Ahmed, thanks very much for agreeing to take part in this discussion and in the series, which I'm doing with various contemporary writers.
For those of you not familiar with your work over the last now over over 20 years,
two decades, you've established a quite considerable reputation in a number of areas.
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.
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,
including your study of D.H. Lawrence, the collection of essays which we'll talk about later.
Clearing a Space, your essays on Tagore. And that's not only your work as a critic, but also as an anthropologist.
You've put together Picador Book of Modern English literature and so on and so on as well.
You've now this year published made your first, I think,
major foray into non-fiction with your book on just called Calcutta came out and came out this year, 2013.
But in addition to all of this, like another one of your heroes going back a long way, like Tagore, you've also,
since around 2004, been experimenting with music in various ways and you now have two albums to your name.
This is not fusion, not fusion from 2007 and found music from 2010.
Along all of this, you know, as if to add more,
you've you've earned various prises and accolades from the Commonwealth writers prise in 1991 for your first work of fiction to 2012.
Last year, the Infosys prise, I think for contemporary literature.
Anyway, I'm extremely grateful to you for making the time to do this.
And as I've been doing in the other discussions in this series,
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.
And in one case, of course, actually, we will just listen to we'll have some music right at the end.
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,
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,
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.
And then finally, the music great. Sounds good.
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.
It came out and it's from Chapter 21 in which we have a the fictional persona at this point walking into East Oxford.
And we just happened to be doing this discussion in Oxford. So I thought it was an opportune piece to start with.
But anyway, if you start off by just reading that opening of the Chapter 21 from Afternoon Raag.
Right. Cowley Road, Iffley Road and St. Clement's small mean Jonte families live here side by side with the Bangladeshis and Pakistanis.
This is the tribe that belong to Dickensian alleys, the Aboriginal community that led its island life,
its daily routines and struggles, and scarcely heard of empire or took part in governance for them.
The supermarkets were built to work in and to shop at not Sainsbury's, but Tesco,
with its long aisles of shopping trolleys, sides of beef and ham, frozen chips,
mango chutney and spinach at tuppence less towards such centres,
they gravitate living in a perpetual present and then walk home to their houses with tiny gardens.
Not for them history, old buildings, literature, but in England of small comfort and marriages, happy or unhappy for them.
Television with endless reruns of EastEnders and Coronation Street showing them their lives and those of their children.
There's a church here in Cowley for they are devout Christians drinking Protestants,
religious, not in a theological, but in a family with rules allocated to the sexes.
The men believing and supporting their football team, the women praying and going out shopping,
all of them seeming to know the words of the Sunday hymns by heart, but blaspheming and cursing God when they feel like it.
Speaking in English, that is hardly spoken in any other part of the world anymore.
With we are proverbs and turns dropped consonants and vowels turning the language like meat inside their mouths.
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.
But it's an obvious way in which this passage can be read.
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
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,
that's a parody of that kind of colonial authority describing the people.
One of the things that alerted me to that in particular is just a description of this obviously being a tribe.
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.
You know, that's a standard, a standard kind of late 19th century description of a certain pastoral idyll.
In some ways it normally is in the West Indies or in parts of Africa or India or whatever.
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.
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,
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,
that are excluded or that are marginalised within certain definitions of culture and in particular official versions of a culture,
whether that's a national culture or an imperial culture or whatever it might be,
official versions or elite versions of that culture, certain figures, voices, things get get forgotten.
So in this case, you know, these are people who have scarcely heard of Empire but might be held responsible
for empire by certain other people and people who are outside of history,
old buildings, literature, that kind of official version of of English culture.
So I just wondered if you could talk a little bit about that that dimension of your of your work
and your interest in those sorts of hidden recesses and forgotten corners of some cultures.
Yeah, well, I suppose one afternoon, I guess my second novel and my first novel, Australian Sublime Address is about arriving in Calcutta,
a young boy arriving in Calcutta encountering a kind of a neighbourhood in a city and a
kind of existence very different from the one he's living in Bombay with afternoon drug.
I suppose I make my first effort to put on record that, um, you know, that that the West is continually different from itself.
And this is something that that people from my part of the world, uh.
