory, especially postcolonial readings of The Tempest, which I’d read in my English courses. Kapalkundala shares a fair amount of plot details with the Tempest, so it was not a completely random exercise (also, I am certainly not the first or the only person to note the overlaps), but the experience of translating abstruse theoretical ideas over the course of a timed exam was, let’s just say, intense. My over reliance on postcolonial theory and a Shakespeare play also meant I may not have said many meaningful things about the regional and cultural details that make Kapalkundala unique as a historical romance, but looking at my marksheet, I can say I knew how to conceal the depths of my ignorance. 

Now when I look upon those days another intriguing detail comes into view. At the time, I was thinking, I am moving between Bengali and English, but there were many other languages in the mix. My facility with written Bengali owes a great deal to comic books and folktales. I got a beautifully illustrated book of folktales in Bengali from the book fair when I was in primary school. Initially my mother read aloud from it to me and then, I would read on my own. In my childhood imagination I thought it was a Bengali book whose title just happened to be “Russian Folk Tales,” but of course, it was a book in translation. Recently I came across an article that explained my experience of growing up with Russian folktales in Bengali and finding a Bengali translation of Maxim Gorky’s Mat’ (Mother/ Ma) in the bookshelves. As Aveek Majumder is quoted saying in the article, “The average middle-class family could not afford English children’s books. But the English translations brought out by Russian publishers were absurdly cheap, as were the Bengali ones.” Apparently, the Soviet Union tried to distribute Russian literature in India, and had a robust translation programme that made this kind of distribution possible in the multilingual country. 

Even after I was disabused of the notion that my book of Bengali folk tales was simply called “Russian,” I thought Tintin was a particularly brave Bengali boy going on adventures across the world. Never mind that Tintin’s day to day habits looked very different from mine. Perhaps I thought that’s how diaspora Bengalis behave–who knows? It did not help that my cousin, a few years older than me, named her dog “Kuttush”--Snowy’s name in the Bengali translations of Tintin. It felt like I was living in the same reality as Tintin. At some point, I must have recognized that Tintin was not Bengali. I understood that everyone in India became acquainted with Tintin through translations. But the character’s and the author’s cultural coordinates were not clear to me, I think, until I was standing in front of the Belgian Comic Strip Center in Brussels in 2016. Incidentally they were displaying special exhibits on Tintin and Smurfs that year. Turns out, one of my favorite Bengali characters from childhood was speaking French all along.

The theories and philosophies I have come to love through my academic experiences, were in many cases translations from languages like French, German, Sanskrit, and Tamil. The popular culture in India, even the mainstream Hindi cinema, is deeply informed by a variety of languages: the Hindi of Hindi films is a mix of Gujarati, Punjabi, Urdu, among other tongues. In other words, at least in my experience, I have found my intimacy with every language–whether that is Bengali, English, or Hindi–to be already mediated by other languages. This is the syncretic experience I have loved, and it is this experience that makes me adopt a skeptical attitude toward claims of linguistic exceptionalism and linguistic nationalism. 

But despite my ambivalence at a more philosophical level, I do feel moved when a Hindi-language writer is recognized internationally. I am thinking of Geetanjali Shree’s Tomb of Sand, translated by Daisy Rockwell, which is on the 2022 International Booker shortlist. I also feel moved when I detect reverberations of literary traditions from Bengal in literature from other parts of India or the world. One of my favorite English-language novels is Amitav Ghosh’s The Shadow Lines, which is as steeped Bengali culture as any narrative can ever be. The combination of affinity and ambivalence I feel arises from recognizing that even as languages intermingle, the intermingling is dictated by structures of power. And yet, these power structures are not fixed or even sortable in binaries. For example, I can turn to Bengali as the language of my people, the oppressed of the colonial era. It was also probably the language of the common folk and the caste-oppressed in pre-colonial times given that vernacular compositions once challenged the authority of Sanskrit. But reading and writing in Bengali today is not subversive by default. Caste, class, and various other hierarchies are embedded in the structure of the language, and by extension, of the culture. Of course, the same language can be…and is used to interrogate and resist those hierarchies. 

Since languages are not politically-neutral territories, the back and forth movement between them is not apolitical either. I have been reading some Bhakti poetry in Bengali of late–reading them seriously after many years, perhaps the first time since passing the Bengali elective papers in college. It is well known that Bhakti poems and Baul songs informed the works of Rabindranath Tagore. If anyone can name one Bengali-language writer, there is a good chance it would be Tagore. So, I am referring to him here. Anyway, so, Tagore was also a translator, though he may or may not have thought of his artistic practices as translation. What often goes unsaid when people discuss his movement between languages is that there are caste-class dynamics governing them. Tagore, a writer from a wealthy and influential Bengali family of dominant caste, was “translating” regional dialects and cultures, compositions of caste-oppressed artists, for new audiences. He wrote a poem titled “Raidas, the Sweeper” and another titled “Sweet Mercy” (published in the English-language weekly newspaper, Harijan, run by Gandhi) in which he describes Raidas/Ravidas, a poet-saint of the Bhakti tradition born into the community of leather workers. These poems are “translating” Raidas/Raviadas’s life and beliefs into English. However, as Joel Lee notes: 

The Raidas of bhakti tradition is a complex figure whose poetic oeuvre includes critical deconstructions of caste ideology and visions of urban utopia as well as the kind of self-effacing love songs with which bhakti is often associated; his hagiography paints an equally mixed picture of a character inclined sometimes to meekness and other times to confrontation in his encounters with brahmins. The bhakti tradition thus offered to Tagore a range of interpretive possibilities. The Raidas that Tagore ultimately chooses to portray [is] scrupulous in his deference to the brahmin, observant of the law of keeping distance, solicitous of voluntary acts of mercy [...]. Tagore supplies a scene of tearful untouchable acquiescence to reformist Hindu leadership in full conformity with Gandhi's insistence that change can be driven by Hindu benevolence and not Depressed Class assertion. (Deceptive Majority, 145)

Of course, Tagore was also involved in anti-colonial movements and his prose express an ambivalence toward “nationalism” that is becoming more relevant every day, but there are power imbalances that contributed to the unique reach of his voice as well as the force of his writings. The memory and imagination of a lot of upper-caste, upper class Bengalis (bhadraloks, ahem) today seek to erase these power imbalances so that they can worship Tagore as excellence, and not really read his works as complex, fraught, provocative artistic expressions rooted in a specific social-political context. 

To celebrate literature written in various Indian languages is also to remember their complex histories. And one cannot help but note the mediating power of English both in and outside India. Having said so, I must reiterate I am very glad to see a Hindi novel on the International Booker shortlist. And I am also thrilled whenever Bengali-language books get wider recognition (I mean, it doesn’t have to be Booker). I am also reading a lot of writings from other cultures in translation these days. I just finished reading two more books on the 2022 International Booker longlist that beautifully render experiences of attachment and isolation: Sang Young Park’s Love in the Big City, translated by Anton Hur, and Jonas Eika’s After the Sun, translated by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg. Both books are funny in specific ways, and work really well when offering fragmentary reflections on contemporary life. 

At the moment, I am working on some translation myself, though not for formal publication. I am trying to better understand Bhakti poetry (in the padabali tradition) and one of the ways I pay any text my deepest attention is when I am translating it. For now, I am mainly looking to study the very embodied and erotic approach to devotion in these texts and how these erotics challenge social mores. The language of these texts is a combination of Bengali and Brajabali–that is, it is syncretic from the outset. My translations are experiments in discovering the extent to which the ideas and philosophies can enter English. Here’s my somewhat literal translation of a poem attributed to (ca. 16-/17th century) poet Govindadasa, found in an anthology edited by Akshay Kumar Chandra Sarkar:

Seeing his beauty, remembering his sweet touch 

The body cannot contain its pleasure.   

The bewitching melody of his flute, so euphonious

Do the others not hear? 

Now what advice will you give me, dear friend?

My body and mind are enthralled in Kanu’s (Krishna’s) love.  

Won’t heed any other religion in the slightest. 

My nose is intoxicated with his fragrance. 

No other rhythm in the limbs or identification.

His ever-new virtues settle in my mind.

Where is the room for any other religion?

The husband’s (head of the household’s) rebukes, the blustering of elders,

Rouse my laughs.

What if a mistake is made in such a state of mind,

Asks Gobinda Das.   

(Listen to T read out the original poem and the translation).

If you read Bengali and understand padabali, feel free to correct me :). 

And do share the many worlds and wonders you have found in translation. 

Love,

T

Post script from P. 

“What language do you dream in?”

This seductive question was posed to me in the middle of an intense discussion on the politics of language, as we were checking off the usual talking points that come up during such discussions, from postcolonialism to social media, Hinglish to China. It was the kind of question that shifted the mood of the moment, and in such a real way. We were all quiet, trying to conjure up that last dream, navigating text as both subtext and context. 

I have used it like something of a north star ever since, because like much else, the revelations of our subconscious are powerful markers, even if underestimated.  It’s also helped me navigate my past, the lived history of growing up amidst several languages, the verbal vignettes of a life not lost, only enriched in translation. 

The Hindi of my parents’ home, the Hindi of my summer holidays in India with large extended families, the Arabic I had to learn as part of school curriculum, one of the first languages that I discovered first in script, followed by songs and the Emirati national anthem.

There was the English of my school friends, my playground friends, the common language we all spoke. The one I bulked up by reading books, watching American soaps, accidentally teaching younger cousins on my trips to India, who were always listening hard. An English that could be as grand and/or mundane as the moment warranted. Soaring in a blank verse soliloquy one moment, shown its place as a “very phunny language” in an Amitabh Bachchan dialogue, comically delivered. There was also the English of Delhi’s streets of the late 90’s-early 2000’s, which I learnt as a college student trying on her street smarts right after her daily dose of Jane Austen and Shakespeare and Joseph Conrad - the last being a writer said to have brought “non-English sensibilities” into the hallowed canon. Someone we read as as legit English Honours course material. 

There is also Pahadi somewhere, serving as static, decorative backdrop like snow-capped mountains in a painting. With grandparents getting older and eventually dying, the language of my so-called clan, only pops up during rituals - in the zeal of a wedding song, the sisterhood of a Holi milan, the lullabies sung to babies.

When you live in north India, there is Punjabi of course. A language that entered my life proper via marriage, shifting my understanding of it from ‘it’s-so-loud’ to ‘it’s-so-loud-and-hilarious’. I mean which other language is so mindful of the pottiness of life, all puns intended, I wonder? And the sheer pragmatic wisdom of a pet na paiyye roti te sab gallan khoti is purely priceless.   

And then there is Marathi. The language of gappa and endless laughter, life stories swapping, reprimanding and cajoling, which my mother shared with her mother and her sister, my Mausi. An entire language I picked up simply by being around.

Much like RM, the only English-speaking member of the world’s number one K Pop band, who learnt the language by watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S.

Speaking of! Aaj kal, with a pre-teen at large, my home is fast becoming a surround sound club for K Pop and K Dramas. Now the Bollywood-inspired dance moves of BTS complemented with the catchy tunes that swing from English to Korean are bound to invade my dreams sooner than later, doncha think? 

More from T. & P. 

T.’s interview with author Namrata Poddar about her novel Border Less was published in Los Angeles Review of Books. Last year, T. also interviewed Meena Kandasamy about her approach to translation for Asymptote.

(Devanagari script from a section of the Sanskrit Bhagavata-purana, c. 1880–c. 1900; in the British Library. The British Librfary/Robana/REX/Shutterstock.com)

Socha na tha ki form hi content hoga, ki medium hi message hai.

In this month’s dispatch of Outspoken-ish, we’re talking about language and how as desis, we remain bi, if not, multi-lingual. And yet we abandon the richness of multilingualism and settle for one. To read, write, think, speak on the straight narrow path of a language not our own historically, but one we have completely owned.

But doesn’t the onus lie on us, if we’re serious about preservation?

