What Happens When Leaders Stop Walking (and apparate as holograms instead)

I find that I cannot write about modern India without dealing with a mischievous little (ish – he wasn’t nearly as tiny as most people imagine) imp who went by the name of Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi. The man was a walker. It was something that stayed with him from his time as a broke, hungry student in England, persisted into his time as a wealthy, less hungry barrister and community leader in South Africa, and then fed into his life-work as the tallest leader of the Indian nationalist movement. South Africa, a country he called home for over two decades, was to prove Gandhi’s laboratory: it is where his experiments with diet, direct non-violent action, civil disobedience, truth or soul force (satyagraha), brahmacharya, caste-less living et al first began. Prime among these was the elevation of walking from an individual activity into an act rife with political significance in the public sphere: think about the Great March of 1913[1]. It involved 2,221 men, women and children (striking Indian miners – indentured labourers - and their families) walking, if they weren’t arrested or ‘deported’ en route, from Newcastle in Natal province to Tolstoy Farm in Johannesburg, in the Transvaal region.  

In the Indian context, I can do little better than to point you towards the apogee of Gandhi’s political life which came in the form of the Dandi March (1930)[2] and salt satyagraha that followed it. This man knew the power of walking as a collective act, not to mention, a symbolic one. An astute semiotician, he knew how to occupy symbols well. Gandhi realised that walking roots and grounds one like no other activity does. Further, it allows the walk-er to be seen as much as it allows her to see – to survey, learn, take in from – her surroundings. This aspect of walking-as-spectacle came to the fore during the Dandi March, but the old man had himself wandered (and covered) the length and breadth of India prior to this, and several times over, in a bid to make himself real to the “masses” he was slowly in the process of crafting into a people. During the Harijan Yatras of the 1930s, given that he was already in his 60s, he no longer walked as much as he once did, but took trains instead. It is said he bled between stations because his skin was chafed from being touched by the thousands of people who turned up to see him, to partake of the magic of the mahatma, everywhere he went. No smoke and mirrors here; there was no room for distance or obfuscation at such close quarters. Those who saw him went away knowing that their leader was as real as they were; wrought of blood and sinew as they were – as human as they were. This inspired faith and belief in his ability to negotiate for them the treacherous terrain that was dealing with the implacable Imperial government.

The Nehruvian era that followed – the dawn of independent India as it were – was configured around the tenet that nation-building was work which took serious doing. A patriot was a producer; one who contributed to the very real task of keeping together this newly hewn nation-state. The leaders were still visible, more or less accessible, and the country seemed to shimmer serenely in the after-glow of the nationalist movement. This period was also characterised by the performance of that rite of passage which marks the most intimate ritual of any democracy: participating in the first set of elections in modern India. If the civic engagement so central to this era has waned since, and with it the sense of a patriot as one who works to build – and keep – a nation, it almost certainly has something to do with the euphemistically titled ‘structural reforms’ unleashed upon the Indian economy at the behest of the World Bank in 1991. The ‘opening’ of the economy has led, among other things, to the shift from patriot-as-producer to patriot-as-consumer (including of narratives such as nationalism itself), and has in the process dismantled the moral imperative upon the nation-state to engage in social welfare (visible in how much ground the State has ceded of what it once occupied in health and education as sectors). This makes it vital to ask, does democracy mean to-day what once it did? If not, what are the new contours of this idea? In a country where leaders are mere holograms – simulated and see-through – and can no longer walk among us (something about security concerns, they say: it would have been fun trying to have this conversation with Gandhi or Nehru or Patel or even Jinnah, no?), how can there be anything but trust deficit in leadership? For example, consider that the last Indian general elections in 2014 saw the BJP sweep to a thumping victory despite the fact that their vote share (the lowest for any single party which has won such a majority in Parliament[3]) was merely 31%. This is indicative of a splintered polity, and it begins with the very real problem of disconnection between so-called political leaders and the lived reality of the citizens they are meant to represent.

