Sebald Lecture 2018: Arundhati Roy

[Music] my name is Duncan large and I'm the academic director of the British Centre for literary translation which forms part of the school of literature drama and creative writing at UEA in Norwich BC LT was founded by the acclaimed writer and critic WG max Ziebart in 1989 and this annual event initially the st. jerome lecture was renamed in his honor after his untimely death in 2001 max a buck would have been 75 next May and will be marking that anniversary in a number of ways on campus but for now we are delighted to be able to continue our rewarding collaboration with the British Library and to host the Ziebart lecture here at the conference center once again for the fifth year in succession BC LT is a research center funded by the Faculty of Arts and Humanities at UEA we coordinate research projects in literary translation we run a lively programme of seminars workshops and conferences both on campus and internationally we're also funded by Arts Council England through our close collaboration with their national portfolio organisation writers Center Norwich who are co-sponsors for this evening's event over the last year writers Center have been engaged in a substantial capital project developing their headquarters at the beautiful 15th century dragon hall in Norwich and later this month they'll emerge from this chrysalis excitingly transformed into the national center for writing BC LT collaborate with writers Center on a number of programs including the International summer school industry translation and creative writing held every year at the end of July and the Zbot lecture where each year we invite a prominent cultural figure to speak about literary translation from their personal perspective so it's my great pleasure and honor this evening to introduce to you this evenings Ziebart lecturer Arundhati Roy born in Shillong in north-east india Arundhati Roy grew up in the south in Kerala and Tamil Nadu after training as an architect in Delhi where she now lives she wrote screenplays for film and TV and won the National Film Award for Best Screenplay in 1989 before achieving worldwide recognition for her debut novel the god of small things which won the Booker Prize in 1997 and has since been translated into more than 40 languages it was followed by two decades of primarily nonfiction writing a steady stream of polemical essays and journalistic pieces opposing global capitalism calling out political oppression passionately defending human rights and environmental causes these have been collected in several volumes including the algebra of infinite justice 2002 field notes on democracy listening to grasshoppers 2009 and capitalism a ghost story 2014 Arundhati Roy s many awards include the Lannon Foundation cultural freedom prize in 2002 the 2011 Norman Mailer prize for distinguished writing and the 2015 Ambedkar Sudha award last year marked an eagerly anticipated return to fiction writing with the publication of her second novel the Ministry of utmost happiness which was duly long listed for the Man Booker Prize 2017 and the Women's Prize for fiction 2018 described by the Man Booker judges as a rich and vital book that has remarkable scale and extraordinary style and intelligence the Ministry of utmost happiness is out this week in paperback in the UK one of the central concerns of this marvelously kaleidoscopic work is language language variety the politics of language and translation between languages its publication confirmed our sense that Arundhati Roy would make an exceptional Ziebart lecturer and we were delighted when she accepted the invitation to speak this evening after the lecture my UEA colleague professor Andrew Cowen will host a question and answer session then at the end of the evening you're invited to stay on and enjoy the cash bar in the foyer where several of Arundhati Roy books are available for purchase and she's kindly agreed to hold a brief signing session for now though can I invite you to join with me in welcoming Arundhati Roy to give the Zbot lecture 2018 which has the title in what language does rainfall over tormented cities The Weather Underground in the Ministry of utmost happiness thank you for that introduction when I was invited to do this Abel lecture I didn't think twice about saying yes because somehow it was a subject that I had been thinking a lot about and well fortunately or unfortunately I think I fell into a rabbit hole and wrote about five lectures so I'm going to try sort of speed through what I've written and maybe it'll be published and you know it it might seem more coherent when you read it obviously you know it seems kind of superficial to say wonderful things about WG sable because I haven't heard anything that's not wonderful about him the only the only thing I'd say is that perhaps the one place where we do disagree is I believe this today his publisher Simon Prosser and mine told me he hated the word novel well I love it maybe I am it so for me it's difficult to almost think without telling stories and I think this is a little bit of a story to this lecturer so let me begin at a book reading in Kolkata about a week after my first novel the god of small things was published a member of the audience stood up and asked in a tone that was distinctly hostile has any writer ever written a masterpiece in an alien language in a language other than his mother tongue I hadn't claimed to have written a masterpiece know to be a he but nevertheless when nevertheless I understood his anger towards me a writer who lived in India wrote in English and who had attracted an absurd amount of attention my answer to his question made him even angrier Nabokov I said and he stormed out of the hall only a few weeks after that incident I was on a live TV radio show in London and the other guest was an English historian who in reply to a question from the interviewer composed a pian to British imperialism even you he said turning to me imperiously the very fact that you write in English is a tribute to the British Empire not being used to radio shows at the time I stayed quiet for a while as a well behaved recently civilized savage should but then I sort of lost it and I said that it was like telling the child of a raped parent that they were a tribute to their father's brutality the historian looked hurt afterwards and after the show he said he had meant it as a compliment because he loved my book and asked him if he also felt that jazz and the blues and all of african-american writing and poetry were actually a tribute to slavery but notwithstanding my anger on both occasions my responses were defensive reactions not adequate answers because both incidents touch on a range of incendiary questions colonialism nationalism authenticity elitism nativism caste and cultural identity all jarring pressure points on the nervous system of any writer worth her salt however to refi language in the way both men had in a sense renders language speechless what happens as it you when that happens as it usually does in debates like these what has actually been written ceases to matter and that was what I found so hard to countenance and yet I know and I knew the language is that most private and yet most public of things and the challenges thrown at me were fair and square and obviously since I'm still talking about them I'm still thinking about them the night of that reading in Kolkata City of my stranged father and of Kali mother goddess with the long red tongue and many arms I fell to wondering what my mother tongue actually was what was and what is the politically correct genetically opposite and morally appropriate language in which I ought to think and write it occurred to me that my mother was actually an alien with fewer arms than Kali perhaps but many more tongues an English is certainly one of them my English that has been widened and deepened by the rhythms and Cadence's of my alien mothers are the tongues I say alien because there's not much that's organic about her her nation shaped body was first violently assimilated and then violently dismembered by an imperial british quill I also say alien because these days the violence unleashed in her name on those who do not wish to belong to her Kashmir is for example as well as on those who feel they do Indian Muslims and Dalits for example make her an extremely unmod early mother how many tongues does she have approximately 780 of which 22 are formally recognized by the Indian Constitution while another 38 are waiting for that status and each of those has its own history of colonizing or being colonized there are few pure victims and pure perpetrators there is no national language not yet and the Hindi and English are designated as official languages and according to the Constitution which was written in 1950 in English English was supposed to cease to be an official language by 1965 15 years after the Constitution