Episodes
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"I don't think Dev Sahab and Goldie ever pretended they were making art but the artistry was inherent in what they were doing. 'Guide' (1965) is the daddy of all films. In it, Dev Anand's character just wanted to escape his past; he is not in search of the meaning of life. The meaning of life is thrust upon him. He's really the unwilling messiah. Goldie Sahab told me the story is a different beast from the screenplay. At that time, I shook my head as if I understood what he was saying. But it's only now that I am a practitioner that I realise, 'Oh, it was a mantra he was transmitting to me'. The screenplay and story are not the same. That's is why RK Narayan cribbed so much about 'Guide'. Watch the English 'Guide' [which was a flop] - that was the book. Watch the Hindi 'Guide'. It was different."
- Tanuja Chaturvedi, author, 'Hum Dono; the Dev and Goldie Story' talks to Manjula Narayan about her book that touches on the professional collaboration of the Anand brothers, Dev and Goldie Anand, who, together, made some of the most memorable commercial Hindi films of the 1950s and 1960s, the power of vintage Hindi film music, and her experience of working at their production company, Navketan Films, as a young graduate fresh out of FTII. -
"It struck me when I was doing the book that people preparing an Onam sadhya were putting together 25-30 dishes that were all gluten free and mostly vegan too. In fact, a sadhya can be fully vegan. The payasam can use almond or oats milk instead of regular cow's milk. Coconut yogurt will, of course, be the best substitute as it fits the flavour profile of the food. Ghee is perhaps the only thing that you will have to give up on. Unlike the old days, now people, even in Kerala, rarely cook the sadhya at home. They order it. I hope that my book will act as a trigger to get people to actually cook a sadhya. Because the process is engaging. There is a pattern to it. The way you cook it, the way you serve it... It's not like any other meal. It's almost like a ritual. There's also a lot of discipline that comes with serving a sadhya. You will find Ayurveda reflected quite elaborately in it. It is not about just shoving some food onto a banana leaf." - Arun Kumar TR, author, Feast on a Leaf; The Onam Sadhya Cookbook, talks to Manjula Narayan about the many delicious dishes that are part of an Onam celebration, the legend of Mahabali, his own childhood memories of the festival at his ancestral home that form the base of this book, and the imaginative use of yams, jackfruit and banana in Kerala sadhya cuisine.
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Episodes manquant?
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"The earliest record of Northeast India is in the writing of Huen Tsang in the 7th century. So people have been going there for many centuries. The notion that people of only one ethnicity have lived in one place is really not true. Closer examination blows up this idea. It is an idea that has come with modernity. Modern identity and the modern idea of the nation state and the following nationalisms have been problematic in places that have deep and intertwined diversity like the Indian subcontinent. Maybe it made sense in a specific part of Europe in a specific time but the idea has been devastating for us. It led to the Partition but it did not end there. We have had insurgency after insurgency. Pakistan too has had the same challenge. Bangladesh is perhaps the only country that comes closest to that original idea.
Northeast India has a history of separatist insurgencies that spring from the history of the place. The issue of identity, of belonging, is very complex. As a Bengali growing up in Shillong it was a very difficult topic of conversation. In fact, there was no conversation. The first book, 'Insider, Outsider; Tales of Belonging and Unbelonging in India's North East set it in motion. That concentrated more on Assam as the largest state in the region. This book focuses on the other states too.
When putting this book together, we were not looking for atrocity propaganda. The intention was to encourage an internal dialogue within the different communities of the northeast. Hopefully, people read these pieces and understand others' histories and look at their own histories too"
- Samrat Choudhury, co-editor, 'But I Am One of You; Northeast India and the Struggle to Belong' talks to Manjula Narayan about the many perspectives on a range of issues presented in this book including the decommissioning of the Gumti dam to aid ethnic reconciliation in Tripura, the Meitei Pangals or Meitei Muslims from Manipur, the Northeastern experience of being othered in New Delhi, Marwaris in Shillong during a dangerous time, and the Nepali speaking people of the different states of the Northeast, among others. -
"Most people seem to think that if they cut 10 trees and then plant 100 trees they have atoned for their sins but ecologically that doesn't make sense. The best thing to do is to protect what we already have. There is a pushback from nature and we are all seeing the effects. When you cut old growth trees, it is going to be that much tougher to deal with climate change because these trees store enormous quantities of carbon. Even if you planted 100 other trees, by the time those grow, where will we be? The oldest tree in the world is more than 5000 years old and the oldest tree in India is about 2031 years old. Trees grow continuously until they die. They are a lesson to all of us -- that we need to keep ourselves intellectually and physically fit until we die or we will become obsolete and irrelevant. I want this book to make people relate to trees in a much bigger way than before. Western countries have their champion/heritage/iconic tree registers and there is a lot of public participation in updating them. We too must make our own tree registers at the village, district, state and finally, the national level. We must have a heritage tree register of India that's updated from time to time" – S Natesh, author, 'Iconic Trees of India' talks to Manjula Narayan about the country's many old and wonderful trees with their own fantastic history including the mother tree of the Dussehri mango in UP, the sacred rayan tree of Ranakpur, the coronation cypress of Norbugang in Sikkim, and the Mahabodhi tree in Bodhgaya under which Buddha attained enlightenment, among others.