Am I suggesting that all is doom and gloom? Possibly. Heaven knows I often feel cynical enough to entertain this possibility. How do we raise and nurture our young – those that Kofi Annan once called the “lifeline” of any nation – into a sentient and sapient citizenry? How do we begin to tackle the problem of trust deficit in political (and corporate, but that’s almost the same thing as we know only too well) leadership? By walking again, I hold. By walking again so we know the land and its inhabitants: the land will learn leaders as leaders learn it back. We need less opaque governance and more accountability, which sounds too obvious to actually need stating, and yet here we are, living in a grossly unequal society, where not everyone can access the categories ‘citizen’ or ‘rights’ in equal measure. Programmes like Swaraj Abhiyan’s proposed rural immersion programme for students, or the Legislative Assistants to Members of Parliament (LAMP[4]) Fellowship are instances of interventions which seek to reduce the spaces between us, but over and over again I can only come back to the idea I started this post with. Nivedita Menon says that a nation is a daily plebiscite[5], and if we are to reclaim it for ourselves, it begins with knowing and naming this nation over and over. And to know it, we must walk it together again.                           

---

[1] See http://www.telegraphindia.com/1131002/jsp/opinion/story_17407676.jsp#.V9_aeih94dU for an overview

[2] See www.gandhiheritageportal.org for all things related to the life and life-work of Gandhi

[3] See http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/BJPs-31-lowest-vote-share-of-any-party-to-win-majority/articleshow/35315930.cms for details

[4] See http://lamp.prsindia.org/thefellowship for more

[5] See http://www.standwithjnu.org/nationalism-teach-in/nivedita-menon-on-the-nation-is-a-daily-plebiscite/ for more

In which the UK mimics the titles of two U2 songs: Brexit as/and the quest for context

The thing about us is that we're contrarian in the extreme. This appears far too obvious a truism to start a post with, but bear with me as I attempt to read the obnoxious campaign that resulted in that ugliest of compounds (not to mention, eventualities) 'Brexit' in its light.

I dig AK Ramanujan muchly. Poet, translator extraordinaire, folklorist, scholar of Indian literatures, and a grammarian to boot, he truly was the real deal. Ramanujan taught at the University of Chicago for long years, and was one of the forces behind the shaping of its excellent South Asian Studies program. How do I know this? He taught one of my PhD guides there, decades ago. One degree of removal separated us, or would have, if Ramanujan had lived. We lost him altogether too soon, but that is another story for another time. To-day, I would have you muse on a formulation Ramanujan offers us in his exquisite 'Is There an Indian Way of Thinking? An Informal Essay' (1989) instead.

This piece begins with the author casting about to identify what it is that makes us Indian; he asks whether there is an Indian way of thinking. More, is there an Indian way of thinking? Or, is there an Indian way of thinking? If the questions change as we play with intonation and stress, answers, necessarily, must too. At one point, the grammarian in him takes over, and attempts to read entire societies as one would languages. This is when he offers us the formulation I now put to you. Ramanujan says that there are two major kinds of grammatical rules: the context-free (subjects and predicates in sentences having to stand in a certain relation to each other, for example) and the context-sensitive (examples of which would be how plurals in English are generated by adding an 's' after stops (as in dog-s, cat-s) or by adding an 'es' after fricatives (latch-es) or 'ren' after child etc.). Where this gets interesting is that he holds that cultures also tend to idealise, or fall into, by and large one of these two modes of thinking and being in the world.

India, to no one's surprise ever, is an extreme example of a context-sensitive society: one's caste (and sub-caste), class (and sub-class), gender, religion (and sub-division thereof), geographical and other 'locations' determine the shape one's life may ostensibly take. Even time - in the form of 'auspicious' hours in a given day, or days in a week, or weeks in a month, or months in a year, or years in an aeon - and space are accorded with properties which mark out good from its nefarious other, dictating what action may be committed when, and where .The quest in a society as heavily circumscribed by context as ours is, Ramanujan tells us, is always going to be for a state of free-play: 'sannyasa' from the neat subdivisions which mark life stages (or 'moksha' from life's aims); 'sphota' (a 'burst' of meaning outside language qua language - much like the effect of montage in generating emotions in filmic texts, if you think about it) in semantics, 'bhakti' in religion; these are all examples of the freedom that comes at the 'end' of a lifetime spent performing the roles foisted upon members of context-sensitive societies.