came into effect but any serious move to making Hindi the national language is obviously you know ended in riots in on him in him these speaking places and so English has continued guiltily and unofficially and by default to consolidate its base but dealt in this case is an unhelpful sentiment because India as a country as a nation-state was a British idea so the idea of English is as good or as bad as the idea of India itself and writing or speaking in English there's not a tribute to the British Empire as the imperial historian had tried to suggest but it's a practical solution to the circumstances created by it and fundamentally India is still an empire held together on his edges by armed forces and administered from Delhi which for most of our subjects is as distant as any foreign country has things and in English which is spoken by a small minority which still numbers in the millions is the language of mobility of opportunity of the courts of the national press the legal fraternities Science Engineering and internationally known writers it's the language of privilege and exclusion it's also the language of emancipation and the language in which privilege has been most eloquently denounced for example by dr. Ambedkar's inhalation of caste which is the most widely read widely translated and devastating this denunciation of the Hindu caste system and it was written in English inspired by him many Dalit that is untouchable formerly known as untouchable activists today see the denial of a quality English education to the underprivileged as a continuation of the Brahmin tradition of denying education and empowerment to people who they consider belonging to the lower castes and for this reason in 2011 the Dalit scholar Chandra Mohan Prasad built her village temple to the Dalit goddess of English it's on to this mind-bending mosaic that the current Hindu nationalists ruling dispensation are trying to graph it's one nation one language one religion vision since the 1920s they call has been Hindi Hindu Hindustani and it's an irony that all three words basically are based in Persian and Arabic because it they're based from Al hint which was the place that lay on the east of the Indus now previously Pakistan had tried to to impose or do on its Bengali speaking each Pakistan and it lost that half of its itself Sri Lanka tried to impose sinhala and you know it ended up in years and years of bloody civil war all this to say we live and work and write in a complicated land when nothing is or ever will be settled especially not the question of language or languages Susan Sontag was surely aware of some of this complexity when she delivered this the WG is about lecture in 2002 hers was called the world as India translation as a passport within the community of literature and what I'll talk about is translation as a writing strategy in a community without passports 20 years after the publication of the god of small things I finished writing my second novel the Ministry of utmost happiness perhaps I shouldn't say this but if a novel can have an enemy then the enemy of this novel is the idea of one nation one religion one language as I composed a cover page of my manuscript in place of the author's name I was tempted to write translated from the originals by Arundhati Roy the Ministry the language is a novel written in English but imagined in several languages and translation as a primary form of creation was central to the writing of it and here I don't mean the translation of the inchoate and the pre lingual into words but regardless of which language and in whose mother tongue the ministry was written in this particular narrative about this particular people in this particular universe would have had to have been imagined in several languages it is a story that emerges out of an ocean of languages a teeming ecosystem of living creatures official language fish unofficial dialect mollusks and flashing shoals of word fish swim around some friendly with each other some openly hostile and some outright carnivores but they are all nourished by what the ocean provides and all of them like the people in the ministry have no choice but to coexist to survive and to try and understand each other for them translation is not high-end literary art performed by sophisticated polyglots translation is daily life its street activity and its increasingly becoming a necessary part of ordinary folks survival kit and so in this novel of many languages it's not only the author but the characters themselves who swim around in an ocean of exquisite imperfection who constantly translate for and to each other who constantly speak across languages and who constantly realize that people who speak the same language are not necessarily the ones that understand each other best the Ministry of artists happiness is being translated into 46 languages and each of those translators has had to grapple with the language that is infused with many languages including if a if I may coin a word many kinds of English shoes and I use the word infused because I'm not speaking of a text that plays the Peter Sellers game of mocking Indian English or one that contains a smattering of quotations of words and other languages as a trope but often attempt to actually create a companionship of languages so after 46 translations to will do in Hindi and just the fact that I use the words will do and Hindi separately that have to publish them as separate books with separate scripts is a story that is folded into the story of the ministry but while I was working on the Whitney you'll do and Hindi translators I found that just because there are sections of the book that are setting will do speaking and Hindi speaking was it didn't make the job of the translator any easier for example the human body the physical human body is a very important part in the book and my new translator and I discovered that it had will do has no word for vagina there are words obsolete words like the Arabic footage and other euphemisms that range in meaning from hidden part and breathing hole and went and parts to the uterus and the most commonly used one audit Keisha Rohm gah a woman's place of shame as you can see we had a problem on our hands but more than the post writing translation it's the prewriting translation that I want to talk about today none of it came from an elaborate pre-existing plan I worked fury by instinct and it was only while preparing for this lecture that I began to see how much it mattered to me to try and persuade language to shift around and make languages to shift around and make room for each other but before we dive into the ocean of imperfection and get caught up in the eddies and whirlpools of our historic blood fields in order to give you a rough idea of the terrain I want to quickly chart a route by which I arrived at my particular patch of the shoreline so my mother is a Syrian Christian from the Malayalam speaking sounds of Kerala my father was a bang goalie from Kolkata which is where they met the two of them at the time he was visiting from Assam where he had a job as an assistant manager of a tea garden the language they had in common was English I was born in the Welsh Mission Hospital in the town of Chillon then it was a part of Assam now it's a part of the state of mahalia and the the dominant tribe in Shillong are the CAHSEE was interesting that the caste language was first transcribed by Welsh missionaries who were fighting their own battle against the tidal wave of English the kasi language is written in what resembles Welsh orthography the first two years of my life was spent in Assam my parents relationship had broken down and I was farmed out to the plantation workers quarters where I learned my first language which my mother informs me was a kind of Hindi but the workers they are they were and are still basically from indigenous tribes of Eastern and Central India brought to Assam and the language they speak is called bad Anya but none is like chai bug on the tea estates so it's a garden language and it's a it's a patois of Hindi Assamese and all their local diversity languages so that was the first began iya was the first language I spoke and when I was less than three years old when my parents separated and my brother and I and my mother and I moved to South India first to Tamil Nadu and then to I'm in him which is the the village where the god of small things is said I soon forgot my bag Anya when I was five my utterly utterly moneyless mother started her own school and I in a little town close by and I grew up on a die cultural diet that included Shakespeare Kipling Kathakali which is a temple dance form sound of music as well as Malayalam and Tamil cinema before I reach my teenage years I could recite long passages of Shakespeare singing Christian hymns in that mantra Mali alleyway and mimic a cabaret from the tamil film called Jesus in which which Mary Magdalene performs