1 00:00:01,440 --> 00:00:11,340 Ahmed, thanks very much for agreeing to take part in this discussion and in the series, which I'm doing with various contemporary writers. 2 00:00:11,340 --> 00:00:16,710 For those of you not familiar with your work over the last now over over 20 years, 3 00:00:16,710 --> 00:00:24,480 two decades, you've established a quite considerable reputation in a number of areas. 4 00:00:24,480 --> 00:00:36,450 As a writer from Strange and Sublime Address in 1991 to the Immortal's in 2009, you've published five works of fiction in one form or another. 5 00:00:36,450 --> 00:00:47,310 You're also published as a poet. You've published quite extensively as a critic with at least four books of of criticism about your name, 6 00:00:47,310 --> 00:00:53,730 including your study of D.H. Lawrence, the collection of essays which we'll talk about later. 7 00:00:53,730 --> 00:01:01,460 Clearing a Space, your essays on Tagore. And that's not only your work as a critic, but also as an anthropologist. 8 00:01:01,460 --> 00:01:06,210 You've put together Picador Book of Modern English literature and so on and so on as well. 9 00:01:06,210 --> 00:01:09,990 You've now this year published made your first, I think, 10 00:01:09,990 --> 00:01:19,200 major foray into non-fiction with your book on just called Calcutta came out and came out this year, 2013. 11 00:01:19,200 --> 00:01:28,440 But in addition to all of this, like another one of your heroes going back a long way, like Tagore, you've also, 12 00:01:28,440 --> 00:01:35,970 since around 2004, been experimenting with music in various ways and you now have two albums to your name. 13 00:01:35,970 --> 00:01:43,050 This is not fusion, not fusion from 2007 and found music from 2010. 14 00:01:43,050 --> 00:01:45,480 Along all of this, you know, as if to add more, 15 00:01:45,480 --> 00:01:55,230 you've you've earned various prises and accolades from the Commonwealth writers prise in 1991 for your first work of fiction to 2012. 16 00:01:55,230 --> 00:01:59,580 Last year, the Infosys prise, I think for contemporary literature. 17 00:01:59,580 --> 00:02:03,390 Anyway, I'm extremely grateful to you for making the time to do this. 18 00:02:03,390 --> 00:02:08,340 And as I've been doing in the other discussions in this series, 19 00:02:08,340 --> 00:02:16,110 what I've what I've done is I've chosen a few bits from your work, which I am keen for us to for you to read. 20 00:02:16,110 --> 00:02:22,230 And in one case, of course, actually, we will just listen to we'll have some music right at the end. 21 00:02:22,230 --> 00:02:31,200 But initially, I've chosen three extracts for you to read, which will then use as the basis for a brief discussion between and ideally, 22 00:02:31,200 --> 00:02:40,180 what I wanted to try to do with these choices of what to look at is cover everything as far as far as we can in the space of about 40 minutes, 23 00:02:40,180 --> 00:02:49,050 cover the range of what you've you've done in your work so far from fiction to your work as a critic to some comments on on Tagore in particular. 24 00:02:49,050 --> 00:02:53,430 And then finally, the music great. Sounds good. 25 00:02:53,430 --> 00:03:03,060 So the first bit I've asked you to, if you could have a look at and read is from Afternoon Raag, which is your your second work of fiction, 1993. 26 00:03:03,060 --> 00:03:19,530 It came out and it's from Chapter 21 in which we have a the fictional persona at this point walking into East Oxford. 27 00:03:19,530 --> 00:03:23,940 And we just happened to be doing this discussion in Oxford. So I thought it was an opportune piece to start with. 28 00:03:23,940 --> 00:03:30,300 But anyway, if you start off by just reading that opening of the Chapter 21 from Afternoon Raag. 29 00:03:30,300 --> 00:03:43,520 Right. Cowley Road, Iffley Road and St. Clement's small mean Jonte families live here side by side with the Bangladeshis and Pakistanis. 30 00:03:43,520 --> 00:03:49,610 This is the tribe that belong to Dickensian alleys, the Aboriginal community that led its island life, 31 00:03:49,610 --> 00:03:56,190 its daily routines and struggles, and scarcely heard of empire or took part in governance for them. 32 00:03:56,190 --> 00:04:00,890 The supermarkets were built to work in and to shop at not Sainsbury's, but Tesco, 33 00:04:00,890 --> 00:04:05,900 with its long aisles of shopping trolleys, sides of beef and ham, frozen chips, 34 00:04:05,900 --> 00:04:10,700 mango chutney and spinach at tuppence less towards such centres, 35 00:04:10,700 --> 00:04:16,760 they gravitate living in a perpetual present and then walk home to their houses with tiny gardens. 36 00:04:16,760 --> 00:04:26,270 Not for them history, old buildings, literature, but in England of small comfort and marriages, happy or unhappy for them. 37 00:04:26,270 --> 00:04:35,070 Television with endless reruns of EastEnders and Coronation Street showing them their lives and those of their children. 38 00:04:35,070 --> 00:04:40,040 There's a church here in Cowley for they are devout Christians drinking Protestants, 39 00:04:40,040 --> 00:04:45,000 religious, not in a theological, but in a family with rules allocated to the sexes. 40 00:04:45,000 --> 00:04:50,360 The men believing and supporting their football team, the women praying and going out shopping, 41 00:04:50,360 --> 00:04:57,440 all of them seeming to know the words of the Sunday hymns by heart, but blaspheming and cursing God when they feel like it. 42 00:04:57,440 --> 00:05:02,240 Speaking in English, that is hardly spoken in any other part of the world anymore. 43 00:05:02,240 --> 00:05:11,990 With we are proverbs and turns dropped consonants and vowels turning the language like meat inside their mouths. 44 00:05:11,990 --> 00:05:21,590 Thanks very much. There's a way in which a kind of an obvious way in which this maybe for some people not so obvious, I don't know. 45 00:05:21,590 --> 00:05:26,480 But it's an obvious way in which this passage can be read. 46 00:05:26,480 --> 00:05:37,610 And it's part of the kind of sort of protean shapeshifting voice that you read that you have in this work where it reads like a parody of some sort 47 00:05:37,610 --> 00:05:51,860 of colonial ethnographer wandering into the the the realms of the natives and sending back a report about the life of the natives in this particular, 48 00:05:51,860 --> 00:05:56,950 that's a parody of that kind of colonial authority describing the people. 49 00:05:56,950 --> 00:06:01,970 One of the things that alerted me to that in particular is just a description of this obviously being a tribe. 50 00:06:01,970 --> 00:06:11,030 But then, you know, the classic idea of the colonial is that the living in a perpetual present without history, this is a tribe without history. 51 00:06:11,030 --> 00:06:18,140 You know, that's a standard, a standard kind of late 19th century description of a certain pastoral idyll. 52 00:06:18,140 --> 00:06:23,300 In some ways it normally is in the West Indies or in parts of Africa or India or whatever. 53 00:06:23,300 --> 00:06:31,190 And that's that's a that's a first level part where there's a sort of Syria comic voice parodying that kind of writing. 54 00:06:31,190 --> 00:06:38,750 But there's something that I wanted to ask you about with this passage, which seems to point to a much, much deeper preoccupation in your work, 55 00:06:38,750 --> 00:06:49,830 is an interest in no matter what forms of culture you happen to be talking about, but an interest in the aspects of a culture that are not there, 56 00:06:49,830 --> 00:06:59,210 that are excluded or that are marginalised within certain definitions of culture and in particular official versions of a culture, 57 00:06:59,210 --> 00:07:03,020 whether that's a national culture or an imperial culture or whatever it might be, 58 00:07:03,020 --> 00:07:10,450 official versions or elite versions of that culture, certain figures, voices, things get get forgotten. 