Shunya's Notes

On the Indian Knowledge Systems Calendar from IIT Kharagpur

(This article also appeared in Raiot.)

My alma mater, Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) at Kharagpur, has created a condensed history of Indian knowledge systems in calendar form. Lavishly produced, it is being widely shared and praised on social media. Sadly, it brims with lies, misleading ideas, and fanciful fictions. Rather than educating to inform and delight, it seeks to inflate cultural pride by taking liberties with the truth. Let me explain.

Early India had many solid achievements in advancing knowledge but this calendar’s authors miss loads of them while twisting the rest into convoluted descriptions laced with Sanskrit jargon. For instance, they ignore the Harappans entirely—their fine urban planning, precision weights, hydraulic engineering, the first indoor toilets, and a relatively egalitarian society with no standing armies or temples. Instead, they begin with legendary Vedic sages. It’s as though they can’t acknowledge that the roots of any knowledge system could possibly lie earlier and outside of the holy Vedas. They also repeat the absurd claim that Sanskrit is ‘the root of the entire Indo-Aryan branch in Asia and systems of European languages.’ No, it’s not. Sanskrit is just another branch of the family, like Persian and Greek.

This false claim also reveals their foundational belief that Aryans did not migrate into the Subcontinent, that Vedic people were indigenous to this land and carried Sanskrit westward. There never was any scholarly justification for this belief, which was driven by ignoble motives: the creators of the Vedas have to be ‘made’ primordially indigenous to promote Hindu pride and ‘faith and fatherland’ nationalism—and to render Islam and Christianity ‘invader’ religions. But the fact is that, to the extent that the Rig Veda, Sanskrit, and priestly fire rituals are seen as foundational to Hinduism, Hinduism too is an ‘invader’ religion that arrived with the Aryans from Central Asia.

Cargo

(A short story, first published in Write & Beyond)

“I re-read your letter concerning your great-great-grandmother, ” Sam said. He was standing, tall and slender and aged, his balding pate gleaming white under the museum-style track-lighting that hung above him. But he moved with a gentle grace as he bent over and placed a yellowed logbook upon his rosewood desk. It was a cargo manifest from a ship called the Good Grace , which had been owned and captained by his great-grandfather, Samuel Collins. Each page of the slim ledger was encased in a plastic sleeve, which he turned delicately. “I don’t know if we’ll be able to find what you’re looking for in here. But let me just see if I can locate the right volume, and then you’re welcome to take a look.”

“My old grandma remembered her, the stories she told.” Keisha said. Her face was serious but not sad as she spoke, peering sideways at the high, teak bookshelves surrounding her. “But it took a lot of digging to learn the name of the ship. ”

“Well you’ve clearly done a lot of research to reach this point,” Sam said with genuine admiration.

“You’re kind to be so helpful.” Keisha smiled uncertainly. Her voice was soft and high, self-consciously sweet. “I heard about the work you do, volunteering at that clinic for the poor. So that’s why I thought I could write to you.”

“Not at all,” Sam muttered, with a relaxed humility. He closed the book he’d been studying. “Well, nothing in this one on… on what you’re looking for. I do hope all your work leads to something useful in these stacks.” But as he reached for another one of the slender ledgers, his own words pricked him. Did he really hope she found notes of her ancestor’s abduction in his family’s treasured records?

Our Moment on Earth

[The seventh in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

“Our plan B has always been grounded in our beliefs around the continued evolution of technology and engineered solutions to address and react to whatever the climate system and its outcomes present to us, whether that be in the form of rises in sea level, which we think you can address through different engineering accommodations along coastal areas, to changing agricultural production due to changes in weather patterns that may or may not be induced by climate change.” —Rex Tillerson, as CEO of ExxonMobile, to shareholders in 2015

***
For the past few years, I’ve been taking a fairly deep dive into attempting to understand the physical and ecological changes occurring on our planet and how these will affect human lives and civilization. As I’ve immersed myself in the science and the massive societal hurdles that stand in the way of an adequate response, I’m becoming aware that this exercise is changing me, too. I feel it inside my body, like a grey mass coalescing in my chest, sticking to everything, tugging against my heart and occluding my lungs. A couple of months ago, I decided to stop writing on this subject, to step away from these thoughts and concerns, because of their discomfiting darkness.

But I’ve discovered that walking away from this matter is no longer something I can just choose to do. For I now experience the world in a different way than I once did, as this grey mass clouds my vision and leaves its residue on everything I touch. I’ve come to see the changing Earth as the greatest single force shaping human affairs into the future, the backdrop against which the human story will play out and respond. 

Just as the temperate stability of the Holocene once enabled the shift from nomadism to settled farming and all of civilization, so the ongoing mass extinction of species and the rapidly warming climate will erode our present modes of life and maps of political order to make way for something new. Not just new, but very likely burdened by unprecedented collective hardship that stresses and tests our political systems, economies, infrastructures, and provisioning networks as never before. Some of these systems will fail. Without knowing how extremely or how quickly the planetary changes will occur, but knowing with some predictive capacity—unlike our Paleolithic ancestors—that an essential and irreversible change is underway, makes it difficult not to feel frightened and aggrieved for our future, even if I may not live to see the most startling changes. But then, what I’ve already witnessed has been startling enough.

Modern Myths of Human Power

[The sixth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

“The American way of life is not up for negotiation.” —George HW Bush to international diplomats at the Earth Summit, Rio de Janeiro, 1992

“Much talk. Talking will win you nothing. All the same, the woman goes with me to the house of Hades.” —Thanatos to Apollo in a scene from Alcestis by Euripides, 5th Century BCE

***

In Classical Greek mythology, Thanatos was Death. As a minor god who got little press in the surviving tales, he appears in the play, Alcestis, as something of a functionary, dutifully gathering those whose time had come and spiriting them to the underworld. Not that he doesn’t find some satisfaction in his work, but he wields his power neither masterfully nor hungrily. The touch of Thanatos did not bring on death from war or violence—those deaths were the domain of other deities—but an ordinary death, as experienced by most. In ancient times, Thanatos was often depicted as a winged youth, as a babe in the arms of his mother, Nyx, goddess of Night, or with his twin, Hypnos, Sleep. Thanatos was not a villain. But he was ruthlessly inevitable.

