Interpretation Ideology And The Loss Of Wonder Ruth Vanita

TITLE: Interpretation, Ideology, and the Loss of Wonder | Talk With Ruth Vanita CHANNEL: Shruti Kohli DATE: 2026-04-21 ---TRANSCRIPT--- If you mean critical theory, if you mean things like deconstructionism, Marxism, queer theory, all of post-colonial theory, all of this, I’d never use any of that. What is most theory doing? Most theory, what it’s doing is teaching the student to be superior feel superior to the author. For instance, my some of my students they read two poems by Wordsworth and they decide he’s patriarchal and this and that and the other and start hitting him over the head. He lived for like over 80 years and wrote so much poetry. Have you read all of it? No. How are you in a position to judge whether he was patriarchal or not and what does patriarchal even mean?

[music] [music] When we read older texts, Mhm. how much of what we see is coming from us rather than the text? Um well, the basic what you see the basic is in the text. The basic things are in the text. If you see stuff that is not in the text at all as sometimes occasionally students do, if you just imagine your own stuff and put it into the text, that is misreading according to me. You can’t just read anything into any text. But um of course, it’s you who are reading the text and so you will notice different things like say I must have read Hamlet I don’t know 75 hundred times, but each time with a great work you notice something new and that depends but it was already in the text it’s not that you are putting in there, but you notice something new and and that what you notice also partly depends on where you are, your age, what you see when you’re 20 is different from what you see when you’re 50. Say if you’re reading King Lear, um it’s about the mistreatment of the older that’s one of its main themes and uh when you haven’t observed that closely and you haven’t certainly haven’t experienced it at 20, you will look you will see some of it, but there’s things you might miss. And when you’re older, then you’ve seen more, you there may be much more that you realize when you’re a parent yourself and so on. So uh there’s that and then of course um it depends on how well you know the language. Uh so there are certain words which have more than one meaning and many words in every language have more than one meaning. Uh and if you it is the say it is the cause it is the cause my soul. Now cause just means the reason to most people and that’s it, but it also has the meaning of this is the cause I’m fighting for. It has that meaning. It has many meanings and not every reader will catch all the meanings or every viewer, but depending on how much depth you have in the particular language, you will catch more of it or less of it. Um so a lot depends on that. And then if you’re studying if you’re not just reading for pleasure or watching for pleasure, but you are studying it, you’re rereading it, you’re studying it, then you will also you can look up some of these words and see their etymology and how they relate to words in other languages and then you’ll have a much more in-depth picture of what is going on. This is true of any text. I’m giving you examples from Shakespeare because his birthday is on the 23rd and I’m giving two plenary lectures on that, but I could give you examples from the Gita which I also teach or from certainly from Urdu poetry. So uh it at the same uh applies to texts in different languages. Can we have some more examples from Gita? Let’s see. Uh in the Gita for example, um the sound of I’ve taught the Gita and I teach it to American students, so uh I’m teaching it in translation. There’s no perfect translation, but I’m teaching it in English translation, but when I that helps me to see the difference between the original and the translation especially when um the language into which you are translating English is very only very distantly related. It is related, but very distantly related to Sanskrit and so there’s a lot of things you can’t translate. For example, when the deepa the Gita mentions a deepa deepa deepak a lamp an oil lamp. Now Indians all know what that is, but in English when you say a lamp, the lamp flickers the mind of a sage is like a lamp that does not flicker in the still air. Now most modern kids even Indians, but most certainly Western kids have only they would think of a table lamp. Then that doesn’t flicker except when the voltage is flickering and that you don’t have in the West very much, right? So now I I can explain the whole thing. This is what a lamp is a Okay, so they can understand it. It’s not that they can’t understand it, but it’s not the immediate perception that most Indians would have who have seen a deepak and seen the lamp flickering in the breeze and all of that. It’s just a minor example. And then there are sound effects in any original poem there are sound effects which cannot be reproduced in translation at all. And without that you get the meaning. So prose for instance when you translate prose a prose essay, you can get the entire meaning. Poetry depends for its effect good poetry not not prose that’s cut up into lines and called poetry as today, but good poetry depends for its effect largely on sound. It’s music basically and that sound you cannot reproduce in in translation. For example, when Arjuna say Krishna says to Arjuna uttishta stand up. So you translate it as stand up. Stand up doesn’t have the harsh consonants of uttishta which is a you know, it tells you something. The difference. So so you can get the meaning the difference between sitting and standing anyone can understand, but you can’t get this sound effect. That’s a very minor example. There many I mean any poetry will have many of these examples. That’s what you lose, yeah. So uh talking of that so the modern critical frameworks, Mhm. do they sometimes illuminate texts? If you mean critical theory, if you mean things like deconstructionism, Marxism, queer theory, all of post-colonial theory, all of this, I never use any of that. I find it and not just not helpful, but actually an obstruction. Uh so [laughter] what Foucault, Derrida, all these people, you know, I find it both for Indian certainly for Indian literature, but even for Western literature. Um and why? Because instead of looking at the thing itself in its context in its uh both its historical context and its universal context, you are bringing a framework from somewhere else and from a late much in most cases from a much later time and imposing it on a text that you know, it doesn’t fit at all. You take post-colonial theory and put it on a 19th century let’s say Bengali text. It doesn’t fit. That’s not So it So what it’s very convenient for students to some extent because they have it’s easy. You’ve got a formula, you just apply the formula and whether the text fits it or not, you stretch the text. You know, there’s this Greek Procrustean bed thing where you stretch the body to fit the bed. That’s what is done. You stretch the body or you cut off part of it to fit the bed. Ignore whatever in the text