Even as the International Booker Prize shortlist sees the Amazon links to Geetanjali Shree ticking, T finds herself thinking about learning to read and write like a translator, while growing up in a milieu as rich as India, wherein the spoken word prevails over the written.

You can expect to find Tintin here. And also Russian folktales. In Bangla. T also discusses Love in the Big City and After the Sun, as she seeks to place herself and the questions around being lost in translation, in an Outspoken-ish essay.

Coming Soon!

The hills are alive with the sound of… birdcalls? Breeze rustling through the leaves? The dogs bounding around? Buzzing bees spreading pollen? 

Well, not so much. 

Let’s try that again.

The hills are alive with the sound of… construction work. Drilling. Boring. Generators. Clanging tools that sound like a call to arms. Punjabi rap. The rustling of the fallen leaves under your feet, that satisfying sensory crunch, drowned out by ‘Soni Kudi’ hollabacks somewhere in the valley below. On loop. Oh, and the Swachh Bharat Abhiyan campaigns. (‘Ghar se kachra nikaal’, goes the most frustrating earworm you’ll ever hear).

Spring in the hills of Uttarakhand in 2022 sure feels different from the early 2000s spring in the hills of Uttarakhand.

There is of course a pandemic to consider. As my first real time out since 2020, it’s bound to feel different. The roadtrip to Bhimtal somehow felt more like a homecoming. But also slightly overwhelming. A favourite pitstop for old memories’ sake, but double-masked. Snacks in the car. And PayTM karo. 

But there’s more. There’s a first time-ness about the seeping in of the years - they tell on the mountains, which wear and tear much like I do. (I find myself more mindful of my yoga practice and consuming my greens than sleeping in and beer and such like). Except nature weighs in more for me as a “natural” passing of time. While some of the changes in the hills are more dramatic because they’re almost entirely manmade, driven by the hand of man, not time. 

Consider the colours. 

The yellows of the piyoli, local yellow jasmine, which are bursting everywhere, are fighting for a stake on the colour, since the bumble bee yellow bulldozers razing down yet more cliffs, laying down yet more roads, demand attention with their monstrous, attack-on-the-senses presence.

There wasn't so much wearing-your-identity-on-your-sleeve-via-colours either. It’s almost like a football jersey choice now. With the state’s election results declared recently, human chatter buzzes with colours of politics and political parties and the loud, blinding narratives painted with harsh, broad brushstrokes. The Mall Road I avoid. I’ve been  told they have declared an early saffron-only Holi. There are fireworks in the sky, an artificial riot of colours puncturing the pink-orange sunsets I watch every evening creeping across and beyond the blooming greens spreading into the infinity of the blue and white skies. A young woman decides to skip dinner in town, the evening of the results. She feels afraid, she tells me. Colours as fearful, how did we get here? Was there a premonition of today, in that Holi you played T, which scarred you, I wonder?

But for every five (or more) years of storytelling and the changes these affect, there is that which remains unchanged. For all the mortality that feels real in a living-with-Covid world on the brink of (in the midst of?) World War III, the mountains do hint at immortality. You’ll be gone, they’ll be here. Eternal Time, Eternal Growth - If there’s one place that paints this for you in black and white, it’s here.

My soul is Pahadi, the hills have my heart, I have always affirmed. As someone who’s been walking and trekking through the mountains of northern India since the early 2000s - long before it was packaged as wanderlust - they’ve had a shape-shifting presence in my life. 

They’ve been escapes and getaways and breaks, a piece of earth under the sky, their very existence for me an invitation to bond as chosen soulmates. They’ve been healing and rejuvenating, the natural fact of their grandiosity juxtaposed against the lightness of being they gift you. They’ve been deeply spiritual and philosophical, always urging, always interrogating, provocative, nudging you to think of purpose and the purpose of thinking about purpose, simultaneously. They’ve been places of joy and mirth and belonging and rest, the purest, most real life lessons. They also tell you that you are alone, hopefully not lonely. A secret best uncovered as you walk walk walk through them. As the mountains outside shift the mountains inside. The most powerful way to lose myself, in the best way possible.

A woman in her 70s, an intrepid traveler I meet here, who’s built a new life for herself having spent much of her youth in misery (“it’s like I’ve been a prisoner all my life”), tells me she waits for that moment every morning when she can first catch a glimpse of the mountains. ‘They are so peaceful, and also so strong. It’s like nothing untoward can happen now. The mountains will always protect you.’ I try and envision myself at her age (still walking the mountains I hope!), and wonder what tectonic shifts await me. As I admire, respect the mountains, equal parts awed, mystified, overwhelmed, grateful, pure joy. And walk along. Humming the Swachch Bharat slogan of course. Ghar ka kachra nikaalna toh aakhir bahut zaruri hai. 

Love,

P

Postscript from T. 

It is one thing to wish for clear skies without electric and cable lines corrupting the view, quite another to live under it.    

My Himalayas are in the east–Darjeeling, Kurseong, Kalimpong. The last time I was there, it was for a research trip. I was researching places I remembered visiting on several occasions in the past for a creative piece. While I had previously treated the hills as a temporary address, this time I was intent on attending to the rhythms of daily life there. Life that my father had known and seen more closely, working as an engineer in charge of electricity in these towns and villages. I found myself in and around bazaars, roadside tea shacks and tea factories, bus stops, sand quarry. Manmade formations of course, and not always the most eco-friendly, but also sites of labor that make the hills inhabitable for the various communities.

There is little doubt that a lot of “development” projects in the hills are misguided and fail to account for the complex ecosystem, prioritizing human needs and profits (economic, political) over all else. But communities living in areas that are relatively untouched find themselves in precarious positions as well. 

A man I ended up chatting with near a forest in the terai region asked me what I do. When I said I write he asked me if I could call attention to the poor living conditions of his village. I explained to him that I am a creative writer, and unfortunately the kind that takes a very long time to compose meaningful pieces, which is to say, I am not the agent of rapid change he wishes for me to be. At best I can serve as a witness. He was disappointed. He would be disappointed some more if he knew I have not yet published what I was working on back then. 

More from T

T.’s personal essay on colonial attitudes to wilderness, overcrowding of US national parks, and what American outdoors meant to her when she was an international student and now that she is an economic migrant appeared in Catapult. The essay is also a paean to the 90s Liril advertisements. 

Photo by David Baker at Unsplash

Hi there,

Spring is around the corner, so is Holi, and I am thinking of those childhood years when I was scared of colors. 

I would run, lock myself in a room every time I saw colorful powders and dyes on someone. It all started one Holi, the festival of colors celebrating the advent of Spring. I went out  with my pichkari and returned home a few minutes later, deeply disturbed. “What’s wrong?” my parents asked. I told them I can’t play with colors and I didn’t want them to play either. My parents were not exactly obedient–they went out to play Holi anyway, leaving me in the safety of the house, but they did ask me, then and later, what happened when I’d gone out that day. Did someone forcefully put colors on me? Did I see something odd? What? 

I had no answer because nothing had happened. Nothing that I remember. Yet I was scared. The fear was real, though its source was a mystery. Perhaps some of our fears have no source. 

I would not get sleep in the days leading up to Holi. The advent of Spring disturbed me in this way for years, and then, suddenly it stopped bothering me. I realized I had outgrown my fear as suddenly as I had caught it. The meaning of Spring had changed. 

This month’s newsletter from P. dwells on Spring. The letter takes us through change, both gradual and sudden. A photo essay on Spring in the Himalayas coming your way, soon. 

Love

T.  

Posters of Raaz (1967) and Henna (1991), Hindi films featuring traumatic brain injuries

One of the better iterations of this plot is Sadma (literally, “trauma”). I remember watching a run of the movie on TV, with my parents, and copiously weeping when the protagonist, Nehalata (Sridevi), recovers from retrograde amnesia and fails to recognize Somu (Kamal Hasan), the man who rescued her from a brothel and acted as her caregiver/companion between her accident and recovery. One of the worse iterations of the same basic plot is Dil Ka Rishta, featuring Aishwarya Rai and a lot of wealthy male entitlement. 

Still from the film Sadma 

Even as an adolescent I knew movies like Dil ka Rishta were terrible in their treatment of mental illness but Hindi films also made me wary of head injuries. I recall how, soon after learning to ride a bicycle, I was trying out some tricks in the lane in front of my house–paddling very fast and going in a zigzag. I saw a motorcycle race toward me. Instead of stepping aside with my tiny bicycle, I freed my hands from the cycle's grip, surrendering to the idea there had to be a collision and I needed my hands to protect my head. I fell with my head in the pillow of my hands. Fortunately, the motorcyclist was far less dramatic. He simply braked. The bike skidded a little and the man ended up scraping his forearm. (If you must know, my parents put a sanction on my bicycling on the roads. Henceforth I was allowed to cycle in empty fields only “for exercise”). 

Trauma was physical in my imagination. I also thought it curable. You had to be hit on the head twice. 

There were quieter and more invisible forms of trauma that did not register as trauma to me back then. For instance, we were taught Mark Twain’s Huck Finn in sixth or seventh grade in school. It was perhaps an abridged version–I am not sure–but I don’t remember recognizing the protracted torture of the runaway slave Jim in the hands of the white boys Huck and Tom in the last quarter of the novel as any more damaging than physical wounds. When I read the novel again in college I was shocked by how I had missed the psychological costs of the physical injuries Jim sustains through the adrenaline-fueled adventure novel. Huck was an abused child. Mistreated, abandoned, and imprisoned by an alcoholic father. But a survivor can also inflict trauma. That is the insight of Huck Finn. 

Why must fictional characters suffer? 

Trauma is everywhere in stories now that I think of it, in pop culture and literature; our epics are certainly full of it. Mahabharata not only features the more popularly known trauma-inducing incidents like the stripping of Draupadi in public, a symbolic rape, but also entire segments, such as the Stri Parva, narrate the psychological toll of war on its survivors. Dushyanta forgets and then remembers his wife Shakuntala–their story is not unlike the more contemporary memory loss-and-romance films. 

Fictional treatments of the Partition, the Holocaust, the endless wars of twentieth and twenty-first centuries, too, present casts of traumatized characters. We consume these stories. We like to watch fictional characters suffer. Invoking Aristotle we may say we love fictions of suffering because they are cathartic. Catharsis endows the spectating of trauma with a default moral and social purpose. But I would hazard a guess that we like characters to suffer because suffering is a “problem” and it pleases us to see problems solved in stories. That is, I do not think trauma as the core problem in stories always invites special moral consideration.  

Another way of thinking about this is: while trauma has been germane to storytelling for ages, not all stories present it in ways that imbue spectating trauma with an ethical or political charge. Without deft treatment, the limitations of trauma-as-conflict, a done to death formula, show. The so-called trauma plot then invites critique. 

For a long time, reading stories and watching movies focused on traumatized characters, I could not tell why some felt more tropey and trite than others. I was interested in understanding my response not only as an audience but as a writer. If trauma is at the heart of fiction, both pre-modern and modern, epics, novels, and films, then how might a writer craft her way out or through it in a purposeful way? So, while reading and watching traumatized characters, I started asking the question “What is trauma doing for the story?” 

Project Humanization 

The most formulaic use of trauma happens in the anti-hero’s bildungsroman. This genre follows unloved, abused, and bullied boys, whose childhood experiences leave them feeling emasculated. They eventually grow up to become Joker (Joker), Travis (Taxi Driver), Joe Goldberg (You), and Munna (Mirzapur); agents who reproduce the cycles of violence that produced them. Simply put, trauma is the backstory for the cis, male anti-hero in pop culture. 

Certainly there are exceptions to the “traumatized straight man becomes a murderer” plot. Thinking of the “shellshocked” Septimus Smith here, brilliantly written by Virginia Woolf, and the gentle, unloved Shutu in Konkona Sen Sarma’s A Death in Gunj. But barring such exceptions, trauma is the ingredient meant to “humanize'' unlikable men, a project to which patriarchy is particularly committed. Trauma is defense for the anti-hero’s bad behavior. 