In the 21st Century Marvel film franchise, Thanatos has been reinvented as Thanos. In this reimagining, Thanos still wields death, but he sees his job in larger terms: he wants to bring peace to the universe, which is engulfed in strife. “Too many mouths. Not enough to go around,” he explains, referring to the overpopulation of the Marvel Universe. Thanos’s solution is to reduce the number of living things through a painless existential cleanse that will magically drift across the universe, gently annihilating half of everybody. He understands himself as the only being possessed of both will and power enough to act upon the need of the hour—to turn every other being into dust, thus restoring balance and enabling peace among the untold trillions who will survive. His desire to erase half of all the living isn’t personal, nor is it inspired by cruelty, venality, or a lust for power. Like his Greek inspiration, Thanos is pragmatic, goal-oriented, and transactional. Though he’s depicted with the stature of a supervillain, in command of limitless legions of grotesque warriors, he’s motivated by a sense of duty: the universe is out of balance and must be set right. “I am inevitable,” he quietly declares.

But, for his heartlessness, Thanos is set upon by the full pantheon of the Marvel Universe demi-gods, the so-called Avengers—a collective of winsome and righteous superheroes—who do not accept inevitability, limitations, or balance. To defeat this supervillain, the Avengers pound their way through a series of epic battles that rage for some five hours of high-CGI viewing in two back-to-back blockbuster films. I don’t think I’m giving anything away to say here that, in the end, the Marvel superheroes win their war.

These two films, Avengers: Infinity Wars (2018) and Avengers: Endgame (2019), became the highest grossing superhero films of all time—and by a good margin—capping off a monumental saga spanning twenty-two films released over the past decade, each of which earned on average nearly a billion dollars at the box office. Presumably, films become such mega-blockbusters, in large part, because they tap effectively into something of the current Zeitgeist, telling a story that audiences want to hear. Many such blockbusters and classic films have become our modern folk stories, providing a vernacular of metaphors, presumptions, and expectations about our world, generating broad conversation, popular analysis, and living threads of storytelling across people of diverse backgrounds and social locations. Stories powerfully tap into our prevalent paradigms, beliefs, and notions, amplify and edify them—or chip away at them. And if, as I’ve suggested in my previous essays in this series, ancient folktales and myths reveal something about our collective understanding of how the world works, or should work, then so do these blockbuster Avenger flicks.

Talk Less, Work More

On India’s troubled relationship with democratic values. (First published in The Baffler.)

Sometime after midnight on June 25, 1975, over six hundred political leaders, social activists, and trade unionists in India were rudely awakened by knocks on their doors. By dawn, they had been placed behind bars for inciting “internal disturbance.” In parallel, the government shut off electricity to newspaper offices, blocking their next day’s editions.

“The President has proclaimed the Emergency,” Prime Minister Indira Gandhi announced in a surprise broadcast the next morning on All India Radio. “This is nothing to panic about.” The previous night, she had made a bleary-eyed President Fakhruddin Ali Ahmed trigger the Emergency provision in Article 352 of India’s constitution, which allowed her to postpone elections and suspend most fundamental rights, including those to speech, assembly, association, and movement. With the stroke of a pen, Gandhi had effectively dismantled India’s democratic infrastructure, concentrating dictatorial power in herself. Total press censorship was imposed, and foreign journalists who did not toe the line were summarily expelled, including stringers with the Washington Post, the Guardian, and the Daily Telegraph. On June 28, someone snuck a clever obituary into the Bombay edition of The Times of India: “D’Ocracy—D.E.M., beloved husband of T. Ruth, loving father of L.I. Bertie, brother of Faith, Hope, and Justice, expired on 26th June.”

The twenty-one months of Emergency that followed are regarded as the darkest chapter in independent India’s history. For those old enough to remember, the word recalls mass incarcerations without trial, a gagged press and propaganda, slum demolitions, and—most shockingly—the forced sterilizations of millions. Often cited as a cautionary tale in Indian political discourse, it is generally seen as an “exceptional” period from which India recovered admirably well, thanks in large part to the resilience of its democratic institutions and ethos. 

Two new books powerfully challenge this consensus. In India’s First Dictatorship, Christophe Jaffrelot and Pratinav Anil expose the chronic weaknesses in India’s democratic culture prior to the Emergency, revealing the role that other actors—businessmen, the middle class, even trade unionists and some communists—played in enabling Gandhi’s authoritarian rule. In Emergency Chronicles, Gyan Prakash considers how aspects of the modern Indian state, particularly its Constitution, enabled a demagogic takeover. In asking fundamental questions about the relation between state and society in India and exploring its many fault lines, these books cut through the boosterism that generally occludes the “world’s largest democracy.” Rather than viewing the Emergency as an aberration, they present it as a logical outcome of certain social and political tendencies of independent India.

Both books are written with an eye to the present. Since coming to power in 2014, Prime Minster Narendra Modi has presided over a kind of undeclared emergency: rejecting constitutional norms; jailing thousands of peaceful dissidents, journalists, and activists; undermining the press; retracting the last shards of Kashmir’s autonomy. While preserving their democratic veneer, he has weaponized civic institutions including the intelligence agency and police force; the central bank, judiciary, and election commission; and even public universities and the Indian Council of Historical Research. Most strikingly, like Gandhi, Modi has embarked on a series of misguided and needlessly punitive policies—from banning certain currency notes with almost no prior notice to overseeing a militarized Covid-19 lockdown that, lacking planning or preparation, prompted a mass migration on foot. The ease with which he has done this has once again raised questions about what Prakash describes as Indian society’s “troubled relationship with democratic values.” These books allow us to evaluate how today’s gathering liberal-democratic deficits stack up against the mid-1970s. Is India today less, or more, vulnerable to tyranny than it was back then?

Lost and Found in Eden

[The fifth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

High in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta of northern Colombia, the Kogi people peaceably live and farm. Having isolated themselves in nearly inaccessible mountain hamlets for five hundred years, the Kogi retain the dubious distinction of being the only intact, pre-Columbian civilization in South America. As such, they are also rare representatives of a sustainable farming way of life that persists until the modern era. Yet, more than four decades ago, even they noticed that their highland climate was changing. The trees and grasses that grew around their mountain redoubt, the numbers and kinds of animals they saw, the sizes of lakes and glaciers, the flows of rivers—everything was changing. The Kogi, who refer to themselves as Elder Brother and understand themselves to be custodians of our planet, felt they must warn the world. So in the late 1980s, they sent an emissary to contact the documentary filmmaker, Alan Ereira of the BBC—one of the few people they’d previously met from the outside world. In the resulting film, From the Heart of the World: The Elder Brother’s Warning (1991), the Kogi Mamos (shamans) issue to us, their Younger Brother, a warning akin to that which the Union of Concerned Scientists would also later issue in their World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity (1997, with a second notice in 2017): that we must take heed of our damage to the planet; that if we don’t stop what we’re doing to it, we will destroy the world we know.