to seduce Jesus as at a cocktail party in 0bc before things began to go badly wrong for both of them as a school grew more successful my mother anxious about my career she banned my speaking of Malayalam and she said that I had to speak only in English even in my off time and if I was ever caught speaking Malayalam I had to write what she called imposition which was like a thousand times I will speak English I will speak English I will speak English which I spent many afternoons doing until I learned to recycle my impositions at the age of 10 I went to a boarding school in Tamil Nadu founded by Sir Henry Lawrence British hero of the 1857 mutiny who died defense defending the Lucknow residency the motto of our school was never given though most of our students believe that what he actually said was never given to the Indian dogs and the dogs partners cut out in the boy in boarding school in addition to Malayalam and English I learned Hindi but my Hindi teacher was a Mullaly so he sort of taught us Hindi and Malayalam and we really didn't know much Hindi and so at the age of 16 I found myself on a train on a three day and two night journey to Delhi to join the School of Architecture basically armed with one sentence of Hindi's that somehow had stuck in my brain from a lesson called swami baku tia which which means the faithful the faithful dog you know it's about this dog this who had saved the baby from getting getting killed by a snake by getting bitten herself and the sentence that I remember it was Subaru Takeda Kotaku Tia Marie polity that when I woke up in the morning the lay dead so long time in Delhi I anyone asked me anything in India chased with her could be our money party and over the years it's the slender foundation on which as my Malayalam became rusty I built my Hindi vocabulary so the architecture school was full of obviously non-hindi speaking people you know Molly Alistair millions Nagas missiles Assamese Kashmiri my closest friend from Orissa who we spoke no English or Hindi and we just communicated with joints and drawings anyway in a while we learnt this Delhi University patois you know which is a mixture of Hindi and English and that was the language of the first screenplay I wrote which is called in which China gives it those ones and in giving it those ones for us meant you know doing your usual number so in the film Annie he's a fifth year student he's failed four times in his final year and he's those ones is this thesis he has about very stoned pieces about how to solve the economy and rural-urban migration by planting fruit trees on either side of the railway track because it's so fertile because everyone shits on the railway track so he keeps failing anyway so so this film was made it had no budget it was like zero budget film and a publicity brochure it said on the back it said you'll have to change the title because giving it those ones doesn't mean anything in English Derrick Malcolm of the Guardian waking up suddenly in the middle of the film and under Nita said well obviously mr. malcolm in england england you don't speak English anymore Arundhati Roy in later fishing she thought of it earlier and so the film won two national awards one for the Best Screenplay and the other my favorite award of all time no Booker could ever beat it best film in languages other than those specified in channel 8 of the Indian Constitution in 2015 we returned our national awards as part of a movement by writers and filmmakers who were protesting what we saw as the current government's complicity in the lynching of Dalits and muslims and the assassination of writers so it didn't help because we've run out of national awards but the lynching continues but writing screenplays I wrote to taught me to write dialogue and it taught me economy but then I began to yearn for access I longed to write about the landscape of my childhood about the people in ayman home about the river that flowed true through it the trees that bent into it the moon the sky the fish the songs the history house and the unnamed terrorists that looked around I couldn't bear the idea of writing something that began scene one exterior day River I wanted to write a stubbornly visual but unfilmable book and that book turned out to be the god of small things I wrote it in English but imagined it in English as well as Malayalam the landscapes and languages colliding and the seven year old twins as stepan and ryan's heads turning turning it into a thing of its own so when the mothers called them a moose calls them and says if you ever disobey me in public I'll send you somewhere where you learn to jolly well behave it's the well that jumps out of them at them you know the well that is in every house or every compound in Kerala almost the well the deep mossy well that has a bucket and a rope and children are told to stay away from so what what could a jolly well be you know well with happy people in it but then how could there be people in a world well they'd have to be dead so it becomes a well full of laughing dead people into his children are sent to learn to jolly well behave so the whole novel is constructed around people young and old English knowing Malayalam knowing all grappling wrestling dancing and rejoicing in language for me or for any writer working in these parts language can never be a even it has to be made it has to be cooked slow-cooked and it was only after writing the god of small things that I felt felt the blood in my veins flow more freely it was an unimaginable relief to have finally found a language that tasted like mine a language in which I could write the way I think a language that freed me but that relief didn't last long as Esteban always knew things can change in a day and less than a few months after the god of small things was published this new Hindu nationalist government came to power and the first thing it did was a series of nuclear tests and something convulsed and something changed it was about language again not a writer's private language but a country's public language a country's public imagination of itself suddenly things that would have been unthinkable to say in public became acceptable the royal national pride float like noxious lava on the streets and dismayed by the celebrations even in the most unexpected quarters I wrote my first political essay the end of imagination my language changed - it wasn't slow-cooked it wasn't secret novel writing language it was quick and urgent and public and it was straight-up English reading the rereading the end of imagination and it's all about that you know about the fact that the having nuclear and the idea of a nuclear bomb changes a nation's idea of itself and you know so coding bits from the FL these are not just nuclear tests they are nationalism tests we are told and you know this was the Hindu bomb then Pakistan had the Muslim bomb and all of that went on but there was a paragraph in this in this essay written 20 years ago where I said why does it all seem so familiar because you could see the communal and the polarization coming at speed and here you know the conflict the Hindu India the Muslims are not real citizens and so on and there was a paragraph here which said why does it all seem so familiar is it because even as you watch reality dissolves and seamlessly rushes forward into the silent black-and-white images from old films this is referring to films on partition you know scenes of people have been hounded out of their lives rounded up and herded into camps of Massacre of mayhem of endless columns of broken people making their way to nowhere why is there no soundtrack why is the whole sir quiet have I been seen too many films am i mad or am i right the mayhem came just in a few years after September 11 2001 the Narendra Modi was sort of para dropped into Gujarat as the Chief Minister not as an elected chief minister but as a chief minister who would deal with the climate that was prevailing in the world and within a few months you had an incident in of arson in which a railway compartment was born 268 Hindu pilgrims in it nobody still knows who said that coach on fire and then there was what we have come to know as the 2002 Gujarat massacre in which Muslims were slaughtered raped and burnt alive on the streets hundreds of thousands were pushed from their homes it was not the first massacre that took place in India certainly it was the first one that was telecast into her our homes so in a way there was a soundtrack and the end of imagination was the beginning of 20 years of essay writing for me as we watched mesmerised this religious fundamentalism and unbridled free-market fundamentalism whilst I mean armed like lovers changing the landscape around us at speed and you suddenly felt like you had these massive populations of rural people being pushed out of their homes by dams by mines by roads and pushed out of the cities because they weren't wanted