Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 202: Mixing Paint with Giant Cricket Bats — with Sirish Rao
Speakers: Alyha Bardi, Am Johal, Sirish Rao
[theme music]
Alyha Bardi 0:04
Hello listeners. I'm Alyha with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar. Our host, Am Johal, speaks with Sirish Rao, the former artistic director and co-founder of the Indian Summer Festival. They chat about his experience as a Himalayan mountain guide, as a book publisher in India, and as an organizer of arts festivals. We hope you enjoy the episode.
[theme music fades]
Am Johal 0:39
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We have a very special guest with us, Sirish Rao, the outgoing artistic director of the Indian Summer Festival. Welcome, Sirish.
Sirish Rao 0:53
Thanks, Am, and by outgoing you mean that I'm no longer the artistic director, not just, sort of, cheerful, cheerful and extroverted?
Am Johal 0:53
Yeah, you're in your sitting duck period.
Sirish Rao 1:09
Yeah. Yeah.
Am Johal 1:11
Sirish, wondering if we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Sirish Rao 1:17
Yeah, it's interesting, because I find in introductions here, as compared to introductions back home in India, where I was born, you don't say much about your parents, except Indigenous folks do. They always name their parents and their grandparents and so that's such a huge part of introducing myself actually in India is like, everyone's trying to figure out your lineage and where you are and how they know you and what you eat and where you might be placed. So I, you know, I was born in the south of India and Bangalore, which is a plateau of 1,000 meters in the middle of generally tropical region of India, very far from the northern plains in the mountains and Punjab, where are a lot of folks from India who live in Vancouver and areas from. And I spent most of my life there, I grew up and you know, it's landscapes and fruits and seasons, or what I know and came to Vancouver as an adult. I crossed the world for love, I met my partner, Laura Byspalko, with whom I co-founded Indian Summer, also in the south of India.
Sirish Rao 2:28
And yeah, so I've grown up, I think in a culture of tropical excess. If you see tropical fruits and flowers or tropical stories, there's always plenty of unnecessary. And I think that's quite magical. That's informed a lot of the way I think of art of the world. You see these flowers, and they're like, why the hell are you doing this, there's no reason, you're impressive as it is, you don't have to, you know, put out 3 tendrils and look like a spider and a parrot and something else. What is that gorgeous filling of space, filling of the complete absence of blank space in story or in art. So that's where I come from.
Am Johal 3:15
Sirish, you know here in Vancouver, of course, people know you and Laura, as the founders of the Indian Summer Festival and the incredible mark that's left on the city. And full disclosure, I've been on the board for the last couple of years, but will be outgoing. So I've been involved, you know, from meeting you both on a Skype call many years ago, but you have this rich entire life you lived before you arrived here and a lot of people in Vancouver know you from the festival, but don't necessarily know those parts of your life. You've published many books, you worked as a publisher yourself. I know that you were a mountaineer for a period of time.
Am Johal 3:53
I'm wondering if you could share a little bit with our audience, which is global, but also local, some of the things that you did before you arrived in Vancouver because I think it's a really important part about how you approach festival curation and other work and the kind of ideas that you know, shaped you, that you're still navigating and playing with and getting to the other side of.
Sirish Rao 4:15
Yes, interesting how every act of travel requires a change of clothing. And so, you know, coming here, a very different cultural and geographic context from what I know. It feels like I brought a limited suitcase with me, you know.
Am Johal 4:32
The other thing is, you've mentioned this before, it's like you never got called South Asian until you arrived in Vancouver, right?
Sirish Rao 4:38
I became South Asian upon arrival. It was never an identity, you know, growing up in India surrounded by people who look like you, talk your language. South Asian, what's that? I mean. And then suddenly you are placed in contrast to all that is around you. Yeah. So I arrived like that and I think so much of this being here has been a learning and I think, to begin at the beginning, I think I started in India. Really at some point in my schooling, I went to an alternative school. It was founded by the philosopher J. Krishnamurti. So it's quite similar to some of the Waldorf or Steiner Schools. And a lot of it was about simply questioning things around you in a very considered way. And the thing I questioned when I came out of school was, am I just going to go into university and then do a couple of degrees and then end up, you know, working a job? Is that the line? Or can I do something else? And I felt that for myself, which for some folks, it certainly was the right thing to do, and they went that route. But for myself, I decided to seek out mentors who I was extremely moved by and asked if they would tolerate me in their presence for whatever period of time they were willing to have me.