doesn’t fit your formula and just fit whatever does. Now I don’t use theory at all in any of my work or my teaching and nor do I ask students to read any of it. Um in fact, I don’t read any of it. I’ve read enough to know what it is and to know that I don’t that’s completely I I disagree with much of it and even what I don’t disagree with is all of that jargon is entirely unnecessary. So um I ask the students to read the primary source. And this is I’m talking about undergraduate students, but if you’re talking about a PhD student, that’s a different matter. They can read many things and decide, but for an undergraduate student, I find the pleasure of reading the text and that’s what literature is. If it doesn’t give you pleasure, then according to me and not just me, according to every thinker throughout the ages. If it doesn’t give you pleasure, whether it’s rasa in Indian theory or it’s pleasure in Western theory Western criticism, if it doesn’t give you pleasure, then what is what is what is most theory doing? Most theory, what it’s doing is teaching the student to be superior feel superior to the author. For instance, my some of my students they read two poems by Wordsworth and they decide he’s patriarchal and this and that and the other and start hitting him over the head. He lived for like over 80 years and wrote so much poetry. Have you read all of it? No. How are you in a position to judge whether he was patriarchal or not and what does patriarchal even mean? You know, so very often a woman author is saying pretty much the same thing as a male author is saying. It’s not about what is saying. Most people There are very few new ideas in the world. It’s about how it is said and Wordsworth has a certain particular way of saying it which is different from another poet, right? So that is what I’m interested in and that is what students be would be interested are interested in too when you free them from these shackles of having to look through the lens of some theory or another. Just look through your own eyes and connect with the text and what it tells you about emotion, about life, about death, about everyday experience. If it doesn’t tell you anything about that, then it’s not then it’s not great a great work, you know. So as I said you you’re talking about about that and you are you said about text being imposed. Um is there a reading of a text it could be academic or popular which you strongly disagreed with because it felt imposed rather than discovered? Huge numbers. Huge numbers. Uh [laughter] [gasps] Okay, good example Okay, shall I give you a Shakespeare example again? You know, cuz in King Lear it’s about basically what we would now call ageism and mistreatment and abuse of the elderly old people. This is the father is 80 plus years over 80 and the three daughters he has three daughters and the two older daughters mistreat him, take away all his property and then through ultimately fight with him and threw him out of the house into the storm, right? That’s what the basic story is. But, um now why did these daughters do that? Two of them do that. The third one is a very loving daughter who rescues him and nurses him back from insanity. He goes mad and she nurses him back. So, now why did the two daughters do that? So, we have any number of feminist critics who say that the two daughters do that because he’s patriarchal. Of course, he’s a patriarch. This is written in so written about 400 years ago and set in an even earlier period. Of course, he’s a and he’s a king. So, he is he’s used to having his authority, but that doesn’t mean that that justifies the treatment the way these girls are treating him. But, these there are feminists not all feminist critics not all I don’t want to say everybody’s doing this, but several feminist critics who say that these girls are rebels against patriarchy. So, they are some sort of early feminists who are rebelling against patriarchy. By one of them actually blinds an old man. She and her husband actually blind him. Is this a rebel rebellion against patriarchy? So, not only that then other critics actually imagine that the father must have sexually abused the daughters for which there is they find some some thing in there which they imagine. Nobody in the text says that. If if Shakespeare wanted them to say that, he could easily put a speech into their mouths where they say that, but they don’t. And it’s not as if it could not have been said at that time because other playwrights of the time were writing and Shakespeare himself in other plays were writing about incest and father-daughter all of this. So, it’s not like it was not talked about, but it’s nowhere there. It’s not in the text. Nobody ever refers to it. [laughter] But, because the father curses the daughter and says may you never have a child and when she is mistreating him and so on or if you have a child that the child be ungrateful to you. So, they say that he’s excessive anger shows that the and his use of these reference to her sexuality by saying may you never have a child. This shows that there must have been sexual It doesn’t show any such thing that there must have been sexual abuse and that is what she is that’s why these daughters are behaving the way they are. Then why is the third daughter not doing that? So, the explanation for that is oh, the third daughter is like a submissive wife. She leaves her husband in France. She’s the married in France and she comes to look after her father and she dies with her father. So, she must be okay with this rape or whatever it is. All of this is imagined that imposed on the text. One of the worst examples there are many lesser ones too. Yeah. Okay, so [laughter] there can be there can be a lot of ambiguity, you know, when you’re reading older texts. So, um uh when uh a when there is a text which doesn’t quite settle into a single meaning, what makes you um what what makes you stay with the uncertainty rather than resolve it? There is a famous book by William Empson called Seven Types of Ambiguity, right? And yeah, a lot of poetry literature, but especially poetry fiction does so, but depends on ambiguity like the end of Henry James’ Portrait of a Lady. We don’t It says there was a very straight road, but we don’t know what she what that means and where how where she’s planning to go. Is she planning to go back to her husband or does she have some other idea in mind? We don’t know. Is she planning suicide? It’s open-ended. So, there are there is ambiguity like that and then we have to stay with that ambiguity because we don’t know. We can’t write the ending to a novel. You can write a different novel with about that as many people do with that ending, but as far as the novel itself is concerned, it’s the ending is ambiguous. So, you have no choice but to live with that ambiguity and and what is the poet the writer trying to suggest suggesting that there are different options open to her and what she does we don’t know. And often also in fiction very often, we don’t know all the motives of a person or we know some of the motives, but as in real life, we know some of