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After the fall of the Soviet Union, Cuba was seen as the last outpost of communism. China went a different way and is now essentially a capitalist society where the communist party is in power. In Kerala, Cuba was seen by those people who were ideologically committed to communism as something sacred. That kind of ideological affinity might have come down but there is still an attraction to Cuba as a country that has miraculously withstood 64 years of extreme American sanctions"
- Ullekh NP, author, 'Mad About Cuba; A Malayali Revisits the Revolution' talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from the flight of bright young Cubans from the country, the little known visionary side of Che Guevara, and Fidel Castro's introduction of Indian moringa to the Caribbean nation, to the dynamic women who head Cuba's exceptional health initiatives, why a taxi driver now earns more than a doctor there, and how the book might help readers understand both Cubans and Malayalis better! -
A lot of our ancestors had tattoos and that's quite surprising. People don't really know what the tattoos on their grandparents mean. A number of archivists have come up in India in the last 10 years who have felt the need to document this, question their grandparents, and also to look into their communities' histories through the tattoos that they no longer have. Here is a tradition that we have lost but it's something that we now consider so trendy."
Naman P Ahuja, editor, 'Indian Tattoos; Only Skin Deep?' talks to Manjula Narayan about traditional Indian tattoos from communities as varied as the Baigas, Pashtuns, Todas and the Nagas, the vanished south Indian tattoos recorded by LK Ananthakrishna Iyer in the 1930s, why people yearn to mark their lover's name on their body, tattoos as talisman, caste markers and adornments in this world and the next, the colonial encounter and the disappearance of traditional tattoos among many groups, and why it's harder to reconstruct a history of Indian men's tattoos -
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The Indian middle class comprises many groups and they are not able to come together. For any group to become powerful, they have to be united. But the interests of each of these groups within the Indian middle class - upper caste Hindus, Dalits, Muslims, OBCs - clash with each other. Today, caste and religious identity is more important to the individual than national identity. Perhaps this is because everything we do today revolves around money. Money is power and even if a person feels that certain things are wrong, he will not raise his voice because his interests might be compromised. In a consumerist, neo capitalist society, everything comes down to economics" - Manisha Pande, author, 'Middle Class India; Driving Change in the 21st Century' talks to Manjula Narayan about the middle class in ancient and medieval India, the vast changes that have occurred since Liberalization in the early 1990s, the status of middle and upper class Indian women as being more shackled and conformist than their working class peers, the shift in the attitude towards the country's population growth and the demographic dividend that heralds good things for the future of the nation
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"I've done three books and a documentary on Guru Dutt and he is always viewed as someone rather morose and internal and a sad man. And yet, there were moments of great joy. You see it in his films. Why did he always include Johnny Walker? Because he had a sense of humour and a sense of fun and his films like Mr and Mrs 55 and Aar Paar are really wonderfully funny. This diary was to emphasize the lighter side of Guru Dutt. So there are various anecdotes from people who remembered that side of him"
- Nasreen Munni Kabir, author, 'The Legacy of Guru Dutt; 2025 Diary' talks to Manjula Narayan about bringing out this diary to mark the film maker's centenary next year, the fantastic Hindi-Urdu writing of the 1950s, Guru Dutt's many extraordinarily productive working relationships with Abrar Alvi, Raj Khosla, Johnny Walker, VK Murthy and others, the self indulgence of Kagaz ke Phool, how his training in dance and choreography at the Uday Shankar Academy showed up in the kinetic movement of the camera in films like Pyaasa, the reproduction of some early letters to Geeta Dutt, and the aptness of Kaifi Azmi's statement that Guru Dutt thought with his eyes. -
"The taste and quality of the ingredients that some street vendors use can rival that of Michelin star restaurants. And that they make it all available at this price point is just shocking. Street vendors also have no qualms about feeding the food that they make to their own families. They don't store their food or refrigerate and reuse, all ingredients are fresh every day, there are no secrets, its made out in the open in front of the customer. Those are the big differences with the large chains. After doing this book, we've realised that we are much better off eating from the street than eating packaged food or even from fancy places"
- Priya Bala and Jayanth Narayanan, authors, 'Bazaar Bites; Tales and Tastes of India's Street Foods' talks to Manjula Narayan about the fantastic sweets and savouries on offer on our streets including in tier 2 cities like Indore, Nagpur, Bhopal, Puri, Srinagar and Allahabad, among others, specialities like the hing kachori of Varanasi, the karela chaat of Gwalior, the ghirmit of Hubli Dharwad, the samosas of Bata Mangala in Odisha, the litti chokhas of Patna and the dosa diversity of Karnataka, and how street food needs to be properly recognised as an integral part of India's culinary heritage. -