Feel or experience, often as little as people from Oxford, England, uh, as are unable to, in a sense,
read India in terms of, let's say, just to narrow down to one thing, letting in terms of class.
So so in in an Indian can an Indian middle class person can read and in another Indian approaching
from a distance in terms of of class background by maybe by the way they look what they're wearing,
that the haircut and the way they walk even and in the way they talk.
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,
in a sense indecipherable to the to the west in that in that way.
And and thereby you, um, in the cultural encounter, you miss a whole evolving narrative that that brings to life the comedy,
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,
but genuinely that this holds true the other way around as well, that we too don't read.
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.
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
abroad and and and we become Indian and and the English or the Australian person,
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.
And I remember mentioning this in a in a in a review of a travel book on India by Robyn Davidson,
the Australian writer who who who was reporting on Agnese during her travels through tribal India and speaking as a Western person.
And I and I was just kind of saying that this is interesting elision here of Hushes, which is an Australian person.
And the specificity of that, what that might mean, someone doesn't kind of come into play at all in the way people,
in the way people are responding to histories, milieus, people,
but also houses and spaces and and and all my work since since afternoon, drugger,
since when I can remember in some unconscious way or another, even in music, is to find echoes of one thing in another.
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.
Involved this process of reading across cultures, reading not as a duty,
but this fissuring which which which makes you think that, hang on, I seem to know this person.
He is he is supposed to be the coloniser or he's supposed to be this or he's supposed to be that.
But I seem to have seen them somewhere at the back of my habitat.
But that doesn't mean that I know this person completely.
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.
So that process began, let's say, with simple things like visits to East Oxford.
Mm hmm. Of of realising England is a foreign country.
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.
But then over globally, over over the period of globalisation,
to continue discovering within what is called the West, especially Europe, newer and newer,
but all but all the also provinces that in all kinds of provincialism, uh,
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.
Also the story of little the migrant, the post-colonial migrant abroad complicates that story, too.
Mm hmm. So when I'm speaking, what can I give you one example from this, uh, global encounter,
that sense of which this is a prefiguring this visit to East Oxfordian afternoon.
So during the during the time of globalisation by, let's say, the early 2000s, I just thought that, you know,
all these questions of milieus, environment, specificities, neighbourhoods were now bessey in the global world.
We needed to think we all become homogenous or become homogenous or we knew we needed to be
thinking about places like airports and multiplexes and redefining what what space was,
what place was. But but then I realised this this too is not completely true.
And and I had a similar experience,
but now inflicted by globalisation to the one I'm describing in afternoon drug where I'm talking about these people who are,
as I say in subsequent paragraphs, the last chain smokers and meat eaters of England.
So I had a similar kind of experience. I was invited by my French translator, along with another Indian writer,
to join her to have pink champagne or whatever and what matters somewhere like that.
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.
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.
And it was kind of glowering at us, but also unsteady on his feet.
So he was a kind of he was a hostile presence, but also a figure of fun.
He would not bring the bill to us.
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.
And we walked out and he passed a comment.
As we came out of the restaurant, I asked Simonne, my translator, what did he say?
And she said he said, I now know who to vote for. And it was 2006.
The elections were coming up, Sarkozy le and they were all in contention.
And and when I heard this, I mean, I the other author, you burst out laughing.
The man was still behind the glass staring at us and thinking back on that experience.
Many things occurred to me.
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.
And I, too, was in the slightly unassailable position of being a global traveller.
I was no longer in the role of the migrant, something that I have played as a student in England.
So visiting a French translator after all. Yeah, so and I was there for the French and the Paris Book Fair.
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.
Who was going to buy Arsala. Uh huh. So the balance of power was changing.
But that is in itself was not as interesting as the fact that I had had this encounter with something that was real.
Something that came from a more visual sense of what France was and something which also proved that neighbourhood and
militia could continue to exist and are our interactions with that could continue to exist in the globalised world.
So so what I'm saying is that the encounters with police, wherever they happen,
whether it's the east or the West, are going to happen in these peculiar ways.