the motives, but you can never be absolutely sure which motives were more important. If there were several motives, which one was more important and that could change over time too, right? At [snorts] one time the person’s motive may be A the most important motive and after even 15 minutes this another motive could come into being and a lot of writers like have talked about this the the way in which the mind is fluid and our ideas and motives etc. change from moment to moment even suddenly from year to year decade to decade and so on. So, that’s the ambiguity of life which is and which we also find in literature, right? Yeah, so as you say that we have to stay with the ambiguity, um but what do we risk overlooking if we push a text toward a single text or meaning? Right, it can only be done and many critics do this. Many critics who are using all these types of theories do this. That can only be done by ignoring a lot of what the text says. You select what suits your theory and only focus on that while ignoring everything else that the text is saying. For example, to say that all ancient there are so many critics I wrote a book on the epics on the Mahabharata and Mahabharata who will say oh, they are patriarchal. They are totally even some will even say misogynist. They are anti-women. They are you know, that all this thing is that a woman should be a good wife and mother like say Gandhari or somebody. You have to overlook a lot. You select what suits your theory, but you have to overlook a lot. You overlook for example, the many single women characters in the text. One of Sulabha is one I wrote about, but there are others. Shabari is another in Ramayana. There are many single women characters who are very well respected and who yes, they do in the case of Sulabha, she does get into a debate in which the king is prejudiced against her, but she points out his prejudices very very well and she wins the debate with him. So, the text is presenting you with this character. So, you have to overlook and there are debates about this as well in the text. Various characters debate with each other on every possible issue from women to vegetarianism to remarkably modern modern-sounding debates. And you have to overlook a lot of that debate to pretend that the text has a fixed meaning and a fixed conclusion on many issues. It doesn’t. So, on vegetarianism in Mahabharata, there are many characters taking very many positions different extreme positions and in-between positions and there’s no absolute conclusion. Different characters have different views and different conclusions about it. Now, if you want to pretend that no, there is only one thing that the text is saying, then you are reducing the complexity of the text to a simplistic meaning. Uh there must be moments of course, there are moments when in translation when you have to when there are two equally valid meanings, you have to choose between them. What guides that that choice? Yeah, it’s a tricky one. You have to try your best to convey the emotion without departing completely from what the original is saying. You can’t just I don’t like to just make up my own meaning. So, for instance, in this poem I translated by song by Sant Ravidas Ravidas Ab kaise chute Ram naam rat laage, right? Ab Ab kaise chute Ram naam rat laage. Rat laage there is no English equivalent. Memorized and rat rat today that rat laagana has unfortunately become treated as a negative thing. Rat laagana is a bad kind of learning. I don’t agree, but this is what most people have turned rat laagana into. So, if I say I have memorized Ram’s name that neither sounds poetic nor does it [laughter] convey convey what the text is saying which is that Ram’s name has become so inherent in me that it cannot leave me. That’s the idea. So, I made it Rama’s name in my heart and on my tongue. Rat laage means it’s there in me and it is also just there on my tongue. It’s that whole idea of repeating the name of God that is what one is supposed to do one does. So, that’s what that’s what I did. I’ll say something Sona lage Suhaga. Suhaga is borax which is used to make the gold shine. Now, it’s very unpoetic gold and borax, but you can’t Sona lage Suhaga there’s an alliteration there with the S and S and Suhaga means borax, but it also has the meaning of Suhag and where a lot of gold is part of marriage, right? You can’t convey that double meaning in English. So, I couldn’t do that. So, I had to just say you know, you are the gold you are the pearl and the thread borax making gold shine bright. So, I had to say that borax makes the I couldn’t bring in the other meaning of Suhaga and I also couldn’t get that alliteration between borax and gold. You can’t do it. There is no alliteration in English possible. So, you can only do the best that you can. And if I was translating prose, I don’t poetry should not be overburdened with a whole lot of footnotes, but in prose of course, I would give a footnote and explain which I did. The same poem in my epics book when I quoted it, I gave a footnote where I explained the play on the word Suhag the you know, many things about the whole poem. Or even Chakora and Chand moon bird gazing. I made it moon bird gazing at the moon. I didn’t want to say partridge for the Chakora which loses the entire meaning of and Chakora doesn’t have that meaning in English of the bird that is staring at the moon. So, I said moon bird to bring a little bit of it in. And when I’m Just the poem if I’m analyzing it in prose, then I would put a footnote explaining the chakora town connection. But I’m just translating the poem as a poem in my book of poems this is a book of poems my poems and of translations, then I can’t start putting so many footnotes in. So yeah, these are the best you can do, right? How do you negotiate tone in translation? Uh especially when even a slight shift in phrasing can change the way a character or a relationship is perceived. Well, I can only speak for myself here as a translator. In Indian aesthetic theory, the idea is that the the author the reader should be so here there of share of the same heart sharing the same emotions with the poet and the poem is good if it manages to to make that happen, to make the reader feel what that what the poet was feeling. And I think a translator also has to be the same so here there you have to get yourself I have to get myself into the same state of emotion that the poet was in and this poem that I just quoted to you it’s a state of devotion. In in the case of this other poem to me I had can I have a whole that the ghazal which I translated there it is getting into that state of a love that you remember a love affair that you remember and that’s easy for anyone to do. You get into that so uh so what I what once there was between you and me you may recall or not recall that commitment to continuity you may recall or not recall. I’m quite happy with this translation because I managed to get keep the the ghazal rhyme and meter and also to and to keep the relief that you know the words that occur at the end of this end of the end of each line. Um I used