The Kogi warning, however, is couched in the language and metaphor of their own knowledge system. They speak of The Great Mother, who taught them “right from wrong,” and whose teachings still guide their lives. “The Great Mother talked and talked. The Great Mother gave us what we needed to live, and her teaching has not been forgotten right up to this day,” they tell us. It’s Younger Brother who is causing problems. “They are taking out the Mother’s heart. They are digging up the ground and cutting out her liver and her guts. The Mother is being cut to pieces and stripped of everything,” the Mamos scold. “So from today, stop digging in the Earth and stealing the gold. If you go on, the world will end. You are bringing the world to an end.” You can hear in their tone that it doesn’t occur to them that Younger Brother might not listen.

For the Kogi, gold is the blood of the Great Mother; it holds for them a value entirely apart from the way we value gold. For them, the wellbeing of the Great Mother is paramount, and they live now—as they always have—in service to her, our world. During the millennium before Columbus bumped into the Caribbean islands, the ancestors of the Kogi had created the complex, non-literate Tairona civilization, stretching from the Caribbean Sea up into the Sierras. They farmed and fished, their subsistence practices enmeshed within a sophisticated knowledge system that described the complex local ecology. They built cities of stone connected by roadways, marvels of engineering, working in league with what nature provided, rather than against it. Their several settlements were located within the different ecological zones of the diverse landscape, and each played its part in providing for their larger civilization. For example, the coastal Tairona fished and collected salt, which they shared with their sister settlements, from whom they received maize and other goods, each of which was produced within its own optimal ecozone, sustainably supporting a population of three hundred thousand people.

Tales From a Changing World

[The fourth in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.]

Tabea Bakeua lives in Kiribati, a North Pacific atoll nation. Her country is likely to be the first to disappear completely under the rising seas within a few decades. Asked by foreign documentary filmmakers if she “believes” in climate change, Bakeua considers and tells them, “I have seen climate change, the consequences of climate change. But I don’t believe it as a religious person. There’s a thing in the Bible, where they say that god sends this person to tell all the people that there will be no more floods. So I am still believing in that.” She smiles, self-consciously, as she continues. “And the reason why I am still believing in that is because I’m afraid. And I don’t know how to get all my fifty or sixty family members away from here.” She’s still smiling as tears fill her eyes. “That’s why I’m afraid. But I’m putting it behind me because I just don’t know what to do.” She turns, apologetically, to wipe away her tears. [from “The Tropical Paradise Being Swallowed By The Pacific” by Journeyman Pictures]

***

Bakeua’s response is one of many that people now have about anthropogenic climate change. Grasping for magic or miracles in the face of destruction and helplessness, her narrative is common among her hundred thousand fellow citizens. Having remained self-sufficient and sustainably prosperous in their way of life for thousands of years—while contributing effectively zero carbon emissions—they will abruptly be left with nothing as the encroaching tides sweep their lands out from under them, sacrificing their islands for the greater prosperity of other countries. The people of Kiribati played no part in triggering this annihilation and have no way of withstanding it. Nor is the international community throwing them a life raft—through compensatory rights to lands, housing, livelihoods, and autonomy, elsewhere, as would be just—nor even expressing any meaningful concern for their plight.

How did we get to this tragic moment? Whose responsibility is it to help save the people and culture of Kiribati? And what of other, similar cases now arising around the globe? Our politics seem wholly unequipped to deal with our ongoing and anticipated climate-forced migrations; our worldviews and political formulations evolved on a planet different from the one presently emerging. And a planet now reeling with nearly eight billion souls and a collapse of biodiversity also offers less resource flexibility to respond to the looming global challenges. Knowing these limitations, however, doesn’t absolve us of our responsibility to do everything we can to address the crises; rather, we must figure out how to change ourselves to meet the moment.

We know that human beings have always had to contend with changing climates since our species first emerged in Africa, during the Pleistocene ice age. In earlier eras, having more wilderness and fewer people on Earth afforded a great deal of climate resiliency—inhabitants of drowning islands could readily enough find somewhere else to go, for instance. But as so many of us have been feeling distress or denial about the effects of the changing climate, I’ve wondered how our distant ancestors experienced the changes they lived through. Did they change themselves to meet their moment? What stories did they tell?

Notes from the SV Underground

During my 20+ years in Silicon Valley and since, I've often pondered the impact of the Internet on social life. As an exploration of this for a broad audience, I think The Social Dilemma is excellent. It captures, if a bit luridly, the largely amoral nature of the hyper-capitalist creativity of Silicon Valley—and its bad consequences. Watch it!

Technology, says the film, ought to be a tool that serves us. But interactive social media works differently from its earlier "broadcast" counterparts. It streams 24x7 personalized news, opinion, gossip, ads, propaganda, pop culture—all competing for our attention. The film shows how we pay for it, how it spies and uses algorithmic wizardry to mine our tastes and behaviors without our consent, how it hacks our attention span and exploits our psychology to benefit private and state interests, how it further polarizes and divides us. It artfully manipulates us with dopamine hits and facilitates the spread of fake news like never before. All this, argues the film, harms mental health and raises social strife. We've ceded too much privacy and power to a few tech corporations that are de facto monopolies, whose understanding of us is "the product" that's monetized—as part of "surveillance capitalism". It’s a Faustian bargain, the film suggests, and calls for sensible regulation before things get much worse. You may not agree with all of the opinions in the film but it'll make you think.

Anyhow, today is one year since my first novel appeared in the world. Among its themes is the culture and inner life of Silicon Valley, revealed via office events and interactions between the protagonist, Ved, and his coworkers. The Social Dilemma reminded me of those parts, so to mark its first anniversary, I've published below one such excerpt from my novel. Go buy it for juicier bits about a 36-year-old who, in an era after the dot-com crash and 9/11, stumbles and ripens through messy experiences in sex, love, work, family, friendship, and cultural belonging. I should add that the novel is a story drawn from life, not a story of my life. Full disclosure: it has dopamine hits galore!

---

An excerpt from chapter four of A California Story | Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley  (click for reviews and more)

Monday morning at work, Ved walks past Omnicon’s new poster art in the corridors: a lone bald eagle in flight, muscular rowers in a longboat, lean multicultural climbers scaling snowy peaks. Each has a hokey inspirational message below. There’s also art that was once anti-establishment but has long been defanged and made chic: a Diego Rivera mural; a wall-sized woodcarving of Ché Guevara’s shaggy face—presumably to inspire ‘the rebels’ in their ranks, rebels, who like him, work in identical beige cubicles in a large carpeted hall to raise Omnicon’s profits.