Bullied boys: Joker, Joe Goldberg, Munna, Travis, Shutu 

The formulaic-ness of such stories is transcended only when the novelist or the filmmaker is able to not only “show” but also comment on the causes and implications of our societies functioning as breeding grounds for trauma. For me, the pulpy You is more successful at commentating than the self-serious Joker, because Joe in You is such a caricature, a character who hams up the emotional scars of his childhood to such an extent that it dulls sympathy. There is a joke in there about him being the average Joe when he is anything but that. 

The motherless and unloved Munna of the hit Amazon Prime series Mirzapur season 1 is, at least in this context, a much more interesting character than Munna of season 2 when the script and the actor (Divyenndu) redeem a part of Munna’s viciousness. I sort of like the Munna of season 2, which paradoxically strips the character’s murderous monstrosity of any moral significance. 

Traumatized women and/or queer men in fiction do not go on a killing spree that often. They are refused the privilege of acting out their feelings in public, even in fictional worlds, and that turns out to be the superior aesthetic move very often.

Abusive and neglectful treatment of girls in domestic spaces makes them subtly manipulative, overly obsessive, or apathetic as women. Raised by the eccentric Miss Havisham, Estella in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is indifferent, sure, but not homicidal. Rahel in The God of Small Things is disoriented but does not spend her broken, adult life plotting revenge against Baby Kochamma or Comrade Pillai. The rage of traumatized women transforms them under the surface. Yeong-hye in Han Kang’s The Vegetarian devastated me by devastating herself. The incremental nature of these characters’ coping and unraveling makes them far more intriguing than the straight male characters toting guns to heal wounds. 

In the Hindi film Dil Dhadakne Do, the abused and fat-shamed Neelam (Shefali Shah) tackles her billionaire husband’s mood swings and bad behavior like a large piece of chocolate cake. That is, with her back to the mirror she creates a mess of consuming it. She loathes herself and the husband who makes her loathe herself, but she is also committed to finding a happy ending with him. What sets Neelam apart from the many long-suffering wives of Hindi cinema is that she does not tolerate her husband's transgressions silently. She is constantly devising strategies to hack her way to happiness. She is assiduous in her attempts at aggravating and exasperating the man who abuses her emotionally. She is also motivated to remain married. 

In Dil Dhadakne Do, Neelam tackles her husband’s bad behavior like a large piece of chocolate cake.

Yet, this brilliant, contradictory character is ultimately used in the plot to prompt the husband’s self-awareness. Her sufferings ensure for her daughter the freedom she didn’t have, though at the outset she had been reluctant to empathize with the daughter’s discontent. The movie has several interesting scenes, but as a high-budget Hindi film that needs to recover its costs, it takes some familiar turns that undo the heft of Neelam’s daily suffering. Dil Dhadakne Do reinforces that a dysfunctional family in a Bollywood film can handle only one divorce at a time and men’s apologies can work wonders.    

A wife suffering for her husband’s self-awareness is still Project Humanization. The husband becomes a better human. And that is the happy ending. 

A plethora of Ayushmann Khurrana movies focused on social discrimination are committed to Project Humanization. In the most recent installment of this project, Chandigarh Kare Aashiqui, Khurana plays Manu, a macho bodybuilder who cannot believe he has fallen for a trans woman, Maanvi (Vaani Kapoor). Setting aside for a moment the debate on whether or not a trans woman should have been cast to play Maanvi, the main problem of the film seems to be how it uses trauma. Maanvi has been rejected by members of her own family. She has suffered physical trauma as well. She is rejected by Manu and humiliated publicly by his sisters. She endures one blow after another but the story is not invested in her healing. It is Manu’s enlightenment in the end that we must applaud. 

So, what else can trauma do in a story other than humanize men? 

The Misfits 

A much discussed contemporary critique of the trauma plot in the US targets formulaic Anglo-American fictions in which trauma becomes the characters’ “totalizing identity.” Totalizing is the key word here. This is “The Case Against Trauma Plot”:

“Unlike the marriage plot, the trauma plot does not direct our curiosity toward the future (Will they or won’t they?) but back into the past (What happened to her?). “For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge,” Sylvia Plath wrote in “Lady Lazarus.” “A very large charge.” Now such exposure comes cheap. Frame it within a bad romance between two characters and their discordant baggage. Nest it in an epic of diaspora; reënvision the Western, or the novel of passing. Fill it with ghosts. Tell it in a modernist sensory rush with the punctuation falling away. Set it among nine perfect strangers.”   

It is a perceptive assessment of the drive in modern storytelling to make trauma, specifically its disclosure, the main object of character-centered drama. We begin with the consequences. Then, a flashback. Flashback after flashback explains away every bit of the chaos unfolding in the present. This is a peculiar storytelling move really, because of all experiences, trauma seems least likely to become bound up in a neat cause-effect chain.

In Bollywood, we see this drive even in films applauded for sensitive treatment of mental health, such as Dear Zindagi. Yes, Dear Zindagi is mostly thoughtful. It does not encourage stigma against depression. It normalizes seeking help. Initially it also makes emotional turbulence seem like an everyday experience, in sync with Millennial and Gen-Z discourses on mental health as well as felt experiences of mental illness. But the trauma plot is not a millennial invention and so, even Dear Zindagi must be held responsible for not only what it says about trauma but also how it deploys trauma. 

Dear Zindagi ends up thoroughly diagnosing its protagonist, Kaira (Alia Bhatt). Her present-day discontent is traced to a decisive past experience. One major trauma, albeit not an over-the-top head injury, was the engine running the plot all along. 

Gehraiyaan, the recent Deepika Padukone film, despite its odd spa-retreat-like visual grammar makes a plucky attempt at twisting the trauma plot. Alisha is dissatisfied with her life as well as her boyfriend who cannot be bothered to share domestic chores, and becomes infatuated with the flashy life of her cousin Tia, plus Tia’s boyfriend. Alisha also resents her own father for the discontent of her deceased mother. There are the flashbacks and video recordings from Alisha’s childhood that seem to explain a lot of what’s wrong with her. The movie certainly lets the audience diagnose Alisha and her maladies. 

Alisha and Zain in Gehraiyaan

However, an interesting turn comes when Tia’s boyfriend Zain (played by Siddhant Chaturvedi) chronicles the traumas of his childhood before Alisha–and exactly in the way we have known straight, cis antiheroes to do. As defense for their unmooredness and bad behavior. Yet, because this is Alisha’s story, and even though Alisha seems to buy his defense, the movie makes us see his story for what it is: a self-serving narrative. At a technical level I thought the filmmaker’s restraint did the job–we do not see a dramatized flashback here, only a first-person account coming at a moment Zain seeks to assert his moral authority. He wants to show Alisha he gets her, because he gets suffering.  

Watching Gehraiyaan, I wondered whether I was overreading the moment. So, I was gratified to be hit over the head with Alisha’s dialogue suggesting she saw through Zain’s spin on the backstory. The climactic twist that comes later in the movie also worked for me because it refused Alisha and her relationship with Tia a neat closure (even though Tia does not realize it). In other words, the backstories in Gehraiyaan do not rid characters’ lives of their jaggedness, accidents, and protect them from suffering. 

I found the web series Taish intriguing for similar reasons. Taish explores misdirected rage and vacuous masculinity. The characters who have been abused in the world of Taish manage to lead restrained lives, even find ways to recuperate. It is the witness who refuses to be contained, and acts at a great cost to not only himself but also the victims he is supposedly avenging. Showing the desi diaspora in the UK, Taish is self-consciously pulpy and establishes the angry young man, Sunny (Pulkit Samrat), as an alienating presence from the outset. By witnessing abuse, Sunny thinks he has won the moral right to wreak havoc, but he hasn’t. 

Sunny in Taish with Rohan and Aarfa

Perhaps no one can win such a moral right, notwithstanding the magnitude of their suffering. And this is not a trivial memo, coming from a pulpy pop cultural artifact no less, at a time when powers-that-be use history in the way toxic men use the trauma plot–to wage wars. Collective traumas like Partition, Holocaust, 9/11 do not give witnesses, future generations, or even the survivors, the moral right to inflict trauma. 

But who is listening? 

-T

Postscript from P: Usne Atmahatya Kar Li AKA How We Missed the Plot on Trauma 

cw: suicide 

T’s ‘main kahaan hoon’ pop culture childhood moment takes me back to a few of my own. The ultimate traumatic moment in a film is, you could say, when a character decides to end her life. Only the way Bollywood dealt with it, again and again, was ‘yet another character in yet another film decides to end her life’. It was a most non-unusual occurence, particularly after the girl had been sexually assualted or raped - always termed “izzat loot gayi” - that I’m not surprised I never blinked an eye when it unfolded onscreen. Yet again. 

For all its blatant obviousness though, it remained a hidden trauma. Characters almost never killed themselves onscreen, there was paraphernalia suggesting it - ek dupatta, ek pankha, ek kursi. ‘The Event’ was duly reported after.

When I encountered suicide up-close IRL - an aunt in the late ‘90s, a colleague a year-and-a- half ago - it felt, unsurprisingly, nothing like what we’d consumed in Bollywood. It was so much messier, the aftermath of a person’s choice on the darkest edge of despair. The point of no return is not a singular moment; there are many, many points that haunt so many, many people that the person leaves behind.        

There have of course been more powerful (more real) portrayals of the atmahatya in mainstream Hindi cinema. 3 Idiots and Masaan rendered the despair and trauma felt by an Indian youth abandoned by the system. And Anjaana Anjaani, a lesser known very-pop flick from the 2000s, in that genre of let’s-party-and-have-casual-flings, dealt with it interestingly too - a couple committing to a suicide pact. 

The trauma that stands out, however, is when the character hijacks the narrative by refusing to end it i.e. the trauma that is her life. Two movies, released in 1978 & 1980 respectively, accomplished this masterfully. Insaaf ka Tarazu has Bharti (played by Zeenat Aman) standing up against her rapist in court, navigating all the public humiliation and censure this action brings. (Think Pink, but without a female lawyer exhorting ‘No means No’). Ghar is an examination of the effect of a brutal gangrape on a marriage - what does it do to the love and the sex and the partnership shared by a happy couple? It also plays out a bit like a cautionary tale - don’t watch late-night movies apparently? Aarti (played by Rekha) portrays the confusion, the anger, the frustration, with great skill and nuance - it’s unbearable to watch. 

(Word to the wise: Don’t Google these movie posters, they’re unbearably traumatic for other reasons).

More from T & P?

P’s short story Sheher Jaise Aag ka Dariya (City like the Lake of Fire), featuring revenge, redemption, Whats App, and the city of Ayodhya, was published on The Third Eye; its Hindi version here.

T’s essay on how literary critics in the US/UK mis(read) stories by writers of color, queer writers, and international writers appeared in Public Seminar. You can read “Literary Imperialism and Scenes of High Melodrama: When BIPOC and queer writers defy minimalism” here. 

You know it’s officially a living-with-Covid-2022-and-beyond when the most good looking product outta mainstream Hindi cinema is all kinds of #feelbad and an OTT release. Even Deepika Padukone, it seems to say, can’t get her shit together. If you’re willing and able on this side of it all, it seems to say, then simply hook up and drown/float. (In that order). Old wounds, new wounds, raw wounds, scars and toxicities, they’re here to stay.

How does Bollywood deal with trauma? Particularly in recent films that have invented a genre of their own - it used to go by multiplex cinema, now it’s allegedly millennial cinema. Where does Dear Zindagi fit in, you think? Or Dil Dhadakne Do? And how about the stuff that the Ayushmann Khurrana movies bring up?

Can it be trauma for the sake of trauma? Is it just a new-ish word that’s yet another safe-ish go-to label when there’s confusion? Is it a layered suffering, hand-in-hand with the tolerance and sehen-shakti we like to celebrate? Throw in a Bollywood Maa, and we got ourselves cringey/classic melodrama?

