Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 249: The Politics of Art — with Ranjit Hoskote
Speakers: Kathy Feng, Am Johal, Ranjit Hoskote
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Kathy Feng 0:03
Hello listeners! I’m Kathy Feng 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 is joined by Ranjit Hoskote, poet, translator, art critic, and curator. Together they discuss the influence of Bombay’s political and cultural milieu in the 1980s and 90s on Ranjit’s work, as well as his poetic responses to humanity’s demise in this moment of ecological crisis. Enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:44
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We have a special guest—Ranjit Hoskote is with us from Bombay. He's authored more than thirty books of art criticism, cultural theory and translation—I think your first book of poems was published in something like 1991. And [he] was recently here in Vancouver, as well. So thank you so much for joining us, Ranjit.
Ranjit Hoskote 1:10
Am, it's wonderful to be here with you on Below the Radar, which is a wonderful title because I enjoy the idea of things that are below the level of what gets noticed. And you know, it's a good space to be able to do all kinds of hopefully interesting things.
Am Johal 1:25
Yeah, maybe we can begin with you introducing yourself a little bit.
Ranjit Hoskote 1:30
You know, for the longest time, I've had what I've come to call a hybrid practice. I'm a poet, and a translator, and an art critic, and I work in cultural theory, and I am a curator. But really, although all of these practices seem to, you know, go off in different directions, uh, I've realized over the years that they're, they're bound by certain key concerns. For one, I think there's a very strong sense of commitment to voices that are vulnerable, positions that are marginal, practices that are not accepted, let us say by the marketplace, or that need more attention, because they are certain temporality or certain kind of language. So all of this preoccupies me very much as a curator. And as a poet, I've come around to this formulation, because every now and again, I get this question about, you know, "but you know, why do you write in English?" And I've had to say, if it makes you feel any better in India, you could call it Engrezi. It's an Indian language. It's been around for centuries. Many of our languages have come in from elsewhere, new languages have been produced in South Asia, they've been exported. What we like to call our authentic regional languages in South Asia are actually global languages. You're a speaker of one as one of your many languages. To me, it's really the situation of being a multilingual reader, who happens to be a monolingual. Right? I'm very happy to write in English but I'm very happy for that English to be extended and stretched and expanded in possibly surprising ways by the syntax of other languages I'm reading and translating from, whether that's Sanskrit, or Kashmiri, or Urdu.
Am Johal 3:11
I wanted to ask you about these different practices and how they intersect for you—we have a number of graduate students and others who listen in and are thinking through their own creative practices—but, you know, how your practice as a poet and a writer informs your curating. How the curatorial work informs cultural theorizing. You're obviously part of a particular cultural milieu that also travels and is global. And I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to that kind of complexity and how you've found yourself at home in each of these areas.
Ranjit Hoskote 3:42
Am, I think long before the travels began, I was blessed to have grown up in a milieu in Bombay, which was experimental, it was cosmopolitan. And it was interdisciplinary, without being part of a university setting—I realize we're in a university setting. But I think what really distinguished this particular moment in Bombay's cultural history, which would be the late 1980s and early 1990s, was that the conversations were vibrant across fields and disciplines. You would have poets and filmmakers and painters and theatre makers all working together thinking through formal problems, addressing political urgencies. And, it really gave someone like me, a teenager at that time, a great degree of freedom, to experiment with different sorts of art making languages to look at different horizons of art making, and to never lose sight of the fact that, you know, as artists, we are citizens. There was, there was something about that ethos that was very, very sensitive to the fact that you couldn't retreat into an ivory tower. That the freedoms that we cherish as artists are aligned and stand alongside the freedoms that as citizens we really cherish, as well. And that if we have some form of privilege, by reason of our social location or our practice, we need to make sure that that, that goes into into the larger public sphere, not to secure a space of retreat for ourselves, but to—to really make sure that that freedom of articulation, for instance, is not is not taken over by forces of tyranny, for lack of another word.