And and they are not going to fall in line with either static ideas of the east or West,
but also static ideas of Migrante or the kind of population they are going to be,
all kinds of people of different points of time who are more or less privileged than you are.
And you mustn't mustn't take for granted the fact that you are either more or less privileged as part of your rhetoric.
And those things are always going to inform the way you become aware of a place.
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
the afternoon raag passage that it's what you you're moving into East Oxford,
the county road, that that all the communities that are there, the version of Englishness that you're getting there and encountering there is,
of course, nothing to do with the official postcard version of Oxford itself.
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.
Brilliant. Thanks very much.
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,
it's actually an essay called Beyond Confidence Rushdie and the Creation Myth of Indian English Writing.
And it's just the last paragraph that I wanted you to maybe read out and have a look at,
partly because it it takes us into another dimension of your work where in a sense,
as you've been saying now this there's so much of your work is against static,
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.
You've had that sort of interest, but at the same time, which, if you like,
expresses a certain wariness about the definition of culture or the concept of culture itself.
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.
And this passage struck me as being a particularly kind of clear and forceful articulation of that.
And I just wondered if you could read that out and then we could maybe.
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.
I mean but yes, I mean, there is this kind of dissatisfaction with a with static ideas of culture.
But but there is also this this defence of culture going on in my work.
So I'm going to read this out now of passages selected.
But the Sanskrit statistician's of antiquity and much later, Philip Sedney writing in the country that would one day colonise India,
conceived of poetry and literature as a realm of radical freedom and autonomy.
This, too, is how the site of literature and culture was delineated in modern India around the middle of the 19th century,
a realm of freedom that presaged and predated political freedom by almost a hundred years.
But artistic and imaginative autonomy differed from the political autonomy
that was to be fought for and which would eventually come in one fundamental
respect that while the latter necessarily entailed a hardening of identity of Indianness and a conflictual relationship with the coloniser,
the former, the realm of imaginative autonomy reserved the right to constantly redefine Indianness,
to have no single exclusive notion of it, and to be related to European culture, not only oppositional but by creative curiosity.
That's why Indian writing in the last 150 years represents not so much a one
dimensional struggle for or embodiment of power as a many sided cosmopolitanism.
It isn't enough today to celebrate Indian writing success after having identified
what its marks of success are as if a whole tradition must only and constantly be
thought of as an activist would be what needs to engage with its long subterranean
history as as hard earned as political freedom itself out of curiosity and openness.
Great. Thank thanks very much. I'm actually, in a way, thinking about and listening to you.
That one of the things that strikes me is interesting, this is you speaking in your voice as a critic,
but it seems also if we go back to Afternoon Raag, if we follow through your fiction in various ways,
it also seems to articulate something of of the kind of testiness you felt with the novel itself as a form,
and particularly the way in which, say, certain versions of the novel.
I mean, obviously certain versions of Rushdie has been associated with not necessarily himself.
It wouldn't necessarily see himself in these terms,
but he's been associated with where the novel has a certain secondary or supplementary relationship to this political project.
In a sense, the one of the key terms and I know you've written about this elsewhere,
but one of the key terms missing from that little passage that you've read is,
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.
I know that's been in the back of your mind. And so the cosmopolitanism is a challenge to that.
I just wondered if you could maybe talk a little bit about how, as a writer of fiction,
you yourself have have tried not simply to articulate this notion of of culture,
but to use your fictional writing as a as a way of articulating that that that refusal to define and settle things,
and in particular, a refusal to define and settle things in terms other than what you may be able
to do through the literary forms that you're experimenting with and trying out.
Hmm. Uh. Try to think about that one, but again, can go back to this passage for a sec.
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.
Um, and but I also remember I tried to address this whole question of what it
might mean or might have meant to suddenly become something called an Indian.
Mm hmm. Uh, in the 19th century and then begin to engage with cultures across the board in a certain kind of way,
which cannot be encompassed by either by the term that is current at the time,
the term native from which the term Indian is subtly different, um, but cannot be, um, encompassed by Indian being a totally nationalistic term.
And it cannot be either also encompassed by, you know,
post-colonial or saidon notions of how a person from a particular kind of culture might be engaging with,
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.