Or is it deeper, like the title of the latest offering peeps are semi-obsessing over?

Hey T! Resident Outspoken-ish millennial. Go on. Deal with it.

(P winks, plays Bekhabar Bekhabar).

I’ve had to remind myself that it really is 2022 several times this month, sometimes multiple times in the span of a day. And this when we’re still just a few weeks into it! With the year starting on a note not unlike the last, given the global Omicron surge and the lockdowns, the sameness of the sameness has officially reached next-league status. But what affirms for me that it is indeed 2022 - beyond the obvious aspects of meeting a book deadline, taking on a big leadership role when I get back to my day job, my daughter on the threshold of teenage, and of course the drifting Thwaites - is that I now know what it means to be able to wield hindsight. Use it like a tool. 

Looking back, I am able to see distinct anchors, personal milestones, professional highs, learnings and accomplishments, the failures and the darkness, and recognize them as helpful markers for the pandemic years 2020 & 2021. I don’t recall another year-end/start when the idea of pausing to look at life this way crossed my mind. But this year, I already know that seven or ten years down the line, the markers that will come to define my narrative for me, in the way put forth in this brilliant essay on memory, starting with the primacy effect (the first life episode we recall), dramatic arcs (plot twist IRL) et al.  

And yet, the stuff that makes every day seems achingly like a big Copy-Paste curse cast upon us. A bad joke at our expense. I mean, I like my daily rituals as much as anybody else, but I desperately, sorely miss coming back to them - and for that I have to go somewhere (what an idea!). But even this is a meta-awareness that only 2020 & 2021 could’ve taught me. No wonder surrealism’s making such a comeback then; sitting above silly deja vu and looking down on haunting misery, surreal is where the meaning’s at. 

What place does the New Year as a concept occupy then in 2022? What significance does this inevitable marching ahead of time, so to speak, have when we seem to be living in nothing but a cluster of frozen moments? With due respect to Dec 31 being an artificial construct, and how our wise ancestors followed the sun and the moon to mark their movements and moments, the holidays marking the last few weeks of the year and the return in the first few that we’ve also ritualized, has come to mean something for most of us. It manifests in haircuts, planners, journals, manifestos, and of course, in the New Year resolutions.

Believer or not - whether you go all big, fat list or none at all please thank you - there is something to be said about the notion of the promise that the new year’s resolutions rest on. The intent to do better, be better that appeals to all of us somewhere, is unarguably a good one, even if predictable.

To lend it newer meaning in 2022 then, perhaps this too can stem from some skillful hindsight-wielding. Perhaps we can craft a more purposeful yet fluid timeline and ask ourselves if being better, doing better, can be detached from our clocks and planners and calendars?

I found some answers where I least expected them - a surefire way of knowing life is happening to and around you! - in the first movie I happened to watch in 2022. Meant as a fun treat at the end of a long day of a doubly isolated life (writing under lockdown), Minnal Murali turned out to be more like a sign from the universe, surreal and fantastic (minor pilot spoilers ahead). It was also a fun treat of course! In a world where The Matrix’s gone mainstream - come on, by now, we all know we’re living in the matrix, we’re ordering both red and blue pills over Amazon, and we’re all but fine with it, there’s no need for resurrections of the 90s’ underground! - Minnal Murali’s the perfect underdog homegrown superhero story. But in the way it speaks about heroism, human connection, and above all, with such lightness and humor, it suggests an introspection. That it does this while sticking with the genre template - the origin myth, characters’ journeys & arcs, the epic battle, cool action sequences - and yet going beyond it, or perhaps expanding it, is a filmmaking feat. As a writer, I admired this brilliance of craft, but it won me over completely as a viewer, because it showed me how I’ve been looking at this whole new-year-new-me project the wrong way. You don’t just wake up one day, don that costume and go flying into the sky; sometimes you simply wing it with a stolen kiddie mask at the local fair, or you’re feeling charged up one day and end up sewing it yourself. (And even then, you never do fly).

Up until 2020, the beginning of a New Year invariably seemed laden with infinite potential. There were no restrictions or limitations on plans, or at least in the drafting of plans. You could take quite a bit for granted and mapping expectations onto realities didn’t seem like a Herculean task. Covid brought along with it hard facts - that actually pretty much everything is uncertain, that you’re bound to be disappointed, but also hey, you do have ‘right-now’ - the only time that matters, everything else is either imagined or remembered. Perhaps the biggest life truth then - our relationship with time - needs recalibration, reboot, work. 

Time is ticking ominously in some sense - we’ve all seen or borne illness and death in the last two years, the next decade is crucial for the planet’s survival - and it is also standing still. A year is not 364 days + a last night party, it comes bunched up in the wake of the years gone by, yours and of those interlinked with yours, and also of the glaciers melting at Antarctica. In Minnal Murali, Jaison kills time waiting for his golden ticket in the form of a passport spelling escape, while for Shibu, it’s dead man walking - time has all but stopped. Both are products of their time, and also of events that unfolded decades ago.    

Upon close examination, this forces us to confront the very idea of change - at the heart of new year resolutions. Despite things feeling unchanged, everything’s also changed with the pandemic. Sure, we’ve killed ourselves trying to ‘let’s normalize’ it all. In our rush to bring all of our madness into the respectable mainstream zone we’re all aching to be comfortably inside, we’ve been brushing it all under ‘the new normal’ carpet. (As if anything about Zoom is normal, or indeed as if anything we did earlier - such as not giving a thought for our carbon footprint - was so normal?) 

Change, real change, is never sudden, and while there is that momentous, literal life-altering lightning strike for Jaison and Shibu in the film, nothing really changes for either, not at once. It is life-altering only in hindsight. Until then, they need to earn it, learn a lot, grow. Jaison needs to look beyond himself and Shibu needs to start feeling again. That their arcs and life paths would then diverge so extremely, be world-saving or world-destroying, is the essence of good storytelling. In their own personal narratives though, which they’re building, they are both, in some sense, growing towards becoming Minnal Murali (Original).   

And that’s where my 2022 vote is vis-à-vis good intentions and promises aka new year’s resolutions. Reworking my relationship with change, seeing it for what it really means, especially in the everyday - growth. There’s a heroism in that I find I’m drawn towards, and it’s within my grasp. I see it subtly in my relationships, especially the one I’m crafting with myself, and vividly in my daughter as she turns 12. I also see it in my garden everyday. It’s always just a little bit further away, but as I get there, I find I do better, I am better. 

Inspiration along the way is always helpful, and I thoroughly recommend seeking it. Watching Minnal Murali is a good place to start, and for me, Biji ‘Bruce Lee’ was the most awesome character in this context. There’s something to be said about committing to the moment and self that’s heroic, and super too. She sets her own challenges in karate and works on them, overcoming heartbreak and living life along the way. Minus any lightning strikes. To me, she’s Minnal Murali (Work in Progress), because she gives me the strongest grit and growth vibes. (Basil & Tovino, clearly I’m here for sequels/trilogy ideas, as you can see). 

But until then, I will heed what the child says to Jaison as he jumps off the tree expecting to soar into the skies. ‘Let’s stick with what we can do’. 

Now that we know we’re going to be living with Covid, my big Jan plan is to check in with my growth from time to time - much like my yoga practice, which grows and changes from one month to another. And that’s it.

What’s new then are impressions of time, change, growth, this new New Year. And the fact that there’s no cut-off. Not on Dec 31 2022, not ever. Life’s too surreal for that.

Happy-ish New-ish Year,

P

Postscript from T

Bizarre times call for bizarre stories. In Adam McKay’s sci fi satire Don’t Look Up! a comet is set to strike and destroy earth within six months. Two astronomers from an American public university discover the comet and try to spread the word, so the disaster can potentially be averted. But people they talk to (reporters, political leaders, and ordinary folx like us) are too caught up in their little daily routines, playing tabloid-style social media stories, to pay the scientists any heed, at least at first. 

There's a scene where the US President (played by Meryl Streep) guffaws at the suggestion of telling people that it is officially the end of times. As audience, we laugh at her for living in denial. Perhaps some of us become despondent soon after, remembering that climate denial is real and all around us. However, what stood out for me in that scene were the President’s reasons for not acting on the comet-crisis with any sense of urgency.

Her first set of reasons (what the film stresses) had to do with petty power games and political maneuvers (elections, popularity polls, and so on). Unforgivable. But the other set of reasons had to do with the sheer number of emergencies brought to her attention everyday. These include drought, nuclear weapons, and what not. Most of these are actually serious contemporary threats to the planet in and of themselves, but I feel like they are cataloged in the scene to underline how the President does not realize the magnitude of the threat to which Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) are drawing her attention. 

While the figure of the President (with obscene amounts of power) is in no way heroic or presented as worthy of empathy in the film, the scene itself brought home for me the feeling that the state of emergency is the norm and not an exception, not today. And if the philosopher Walter Benjamin is to be believed, then the state of emergency has never been exceptional. If we did not know that emergency is the norm, then we could, from time to time, look the other way. Of late, we have no respite. 

Photo by T, Sunset on 1st January 2022

Hi friends,

It is January and I do not know whether I should wish you all Happy New Year. 

A day into 2022, and for the first time in my life, I wondered whether cheery HNY messages and texts could trigger their recipients. I went on a rather frigid evening run that day to clear my head of some upsetting news (minor in the larger scheme of things) I received on new year’s eve. Then I sent Happy New Year messages to friends and acquaintances who wished me first, and some others who I thought would get my intent and forgive me, even if my message exuded the wrong kind of vibe. 

While the pandemic had never really become a thing of the past–notwithstanding how many times the media in countries like the US tried to conjure a ‘post-pandemic world’ in 2021–the year-end omicron-surge vehemently punched holes into any happy picture. 

If we insist on using ‘post-pandemic’ now, then we ought to understand that the post in post-pandemic, much like the post in postcolonial, means something like “as a consequence of the pandemic” and not after the pandemic. It is a prefix denoting causality rather than the linear movement of time.    

In March 2020 I thought our lives were going to be on hold until the pandemic ended. The truth is nothing has been or can be on hold. We have moved, even though none of us may have fully moved on from how we felt at the onset of the crisis. 

P.’s newsletter this month thinks through the paradoxes of our times. Coming soon to your inbox. 

Warmly,

T

In March 2020, when my university, like several other universities across the world, had to go from being an institution of face-to-face teaching and learning to an institution of relentless videoconferencing, I remember thinking, lecturing via a video platform can’t be that bad. I can wear a full face of makeup, not bother about ill-fitting dress pants, and focus on what’s essential: communicating through and about stories. As someone teaching writing and literature, I did not lose sleep like my colleagues in some other disciplines. I don’t need wet labs. As a millennial who has used Skype and FaceTime for many years to keep in touch with her family in another continent, I did not mind the challenge of simulating hands-on activities and in-class discussions for an online environment. 

Indeed, videoconferencing seemed like communication stripped of useless trappings, such as the uncomfortable desks and overheated or freezing classrooms, walking around in stiff shoes that cause blisters, anxiety about making it to class on time after struggling to find parking, and so on. Those were the days of innocence, when we still joked around, saying things like how did Skype lose this round so bad to Zoom. 

So, optimistic about the possibilities of videoconferencing, I invested in a tinted hydrating moisturizer to cover my face during Zoom meetings and a lip mask to nourish my lips while I logged off the platform. (Stores around me were out of hand sanitizers and toilet papers at the time, fyi). That my first purchases during a raging pandemic were skincare products and cosmetics were not alarming–not to me. 

I have always been moderately conscious of my appearance. I enjoy dressing up and styling. I have been shamed for these but know better. Moral purity tends to be associated with appearing as though you don’t care about appearances in societies that are actually obsessed with appearances–like, the moment I see friends or family in India, they comment on whether I’ve grown thin, fat, bright, dark, fair, since the last time they saw me. Slender is good, chubby is bad. Bright and fair–good. Dark–bad. But if you are thin because you work out or watch what you eat, then it’s a problem. It has to come effortlessly, like a dream.