Sirish Rao 6:06
And it began just after high school, which is all I've studied. I met this German engineer turned botanist, who came to India in the 70s. And a lot of those buses that went from, you know, London, overland through Afghanistan, across Pakistan, landed up in Nepal, and then in Indian and he never left, Wolfgang Theuerkauf was his name. And he ended up in the middle of the rainforest in Kerala, and began to see the degradation that was happening, the complete lack of regard for plants. I mean, I think there was some amount of conservation for larger mammals or, but plants, rare plants were just being lost species, hundreds of species being lost. And he was going to all these places where forests had been raised to create tea plantations and he would nurture these little plants and come back and try and give them the same habitat he found them in. And it was just such an act of love, like futile love. And it moved me so much to see that there was someone so obstinate, and so able to carry this thing of going and rescuing little gunny bags and spraying them with mist on bumpy jeeps and coming back and growing these plants. And so I said, I don't know if I necessarily want to be a botanist, but I want to be around you because he had an intensity that I felt I could learn from. And so for a season, I was in the monsoon in the rainforests of Kerala basically doing whatever, picking up the shopping, carrying, you know, firewood. It was very, very much that learn by fetching water, kind of an apprenticeship. And then I went like that from mentor to mentor. And there were very many people who were extremely generous to someone who didn't offer much except that I'll hang around and do our jobs, which I guess everybody wants in some way. So yeah, I moved from there. And through friends and people, I ended up apprenticing with this amazing ecologist and mountain climber in the Lake District in England, and then with a martial arts expert in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia. And it was an incredible time, I got such an education.
Am Johal 8:32
You could have gotten it, you could have become an ultimate fighting champion.
Sirish Rao 8:37
Well, I showed up near Sochi in Russia in 95. And that was around the time when it was just starting to change into, now, you know, a rampant capitalist society that it is today. But at that moment, they just didn't know what was going on. It was just on the cusp of all this change. It was a fascinating time to be there. Moscow still didn't have a single store. I think the Adidas store might have opened as I was leaving, and there was like a big, you know, lineup for it. And everyone was wondering, “what the hell is this thing? There's a logo, what's a logo?” And yeah, and I spent a good time in the Caucasus Mountains. And it was an incredible, incredible experience really trying to learn to be in nature. Because as much as I love culture, I think my first love is just moving in nature. And that's when I thought, "Okay, I'm going to be a mountain guide." I've spent enough time in the mountains. I've always loved the outdoors. And I went and trained at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering in the Indian Himalaya and thought that's what I'm going to do.
Am Johal 9:46
You must have some really memorable times from mountaineering, whether it's delegations of Russians or others and probably was a source of some of your writing as well, at least some of it that I've read, but wondering if you have any stories you'd like to share from that period?
Sirish Rao 10:04
Mountaineering is really a crash course in colonialism. Everything about how it was set up, and how it still is set up, has so much to do with the conquering of territory that empires sought. And the Himalayas certainly was that crossroads of the Germans trying to climb Nanga Parbat, the Italians trying to climb K2, the British trying to get Mount Everest, and there, it was high altitude warfare, really. And that's how it was designed, as a military expedition. And then the exploitation of Sherpas and local folks and their knowledge, while also having the complete erasure of their work in getting people to the top. It's just really. You take history, you compress it into a group of 20 people, you pitch it up at high altitude, and you get mountaineering. And you learn a lot of lessons at high altitude because not only do you see these larger forces at play, the dynamics between people become so heightened. Your awareness of their tiny irritations like if someone just has a button loose on a pant flap, and you're climbing below them for a day, you may murder them for that. Because it's so in a weird way, it was really an exercise in mother tincturing history and, and human consciousness. Yeah, and I loved it. And at the times when you were not in the human world, you were in this incredible world of black and white, a world that, you know, a moonlit night on a snow field with a few rocks, and you suddenly feel like you're just in this otherworldly landscape. And then one little glow of an orange tent with a light and there is something, I mean, the feeling that people get when you look up at the stars or have deep space photos and realize how tiny we are, certainly, you know, that was there, how tiny and how annoying.