Some of you may have, by now, discerned where this is headed, and you would be right if you had deduced that the United Kingdom would, in this schema, qualify as an example of a context-free society, based as it seemingly is upon the Judaeo-Christian predilection for universals ('thou shall not kill,' - not even if you are a Brahmin who has been wronged by a Shudra, no. Down.). At least theoretically, this would qualify as a society premised upon the egalitarian democratic notion that "any member is equal to and like any other in the group" (Ramanujan 1989: 54), where despite religious, class and other markers, the same rules applied to, as he so colourfully put it, "the lion and the ox". 

Now, if Ramanujan is to be believed, and I see no reason why he shouldn't be, this means that the quest in a polity like Britain's is one for context: for what people imagine to be 'roots and legacies', which can only come from belonging to (which is another way of saying these categories can be claimed only by 'othering' the waves of Eastern Europeans, Asians, West Indians and others who also lay claim as citizens to) this insular little island nation. This is the shadowy, murky underbelly of the quest for context; the calculated and noxious logic which culminates in Jo Cox's killer thinking of himself as a patriot who puts 'England first'. Does this begin to add up? In a world come unhinged, postmodern in the extreme in that the meta-narratives of religion, capitalism, democracy and their ilk have been judged and found wanting for they no longer serve to affix us as once they did and no longer seem to give our identities coherence, we are almost bound to witness a simultaneous unease with, and reaffirmation of the rhetoric of jingoistic nationalism. World over, we seem intent on splintering ourselves into as many sub-groups as it will take for us to feel comfortable in our skins again. 

This is what I meant when I began by suggesting we're devilishly contrarian. Of course there were Asian-Britons who voted 'Leave': every last one of us is someone else's other. Racism can be, and is, paid forward. Which is why, much like those blasted U2 songs I began by invoking, it's fairly safe to assume that the UK is a long way away yet from finding what it thinks it is looking for. With or without (E)U.

In which she is forced out of her delicious (self-imposed) write-irement to show solidarity with what she saw at FTII

I simply haven't the nose for rain. Or anything else, come to think of it. Not since I broke it on someone's forehead 18 years ago, but that's another story for another time. Someone who does though, is my father. He can smell it from hours and miles away. And my friend Jyo, who is in Poona today, and scheduled to do a session at the FTII. Which is where I was yesterday. Now, I'll admit that's a shady segue. But it'll do.

There's probably nothing I can tell you about the ongoing strike (we're at day 70 today) that you haven't already heard. Depending on your political predilection and curation of news sources, it'll likely fit neatly into one of two possible sweeping narratives, one of which will paint the student protestors as lumpen elements who sit around smoking copious amounts of weed (which, just for the record, can never be a bad thing in and of itself), treating the strike as one long holiday, and not actually being invested in resolving this (non)issue which they've precipitated and forced onto themselves in so many ways. The other one, the one I find closest to that shape-shifting slipperiness which masquerades as the idea of 'truth', is the version where the government, in a continuation of its avowed agenda to rewrite the script that India will proceed to play a starring role in (even as it recasts the long shadow of history to better fit its tenor and give heft to its exercise in cultural engineering), fucked up. It fucked up badly when it appointed dimwitted pracharks whose only claim to the positions they were gifted was their connection to the people doing the gifting: no one can accuse this government of not being a generous friend, at any rate. The chairperson and new appointees to the FTII council are laughable additions to an institution which, tiny and resource-starved though it might well be, has continued to churn out some of our finest film and television practitioners. This is saying a lot.