Or a nightmare. 

On the surface, my initial Zoom prep did not signal any fundamental change in my buying habits. In the weeks that followed, along with constantly tweaking course syllabi to adapt to evolving student needs, I realized I needed more natural and neutral toned lipsticks. Brighter colors on the lips drew too much attention. 

Whose attention? That’s a tricky question. 

Today the answer seems obvious. The attention I was both seeking and eluding through choices in lip color were mine, and perhaps, mine alone. 

The disparity between what I assumed my face looked like when I spoke or taught and the ‘real’ version staring at me as I lectured on Zoom began to, gradually, overwhelm me. I focused on smiling with shut lips because I did not want to see a protruding canine on the left. More than one dentist in the US previously encouraged me to see orthodontists to fix the canine for cosmetic purposes–my standard position has been, I won’t fix it unless it becomes necessary for health reasons. Now, facing myself on Zoom, I wondered whether I should have listened to the dentists. 

The experience reminded me of my screen test for a news anchor job with a Bengali broadcasting channel from several years ago. I disliked my own appearance on tape just enough to not respond to the channel’s call back after the audition. When a friend asked me what was so wrong with my appearance on screen, I had said, ‘in videos I look like I have too much teeth.’ 

As the months went by, more and more of my students started leaving their cameras off. Their reasons were: privacy, lack of access to decent cameras, and discomfort with being on camera. In class sessions that ranged anywhere between an hour to three hours (yes, I taught three-hour seminars via Zoom for three semesters straight) I often had nothing but my own face to see. 

Nothing could be more grueling. 

Turns out I was not the only one who was exhausted by Zoom. By spring 2021, a year into the pandemic, there were a slew of articles and opinion pieces on why Zoom tired us. ‘Zoom fatigue’ earned the great distinction of having a Wikipedia page devoted to it. 

One cause of collective exhaustion was the unpredictability of the technology coupled with human fallibility, the stuff of #zoomfails. Audio and video cut out in the middle of important conversations, we forgot to turn on the mic, forgot to turn off our cameras. Or our partners and roommates did their thing, notwithstanding the camera and the mic–like the wife who tried to kiss her husband while he was discussing GDP for a news channel or the doctor who received a dressing-down from his wife on live TV for getting vaccinated without her. The other cause of fatigue was our ‘mirror anxiety.’ The self-view mirror and the ability to ‘touch up’ our appearance (essentially adding a filter) on Zoom were doing us no favors. 

A study  co-authored by researchers at Stanford University and the University of Gothenburg, published in April 2021, showed that women experienced higher levels of Zoom fatigue than men. No surprises there. The key cause was self-focused attention, triggered by Zoom’s self-view mirror. In short, ‘mirror anxiety’--that is, the heightened awareness of how one comes across during an interaction or a conversation, similar to how one feels in front of a mirror. Other factors considered in the study for contributing to Zoom fatigue included “being physically trapped, hyper gaze from a grid of staring faces, and the cognitive load from producing and interpreting nonverbal cues.” 

After the first wave of lockdown, the first wave of Zoom, there was reportedly a rise in facial plastic surgeries in the US. A surge in body dysmorphic disorder. I listened to a podcast that suggested this was not always because people wanted to alter how they looked on Zoom, but also because, in some instances, they wanted to look in real life like they did on Zoom after the camera had touched up their appearances. 

On the surface, there is a solution to these problems. Just turn off the camera. In my profession, at a pedagogical level, this solution does not seem like a good idea–I feel like my students’ sense of access to me is in part guided by their ability to see me, picture me, and understand my body language (whatever little of it fits in the Zoom frame). Ok, you say, if not the camera, then turn off the self-view function. Zoom does seem to allow this under specific conditions but I have to admit I crave, I suppose in a masochistic way, the illusion of control over my appearance that the self-view function affords. I cannot help looking while passing by a mirror. 

So, for hours on end, I am now talking to my own face. 

*

In my three-hour class on Zoom, I teach “Ethics and the Face,” a part of Emmanuel Levinas’s Totality and Infinity (1961), which says: 

In as much as the access to beings concerns vision, it dominates those beings, exercises power over them. A thing is given, offers itself to me. In gaining access to it I maintain myself within the same. 

The face is present in its refusal to be contained. In this sense it cannot be comprehended, that is, encompassed. It is neither seen or touched–for in visual or tactile sensation the identity of the I envelops the alterity of the object, which becomes precisely a content.

Levinas was a prisoner of war during World War II. His relations were murdered during the Holocaust. So, his thinking about faces, the relationship of the self with the other, what distinguishes or does not distinguish ‘I’ from ‘you’ arises out of a specific historical crisis. His thinking also takes as its basis traditional forms of interactions, that is, face-to-face communication. 

Imagine, now, the thing being offered to you during a conversation is not the interlocutor’s face, which could be an enigma in its own right, but your own. In gaining access to that face, which is also your own face, can you still maintain or contain your sense of self? If the presence of alterity–with some commonality–is a necessary condition for being a self, then how can I be when facing nobody but my face? 

These questions conventionally fall into the lap of performers. Film and television actors are routinely asked if they can watch or enjoy watching themselves on screen. Manoj Bajpayee says he finds the experience “awkward.” Adam Driver famously walked out of an interview when he was forced to endure his own performance–he seems to have an explanation for it. And while I won’t hazard saying I know Adam Driver’s or Manoj Bajpayee’s minds, I would speculate that actors’ discomfort watching themselves may have less to do with the fear of finding flaws in their impersonation of an Other (a character), and more to do with the fear of loss–the loss of the self in role play. Gender further complicates matters. Women actors can be caught in a double bind, being especially vulnerable to harsh comments on their looks. Thus, for a woman, watching herself outside role play can be nerve-wracking as well, as Gina Rodriguez admits while captioning an Instagram video in which she appears without make-up and styling. 

Teaching like many other ‘public’ facing jobs has a performance aspect to it. In the college I attended for my undergrad in Calcutta, professors lectured from raised platforms, their stage. My first memory of college is entering a class in which the professor was pacing up and down the raised platform reciting lines from Macbeth. When I signed up to be a professor, I imagined performing in a small theater. I, a desi woman in her late twenties then, would be playing a role that people–students–habitually associate with old (often, white in the US) men. When the theatricality combines with a live audio-visual feedback monitor, it is like watching yourself act while acting. You wonder if you belong in the frame. What are the chances you were miscast? It becomes impossible to fully commit to the moment. 

The title sequence of Navarasa, a Tamil-language film anthology on Netflix, is an authentic interpretation of what communication feels like on Zoom. 

Navarasa was shot by veteran directors and actors to generate funds for workers in the Tamil film industry adversely affected by the pandemic. Each segment of the anthology is a short film associated with one of the nine rasas or moods discussed in Indian aesthetic theory by Bharata Muni, Abhinavagupta, and others. The films in the Navarasa anthology are not particularly striking. For instance, the science fiction film–Project Agni, associated with the state of ‘wonder’–unfolds as a conversation on time travel, free will, and the origins of the universe. If the speculative theories dropped in Project Agni were more water-tight, I would pardon the rambling monologues the ‘genius’ scientist who works from home (played by Arvind Swami) delivers to a scientist (played by Prasanna) from the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO). The ISRO scientist reminds us at least three times in the first five minutes of his appearance that he is busy because he works at ISRO. That’s the level of sloppy writing we are talking about here! That Swami’s character is called Vishnu and Prasanna’s Krish, while there’s a Kalki somewhere in the narrative mix, does not elevate the material. Names of Hindu Gods and tangential references to Hindu mythology do not add layers of meaning. If anything, the film inadvertently showcases the misjudgements we make while working in isolation. WFH isn’t for everyone.

The title sequence designed by Bharatbala, set to A R Rahman’s music though, stands out. Each monochrome frame in the sequence features a close up shot of an actor emoting in absence of a context. Faces have been ripped out of stories, specific moments, to showcase a range of emotions. However, emotions, fleeting as they are, and even when expressed by actors in fictional contexts, are effective only when anchored to environments. Emotions are figures produced on the grounds of experience. By stripping faces off contexts, the credit sequence says, marvel at what these faces can do. These are great actors, the sequence says, and I agree. The sequence induces awe, perhaps, but no other feeling as faces appear and vanish to the rhythms of Rahman’s composition. Combined with a violin interlude, percussion and background vocals give the theme music a monumental quality, further underlining the sense of awe. And though films in the Navarasa anthology are not explicitly about the pandemic, the title sequence channels the hyper focus on the surface of the face, known to us through hours on Zoom, in opposition to a focus on what the face is truly saying. 

*

And then, there’s the Other side of it, so to speak, in this late-age of Zoom, when more and more people keep their cameras off. Facing someone is forming a relation, whether wanted or an unwanted one. Social networking sites and applications pick up on this, calling themselves Facebook, FaceTime, and so on. Trolls, too, intuitively know this, which is why they use anonymity and facelessness as ammunition. So, while leaving the camera off during meetings and classes may be helpful in many respects, we cannot deny that by refusing someone our face in a conversation we also end up refusing them the possibility of a relationship. 

Now, I do not think that the need for intimacy or relation should automatically supersede one’s need for privacy–one condition is not ethically superior to the other in my opinion. However, I wonder if communication has not always meant giving up a bit of one’s privacy. Will the years of videoconferencing end up transforming the basic idea of communication then? Is this how things will turn out: We will want to see without showing ourselves. We will want to learn without asking questions. We will become passive consumers of each other’s lives without letting each other know. Wait, we are already at it. Social media were changing our ideas of privacy and intimacy for a while, transforming “friends” into “followers,” even before Zoom entered the scene.   

Beside buying makeup, I bought a lot of books during the pandemic. This, too, was not an epic shift in my buying habits. I had book shelves in my study room before they became everyone’s go-to Zoom background. 

Katie Kitamura’s Intimacies, a novel I bought and read, is not a story about the pandemic, but spoke to me in a specific way because of the pandemic. The narrator of Intimacies is an interpreter at the International Court in Hague. She is a migrant, and not quite at home in her present circumstances. Kitamura’s writing masterfully shows the lengths to which we can go to focus our attention on others, make sense of other faces, in both personal and professional settings to avoid facing ourselves. 

Kitamura’s narrator is not as self-effacing as say Jenny Offill’s narrator in Weather or as voluble about worldly crises as the narrator of Olivia Laing’s Crudo but stands somewhere in the middle She is utterly ordinary. But this ordinary narrator has some out-of-the-ordinary experiences and obsessions, something just a bit off-center about her at times. And maybe this is all of us too. So, I follow her as she reads faces and gestures exhaustively. 

I love, for instance, the description the narrator offers of her encounter with an accused in the Detention Center. She first sees the man’s photograph and thinks, “He did not look the way I expected, his face did not live up to the magnitude of the crimes I had read about in the dossier. It was not that he looked innocent or guilty, it was more that his face was utterly without depth.” The narrator’s boyfriend Adriaan meets her friend Jana for a dinner to which the narrator arrives late, and the narrator notices Jana has “put on lipstick and eye makeup, which she did not usually bother to do,” but then decides that Jana’s “transformation” was not only physical, but also marked an “intangible shift” resulting from the “intimacy” Jana established with Adriaan. Throughout the scene, Adriaan “looks,” “gazes,” and Jana acts both in and “out of character.” I can picture Jana’s and Adriaan’s faces. But the narrator refuses to draw her face for me. 

It is an intimacy of a withholding or halting sort that the narrator offers. This sort of intimacy feels increasingly familiar as my students carry on videoconferencing with cameras turned off. I, too, turn off my camera during meetings nowadays. Nobody is above hiding. 

*

Looking forward to 2022, I wish I could say I don’t see my face mirrored on Zoom, but videoconferences are here to stay for the foreseeable future.