Am Johal 12:19
Sirish, in terms of starting your own writing and publishing books, when did that start for you?
Sirish Rao 12:28
Well, I came off down the mountain and bumped into a group of people who were brainstorming about getting a publishing house going. As far as I was concerned, it was a free place to sleep and get some food. They were holding this retreat in a school in the valley. And that school was linked to the school that I went to. So I had an in. And I basically went there to crash. But then there was an incredible collective of people in India who were beginning to feel that there weren't enough stories rooted in the Indian context. I mean, one of the things of us, having had the British camp there for a few 100 years, was that our education system was extremely directed towards the UK. And so we got a lot of, you know, a lot of the values that were there, a lot of the experiences that we read about were not in our context at all. We were, as children, reading literature that upheld somebody else's experience that had nothing of the familiar. And then of course, India was also a socialist country in the 60s and 70s. So we got a lot of amazing Russian children's literature, which I love. I mean, I grew up on Cossack Mamay and Baba Yaga. And, you know, fabulous, but again, not my experience. I mean, I used to read about the snow and when I was a child and wonder what that was.
Sirish Rao 13:54
So there was this feeling in India at that point that suddenly we had to find our own voices and things like children's literature and you know, certainly was starting to happen in film and in contemporary art. And so there was a movement of folks who were really starting to wonder what is our language because for people like me, who are brought up in English speaking, milieus in large cities occupied the strange dual world.
Sirish Rao 14:25
On the one hand, I was growing up with the stories that my grandparents or the local temple would tell, which are these myths and epics. Like I would listen to the Mahabharata, the great epic, which is bigger than the Iliad and the Odyssey combined. Indians will always say with pride, Greeks could only do half the job we did. But it's one of those, you grew up with us with an oral storytelling culture that is deep and continuous. And then you have this very pre-World War Two British education, and they're working side by side and your mind is kind of split. Your soul is split between these two realities.
Sirish Rao 15:07
So I think a lot of people at that time were trying to understand how you bounce between these two worlds. And do you feel on the outside of both? Or are there some treasures you can smuggle across the borders of both? And that was really, you know, how the publishing house began. It's called Tara Books, and it continues to this day, but in many ways, it was to try and find a voice that spoke to this experience, and brought that to kids.
Am Johal 15:39
I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to your own writing that you were doing at the time, and some of the publishing projects you took on from others that you particularly, are things that you remember really well, or something that you're really proud of, you know, obscure books that you were able to put into the public eye that may not otherwise have had the chance to have that type of circulation.
Sirish Rao 16:05
In my own work, of course, because of my background, and working in, you know, forests and mountains, I always tried to find a way of speaking of the natural world in the books I did. So I did a lot of books that linked somehow, especially for kids. But as I began to publish in, understand what the act of publishing is, and what the book actually is, because I began to meet Indigenous artists from different parts of India, I realized that the book, as I understood it, and I always understood the book as a place of invitation, for many of the artists who are respected, the book for them was a fearful place. Because books had always been used against them. Books of law to imprison them, or books that, you know, talk down at them and had admonishments from strange and angry gods. And they were very suspicious of the book.
Sirish Rao 17:08
And so I began to speak, especially with my friend, Bhajju Shyam, who's from the Gond community in central India, and try to understand how could, say something like an oral narrative or a nonlinear narrative, find its way into the form of the book. Could the book, the notion of the book, as a linear thing that you go from top to bottom read from left to right be exploded. And the challenge that he put to me was that and then we began to make books, these books made by hand that were almost like scrolls, you know, like you see this it just, this is Joydeb and Manu Chitrakar, who are Patua, from the group, a group of painters called Patuas. And they create these things called Patas. They're like wandering minstrels, they take stories that are around and then turn them into paintings and songs. And so they were actually professional storytellers, who would go to villages and sing these things. And so it was like, okay, there is a, maybe the book really needs to be reimagined if it is to do justice to Indian ways of storytelling. And so that was extremely exciting to try and play with the very form of the book so that it no longer was trapped in structure.