But I remember dwelling on the fact that this this creation of this category, what the genealogy of it, I'm not completely sure.
But the Christians got Indianness or Indian is a very interesting creation.
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.
Uh, so. Just as much as certain other national categories are also actually fundamentally positing themselves as humanistic categories,
uh, Indianness is doing that and that's whether or not we agree with it,
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.
There's no doubt that a kind of modulation has been effected,
which is very important and interesting, and it allows the Indian to do a number of things.
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?
I mean, suddenly at a certain point of time, if you as an Indian, so it's a secular category,
as a humanist academy, you stop reading the Bhagavad Gita or Shakespeare or the Koran or whatever,
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.
Mm hmm. And and this allows this category to be posited as a nationalistic category on the political level.
But on another level, it allows for an engagement with the culture of those who might be politically opposed to because it
it is the insertion of a certain category of humanism into that whole whole province of of being.
And I think that that isn't recognised enough.
You know, the the place the modulation called Indianness,
the place it has in this narrative of humanism and what then it allows in terms of cross-cultural
engagement that might often be at odds with or not logically related to one's political position.
Mm hmm. And that and then going on from there,
you can see that affinities come about in that category to do with the politics of culture and as they do with me,
and they play themselves out in different ways.
Um, so that's that's kind of one thing that I wanted to point out.
The other thing I wanted to point out is, again, I mean, why over here?
I'm partly speaking about, um, this realm of of culture, of artistic freedom,
of creative freedom is because that's the first people began to talk about culture,
Togo, for instance, in that particular way, also having to position themselves against various things.
But what's uppermost on their mind in terms of what the positioning themselves against
or in distinction to is not actually the culture or the person of the coloniser.
It's a particular kind of historical archivist. I mean, he has great respect for them.
Mm hmm. But he's saying his his cultural practise and let's say the engagement he has, for instance,
with nursery Bengali nursery rhymes is in distinction to the engagement the historical archivist collecting those nursery rhymes has.
Mm hmm. And so so, um. So he's he's throughout his life, right.
Till two weeks before his death, he had a problem with the historicism and as you call it,
pedantic tendencies of some of the intelligentsia in Bengal around him.
Mm hmm. And against that, he had to kind of, um, define a realm of freedom.
The realm of freedom was important to him because, again,
he was not just a romantic artist who spontaneously wanted to just be gambling in the kind of world of his creativity.
But because he was he was a cross-cultural particular.
Mm. He was a hoarder of various things from his own culture, from low from low culture and popular culture, high culture.
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,
you know, overheard stuff, and this is not a new thing, I'm here.
Kunzru in the 13th, 12th, 13th century, whenever a country with the exact date that is holding, I mean,
he's one of the first kind of intellectuals that we still remember and creative people in India,
really somebody who is a counterpart of Tagore, who is also holding.
So no, but to be able to do that kind of playful reaching across according to certain affinities,
which it is up to the critics to find out that the tendency and that and the direction of those affinities.
To do that, you have to reserve for yourself a domain of freedom.
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.
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,
at least in India and maybe in other parts of the world, the necessity of of insisting on a domain of freedom and play,
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.
And the narratives of those are not the narratives of the historian.
And and and if one is talking about this space.
Positioning oneself against those those narratives,
as well as the present day globalised versions of those kind of premade narratives which are inherited by,
say, marketing people or people who want to think of Indian writing in a particular way, let's just take one example.
I mean, they, too, are inheriting certain premade narratives or creating what looks like a premade narrative.
And it's it's always to find that because one's survival as an artist depends upon this,
this kind of across the board borrowing and and movement that one argues for this realm called culture to the realm of freedom.
And maybe just to add one thing there, because you've mentioned Tagore's,
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.
But but in a sense, maybe we should also just clarify clarify also what you mean when you use the word like play.
You're not using it just in the sense of nonserious playfulness, but also a kind of looseness of play in the system.
So where the where certain, again,
sort of official versions or the historical version or the political version or something will maybe not necessarily allow for that looseness?
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.
Yeah. Or comic. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's an it's a kind of aesthetic play which but which also in the interests
of delight but which also challenges premade cultural notions about things,
which is why it goes beyond things that are wonderful.