there and it was suddenly as though the city and the Treece I'd had stopped being able to communicate with each other it had nothing to do with language but everything to do with translation so you you you couldn't even explain to someone in the city what the result of this was for example to try and explain to a Supreme Court judge that for an indigenous person land is not transactional you cannot just translate land into money and I actually got hauled up for contempt of court and eventually went to jail and the first thing they took objection to was my saying that to give an indigenous person cash compensation for his land is like paying for a Supreme Court judge his salary and fertilizer bags which they didn't like anyway haha but so many years these essays open these secret words for me and I met languages and stories and people that expanded me in ways I couldn't have imagined and somewhere along the way the slow-cooking began again and folks began to drop in on me first their visits were infrequent and more frequent and then they just bloody moved in and said you better write about us you know so first there was an Jim the oldest speaker from old Ellie she she came with her adopted daughter zeinab and a laconic cloudy dog called biryu a young man who called himself saddam hussein showed up on a white horse who he introduced a Spile and he said that his real name was dieter and that he was a chamalla a skinner belonging to the untouchable caste from a village called ginger in Haryana and he spoke in a sort of Marathi Rajasthani he showed me a video that he always kept in his phone of the execution of Saddam Hussein of Iraq and he admired the way Saddam Hussein had faced his death and then my Saddam showed me told the story about how his father had been beaten to death on the road by Hindu mob and why he had converted to Islam a real thin man with his right arm in a plaster cast and his sheet shirt sleeve flapping at his side slid in like a shadow and he introduced himself as a partier and he said he was from Bihar and he gave me his CV which Jimmy's address and what he did is basically what he did was he was on a hunger fast for 11 years at Jantar Mantar for a new world and his qualification qualifications were ma hindi ma will do first class first ba history beard elementary course in Punjabi ma Punjabi ABF which stood for appeared but failed PhD pending the university lecturer Ghaziabad found a member of the vishwas Samajwadi stoppin are the people's world people's forum an Indian socialist Democratic Party against price rise I offered him a cigarette he went out to smoke it and returned only after a few weeks that was the beginning of my relationship with him then came the club Das Gupta the opposite of a drifter from the universe of English and he was an elite intelligence officer he came with his own expensive whiskey which he drank steadily and borrowed my pen and started to write without asking me and every now and then looked up and started enunciated the Latin name of birds that he knew as I was trying to learn to spell them and this created a big problem for me in the translations because because you know there aren't Latin names of birds in those languages then to know Tamar and her lover Musa came her Kashmiri lover who seemed to know Hobart and Tilottama put up a few sheets on my fridge and they were the Kashmiri English alphabet and it went like this a Azadi army a la America attack eighty 47b BSF body blast bullet battalion barbed wire border cross booby trap bunker C cross border cross fire camp civilian curfew crackdown cordon and search the disappeared defense spokesperson double cross he went on to cover the whole of the English alphabet all the way to Zed and I asked her what it was for and she said it was to help innocent Indian tourists to communicate better with the locals when they went to Kashmir and and and clearly she was telling me that the military occupation creates a whole vocabulary of its own Musa said nothing he just melted into the surroundings then Tillett my ex-husband Naga arrived pretending not to look for her and he had this big medical file of his mother-in-law's medical reports full of oxygen charts and blood profiles and I said I I'm not interested in strangers blood profiles you know but then it was much later I saw that there were all these hallucinations from her hospital bed and I learned that when you stare at people's hallucinations they tell you more than real conversation ever can then there was a stall seek army officer who came in I'm reaching just denying killings that I hadn't killed him off and saying that he he was being made an escape goat and then when he when he picked up on the generally non accusatory atmosphere he began to boast about how because he was a Punjabi speaking Sikh he could actually masquerade in a counter-intel in intelligence operation as a Hindu or a Sikh or a Pakistani militant and then a baby girl arrived unaccompanied and unzoom went and took her away and then a hand letter hand-delivered letter arrived from the forest of Buster it was written in tiny cramped handwriting English as far as I could tell and addressed to a third party a-- who for some reason read it aloud to unzoom translating it into all do on the fly and this is the beginning of the letter dear comrade Azad party ah guru I'm writing this to you because in my three days time in gentlemen Tara I observed you carefully if anyone knows where my child is now I think it might be you I am a Telugu woman and sorry I don't know Hindi my English is not good also sorry for that I'm really working as a full-timer with the Communist Party of India Maoist when you will receive this letter I will be already killed my home became a commune and a confederacy of languages and over time we learn to talk to each other to translate each other the slow cooking recipe involved the new slow cooking recipe involved considerable risk I had to take the language of the god of small things and threw it off a very tall building and then go down using the stairs and gather up the shattered pieces and so was born the Ministry of what most happiness it's not necessary for readers of the ministry what most happiness to know or even understand the complicated map of languages that underpins it if it were if readers needed a field guide in order to properly understand this book I'd consider myself a failure to see it on a bookshop sitting side by side with pulp fiction and political thrillers gives me nothing but pleasure the fun and games of the language map is only that an extra layer of fun and games in truth the map of the Ministry of utmost happiness and their entertaining the languages and their intertwining histories could become a rather large book in itself so all I can do right now is to drill below the surface just at the first couple of chapters to give you an idea so I start with the opening sentence she lived in the graveyard like a tree so she his and Jim whose middle age now and has left her home in the Cobb gar the house of dreams where she lived for years with a group of others like herself and the first time you meet her the first time she reveals something of herself to you it's really at an intersection of two languages in which the traffic policeman is none other than William Shakespeare himself so this is the this is a paragraph a long ago a man who knew English told her her name written backwards in English spelt Majnu in the English version of the story of Laila and Majnu he said Majnu was called Romeo and Laila was Juliet she found that hilarious you mean I've made a kitchen of their story she asked what will they do when they find that Laila may actually be Majnu and Romeo was really Julie the next time he saw her the man who knew English said he'd made a mistake her name spelled backwards would be much now which wasn't a name and meant nothing at all to this she said it doesn't matter I'm all of them I'm Rumi and Julie I'm Laila and Majnu and Majnu why not who says my name is Anju I'm not Anju I'm unhuman I'm a mere Phil I'm a gathering of everybody and nobody of everything and nothing is there anyone else you'd like to invite everyone's invited the man who knew English said it was clever of her to come up with that one he said he'd never have thought of it himself she said how could you have with your standard of all do what do you think English makes you clever automatically so angela is born into this Shia Muslim family in Old Delhi in the year soon after independence and her father malacca ali he traces their lineage back to changose khan and he's a Hakim a doctor of herbal medicine but really a lover of Persian and will do poetry and he believes that poetry can cure everything and he prescribes poetry to his patients like other doctors prescribed medicine and when angioma is born again in the you you see I mean it obviously the book goes backwards and in the second chapter called