"While I was translating this manuscript from Persian I realised that the food mentioned is very different from what's sold now as Mughal food. They had four masalas only. We have now laced the mutton, chicken and fish with spices so that the real taste has disappeared. In those days, you could taste the meat. The food eaten by Jahangir and Nur Jahan was very different and I wanted people to know that what we are eating in the name of Mughal food is not really Mughal food"
- Salma Yusuf Husain, translator, 'Alwan-e-Nemat; A Journey Through Jahangir's Kitchen' talks to Manjula Narayan about featured recipes that combine unlikely ingredients like the fish and banana curry, Mughal emperor Jahangir's love for Gujarati khichdi and rohu, his queen Nur Jahan's many culinary innovations including the creation of fruit yogurts and vibrantly coloured dishes, how Indian cooks in the imperial kitchen took Iranian and Central Asian recipes and completely transformed them, how they turned pulao into biryani by layering and roasting it, her own surprise on encountering the utterly rice-less biryani Isfahani during a visit to Iran, and why the vegetable biryani cannot be called a biryani at all. -
"Those who don't have a university or a high school for their languages are the ones who don't have economic resources. The poorest among the poor are linguistically deprived and also economically deprived. People say, 'What is the harm if many languages go and only some remain?' These are questions raised out of ignorance. Every language is a unique world view. The way every language defines space and time is unique. When languages die, we are denying ourselves the benefit of the diversity of unique world views. Diversity is necessary for the evolutionary process. By denying diversity, we are reducing our ability to go forward and meet new challenges" - GN Devy, author, 'India; A Linguistic Civilization' talks to Manjula Narayan about the emergence of a rich literature in many Adivasi languages in the 21st century, his work with the Linguistic Survey of India, language aphasia, the rise of Sanskrit, why the Harappan script still hasn't been deciphered, the tragedy of gadgets replacing parental interactions with children, and dyslexia and dysgraphia as conditions that indicate a step in the evolutionary process, among other things.
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"In the 1970s, Muslim characters in films were very different. In the 1990s, Roja opened the floodgates for films representing Muslims as terrorists. It was the first film which looked at the identity of the enemy. Then, especially after the attacks of 9/11, there was a big change in the representation of Muslims in Hindi films. As for women, in many films, Muslim women are reduced to being victims of oppression always. Now, whatever is happening in the current sociopolitical scene is directly reflected on screen. I have tried to connect the politics of representation in Hindi films with contemporary politics. So my book isn't just film studies, it is also a political text" — Nadira Khatun, author, 'Postcolonial Bollywood and Muslim Identity' talks to Manjula Narayan about everything from Pran in Zanjeer to the saviour syndrome in Gully Boy, the Brahmanical stance of films like Secret Superstar and Lipstick Under my Burqa, the absence of films made by subaltern Muslims, the vanished Muslim Social of the 1970s and 80s, and much more.
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"The parapsychological element is very strong in Theyyam, which is an example of Indian shamanism. When you worship a Theyyam, you don't need an intermediary, a priest, like you do in a temple; here you can go into a direct dialogue with the Theyyam. 90 percent of the Theyyams are mother goddesses performed by men. And though a Theyyam performance is highly caste oriented, it can only be a success if every community of a particular area gives their support. So everybody joins together for it and if they have disputes, it is all settled before the Theyyam, during the performance" - KK Gopalakrishnan, author, 'Theyyam; Indian Folk Ritual Theatre' talks to Manjula Narayan about this living tradition of Kerala, the touching stories that are narrated, elements of ancestor and nature worship that are central to the pre-Brahmanical folk form, the paradox of it flourishing in northern Kerala where communism first sprouted in the state, the Muslim Theyyams of Malabar, the spectacle of the performances, and how it is, in a sense, a repository of the race memory of the people of the region.
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"She was my grandmother so I could have wanted to create a portrait of a person who was very fantastic and - she was fantastic and wonderful - but I didn't want to do anything that wasn't factual that tried to whitewash anything she did - there ware controversial things about her and her academic life and how she went about things. I knew this from my own mother 's view of her. One of the reasons Thiago and I did get along was because we were very clear that we weren't going to do a hagiography" -- Urmilla Deshpande and Thiago Pinto Barbosa, co-authors of 'Iru; the Remarkable Life of Irawati Karve' talk to Manjula Narayan about the pioneering Indian anthropologist, her time in 1920s Berlin where she did her PhD under racist anthropologist Eugin Fischer, her use of the Mahabharata and other ancient Indian texts to help her interpret contemporary questions about language, culture and religion in Indian society, Yugant, their own use of critical fabulation in the writing of this book, and the strange similarity between the sarcasm and dourness of the people of Berlin and of Karve's hometown, Pune!