59 00:07:10,450 --> 00:07:16,010 So in this case, you know, these are people who have scarcely heard of Empire but might be held responsible 60 00:07:16,010 --> 00:07:22,490 for empire by certain other people and people who are outside of history, 61 00:07:22,490 --> 00:07:26,960 old buildings, literature, that kind of official version of of English culture. 62 00:07:26,960 --> 00:07:31,880 So I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about that that dimension of your of your work 63 00:07:31,880 --> 00:07:40,760 and your interest in those sorts of hidden recesses and forgotten corners of some cultures. 64 00:07:40,760 --> 00:07:53,280 Yeah, well, I suppose one afternoon, I guess my second novel and my first novel, Australian Sublime Address is about arriving in Calcutta, 65 00:07:53,280 --> 00:08:00,860 a young boy arriving in Calcutta encountering a kind of a neighbourhood in a city and a 66 00:08:00,860 --> 00:08:07,100 kind of existence very different from the one he's living in Bombay with afternoon drug. 67 00:08:07,100 --> 00:08:23,960 I suppose I make my first effort to put on record that, um, you know, that that the West is continually different from itself. 68 00:08:23,960 --> 00:08:34,170 And this is something that that people from my part of the world, uh. 69 00:08:34,170 --> 00:08:51,930 Feel or experience, often as little as people from Oxford, England, uh, as are unable to, in a sense, 70 00:08:51,930 --> 00:08:58,090 read India in terms of, let's say, just to narrow down to one thing, letting in terms of class. 71 00:08:58,090 --> 00:09:07,560 So so in in an Indian can an Indian middle class person can read and in another Indian approaching 72 00:09:07,560 --> 00:09:15,490 from a distance in terms of of class background by maybe by the way they look what they're wearing, 73 00:09:15,490 --> 00:09:21,260 that the haircut and the way they walk even and in the way they talk. 74 00:09:21,260 --> 00:09:36,030 Uh, and, uh, and, you know, this is something that you kind of realise when you first come here is that people from outside the West are in, 75 00:09:36,030 --> 00:09:39,880 in a sense indecipherable to the to the west in that in that way. 76 00:09:39,880 --> 00:09:56,490 And and thereby you, um, in the cultural encounter, you miss a whole evolving narrative that that brings to life the comedy, 77 00:09:56,490 --> 00:10:08,220 but also the historic ality and the reality of who you are at a certain point of time and without recognising the fact not out of a sense of duty, 78 00:10:08,220 --> 00:10:16,620 but genuinely that this holds true the other way around as well, that we too don't read. 79 00:10:16,620 --> 00:10:29,580 We who come from our part of the world don't actually read, let's see the English or even see that the English as a contingent with various meanings. 80 00:10:29,580 --> 00:10:37,500 Mm hmm. And of course, I mean, there's there's a sense in which all of us also do that to ourselves when we are 81 00:10:37,500 --> 00:10:45,780 abroad and and and we become Indian and and the English or the Australian person, 82 00:10:45,780 --> 00:10:53,480 all of them become Western, let's say, when they're travelling through India. Mm hmm. And so as so, begin to respond as a Western person. 83 00:10:53,480 --> 00:11:01,920 And I remember mentioning this in a in a in a review of a travel book on India by Robyn Davidson, 84 00:11:01,920 --> 00:11:13,560 the Australian writer who who who was reporting on Agnese during her travels through tribal India and speaking as a Western person. 85 00:11:13,560 --> 00:11:22,560 And I and I was just kind of saying that this is interesting elision here of Hushes, which is an Australian person. 86 00:11:22,560 --> 00:11:29,400 And the specificity of that, what that might mean, someone doesn't kind of come into play at all in the way people, 87 00:11:29,400 --> 00:11:34,950 in the way people are responding to histories, milieus, people, 88 00:11:34,950 --> 00:11:44,790 but also houses and spaces and and and all my work since since afternoon, drugger, 89 00:11:44,790 --> 00:11:54,720 since when I can remember in some unconscious way or another, even in music, is to find echoes of one thing in another. 90 00:11:54,720 --> 00:12:06,260 And they may not be they may be culturally disparate, but they are kind of they converge in some ways which ways which are not sentimental, but. 91 00:12:06,260 --> 00:12:11,210 Involved this process of reading across cultures, reading not as a duty, 92 00:12:11,210 --> 00:12:20,760 but this fissuring which which which makes you think that, hang on, I seem to know this person. 93 00:12:20,760 --> 00:12:26,510 He is he is supposed to be the coloniser or he's supposed to be this or he's supposed to be that. 94 00:12:26,510 --> 00:12:30,980 But I seem to have seen them somewhere at the back of my habitat. 95 00:12:30,980 --> 00:12:33,230 But that doesn't mean that I know this person completely. 96 00:12:33,230 --> 00:12:42,620 In fact, there's an estrangement also when this recognition of this fact comes around from my own position of who I thought I was. 97 00:12:42,620 --> 00:12:51,440 So that process began, let's say, with simple things like visits to East Oxford. 98 00:12:51,440 --> 00:12:56,660 Mm hmm. Of of realising England is a foreign country. 99 00:12:56,660 --> 00:13:04,700 And what that means earlier, it was just a place which was not home and I wouldn't look at it, but to understand what that foreignness means. 100 00:13:04,700 --> 00:13:09,260 But then over globally, over over the period of globalisation, 101 00:13:09,260 --> 00:13:16,400 to continue discovering within what is called the West, especially Europe, newer and newer, 102 00:13:16,400 --> 00:13:25,160 but all but all the also provinces that in all kinds of provincialism, uh, 103 00:13:25,160 --> 00:13:40,820 all kinds of secret kind of regional realities coming to you in in all kinds of ways in which also, you know, I mean, um, complicated. 104 00:13:40,820 --> 00:13:48,710 Also the story of little the migrant, the post-colonial migrant abroad complicates that story, too. 105 00:13:48,710 --> 00:13:55,230 Mm hmm. So when I'm speaking, what can I give you one example from this, uh, global encounter, 106 00:13:55,230 --> 00:14:01,400 that sense of which this is a prefiguring this visit to East Oxfordian afternoon. 107 00:14:01,400 --> 00:14:08,330 So during the during the time of globalisation by, let's say, the early 2000s, I just thought that, you know, 108 00:14:08,330 --> 00:14:15,860 all these questions of milieus, environment, specificities, neighbourhoods were now bessey in the global world. 109 00:14:15,860 --> 00:14:19,970 We needed to think we all become homogenous or become homogenous or we knew we needed to be 110 00:14:19,970 --> 00:14:25,850 thinking about places like airports and multiplexes and redefining what what space was, 111 00:14:25,850 --> 00:14:31,760 what place was. But but then I realised this this too is not completely true. 112 00:14:31,760 --> 00:14:34,070 And and I had a similar experience, 113 00:14:34,070 --> 00:14:39,860 but now inflicted by globalisation to the one I'm describing in afternoon drug where I'm talking about these people who are, 114 00:14:39,860 --> 00:14:45,620 as I say in subsequent paragraphs, the last chain smokers and meat eaters of England. 115 00:14:45,620 --> 00:14:52,940 So I had a similar kind of experience. I was invited by my French translator, along with another Indian writer, 116 00:14:52,940 --> 00:14:58,580 to join her to have pink champagne or whatever and what matters somewhere like that. 117 00:14:58,580 --> 00:15:05,810 And and we told her we didn't like we didn't have a taste for champagne, but she coerced us into accompanying her anyway. 118 00:15:05,810 --> 00:15:14,240 And we were being served by a drunk French total drunk French waiter who obviously didn't like us, me and the other Indian author. 