I mean things like Bakhtin might have said and others because those get some appropriated yet another premade kind of narrative.
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.
Well, it's partly because it's useful if you've just been talking about Tagore,
but it's also it touches on the whole question of what you're talking about and what are you trying to
address with this notion of the cross-cultural that that sort of curiosity and openness to interconnection,
intercultural connexion, that it also touches on the notion of translation in all its forms in very in various ways.
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.
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.
The moment of all of this was the 150 year anniversary of the Gore's birth.
And so that was the the trigger in many ways.
But it's this particular passage where I've selected where you you talk in particular about Tagore's own translations into English,
and he was translated by others as well,
has been very successfully translated by by others like like Kitakata Eisen and various other people that you mention.
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.
And this is a passage where you where you touch on that.
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.
OK, I read that passage to goslings.
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,
the royal family to England and Ben Kingsley to Gandhi, a tantalising mirage that obstructs the view of what's behind it.
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.
Rest belongs to the work as the eyelids to the eyes plucked out of the air, thus their ludicrus.
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,
especially some would add to a language attuned to empiricism like English.
For instance, what do we make of these are?
And around this centre the rows of onlooking blooms and blossoms with nothing of language
but a beating in the sky from so precious a place yet to future burst will rise.
All my rapt verse, my call mock me. Not not for the bards of the past.
Not in. OK, them have launched you forthe. I said many things to him for whatever poets think and sing is mostly the angels
and his all words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind.
The first is from Rilke, the second from the third isn't a translation at all,
but is from Whitman, the fourth is from in, the fifth from the charlatan Khalil Gibran.
It's branes, ingratiating, proffering of wisdom that gives him away.
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,
but as a crucial figure in the history of modernism, is a bit of a disaster in English.
Yet in contrast to Tagore, there's no fundamental debate about him because we take the French and modernist canons on trust,
and the Anglophone critics who made up their mind about him were multilingual.
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
a rather a happy world of cross-fertilisation and mixing that we've been talking about before.
It's something that we want to see an exclusively positive terms and something that's reasonably easy to achieve.
But in a sense, what you talking about in this passage are some of the real pitfalls of those moments of translation.
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,
the biggest difficulty and in some ways the trigger for this preface that you wrote
is that people in Britain particularly writing about the anniversary and saying,
you know who who reads Tagore now? Why read to go now?
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.
And it's abstractions and it's it's a weird sort of metaphysical romanticism.
Yeah. It's he's got sort of frozen in that image.
And so that's that's itself itself part of the problem of translation where he gets he got packaged in that way.
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,
created the beginning of 20th century with the associate, with Yates', the Nobel Prise and all of that.
But I wonder if you could just maybe talk about both those things,
in particular the importance of Tagore for your work and that particular problem for the world,
but also more generally about that issue of, if you like, the pitfalls or the dangers of not so much.
It's not just linguistic translation,
but there's a kind of a concept of cultural translation which which can also be a force that you have to reckon with.
Hmm. Well, you know, I mean, Tagore is a is a huge problem.
I mean, I have tried to address this whole problem of Tagore,
partly because he was forced on my throat as I was kind of growing up and and I'm a Bengali.
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.
But, you know, he is. An extremely interesting figure, and that's one of the reasons why I keep writing about it,
but also because I keep writing about him, because he is a problematic figure in it and is at odds.
I mean, he's not necessarily more important to me, let's say, than some other poet whom I might have equal regard for.
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,
he is astonishing and all the more astonishing when you think that people, unless they know Bengali,
have no access to that very specific quality of each one of his kind of linguistic turns and his phrases,
that makes him even more interesting and frustrating to go was packaged really than he packaged himself.
And and and and he he simplified when he was translating himself into English,
he simplified himself and later on became kind of aware of the fact that he had done that.
And so he was playing almost, in a sense,
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,
um, would remain consumable and publish widely in a certain kind of way.
Uh, that that that is that is interesting and that is puzzling and that makes him enigmatic.
Uh, I, I just saw an exhibition about some painters.
He has been to see it introduced into Calcutta in 1922.