Second year into the pandemic, writing with a booster-shot induced throbbing headache, the question that raises its head is not simply whether I will eventually make my peace with the self-conscious performance that is talking at my own face, but how this continued performance will transform the substance that constitutes faces in the long term: our lives.  

Love

T

Postscript from P

Strike a Pose: Some Good Zoom Bits this Year

It was during a recent year-end party that I realised how people-watching, people talking about people, never gets old. Even two years of a pandemic and losing loved ones haven’t changed schadenfreude and our insatiable ability and need for/to gossip about those we know, and those we don’t. 

Discussion, critique, even bitching and judging, are methods of human connection after all. How else would ‘haters gonna hate’ be such a strong proclamation? 

So if we all do it, what was so different about the way her peers treated her, I was thinking. Shweta, whose private phone conversation was overheard by her entire class during a virtual learning session, since she forgot to mute herself before picking up the call. Is it the fact that snippets of it were shared online? That she became a viral meme overnight? 

What about letting go of employees over email - SOP pre-Covid - as opposed to a Zoom call - in the manner of the better.com CEO? Where do we draw the remote working boundaries? 

How can we carve out what’s real, where feelings live, and what’s not? Is there even a space like that anymore, living as we do offline-online in a continuum of sorts? And how come we all get to judge?

Are the discomforts of Zoom and the online world steeped then in how the internet never forgets, as opposed to the human brain? Are they mired in arguments around our recent favorite word ‘consent’? Is that what makes it - another recent favourite word - ‘problematic’? But if I had a penny, as they say, for every time something about me was shared with a stranger, even an ill-intentioned one, without my permission - circa pre social media era…

Setting these questions aside, and in the spirit of gratitude as 2021 closes, I want to make note of a special ritual that emerged this year for me, and one which could only have come out of the Zooming, the video calls, and facing the faces - mine and others’. 

My mum came up with the idea of sharing lockdown selfies on the family group just as we started our days. What sounded clearly exhausting if not exasperating as an idea at first, ended up becoming the stuff of daily routine I began to look forward to. With my parents, my brother, and I living in different states of India - and borders have never seemed as hard as they have through the last 2 years - this became a way of keeping in touch. We dressed up at times, smiled, wrote cheeky hellos, tried different ‘strike a poses’ at times, and waited to see the other’s face doing the same - while our backgrounds remained unchanged and second waves ravaged all around us. 

Somewhere through 2021, upping the game, cases at an all-time low, we pivoted to colour-coding outfits with days. I started writing captions - ‘Lal Mangalvaar aur Parivaar aka Monday Motivation’, ‘Gulabi Shukravaar Ho Mazedaar aka TGIF’. It became fodder for comments, concern, sharing, feedback, gestures of love and appreciation, comic relief, bonding. 

And it all started with staring at a camera, at my own face.

Cheers to less, or do I mean more?, of ‘preparing faces to meet the faces that you meet’ in a new year of the pandemic in 2022, as we continue staying Outspoken-ish!

Safed Somvaar & Peela Guruvaar, 2021

Best of 2021, from T & P

T’s book of literary criticism, Out of Mind, came out in 2021.

P wrote a long read for Article 14 on the devastating second wave and its complex nuances in rural northern India, Death, Disbelief & an Odd Resistance in UP’s Rural Hinterland 

Good Deity, T’s short story about WhatsApp, spirituality, and cockfighting, set in rural Bengal, was published in Necessary Fiction. 

In There is Something about Parveen, P explored fame, mental health, and culture via a  2020 Parveen Babi biography, for Himal SouthAsian. 

T interviewed Meena Kandasamy for Asymptote. 

My favourite piece of trivia this year has been the one about how the last time us humans maintained such close eye contact face to face was back when we were weighing our options along the binaries of 'Hmm. Kill or Mate?'

Through 2021, we've been doing precisely this, practically all the time - albeit via screens minus (arguably) the binaries running in our heads. It's how we did our meetings, our schooling, our yoga, much of our socializing, and of course, our therapy. If there's one definitive feature of the year then, it's the video call. As the months rolled by, we got Zoom weddings as well as Zoom firings. Zoom prayer meets & Zoom parties, Zoom dates & Zoom bombings. Plus, MANY memes.

What does it mean for who we are as "social animals" though? For our definitions and the ever-blurring lines between the private and the public? The performance of our selves as we adjust the lighting and filters and backdrops versus what we choose to hide/nudge out of the frame? What did it mean for Shweta, you think? The 900 employees who were let go of, over a Zoom call? Or the CEO who took time off, soon after? And seriously, what do you make of Zoom's investments in mental health? 

It's an ongoing debate on privacy, big tech, our bodies and data, our anxieties and peeves. What turns us on is an ever-changing fable after all, cameras on or off, mute or unmute.      

In the final dispatch of 2021's Outspoken-ish, T explores these questions and more, weaving in her experiences as a professor over Zoom facing a classroom full of boxes on screen and her own face staring back at her, bringing in thoughts from what she's read and watched this year, including Netflix's Navarasa & Kitamura's novel Intimacies, and more. 

Keep your eyes peeled then. For a Zoomtastic Zoom-ocalypse year-ender Outspoken-ish edition. 

In your inbox soon.    

Beware the Bogeyman

In hindsight, the money shot in these films always played like a toss up between the impossible cleavage and a bath-time ritual - some extremely uncomfortable attire and a shower, all bathed in an impossibly scarlet, disturbingly grainy, light. 

Often there was both, with the suggestion of fornication thrown in. 

And it was always a build-up towards a this.is.the.end. moment. A very, very tall man-like creature with very, very red eyes planted on a perpetually melting face, conveying a general aura of brooding despair, would always be waiting around the corner, ready for the kill. And when the moment arrived in tandem with the music, he would strike.  

I’m talking of scenes from Ramsay Brothers movies, memories of forbidden childhood viewings - dare over truth, am I right? - macabre curiosities, finding satisfaction behind parents’ backs, determined as I was to find out, for myself, how scary could scary be. Enough for it to be called what sounded like a distinction - horror. 

Purana Mandir (1984), Tahkhana (1986), Veerana (1988, described on Wikipedia as ‘Hindi language erotic supernatural horror thriller film’), Bandh Darwaza (1990), no matter how different each movie was from the other, almost the entire Ramsay oeuvre, which has  gained cult status over the decades, had two recurring archetypes down to the formulaic T. The man-like spooky creature and the sexy woman-victim, sexy for a few seconds before turning victim. Sometimes, the tease would run longer, with the woman running (there’s a lot of running) away, escaping, to add to the filmy tension. 

(Film still, Tahkhana, YouTube, the ubiquitous “sexy woman” who’ll soon be murdered).

In the moments when the blood would invariably flow - on the bed, on the bathroom floor, and yes, over her cleavage too, with her eyes staring at you, lifeless, the lingering emotion would be,  I reckon in hindsight again, not so much a question as a statement. 

Surely this must be the famed/notorious buddha baba of the ‘soja varna buddha baba aa jayega’ warnings we’re told as children when the grown-ups want us to “behave”. i.e. sleep on time i.e. do our homework i.e. drink our milk i.e. fall in line, i.e. toe the line, i.e. be generally achcha bachchas. 

In hindsight then, the clandestine childhood viewings packed many layers in its signifier of ‘forbidden’. It was only as an adult that I realised how most of the intimacy in Ramsay movies was consensual - making them rare Hindi movie fare to actually portray that ultimate no-no: Girlfriends and boyfriends. 

As you grow older and discover more, it could be a parable of the-horror-the-horror of pleasure. And specifically sex, having sex. The lesson is beware! This could happen to you, girl. And only to you, girl. Even IRL, the actresses of the Ramsay movie genre never went onto achieve mainstream success, while many of the men - such as Puneet Issar and Mohnish Bahl - did find work in popular cinema, the latter even going onto become the ultimate achcha beta of 90’s Barjatya cinematic universe, including the supremely successful Hum Aapke Hain Kaun.

Not that this was too unique a takeaway, even culturally. Notions of sins and paying the price - in horror, the ultimate price - are familiar tropes everywhere. Your Bogeyman after all, is my Buddhe Baba.

Take Psycho (1960), for instance. In essence, it is the story, told with legendary flourish, of a young woman on the run; anything but innocent, she embodies temptation and evil to the repressed motel owner. She is massacred in the shower (but of course) - a cult moment that you could say, is the source code for the slasher genre. It picks up on this and plays it up, minus subtlety and with a lot more gore plus titillation. In Halloween, Laurie (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) is the only one among her friends not sneaking in boyfriends at babysitting duties and the only survivor. She is the famed “final girl” of slasher movies, the only virgin among her sexually active friends, while her friends all suffer brutal fates, mostly minutes after having slept with their boyfriends. 

(The cult shower scene in Psycho as the source code for the super successful slasher genre to follow, which invariably featured brutal murders of women).

The possession genre, that other favourite, doesn’t play out any differently. These are movies upon movies playing out like cautionary tales, of the young/adolescent girl, pure and devout, possessed by the devil to basically prove a point. It’s even stated as such, plainly, in the terrifying horror-plus-courtroom-drama The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005), allegedly based on true events. Evil is always lurking around the corner, it is always looking to enter and defile the pure female soul. 

(Film still, The Exorcism of Emily Rose, the devout female body is always ground for demonic possession).

If stories are powerful, and by effect, storytelling is power, then the medium of horror is arguably, the most powerful of them all. No wonder then that they’re used to reinforce the status quo, working as subliminal inceptions in our brains, haunting us in our nightmares to ensure we do their bidding. It’s what makes us grow up fearing the bogeymans and buddhe babas we then imagine all around us - frantically othering men on the basis of caste, class, religion.

Negotiating with Nightmares

Shall we just dismiss horror as a regressive genre then?

Or is there scope for locating, or attempting to locate, strands of feminism in horror? Is there a genre of feminist horror that has a deeper and larger scope of imagination, beyond an all-female remake of Ghostbusters (2016)? More thought-provoking than a Halloween reboot (2018), which assumes that just a suggestion of ‘agency and an older Jamie Lee Curtis’ is enough? 

(Does the imagination of feminist horror stop and end with an all-female reboot of Ghostbusters? Also watch Trump’s infamous rant against it, in a classic portrayal of white male power feeling threatened, again).

The aforementioned dismembering and murdering of “sinful” girls in slasher movies achieved such formulaic fame that they went all meta on it with Scream (1996). Randy, the horror movie fan within the movie lists the “rules” of horror movies - ‘you can never have sex, you can never drink or do drugs,’ even as these rules are reinforced, played out in the next scene.

Scream was most definitely the milestone movie of those formative years I spent renting horror movie DVDs - the short walk at dusk to the local DVD parlour guy in Gurgaon, who ran a basement shop was all part of the ritual that ended with a night’s binge-watch of scary movies. The guy had begun to call my brother & I “the spook kids” - it was a badge of coolth, as I was still revelling in the Dare over Truth.

The subversion in Scream is real in hindsight, and enjoys cult status today. Its radicalization of the genre - sex does not necessarily lead to the brutal murder of young women - was also perhaps one reason why the films found a significant female viewership, an anomaly for slasher movies and also Ramsay Brothers cinema that were primarily made for men. I still remember Sidney (played by Neve Campbell) angsting in the meta moment of referring to the genre - “Some stupid killer stalking some big-breasted girl who can’t act who is always running up the stairs when she should be running out the front door? It’s insulting” - and being riveted, moved by the force of it.

(Scream tried subversive meta storytelling by tweaking the “rules” of horror movies).

If Scream worked with a playful, questioning spirit around the systemic taming of female sexualities, Teeth (2007) pushed the boundaries further. There is something deeply radical enmeshed within its deeply disturbing premise, like a reclamation of the slasher genre by the women it has violated over decades. It is very specific in this case, a decapitation of the perpetrator’s organ at the very site of male desire.  