recall not remember to keep that vowel yad that long vowel um so yeah and I hope that [snorts] it conveys that sort of nostalgic emotion that the original has, you know, and I kept the internal rhyme as well. I’m the one you thought loyal and true the once who one who once was dear to you the same sad moment I used to be whether you recall or do not recall. You know, so I tried to keep that pungent kind of rhythm that is in the original. Um yeah. Have you ever felt that translating a text made you uh agree with it even less or maybe understand it less comfortably than when you first read it? I only work see I could for instance we were talking about post post-colonial theory and I could I’ve written a little bit about it one essay, but I could easily write a book critiquing it and tearing it apart, but I have decided not to focus whether in translation or in criticism not to focus on text that I don’t agree with and don’t like because I don’t want to be in a negative state of mind, okay, and being. I want to write about and translate text that I love. Otherwise I want Ananda to be the product I want joy to be the effect on me as well as the product for the reader and myself. So um therefore I don’t translate text I don’t agree with. So I’m translating Mahadevi Varma now I’ve translated two of her books one is my family Mera Parivar Penguin published this and this is about her animal companions all her rescued animals like a deer and a squirrel and a very interesting animals a rabbit and a peacock or three peacocks and she calls them her family. Um she was a single woman and she had this huge household of people and animals. So that was one I translated then I translated just now this year the book called Portraits from Memory which is her [snorts] sketches of people mostly low-income people whom she knew throughout her life. HarperCollins brought this one out and now I’m translating Pathke Sathi which is about other poets like Nirala, Tagore, etc. poets she knew and it’s a little book about these poets. So yes, I learn a lot from these translations like from translating the one I’m doing now. I didn’t know so much about the lives of Sumitranandan Pant or Nirala about their personalities that she knew them all personally and so it brings them out and Tagore too. So I learn a lot from them. Does it make me agree less with her? I don’t agree with everything she says all her views. She was a Gandhian I agree with some of it and not all of it certainly all her views, but that’s okay one doesn’t have to agree with everything you know I mean overall there should be I admire her work and her and her I love her wonderful prose style. But I yeah one doesn’t have to agree with everything one can’t agree with the opinions all the opinions of anyone living out there, you know, so yeah. So across centuries of literature what strikes you as unchanged in how people experience relationships? What’s unchanged is what the rasa say those nine emotions which are felt by everyone everywhere at different times in different mixtures and combinations and the everyday experience just the everyday experience there’s a funny line in Shakespeare which is very well observed. It’s a prose line where one man says to another I’m carrying the inventory of your shirts in my head like this one and the other one you have for formal wear. So this I’m summing up this is not Shakespeare’s language, but then it just struck me wow this is absolutely true. Wherever you are your close friends and associates you know all their clothes it’s all in your head and when they wear it you say well I know this [laughter] one and there’s that you know. Now this is not something you consciously try to remember that when you are carrying that inventory. Now this is the sharpness of observation to have noticed a universal experience, you know, this is a very small experience, but if you want to take major experiences like say jealousy when when Othello is so got this fixated on the his nonsensical and imagined infidelity of his wife and in real life when I worked for Manushi this women’s organization that I co-founded for 13 years I worked on and just in everyday life in friends’ lives too I see that to be absolutely true. There are people who just fixate on the idea that that the the other person is being unfaithful. And they have shreds of evidence that are not evidence at all that they have just decided that evidence and you can’t shake that idée fixe in their head. Nobody can and Emilia in in Othello says jealous you can’t give them logic and reason because jealous men will not be answered so. They are jealous for they are jealous. They just are jealous. You can’t give them reasons and say no this was not true this is not what happened. They are not going to be because that they are just are jealous. So that’s he notices the nature of jealousy which is again pretty cross-cultural across time and place, yeah. You just talked about details ordinary details like you know remembering your friends’ clothes and do you think that literature has always paid more attention to the ordinary than we credited for? Absolutely. My book on Urdu poetry it’s called Gender, Sex and the City is all about this and it’s about instead of being about Urdu poetry you know, the kind of Urdu poetry we are used to the ghazals which are all about love and pining for love and all this poetry that I analyze in this book is everyday poetry about women’s everyday lives from the 18th century I’m talking about 18th and early 19th century women’s going for shopping going for picnics going for excursions buying jewelry buying cosmetics buying clothing chatting with their neighbors fighting with their friends all of this with their servants whatever and I wrote this since most people don’t read academic books and I also wrote this novel Memory of Light which is based on that poetry and even quotes and translates some of that poetry and it’s about two women’s relationship with each other love love relation romance with each other and in that are also other people there’s a man and woman also having a romance also based on the poetry of the time. I also translated this book into Hindi as Pariyon Ke Beech um and that was a very interesting translation exercise the only one I’ve done from English to Hindi otherwise my translations have been in the Hindi to English and I love this poetry because I mean I love the other kind of love ghazal too which I just read to you the Momin ghazal which is about love, but I also love this type of poetry which gives you the uh which is about everyday life some of which is different from today and some of which is remarkably the same as today. When I read some of this poetry out into audiences uh they are shocked that it was two centuries ago. It sounds to them like it’s written today that the the Urdu which was called Hindi at the time Hindi means the language of Hind as opposed to Farsi the language of Persia uh it’s everyday language that anybody can understand right now. Jo here’s an example Jo socha khoob sa maine unki dosti ka dhab. Okay, Jo socha khoob sa maine unki dosti