Am Johal 5:23
You've had a long standing involvement with PEN [International] in India, right?
Ranjit Hoskote 5:28
That's right.
Am Johal 5:29
Yeah, yeah. Can you speak just a little bit to some of the issues that you've had to take on in terms of your involvement with, with PEN?
Ranjit Hoskote 5:36
Sure, in some sense, I inherited the PEN from my mentor, my guru, Nissim Ezekiel, who was, you know, the one of the finest of the first generation of postcolonial Indian poets, certainly Anglophone poets in India. Nissim really embodied some of the values that I'm talking about here. He was a poet and an art critic, and he was involved in citizens forums, was an advocate of civil rights, especially during periods like the Emergency when civil freedoms were suspended for a 19 month period in the 1970s. And the values of PEN were always, you know, very resonant for Nissim and his circle, and so for many of us. But as we went into, you know, the late 90s, and the early years of the 21st century, we also realized that problems we faced, the urgencies we faced were more complex perhaps, than, than what the previous generation faced, we were dealing not only with crises of what was happening within the polity, in terms of essentially a neo-colonial state exerting itself, but that the character of Indian society was being manipulated into change, and you see the results of that today.
So we realized that we had to really construct solidarities, craft and sustain solidarities, across language groups, across the arts, as between artists and activists. So this was a whole different canvas in a certain way, or at least the magnitude of it was, was different. So some of the questions we've had to deal with, there have been, for instance, the narrowing of possibilities of expression in the public space coming fundamentally from what is called the Hindu Right. But you know, they may speak in the name of Hinduism, but they have very little to do with the actual religious practice. It's the weaponizing of a cultural identity. But we also found ourselves, for instance, advocating and trying to help out in the context of what was happening in Afghanistan, this moment, with colleagues there. Some of these things we haven't even talked about, because the negotiations that were needed to get colleagues out, for instance, of Kabul were really behind the scenes. So it was a range of crises that we were dealing with, but crises that I think we were all dealing with, in a world that is so incredibly interconnected. I like to think of it as the world of the butterfly effect.
Am Johal 7:52
I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to just in terms of the last few years or so in the political landscape of India, the continuing move to the right, the forms of nationalism that get weaponized, as you said, and the kind of challenges to freedom of assembly, expression, a number of various—but particularly in how it gets deployed in artistic fields, and the challenges that you and colleagues working in the art and cultural sphere are facing in terms of new modes or models of what were general directions that were happening in India.
Ranjit Hoskote 8:29
You know, I remember a point of crisis. It was about 2007, when a student at the art school in Baroda was taken away by, not really by the police, but by right wing militants, and then handed over to the police, because according to his detractors, he'd come up with some obscene paintings that, that were offensive to Hindu religious sensibilities. It's at that point and through the discussions around then that we realized how not all of the arts experienced this kind of oppression in the same way. Because I remember a lot of painters were really quite taken aback and to the extent that I realized that for many of them, the gallery system was a kind of cocoon in a way that for theatre makers or filmmakers this was, there was no question. Just the nature of their art, the public nature of their art and the fact that it was under such intense scrutiny meant that they were so much more vulnerable. So arising out of that, we've really tried to, along with colleagues, some of us have really tried to work towards sustaining this climate across the arts of resistance. And we were inspired also by other formidably organized groups like Samarth in Delhi, and with a pan Indian presence, of some of these very courageous organizations, voluntary associations that have taken on these key questions of what do we do with the narrowing of the public sphere in terms of what might be said about the religious imagination, for instance. The restrictions that are placed on, on members of the religious minorities increasingly.