Sirish Rao 18:29
And then there was this book, The Night Life of Trees, which, again, came out of conversations with my friend, Bhajju and other members, Durga Bai and Ram Singh Urveti from the Gond community. So we're talking about trees and as like, could you draw a tree and they're like, What do you mean, could you do 'a tree'? There is no such thing as 'a tree'. Is it a Mahua Tree, a Banyan Tree, a Peepal Tree? Like it's very, I realized what an urban thing I just said, despite all my working in the forest of like, ‘draw a tree’, and there was no such thing as a generic tree for them. And I realized that every tree that they knew, was a character with stories. And we did this book called, The Night Life of Trees, that speaks to the spirit that trees have at night after they've given shelter and fruit and shade, when they live for themselves.
Sirish Rao 19:19
So these are the, working with artists from these old and sincere storytelling traditions, and I say sincere because they tell us, often they would tell stories of paint, not in order to sell their art or to be in the marketplace, but simply to beautify their homes and to talk to each other about what they already knew. It was a pool of common experience that they were constantly repeating and invoking and adding authorship in their own way. And this to me was like such a beautiful thing about oral storytelling cultures, is that they have little room for fundamentalism. Because they're not trapped in one book and one way of saying things and interpreted by only one class of people, you suddenly have endless variations of the story, you have the the story can be tweaked or innovated or corrupted in infinite ways, which I think is so human, like such a such a sustainable way of continuing legacies.
Sirish Rao 20:29
And then the other thing that really intrigued me was found art and kitsch, like ephemera, Matchbox labels, and sign painters on the street and other ways in which, I mean, the Indian street is such a garrulous place and to me the best art is found on the street and not necessarily in galleries. And it's where everybody has a say, and if anyone has ever been to India, there is no regulation in terms of font and size and who can put what where. It's just like signboards everywhere, it's such a life giving thing.
Sirish Rao 21:03
And I came across a strange phenomenon of baby posters. And it's just posters of cute babies like hand painted, and a calendar to go with it. And business houses would give these out as compliments because, you know, they're just cute. And also in a country with, you know, several 1,000 gods and multiple religions. The most secular thing was a baby, but also because India, as a place, places a particular weight on babyhood. You know, India was a young nation, and then you had these babies too like, you have this farmer baby, soldier baby, doctor baby. So all the dreams of a nation on these chubby little shoulders. So it was a very fascinating thing in which I realized that you could literally take any piece of ephemera, whether that was Matchbox labels, or calendars, and begin to unearth a complex social history. And I, myself, and a few of my colleagues, and then it grew into many artists started doing that. And I think what we really were trying to do is capture a fast disappearing present in India as, you know, it became a free market economy and as the aesthetic and the storytelling became more and more in the grip of pretty much the same large corporations you see everywhere in the world. We realized we were holding on to something that may not last. And all we could do was to try and record it and treasure it and see if we could extend its life by giving it value.
Am Johal 22:55
Also, through your publishing work and in writing have had a long relationship to the Jaipur Literature Festival in terms of moderating sessions and all of that and and sometimes people here don't realize the rich publishing history in India and also in the English language itself. In terms of Jaipur being the largest English Language Literature Festival in the world. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to sort of your times and memories from that involvement and who you're able to meet and be in conversation with?
Sirish Rao 23:36
Yeah, no, for sure. And, yeah, I mean, I think these books began to open conversations and start taking us places. And I think one of the things that became early on with these books is that they, even though we were working in a tiny local context, as a publishing house, this is Tara Books. And we were making some of these books by hand, with handmade paper and silkscreen, printing them and mixing paint with giant cricket bats in a vat. It was such a tactile thing, because these books are labours of love, but we began to think very much of ourselves as a global voice as well. So we'd go to the Frankfurt Book Fair and Bologna Book Fair, London, Paris and sell rights to these books. And we ended up, you know, working with the Getty Museum and the Museum of London and all these large institutions that saw what, you know, the precious thing that handmade books could do. But there were very few forums in India that looked at it like that until the Jaipur Literature Festival came along.