119 00:15:14,240 --> 00:15:18,020 And it was kind of glowering at us, but also unsteady on his feet. 120 00:15:18,020 --> 00:15:23,540 So he was a kind of he was a hostile presence, but also a figure of fun. 121 00:15:23,540 --> 00:15:25,040 He would not bring the bill to us. 122 00:15:25,040 --> 00:15:33,260 And until we can then complain to the proprietor and then we handed the bill and and I said to my French translator, let's not tip him. 123 00:15:33,260 --> 00:15:36,920 And we walked out and he passed a comment. 124 00:15:36,920 --> 00:15:41,720 As we came out of the restaurant, I asked Simonne, my translator, what did he say? 125 00:15:41,720 --> 00:15:46,400 And she said he said, I now know who to vote for. And it was 2006. 126 00:15:46,400 --> 00:15:51,200 The elections were coming up, Sarkozy le and they were all in contention. 127 00:15:51,200 --> 00:15:57,050 And and when I heard this, I mean, I the other author, you burst out laughing. 128 00:15:57,050 --> 00:16:06,260 The man was still behind the glass staring at us and thinking back on that experience. 129 00:16:06,260 --> 00:16:07,190 Many things occurred to me. 130 00:16:07,190 --> 00:16:17,450 One is that I had a sense of a person who who belonged to a place and probably also lived in a place where he was surrounded by minorities. 131 00:16:17,450 --> 00:16:25,820 And I, too, was in the slightly unassailable position of being a global traveller. 132 00:16:25,820 --> 00:16:33,770 I was no longer in the role of the migrant, something that I have played as a student in England. 133 00:16:33,770 --> 00:16:41,180 So visiting a French translator after all. Yeah, so and I was there for the French and the Paris Book Fair. 134 00:16:41,180 --> 00:16:52,610 Uh huh. Um, and, you know, I was in a country which just a few weeks before my arrival there had been trying to keep Mittel out of France Mittel. 135 00:16:52,610 --> 00:16:56,720 Who was going to buy Arsala. Uh huh. So the balance of power was changing. 136 00:16:56,720 --> 00:17:05,700 But that is in itself was not as interesting as the fact that I had had this encounter with something that was real. 137 00:17:05,700 --> 00:17:15,030 Something that came from a more visual sense of what France was and something which also proved that neighbourhood and 138 00:17:15,030 --> 00:17:22,840 militia could continue to exist and are our interactions with that could continue to exist in the globalised world. 139 00:17:22,840 --> 00:17:30,900 So so what I'm saying is that the encounters with police, wherever they happen, 140 00:17:30,900 --> 00:17:36,510 whether it's the east or the West, are going to happen in these peculiar ways. 141 00:17:36,510 --> 00:17:43,560 And and they are not going to fall in line with either static ideas of the east or West, 142 00:17:43,560 --> 00:17:53,400 but also static ideas of Migrante or the kind of population they are going to be, 143 00:17:53,400 --> 00:17:58,410 all kinds of people of different points of time who are more or less privileged than you are. 144 00:17:58,410 --> 00:18:06,150 And you mustn't mustn't take for granted the fact that you are either more or less privileged as part of your rhetoric. 145 00:18:06,150 --> 00:18:10,770 And those things are always going to inform the way you become aware of a place. 146 00:18:10,770 --> 00:18:15,750 Mm hmm. I mean, in a way, it's also one of the things that that picks up on is just simply going back to 147 00:18:15,750 --> 00:18:20,910 the afternoon raag passage that it's what you you're moving into East Oxford, 148 00:18:20,910 --> 00:18:26,700 the county road, that that all the communities that are there, the version of Englishness that you're getting there and encountering there is, 149 00:18:26,700 --> 00:18:30,660 of course, nothing to do with the official postcard version of Oxford itself. 150 00:18:30,660 --> 00:18:39,030 No, you do not see postcards of these kinds of these parts of Oxford amongst the old buildings and and so on and so forth. 151 00:18:39,030 --> 00:18:40,110 Brilliant. Thanks very much. 152 00:18:40,110 --> 00:18:48,360 I mean, if we if we can move on to the the second passage, which comes from clearing a space, a collection of essays from 2008, 153 00:18:48,360 --> 00:18:54,350 it's actually an essay called Beyond Confidence Rushdie and the Creation Myth of Indian English Writing. 154 00:18:54,350 --> 00:18:59,670 And it's just the last paragraph that I wanted you to maybe read out and have a look at, 155 00:18:59,670 --> 00:19:05,100 partly because it it takes us into another dimension of your work where in a sense, 156 00:19:05,100 --> 00:19:09,180 as you've been saying now this there's so much of your work is against static, 157 00:19:09,180 --> 00:19:17,910 fixed all versions of cultures that are tied to particular groups, the official version of a culture or even of a place, that sort of thing. 158 00:19:17,910 --> 00:19:21,570 You've had that sort of interest, but at the same time, which, if you like, 159 00:19:21,570 --> 00:19:28,890 expresses a certain wariness about the definition of culture or the concept of culture itself. 160 00:19:28,890 --> 00:19:39,370 At the same time, your work has been passionately committed to a notion of culture defining a certain space in its own terms and so on and so forth. 161 00:19:39,370 --> 00:19:44,670 And this passage struck me as being a particularly kind of clear and forceful articulation of that. 162 00:19:44,670 --> 00:19:47,750 And I just wondered if you could read that out and then we could maybe. 163 00:19:47,750 --> 00:19:54,720 Yeah, I've gotten a bit of a mention both of these things, because people people who mention one thing about we don't mention the other, you know. 164 00:19:54,720 --> 00:20:05,850 I mean but yes, I mean, there is this kind of dissatisfaction with a with static ideas of culture. 165 00:20:05,850 --> 00:20:13,080 But but there is also this this defence of culture going on in my work. 166 00:20:13,080 --> 00:20:16,740 So I'm going to read this out now of passages selected. 167 00:20:16,740 --> 00:20:26,190 But the Sanskrit statistician's of antiquity and much later, Philip Sedney writing in the country that would one day colonise India, 168 00:20:26,190 --> 00:20:31,590 conceived of poetry and literature as a realm of radical freedom and autonomy. 169 00:20:31,590 --> 00:20:39,030 This, too, is how the site of literature and culture was delineated in modern India around the middle of the 19th century, 170 00:20:39,030 --> 00:20:45,840 a realm of freedom that presaged and predated political freedom by almost a hundred years. 171 00:20:45,840 --> 00:20:50,850 But artistic and imaginative autonomy differed from the political autonomy 172 00:20:50,850 --> 00:20:55,050 that was to be fought for and which would eventually come in one fundamental 173 00:20:55,050 --> 00:21:05,310 respect that while the latter necessarily entailed a hardening of identity of Indianness and a conflictual relationship with the coloniser, 174 00:21:05,310 --> 00:21:12,420 the former, the realm of imaginative autonomy reserved the right to constantly redefine Indianness, 175 00:21:12,420 --> 00:21:22,290 to have no single exclusive notion of it, and to be related to European culture, not only oppositional but by creative curiosity. 176 00:21:22,290 --> 00:21:27,720 That's why Indian writing in the last 150 years represents not so much a one 177 00:21:27,720 --> 00:21:35,040 dimensional struggle for or embodiment of power as a many sided cosmopolitanism. 178 00:21:35,040 --> 00:21:40,800 It isn't enough today to celebrate Indian writing success after having identified 179 00:21:40,800 --> 00:21:46,710 what its marks of success are as if a whole tradition must only and constantly be 180 00:21:46,710 --> 00:21:52,710 thought of as an activist would be what needs to engage with its long subterranean 181 00:21:52,710 --> 00:22:01,290 history as as hard earned as political freedom itself out of curiosity and openness. 182 00:22:01,290 --> 00:22:05,540 Great. Thank thanks very much. I'm actually, in a way, thinking about and listening to you. 183 00:22:05,540 --> 00:22:12,170 That one of the things that strikes me is interesting, this is you speaking in your voice as a critic, 184 00:22:12,170 --> 00:22:19,310 but it seems also if we go back to Afternoon Raag, if we follow through your fiction in various ways, 185 00:22:19,310 --> 00:22:26,690 it also seems to articulate something of of the kind of testiness you felt with the novel itself as a form, 186 00:22:26,690 --> 00:22:32,450 and particularly the way in which, say, certain versions of the novel. 