While horror as interrogation (Scream), and horror as disruption, tearing down world orders, a harbinger of chaos (Teeth), can be considered potentially feminist impulses - only destruction can lead to an ushering of the new - the violence of both never sat too well with me, beyond a point. Meta and trite couldn’t be the most effective bedfellows - after all, weren’t big breasted women still running, terrified? And didn’t turning vaginas into weapons of mass destruction only underline the all-pervading anxieties around female desire?  

I’d almost given up on my favourite genre as I grew older. In my hunt for identity and identifying politics that embraced all of me, the straightforward narrative of horror stopped speaking to me. As I was navigating my way in the adult world, negotiating with its ideas, forming mine, I found myself resistant to what felt like absolutes in the horror genre. It felt unreal, like a pack of lies. I drifted away, lost touch. 

And then I encountered a piece of culture that brought me back into the fold: True Blood. This was messy, complex, funny, sexy, political and supernatural horror! Set in a world where synthetically produced TruBlood has finally let vampires live amongst humans, the series portrayed creator Alan Ball’s cheeky and powerful take on ‘the other’, those who’ve been forced to live on the fringes of the society, and what happens when they begin mingling with the majority. ‘Mainstreaming’, as the True Blood world calls it. 

(Maker Bill offers newly turned vampire Jessica TruBlood samples to facilitate her “mainstreaming” amongst humans).

With responses ranging from seething hatred for the non-normative that puts up signs declaring ‘God Hates Fangs’ - which we can very well read as Fa(n)gs - to disgruntled, reluctant acceptances, True Blood’s politics really hit home for me at a time when the world, the country I called home, seemed to polarize across identities in ways more brutal than anything any horror flick could depict.  

(Still from True Blood, a play on ‘fags’, as a comment on hardline religious stands and othering).

And what of desire? In the world of True Blood, sex and desire often offered new paths of navigation, newer negotiations we constantly make with the world as women. As the newly turned vampire, erstwhile “good Catholic girl” Jessica Hamby angsts, ‘Is it my fault my fangs come out when I get turned on?’ To me, it felt so real - like what she’s saying is this is me, all of me, my desire is me. Murkiness was so deliciously wrapped up in the Sookie-Bill love saga too, while the southern American vibe lent a flavour not unlike Delhi of the 2000’s. 

I call this feminism then, because to me, it’s not a set-in-stone-ism defined by a few good women (or men), a handbook that I can consult when in doubt. It is a living, breathing, shape-shifting, ever-adapting philosophy that forms and respects the journey as much as the destination - a vision of equity and equality we’re all striving for. 

In much the same vein, Jennifer’s Body (2009) felt like another force of nature, something about friendships like sisterhoods and how powerful they can be - to the point of demonic destruction. Bates Motel, the series that plays out like a Psycho prequel with stellar performances by Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore, packed in so many radical moments of viewing and was above everything else, a subaltern retelling of the Hitchcock classic, because seriously, who was Nora Bates? Who was the woman before she was that stuffed spooky life-sized, lifeless doll in Norman’s basement?

(Megan Fox was the draw but Jennifer’s Body was essentially a story of female friendships).

(The series Bates Motel urged the question that hadn’t been asked in the Hitchcock classic: Who was Nora Bates?).

In the genre as life trajectory, I found myself drawn to truth over dare. 

Skin in the Game

And then Covid came along. 

It was as if we all re-watched Contagion (2011), even if we didn’t actually re-watch the film. This was unarguably horror redefined, horror anew, all in real time. And, I realized, as I couldn’t stop myself from streaming The Walking Dead, horror was finally too close for comfort. It rendered the whole question of ‘Are you a horror movie fan?’ redundant, irrelevant, even disrespectful.

(Contagion, horror too close for comfort, come 2020).

What does this mean for the genre? Is there a message in all of it, how we’re all ultimately the same? Skin and bones and blood and hearts and a decent pair of lungs, we hope?

Does it render horror banal then? 

As I pore over these questions now, for the purposes of this letter, in hindsight, and with the talk of endemic control tactics all around us, I find deeper truths. It is not that life is fleeting, suffering inevitable, and all experience is as blah or as sublime as we want it to be. Or rather, yes it is, but that’s not the point. What’s to be absorbed is that latent in all of us - are tiny antibodies of humanity that prompt expression, philosophical, existential, behavioural.  

Horror, I find, is finally demanding what we’ve never understood: Acceptance. 

It’s a concept perhaps best understood in classical nritya, which embraces horror as a powerful form, and a communication tool - to drive home stories. Bibhatsya in its affect or rasa, has agency, choice, and it enables a vicarious channeling. 

Horror is often Surpanakha, the demon in Ramayana, but also horror is Laxman in the act of cutting off her nose. Lord Shiva’s followers, who accompanied him as baaratis to Parvati’s doorstep, are all kinds of “freaks” - not very different from the horrific creatures who populate scary stories, except the bairagi god assimilates them into his fold. This is horror that is immediate, urgent, familiar - there is no us and them, because it’s all us. 

This feels like something akin to an authentic feminist awakening. Where the ghost in the mirror, the shadow in the corner, is actually me, and I’m no longer in denial.  

(Bulbbul, a poetic portrayal of the chudail myth reimagined as a revenge saga)

In Bulbbul (2020), this embracing of the self and its inherent horror - the chudail myth as the wronged woman’s revenge saga - is rendered poetic, symbolic, empowering. It reminded me of another (allegedly) very different film - NH10 (2015), which favored the Bride’s yellow jumpsuit from Kill Bill over the witch’s red sari in the closing shot of the avenging angel. 

While NH10 wasn’t technically horror, it’s safe to claim that no Indian woman, especially from northern India, would disagree with me in labelling the movie so. For anyone who’s watched it and is not convinced, I’d simply recommend closing your eyes and recalling the moment when Meera (played by Anushka Sharma) finally thinks she’s safe now that she’s in the pradhan’s (who’s a woman) house. And then. I mean, it’s burned onto my brain. 

But the pradhan is someone I know, just in a slightly tweaked context, isn’t she? The movie is nerve-wracking and terrifying because it is a reminder of the horror that lives inside us. It is ready to rear its horrific self during the fight-or-flight moment  - like that nano second when Meera stabs the cop’s eye.

(Film still, Deepti Naval in NH10, one of the scariest films P’s watched, since it hits home hard for all her anxieties as a woman living in north India).

Perhaps this awareness of self, the post-pandemic world, and one located in the other, is what’s also slowly getting me back full circle. Because I find myself thinking, as I revisit the Ramsay classics, perhaps even showing consensual sex (or let’s be real, the hint of it), is pretty progressive for the ‘80s, isn’t it?

In this phase of life, I’m finally ready for both. Truth and Dare.

More on scare from T

As I watch actors covered in blood and prosthetics take a bite of one another’s neck, suck one another’s blood for relief, salvation, and compulsion in 2021 TV shows like Midnight Mass and Happiness, and somewhat older films like Train to Busan, every scene plays out as an allegory. Everything seems to anticipate or describe the pandemic. 

There is something paradoxical about our engagement with the other worldly in stories--we demand fantastic worlds of artists and then enter those worlds in search of the remains of our own. Under our watch Sci Fi, Speculative Fiction, Horror are fated to be allegories. The literary scholar Northrop Frye wrote that critics tend to dislike allegories because they prescribe “the direction of his commentary.” Horror stands out among the genres often read as allegories because it prescribes not only its meaning but also feelings.

Horror feels timely because of the pandemic. The meaning of horror is also the pandemic. I find much of contemporary horror on screen collapsing under the weight of social-political reification. 

Midnight Mass, a gorgeously shot Netflix show, directed by Mike Flanagan, seeks to stage the conflicts inside us, tries to understand why we seek out or turn away from religion, how we make sense of the absence of sense--that is, death--but it often lapses into long monologues with no ellipsis for ambiguity to enter the scene. Indeed, the allegorical structure leaves no room for an end but the containing of the spreading disease. This is not a spoiler, if you follow the emotional architecture of the show. Happiness, directed by Ahn Gil Ho, does not try its hand at subtlety. So, it is what it is: an allegory for the monstrosities within us that are unleashed during and after a collective health crisis. 

Timeliness, common sense goes, injects fresh blood into a genre. But here’s a thought--maybe it sucks the blood out of genres? As a viewer, what terrifies me is the unidentified, inchoate. While working from home, I watch the recently-produced popular horror shows and films and wait for the ghost that will make me feel what I cannot name. 

More from T & P?

T spoke about reading, writing, and her favorite books at Desi Books, following the publication of her book Out of Mind this month.

P played EP on a docu short City Girls, A Chambal Media X The Third Eye production, playing at the 26th IFFK2021 (International Film Festival Kerala).

Photo by Daniil Onischenko at Unpslash. 

The darkness of November is upon us. Dense layers of fog are nibbling at the short days here in Sacramento. Yesterday I learned that the fog has a name. Tule fog, a low cloud formation in California’s Central Valley, near the foothills of the Sierra Nevada, dramatically reduces visibility, not unlike the Delhi winter smog. On Friday I went out to get groceries in the late afternoon and while driving back I could see very little of what lay ahead of me. It felt like the beginning of a horror story. 

Sacramento has its fair share of ghosts, and some of the more popular ones call the Sacramento Theater their home. I am particularly intrigued by the spirit of Madame Modjeska, who watches wistfully as actors put on their costumes and make up in the dressing room. 

Madame Modjeska is said to be a failed Polish or Hungarian actress. The story is familiar--a woman with unfulfilled desires refuses to rest in peace and instead goes around haunting the living. Given how societal structures have actively thwarted women’s desires for centuries, the ghost in the story is also guilt. 

What strikes me as really remarkable in the case of ghost/woman Madame Modjeska though is her name. She shares it with an extremely successful and popular actress who emigrated from Poland to California in the nineteenth century--Helena Modjeska. 

In Warsaw, Helena Modjeska played leading roles in Shakespeare’s tragedies. She was Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona. When she moved to the US--to Anaheim in Southern California--in 1876, she struggled to learn English. Nonetheless, she managed to enter the theater circuit. She acted at the California Theater in San Francisco, debuted in New York, produced Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, and even spoke about the conditions of Polish women at the Chicago World’s Fair. Susan Sontag’s In America (1999) is supposed to be inspired by Helena Modjeska’s life. 

The Madame Modjeska who haunts Sacramento Theater is not Helena Modjeska, cannot be. But I wonder if Helena Modjeska’s success did not play a part in the construction of the legend around a failed actress. The urban ghost story is meant to foil the history of a woman who lived. Perhaps. 

In this month’s Outspoken-ish newsletter, P. will look for the place of women and silenced voices in horror. From being a proper fan of the scary movies and shows labeled ‘feminist horror’, P. went to not caring about them, only to be getting some of the keenness back. Why? What are the cultural and historical roots of this so-called ‘feminist horror’? 

P.’s letter will be in your inbox soon with a closer look at classics like Halloween and the reboots, desi cult horror made by the Ramsay bros., and more recent experiments like Us and Bulbbul. 

Until then, wishing you warmth for the cold days and nights,

T

Photograph of Helena Modjeska acting in As You Like It. Source: https://picryl.com/media/helena-modjeska-1840-1909-1

Photograph by Sam Manns at Unpslash

Every once in a while I come across #brownjoy on Twitter and wonder about the place of cultural identity in the philosophy of happiness. 

I get the explicit political meaning of the hashtag, when used in Europe and North America. Brown joy takes after the notion of ‘Black Joy,’ the recognition that both Black history and resistance include the materiality and possibility of happiness. It makes happiness a tangible goal of political movements. Along similar lines, in places where brown bodies--South Asian and Latinx people--are the minority and are subjected to oppressive forces, happy brown faces can be faces of resistance. #Queerjoy follows a similar logic. Hashtags make one’s subscription to the logic legible to members of the same (and opposing) communities as well as to recommender systems (a type of algorithm) that, then, reinforce the sense of belonging by finding others who will either like one’s post or troll them. 