Sirish Rao 24:39
About 15 years ago, a group of folks, William Dalrymple, the historian, Sanjoy Roy, a festival producer, and Namita Gokhale, writer, and a few others, sort of began to feel there needs to be a place in India for conversations of this kind. They started the Literary Festival which had, I think, 20 people on stage and 20 people in the audience, which is a terrible ratio, as any event organizer will tell you. But it grew so quickly. It grew. In the next year there were a couple of 100. And I think I was involved from that year on, showing my books there. And suddenly the next year we had Salman Rushdie and the next year, the Dalai Lama, and then suddenly Oprah was there. In the way that sometimes festivals grow without you knowing what magic ingredients they have. Perhaps it was because there was not a forum like that. Perhaps it was because Indian literature was suddenly everywhere on a global scale with writers like Arundhati Roy and Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Rohinton Mistry, but also because I think it happens in this. You've been there, Am, to the Jaipur Lit Fest with me. It's this crumbling old palace, there's, you know, forts everywhere. And when I came here first, I expected a literary festival to be like that, that elephants would shower you with rose petals as you walk through the door, and that didn't happen. But yeah, I mean, there is a sense of celebration. There is a sense in Jaipur, I think, of ferment that you really want in a festival and always a surprise, and it had all those magical qualities.
Sirish Rao 26:21
And I became involved in the early days and began to host the main stage there and did that for seven or eight years. And it was quite incredible to be, you know, welcoming the Dalai Lama or introducing Gloria Steinem and Orhan Pamuk. And I remember one year, the PR for the festival, the guy from the festival, who's running PR had a stroke and my partner Laura and I had to run the whole PR for the festival. And we had to act as bodyguards to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie and Candace Bushnell. So it was a very diverse cast of folks that we saw there. And yeah, I think we began the Indian Summer Festival in Vancouver in partnership with the folks from the Jaipur Lit Fest. In fact, on that early Skype Skype call where we met you, we were trying to get your take on how a festival like this would land in Vancouver and whether there was a space for it. And you said, "No, it's crazy. Well, I love you for it, so do it."
Am Johal 27:30
Yeah, that was a fascinating call. I just started working at SFU. So this was sometime around 2011. But I loved the bravado and the sheer daring of attempting to do that. And wondering if you can talk a little bit about the early years of the festival as you arrived because Vancouver, you know, in as much as it has these global pretensions and looking to the outside, there's something about the Rockies to the east, the border to the south, that closes itself off to a bunch of the world as well. It can be a very internal place. And so to come in, to attempt to do something new, there's a kind of welcoming, but there's also a kind of borders and walls that go up in these places, because it doesn't imagine some things for itself. On the other hand, it can be a kind of clear palette where you can kind of come in and so, wondering if you could talk a little bit about the cycle of starting off a festival in a new town.
Sirish Rao 28:35
Yeah. The way you were speaking just now reminded me of something the writer, Anosh Irani says, it's like, “Vancouver is a fabulous canvas, but you better bring your own paints.” Like, which I mean, you know, I think it's interesting because Vancouver in so many ways, when I tried to think of it in more Calvino-esque terms, is actually a city with amnesia. It feels like not only has it forgotten who it was, because of the active silencing or ignoring of Indigenous voices and the old stories here, which are really, you know, there and present in the landscape. And when we celebrate the landscape here on nature, we're actually celebrating that stewardship, but people don't really see it that way. And then, because it's a lot of people who have forgotten, try to forget or are distant from their homelands. So I often get the feeling that you have a conversation, you walk away and everyone's forgotten about it already. So, if Calvino were to work Vancouver into Invisible Cities, I think he would call it a city of earnest forgetfulness.