In his first meeting, he endures a visiting British colleague who spouts jargon with possessed élan. He speaks fast: ‘My charter is risk management, knowledge extension, empowering feet on the street … competition is intense  … we are in daily dogfights … the European theatre needs better products faster.’ His body language is aggressive, he is clearly used to dominating conversations. Ved is mildly repelled by the man.

In his second meeting, a woman from Operations addresses a group of marketers about proactive cost management. Ved’s eyes roam her curvy body. In a reverie, he imagines her naked on his Moroccan carpet, legs spread, yielding to his touch. Might this serious, bookish transplant from Middle America turn into a hot little siren in bed? Snapping out of his daydream, he chides himself. It has again been too long since he got laid, he thinks. So ridiculous, his wayward libido, always making an ass of him. Good thing he can often laugh at it too.

Of Wanderers and Nomads

(The third in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The previous part is here.)

At the beginning of our story—paraphrased from an origin story remembered by a Cree elder—two figures are walking along the clouds. They’ve been walking long and far. Looking down through the spaces between the clouds, they spy a beautiful, green landscape, rich and inviting. They long to go down to this land, but they don’t know how to get down from the clouds. So the two keep walking. When at last they see a speck on the horizon, in the far distance, they walk toward it. The speck grows, looming larger than they are as they get nearer. When the two look up at it, it looks back down at them—it’s Great Spider.

The people tell Great Spider how much they wish to climb down from the clouds and inhabit the land below, and they ask him for his help. So Great Spider begins to weave a web. He weaves and weaves and weaves, until he’s woven a boat. The two climb into the boat with Great Spider’s web still attached, and Great Spider lowers it down from the clouds. Despite his care, the boat rocks and sways precariously. After a long and harrowing downward journey, the boat ends up stuck in the top of a huge tree.

Now the Earth is almost within reach, but the people don’t know how to get down from the top of the tree. Below them they can see Caribou and other animals walking around. They call out for help, but none of the animals is able to help them. Finally, they ask Fisher-weasel, who scampers up the tree and carries each of them safely to the ground. Once they’re on the ground, Brother Bear befriends the people and teaches them everything they need to know as they make their way in this world.

I’m neither a member nor a student of the Cree people and I don’t know what this story means to a Cree person, nor what was left out or changed in this telling. But I’m struck by the tale as both alien and familiar and brimming with humility and kindness in a way that’s unlike many other ancient myths I’ve heard. Before Europeans invaded the Americas, the Cree people were nomadic foragers living in what today is Canada. They traveled in family bands of around ten people, give or take a few, related by blood or marriage; each of these family bands associated with other bands to form larger, more loosely related sociopolitical groupings. These larger groupings facilitated working and socializing together, while each family band maintained its independence. When larger group decisions were called for, every band had a vote; unresolvable disagreements could also be handled by fissioning the larger group associations, with dissenting bands going their own way—voting with their feet, as anthropologists are fond of saying.

A Story of Fire and Ice

(The second in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily. The first part is here.)

When I was a kid, I used to wonder about the possibility that the planet could slip back into an ice age. I grew up in the Rocky Mountain region of the northwestern USA, where winters lasted half the year and summers were brief and blustery. I hated being cold all the time. Aware that ice ages result from some sort of natural cycles, I worried what might happen if the planet should head that way again. I tried to imagine how we would construct cities and farms, how we would travel between countries or even build roads, if huge glaciers grew down from the Arctic Circle and smothered our little mountain town.

So I was surprised to learn, much later, that we actually do live in an ice age. In historical memory, we’ve been enjoying a warmish, rather pleasant phase of this ice age, to be sure—an interglacial phase, called the Holocene, that’s persisted for about ten thousand years. But interglacial phases, like our present one, have only been brief respites, as the ice age has cycled between glacial and interglacial phases over the past two million years. Past interglacials never lasted very long and, left to its own geological devices, all signs suggested that this one would end too, to be followed by a much longer glacial phase—the stuff of my nightmares.

In fact, a 2016 study indicates that the Holocene interglacial should already be ending. As it was, the weather of the fourteenth through mid-nineteenth centuries was already given to frequent fits and bouts of cold weather extremes. The precise causes for the drop in temperatures are complex, and though it didn’t get cold enough to become a real glacial age, the period is now playfully referred to as the Little Ice Age. During that time, centuries of sporadic, crop-crippling cold led to erratic harvests, reducing grain yields and causing periodic famine, helping to topple Chinese dynasties and destabilize the feudal order of the European Middle Ages. Persistent hunger and poor nutrition amplified the depredations of plague and other diseases across Europe. In England, the Thames regularly froze over. In North America, even the Rio Grande froze up more than once. Peoples across southern North America suffered frequent droughts and malnutrition, especially in the southwest, which remained persistently dry for a span of decades. Some agricultural peoples were forced to return to lives of nomadism. Across the northern latitudes, glaciers extended themselves. The Norse Greenland colony, which had been thriving for centuries, collapsed and was abandoned by around 1500 CE. Early European colonists in North America struggled to survive frequent winters of bitter cold and failed harvests.

A Day of Shame

A double whammy day: a year of Kashmir in chains and a vulgar display of majoritarian pride in Ayodhya. Today, it's worth listening to Baba Laldas, the former priest at the Ram Janmabhoomi temple in Ayodhya, on the motivations behind the Ram temple movement and its leaders. This is an excerpt from the documentary, Ram Ke Naam ('In the Name of God', 1992) by Anand Patwardhan, now on YouTube. Laldas spoke openly against Advani's rath yatra and the demolition of the Babri masjid. He was shot dead within a year and the case remains unsolved.

Caste and the Delusion of "Merit" in Indian Higher Education

(This essay first appeared in The Caravan, Aug 2020, where it has received many comments. Its full text is also available on Magster.)

The great engineers of medieval India were mainly Shudras. Members of the lowest varna in the caste hierarchy, the Shudras produced a steady supply of architects, builders, stonemasons, bronze sculptors, goldsmiths and other professionals. Sometimes called the Vishwakarma community, these artisans and craftsmen worked in hereditary guilds. They studied structural design, mathematics, material science and the artistic conventions of the day. Commissioned by kings, merchants and Brahmins—who disdained all manual labour themselves—the Shudras, aided by the labour of those considered “untouchable” and outside the varna hierarchy, built all of India’s engineering marvels, including its grand temple towns, magnificent cities such as Vijayanagar and medieval fort-palaces.