187 00:22:32,450 --> 00:22:38,820 I mean, obviously certain versions of Rushdie has been associated with not necessarily himself. 188 00:22:38,820 --> 00:22:40,850 It wouldn't necessarily see himself in these terms, 189 00:22:40,850 --> 00:22:49,430 but he's been associated with where the novel has a certain secondary or supplementary relationship to this political project. 190 00:22:49,430 --> 00:22:53,360 In a sense, the one of the key terms and I know you've written about this elsewhere, 191 00:22:53,360 --> 00:22:57,470 but one of the key terms missing from that little passage that you've read is, 192 00:22:57,470 --> 00:23:05,030 is the notion of of of the nation and of its comes up in Indianness and so on, and particularly the novel as a form of national allegory. 193 00:23:05,030 --> 00:23:10,490 I know that's been in the back of your mind. And so the cosmopolitanism is a challenge to that. 194 00:23:10,490 --> 00:23:17,030 I just wondered if you could maybe talk a little bit about how, as a writer of fiction, 195 00:23:17,030 --> 00:23:23,480 you yourself have have tried not simply to articulate this notion of of culture, 196 00:23:23,480 --> 00:23:32,310 but to use your fictional writing as a as a way of articulating that that that refusal to define and settle things, 197 00:23:32,310 --> 00:23:38,270 and in particular, a refusal to define and settle things in terms other than what you may be able 198 00:23:38,270 --> 00:23:42,330 to do through the literary forms that you're experimenting with and trying out. 199 00:23:42,330 --> 00:23:54,530 Hmm. Uh. Try to think about that one, but again, can go back to this passage for a sec. 200 00:23:54,530 --> 00:24:08,210 Sure, yeah. Yeah, um, because I've tried to articulate this in a certain kind of way as as a as a kind of dichotomy. 201 00:24:08,210 --> 00:24:18,080 Um, and but I also remember I tried to address this whole question of what it 202 00:24:18,080 --> 00:24:23,510 might mean or might have meant to suddenly become something called an Indian. 203 00:24:23,510 --> 00:24:33,260 Mm hmm. Uh, in the 19th century and then begin to engage with cultures across the board in a certain kind of way, 204 00:24:33,260 --> 00:24:41,840 which cannot be encompassed by either by the term that is current at the time, 205 00:24:41,840 --> 00:25:01,670 the term native from which the term Indian is subtly different, um, but cannot be, um, encompassed by Indian being a totally nationalistic term. 206 00:25:01,670 --> 00:25:08,390 And it cannot be either also encompassed by, you know, 207 00:25:08,390 --> 00:25:17,540 post-colonial or saidon notions of how a person from a particular kind of culture might be engaging with, 208 00:25:17,540 --> 00:25:29,570 let's say, the culture of the country that is colonised. That culture and those are the lines of contact and affinities are are complex. 209 00:25:29,570 --> 00:25:38,630 But I remember dwelling on the fact that this this creation of this category, what the genealogy of it, I'm not completely sure. 210 00:25:38,630 --> 00:25:44,030 But the Christians got Indianness or Indian is a very interesting creation. 211 00:25:44,030 --> 00:26:02,160 And it seems to me that its thrust is not to create it at the beginning, uh, a nationalistic identity or category, but, uh, a humanistic category. 212 00:26:02,160 --> 00:26:24,440 Uh, so. Just as much as certain other national categories are also actually fundamentally positing themselves as humanistic categories, 213 00:26:24,440 --> 00:26:29,730 uh, Indianness is doing that and that's whether or not we agree with it, 214 00:26:29,730 --> 00:26:41,580 whether or not we think it deserves to be any more than any other such category deserves to to, you know, take such a right for granted. 215 00:26:41,580 --> 00:26:45,600 There's no doubt that a kind of modulation has been effected, 216 00:26:45,600 --> 00:26:52,080 which is very important and interesting, and it allows the Indian to do a number of things. 217 00:26:52,080 --> 00:26:58,710 So as I say in this piece, which is a piece on Amartya Sen, actually, which came out in the tearless, is that with this category? 218 00:26:58,710 --> 00:27:05,220 I mean, suddenly at a certain point of time, if you as an Indian, so it's a secular category, 219 00:27:05,220 --> 00:27:12,510 as a humanist academy, you stop reading the Bhagavad Gita or Shakespeare or the Koran or whatever, 220 00:27:12,510 --> 00:27:24,000 as a as a Hindu who belongs to a certain caste or a certain region or a Muslim who belongs to a certain community who begin to read as an Indian. 221 00:27:24,000 --> 00:27:35,070 Mm hmm. And and this allows this category to be posited as a nationalistic category on the political level. 222 00:27:35,070 --> 00:27:42,630 But on another level, it allows for an engagement with the culture of those who might be politically opposed to because it 223 00:27:42,630 --> 00:27:52,240 it is the insertion of a certain category of humanism into that whole whole province of of being. 224 00:27:52,240 --> 00:27:56,310 And I think that that isn't recognised enough. 225 00:27:56,310 --> 00:28:03,630 You know, the the place the modulation called Indianness, 226 00:28:03,630 --> 00:28:12,330 the place it has in this narrative of humanism and what then it allows in terms of cross-cultural 227 00:28:12,330 --> 00:28:22,680 engagement that might often be at odds with or not logically related to one's political position. 228 00:28:22,680 --> 00:28:25,800 Mm hmm. And that and then going on from there, 229 00:28:25,800 --> 00:28:38,200 you can see that affinities come about in that category to do with the politics of culture and as they do with me, 230 00:28:38,200 --> 00:28:43,140 and they play themselves out in different ways. 231 00:28:43,140 --> 00:28:50,430 Um, so that's that's kind of one thing that I wanted to point out. 232 00:28:50,430 --> 00:28:54,810 The other thing I wanted to point out is, again, I mean, why over here? 233 00:28:54,810 --> 00:29:05,280 I'm partly speaking about, um, this realm of of culture, of artistic freedom, 234 00:29:05,280 --> 00:29:13,470 of creative freedom is because that's the first people began to talk about culture, 235 00:29:13,470 --> 00:29:21,120 Togo, for instance, in that particular way, also having to position themselves against various things. 236 00:29:21,120 --> 00:29:28,620 But what's uppermost on their mind in terms of what the positioning themselves against 237 00:29:28,620 --> 00:29:35,190 or in distinction to is not actually the culture or the person of the coloniser. 238 00:29:35,190 --> 00:29:40,560 It's a particular kind of historical archivist. I mean, he has great respect for them. 239 00:29:40,560 --> 00:29:47,100 Mm hmm. But he's saying his his cultural practise and let's say the engagement he has, for instance, 240 00:29:47,100 --> 00:29:55,470 with nursery Bengali nursery rhymes is in distinction to the engagement the historical archivist collecting those nursery rhymes has. 241 00:29:55,470 --> 00:30:02,940 Mm hmm. And so so, um. So he's he's throughout his life, right. 242 00:30:02,940 --> 00:30:11,730 Till two weeks before his death, he had a problem with the historicism and as you call it, 243 00:30:11,730 --> 00:30:22,140 pedantic tendencies of some of the intelligentsia in Bengal around him. 244 00:30:22,140 --> 00:30:32,610 Mm hmm. And against that, he had to kind of, um, define a realm of freedom. 245 00:30:32,610 --> 00:30:36,060 The realm of freedom was important to him because, again, 246 00:30:36,060 --> 00:30:46,350 he was not just a romantic artist who spontaneously wanted to just be gambling in the kind of world of his creativity. 247 00:30:46,350 --> 00:30:52,960 But because he was he was a cross-cultural particular. 