Sirish Rao 30:00
But I, you know, arrived here wanting to make it home because it was home to someone I love and had no engagement with this place. And so one of the best ways to do that is to start a festival because it urges you to throw out many conversations at once. And people, you know, of course had prepared me for this thing that, people like yourselves, it's like, you know, go easy, don't have too many expectations. But what was really nice, as you say, is also because of this blank canvas. So because there isn't something like this, there was a great deal of interest. I mean, no festival grows, simply because you think it's a good idea. It needs to find an echo, like, especially, especially a public thing, like a festival requires many, many people to buy into it and to give it voice. So I have to say, like, on the one hand, it felt like yes, it's uphill, on the other hand, couldn't have expected to take on, we never started as a thing of let's see what happens if you try and create a cultural bridge. But it's, yeah, I mean, you know, we create an element of surprise by saying, "Oh, we showed up here in February, we're going to start a festival in July. We don't have an organization, we don't have funds. We don't have anything. But oh, we have a venue," because at that point SFU Woodwards was going up. And then you were in there. And yeah, you remember in the early days, we went to meetings at City Hall, you took us to meet some folks there. And I remember coming out of that, and three days later expecting them to have disbursed some money towards this obviously fabulous thing. And your like, this is not India, man. It's not gonna happen. Maybe three years from now. But nevertheless, when you start a conversation, and you're garrulous enough about it, and you bring some exciting people, it does find echoes.
Sirish Rao 31:58
And yeah, I'm really proud of the years that we've really, you know, made it a place of gathering with deeply local roots, but with a, you know, with a very global reach. We've been thrilled to be able to present writers like Arundhati Roy and, and Rushdie and musicians and thinkers and filmmakers. So that was maybe perhaps, to think about the flavor of it, it's really that we took it back to the root word of festival, which is feast. And we really extended an invite, I think, to come and feast together and all good feasts have elements of nurture, where you know what to expect and elements of surprise, where you may eat something completely new, and be seated next to a stranger. And I think that was the spirit.
Am Johal 32:48
Then, you know, I think, you know, the early days of SFU. Of course, Michael Stevenson and Michael Boucher were involved and instrumental in bringing it but I think that the memory that I have is the opening night of the festival, the kickoffs just to have so many people wearing clothes that have been sitting in their closet, it really became a place to see and be seen, like that kind of sense of joyous hospitality that you brought to the city. But I think the other mark of it from a curatorial point of view is that it really became a multi-arts festival in so many different disciplines. And also that it was embraced by people beyond the South Asian diaspora just because of the curatorial approach that you took in terms of like, what does the festival do when you invite people in and bring them together.
Am Johal 33:26
And wondering if you can speak a little bit to that curatorial approach that you took, because I think that has been a signature quality of it, and also its internationalism, and also in the city that, Vancouver, where you have a large Punjabi, Sikh diaspora here to have a pan Indian vision of a festival, which also sort of set it apart in many ways and trying to bring those two together in a way that is community building and building the complexity of the art sector in that area as well.
Sirish Rao 34:12
That's interesting, you say, you know, when you think of festivities of people being proud to come out and wear their clothing, it should never be discounted how important making space for celebration is, especially for communities whose celebrations have been mocked or repressed. And that was certainly clear in this context. I could see a lot of folks who grew up here and almost every single one of them from the South Asian community would say, I've been told my food smells funny, or my parents dress strange or talk strange. There's a huge amount of cultural shame. And so, being able to authentically and joyfully be in public is a healing and an elixir that should not be ignored. And how to create space for that is, you find your way to it. You kind of have to create, I think, the conduction conditions for you. You know, Indian Summer we describe it as radical hospitality is how do you create a space for gathering that is welcoming, but also communicates to those there that you will fight for the right to be what they are because the space, conscious invite randomly people who don't belong and say, oh, all of you be in a room together, you have to have the courage to set the tone for that place and defend people's right to be all their selves in that space.
Sirish Rao 35:51
And I think from the point of view of curating, it was important, I think, to me, A) that it's not about India, it's first of all, South Asia in general, despite the name, which I think, the name Indian Summer has been problematic in so many ways to myself and to others. And we've kind of, you know, just inertia and lethargy, to not change it. And perhaps, it really, I mean, it does actually irk me to the point that I wonder why we haven't. But that's now someone else's weight to bear. But I do hope that it happens, because it was always about looking at South Asia as a whole. But we had writers and thinkers from Iran from Afghanistan, Pakistan, and recognizing that the liberation and celebration of South Asian experience here or globally, or this moment of reinvention, after centuries of colonialism, can't be done by the South Asian community in isolation. Not even in South Asia, but also over here, especially over here, where our liberation and our joy and our celebrations and stories have to be bound up with and in solidarity with other folks who have the same experience.