Take for instance the town of Khajuraho a thousand years ago, where Shudra artisans, in large workshops, conceived and carved their artwork and taught apprentices amid the sounds of hammers and chisels. Inscriptions show that with rising proficiency, artisans gained new titles. A skilled artisan was called Silpin, who sometimes inscribed his name on his creations, including on panels of erotic art with playful moods and delicate emotions. With higher skill, he became a Vijananin. A few became adept enough to be called Vaidagdhi Visvakarman, masters who went beyond mere technicalities of craft to conceiving large architectural projects and the finer aesthetics of art, winning much respect, social status and economic rewards. The Shudra domination of the engineering profession in India continued well into the colonial era.

By the late-twentieth century, however, things had changed dramatically. In my incoming class of 1985 at the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur—one of five IITs founded between 1951 and 1961 that had become the premier engineering colleges of India—Brahmins were by far the largest caste group. Most of the nine students I shared a hostel wing with were Brahmin, and all belonged to dominant castes. Our faculty and student body were almost entirely upper-caste, representing less than twenty percent of Indians. There were hardly any Shudras, who comprise about half of the country’s population. Moreover, this utterly ahistorical domination of engineering education by the upper castes was now accompanied by their baffling claims of “merit”—implying that they had a higher natural talent and aptitude for engineering work than others. How did this extreme professional transformation come about?

Happy Childfree Day!

Today, August 1, is International Childfree Day, one of my favorite marked days of the year. Today I celebrate my early decision to never have children—one of the greatest decisions of my life—among my surest, bestest, zero-regret life choices. I feel like I dodged a bullet!

I like kids as people, but on the rare occasion I’ve tried to imagine life with my own kids, it has felt like a horror movie that might leave me screaming and panting. Ok, I exaggerate, but only a little. 😊 Perhaps I simply had a weak instinct for fatherhood. I can’t remember ever wanting it; it seemed like a bad deal. Were I religious, I’d thank god every day for saving me from a life of far more angst, suffering, and prayers—and, I reckon, not enough compensatory joy. I’m thankful for life’s countless miracles of non-birth and its precious unbundled love. 😀 And I’m lucky to have an amazing life partner whose beliefs and values align with mine—a rare gift, without which the trials of parenthood, too, are far worse.

To younger folk in two minds about having children, especially in the nauseatingly baby-obsessed culture of India, I assure you that going childfree can be a perfectly wonderful, fulfilling and wholesome way of life. Don’t let social pressure—led by unimaginative family and friends lost in the quicksand of conformity—risk ruining your life. Don’t make babies because you’re expected to, or out of boredom, or to mask marital problems. Don’t live someone else’s dream for you. Unlike many other decisions, entering parenthood is non-reversible and could well be your one-way ticket to far more misery than joy—witness the legions of parents mired in toxic spousal relationships, shrunken horizons and mindless drudgery. But if it’s then fair to say that parenthood is not right for everyone, the flip side holds too: being childfree is not for everyone either. So think hard, very hard!

For some thoughtful writing on this topic, check out Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed: Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids. Another book to check out is Childfree by Choice by Amy Blackstone.

Meanwhile, three cheers! Happy International Childfree Day from Namit and Usha! ☺️🌿

   

What We Talk About When We Talk About the Weather

(The first in a series of essays, On Climate Truth and Fiction, in which I raise questions about environmental distress, the human experience, and storytelling. It first appeared on 3 Quarks Daily.)

In 1997, I was living on Ambae, a tiny, tropical island in the western South Pacific. Rugged, jungle-draped, steamy, volcanic Ambae belongs to Vanuatu, an archipelago nation stretching some 540 miles roughly between Fiji and Papua New Guinea. There, under corrugated tin roofs, in the cinderblock classrooms of a small, residential school, I taught science to middle- and high-schoolers as a Peace Corps volunteer.

That December, the rainy season was in full force, with heavy downpours most afternoons, lasting sometimes long into the night. Never before had I, and never again would I, witness rains like those, where the water poured straight down, not in drops, but in globs and sheets. Standing in it felt like standing under a waterfall; I’d catch myself stepping forward or back, left or right, in an attempt to get out from under the flow, but it was everywhere. It seemed impossible that the sky could hold so much water, constricting summer’s broad daylight to a sodden gloaming.

One evening, during such a downpour, I left a teachers’ year-end potluck to return to my room—one in a row of tiny, concrete flats for the school’s single female staff. Mine was not much more than 100 yards away across an open lawn, which was now filled with ankle-deep water flowing gently down the long campus green toward the sea. As this was not my first deluge, I wasn’t concerned by the prospect of a routine water-logging; it was only water, after all, and not at all cold. The only problem was that the rains had washed away all light into a blind, enveloping darkness. I knew that once I stepped into it I would become disembodied, aware of my limbs only through my untrained sense of proprioception. How dependent we are upon the faculty of sight, even to know where we end and the external world begins.

Standing in front of the large, glaring light, which the principle had set up outside the classroom doorway, I pointed myself in the direction of my house. I held out my arms and stepped forward. Walking in perfect darkness feels like stepping in place, going nowhere. There’s only the light sensation of your feet tapping over a surface—or in this case, shuffling through a pool of water nearly indistinguishable from the cascade of water also flowing over my body. And at the time, I didn’t know that a person who tries to walk a straight line with no bearings will end up traversing an arc. But I continued moving, certain that after about a minute I would run into one of the papaya plants in front of my house. This did not happen.

Satire by Pushpa Jijji

I recently discovered Pushpa Jijji (Cheshta Saxena in real life), a talented satirist who performs mostly in Bundeli. I was especially charmed by her use of Bundeli language that I often heard growing up in Gwalior (Hindi speakers should get most of it). She has been putting out short videos on YouTube in which she pokes fun at Indian patriarchy, politics, and, lately, their interface with the pandemic (no subtitles). As with most good satire, the laughs lie uncomfortably close to a substrate of grim realities.

If you like the episode below, check out a few others I liked: one, two, three, four, or visit her YouTube Channel.

The Threat of Covid-19 in India

How to assess the threat of Covid-19 in India? How much fear is justified and how much is overblown? How to think about future policies? Some thoughts below.

About 27,000 people die every day in India, including all causes of death combined (0.73% of the population annually). These can be classified into three categories: 

(1) About 25%, or 6,750 deaths, are from communicable (infectious) diseases like TB, HIV/AIDS, Malaria, Flu, Diarrhoeal and other respiratory or parasitic diseases.