ka dhab. I thought a lot about the nature of this friendship, right? Of this friendship with the other person unki now this you can’t do in English because unki can be his or her we don’t know. Unki dosti ka dhab na seedha hai na tedha na tedha hai na ada hai na tedha hai na tedha hai na ada hai. The nature of this friendship is such that it is neither straight nor crooked nor bent nor whatever. So this is an experience we’ve all had when we are thinking about a particular friendship or relationship. What exactly is it? It’s ambiguous. Is it is it is it straightforward? No, it’s kind of crooked. Is it what is it? This person the woman it’s a woman speaker. The poet is male, but the speaker in this poetry is always a woman. It’s called Rekhti poetry. So she’s thinking about the friendship she has with somebody and what is what is going on in this what is the nature of this friendship? Now, so it’s yeah, it’s about um Right. So, it’s about this is an experience, universal experience in a way. So, is the modern reader more drawn towards conflict and rupture and therefore missing out on the smaller, the subtler continuities in text? Yes, there’s always conflict in literature. If there’s no conflict, then there’s no story, right? There’s always conflict in literature, some sort of conflict. But, I think we’ve been bothered and sort of critical theory has and modern ideologies have taught us to look for to impose on the text conflicts which may not be in the text at all, say class conflicts or whatever conflict, gender conflicts, etc. Which may not be there. This poetry, Rekhti poetry, is all about women’s everyday lives and love relationships, mostly with other women. Uh women spend most of their times with women in those days and even today I would say spend a lot of time with your own sex. And so, it’s it’s not about all the the victimhood of being an oppressed wife or mother. Then, the wifehood and motherhood is just not talked about at all. They are mothers and there’s some mention of it. But, it’s not the main focus at all. The poet has decided The poets The many poets have decided to look at it from a different angle. And [laughter] that’s what I tried to do in this novel of mine, a slight angle, where I It’s a quotation a slight angle where you look at life looking at life from a slightly different angle. It The focus doesn’t have to be only It will be on love, romantic love, but not only on that. It can also be on friendships. It can be on sibling relationships. It can be like several of Jane Austen’s novels are like Sense and Sensibility, right? So, the most important relationship in your life may not be with a husband or a wife or a partner. It could be with your mother. It could be with your sister. It could be with your friend. It could be could be with your dog. So, this poetry, the Rekhti poetry I’m talking about and a lot of poetry in all languages, is about all these different types of uh relationships and different types of experiences and events, some of which many of which are conflicted, but not the kinds of conflicts that we might expect. It’s not necessarily gender conflict. It could be as in Othello, but it’s not necessarily that. It’s not necessarily class conflict or race conflict or some something like that. It could be some totally different type of conflict that every And then, it may not have it may not be primarily conflicted even, right? So, you have to the I would say like I my my approach is to trust the text and follow suspend as Coleridge says, suspend disbelief. The first time you’re reading a text, and I always tell my students this, the first time you’re reading a novel or a poem, if you go in with the attitude that you want to destroy it and show how clever you are by you as a how cleverer than Jane Austen [laughter] because you will show how she is classist or how she’s middle class or whatever, you will you won’t enjoy the you won’t enjoy the novel at all and you will it doesn’t matter to the novel. The novel is going to last regardless of you. It is going to matter to you. It’s not going to you’re not going to have the pleasure and you can you’re not going to learn from it. The first time you read it, you should I think the best way is to suspend disbelief and go with the writer, where the writer is taking you into their world and into their way of looking at things. And then later on, later rereadings, you can become you can be critical and take different views of it and so on. Um but yes, to to bring a standard from outside, an ideological standard, whether that standard is Christianity or whether it’s Marxism or whatever it is and try to bash any writer who doesn’t fit that that framework or force them into that framework is I think a mistake. As I said, it doesn’t matter to the work. The work will survive without you. But, it matters for you. Yeah. your slight angle, so I know exactly, you know, where you’re coming from. And the relationships which are not which are not projected as important, but they are on the sides, but they are as important. What is the you know, it makes me just curious to ask you this. What is the literary value of uneventful lives, of relationships that don’t outright present themselves as extraordinary? Well, I can give the example of male-female friendships, which are very often for past decades overlooked because we think, and rightly, that most relationships in the past were between men or between friendships. I’m talking about friendships, not love relationships. So, the most that love relationships were between men and women, but friendships were between men and between women. That’s true. But, there were also male-female friendships and that’s what I In both my novels, I have talked about male-female friendships of different unexpected kinds. Like in a slight angle, there is a Hindu girl who marries a Christian man against the opposition of both families. Now, in a in many novels, this would become the central relationship and all the other things would revolve around it. But, here it isn’t. It is there and I’ve got six narrators. So, two of the narrators are these two this couple. But, there’s another friendship develops between her brother and his sister, who are very unusual people in themselves. She’s a The sister is a Gandhian activist and the brother is a is a guy who’s trying to do something different in his profession, not going to his father’s profession, but do something. Set in the 1920s. So, this is an unusual thing he’s trying to do. He’s also in love with a man. And they form a friendship which becomes an underlying running theme throughout the novel, right? So, there are other romances in the novel, there are other kinds of things, but this friendship is I think is very important and how she gradually She’s one of the narrators, Sheela is her name. She gradually discovers things about him, about Sharad, that she didn’t know that he’s in love with a man. She never figured it out. And she was wondering if he could marry her friend who who kind of likes him. And then, there’s a moment at which she He doesn’t say it, but she sees it in the