And and there are there's some film footage of him visiting various parts of the world at the time, including Europe.
And I suppose the film footage is there to remind us how he became interested in Baja, sprinter's, et cetera, et cetera.
He had been he had been interested in European culture since he was a teenager.
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.
Um, and. What is what makes him doubly enigmatic is that at the same time,
here is the man who is interested in clay and painters of that kind and is allowing that
to kind of converge into interests of his own as he begins to paint later in life.
Just just the evolution, the very interesting evolution that is going on in the man as a as a writer,
as a musician, as a poet side by side with this invention of this kind of political persona.
Mm hmm. One can't call it anything else. Uh, makes him doubly enigmatic.
If you just sold out, let's say, like like maybe I don't know.
Julian Barnes did not. Maybe not.
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,
on their hard disks, which will prove us wrong,
then it would have been merely puzzling as to why a person who wrote so well towards the beginning puzzling,
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,
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.
But to go for the creation of the success, first of all, which was in the Western world, which was anyway a kind of,
well, misled, maybe even maybe the strategic act and then the continual sort of rehearsal of that.
Going side by side with this extremely intelligent man, evolving, questioning himself, questioning others.
That makes for some I mean, something quite unprecedented, which is why I've kind of.
Off the cuff, as it were, returned to her time and again, there were two questions and the other one.
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.
It's it's almost as if he's he's he's kind of ripe material for this little story.
Boca's and, you know, there's this kind of pursuing this figure of to go around.
But but, you know, in a way that the book has had has had absolutely no time to go.
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Yeah. But maybe, maybe actually we can pick up on that.
There was a specific question about to go that I asked, but there was a more general question about cultural translation.
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
preoccupation in your own practise and this and this is more to your musical career and what you've done with that.
And so what I thought I would just do is play a very short extract from towards the
beginning of the piece called the Lailah Rift Study from your from your first album,
which is the not fusion album from 2007.
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,
cross-fertilisation, those kinds of exchanges, has also been something that you've developed in your music.
And if we could maybe just sort of play that extract and then talk about where that's where
that's come from and where do you think it's going as the last item to try to discuss.
So this is the it's just an extract from the beginning of the label related to the mother
that I need more than anything other than any other beside my mother than any other mom.
And I need to go get a go get a mammogram. The mother to have my.
Hello, and then am a goody goody goody Muggeridge chided my mother and the.
My and my mother, the mother of the goddess mother, dominating the window and oh, my goodness, my God, Mother.
So just to use that as our last piece, I mean, you pointedly called that first album, you know, this is not fusion.
So this is kind of Rene Magritte style of of title and music, because, of course, just listening to that hearing,
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.
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
just listening to it and thinking about what you would you were doing with it.
I had I had my own idea in my own mind was that it's as if you were saying that fusion music,
you know, the kind of thing that we associate with, say, Paul Simon and Ladysmith Black Mambazo,
those kinds of things of the 80s, of the 70s, 80s and 90s,
that sort of fusion fusion music was the kind of musical soundtrack to the era of multiculturalism.
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,
not only in terms of who your members of your band were,
but also what you were doing musically was different to to the kind of fusion music of multiculturalism.
It also seemed to be saying we needed to move beyond the terms of reference set by the multicultural debate as the only
way of understanding what you've been talking about throughout this discussion of cross-cultural connexions and linkages,
that there's other ways of understanding and thinking about that.
Yeah, I wonder if you could just talk a little bit about that sense of the broader cultural background.
But in but also, of course, what you were doing specifically in musical terms.
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,
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.
And then I, you know, got drawn towards Indian classical music.
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.
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,
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.
So we are talking about different selves, different decisions, but also different selves.
Over here. One comes to inhabit and one in. When you inhabit those cells, you don't think the other self will ever return.
But sometimes the older self returns in unexpected ways.
And so around 2004, I had begun to listen to to Western popular music.
And I listen to Jimi Hendrix listening to him playing the blues and hearing kind of echoes of a pentatonic ragas, five, not ragas.
And what you're singing. And it's around that time that one morning as a singing practising rogatory that
I heard the riff to Clapton's Layla in some of the notes that he was singing.