(2) About 50% of the deaths are from non-communicable diseases like cancer, diabetes, cardiovascular, digestive, respiratory, neuro-psychiatric, etc. 

(3) About 25% of the deaths are from injuries, industrial and road accidents, suicides, and unclassified or ill-defined causes.

We are all mortal, so a certain number of daily deaths are a given, even if we all die happily in old age. But effective public health systems slash premature deaths from communicable diseases through universal vaccination, better hygiene, sanitation, education, etc. (that’s how India eliminated polio and smallpox; that’s how the average lifespan goes up). Communicable diseases also cause the most fear and panic because they can strike anyone randomly (though they often disproportionately strike the poor). The fear and panic are worse when, as with Covid-19, a disease is novel, is very infectious, has no cure or vaccine, and is abundant among the rich.

Of Migrants, Muslims, and Other Non-People

(First published in The Baffler)

The Coronavirus entered India by plane, hidden in the lungs of upper-class travelers. It then jumped to their family members, colleagues, drivers, and maids. The first case of Covid-19 was reported on January 30, but it was only over a month later, in early March, that the government began screening passengers from all international flights. By then, there were twenty-eight known cases in five states; in some parts of the world, the virus was killing nearly as many people as all other causes of death combined.

India is the world’s second most populous country. Yet it boasts one of the globe’s lowest levels of public expenditure on health care, just 1.3 percent of GDP, less than a fifth of what the European Union countries invest. Knowing this, the government recognized the virus as a grave, perhaps catastrophic, threat. Public health officials heroically pursued contact tracing. “Social distancing” and “self-isolation” rapidly entered the national lexicon. By March 23, with the number of confirmed cases nearing five hundred, the government had prudently shut down all domestic and international flights and hardened its borders.

The following day, amid a growing sense of alarm, Prime Minister Narendra Modi abruptly ordered a nationwide lockdown, the largest in the world, meant to last twenty-one days. He made the declaration via a live telecast to the nation at 8 p.m., leaving people just a few hours to plan their affairs. The timing of the announcement was needlessly theatrical, as if he wanted to take the public by surprise. In this it resembled his decision in 2016 to rescind all higher denomination banknotes overnight, an order intended to defeat the shadow economy run by “black money”; the foolishly conceived plan, known as “demonetization,” never stood a chance of achieving this stated goal, though it struck a brutal blow to India’s vast informal sector, which relies on cash transactions. Other parallels soon emerged: the same disastrous planning and execution, callous disregard for the poor, and ruthless policing. As before, Modi continued to avoid all interaction with the press, defying a rather basic expectation in a democracy.

The response to Modi’s announcement was chaotic. He had conveyed the gravity of the situation well—so well that his speech triggered panic shopping that very night. People descended on food and liquor stores, making a mockery of social distancing. By midnight, all factories, offices, and businesses were shut; alarmingly, so were all passenger trains, buses, and taxis. Going forward, no one would be allowed to step outside their homes except for essential services.

But then, not everyone can afford to stay indoors. The next morning, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers were leaving cities and walking home along highways, carrying their belongings in cloth sacks, pitiful scenes that reminded many of Partition. More than twenty died from exhaustion or hunger, often hundreds of miles from home. When a fleet of buses was dispatched in Uttar Pradesh to aid the migrants’ journey, hundreds of thousands more swamped the city bus depots, once again defeating the aim of social distancing and risking the spread of the virus to remote villages.

A California Story | Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley: A Novel by Namit Arora

I’ve done it, friends. I’ve written a novel and it’s out today! 🙂

It’s available in two editions: A California Story in the United States from Adelaide Books, and Love and Loathing in Silicon Valley in India from Speaking Tiger Books. I thank both publishers for betting on me. Extra thanks to Speaking Tiger for their professionalism and the love and care they invested in their edition.

This novel has been in the works, off and on, for over a decade, and I’m delighted to see it in print. Today I can even partly forget all the trials and tribulations en route (what follies and conceits kept me going, I wonder).

Hope you’ll read and tell others — that’s a big part of the marketing plan my publishers have for this book. :) If you’d like to review it for an outlet, please contact me and I’ll request one of the publishers for a complimentary copy.

Click HERE for more details, reviews, buying info, etc.

Inside an Indian Family

This essay first appeared in White Wall Review.

My grandmother was nine years old when she married my seventeen-year-old grandfather, who was just completing his university studies in South India. They were wed in an Andhran village surrounded by jungle, where tigers still roamed. The pair had never before laid eyes on each other. Nor would they meet again for several years afterwards.

My grandmother, whom I called Avva, remained at home with her own parents after her wedding rites, but she was immediately subject to the dictates of her in-laws, who plainly intended to enforce her subservience: Avva was removed from school, where she attended the third standard. She was denied her violin, which she loved learning to play. She was forbidden to wear black, her favorite color, because her husband didn’t like it. Before she even knew him, Avva’s horizons were darkened by her husband’s shadow, which would follow her for the rest of her life.

When I came into Avva’s life, Grandfather was recently departed, but his shadow had grown heavier with the years. Its twilight stretched across miles and decades, from his roots in that mud-lane village of late Colonial India, where he was born, to the sagebrush hillsides of the late-century American Mountain West, where I grew up in Idaho. The three adults of our household—Avva, my father (her son), and my mother—all seemed breathless under the weight of it. It dripped from their tongues, as they spoke of him in tones of mesmeric awe.

What Is Climate Catastrophe?

The changing concentration of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Carbon dioxide is a potent greenhouse gas.

The looming catastrophe of climate change is not only about the increasing frequency of natural disasters that we already see causing hardship and economic stress to communities. The worst catastrophe is not even the horror that will befall more and more people over the coming decades as their food, homes, livelihoods, and security are eliminated by these disasters and the uncertainties that follow in their wake. Most of us are unaware that there are already millions of people displaced by climatic factors—droughts, storms, floods, desertification, sea-level rise, heat, and fire—across the world. Within the next decade already, the UN estimates that there will be tens of millions of climate refugees looking for food, shelter, and safety. This will affect geopolitics, as we’ve already seen. This will spawn untold scenes of humanitarian disaster as famine, disease, and violence propagate. But perhaps 20 or 30 or even 50 million refugees are something the world can deal with, a hardship from which our systems can eventually bounce back.

 

However, if we do not shift our present course and take RADICAL action to eliminate fossil fuels and restructure our ways of life on this planet as quickly as humanly possible, we are looking at a future where more than a billion refugees are expected to accrue over the coming decades. It’s difficult to see how such a situation would NOT spell the collapse of modern human civilization. This is the ultimate catastrophe climate scientists are urging us to act to avoid.