But what draws me to FTII - I am a moth to its flame (because tired metaphor to banta hai) - is something quite else. The moral and intellectual legitimacy of their claim is one I can get behind. This is vital. This is a given. What isn't apriori, however, in this increasingly atomised space that is life in an institute of higher education in India today (I should know. I work in one, and have for several years now) is the curious spectacle of solidarity cutting across class, caste, gender, programme, student-faculty and other lines today. When FTII speaks, it speaks in one voice: there is heft in their message because they have managed to cobble together (at least ostensibly, to an outsider - which is what I am on their campus) a solidarity which is iterated and reiterated by the student body as a whole. Am I suggesting that this solidarity bespeaks some kind of a utopian experiment in true democracy? That every voice within this body is countenanced? I don't know the answer to this, but I would imagine it cannot possibly be. What every voice is, though, is heard. I sat with them all evening and late into last night, first hearing Satchith and Vikas, Ameya, Yashasvi and others bravely stand their ground in the charade that plays itself out on countless television channels relayed into millions of homes nationwide each evening: You might know this better as the News-Hour or a minor variation on this theme in terms of the presenter/channel telecasting it. Structurally, the shrillness and agenda-setting at work in each and every last one of these programmes is the same. The same. You heard it here first, because the nation wanted to know. You're welcome. This, I should add, was after five of these guys had spent the night at the Deccan Gymkhana Police Station where they were being held, and a tortuous afternoon in court (where they were joined by the rest of the students named in that scam of an FIR lodged against them by their Director, who alleged they "gheraoed" ['surrounded' just doesn't ring with the same sinister intent, nahi?] and "tortured" him, thus making a mockery of what torture actually is, and those who have had to deal with its myriad functionings, all in one fell swoop. He sounds like quite the dude.) I digress. Anywho, the strikers went on air, tired, hungry, most of them without having slept in over 24-hours, and all this, to be shouted down between the ludicrous rantings of the BJP and Congress (and AAP! I mean, whatthewhythehowtheFUCK did that happen?) spokespersons, who insisted on playing their tired blame-games - when they weren't grand-standing - and basically diverting from every real issue at hand. The students reacted...passionately. They appeared cornered at times - they were - and they were angry. Angry at what they'd had to go through, angry because the institution charged with their well-being had turned on them so violently and virulently. This came through last night.

However, when it was all over, and they regrouped under that glorious space they call the Wisdom Tree (everyone everywhere needs to come and experience this space to understand why the FTII-folk feel about it the way they do), we proceeded to speak about modes of protest: this was why I was ostensibly there, after all, but more on this in a minute. When Satchith and Yashasvi were in Ahmedabad a couple of weeks ago, on a little tour of educational institutions to engage students everywhere on why the battle for FTII matters, they came to see us on our campus. They told us that solidarity with who they are and what they do can take many forms: musicians, artists, academics - everyone was welcome to come see the students and engage with them in any form they saw fit. I teach. It is a huge part of who I am - not just what I do - so I offered to come and talk to them about Gandhi and protests: if ever there was anyone who understood that to protest is to inform, entertain, engage and generate a spectacle simultaneously, it's our man G. It made sense to go give them an account of his 'best practices' to show that history is never 'finished' or accomplished: it lives and breathes in our midst and informs our present each moment. It was one of four 'engagements' with architects, musicians and academics they'd lined up yesterday, in a bid to "retrace freedom" as an overarching theme. The arrests and midnight crack-down on Tuesday and into Wednesday put paid to those plans. Or so I thought. I went to Poona anyway, to see for myself what the mood on campus was; to try and make sense of what the 'student-body' - that mythically united beast - made of the present moment, given their 'leaders' were in custody. Bapu and the marchers always had a plan B and a second (and third and fiftieth) rank and file, because movements need to be bigger than the protagonists they throw up to lead them. Thankfully though, the boys got bail, and by late-evening, the Wisdom Tree was abuzz with activity. It was, not to put too fine a point on it, electric. There were tears - just the wearniness and sobering reality of having lived *that* day, I suppose - from some quarters, hushed gently by other students going up to hug and hold - just hold - anyone who needed it. There was rage, while the television hosts relentlessly parroted their lines for the evening, their minds made up long before the students had said a word. But there was also laughter: we were live-streaming Arnab's shout-fest, and it was all we could do to not snigger and shout so loudly that they'd pick up the "halla" on Satchith and Vikas's microphones! There was tiredness, and much, much chai. There were cigarettes and protest songs galore. And then, late into the night, the students decided there might as well be some Gandhi as well. So we sat under the Wisdom Tree and we spoke of movements and marches and symbols which could rally masses and how protests were (and can be) nurtured and birthed. And it was glorious.

I then spent the night at Vijaya's place - we continued talking about the non-negotiable articles of faith for democracy to exist, how public movements cannot "wait" until what they need comes to pass before becoming gender equal, how movements need in-built mechanisms for the voicing of dissent, and the like: things that can only come of a mind and heart as wonderful as Vijaya's.