the Cobra we witness and Jung's birth and in addition to her mother and the Midwife her mother tongue is present too and found wanting so you see the morning when the Sun was up in the room was nice and warm her mother who who was told by the Midwife that she had had a son so Johanna Begum and swaddle little aftaab and explored his tiny body eyes nose head neck armpits fingers toes with unsated unhurried delight and that was when she discovered nestling under his boy parts a small unformed but undoubtedly girl part is it possible for a mother to be terrified of her own baby Jahanara Begum was in hoodoo the only language she knew all things not just living things but all things carpets clothes books pens musical instruments had a gender everything was masculine or feminine man or woman everything except her baby yes of course she knew there was a word for those like him he drew two words actually he did ah and Kiner but two words do not make a language was it possible to live outside language to live outside language for a family whose lives are intricately and obsessively wrapped up in language is the crisis that onions birth creates and for the first few years her mother keeps the secret from her father but when she tells Malacca Tali her husband mulecada Ali who care who has a poem from his huge repertoire of poetry for every single thing for every my new change in political climate for every crisis of love or anything has no poem for his son or daughter and that annoys him completely but but when you first meet Malacca Ali he's he's actually a person who every few years entertains these shallow young journalists who are doing some exotic piece about exotic old daily you know where the Muslims live and the Muslim food and so on for some you know newspaper and he always you know receives them with grace and he tells them about his lineage and so on and then he recites poetry for them and so there's a part in this where you suddenly begin to understand the complexity of how point how language was partitioned along with society along with the land you know and I'll just read this little bit where melaka tally you've always welcomed visitors into his tiny rooms with a faded grace of a nobleman and he spoke of the past with dignity but never nostalgia he often ended his interviews with the recitation of an older couplet by one of his favorite poets Mir Taqi means this is go garage heritage America Kalispell yeah he showed his no hog arica which means the head today which proudly flaunts a crown will tomorrow right here in lamentation Brown most of his visitors brash emissaries of a new ruling class barely aware of their own youthful hubris did not completely grasp the lead meaning of the couplet they'd been offered like a snack to be washed down by a symbol sized cup of thick sweet tea they understood it was a dirge for his own straight in circumstances but what escaped them was that the couplet was a sly snack a perfidious samosa a warning wrapped in mourning being offered with full humility by an erudite man who had absolute faith in his listeners ignorance of all do a language which like most of those who spoke it was gradually being ghettoized so now there's a long part in this which I'm not going to read but I'll just try and extemporize for you about how a language came to be partitioned so we'll do also known as Hindi and also known as Hindustani were a single language written in the Arabic script the base language was a language called khari boli and to which the persian lexicon was added so kuriboh Lee's was spoken in a run in and around Delhi mirrored these cases and it was not it was not the language of the elite nor was it the language of ordinary people but it was certainly a vernacular lie was born on the streets and bazaars of North India kind of lingua franca bit like what English is today in some ways English and Hindi are in some ways so it was the formal language of literature and poetry for both Hindus and Muslims and it varied in ways from region to region so the partition of all dough into Hindi and Urdu began post the mutiny of 1957 I mean trouble had started earlier but in earnest it began in 1919 1857 so basically after the mutiny the Muslims were viewed by the British with great suspicion so all the platelets of power began to shift our kind of vacuum was created all resentments began to smoke through the cracks and for the first time the people who today call themselves Hindus who never called themselves Hindus they always refer to them by their own caste names you know I'm a Brahmin I'm a banya I'm a dirt whatever but suddenly you know at the time when representative government rather than Empire became the issue people started these whole feudal communities began to coalesce into constitutions and they the bigger your constituency the bigger your leverage greater your leverage so that was how people began to call themselves Hindus all these this whole lot of castes and one of the biggest anxieties which are written about another essay was about the untouchables who had then were about 45 million people and who had been converting to Islam to Sikhism to Christianity to escape and now they were being sort of would back into the Hindu fold and there was this great ceremony called called whoopsy meaning return home where there'll be this kind of purification and they will be told now you're Hindu although the caste system was kept in place so now when this whole new constituency has been created there were certain markers cultural markers of how do you marked this community out one was this valve up see the other was goraksha which is cow protection which is a huge issue today I mean people are being lynched and killed about it even today but it began 150 years ago that was the cow protection there was the return home and then there was the campaign that Arabic and added the Arabic Persian script for do not be the only script and that there was a proposal that Dave Nagar II the script we know today as the Hindi script we also accepted officially as a script and finally that campaign basically won its first battle in 1900 when the British agreed in in a certain province that it could have two scripts and the military had two scripts of course very soon you had two languages the language mandarins moved in and the upper caste Hindoo started purging Persian from will do on the other side they were purging other vernacular tongues and the scripts via the languages began to drift apart actually this to to campaign for a script to as a popular movement when you only had 2 percent of the population who was literate it was really the elites who were you know jockeying for position buddy but that campaign was fused to this idea of Hindu nation of cop protection and so on and eventually it became two languages and even the the literary heritage was partitioned like the the Hindi part left out all the beautiful new poets the Urdu part left out all the beautiful bhakti poets and you had a language partition of people partition and finally of course the land partitioned and so that's why you know you had of course the whole thing was resisted by writers because you had you had a language like Sanskrit replacing local vernacular and Sanskrit was the language of ritual Sanskrit was not a language used by human beings to describe human experience it was not the language of labour or love or yearning it was the language of ritual and so in a way it was impoverishing rather than enriching a language which was a very peculiar thing for anyone to do but writers especially progressive writers resisted this and continued to write the most beautiful prose you know dipping into all of this although now you know the official you know text books and so on are going to cause that generation that has gone away to be unable to dip into it because the scripts are different people can't read them anymore so that's why when monocot Ali recites this couplet to his his his young people they know that he knows that they can't understand it and and so you have a situation now where you have this new Hindi which is which is being promoted in India or Dewey's being you know demoted and recently in fact people were like in to Muslim members of the Legislative Assembly of Uttar Pradesh the home of all Duke were prevented from taking their oath of office in all do and one of the DEM was charged with blasphemy so although Hindi's victory has been a resounding one the anxieties are still huge you know so you see unzoom in the ministry she at one point is in Gujarat in 2002 when the massacre happens and she has gone there with a friend of her father's to pay her respects at the grave of wali bikini he's a 17th century poet of loves the first poet to to collect a divine which was the formal collection of Persian poetry in its formal way you know with all the formal requirements the machinery the mafia the the kashi does so you know these were the formal