So these are some of the key questions that we've had to deal with. And it's incredible to those of us who grew up in a pluralistic, ecumenical, Nehruvian India to look around and see how very rapidly the country has descended into this kind of unthinking uncritical, ultra-nationalism. Sometimes you look around and think you're, you know, 100 years ago, it feels like the 1920s and the 1930s in Europe. The cult of the strong man, not only in India, but really wherever you look, whether it's Turkey or anywhere else. It's in a strange way it feels like we're back in time. But just the magnitude of the mass media the possibilities of manipulation by digital means, the technologies of control and surveillance, all of this is very, very challenging indeed.
Am Johal 10:50
Interesting. And when I, when I sort of compare the Canadian and Indian contexts where, you know, we have had a gutting of our media spheres, a very narrowness of the range of opinions offered, having visited India, in seeing some of the many versions of Fox TV that exists there, in terms of—you know, there's more media, there's a diversity of voices, but certainly a kind of weaponization of the media in a particular form. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to, you know, that proliferation in the Indian context.
Ranjit Hoskote 11:23
Well, we saw it happening. It's, it's over about a 15 year period, the media sphere has just become intensely and insanely toxic in India. It's really, it's unabashed propaganda that you get off these channels, one of them astonishingly called Republic, even. You know, it's also, it's also obliged us really to look elsewhere for, for news. And, you know, it's incredible that when I asked myself what, what, what media platforms, I would trust in India, almost all of them are online. And they're run by very committed groups of people who are at great risk, whether it's Scroll, or The Wire, or Newslaundry, or NewsClick, this is where one would turn to, both for reportage that, for instance, goes out to where the battering ram of the state is really coming down against let's say, the Adivasis, or the tribal populations. The alienation of forest land, the way in which laws are being passed, that will allow infrastructure and big capital to override the good of communities and the natural world. I mean, it's almost as if all these crises were taking place on another planet, as far as this, the system is concerned, of the state and the media. Very, very crucial questions of the planetary future are honestly not on the agenda, the way this is going. I mean, the obsession with infrastructure, and the profits to be made out of it, that obsession today seems not only out of date, it's positively dangerous. But you will not find this debate in the so called mainstream media, India.
Am Johal 12:56
And, you know, you were in Vancouver, not very long ago, just last year, towards the end of last year. And there's been, here in a small town, like Vancouver, there's a long history of poetry and visual art intersecting and I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to the various artistic communities in India that you've been a part of where you see the intersection of these fields, particularly between poetry and visual art.
Ranjit Hoskote 13:22
I think it was much stronger in the past than it is today. Today, for reasons that I can only think of as economic reasons, there's a way in which the world of the visual arts is, as I said earlier, cocooned within the gallery system, and it tends to be defined in terms of institutions of patronage, which I find very sad. But not that there isn't very interesting work being done in the visual arts, outside. But this tends to be the big picture. And poetry has tended to go in the direction of performance through its collaborations with music. And at such a moment, I begin to look back to, to the moment of Tagores in Calcutta, in the 1920s and the 1930s, when there was a great sense that all—you need a symphony of the arts, really, to both enrich your imaginative expression, but also to make better and more multilayered sense of the word. And that remains, to me an ideal in terms of how one might collaborate. And I have to say, this might be somewhat irrelevant, but I find that there's a role that's been played by grant making institutions in, in generating collaborations which has not always been healthy. There's a history to this, which goes back to the Ford Foundation. But there is—you might see a lot of collaborative artistic projects, but they tend to become island-ed, they don't somehow seem to stem from a genuine sense of artistic quest, or a curiosity or a mutuality. They tend to be much more instrumental. And that, to me, is a source of sorrow. But I'm open to forms and possibilities of genuine collaboration across the arts.
Am Johal 15:03
I wanted to talk to you a little bit about—you were on a committee with Documenta which you resigned from and that's been sort of covered in the press, there was many articles that went out and now I wonder if with some distance from it, if you could maybe share a little bit, what you think that you know, some of the things that are at stake around what was happening then, I guess, continues to some degree now, in terms of the larger questions that people in artistic fields ought to be asking, given the broader dynamics at play.