248 00:30:52,960 --> 00:31:01,950 Mm. He was a hoarder of various things from his own culture, from low from low culture and popular culture, high culture. 249 00:31:01,950 --> 00:31:13,550 This is this is dance music. It's there in. The autobiography is written by people in his family as to how they used to hoard stuff, 250 00:31:13,550 --> 00:31:16,280 you know, overheard stuff, and this is not a new thing, I'm here. 251 00:31:16,280 --> 00:31:23,390 Kunzru in the 13th, 12th, 13th century, whenever a country with the exact date that is holding, I mean, 252 00:31:23,390 --> 00:31:29,810 he's one of the first kind of intellectuals that we still remember and creative people in India, 253 00:31:29,810 --> 00:31:35,270 really somebody who is a counterpart of Tagore, who is also holding. 254 00:31:35,270 --> 00:31:45,080 So no, but to be able to do that kind of playful reaching across according to certain affinities, 255 00:31:45,080 --> 00:31:51,440 which it is up to the critics to find out that the tendency and that and the direction of those affinities. 256 00:31:51,440 --> 00:31:54,740 To do that, you have to reserve for yourself a domain of freedom. 257 00:31:54,740 --> 00:32:04,370 You have to fight for the domain of freedom, which cannot be curtailed by a certain understanding of history or a certain interpretation of history. 258 00:32:04,370 --> 00:32:11,240 And I think that is what is struggling to do. I'm not comparing myself to go, but I would say that many of us share, 259 00:32:11,240 --> 00:32:24,470 at least in India and maybe in other parts of the world, the necessity of of insisting on a domain of freedom and play, 260 00:32:24,470 --> 00:32:41,840 because many of us are engaging across the board in cross-cultural kind of bricolage or cross-fertilisation or affinities of all of all kinds. 261 00:32:41,840 --> 00:32:46,820 And the narratives of those are not the narratives of the historian. 262 00:32:46,820 --> 00:32:52,400 And and and if one is talking about this space. 263 00:32:52,400 --> 00:32:56,360 Positioning oneself against those those narratives, 264 00:32:56,360 --> 00:33:04,810 as well as the present day globalised versions of those kind of premade narratives which are inherited by, 265 00:33:04,810 --> 00:33:12,260 say, marketing people or people who want to think of Indian writing in a particular way, let's just take one example. 266 00:33:12,260 --> 00:33:20,420 I mean, they, too, are inheriting certain premade narratives or creating what looks like a premade narrative. 267 00:33:20,420 --> 00:33:31,400 And it's it's always to find that because one's survival as an artist depends upon this, 268 00:33:31,400 --> 00:33:41,150 this kind of across the board borrowing and and movement that one argues for this realm called culture to the realm of freedom. 269 00:33:41,150 --> 00:33:46,160 And maybe just to add one thing there, because you've mentioned Tagore's, 270 00:33:46,160 --> 00:33:51,770 that would be the next bit I wanted to read actually does come from some comments you made on the which is perfectly down to that. 271 00:33:51,770 --> 00:33:57,500 But but in a sense, maybe we should also just clarify clarify also what you mean when you use the word like play. 272 00:33:57,500 --> 00:34:04,110 You're not using it just in the sense of nonserious playfulness, but also a kind of looseness of play in the system. 273 00:34:04,110 --> 00:34:06,110 So where the where certain, again, 274 00:34:06,110 --> 00:34:13,650 sort of official versions or the historical version or the political version or something will maybe not necessarily allow for that looseness? 275 00:34:13,650 --> 00:34:21,590 Yeah. So there's a play in that in that sense, as well as players, even sort of testing notions of what might be deemed to be serious or. 276 00:34:21,590 --> 00:34:30,260 Yeah. Or comic. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's an it's a kind of aesthetic play which but which also in the interests 277 00:34:30,260 --> 00:34:36,710 of delight but which also challenges premade cultural notions about things, 278 00:34:36,710 --> 00:34:42,030 which is why it goes beyond things that are wonderful. 279 00:34:42,030 --> 00:34:49,970 I mean things like Bakhtin might have said and others because those get some appropriated yet another premade kind of narrative. 280 00:34:49,970 --> 00:34:59,570 Yeah. Packaged hybridity, that sort of thing. I mean, that does actually lead us to the next passage I've chosen, which actually in some ways. 281 00:34:59,570 --> 00:35:03,470 Well, it's partly because it's useful if you've just been talking about Tagore, 282 00:35:03,470 --> 00:35:08,450 but it's also it touches on the whole question of what you're talking about and what are you trying to 283 00:35:08,450 --> 00:35:15,500 address with this notion of the cross-cultural that that sort of curiosity and openness to interconnection, 284 00:35:15,500 --> 00:35:21,350 intercultural connexion, that it also touches on the notion of translation in all its forms in very in various ways. 285 00:35:21,350 --> 00:35:32,450 And this this passage that comes from the area of your collection of essays on Tagore, which which is to call on Tagore appeared in 2012. 286 00:35:32,450 --> 00:35:39,980 And it's from the the preface that you write, which is talking about, in a sense, the the prompt for this collection of essays. 287 00:35:39,980 --> 00:35:46,880 The moment of all of this was the 150 year anniversary of the Gore's birth. 288 00:35:46,880 --> 00:35:50,600 And so that was the the trigger in many ways. 289 00:35:50,600 --> 00:36:00,620 But it's this particular passage where I've selected where you you talk in particular about Tagore's own translations into English, 290 00:36:00,620 --> 00:36:02,680 and he was translated by others as well, 291 00:36:02,680 --> 00:36:10,160 has been very successfully translated by by others like like Kitakata Eisen and various other people that you mention. 292 00:36:10,160 --> 00:36:18,860 But that there was for to go a wider aspect of translation that was as much of an opportunity for him as it was a problem. 293 00:36:18,860 --> 00:36:21,950 And this is a passage where you where you touch on that. 294 00:36:21,950 --> 00:36:30,300 And so I wonder if we could use that as a precursor to talking about some questions of translation in relation to you in your own work as well. 295 00:36:30,300 --> 00:36:34,700 OK, I read that passage to goslings. 296 00:36:34,700 --> 00:36:43,790 I'll start again. Togo's English version of the Gitanjali for which he got the Nobel Prise in 1913 is what Mother Teresa once was to Calcutta, 297 00:36:43,790 --> 00:36:51,860 the royal family to England and Ben Kingsley to Gandhi, a tantalising mirage that obstructs the view of what's behind it. 298 00:36:51,860 --> 00:37:02,660 And the Tagore, an abstraction not just from the Gitanjali but from a variety of translations he did, is remarkably handy and will not go away. 299 00:37:02,660 --> 00:37:10,370 Rest belongs to the work as the eyelids to the eyes plucked out of the air, thus their ludicrus. 300 00:37:10,370 --> 00:37:20,120 And one can't think how that original would be better. But poetry that possesses a high degree of abstraction is particularly hard to translate, 301 00:37:20,120 --> 00:37:25,160 especially some would add to a language attuned to empiricism like English. 302 00:37:25,160 --> 00:37:28,970 For instance, what do we make of these are? 303 00:37:28,970 --> 00:37:37,430 And around this centre the rows of onlooking blooms and blossoms with nothing of language 304 00:37:37,430 --> 00:37:45,080 but a beating in the sky from so precious a place yet to future burst will rise. 305 00:37:45,080 --> 00:37:50,870 All my rapt verse, my call mock me. Not not for the bards of the past. 306 00:37:50,870 --> 00:38:01,970 Not in. OK, them have launched you forthe. I said many things to him for whatever poets think and sing is mostly the angels 307 00:38:01,970 --> 00:38:12,890 and his all words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind. 308 00:38:12,890 --> 00:38:17,720 The first is from Rilke, the second from the third isn't a translation at all, 309 00:38:17,720 --> 00:38:24,860 but is from Whitman, the fourth is from in, the fifth from the charlatan Khalil Gibran. 