Sirish Rao 37:11
And so, for me, when I got here, there was no sense of indigeneity to Canada from where I was sitting in India, so it was a huge learning to me to even know that they were Indigenous people here. That's how much of a fabulous fiction has been spun about this country internationally. And then, you know, to actually learn about how bloody that history is and how ongoing that violence is, became very important to start talking to and ask whether members, artists from the host nations, found it valuable to converse with us, found it valuable to collaborate, or, you know, be part of our stages and it has been incredible to work with visual artists like Deborah Sparrow and Susan Point and curators like Jarrett Martineau and Joleen Mitton and Kamala Todd to really expand that conversation, that it's South Asian, Black, and Indigenous voices entwined together and dreaming new possibility. That's really what we, you know, we hope to do at the festival is offer a model for that kind of intertwining. Therefore the curatorial choices for example, this year of bringing Amitav Ghosh, Naomi Klein, Robyn Maynard, and Leanne Simpson in one sphere, because these are critical thinkers today about some of the most urgent things facing us, like climate change and sort of the crisis of the imagination that we face as a species. So how do you dream yourself out of this is really the question that the festival has asked.
Am Johal 38:49
Also the amazing Arooj Aftab, from Pakistan for a festival named the Indian Summer Festival. It was just amazing to see the full house. One of the things I was gonna ask you, Sirish, you know, even Laura, in starting up the festival, you walk through the arts and cultural landscape of this context, you know, provincially, federally, civically, and, you know, had the opportunities to give input into the city's tenure arts and culture plan. And things have shifted somewhat, but there's so much more to do, so much where to go in terms of voices from BIPOC communities and others that have traditionally had a fairly marginal space, but also the big institutions themselves, have had limited spaces or have taken particular approaches. There's a kind of under development baked into the inertia of arts and culture policy. I'm wondering if you, having run this festival for so long, your kind of perspectives on the sector broadly in terms of what needs to happen, where things need to go?
Sirish Rao 39:56
I think when we began this festival, and I think you know, when I said that I became South Asian when I came here, it's because I went from being completely immersed and surrounded by language and art and a way of being that I knew, to this place where suddenly, it did feel like everything that was central to me was to be found in the ethnic foods aisle in the supermarket of culture, you know. And that was certainly what I saw happening to a lot of incredible artists that have been on our stages, is that no matter, you often find with BIPOC artists, that they'll be mid-career, but they'll be considered emerging in terms of their cultural impact, and often their economic impact. And that goes hand in hand. The number of avenues open for publishing deals or album or record deals or main stages at festivals are very few. So you may still be included in, you know, inside a special aisle, but not given the sort of heft, promotional or economic, to actually effect any real change. And it's the kind of breathlessness that you see, amongst BIPOC organized organizations and artists who have done so much, stretched so much, made it work on so little. And that's, that speaks to structure. That speaks to how things are resourced, and to what expectations are of your participation in public life.
Sirish Rao 41:28
And so with our festival, we are not so small anymore, but we were able to give mainstage spaces for artists who would normally not get that and say, look, the headline, this should be the headline or not, you know, opening for somebody else. And I think that shift is slow to come. And it's festivals like ours are extremely necessary to do this small and furious work of defending that. But I'm also increasingly very aware that there are huge amounts of infrastructure and capital that belong to the public, from public institutions and public organizations that should be more reflective of who lives here, and who the people of this land are from a long, long time ago, and from now. So I think I'm quite interested in how someone tips that that stone now, which at least I think there's a broader conversation, even though it's happening, I'm also cognizant that this conversation of diversity and decolonization and reconciliation happens sometimes in this extremely vacuous, flared nostril kind of way that is actually very insipid. If you wanted to get into that business in a felt heartful active way, you stop talking, and you start doing and I'm seeing a lot of DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) statements and, you know, everybody's got one. It's like the, you know, the early days of COVID, where everyone put one of their COVID policies out. That that is in itself a rash that hides the real illness and I'm very interested in shifting those big pieces of how do we make sure that we're not just inviting more people into the same sort of scarce pool of resources, but we're actually questioning whether and this has again, why I say capital resources for culture has to accompany the sort of change. And I'm seeing some change at least that you know, in the systemic level.