I've promised them I'll be back. I hope it's under a shinier, more auspicious star.
Tonight, and every night in the meantime, I'm going to think about how I can show solidarity with one of the most singular movements I've seen up close. Last night we spoke about the need to engage Poona. Then, the country. It is a moment that comes but rarely, and my friends, it is here. Halla bol, for FTII - coalesced here is everything we fight against. But also, in what these students are cobbling together each day, is everything we must fight for. So much more powerful, non? 
      

For Behram; or how H almost wasn't

“Hello, I’m Behram, and I was the first man to see this girl naked.” That’s what he used to lead with, every time I introduced him to any of my friends, or anyone I was seeing (much to their amusement and my discomfiture). And it was true, for he ‘delivered’ me unto this world. Here’s the thing about Behram uncle: every single person who ever met him – whether they saw him once or knew him all his life (or their lives) – will have stories about him; tales occasioned by the fact of his presence. I was fortunate to’ve known him from the moment I was born. This is our story, because that I came to be at all is because of this man.

My mother was a very tiny woman. She stands at (just about) five feet, and weighed less than I do now when she was pregnant with me, full-term; but wait, I get ahead of my-‘self’. Being so tiny, she was told by her gynaecologist – a stupid woman whose name escapes me now (which is for the best, really) – that she’d be unable to a) conceive, or on the off-chance that she did, b) give birth to a child. Wonder of wonders, my mother found that she was pregnant. A few weeks later, aforesaid doctor told her that she would “self-abort” or they’d have to induce an abortion because her foetus (an incipient H) showed no signs of life. Distraught, my mother returned home in tears. She spoke to my grandmother about what she’d been told, and being the veritable force of nature that she was, Bacchu granny prevailed upon her to go seek a second opinion; to go see Behram uncle (whose mother, also a gynaecologist, was responsible for my father seeing light of day – another story for another time).

This transpired in the sleepy town that was Ahmedabad in ’81, just so we’re clear about the context. There were no sonography machines back then. Hospitals looked and felt and smelled different from the sanitised – anaesthetised – versions we live with today. Full of trepidation, my grandmom took Ma to the Anklesaria clinic in the heart of the old city. Behram uncle, with his easy charm and ready wit, immediately set her at ease. He proceeded to examine her, iterating that she hadn’t been pregnant when she was first told she was by the other doctor. Instead of three months, his guess was that she was five weeks pregnant at best, which explained why that woman hadn’t been able to detect “growth” and life in the primordial goo that eventually turned into me. He told her she would bloody well be able to keep this pregnancy. And she did; with his help and under his constant supervision. Both Mel and I are C-section babies: we’re part of the agglomeration which is fortunate enough to call itself ‘Behram’s Babies’ – in so many ways, we’re all monsters of his creation.

Behram uncle knew his classical music better than anyone I’ve ever met. And he read. Everything. This made him a joy to talk to, and when he turned to look upon you? For that brief moment, you became the centre of the cosmos. The sun, around which all other astral bodies dance to the music of the spheres, shone directly and roundly upon you. I was fortunate enough to have Behram uncle and his wonderful family be a large part of my childhood and formative years. My aunt Persis remains one of my favourite people in the whole wide world, and every time I see her, I remember why I’ve loved them so all my life. He died – heartbreakingly suddenly – a couple of years ago, and to-day I grieve for him again. Afresh.

His daughter Ava called me over to their old house this afternoon – the house where Melody and I were born, for it also doubled up as his hospital. The family has moved to the new city since Behram uncle died, so this was one of the only times I’ve been back to this place in two years. It’s a house every corner and nook of which is filled with the smell and tastes and sounds of my childhood – I’ve spent ages poring over books there, seen my first ever computer (Sarosh’s Mac) there, imbibed some of the loveliest (and love-laden) meals of my life there, heard my first aria and concerto there, and all this in the company of the giant that was uncle Behram. Aavul is trying to find his books and prodigious collection of music a new home now, and it was to do with this that she asked me over. We went over all this stuff – his stuff, their stuff – and it dawned on me that this might well be the last time I ever get to “go home” to the place of my birth; the place where the idea of me changed from possibility to reality. And I missed him. I missed him so much, my heart broke. I’ve carried him with me these past couple of years, every time I went to the Opera or took in a symphonic recital – we’ve been to Vienna and London together, like this – and I suspect he’ll stay with me till I live and breathe.