requirements of how you how you deliver a collection and well Italy the first and therefore in some ways known as the father of all new poetry because until then high poetry was always written in persian and later people started to write and will do and when she went now I'm talking about 2002 she's caught in Gujarat and the mob destroys and this is true it happened the mob destroys the grave of Walid aki-nee and overnight they build a road over it so you can imagine how how high the feelings run that a poet of 300 years ago still causes this kind of an anxiety so there's a passage in the ministry where you know all on Jim's friends at the coop gar are looking at the TV hoping to see some sight of her in a refugee camp or somewhere and they learned that this grave has been desecrated and they learned in passing that Walid aki-nee shrine had been razed to the ground and a Todd Road built over it erasing every sign that it ever existed but neither the police nor the mobs nor the Chief Minister could do anything about the people who continued to leave flowers in the middle of the new Todd road where the shrine used to be when the flowers were crushed to paste under the wheels of fast cars new flowers would appear and what can anybody do about the connection between flour paste and poetry I learned this very long lecture with a very short note about slogans and mantras in the Empire of India Anjem survives the Gujarat massacre because the mob that finds her lying over the corpse of Zakir Mia feigning death believes that killing hydra's brings bad luck so instead of killing her they stand over her and make her chant their slogans bharat mata ki jai one day Mottram she did weeping shaking humiliated beyond her worst nightmare victory to Mother India salute the mother one day matram usually translated as praise be the mother is a poem written by the Bengali writer bankim chandra Chatterjee which appeared in Anand MOT his story his novel about the sannyasi rebellion against the Muslims published in the 1880s a novel greatly favored by Hindu nationalists both past and present because it created a template for their fantasy Hindu warrior who rises in rebellion against his degenerate Muslim oppressors so you you have a you know you have an Urdu poet who is whose grave is desecrated you have the mob chanting a Bengali poet in you know in their attack so you know the thing about slogans in the Empire of India is extraordinary because you never normally find people chanting slogans in their mother-tongue in Kashmir you don't find people chanting in Kashmir because the slogans always calling out to someone else or to the outside world so they are chant as Adi Adi Adi and Kashmir which is in Urdu obviously it's a slogan that came from the Iranian Revolution you know there's a very far anyway I'll tell you that data but and so there are slogans in Persian slogans in English and slogans and will do at the opposite end of the country down south in Kerala I grew up to the resounding roar of Inquilab zindabad long live the revolution in Urdu it says it's a it's a sort of doffing of the cap to Bhagat Singh the martyr who was hanged by the British in 1931 was a socialist in Punjab the other communist party slogan in Kerala was swadden dream gennadi partying socialism zindabad freedom democracy socialism long lived that Sanskrit Malayalam English and I will do in a single and now to end with a mantra so when unzoom returns from the club gah after being in the refugee camps of Gujarat for a long time she's very worried about this little girl zineb who she's adopted after having seen what she's seen in Gujarat so first of all she has her cut her hair and puts her into boys clothes cause she's seen all this rape that happened and then she teaches her a Sanskrit mantra the Gayatri mantra which all the Muslims in the refugee camp are saying you should know to use in a mob situation to pretend that you're a Hindu so the first time you hear the Gayatri mantra this little Muslim girl who's playing with the dogs and her goat and walking down the street and she can chant the Gayatri mantra the second time you hear the Gayatri mantra in the book he's in a British Airways advertisement where they are trying to solicit customers for the new India you know so everybody is going around doing namaste and all that and doing the Gayatri mantra which basically I'll just read the translation it says O God thou art the giver of life removal of pain and sorrow bestow of happiness o creator of the universe may be received I supreme sin destroying light may thou guide our intellect in the right direction and the third time you hear the Gayatri mantra is when zeinab and your little daughters grown up and she actually gets betrothed to saddam hussein and he takes them all to a mall in delhi to have a meal and then he tells them that the small really stands on the ground where once his father was beaten to death you know and and Raynham says oh I'll say a prayer for him I know him Hindu prayer and she in this fast-food restaurant in a mall recites the Gayatri mantra such other ways in which Sanskrit has finally been indigenized a few months after she returns from the Gujarat Massacre unable to continue living her whole life and you moves to the old graveyard way as she gradually recovers she builds the Janet Paradise guest house when Saddam Hussein joins her they expand their business to include funeral services and the graveyard becomes a place where any body that has been denied the grace of a funeral by the dunya the outside world is given a dignified burial under the auspices of today honored guest house and funeral services depending on what the occasion calls for prayers for the dead include the reciting of the Fatiha the singing of the hindi internationally and recitation from Shakespeare's Henry v in English so how should we answer Pablo Neruda's question that is the title of this lecture in what language does rainfall over tormented cities I'd say without hesitation in the language of translation thank you [Applause] how many hours was that just to say I'll ask a few questions and then I'll open the questions to the audience we have a couple of mics and then there's going to be a dance that means like the urgency the erudition the humor and it made me it made me think about well the bit I made me think about your process the thing I liked the most thing I loved was the description of how the book came to came about that you found the characters were dropping in on you and then they were visiting more and more often some of them actually moved in and he had this confederacy of languages around your table and some of them started to write stuff others actually turned up with documents already it almost sounds like transcription more than translation okay talk a bit a bit more about your your process how writing happens well both the the the very big there's very big difference almost in my body you know when I'm writing the nonfiction and when I'm writing fiction because the nonfiction is always something I almost don't want to write and then at some point it becomes like just holding it inside me is too difficult and so just and when I read as a there's an impatience and an urgency and an anger when I write it and the fiction much to the annoyance of everybody publishers agents everybody that I'm an absolutely no hurry you know so and and sometimes I just feel that I mean some of my friends are very impatient because it makes I make it sound esoteric but it is in so tarik you know that I just I just have to wait you know and I just have to be open to it and then it comes you know and it it's it's it's very odd because I don't it's not that I write a lot and then I discard a lot and I get its I don't write a lot but I'm clearly writing a lot in my head you know but when it comes on the page it's it's it's not very far from what eventually is published it's not exactly but you know there's a lot of so so the but there is that sense in which these people just come and crowd me out you know and the last couple of years I live alone and you know when people would come to visit me I'd almost be like you know can you different behave yourselves all of you like can you and and I'd often be telling myself looking at this person and they're seeing something and I can't really hear what the real person is saying and I I'm just telling myself be normal you know just try lean normal and the minute they leave all these people have opinions about that person you know and and I have this sense that they are here now too and they have opinions about people who have opinions about the book and all of that I was gonna testify that whether they're still around have you found a new home for them oh yeah they are around and in fact people in the god of small things have also arrived and guest houses is doing well and I are you receiving you visitors not yet not yet not yet not yet I should