eyes of the guy who is whom he’s in love with and and she suddenly it’s a flash. It’s a revelation to her. But, you know, the friendship between these two is very useful to helpful to both of them because they can discuss with each other things that they cannot discuss with their siblings or parents or even their everyday normal their other friends, their same-sex friends. They can’t discuss. They discuss with each other. So, that’s what And in the other novel, Memory of Light, also which is set in 18th century Lucknow, also there is there are these friendships between courtesans, the wives who are in the quota, and men who visit the quota, who are regular visitors, some of whom minor characters are actual poets from the time, real life poets of And this is true. It’s based on the prose of that time where these poets say that they learned their language from a lot of their idioms and language from the women they knew, women friends. So, we think that men went to quotas only to have love affairs. They did that as well, of course, or to have sex. But, also there were friendships. There were conversations. There it was a place where men could go and relax in the company of women and have These women were very highly educated and accomplished women. The tawaifs were not sex workers, what you know. They were highly educated women and they could talk about literature, about life, about love in a way these men could talk freely with them in a way they could not talk with the women of their families, who were the only women whom they would otherwise meet. So, even with their wives, they couldn’t, right? So, but with these women, they could have these conversations and you see that in the poetry and that’s what I tried to bring out in the novel as well. Yeah. You’ve moved from criticism to fiction and poetry. Um when you move [snorts] from, let’s say, criticism and to fiction or poetry, does does your relationship with language change? Yes, absolutely, absolutely. Because in criticism, it’s discursive prose. You’re trying to write in a clear I try to write in a very clear and lucid way that anyone who knows the language well can understand it fairly well. You don’t have to be an academic to understand my People might get intimidated or scared of academic books, but my non-fiction is written for the general reader. I want everybody to be even an undergraduate to be able to understand it. So, I write in that way. I don’t use jargon. I don’t use any in terms that people won’t understand. I don’t use any any of that. So, there’s that. But, I’m trying to explain a point or make an argument. In a novel, that’s not what you’re trying to do, right? And so, in a novel, I’m telling a story or a set of stories and uh the language is also figurative. It’s not just discursive describe It’s not just describing something or certainly not arguing anything. But, it is there’s no argument in that sense, but it is trying to create a mood, a setting, an atmosphere, kind of set of characters. It is figurative language and that’s even more heightened in poetry. In poetry, the language is largely figurative, right? It’s not I mean, there is a kind of poetry which is a poetry of statement, but it’s suggestive. The language in poetry is suggestive where you are suggesting something that you are not exactly saying or stating and the reader has to pick up on the suggestion, right? That’s how the language of poetry is different from the language of prose of any kind, right? And also the reader, and this is true of most poetry, the reader has to guess where you’re going with this. Even in a short poem, at the it’s not clear at the start. Whereas in a in a book where you’re making an argument, you state it at the start. You state your main argument at the start and then unpack it. In a poem, it’s kind of the opposite way you often where you kind of like for instance in this poem, it’s called Saris. Your birthday tomorrow, I must go sari shopping. Now, the who the you is, you don’t know. So, that could be and this happens in fiction, too. So, this could be anyone, any woman, right? Um and then goes on to describe and then says, “I leave the tiny flat where we live, the four of us.” Now, who are the four of us? Is it me and a spouse and children? But it actually isn’t. In a and then at a CP corner, two shops face each other. One is clothing. Amid reds, mustards, magentas, I look for the pastels you like. Saris draped over my lap. Cold. Is my mother alive? I think, half awake, calculate. Is it May? No, it’s not. And now I’m chilled through. So, I don’t say that my mother is dead, but I say, “Is my mother alive?” And then alive. And then I say, “I think, is it May?” Now, what does that mean? It means that her birthday was in May. But for you the reader have to perhaps read twice to figure that out. And now I’m chilled through half awake means that I’m waking up from the dream in which I was buying these saris. Which you wouldn’t know when you read from the start that it is a dream at all, right? So, you have you probably have to read this twice and you get to the end, you realize that okay, it was a dream, the mother is dead, and I was dreaming of her birthday which is in May and of buying her sari. But it’s not None of this is stated anyway. You have to sort of gather that by the end. So, is there anything I mean, are there things you would only ever say in a poem and never in an essay? Yes, in an essay a poem lyric very often a poem is autobiographical. It’s or semi-autobiographical. And a critical essay is usually not unless it’s a memoir, right? So, yes, I wouldn’t write about my love relationships in a critical essay, certainly not uh uh in detail. I would I mean, mention in passing if it was a memoir, but not in anything not anywhere else. And uh in the poem, it dwells on emotion. It’s not just telling a story of an actual relationship. It it dwells on emotion, right? Uh and that emotion like in this poem, “Little I call you too much you hold me. Little I know you. Little you’ve told me. Raising your eyes, you pour sadness through me. Sand seeping slowly us to undo me. Two worlds transparent, slender their meeting. Cup running over, reticence reaching. Empty to fullness, endless this measure. Sleepless I write you, invert a beginning.” Now, this this the emotion and the language you can’t say it in prose. You can and this true of any poem. I can try to sum up say the Ode to a Nightingale or Ghalib’s ghazal or something. It can A it’s very hard to translate into English. But if you were even in the original language, you try to explain the meaning of it to the students, you can get something through, but only the poem can say what the poem is saying. You know, you can’t you you it’s not it’s not you can’t explain it away by putting it into prose because prose can’t say what can what is being said in through the poem, yeah. Has the way you read uh changed over the years? Uh have you become more patient or more questioning? I have My way of reading certain things, media for example, history for example, has changed. As I have Earlier you when when you’re young, you’re