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?
This is not fusion. She said so I think the reason I was saying that it's not fusion is firstly,
I was distinguishing it from what Indian musicians call fusion, which is that's a bit of raga with bass guitar and drums.
In in the background, and there are so many kind of reasons,
technical musical reasons as to why it is that you also wouldn't in Indian fusion music hear something like this,
you know, a quotation from the Derek and the from Derek and the Dominos.
So on on just on that kind of obvious level.
It's not fusion. It is as it is understood there. But secondly,
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
within which Indian fusion existed and still exists to a certain extent since the days of Shakti and John McGlocklin,
and which is basically that you have Indian classical musicians on one side and you have a Western jazz musician on the other,
and they come together and Indian classical music tradition is Okkult and difficult and somehow spiritually renovating for the,
uh, for the jazz musician who's a modern the modern meets the immemorial.
And and then this fusion music happens in which somehow, you know, the immemorial remains immemorial.
The modern remains modern, but they kind of get mixed up.
And in my case, I didn't have these two categories.
Uh, I was certainly not going to play the part of the immemorial Indian musician.
Mm hmm. Um, I was also not going to pretend to be a Western musician, as I might have been.
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,
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.
And and so, you know. What I suppose what I was exploring.
Was not just an overlap, but certain accidents up of consciousness, which are intrinsic intrinsic to being.
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.
Uh, as long as they don't all go to India pretending, let's just take an exam pretending they're Western.
Mm hmm. So that's that's what I was exploring.
And that's why I didn't go quite far. That's one reason why I didn't fall into the fusion category.
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,
which is your 2009 novel, which is a lot about, uh, about these issues of music.
It touches on that.
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,
the narrating voices here as he began to shed the meanings he'd grown up with, he bizarrely assigned new ones.
He felt almost belligerently in love with an idea to do with an immemorial sense of his country.
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.
It gave him an ideal, magical sense of the country. And then this is the line.
The line I can see that I don't want to read this autobiographically,
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.
Much bigger Cultana. But then, you know, the the Narrating voice drops this one particular key line,
which seems to me to pick up on a whole series of things that we've been talking about since.
Yes. This magical sense of the country immemorial, etc. It was a fiction he fell in love with.
It was a fiction he fell in love, having a subscribe to the fiction.
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,
in a sense, you own your own wariness about claiming one thing is the authentic.
And another thing is not that maybe the debate has now got beyond that.
Yeah, just going back to the way I sort of.
How that fiction became so real to me, going back to that and trying to explore it through through through proper fiction,
through the novel and then realising later when I began to listen to, let's say,
pop music that I might have heard in the 70s when I began to listen to it again,
just out of curiosity in the 2000s, thinking how much more actually integral to the Bombay landscape,
these pieces of music were then the kind of ragas I thought they were part of that that landscape or maybe both are true.
But but, uh. But the experience of.
Of things makes you revise not just your notions of authenticity, but, you know, I mean.
The fact that you're caught within meanings that are always being made.
Mm hmm. You know, uh. And yeah, um.
So, yeah, I think I think that's also something that I'm trying to, in a sense, enact and dramatise through the music.
I think this is one thing that fiction that fusion music can do is actually a stranger from these categories,
you know, and that's that's one of the things that I quite like doing with with my music and.
The whole fusion thing, as you said,
is related to notions that might have to do with multiculturalism of the way we add up communities to to arrive at a
multicultural or something that I kind of have written about in terms of the way we in India understand secularism,
which we say is our own kind of new logos, you know, and is a form of I call it constitutional secularism.
The constitutional secular is how we understand various communities added up come together to create the nation state,
not our understanding of the secular and my understanding of how we are affected by each other's communities or religions or,
you know, ways of life is different.
And the same holds true for internationalism or you know, how we understand, you know, the way cosmopolitans take on board different cultures.
And again, I think, uh, the echoes we find, suddenly we find ourselves confronted with a disorienting rather than, you know, confirming, uh.
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,
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.
Amit, thanks so much. I think that the phrase disorienting echo is a is a good moment to end.
Thanks very much for doing that. Thank you. Thanks a lot.