say that I'm a writer and a teacher of creative writing rather than a translator and a teacher of translation so my understanding of translation is very much a layman's and I I think perhaps naively about translation in terms of borders and crossings liminality z' that borders are very very important to this book in that that figures most profoundly in in the figure of engine as you described it there angela is born a boy a much wanted boy I've taught and then translates himself into herself and I think you said somewhere else that there is an incendiary border of gender running through her but there are incendiary borders of some kind running through everybody in the question is and and in fact Angela you know I mean often people do ask a lot about her but I always said is that that's not the only thing that she is you know she's she's she's also she are Muslim born in Delhi that's today the more dangerous identity you know because obviously when she goes to Gujarat she gets caught up in a massacre because she's a Muslim she escapes because she's a Jew and they are worried about killing his jaws but she's also just a unique person in so many ways a grand raucous person you know but Saddam Hussein has the border of caste and religious conversion another I mean as I said something that's been coming since 1857 like that is a dangerous border Musa had the border of Kashmir running through him the Altima too has a border and one of the characters we didn't speak much about the one who just arrived with his whiskey and was writing his own stuff he also has a border running through him because he's but he's part State you know part the person who can wait and put everything in perspective and not react emotionally and not react personally and the other half of him is distorted lover who's failing falling so each of the characters has some kind of division in them in in a way which which which is in a country where everybody lives in a grid of caste of ethnicity of language religion of tiny not even a grid of mesh mm-hmm you mentioned the place I think it's in in Delhi Jantar Mantar which is a kind of gathering place of people with with a cause it's something they need to express they gather there the men even quite eccentric there's a it's sort of resembles on a grand scale the cop car where an Jim lives initially which is a gathering of outsiders like her it also resembles the the the hostel that she establishes in the old Muslim draga which again becomes a magnet for all kinds of different people the way in which this this book is a model for those places and that it's so very accommodating I mean I've always found you know I mean because I've been involved with a lot of these these movements and all of them do in some ways shelter a lot of eccentrics and not jobs you know and it's something very sweet about that even but unfortunately gentlemen terror has been shut down by the government people are not allowed to go there now and protest and it's like suddenly one lung has collapsed you know it's just obviously the drive against every kind of dissent and this is one of the things that happened I I feel it very keenly actually and very sadly because I spent after many many nights and days there you know is there another lung where people are able to well they are they are now told that they can gather in this place very close to all Delhi which is also in a book called the ram-leela ground but you know just to hire it you have to pay fifty thousand rupees so first thing you have to be quite rich to protest you spoke earlier up here about finishing the goddess small things and you have a huge sense of relief that you'd found a language that tasted like yours a very strong pie that have tasted like yours and then the Indian nationalist government started testing nuclear weapons and that taste was soured for you and you wrote an essay against that it's called the end of which I read on the train down actually there's a very powerful polemic it's it's it's a different voice it's still recognizably your voice I think it's the voice of the novel is still but it's somewhat more singular you talk a little bit about the relationship between the artist and the activist my most unfavorite word is activist no I'll tell you why because because I keep trying to think when was this word born the activist at that word it's a very new and recent word and why do writers who write politically as they have done forever and been beheaded and shot and killed and all that for but suddenly writers seem to have been domesticated and so we need an extra profession to describe ourselves when we become political you know and I I think that's a very very important thing for us to remember because it reduces the idea of what a writer used to be but for me like I was saying the you know the the the novel then maybe the reason why the novel is so much more you know as an act as writing activity is more delightful for me is because the novel I see as as a way of creating universe and inviting the people you love to walk through it with you whereas the nonfiction not all non-teaching but my nonfiction has always been a very urgent intervention in a situation that is rapidly closing down so sometimes in the when you see the nonfiction collected you may not understand what the situation was at that moment you know the Supreme Court had lifted a stay or the government that ordered operation green heart like a war in the forests against indigenous people something urgent was happening and the increasingly corporate media is closing in with the consensus just just despicable and so I I would write to blow that open you know but in fiction there's always this display and this whimsy and this ability to take a time and create create a universe but again when I started writing the ministry I was I was aware that I I wasn't no longer or at least not no longer but in in whatever I was thinking of I could not write a conventional novel in which there were a few characters and there was a back you know there was I needed to and I did begin to think of the novel as a city as something very much more complicated and with rules that needed to be broken and walls that needed to be moved would you say that the art itself is a form oh yeah I mean it's it's full of unspeakable horrors except you speak them it's full of darkness but it's carried by this huge generosity of spirit its capacious invites all people in its you know the thing is that there can never be or they should not be only one kind of thing in a novel you know to me a novel that was only full of horrors would be very tedious and a very sort of simple way of looking at something you know so as as you saw the idea is that there is so much that is beautiful there's so much love and there's so much wicked humor and poetry and even in the people who are being crushed there's still that smile before you go down you know so for me that is what a novel can do you know that is what a novel can do I mean if you look at the section on Kashmir in truth I haven't written that much about Kashmir but whatever have said I have said pretty simply and that is why it has created an outdoor when I speak often there's you know chanting and charges of sedition and all of that but I knew that really the the only way I could write what I thought about Kashmir was in fiction in a novel because it's not just a chart of human rights abuses it's really about how people negotiate in those situations where you're living under an occupation what are the negotiations the collaborations the subversion the management techniques you know it's fascinating so you hear from Garson Hobart his point of view you hear from Musa you hear from Tilottama you hear from all kinds of voices and stories and pamphlets that come out you know and that I feel only a novel can do and that to an experimental novel mm-hmm there's a kind of refusal to give in to despair if I think about the kinds of things you described and then read about your involvement in various campaigns and try to imagine myself into those situations I fear that I would give in to despair and yet to write a novel about them and such a kind of joyful novel is a form of activism it's a form of repost no it's you think the thing is that if you're I mean I I found this a lot you know that people who looking who look at what's going on you know struggles that are happening and things from the outside and who understand it are in solidarity are often quite despairing but when you are inside them you know it's not it's not so bleak because people know what they have to do and they do it you know so like say you you you go to Kashmir you know you're in the in the forest with the mouse I mean I are in the Narmada Valley I've spent so much time laughing you know I mean I remember one dawn we were walking like in the darkness like thousands of us to capture a damn sight right like before so we were just supposed