just uh passive recipient and you take everything that is in print to be true. And it takes some time to realize there was a like for example, I used to read the New York Times every morning for many years. And uh there was a point at which I started noticing that everything they wrote about India and about Hinduism was negative, almost everything, 95%. And I became so irritated by it. After a while, I stopped reading what they wrote about India. And then it occurred to me that if this is what they’re doing with India, why would they be doing anything different with everything else? And now once you get that angle, you start now noticing so many gaps, missing things, selective kind of reporting and and and on on many things both within on America and also on outside other countries. I just stopped [snorts] reading the New York Times altogether. And you realize that you have to I realized that you have to look at different sources and different newspapers. You can’t just read one that takes one angle. If you just read only the New York Times and listen to the NPR, which are very left-leaning vehicles both of them, and lots of people do just that. They just watch CNN, listen to NPR, and read the New York Times. You get only one view of situations. If you read those and you also read something else, say the Wall Street Journal or something else, then you get a somewhat corrected view. You get a view from the other side. And then you can make up your mind, right? That’s the way one should read. And same thing with history that there’s a lot of biases built in to history writing and it takes you time to realize that. You don’t when you’re a student, right? So, yeah. Is there a risk of reading literature too programmatically today? Looking for confirmation rather than surprise. Yeah, that’s what I have I was saying earlier when talking about theory that if you start if you start out with a formula, if you start out let’s say with anything with Marxism, with Christianity, with or with feminism or a certain kind of feminism is a very broad term. But you start out with a certain kind of feminist theory or queer theory and you think that’s the truth somehow that you’ve got hold of the truth with your ideology, post-colonial theory, anything. Anything it could be. And then you start reading every text to see whether it either confirms what you think or it goes against what you think. So, if it confirms what you think, you think it confirms what you think. It might not. Then you like it. And if it doesn’t confirm what you think, then you bash it. And sometimes you’re not sure what what the text is where exactly it to fit it. Then you make it fit into your formula. Right. So, then as you said, you lose surprise and you use lose wonder. You lose wonder and wonder is one of the most enjoyable experiences with art, any art, not just literature, but visual art, too. And if you lose wonder, adbhuta rasa, then you lose a lot. And you’re not also getting what the text may be telling you or showing you. For example, one of my favorite poems is Andrew Marvell’s “Had We But World Enough and Time.” It’s one of the greatest poems I think in English um uh where he is telling his It’s a very old theme. He didn’t invent the theme, but he’s doing something really funny and playful with it. So, it’s an old theme which is seize the day, seize the hour. Comes from ancient Greece and Rome. Like enjoy yourself now, right? Because you will lose your youth and your ability to enjoy. So, that’s what it is. “Had we but world enough and time, this coyness, lady, were no crime.” Now, she doesn’t want to have sex with him and he his beloved. And she says, “Uh you grow old and then you’ll be dead and you’ll be in the grave. The grave’s a fine and private place, but none, I think, do there embrace.” So, that’s the funny witty part of it. He’s showing his wit and it’s just brilliantly done. But my some of my students who had come straight from women’s studies classes and feminist theory said that he is trying to force her to have sex with him. They don’t know the difference between persuasion and force, between seduction and rape. And I asked them, “Is there no difference between seduction and rape?” And they said they seem to think no. That if you’re trying to persuade somebody to be with you, to have sex with you, then that’s equal to rape. Which an adult I’m talking about adults. Which is I think absurd. If you never make a move to anyone, then advance to anyone, then how are you ever going to know if they are interested? Both parties just cannot persuade, cannot make any move, then you’ll be forever in this limbo. So, and they also completely missed the wittiness, the playfulness, the all of that in the poem because they’re just looking for meaning. See, this is when you’re not looking for for wit or for playfulness or anything, but you’re just looking for meaning. What is the meaning? What is he saying? Oh, he’s trying to get her to have sex with him. That’s a bad thing. Therefore, I don’t like the poem. The poem must be patriarchal and misogynist. So, [gasps] also, of course, they didn’t know the whole history of the carpet because these days the way English is all literature is taught, English literature particularly is the only one I can speak for. They are not given history and chronology of English literature, right? So, they are taught one bit of literature from 16th century, one bit of Japanese literature from the 20th century, one bit of Urdu literature from the 19th century. No connection between any of these, no history of any of these languages or literatures. They are stewing in this vacuum. So, they didn’t know that there is a whole tradition of poets going back to the Greeks and the Romans who are talking about who have this theme of enjoy yourself here and now, “Gather your roses while you may.” Kind of enjoy yourself now. So, he didn’t make up this poem. So, they’re assuming that Andrew Marvell, the poet, is an actual man who is actually trying to persuade an actual woman to have sex with him. No, it’s not. It’s a poem on this theme of seize the day, seize the hour, enjoy yourself. It’s a poem. He may not have had an affair at all. It may not be about his life at all. It’s about an imagined love relationship. And the question being, should you have sex now or should you keep waiting and waiting? So, you know, that’s what it is. And the funniest thing you to me was these were American students who are freely having sex, who who don’t believe that they shouldn’t they should wait for sex till marriage. That’s not what they believe. But when it comes to the poem, [laughter] they want to come they revert to the most puritanical values. It’s most interesting. It’s wonderful. So, we we So, we do underestimate the intelligence of older texts by by in a bit to you know, explain it quickly. We do. Absolutely. It’s this view that every day and every way we are we are things are getting better and better. No, they’re not. And when I taught Sappho for example, the ancient Greek poet writing about love relationships with women, I said you know, things