 

To avoid this catastrophe, we must prepare ourselves to reimagine how we live upon this planet—our energy systems, our food systems, our urban infrastructures, our politics, and everything in between. People are understandably resistant to this idea. It requires a commitment to chart an unknown path for humanity, fraught with uncertainty, and to do it collectively with people from all walks of life, even those we may consider our enemies. But if we do NOT accept this and do not do our best to adjust ourselves and our civilizations to mitigate the worst ravages of climate change—still yet to come—we will face not only the sincerely difficult task of demanding the best of ourselves, not only the genuine risks of exploring unfamiliar ideas and directions for innovation, but also the near certainty of total collapse, much sooner than most of us are willing to imagine: we will feel the shift in our own lifetimes; our children will struggle in a rapidly devolving world as they reach middle age; our grandchildren will bear the brunt of this catastrophic failure. This is if we continue on our present course of denial and inaction.

What can you do? If you live in even a moderately functioning democracy, the most important thing you can do is to put your efforts toward empowering leaders who will suitably address the emergency, enact policies that begin the needed transitions of our infrastructures and business practices, and hold the responsible bodies accountable for positive change. In other words: VOTE for climate-conscious candidates. Learn what you can. Teach what you can. Make noise.

The latest IPCC report that was released this past week was about the feedback between land use and climate change. It recommends sweeping changes to our current land use patterns, without which we will not meet the goal of limiting global warming to 1.5ºC above the pre-industrial baseline temperature. Implicit in this are changes to what we grow, where we grow it, how we grow it, and therefore, what we eat. One fundamental recommendation is to eat less meat, especially beef. Even if you aren’t a person who's concerned about the systematic torture of animals, climate change concerns alone should be an incentive to minimize your consumption of meat. Another major concern is food waste—an absolutely easily avoidable practice by those who live in developed countries!

If we begin to imagine the necessary changes today, giving ourselves time to mentally and emotionally prepare for them, there is still hope that we can preserve what is best about what we as a species have built.

The Climate Crisis and India

(A version of this article first appeared as the cover story in The Caravan, The End of Nature: Ecological myths and warming climates.)

FIVE YEARS AGO, there was some speculation as to whether Narendra Modi, the prime minister of India, was a climate-change sceptic, after he made a remark that indicated he was unconvinced about the phenomenon. “Climate has not changed,” he said, in September 2014, during a televised address to a group of schoolchildren. “We have changed. Our habits have changed. Our habits have got spoiled. Due to that, we have destroyed our entire environment.” In a remark made to a group of students at Sacred Heart University around the same time, he displayed total incomprehension of the matter: “The reality is this that in our family, some people are old ... They say this time the weather is colder. And, people’s ability to bear cold becomes less.”

These statements contradict Modi’s imperative to readers of his 2011 book, Convenient Action: Gujarat’s Response to Challenges of Climate Change, in which he references Al Gore, the environmentalist and former vice-president of the United States, who has been vocal about the need for urgent action to save the planet in his 2007 documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It is also entirely at odds with some of his other public statements, such as his declaration at the World Economic Forum, last year in Davos, that climate change constitutes the “greatest threat to the survival and human civilization as we know it.” This apparent contradiction is reflected in the disparity between statement and action when it comes to his government’s measures to protect the environment. For example, his acknowledgement that climate change is our greatest existential threat does not align with the present government’s lack of urgency around decarbonising India’s transportation sector or its energy grid. It has created no institutional structures designed to specifically tackle such a grave existential threat. His government has even failed to properly allocate earmarked funds toward environmental initiatives.

Previous governments were resistant to setting targets for limiting emissions, citing development priorities. The Modi administration at least signed on to the much lauded Paris Agreement in 2015, which aimed to get countries to voluntarily reduce their greenhouse gas emissions, with the goal of limiting the rise in global average temperature to 1.5º Celsius above what we call the pre-industrial baseline, or the average global temperature in the centuries before the Industrial Revolution, when the mass burning of fossil fuels began to change the atmosphere. In addition, under Modi, India ratified the International Solar Alliance, an agreement intended to nurture cooperation among “solar rich” tropical countries in developing and deploying solar power infrastructure. Such measures that the Modi government intends to undertake are helpful but not substantial. While India’s carbon emissions are expected to rise for some years, far more aggressive steps need to be taken to alter the emissions trajectory that India is currently on.

Stories About the End of the World

(This essay first appeared in Pangyrus literary magazine, June 2019.)

My first visit to a science museum, when I was kid, had a remarkable impact on me. I might have been eleven or twelve; it might have been in Los Angeles or San Francisco or Seattle. In one hall of the delightful exhibits, an electronic signboard hung mutely overhead. It displayed only a number—a very large number, of a magnitude difficult to grasp, though I don’t recall how many digits—that represented the estimated number of species currently living on our planet. This number was silently ticking down, like a clock running backwards. I watched the display for a while, as the last digit dropped. And dropped again. Five species lost. Then ten. Right before my eyes! Unsettled by this, unable to accept the implications, I wandered off to find a fun distraction in the museum. When later I returned to check, I saw that dozens of species had already gone extinct that very afternoon. Nobody else in the museum seemed alarmed. I told myself this must be because it’s a bigger number than I can comprehend, and I’m childish to be concerned; everyone else understands it’s not such a big deal. But there was no denying that it was dropping very fast, and it’s haunted me ever since.

It’s possible that seeing the extinction clock struck me with such force because I’d already noticed living things disappearing around me at home. As a child growing up in the arid hills of southern Idaho, I’d once discovered a colony of tiny creatures living on the side of our home. Each one was about the size of a thumbnail on my six-year-old hands, bearing a curled shell, like a snail. But these shells were soft, and the animals within seemed dry and sticky, rather than slimy. Their rate of movement was imperceptible to me, but every summer a great throng of them clung to the sunbaked red bricks of our southwestern exposure. A couple of summers after I’d first noticed them, I realized that there were fewer of them. Their numbers shrank every year, until, by the time I was eleven, they were simply gone. I never found out what kind of animal they were, and I’ve never seen or heard reference to animals like them anywhere again.