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"In the West and in privileged pockets of India that have access to technology, we think technology is linear — first film, then TV, then video... But actually in India and in most of the countries that form the global majority, obsolescence structures this. It is not like there is a linear progression of technology for everyone. A lot of people have access to tech which might not be current or new for a certain privileged class.
One of my research sites was the Malegaon film industry. This was a DIY filmmaking culture where they made their own films, which had social messaging and were spoofs of Bollywood or Hollywood films. Analog video tech was the base infrastructure of this film industry. They used analog video to shoot and edit these films. It was really interesting that analog video, which was supposed to be very 1980s, 20 years later becomes the base for the industry in Malegaon. I saw this industry, as I was tracking it, changing from analog to digital and thought there seems to be a connection between the two. How can we understand digital culture through a historical perspective? I thought video might offer me clues to make sense of the present" - Ishita Tiwary, author, 'Video Culture in India; The Analog Era' talks to Manjula Narayan about her book that excavates an entirely forgotten cultural moment with its wedding videos, video libraries, godmen like Rajneesh who used the technology to gain an international following, video news magazines like Newstrack that documented everything from Mandal and Masjid to the militarization of Kashmir, and the video films featuring, among others, Aditya Pancholi and a pre-Rangeela Urmila Matondkar, that emerged from media magnate Nari Hira's company, Hiba. -
"British India was what had been annexed before 1857. The rest of it was princely India, which formed 45 percent of the subcontinent, almost half. At school, we learn about what happened in British India but most of us don't know about what happened in the part ruled by rajas and nawabs even though it formed such a big part of the independence movement and transfer of power and so on. It's a key element of the story of independence but somehow, it doesn't figure in textbooks.
The general idea we have is that the princely kingdoms were all backward and feudal. All of them were not like that. In fact, the first constitution in India was in a princely kingdom -- Baroda. Many princes were forward thinking — there was the Maharaja's temple entry proclamation in Travancore, some states like Mysore were industrialising... The idea that all of them were backward is not true. I have tried not to pass judgement. I have tried to humanise these people and see them from different perspectives...Nehru and Patel had nothing but disdain for the royal class but Patel was a practical person. He knew he had to get them on board to sigh their own death warrants. This book is a bit of history and geography. Had it not been for these events, the map of India would be very different. I have tried to not make it like reading a record but like watching a movie"
- Mallika Ravikumar, author, '565; The Dramatic Story of Unifying India' talks to Manjula Narayan about how Sardar Patel, VP Menon and the hurriedly formed States Department managed to coax and, in some cases, force princely states like Tripura, Bikaner, Travancore, Bhopal, Jammu and Kashmir, Patiala and Hyderabad, among others, to join the Indian union in 1947. -
As HT Smartcast completes 5 amazing years, we are re-releasing the most loved episode from this podcast. "People who are powerful and wealthy are always complex and layered characters," says Anirudh Kanisetti, author, Lords of the Deccan, in this Books & Authors' episode with Manjula Narayan, about the ambitious, adventurous, charismatic and bloodthirsty medieval dynasties of southern India from the Chalukyas to the Cholas.
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"If you think about it deeply, everybody makes their own faith. No matter what faith they are from, everyone finds their own journey, their own truth, and they may mix and match things from different elements of different faiths and see what is true to them. Hinduism and Buddhism tend to be away from any springboard of certitude. They are more amorphous; you can make God whatever you want.
A lot of people would say that the beauty of Hinduism is that it is not overly prescriptive. It is a different matter that some are trying to change that now. Still, its an organic religion. I wanted to contrast the various shades of it through the people that I interviewed and through the culture in which I had grown up.
Even if you are non religious, religion and faith encumber everything in our country. It's not just politics but also in everyday things like going out for a meal and asking a vegetarian friend if it's ok that you eat meat, in how ritual ties into caste and how caste ties into identity. All of this we know but I wanted to go into it in a granular way and so this became a big book in the end! 'Tripping down the Ganga' is about the nature of everyday Hindu faith. It is a memoir; it is my journey and you can't separate the observer from what he or she observes. It is a subjective journey, in that sense" — Siddharth Kapila, author, Tripping Down the Ganga, talks to Manjula Narayan about going on yaatras with his mother to pilgrimage spots along the great river from Gaumukh to Ganga Sagar, the believers he met along the way, the experience as a liberal, city bred Hindu Indian of being both an insider and an outsider, the faultlines of caste and gender, and the sense of ecological doom that now hangs over many sacred spots in the Himalayas that are key to Hinduism. -
"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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"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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