haven’t got better since her time. In her time, there’s no protest. She’s writing these poems, but she’s not protesting about anything. She’s not anything strange. None of the people around her are finding it anything strange. She’s just writing about love. Never again in the next 2,000 years could you write the next not 2,000 years. You could for some years after that, but then in the modern period, you couldn’t do this. You had to be hiding it. You had to be changing pronouns. You had to be you know, doing all kinds of things. You couldn’t write openly and cheerfully about this kind of love anymore. So, things are not getting better on every In some ways, they’re getting better and some ways, they’re getting worse and in some way, who knows? They’re going in some different directions. Either either either either we don’t know. Right? So, to imagine that we know everything, we are smarter than Kalidas or than or than Tulsidas and that we can tell them whether we can judge whether they were patriarchal, heterosexist, this, that, or the other because we are so smart and we have all these words and they didn’t is to Yes, you said seriously to underestimate the intelligence of the past, you know, of people in the past. Um Also, you have all these this new American formula, new I mean, 20th century American formula of we have to make the world a better place. I have to make myself a better person. I have to constantly make myself a better person and I have to make the world a better place. So, you have these 18-year-olds who are setting out to go on these foreign trips to Guatemala or to India or whatever to make things better there. As if those people there, even if they are illiterate, they are people with experience, life experience. Somebody in their 50s has life experience. You are going to go and tell him or her how to make their village better? No. That’s not how those people are laughing in your face, but you know, they they want to get whatever money or whatever you can give since you’ve come from a richer country, but they don’t think that you as a 18-year-old know more than they do. So, this idea that our purpose in life is to make the world a better place, which is basically Christian idea recycled in Marxism is I think a huge obstacle to understanding the world, to making yourself the recipient to first understand the world and understand life before trying to sort of bludgeon it into doing what you think is the best thing to be done. Yeah. After a lifetime of reading and writing, what continues to surprise you about literature? Uh As I said, I keep discovering um insight into everyday experience. Um Like I gave you the example of jealousy of hello, but then I was reading a minor Victorian novelist, George Gissing. Uh and uh there’s this novel about an older man who falls in love with a younger woman and the same sort of jealousy, but he he knows that he sort of he wants her to only spend all her time only with him and not with anyone else, not with her friends or her mother or her go to concerts or go to any things in 19th century. And he says, “Why do you need anybody else? If you love me, I love you. I don’t need anybody else than you.” He kneels down and he says, “I adore you and if you love me, you won’t need anybody else. You should be happy just with me. Why do you want to go out to dinner or invite anyone or anything?” And she So, there’s a certain kind of idea of love that’s still today and I why why I notice this is because this happens to people that I know where the spouse kind of tries to make them feel that they should If you really love me, you should just want to spend all your time with me. Why you want Why do you want to meet your friends and your you know, why do you want to spend much time with them? Okay, meet them, but briefly and just with me and you shouldn’t want to meet them alone, for example. So, this we may this we may think is now in modern world would not be there, but it’s very much there. And he has it’s a brilliant little portrait of it in this 19th century novel. So, one thing that surprises me is that kind of insight. And another thing that surprises me with surprised by joy as Wordsworth said is just the lovely language. Like I’m translating Mahadevi Varma and just the beautiful language that she’s writing. This is not one of her best pieces even. She’s writing an essay eulogy for Rabindranath Tagore who had just died. And just the language she uses is her language is so beautiful and so there’s so much depth and profundity to her language of describing things and she plays on words in a way the word has more than one meaning and she plays on the word. She uses these words like sadhana, sadhana, sadhaka uh not in a religious context, but for an artist, for a writer, for a potter, for an ordinary potter whom she meets, a poor very poor potter, but he has sadhana in him. Uh this is one that I translated in this book Portraits from Memory. And um He’s a very bad potter to begin with. He makes these ugly misshapen vessels and he says, “No, no, this is the way we do it in my village.” But then she just gives him a picture of Saraswati just as a decoration for his hut and he is so inspired by that picture that he starts wanting to make an image of Saraswati that should be beautiful as in the picture. And he works on it again and again and again, keeps breaking them when he makes them and making new and finally he makes it like a fantastically beautiful one which he comes and brings to her Diwali. And this is sadhana. You know, this that just that has inspired him to and after that, he starts making beautiful things. So, that’s just a minor example, but this is how she takes words and uses them in different contexts to mean a variety of things that cannot be expressed. Sadhana, there’s no English equivalent for this, no? So, yeah. And talking of that, what keeps you returning to certain texts? Is it curiosity or pleasure or is it something else? It’s pleasure basically. I read a lot for pleasure and reread a lot for pleasure and read new things also for pleasure. If I like a particular poet, then when I like very few modern poets, but present-day poets, but if I like a particular poet or writer, I like Suniti Namjoshi, I like Vikram Seth, then anything they publish, I’ll buy it and read it, which doesn’t mean that I like all their work equally. Like I love Vikram Seth’s poetry, but then I read his Hanuman Chalisa translation, I didn’t like it at all and that’s not perhaps his fault. Hanuman Chalisa cannot be translated into English. So, you can’t keep that rhythm. He tries to keep the rhythm and the rhyme, but then if you keep that, you lose a lot. You can you can’t keep the meanings of the words. So, so it’s pleasure that keeps me and then going back to certain authors like reading Jane Austen over again or reading Nirala over again. This is pleasure just because I like listening to Hindi film songs. A lot of them are older ones. A lot of them are great poets. They were written by great poets, the words. And so, yeah, it’s for the pleasure that one pleasure that one goes [music] back.