310 00:38:24,860 --> 00:38:29,330 It's branes, ingratiating, proffering of wisdom that gives him away. 311 00:38:29,330 --> 00:38:38,270 But the others don't come across too well either. Indeed, Malama, whom every student of literature knows of not just as a major French poet, 312 00:38:38,270 --> 00:38:43,760 but as a crucial figure in the history of modernism, is a bit of a disaster in English. 313 00:38:43,760 --> 00:38:51,080 Yet in contrast to Tagore, there's no fundamental debate about him because we take the French and modernist canons on trust, 314 00:38:51,080 --> 00:38:57,030 and the Anglophone critics who made up their mind about him were multilingual. 315 00:38:57,030 --> 00:39:08,930 Thanks very much. So in a sense, this this does point to some of the the difficulties of what what might be otherwise sound like 316 00:39:08,930 --> 00:39:13,970 a rather a happy world of cross-fertilisation and mixing that we've been talking about before. 317 00:39:13,970 --> 00:39:20,000 It's something that we want to see an exclusively positive terms and something that's reasonably easy to achieve. 318 00:39:20,000 --> 00:39:26,930 But in a sense, what you talking about in this passage are some of the real pitfalls of those moments of translation. 319 00:39:26,930 --> 00:39:33,220 And in Tagore's case, as you talk about in the in the in a bit before this passage that you've just read about, of course, 320 00:39:33,220 --> 00:39:37,130 the biggest difficulty and in some ways the trigger for this preface that you wrote 321 00:39:37,130 --> 00:39:43,430 is that people in Britain particularly writing about the anniversary and saying, 322 00:39:43,430 --> 00:39:47,600 you know who who reads Tagore now? Why read to go now? 323 00:39:47,600 --> 00:39:58,430 And it's partly because, you know, he's just now associated with this kind of fixed image of the the wheel on Easterns Sage here and with Gitanjali. 324 00:39:58,430 --> 00:40:04,830 And it's abstractions and it's it's a weird sort of metaphysical romanticism. 325 00:40:04,830 --> 00:40:07,550 Yeah. It's he's got sort of frozen in that image. 326 00:40:07,550 --> 00:40:15,630 And so that's that's itself itself part of the problem of translation where he gets he got packaged in that way. 327 00:40:15,630 --> 00:40:23,300 Yeah. And a lot of what you say about to go is actually trying to free him from from that that version, which was of course, 328 00:40:23,300 --> 00:40:27,440 created the beginning of 20th century with the associate, with Yates', the Nobel Prise and all of that. 329 00:40:27,440 --> 00:40:31,070 But I wonder if you could just maybe talk about both those things, 330 00:40:31,070 --> 00:40:35,600 in particular the importance of Tagore for your work and that particular problem for the world, 331 00:40:35,600 --> 00:40:42,800 but also more generally about that issue of, if you like, the pitfalls or the dangers of not so much. 332 00:40:42,800 --> 00:40:44,450 It's not just linguistic translation, 333 00:40:44,450 --> 00:40:51,230 but there's a kind of a concept of cultural translation which which can also be a force that you have to reckon with. 334 00:40:51,230 --> 00:40:56,720 Hmm. Well, you know, I mean, Tagore is a is a huge problem. 335 00:40:56,720 --> 00:41:02,990 I mean, I have tried to address this whole problem of Tagore, 336 00:41:02,990 --> 00:41:11,750 partly because he was forced on my throat as I was kind of growing up and and I'm a Bengali. 337 00:41:11,750 --> 00:41:21,110 So he was all around me. He was in me as well. But but but then I began to make my own discoveries of travel. 338 00:41:21,110 --> 00:41:29,210 But, you know, he is. An extremely interesting figure, and that's one of the reasons why I keep writing about it, 339 00:41:29,210 --> 00:41:35,630 but also because I keep writing about him, because he is a problematic figure in it and is at odds. 340 00:41:35,630 --> 00:41:42,540 I mean, he's not necessarily more important to me, let's say, than some other poet whom I might have equal regard for. 341 00:41:42,540 --> 00:41:55,420 But I just think that. Some of this as an experiment here is, you know, he's unburdened and even as a songwriter in Bengali, 342 00:41:55,420 --> 00:42:03,130 he is astonishing and all the more astonishing when you think that people, unless they know Bengali, 343 00:42:03,130 --> 00:42:14,500 have no access to that very specific quality of each one of his kind of linguistic turns and his phrases, 344 00:42:14,500 --> 00:42:21,850 that makes him even more interesting and frustrating to go was packaged really than he packaged himself. 345 00:42:21,850 --> 00:42:28,450 And and and and he he simplified when he was translating himself into English, 346 00:42:28,450 --> 00:42:33,610 he simplified himself and later on became kind of aware of the fact that he had done that. 347 00:42:33,610 --> 00:42:37,660 And so he was playing almost, in a sense, 348 00:42:37,660 --> 00:42:49,690 the role of a kind of copyeditor or an editor with a marketing person sort of overseeing what they're doing to see to it that his work, 349 00:42:49,690 --> 00:42:57,170 um, would remain consumable and publish widely in a certain kind of way. 350 00:42:57,170 --> 00:43:05,170 Uh, that that that is that is interesting and that is puzzling and that makes him enigmatic. 351 00:43:05,170 --> 00:43:10,360 Uh, I, I just saw an exhibition about some painters. 352 00:43:10,360 --> 00:43:15,130 He has been to see it introduced into Calcutta in 1922. 353 00:43:15,130 --> 00:43:22,420 And and there are there's some film footage of him visiting various parts of the world at the time, including Europe. 354 00:43:22,420 --> 00:43:30,310 And I suppose the film footage is there to remind us how he became interested in Baja, sprinter's, et cetera, et cetera. 355 00:43:30,310 --> 00:43:35,110 He had been he had been interested in European culture since he was a teenager. 356 00:43:35,110 --> 00:43:46,340 But the film footage shows a man who's kind of hamming it up, you know, and who's really behaving like a like a minister of state. 357 00:43:46,340 --> 00:43:54,160 Um, and. What is what makes him doubly enigmatic is that at the same time, 358 00:43:54,160 --> 00:44:03,810 here is the man who is interested in clay and painters of that kind and is allowing that 359 00:44:03,810 --> 00:44:13,740 to kind of converge into interests of his own as he begins to paint later in life. 360 00:44:13,740 --> 00:44:23,460 Just just the evolution, the very interesting evolution that is going on in the man as a as a writer, 361 00:44:23,460 --> 00:44:32,670 as a musician, as a poet side by side with this invention of this kind of political persona. 362 00:44:32,670 --> 00:44:37,980 Mm hmm. One can't call it anything else. Uh, makes him doubly enigmatic. 363 00:44:37,980 --> 00:44:41,610 If you just sold out, let's say, like like maybe I don't know. 364 00:44:41,610 --> 00:44:43,100 Julian Barnes did not. Maybe not. 365 00:44:43,100 --> 00:44:52,950 And but if you're just plain sold out like some of the successful writers of our time who unless they have something in their trunks or, you know, 366 00:44:52,950 --> 00:44:55,980 on their hard disks, which will prove us wrong, 367 00:44:55,980 --> 00:45:02,220 then it would have been merely puzzling as to why a person who wrote so well towards the beginning puzzling, 368 00:45:02,220 --> 00:45:11,730 but also kind of confirming in a way, why how is it that somebody who wrote such quirky or interesting things to at the beginning of their careers, 369 00:45:11,730 --> 00:45:23,490 turned up writing such conventional stuff later on? Because if it is a kind of, um, it is a kind of temptation to market, you are your own successes. 