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"Millennials are unique in that every conflict or political situation that we see feels like it is at the same distance from us. So Manipur or the riots in Delhi feel at the same distance, which may or may not be great for political action. We were convinced that we could do things that were much more meaningful than any generation before us because of the tools that we had -- the Internet and the ability to share things with a billion people at once. That deluded us into thinking that we could actually change things! Millennials do have an inflated idea of their ability to change things and that drives a lot of anxiety because then we realise that we are powerless against most things. The millennial hero complex looked at from the outside can be cringe worthy" - AM Gautam, author, 'Indian Millennials; Who Are They Really' talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from The Kashmir Files and grief at ecological deterioration to political action, free floating anxiety and the reaction to the Sushant Singh Rajput case.
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"There is no reference to the biryani in the popular domain earlier than 125 years ago. Biryani was just one of the many varieties of pulao. One text tells us that no civilised gourmet in Lucknow touched biryani. They only ate yakhni pulao. So how has biryani become so important? Because if you are a show off and nouveau riche, you could show that, look, I've cooked something so expensive and exotic for my guests! Yes, the Nizams of Hyderabad, with the Hyderabadi dum ki biryani, did cultivate it into a very good art form. But the Nizams rose only after the decline of the Mughals so the biryani came from the Nizam who was experimenting with Turkish and Persian food. The food was from different directions. The biryani has been mythologised and mystified as an exotic dish so it has become aspirational. But a pulao is a pulao is a pulao and, with all due respect to biryani lovers, a biryani is a bit of a con! The biryani rose after 1857 to please the British. People wanted to go outside the pulao route and make it so complicated that it was like a jigsaw puzzle for them to unravel - ki kha kya rahe hai!" - Pushpesh Pant, author, 'Lazzatnama; Recipes of India' talks to Manjula Narayan about biryanis and pulaos, recipes of the Mahabharata, prawn poha, Kayasth mock meat dishes, North Eastern cuisine, kheers and khichdis, and how the modern kitchen has taken the drudgery out of cooking, among many other interesting things.
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"The Great Nicobar Island Project will cause huge devastation in the landscape. Just 20 years ago, this was the epicentre of the earthquake and tsunami of December 2004. With this project, we are putting the island, the people and the ecology back in harm's way. These islands experience an earthquake a week. In 2004, precisely the spot where this port is coming up has seen a permanent subsidence of 15 feet. The lighthouse at Indira Point, which was in the forest is now surrounded by the sea. Even if we forget the indigenous people this will effect and the loss of 1 million trees that will be cut down for the project – though there is no reason to forget about them – if there's another tsunami, or another two feet of subsidence, the investment of Rs 72,000 crores will be completely lost." - @pankajsekh, editor, 'The Great Nicobar Betrayal' talks to @utterflea about the recklessness of the planned Great Nicobar Island project which will lead to the loss of primitive forests, undocumented biodiversity, ways of life of the Great Nicobarese and Shompen tribes, and of a huge chunk of public money.
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"For people who grew up in the 1990s in Srinagar, the undercurrent of tension has always been our lived reality. This book is about how everyday normal lives also exist in Kashmir and how people navigate around the violence. It is about finding the tender moments in a city that is not 'normal'. The kind of pain that different people have felt in Kashmir has been different but the intensity of it is not something that you want pitched each against the other. Some people say Pandits had it worse because they had to leave. Others say Muslims had it worse because they had to stay and witness what happened over the last 30 years. But it's not a competition of who had it worse. It is horrible what happened to both communities. We have to move forward" - Sadaf Wani, author, 'City As Memory; A Short Biography of Srinagar' talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast about life in a city that's seen much conflict, about marginalised sections of the populace, caste and class discrimination, the self surveillance of Kashmiri women, PTSD, the ongoing drug epidemic, the slow decline of the Kashmiri language, and collective and individual trauma.