I can’t remember the last time I felt such a pressing need to write, but as I pulled away from that place to-day, I felt like I would burst if I didn’t. I can only imagine how much of a struggle it must be for my darling aunt and his children – he might have belonged to the world, to us all, but he was theirs first – to deal with this Behram-shaped absence on a daily basis. I also realised that while it *is* the people who make a place, if you live, if you love in one long enough, it takes on elements of you – a trace residue – which it is impossible to diffuse. So despite the fact of the barren rooms, and carton-ed books and LPs and cassettes, he was everywhere. The terrace-garden I’d played in as a child (it’s where I first touched a ‘Touch-me-Not’ – an inkling of the contrarian to come) has now become a veritable tropical jungle. His tomes will find new takers, and his music will delight others, but this place and what it meant to us each and all fortunate enough to know the singular phenomenon that was Behram Anklesaria will live inside us – within us and without us. The King is dead; long live the King.   

Two musings.

Here. Have two pieces rescued from oblivion because I decided to put them *here* before the notebook they adorn the back pages of is complete, achieved, archived, and undoubtedly, if there's no escaping past precedent, lost in the mists of time (or the mess that is my room).


Craving.

On reading,
I crave
his mouth, his hair, his voice, his breath;
the 'intelligent light'
transferred from the bottle to the eyes,
the archness, the tartness
of that line,
the softness of the smile - his.

Craving is an ephemeral absolute:
It doesn't cease 'ere it consumes, nay, devours
me whole,

But then it passes.

A craving passes.

The memory of its toll, though:

It imprints itself so,
turning everything once touched, held, known
into itself.
It is the muscle memory of a phantom limb.

It becomes self and non-self in one aching
delicious
breath.



The Expert Speaketh

We agree only that there is a valley.
Mountains surround it,
and people live there too.
Are they experts or amateurs?
Does being born there suffice? Who
decides?
The Arrow shirt?
The parting in the chaiwala's hair (centre-right)?
Us and them.
You know, of course, that we're all just ordinary men.

At Phoenix Ashram, or, 'A Settlement'.

14/09/213

He was younger then;
     Gropingtastingfeeling his way achingly. Slowly,
allowing himself to articulate that which could be, because
of precedent, there was none.

Is this why I see him not here?
Is this why I cannot hear him, here,
where the sounds first came?
Is the resonance too diffused
or my hearing not keen enough, bapu?

Little remains of the lands you tilled;
littler yet of the roads you walked, the rooms you inhabited,
the lives which imagined alongside yours.

But, again, perhaps it is my eyes which fail me,
accustomed as they are to seeing you formed, complete, 'achieved'.
You did not engage with the Zulu: you didn't see the inequity; not to begin with.
I suspect this is why I struggle so.

You see, bapu, I turn to you for light, and you shine.
Being here has made me see that
if I must have your light,
I must also embrace the darkness at its core.

Where she acknowledges debts owed and other suchlike.

It's a tad impossible to try and translate the giddying feeling which accompanies a final submission of one's Ph.D. thesis. To be sure, it had been "cleared" four months ago (almost to the day), but I finally got around to printing it and handing it over - gasp, but...mine! MINE! - to the programme office only to-day. I then took ten minutes off from the rest of the world, found myself a shady little bower, and proceeded to smoke my first cigarette and imbibe my first cup of coffee, as smugly carefree as only a woman who has submitted her dissertation can be.

The process of churning out aforesaid labour of love was a (well...not very) long and (erm...really, not so much) arduous one, and I feel keenly for all the people who've had to deal with H in thesis mode. No. In the interest of keeping it so that you love me yet, I won't go on to describe what she was like. It's for the best. Her list of acknowledgements, therefore, is a bloody long one: one tends to rack up quite a fucking tab of gratitude owed when one is a little bit of a monster.