Sirish Rao 43:53
We began with the City of Vancouver grants to look at different ways of organizing intake so that you don't, just the very nature of the questions that you use to ask for the grant to the kind of reporting you demand or the kind of language that is used is like building a series of stairs in a gigantic padlock door to a building and then seeing everybody come in. So I think that there is so much work to be done there and I'm quite excited now. Having done the work of being a small but furious thing to really see if we can move some of those big stones along. I think it's a moment. I'm excited by things being shaken up.
Am Johal 44:44
Sirish, you and Laura and family, Teo, are heading off on a little sabbatical for a little while and, you know, you've been involved in, you know, really important ideas around the artist as healer, and storytelling more broadly. As you go away on this time of reflection after these years of exhaustion from the COVID period, what are some of the things that you're thinking about in terms of storytelling, and artist as healer and other projects that you might be conceiving of in the future?
Sirish Rao 45:20
I really feel more and more that if the reason to do art might be to offer some kind of healing, and that it ought to be taken more seriously as a healing force, and of late the project that we piloted at Indian Summer, which you refer to as artist is healer was to bring traditional healers, the current sort of medical establishment as it is, and artists together to try and find potions for joy or remedies against despair. Because especially during COVID, we felt that a lot. So that's certainly something I think I'm going to be thinking about for the next, you know, for the next phase of wondering what, how does one offer art because art can be offered as an elitist activity. It can be offered in some strange way, like, when I came to North America, I found how much art is, an artist is prized as a single voice against society. Whereas when you think of the art that, for example, came out of my friend Bhajju and his community, or a lot of Indigenous communities here, it is about the collective expression. So I'm curious about how one balances that now in the change that needs to happen, and just more and more seeing the need for knitting and weaving and interconnectedness. And that storytelling ought to be a vehicle really to do that, and not in an abstract way, but actually to spur action. Because art and storytelling in and of themselves as a purely aesthetic exercise, I think the time for that is over. I do feel it's a time now for museums without walls.
Sirish Rao 47:15
And yeah, and I'm looking forward to spending this time on a sabbatical. A lot of this sabbatical coming up is actually, I describe it as a kind of pilgrimage. I want to go to places and people and teachers who have mattered and just go and touch that source of meaning for myself and my family and wander, like a pilgrimage, because it feels like there is a need to center an intent in working towards the art as a healing force. So yeah. And not in an overly noble way, but in an excited, you know, compassionate, celebratory way. Yeah. So I hope I can drink from some old wells and come back, recharged, to be able to share that.
Am Johal 48:09
Sirish, is there anything you'd like to add?
Sirish Rao 48:13
Well, I mean, since you were there in that fateful first Skype call, I just want to thank you for, not only for me, but for many other people, providing that exact kind of encouragement, which is, this is completely crazy, but I love you. Which I think is something that comes as a lift for anyone who is going to embark on such a thing, because people who start projects like this are going to do it anyway. And they need to know someone loves them for it, and agree that it is completely tilting against windmills. But yeah, so it's been really lovely to go through that 12 year cycle with you. And yeah, now we are here.
Am Johal 49:02
I feel so grateful to be taken along the ride and my life has been so enriched and I've looked at the city in new ways as a result of the kind of journey you took us on, you and Laura and the whole festival, in terms of what it's given back to the city. So thank you for that and best wishes for whatever comes next but I'm excited about whatever that will be.
Sirish Rao 49:30
Thank you and I have my Below the Radar badge.
Am Johal 49:35
Yeah, thank you for joining us.
Sirish Rao 49:37
And I try to go "below the radar" myself for the next little while so I feel I feel adequately honored.
Am Johal 49:44
Thank you.
Sirish Rao 49:47
Thanks Am.
[theme music]
Alyha Bardi 49:49
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement. This has been our conversation with Sirish Rao. Head to the show notes to read up on some of the resources mentioned in this episode. Don't forget to subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcast listening app of choice. Thanks for listening and we'll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
[theme music fades]