Ranjit Hoskote 15:40
You know, thinking back on the whole Documenta crisis, especially, as it is, you know, a small but symptomatic part of the larger scenario. And, as we speak, Gaza has been annihilated. So, when I think back to what happened with a Documenta Finding Committee, as they called it, the search committee for the artistic director of the next edition—I think what it dramatized above all was the fact that Germany in terms of its cultural politics, and its politics at large is in an extremely precarious and perilous place. For one we realize that the turning of the Holocaust into an uncritical, unquestionable dogma, and it's use to simply justify and allow for another genocide, the Nakba, this time against the Palestinians, that was simply not tenable. And I think it's obliged a lot of people to think back to the project of post war Germany. And you realize that, of course, there's a tremendous sense of historical wrongdoing and guilt about the genocide, about the Holocaust. But, is this the same Germany that thought back to these questions in the early 1960s?
That's the question, I think that's come up. Because if Germany is now going to compel citizens to forever give up the possibility of criticizing the Israeli state, how tenable is that for a large proportion of the German population, which has Muslim heritage, people of Syrian or Iraqi or other Arab or Turkish heritage? What then is the question before Germany in terms of what constitutes its citizenship? And I think that that's, that is a very profound question that Germany needs to face and confront. It's also tragic that what looks at first glance to be this great sense of guilt for the Holocaust, and therefore this desire to protect Israel, is also a very crude excuse for the German far right. Remember that the entire push towards canceling BDS came really from the AfD, the far right party. And that's the agenda that has swept up to the center. So actually, I mean, we've really witnessed in the last seven years, the way in which German politics has been taken over by the right. So it's, it's terrible if you're willing to use a certain sense of guilt towards the Jewish people as camouflage for your Islamophobia.
This, I think, is the most tragic element of, of this entire story. And it does not protect Jewish people in Germany or anywhere else. It actually exposes them—we have the statistics now—it's actually exposed them to far greater levels of actual antisemitism. And the way in which the German establishment, the politicians in the media have used this word "antisemitic" to, to simply cancel people, and to silence them, it's been absurd. It's been used not only against people like me, or Shahidul Alam, but against Candice Breitz, who is an Israeli Jewish artist. This is beyond absurd. It's monstrous. And to me, it was deeply hurtful, because I mean, not only have I been very, very closely aware of the presence of three Jewish communities in our midst for centuries, in India—my mentor, we just talked about him, Nissim Ezekiel was Jewish, I had a great aunt, Kitty Shiva Rao, or Kitty Verständig, who belong to a Viennese Jewish family. A number of her or her relatives perished in the death camps. And she then came out to, to a very young nascent India and applied the lessons of the Holocaust to healing all the violence and the trauma of the partition and what that had left behind. So I just felt that, you know, it's, Germany seems to have this sovereign and ultimately very arrogant sense of its own exceptionalism in this in this very tragic history. Germany needs to realize that there are other perspectives on this question in other parts of the globe. So there's actually a need for a far greater dialogue on these questions.
Am Johal 19:40
Thank you for sharing that, Ranjit, and certainly, those questions continue to happen in Germany in this particular political moment, of course. You know, you mentioned earlier, the planetary and the global climate crisis. I've had a chance to read some of your work from Icelight, which is a beautiful collection. It's hard to prepare to ask questions of somebody who's written 30 books, this is a quite a wide sweep. But I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit to that project and sort of where it began for you.