370 00:45:23,490 --> 00:45:30,980 But to go for the creation of the success, first of all, which was in the Western world, which was anyway a kind of, 371 00:45:30,980 --> 00:45:40,560 well, misled, maybe even maybe the strategic act and then the continual sort of rehearsal of that. 372 00:45:40,560 --> 00:45:49,290 Going side by side with this extremely intelligent man, evolving, questioning himself, questioning others. 373 00:45:49,290 --> 00:45:57,300 That makes for some I mean, something quite unprecedented, which is why I've kind of. 374 00:45:57,300 --> 00:46:04,320 Off the cuff, as it were, returned to her time and again, there were two questions and the other one. 375 00:46:04,320 --> 00:46:11,820 Well, it was it was I mean, actually in many ways that I was just thinking of what are you what you're talking about to go there. 376 00:46:11,820 --> 00:46:17,010 It's it's almost as if he's he's he's kind of ripe material for this little story. 377 00:46:17,010 --> 00:46:22,500 Boca's and, you know, there's this kind of pursuing this figure of to go around. 378 00:46:22,500 --> 00:46:27,420 But but, you know, in a way that the book has had has had absolutely no time to go. 379 00:46:27,420 --> 00:46:33,210 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But maybe, maybe actually we can pick up on that. 380 00:46:33,210 --> 00:46:38,220 There was a specific question about to go that I asked, but there was a more general question about cultural translation. 381 00:46:38,220 --> 00:46:46,770 But maybe we can, we can park that one for now and move on to the next section because actually this does touch on that that that 382 00:46:46,770 --> 00:46:55,950 preoccupation in your own practise and this and this is more to your musical career and what you've done with that. 383 00:46:55,950 --> 00:46:59,820 And so what I thought I would just do is play a very short extract from towards the 384 00:46:59,820 --> 00:47:05,520 beginning of the piece called the Lailah Rift Study from your from your first album, 385 00:47:05,520 --> 00:47:10,290 which is the not fusion album from 2007. 386 00:47:10,290 --> 00:47:16,890 Just so that we can sort of get a sense of of how you everything that you've been talking about in terms of linkages, 387 00:47:16,890 --> 00:47:25,200 cross-fertilisation, those kinds of exchanges, has also been something that you've developed in your music. 388 00:47:25,200 --> 00:47:31,170 And if we could maybe just sort of play that extract and then talk about where that's where 389 00:47:31,170 --> 00:47:36,630 that's come from and where do you think it's going as the last item to try to discuss. 390 00:47:36,630 --> 00:47:43,220 So this is the it's just an extract from the beginning of the label related to the mother 391 00:47:43,220 --> 00:47:52,860 that I need more than anything other than any other beside my mother than any other mom. 392 00:47:52,860 --> 00:47:59,120 And I need to go get a go get a mammogram. The mother to have my. 393 00:47:59,120 --> 00:48:12,660 Hello, and then am a goody goody goody Muggeridge chided my mother and the. 394 00:48:12,660 --> 00:49:09,290 My and my mother, the mother of the goddess mother, dominating the window and oh, my goodness, my God, Mother. 395 00:49:09,290 --> 00:49:15,770 So just to use that as our last piece, I mean, you pointedly called that first album, you know, this is not fusion. 396 00:49:15,770 --> 00:49:25,100 So this is kind of Rene Magritte style of of title and music, because, of course, just listening to that hearing, 397 00:49:25,100 --> 00:49:36,650 the moving from the rock to the into into Eric Clapton, everybody, of course, will immediately think of Fusion and and so on and so forth. 398 00:49:36,650 --> 00:49:44,050 But you pointedly called it not fusion trying to prevent that. And I just wanted one of the things when when that album first came out and it 399 00:49:44,050 --> 00:49:48,680 just listening to it and thinking about what you would you were doing with it. 400 00:49:48,680 --> 00:49:55,580 I had I had my own idea in my own mind was that it's as if you were saying that fusion music, 401 00:49:55,580 --> 00:50:02,030 you know, the kind of thing that we associate with, say, Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo, 402 00:50:02,030 --> 00:50:05,900 those kinds of things of the 80s, of the 70s, 80s and 90s, 403 00:50:05,900 --> 00:50:12,470 that sort of fusion fusion music was the kind of musical soundtrack to the era of multiculturalism. 404 00:50:12,470 --> 00:50:23,270 Um, and it seemed to me that what you were trying to do by going calling is not fusion and trying constantly to highlight that it's in various ways, 405 00:50:23,270 --> 00:50:25,490 not only in terms of who your members of your band were, 406 00:50:25,490 --> 00:50:31,370 but also what you were doing musically was different to to the kind of fusion music of multiculturalism. 407 00:50:31,370 --> 00:50:38,690 It also seemed to be saying we needed to move beyond the terms of reference set by the multicultural debate as the only 408 00:50:38,690 --> 00:50:44,840 way of understanding what you've been talking about throughout this discussion of cross-cultural connexions and linkages, 409 00:50:44,840 --> 00:50:47,120 that there's other ways of understanding and thinking about that. 410 00:50:47,120 --> 00:50:52,850 Yeah, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that sense of the broader cultural background. 411 00:50:52,850 --> 00:50:56,500 But in but also, of course, what you were doing specifically in musical terms. 412 00:50:56,500 --> 00:51:06,920 Yeah, well, as a kind of musician, I have had a life which consists of a series of kind of deaths and births, you know, 413 00:51:06,920 --> 00:51:16,550 so my first incarnation was as a guitarist and singer of other people's songs, and I tried to become a singer songwriter in the Canadian mould. 414 00:51:16,550 --> 00:51:21,290 And then I, you know, got drawn towards Indian classical music. 415 00:51:21,290 --> 00:51:32,630 And that's what took up most of my time as a practising musician in terms of practising, literally practising, you know, during the day. 416 00:51:32,630 --> 00:51:48,380 And and and then, you know, I started this project in 2004 because after having lived in England for 16 years and having returned to India in 1999, 417 00:51:48,380 --> 00:51:57,350 I began to actually listen to my old Western popular music records, which I had stopped listening to during the time I was a classical musician. 418 00:51:57,350 --> 00:52:01,010 So we are talking about different selves, different decisions, but also different selves. 419 00:52:01,010 --> 00:52:09,020 Over here. One comes to inhabit and one in. When you inhabit those cells, you don't think the other self will ever return. 420 00:52:09,020 --> 00:52:14,870 But sometimes the older self returns in unexpected ways. 421 00:52:14,870 --> 00:52:23,930 And so around 2004, I had begun to listen to to Western popular music. 422 00:52:23,930 --> 00:52:32,480 And I listen to Jimi Hendrix listening to him playing the blues and hearing kind of echoes of a pentatonic ragas, five, not ragas. 423 00:52:32,480 --> 00:52:38,210 And what you're singing. And it's around that time that one morning as a singing practising rogatory that 424 00:52:38,210 --> 00:52:44,180 I heard the riff to Clapton's Layla in some of the notes that he was singing. 425 00:52:44,180 --> 00:52:55,260 Now, why? I think it was my wife who suggested just call it not fusion, because I was saying this is not fusion, so why don't you call the album? 426 00:52:55,260 --> 00:53:02,880 This is not fusion. She said so I think the reason I was saying that it's not fusion is firstly, 427 00:53:02,880 --> 00:53:13,300 I was distinguishing it from what Indian musicians call fusion, which is that's a bit of raga with bass guitar and drums. 428 00:53:13,300 --> 00:53:18,370 In in the background, and there are so many kind of reasons, 429 00:53:18,370 --> 00:53:25,930 technical musical reasons as to why it is that you also wouldn't in Indian fusion music hear something like this, 430 00:53:25,930 --> 00:53:30,970 you know, a quotation from the Derek and the from Derek and the Dominos. 431 00:53:30,970 --> 00:53:34,570 So on on just on that kind of obvious level. 