to just arrive at the dam site and take it over and dawn and then the police came and all the women were you know I mean I'm so that they couldn't isolate us and the police were like meeting up people and honestly the only conversation that was going on was who's sleeping with who honestly it is like crazy you know there's that too which keeps people going and and in Kashmir on Indian Independence Day everyone wishes each other happy slavery days you know and there were the stories about like the you know the remote villages the border villages in Kashmir are obviously thinner populated and major army presence but so so they're really living under the boot and so for them to protest is a big deal so there's a huge protest in the city of Sheena girl because a militant had been killed and a few villagers decided that they were also going to be protesting and like I said you know the protests always often in languages the slogans are languages that people don't understand so a friend was telling me the story of this little group of villagers who were marching through the village shouting Indian dogs go back so they were being stopped by the army and the army caught hold of the stragglers and start to beat them up and sort of say how dare you do this and what would you say and he said Lisa met oye kirisaki Indian dogs you hear who you saying that no sir I was just saying Indian dogs please stay here didn't know which part of it was insulting my notes are right at the back that we'd be talking a little bit too long are there any questions for our entirety from I so my question is because you talked about language and translation so my question is regarding memory because I wanted to ask your opinion on how you see memory navigating translation especially between communities and also this is kind of regarded in in relation to creation of history especially in a country like India because it kind of dominates how we look at language being created so yeah well that's a very it's a very good question you know and it requires a a very long answer because one of the things that is being manufactured in factories is memory now you know so we are manufacturing you know like people manufacture antique furniture we are manufacturing antique memories you know so so so the and and it has been something that that society is that veer towards fascism and majoritarianism have always done you know so of course you know as a Russian saying like the past is unreliable you know so you don't know and memory and memory is and and for example I can give you an example like the whole protests that happened around this film called padmavati you know which was you know people were actually protesting about a past that did not exist but it just didn't matter you know I mean are you going to reason with them with footnotes when people are out with swords and wanting to burn down theater so so today this is a very very serious problem you know that memory is being manufactured thank you that was I was great could I ask you about the embodiment of language because like you said language is not just words or sentences or Hindi and Urdu language is so much more languages what brings us into being as subjects of the Empire like you were saying so what happens when you sort of embody that language because I think we in India are embodying that language of being a colonial or a new colonial subject of being a Hindu of being a Muslim and is that where the problem lies and the other thing was you spoke about the Constitution of India and how it's written in English that's another thing but it's also written in the language of modernity it is a colonial language of development and protection so what do you think is the place of minorities in the Indian Constitution minorities that Muslims are a disease or you know the Dalits and what does that mean for India today well you know I think I think again that's a profound question about about language and I sort of try to touch on it when when when I when I talked about the fact that when you refine language you know when you make it into something like a cement block then what is being said doesn't matter or what is being written doesn't matter and I think the thing about language is that most often language uses us and then you have writers who use language you know so can does language bend you to its will or you do you bend it to your will I think that's kind of important to me at least because when when the blood in my veins flows without stopping it's when I know that I'm able to write what I think and when I feel that I have not really managed to say exactly what I think when the distance between language and thought is is large I am uncomfortable you know but to a painter that might not be the problem with or to a musician about the Indian Constitution you know the thing is that the the architect of the Indian Constitution was dr. makers who I mentioned and he himself had huge huge battles with the rest of the people on the committee and he himself was unhappy with the Constitution he did want want it to be rethought but again you know like language a constitution that is refined is also a problem anything that is verified and so but you have the problem today that the Indian Constitution when it was written was in a way a much more liberal document than the society it was written for because of Ambedkar you know because of his caste and his understanding and his fears of what was going to happen when the Hindu elite took over from the British you know because the British may have played into caste for their own good or their own reasons or their own advantage but the Hindus believed in it you know so there was a real fear there and he did work quite hard to make a constitution that was more liberal but now today the the Hindu nationalists have said that they want to rewrite the Constitution to make it a Hindu nation you know so and then within the Constitution there are things which which were also very hard on people like for example while it is liberal on more liberal than societies on caste it was very liberal for the adivasis for the indigenous people who were made you know the lands were taken away from them by the Constitution and the handed you know the the the state owned their lands and they were made squatters on their own land overnight then there were certain amendments to protect those rights but those amendments are being vandalized by the government itself by selling land to big mining corporations and so on and so often the most radical resistance groups are asking for the complement for the constitution to be implemented for the government to just just abide by the Constitution which is not happening you know thank you for your lecture tonight the Booker committee described your effort with adjectives of a style and elegance and that was the fruit of your endeavor which was god of small things move forward to a different chapter sitting in squelching boots and mud fighting for the dam disposed individuals fighting for the Dalits in the streets of India and even going to jail requires brute force and resilience how does the writer link style and elegance with brute force and religious and resilience does that create a tormented soul just you just go to jail elegantly [Applause] it would be it would not be a great writer whose soul was not from time to time tormented or all the time tormented you know so when it's not looking for I'm not the kind of writer I mean I actually get terrorized when people ask me whether I would like to retreat to some Chalet and Switzerland to write I'll kill myself you know I can't do that so for me writing writing the way I do in in the heart of chaos is absolutely fine you know and I I think I think that one thing one thing that the mobs who are born who are desecrating the graves of 17th century poets burning the homes of great singers like wrastlin by desecrating the grave of fiies Khan one of the greatest Hindustani classical vocalist ever those mobs understand the danger of artists and they are very good taste you know so why we would never call Valley dhakini an activist or fires cannon activist or acelin or any you know people who who are alive in the world they live in and who I mean is so important for writers to be dangerous people you know people people and this is the great danger today where writers have been placed in the marketplace and assessed by the value on bestseller lists whereas in India today at a time when majoritarian is Taran ISM is he's taking over where people are being brutalized ghettoize it is the time for the unpopular writer it is the time for the writer who stands there alone and says I denounce you your bestseller list [Applause] [Music]

Channel: British Centre for Literary Translation

Views: 55,531

Keywords: Literary Translation

Id: -tFom1WihPY

Length: 92min 53sec (5573 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 19 2018