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"The mango truly is a natural obsession, like cricket or Bollywood or politics. Every Indian is an expert on the mango. Perhaps there's no other country in the world which has a comparable relationship with a fruit. But the excitement of the mango doesn't come from the fruit. It's an ancient thing and the reason the mango is so central to all matters of culture is because settlements across most of India had mango groves close by. They were not planted just for fruit. Fruit was one of the benefits. Primarily, the mango grove was infrastructure. It was where all manner of communal activities happened. That's the reason the mango was central. In India's many calendars, spring was the beginning of the new year and the mango was central to all spring festivals too. That's the reason it is so deeply enmeshed in our psyche. Because we've become deracinated and lost connection with all that, now the only discussion is about the fruit" - Sopan Joshi, author, Mangifera Indica; A Biography of the Mango talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from the loss of mango groves to creating flour from mango kernels, and Jesuit and Mughal experiments in horticulture.
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"In the Indian-Chinese context, food is one of the battlegrounds. It's often the first thing that triggers parents of the couple. Both Indian and Chinese societies are patriarchal so the girl is considered as property and she is the one who has to face the most difficulties. However, in general, perhaps because of the single-child policy, women in China are quite empowered and their participation in the workforce is much higher than that for women in India. Much as we would like to think that these kinds of relationships break cultural barriers, break stereotypes, new types of stereotypes may also be formed. In the end, though, so much of our differences are individual and not attributable to stereotypes" - Shivaji Das and Yolanda Yu, co-authors of 'Rebels, Traitors, Peacemakers' talk to Manjula Narayan about love and conflict within Indian-Chinese marriages.
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"Last year, when Anita Mani of Indian Pitta Books contacted me and asked if we could update Snakeman (1989), which was about Rom Whitaker and his exploits with reptiles and about our life after we got married, I had to laugh a little bit. I said, "You know, it's a bit odd for a divorced wife to be singing the praises of her ex husband even though we continue to be colleagues and work very closely together because we are both committed to the projects that we started". Rom said there is a lot to write about and we have done a lot together after the divorce so why don't you write about all that. So the idea was to rewrite parts of Snakeman and then add the diaries of the years after that and up to the present. It's a valuable account of the conservation projects we've been involved with in the last 20 years. It was difficult on many levels. When you've lived with someone and been their wife for 20 years and then you are something else, there's a constant renegotiation of the tone. I was very happy when a friend said you've got the tone right. I still admire Rom - he's done so much for conservation in this country. I felt the follow up should also be written from my perspective. It's probably the most difficult writing I've ever done" - Zai Whitaker, author, Scaling Up talks to Manjula Narayan about her life at Chennai's Crocodile Bank, a crocodile called Jaws III, the Irular tribe, why snakes are important, and the many projects she is juggling at the moment.
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"The history of drinking spices is older than the history of drinking tea, which is more recent in India. Drinking spices in hot water and in milk comes from the Ayurveda. As to when the marriage of these two happened, that's lost in history somewhere.
In the West, people's palates are getting more accustomed to spices so there are more chai spice brands coming about and a lot of the blends are getting richer in spice. About the recipes, I really wanted to come up with ones that were simple to make, simple to bake. The idea was to put spices in everything. When you spice up cakes, they taste amazing to then why not put in the whole concoction of the tea? Masala chai cake makes so much sense," says Mira Manek, author, The Book of Chai that includes a history of chai drinking in India, stories of her own family's migrations from Gujarat to East Africa and the UK, and a range of recipes of regular Indian teatime favourites like chilli cheese toast and bhajias as well as fusion treats like Parle G cheesecake, chai fudge, and of course, Masala chai cake. -
"The general greater acceptance of reservations in India as compared to the US comes from the acceptance of a karmic world view, the principle that you can't escape the consequences of your actions. Therefore, if your actions have been evil, then it is better to own up and do something to correct it and make amends. You find this idea of the karmic in the Manusmriti too. Yes, there's also a lot in the Manusmriti about jatis and marriage and caste, which is not appealing to a modern mind. But at least 40 smritis have been known to exist. The Manusmriti was just the one chosen by the British when they were looking at Hindu law. The smritis were a way of updating legislature, as it were, with changing times. It wasn't set in stone and there's an awareness within the tradition about this. In the end, we have to apply our judgement to both tradition and modernity."