432 00:53:34,570 --> 00:53:38,530 It's not fusion. It is as it is understood there. But secondly, 433 00:53:38,530 --> 00:53:51,430 I thought it wasn't fusion because it was I didn't kind of it didn't subscribe to adhere to the kind of parameters 434 00:53:51,430 --> 00:54:02,830 within which Indian fusion existed and still exists to a certain extent since the days of Shakti and John McGlocklin, 435 00:54:02,830 --> 00:54:13,180 and which is basically that you have Indian classical musicians on one side and you have a Western jazz musician on the other, 436 00:54:13,180 --> 00:54:25,150 and they come together and Indian classical music tradition is Okkult and difficult and somehow spiritually renovating for the, 437 00:54:25,150 --> 00:54:30,370 uh, for the jazz musician who's a modern the modern meets the immemorial. 438 00:54:30,370 --> 00:54:37,960 And and then this fusion music happens in which somehow, you know, the immemorial remains immemorial. 439 00:54:37,960 --> 00:54:42,040 The modern remains modern, but they kind of get mixed up. 440 00:54:42,040 --> 00:54:47,020 And in my case, I didn't have these two categories. 441 00:54:47,020 --> 00:54:51,700 Uh, I was certainly not going to play the part of the immemorial Indian musician. 442 00:54:51,700 --> 00:54:57,520 Mm hmm. Um, I was also not going to pretend to be a Western musician, as I might have been. 443 00:54:57,520 --> 00:55:07,750 I was 16. Mm hmm. But, uh, but those were both those kind of not not only those inheritances and musical traditions, but, you know, 444 00:55:07,750 --> 00:55:21,560 both those ways of listening and thinking about music were coming together in me as the story changed to Lailah in those in those notes. 445 00:55:21,560 --> 00:55:31,760 And and so, you know. What I suppose what I was exploring. 446 00:55:31,760 --> 00:55:42,070 Was not just an overlap, but certain accidents up of consciousness, which are intrinsic intrinsic to being. 447 00:55:42,070 --> 00:55:52,870 Who we are now, who Indians are now, and maybe other people from other parts of the world, as long as they're alert to those kind of convergences. 448 00:55:52,870 --> 00:56:00,490 Uh, as long as they don't all go to India pretending, let's just take an exam pretending they're Western. 449 00:56:00,490 --> 00:56:04,930 Mm hmm. So that's that's what I was exploring. 450 00:56:04,930 --> 00:56:10,330 And that's why I didn't go quite far. That's one reason why I didn't fall into the fusion category. 451 00:56:10,330 --> 00:56:19,570 Mm hmm. Yeah. And this I mean, in a sense, I was just alerted to this one passage from from the Immortal The Immortals here, 452 00:56:19,570 --> 00:56:24,940 which is your 2009 novel, which is a lot about, uh, about these issues of music. 453 00:56:24,940 --> 00:56:25,660 It touches on that. 454 00:56:25,660 --> 00:56:34,960 And this is this one passage where you're talking about the key young male, male male figure, the central character in Mulya and you, 455 00:56:34,960 --> 00:56:42,520 the narrating voices here as he began to shed the meanings he'd grown up with, he bizarrely assigned new ones. 456 00:56:42,520 --> 00:56:48,670 He felt almost belligerently in love with an idea to do with an immemorial sense of his country. 457 00:56:48,670 --> 00:56:57,970 And music was indispensable to it. The raga contained the land within it, its seasons, its times of day, its birdcall, its clouds and heat. 458 00:56:57,970 --> 00:57:03,730 It gave him an ideal, magical sense of the country. And then this is the line. 459 00:57:03,730 --> 00:57:08,170 The line I can see that I don't want to read this autobiographically, 460 00:57:08,170 --> 00:57:14,950 but I can see that connecting to a certain phase of your own relationship to this music and and of course, also a cultural narrative about this music. 461 00:57:14,950 --> 00:57:21,670 Much bigger Cultana. But then, you know, the the Narrating voice drops this one particular key line, 462 00:57:21,670 --> 00:57:25,360 which seems to me to pick up on a whole series of things that we've been talking about since. 463 00:57:25,360 --> 00:57:33,410 Yes. This magical sense of the country immemorial, etc. It was a fiction he fell in love with. 464 00:57:33,410 --> 00:57:38,240 It was a fiction he fell in love, having a subscribe to the fiction. 465 00:57:38,240 --> 00:57:48,440 Everything else was a corruption or aberration. So it's it's just touching on that notion of a fiction of authenticity, which is where, 466 00:57:48,440 --> 00:57:52,880 in a sense, you own your own wariness about claiming one thing is the authentic. 467 00:57:52,880 --> 00:57:57,740 And another thing is not that maybe the debate has now got beyond that. 468 00:57:57,740 --> 00:58:03,240 Yeah, just going back to the way I sort of. 469 00:58:03,240 --> 00:58:11,250 How that fiction became so real to me, going back to that and trying to explore it through through through proper fiction, 470 00:58:11,250 --> 00:58:18,330 through the novel and then realising later when I began to listen to, let's say, 471 00:58:18,330 --> 00:58:22,920 pop music that I might have heard in the 70s when I began to listen to it again, 472 00:58:22,920 --> 00:58:31,860 just out of curiosity in the 2000s, thinking how much more actually integral to the Bombay landscape, 473 00:58:31,860 --> 00:58:40,140 these pieces of music were then the kind of ragas I thought they were part of that that landscape or maybe both are true. 474 00:58:40,140 --> 00:58:46,750 But but, uh. But the experience of. 475 00:58:46,750 --> 00:58:56,630 Of things makes you revise not just your notions of authenticity, but, you know, I mean. 476 00:58:56,630 --> 00:59:00,620 The fact that you're caught within meanings that are always being made. 477 00:59:00,620 --> 00:59:08,180 Mm hmm. You know, uh. And yeah, um. 478 00:59:08,180 --> 00:59:16,160 So, yeah, I think I think that's also something that I'm trying to, in a sense, enact and dramatise through the music. 479 00:59:16,160 --> 00:59:24,080 I think this is one thing that fiction that fusion music can do is actually a stranger from these categories, 480 00:59:24,080 --> 00:59:33,540 you know, and that's that's one of the things that I quite like doing with with my music and. 481 00:59:33,540 --> 00:59:34,950 The whole fusion thing, as you said, 482 00:59:34,950 --> 00:59:46,080 is related to notions that might have to do with multiculturalism of the way we add up communities to to arrive at a 483 00:59:46,080 --> 00:59:56,310 multicultural or something that I kind of have written about in terms of the way we in India understand secularism, 484 00:59:56,310 --> 01:00:06,810 which we say is our own kind of new logos, you know, and is a form of I call it constitutional secularism. 485 01:00:06,810 --> 01:00:15,270 The constitutional secular is how we understand various communities added up come together to create the nation state, 486 01:00:15,270 --> 01:00:21,680 not our understanding of the secular and my understanding of how we are affected by each other's communities or religions or, 487 01:00:21,680 --> 01:00:23,700 you know, ways of life is different. 488 01:00:23,700 --> 01:00:32,880 And the same holds true for internationalism or you know, how we understand, you know, the way cosmopolitans take on board different cultures. 489 01:00:32,880 --> 01:00:47,870 And again, I think, uh, the echoes we find, suddenly we find ourselves confronted with a disorienting rather than, you know, confirming, uh. 490 01:00:47,870 --> 01:01:02,790 And and that's what I've been trying to explore, uh, through the writing and the music, the explore my kind of experience of the disorienting echo, 491 01:01:02,790 --> 01:01:17,130 which then says that it's not enough for people in Calcutta or in Delhi or in Brussels to be making certain kind of assumptions about where they are. 492 01:01:17,130 --> 01:01:23,520 Amit, thanks so much. I think that the phrase disorienting echo is a is a good moment to end. 493 01:01:23,520 --> 01:01:26,744 Thanks very much for doing that. Thank you. Thanks a lot.