Here: have her list of thank-yous; each heart-felt, each so utterly necessary.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

At long last, and yet in some ways, the source from whence it sprang: I started composing my ‘Acknowledgements’ page before a word of this thesis was written, and I finally commit it to paper to-day.

That this thesis would have been impossible – inconceivable, even – without the force of nature that is Tridip Suhrud is a given; something barely worth mentioning because it is obvious to me in each word I read or write, every phrase I utter in class, and every question I pose to my time and times bygone. Tridip, you are the light, and for the millionth time (most certainly not the last either), I extend you my gratitude: I am beholden to you, Sir, for everything you are, and everything you exhort me to each day become. My experiments – with truth, form, structure, self, identity – are mediated by the brilliance that is you.

Binita Desai, from under whose office desk I made my first ever Ph.D. “presentation” should know that neither distance nor time will ever dim what she means to my scheme of things. It all began with you, Bini, and your faith that this could come to be: I am grateful every moment for the fact of you.

Profs. Shiv Visvanathan, Ganesh Devy, Aditi Nath Sarkar and Rita Kothari: you are the giants of our time, and to walk with you awhile has been an honour and a privilege. Thank you for all the poking and proding and pushing and shoving: you demanded more, and I couldn’t help but strive that much harder. The generosity of your spirit staggers me, and I thank you each with all my heart for the ear, the coffee, and the laughter. AF Mathew, you number here too: friend, colleague, sounding-board, and usher sans compare – thank you for asking each day, rather optimistically, if the thesis was “done yet”! My love and thanks to you each for giving me so much of yourselves: you humble me.

None of the archival work at the British Library, London, that went into the making of this thesis would have been possible were it not for the Charles Wallace Grant that I received in 2012: my thanks to Richard Alford and the Charles Wallace India Trust for this crucial funding which allowed my work to speak more authentically than it could have done without this time at the grand old institution that is the British Library. In the same vein, I’d also like to thank Nagesh Rao and MICA, my ‘home’ institute, for granting me the time off from teaching that I needed to avail of this Grant. In addition, my heartfelt thanks go out to Shailesh Yagnik, Lavji Zala and everyone else who makes the KEIC at MICA the splendid home to scholars that it is.

The joys of teaching include being constantly pushed into corners by students past, who want to know what one is working on, and subject the writer to questions galore about back-stories taken, perhaps, for granted. Pritish Mukherjee, Sanchita Dasgupta, Anupam Dhar, Sukaran Thakur and the host of others – students and friends –  with whom there have been countless discussions while I was working on this thesis: thank you for taking the time to engage with my work and showing me that this was never a one-way street. Sukaran is also the reason you, dear reader, see a ‘Contents’ page on this thesis at all - thank you for teaching me to speak technology, Mr. Thakur.  

The lot of the people who surround the thesis-writer is never an easy one. Antoine Perrin, thank you for all the love, the faith, the good humour and the ‘calm’ I had at my disposal as I lived in and thought through the 19^th-century. First reader and dearest ally, you will always mean the world to me. Marc Damania, you know that all my stories invariably have you in them. This is one of the bigger ones, and it counts the most, so thank you for having put up with me through this phase: you deserve chocolate. Equally, love and thanks to Kyra Fuchs for egging me on to finish “editing the thesis so I can read it already” – I did, and you still haven’t. To everyone who’s been in Purple Flower from 2009-2012 – cheers for making time off from thinking about this beast as joyful and beautiful as you have: Arnav, Dhaara and Meher (who came into our world so close to the end of this process), Anup, Abhinav, Dev, Chinmay – you’ve been fabulous.  

Manik Acharya, you made finishing this thesis easy: I didn’t mind leaving my 19^th-century home because I knew you were waiting two centuries away. Thank you. I like it here.

And then there’s the fact of Vispi and Nilu Siganporia, followed by the inimitable Melody Siganporia, Dhun and Hazel Karkaria, and Kaiki Siganporia: I owe you my life, and whether you like it or not, all I am and all I ever will be. I know that I don’t say this nearly enough, but each day that I live and have the privilege of learning from and being with each of you is a gift. All that is of any worth in me comes from you, Vispi and Nilu: you are the music that scores my world.

This thesis is dedicated to my grandmother Bachu Siganporia; my first librarian, best friend, and the one who ordered my universe.