I understand how the psychological state of happiness is entangled with social questions. Nonetheless, I find it difficult to pursue happiness by way of cultural identity (ethnic and/or religious and/or gendered). The culture I was raised in (Indian-Bengali-Hindu) told me that flaunting my happiness in front of others will draw the evil eye and one way to protect my happiness is to, well, hide it. Another way is to hang chili and lime at my door to ward off the evil eye. But it is not the evil eye I am concerned with here, today. I am concerned with the ethical tension inherent in seeking happiness using my own identity as a framework, the contours of the self as the means to find happiness. 

Photographs by T, Rashmi Bhatia, Mohd. Aram

Autumn in India is the season of festivals. One celebration leads to another. Durga puja, in which we--Bengali Hindus--worship the ten-armed goddess ends in Dussehra or Dashain, which quickly leads to Kojagori Lakshmi puja. Ethnic communities originating in western India observe Navaratri (with garba and dandiya raas). These Hindu festivals often coincide with Eid-e-Milad, celebrating the birth of Prophet Muhammad. Diwali follows in Northern India, which overlaps with Kali puja in the east. And so on. 

Every autumn the Indian diaspora simulates the subcontinental festivities, transplanting a Durga puja here, to the basketball court of a local high school; holding a Garba there, in a metropolitan convention center. And every autumn, since moving to the US in 2011, I puzzle over the lengths to which I will go to accept or refuse the invitation to define myself in terms of my ethnic origin, class, caste, and religion. 

To the first Durga puja I attended in the US--I was a graduate student in Columbus, Ohio, then--I wore a saree with a halter neck blouse, only to be told by another graduate student attendee to cover my upper back with the pallu before bowing in front of the Durga idol. “Why?” I asked. She had no answer. She probably thought the brown skin showing on my back would shame me, disrespect the Goddess. I paid no heed--it was a matter of my beliefs against hers regarding the right way to worship; my belief being there is no right way. Besides, her remark premised on prudery and hetero-misogyny was not that extraordinary--it could have been made anywhere, in Calcutta even. What was actually outstanding about the puja in Columbus was the tortured manner in which the attendees insisted on defining themselves as Bengali Hindus through costume, cultural programs, and everything else. 

This was a celebration of similarity based on social arrangements, while also feigning oblivion about the nature of the social arrangements. Why, for instance, in a ritual worship organized in a school’s basketball court and on dates deviating from those of the festival according to the Hindu calendar, all changes made for convenience, did they still have a man (most likely a Brahmin) play the priest? 

Expressions of cultural identity at the Durga pujas I have attended in North America seem to be motivated by the fear of losing that identity. Fear imposes stringent duties--children of immigrant parents, born and raised in the US, sing and dance to tracks they have little engagement with beyond the days of the festival. 

But to wage a war against possible loss, one needs to first define what one is saving. The cultural identity at stake is barely described or understood in practice, other than perhaps as a certain way of feeling. 

The Location of Joy

In Whereabouts, Jhumpa Lahiri, the author co-opted by the American culture industry to represent and celebrate the Indian American identity, tries to dull this way of feeling. Her protagonist is in a push and pull relationship with solitude, her family, an unnamed city, life. Lahiri first wrote the novel in Italian, abandoning both the language in which she, however reluctantly, first found fame, and the cultural identities familiar to readers of her previous work. 

I cannot separate the aesthetic value of Whereabouts from Lahiri’s ethical courage to embrace the unfamiliar, the other, instead of holding on to what she is expected to represent. It is another matter that the culture industry in America manages to pull off feats that turn virtues of artists from minority communities into problems (though these are not the artist’s problem). A review in the NPR while appreciating Lahiri’s style, her move away from “generational and cultural friction,” her exploration of “places geographical and emotional,” misidentifies the geographies and cultures Lahiri depicted in books like Interpreter of Maladies and The Namesake. 

My only social media post on Whereabouts has to do with my calling out NPR for confusing South Asia with Southeast Asia. They, of course, ignored it.  

* 

If one considers cultural festivals celebrated by minorities as celebrations from the margins, they seem ethically beatific (to those who believe, however superficially, in equity and justice), but they aren’t. 

Some years I skip the Durga puja celebrations in the US. This year I showed up at one with my partner. The founder member of the Durga puja pulled my partner aside and asked, “Can you blow the conch shell?” He said something to the effect of ‘sort of.’ The woman replied, “Good. You can take the responsibility next year, since you must be Brahmin--I figured from your last name.” My partner came running to report this bit of casteism to me, not because he was astonished that people in the Indian diaspora hold on to beliefs of caste supremacy (Brahmins as the highest caste, followed by Kshatriyas, Vaishyas, Shudras). After all, the State of California sued the company Cisco, operating from the Bay Area, for casteism in the workplace (the case was withdrawn last week and will be taken to a different court). It was only the nakedness of the woman’s question that surprised my partner because people--especially genteel Bengalis--often play ‘caste-blind’ in public, put on a show of inclusivity. 

When the woman cornered my partner, she did so propelled no doubt by her belief that my partner was an insider--one of her kind. Similar assumption--the assumption of sameness--causes people to casually betray their bigotry before family and friends: for example, when another Bengali Hindu watching an India-Pakistan cricket match with us pretends to be surprised by a woman in full burka waving the Indian tricolor (never mind that India is a secular nation) or complains that because of affirmative action in India, there are no jobs anymore for Brahmins. 

What is our responsibility toward people who think they can share their bigotry with us because we are ‘friends’? 

“Call out” is my go-to tactic in such situations. I distance myself from an acquaintance’s bigotry when I recognize it (for I, too, am surely not prejudice-free)--and eventually, waltz out of their social circle, feeling righteous for a bit, before having to admit that my call out accomplished nothing of great significance. 

The pursuit of cultural identity extorts happiness. 

*

What, then, are the roots/routes of unadulterated joy?

Community Durga pujas, subjects of my attachment and detachment, are a “recent” phenomena in the US. Though Bengali immigrants have streamed into the US at least since the late nineteenth century, as Vivek Bald discusses in Bengali Harlem, many of the early immigrants were Muslims or Sikhs. The enactment of the Immigration and Nationality Act in the 1960s led to the influx of Bengali Hindu professionals like never before and the first community-organized Durga pujas are supposed to have been held in the ‘70s. 

Many Indian Bengali professionals who gather under one roof for Durga puja in places like Sacramento today are working under conditions of indentured labor (that’s H1-B visa, for you), though their salaries and possessions will ostensibly belie the precarity of their status in the US. So, I do not take the ability to gather in celebration, to wear sarees without having to explain, to speak in our mother tongues, for granted. Yet, I also recognize the capability of the relatively powerless to exploit and abuse each other. The Indian upper-caste employees in Cisco discriminating against their colleagues may share the precarity of their legal status in America, and yet…

Timing Joy

I come from a family of refugees and economic migrants. A few years before India’s independence and Partition, one of my grandfathers came to study in Calcutta, India, from Faridpur (in present-day Bangladesh). He remained in the city after finding employment. His siblings followed and by 1947 most of his family was on this side of the border. Those who remained on the other side (East Pakistan then) later came as refugees. I do not know for how many generations my grandfather’s family was in Faridpur, but I do know that the family lived in Calcutta for about a generation and a half to be dispersed again. The differences in political circumstances notwithstanding, my migration to the US follows an arc similar to my grandfather’s. I came for graduate studies and have thus far stayed to work here, under conditions that are not always hospitable. My cousins made similar journeys to other places and nations. We are a family with many moving parts, fragmented continually by accidents of history.  

The Durga puja celebrations I attend in North America though (and perhaps this is true of other festivals in the diaspora as well) seem resistant to the idea of movement. They simulate practices, food, and culture of an imaginary, static homeland, avoiding any critical scrutiny about the ‘why’ and the ‘how’ of the celebrations. 

On Saturday, 23rd October, a day before the Indian and Pakistani cricket teams faced off at the ongoing T20 World Cup, and both teams demonstrated support for the Black Lives Matter movement, with the Indian side taking a knee, many of my Bengali acquaintances from the puja in Sacramento marched to the California Capitol protesting the attack on Bangladeshi Hindus during the Durga pujas in Comilla, Bangladesh, the ensuing rampage, and the desecration of an ISKCON temple in Noakhali. 

For Indian Bengali Hindus this protest is easy to participate in--the critique here is externally directed, at a nation-state where Hindus are the minority. Just as it is easier for the Indian team (prodded by its ‘management’) to show solidarity for a movement about racial justice originating outside India than making statements about the trolling and attacks on the Muslim player currently playing for the Indian side or the plight of the Kashmiris in India. 

And it is simpler, too, for me to catalog wrongs and call out when I can put distance between me and bigotry. The moment before distancing is the moment when I feel the demand of critiquing from the inside. It is an excessive responsibility. An impossible responsibility, too, given that the instant in which I become attuned to the discordant notes in someone else’s pronouncement I have already become alienated. I cut myself out--for what? To save myself from (committing) cruelty? And, then again, I find no joy in abstinence. 

In Ayad Akhtar’s novel Homeland Elegies, a meditation on both the outside and the inside of cultural identities, a character tells the narrator “Use the difficulty; make it your own.” As a writer and academic, I suppose it is inevitable that I do. I have written over a thousand words here using the difficulty and it will certainly not be the last time I do so. However, what of joy? Is there joy in using the difficulty, digging into it, unraveling it? Maybe. One joy in my dispersed family is to share photos and videos of how we celebrate festivals in different corners of the world. In fact, it is safe to say that our overlapping routines during festivals evoke a sense of belonging, however fleeting. This year my parents, uncles, and aunts confined to their respective homes, observing COVID-related restrictions, streamed the puja in Sacramento to catch glimpses of me and the events in which my partner and I participated. There is some joy in that. 

And I know there’s joy too in dressing up as an Indian witch this year --inspired by the movie Bulbbul--for Halloween in the US. 

Love,

T

Photograph by T. Prep to dress up as Bulbbul. 

Postscript from P 

Speaking of identity and festivals, the recently celebrated Karwa Chauth made me recognize how women (particularly in northern India) participate of their own volition in a practice that above everything else, seems to give them a very solid feeling of being part of a community, a sisterhood even. 

While I’ve never really understood fasting, and never practiced it as a ritual in the name of well, anything, it’s only recently that I’ve come to the understanding that while the tradition itself might reek of patriarchy, only a fool would believe that it’s about a husband’s long life. Clearly, it’s a day when the tribe badge shines bright for the women who choose to keep it, brighter than the awaited moon, brighter than their own highly bedecked selves. And that badge for me is all kinds of #hardrelate.

Growing up in Sharjah, our clandestine phooljhadis and diyas, rangolis masquerading as hospitality decorations during Diwali -- you could not be seen celebrating a Hindu festival publicly in the Muslim-majority UAE-- were the stuff of pure joy for me. There were mutually agreed upon “work breaks'' for adults (read: parents), because everyone (including their non-Indian/non-Hindu bosses) understood the importance of time out for celebrating festivals - there was no secular garb needed. All of us looked forward to these weeks and the endless house parties (sometimes I feel like my folks invented this very particular way of having fun) with family friends across the desert. Fun road trips to Abu Dhabi, Al Ain, Dubai, dressed in “Indian” attire often hand-made/stitched on her favorite sewing machine by my mother. At these parties, all the desis would unite, profusely shed tears over Chitthi Aayi Hai, and participate in that ancient but never-old ritual of sharing food as communion.  

And the color of joy? That for me remains cola-black, harking back to the secret Pepsi’s my brother and I consumed in cars during Ramadan. Sipping the thrill-laced cans, I still feel the taste of those days on the tip of my tongue. 

More from T & P

P was the guest on #sayftychat earlier this month, representing Khabar Lahariya, to discuss Feminist Representation in Indian Media.

T spoke to Dr. Neelofer Qadir about forms of unfree labor, capitalism, and stories in the Indian Ocean world for the Narrative for Social Justice podcast.