Arvind Sharma, author, From Fire to Light; Rereading the Manusmrti talks to Manjula Narayan about the amorphousness of religion in India, Ambedkar and Buddhism, the text's pronouncements about women and oppressed castes, and the context in which the Manusmriti was written. -
"The problem of studying history is that we often think of history from today's point of view. When we look at history we must always look at the physical reality that existed at that particular time. The main reality of Nehru's time wasn't the threat from Pakistan or China or India's relations with the Soviet Union or the US. The biggest physical reality was hunger. Food is a strategic commodity as we see even now in Gaza and Ukraine. The Indian people did not create the Indian food crisis. It was a creation of the Allied war effort. Food had to be acquired. Nehru tried very hard to deal with the food security issue and reached out to many countries. India's first diplomats were actually food diplomats. This was the reality of that time" - Kallol Bhattacherjee, author, 'Nehru's First Recruits; The Diplomats Who Built Independent India's Foreign Policy' talks to Manjula Narayan about his compelling study of the Indian Foreign Service, the many individuals from varied backgrounds who formed part of it in the immediate post Independence period, the first evacuation of Indians during an international crisis, the evolution of the idea of Panchsheel, the 1962 war with China and the birth of Indian realism, the role of stenographers in the IFS, the battle of Surabaya that could have had an impact on Indian independence, and the many dynamics that were crashing against each other in the early days of the Indian republic.
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"It's very easy to criticise the BJP government or the Mamta government for censorship. What we don't realise is we are doing the same thing on social media without allowing a certain kind of freedom of speech that is in disagreement with what we feel. But it is disagreement that produces culture! Amartya Sen said we are argumentative Indians. In the India we are in now, we are supposed to be agreementative Indians. We have to always agree with each other. And we have forgotten that consensus will never produce any philosophy." - Sumana Roy, author, 'Provincials; Postcards from the Peripheries' talks to Manjula Narayan about being a proud provincial, the difficulty of swimming against the current, bricolage as a literary device, the use of ossified jargon in academia, English literature departments forsaking beauty for the sociological approach, and the reductionism inherent in labelling writing.
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"The book is about my story as somebody of mixed heritage. In many ways it's just the story of somebody trying to figure out who they are in a world that likes to separate and divide. the story of the book is about how, through discovering the origins of ideas, through discovering history, I discover a new way of thinking. So then it became easy for me to reconcile my mixed identity with my Englishness. Because actually, to be English is to be mixed. Then suddenly, it made sense. Identity is constantly in flux; it's an process to be engaged with constantly" - Jassa Ahluwalia, author, Both Not Half talks to Manjula Narayan about the experience of being both Punjabi and English in the UK, not changing his name when he became an actor, the many instances of mixed race actors passing for white in old Hollywood, Sikhism, nationalism, feeling a sense of kinship with transpeople, and being determined to change how the entertainment industry in the West represents people of mixed heritage.
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"If you look at late 19th century photographs or sketches of Delhi, it is empty and treeless. It's a historical fact that the city's greenery has come with the development of urban settlements... My favourite Delhi garden is Sundar Nursery because there are always new trees to discover there" – Swapna Liddle and Madhulika Liddle, co-authors of Gardens of Delhi talk to Manjula Narayan about the capital's wonderful green oases from Lodhi Garden and Qudsia Bagh to Buddha Jayanti Park and The Garden of Five Senses, among many others.
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"Social comedy usually has a very short span because it gets dated. For people to laugh at the same silly jokes, for social comedy to survive means that it's hit some enduring spot. I was trying to write a literary novel. It was a take on the Gothic novel and was about the relationship between Paro and Priya. In a way, Paro was Rebecca (in the eponymous novel by Daphe du Maurier), the beautiful and ruthless woman, and Priya was the archetypal counterpart, the woman who is more discreet and strategic perhaps, one who is more cunning and at the same time entranced by the freedom that someone like Paro represents. When it first came out, it got great reviews outside India but the Indian literary establishment spat at it. It took me by surprise how much they hated the book. I realise now that they hated it because it did not fit their idea of the exalted role of English literature. This was not the language of the rulers; it was the language of the users, the people who use English every day. They just didn't get it." - Namita Gokhale talks to Manjula Narayan about her first novel, Paro; Dreams of Passion, that's just been issued as a Penguin Modern Classic
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"As a writer and art critic Rudolf von Leyden was able to mentor artists in a certain capacity but for artists to live, to sustain a life as an artist, they need to sell their work. They need patrons. Because of his corporate job, Rudi was able to support the work of the artists he liked – Ara, Husain, Hebber, Souza, Raza of the Progressive Artists Group" - Reema Desai Gehi, author, 'The Catalyst; Rudolf Von Leyden and India's Artistic Awakening' talks to Manjula Narayan about the man who promoted some of India's most eminent artists of the post Independence era, helped them through tough times and ensured they continued to produce great art.
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"You can't leave caste behind but you can change religion so why won't you get attracted to another religion for whatever reasons? We are now paying too much attention to religious conversions. There are so many histories which run parallel within this one big history of the country and that's what makes the nation" - Nusrat F Jafri, author, 'This Land We Call Home' weaves the history of her family – her Bhantu maternal great grandparents who became Methodists, her grandparents who were Catholic, and her Shia Muslim parents – with that of India during the colonial period, the post Independence era and right down to the present, to present a view of a nation in flux.
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