I’d already noticed, too, that the shimmering explosion of grasshoppers, which once erupted from our every footfall as we walked through the weedy grasses, where our lawn gave way to tumbleweed, sagebrush, and juniper, had gone still. The long, fat earthworms that exhumed themselves during every rainstorm, to twist awhile and then dry up on the pavements, no longer left their brown stains along the sidewalks. Stinkbug beetles and roly-poly potato bugs, once our playthings on idle summer afternoons, had become harder to find. The little scorpions that occasionally took shelter in our house, hiding in our shoes, stopped coming inside (though I habitually tamped out my shoes before wearing them for years after). No longer did we have to scrub our car’s windshield and grille clean of the bugsplats that coated them after every night drive along the highway, for the swarms of flying insects that once hovered ubiquitously over the sundowned desertscapes had thinned and finally vanished.

It seemed to me as though all the bugs, everywhere (except the pesky mosquitoes!), were disappearing. As in the museum, no one around me seemed concerned about this. My peers and elders carried on as though the world remained limitless and unchanging. In the fifth grade, I didn’t know much about bugs and I had no one to ask. I wasn’t aware at the time how much of the living world depends upon their daily toil, their unremarked—and still largely mysterious—interactions that link the microscopic and macroscopic worlds. Yet somehow I intuited that their demise was a dire warning, like canaries in a coalmine.

But it was worse than that: it was not a warning but a collapse already underway. Today we know that perhaps eighty percent of the world’s insect biomass has vanished in just the past three decades. The ticking signboard I saw at the museum, and the research results of scientists I’d learn about decades later, confirmed to me that the silent decline of the natural world was not merely my imagination.

A Collective Madness

What Modi’s victory says about today’s India. (An op-ed published in Himal Southasian, where it has received many comments.)

In Varanasi recently, I took an auto-rickshaw from Godowlia to Assi Ghat. Like everyone else in town, the driver and I began talking politics. The 2019 general election was a week away and Prime Minister Narendra Modi was seeking reelection from Varanasi. The driver was an ardent Modi fan and would hear no criticism of him. He even claimed that demonetisation had punished the corrupt rich. One topic led to another and soon he was loudly praising Nathuram Godse as a patriot — Gandhi deserved no less than a bullet for being a Muslim lover. “You don’t know these people,” he thundered. “Read our history! Only Muslims have killed their own fathers to become kings. Has any Hindu ever done so? Inki jaat hi aisi hai. You too should open your mobile and read on WhatsApp. Kamina Rahul is born of a Muslim and a Christian; Nehru’s grandfather, also Muslim, Mughal. Outsiders all. Modi will teach them!” Fortunately, my destination came before his passion for the topic could escalate further.

I entered Assi Ghat with a numbing sadness. Was this really Kashi, among the oldest continuously inhabited cities of the world, known for its religious pluralism and massive density of gods, creeds and houses of worship, with its long history of largely peaceful coexistence? The Kashi of the Buddha, Adi Shankara, Kabir, Ravidas and Nanak? The Kashi of shehnai maestro Bismillah Khan, who lived in its tangled gullies and regularly played during the aarti in Balaji temple, or of Hindustani vocalist Girija Devi, whose family kept mannats on Muharram? What still remains of its famed Ganga-Jamuna tehzeeb? No, I consoled myself, my auto driver was not the norm in Varanasi, but he did herald certain fundamental changes now sweeping the country.

What Are We Made Of?

A brilliant, accessible talk on Quantum Fields by David Tong. It reminds us how bizarre, mysterious, and awe-inspiring our universe really is! 

In the same lecture series are Philip Ball on Quantum Mechanics, Andrew Pontzen on Dark Matter (Q&A), and Harry Cliff on the Higgs Boson.

Happy New Year!

Discovering Virinara

(This essay appears in its entirely in The Punch Magazine, under the title, On Writing: Discovering Virinara.)

I don’t think I’ve ever had an idea for a story simply fall into my head. Other writers seem to get Ideas —or so one hears — but not me. My historical novel, The Legend of Virinara, did not begin with an idea. No plot point struck me in the shower. No character strode forward, fully formed from the mists of My Imagination, declaring their inner life and intentions, grabbing me by the hand to lead me along a journey through their world. No, nothing like that. Now that the finished book sits before me, in fact it’s difficult to look back and remember with any clarity how it was at the beginning, how the first words fell upon the page, barren and loose as blown leaves. 

But I’m quite sure that before I began, it wasn’t my intention to write a story about a forsaken princess who falls in love with an enemy warrior. Nor of a young king caught up in a battle for succession to the throne. The pieces of the story emerged slowly over time, shaped by my reading and life experiences and the milieu in which I was living, especially about a decade ago. I was traveling around India, visiting its most ancient ruins and reading up on its history, immersed in the multiplicities of its pasts. Fragments of disparate stories and images stuck in my head. In the National Museum in Delhi, I saw a 2nd century stela depicting a woman drunk among her friends. 

In Khajuraho, I learned about the Chandela dynasty, whose founders, likely embarrassed by their subaltern origins, invented a glorious Kshatriya lineage for themselves, aided by the Brahmins in their courts. I saw one of Emperor Ashoka’s paternalistic edicts, which he had inscribed on stone pillars across the subcontinent; in one of them, he entreats the forest dwellers who live beyond the cultivated lands to behave, else face punishment. I read about the decline of matrilineal social systems that once existed commonly in India, only the most meager, thwarted vestiges of which remain, especially since British Colonial times.

I read about the shifting and dissipation of rivers, changing habitats and urbanization, the ongoing destruction of the forests, which today cover the merest fraction of what they did in Ashoka’s time. I read about the millennia of trade that brought products and ideas from distant shores, and also carried them away. I read ongoing discussions regarding the Aryan migration and considered the mythologizing of identity, the construction of meaning, and the often impenetrable fog of history. I was also learning about India from friends and relatives and people in ordinary streets, trains, homes, and wedding halls. One of my friends, who lives in a small, rather left-behind Indian city, used to surprise me with her particular style of independence and her willingness to question authority, to go against the grain, so much more than others of her conventional social set. I admired her as a woman of intelligence, curiosity, and candor.

I learned that, in spite of her gifts, her value in the marriage market had dropped to zero at a young age, when she was found to be barren. Seeing how this had ultimately proven both devastating and liberating for her in her life gave flesh to musings I’d long had about growing up under the Indian style of patriarchy (which I had largely — though, not entirely — escaped). But it’s misleading to suggest that The Legend of Virinara was actually born in India. It was a slow accretion of story that began before I immersed myself in Indian history, before I read about Ashoka and the Carvakas and the spread and dominance of Sanskritic culture, maybe before I’d even studied anthropology. Even before that there were discussions, questions, matters of wonder that preoccupied me and that would eventually find their way into this story. For even as I learned more about India, in some part, I was merely struck by its parallels to everywhere else. 

Read the article on The Punch Magazine website....