Ranjit Hoskote 20:10
When it began, really, I have to say, with an earlier book called Jonahwhale. It's only later that I realized that these three books Jonahwhale, Hunchprose and Icelight form a trilogy, and I've become fascinated by that idea, but the pattern revealed itself afterwards. It wasn't planned. So with Jonahwhale, I was really thinking of—and that's of course, a portmanteau, it's Jonah and the whale, they come together. So you know, it was a way of thinking about how the individual and the system are not two different things just as we as humans are not separate from the natural world. We are imbricated in it. So that book was a way of thinking about maritime histories, about the mobilities, the languages, the experiences and encounters of the sea. And what happens if you invert our usual way of looking at the atlas. And think about a history that's not based on land masses, but on the waters, where borders are unclear. So that I found very liberating in a certain way. The next book, Hunchprose had to do with questions of extinction. What does it mean to be the last member of a species? What does it mean to be the last speaker of a language? What are these overriding urgencies that threatened to extinguish us? And that came to a head with Icelight. I think it's. from my point of view, a rather melancholy, pensive book that wonders what might outlive us? What survives? And what does it mean to make art regardless of these questions?
Am Johal 21:41
I don't know if you have the book close by if you'd be willing to read something from it.
Ranjit Hoskote 21:45
Oh sure, I could actually. I don't have the book with me here, but I have it on my computer, so I'm going to do that.
Am Johal 21:51
Oh, perfect.
Ranjit Hoskote 21:53
Okay, let me read a poem called "Eclipse."
Am Johal 21:56
Great, thank you.
Ranjit Hoskote 21:59
It goes like this:
“A panther loped down to the lake
and swallowed the moon.
Another night you thought the wind
had called for truce. The moon
never crossed the laterite border.
A third night, searching in this field
where the sky had rained stars,
you found the moon
buried in a furrow that a yoked bull
had measured in loops from left
to right to left, turning
and returning. Speak, lunatic angel,
which was the right way?
Was I implement or impediment?
All night the eclipse waited for you.”
Am Johal 22:52
Oh, that's beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that.
Ranjit Hoskote 22:56
Thank you, Am.
Am Johal 22:58
I was wondering, Ranjit, you've done a lot of translation work as well. And I'm wondering, sort of, your approach to translation work. It's, it's a very complicated field in many ways, and so many different ways to approach a text as it moves across languages to different tones and meanings that that can take on. But I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that part of your work.
Ranjit Hoskote 23:23
Sure, I came to translation out of an existential need to reconcile these different parts of myself. Because I also grew up in a very multilingual family. And, um, I was very, very aware from early on that you're a slightly different person, depending on what language you're speaking in. And there's a different context, you can call upon, a different repertoire of images, substrata of language, there are things you can activate in one language which you can't necessarily in another. So that to me was very stimulating kind of challenge. Also, I was very, very fortunate, I think, in the world of Anglophone poetry in India and in the diaspora, to have as mentors or as inspiring figures, people like A.K. Ramanujan, who was at the University of Chicago. He was, he was a poet, but also cultural anthropologist, a collector of folktales, and really someone who was ardently devoted to this idea of bringing back into circulation texts that had essentially been in the archive or in the library or confined to particular religious traditions, for instance. So he, you know, so Ramanujan was a great influence.
Agha Shahid Ali was another great influence. He was a wonderfully generous person. And I love the way in which, for instance, he really turned the ghazal into a North American form. Aijaz Ahmed tried to do that, in the centenary of Ghalib, the great Urdu poet in 1969. Aijaz Ahmed invited a range of American poets—Adrienne Rich, Mark Strand, W.S. Merwin, and others—to, to translate or transcript Ghalib. But it was really Shahid, who I think, brought the ghazal into a certain kind of American mainstream, so he was a great inspiration. And Arun Kolatkar and Dilip Chitre who were bilingual poets who also wrote in English and Marathi. So in a sense, as a young poet, I was surrounded by very influential figures, who worked across languages. So that to me was almost a natural extension of my own poetic practice. So that's, it's a kind of a long winded tale. But as I go along, I realize that you know there's—many people live through us and they, and they inform what we do. And I think it's important to acknowledge the presence of all these people in our lives and in the shape of our imagination.
Am Johal 25:39
I remember reading Agha Shahid Ali's poetry in the night 90s. And I just used a few poems in a course that I'm teaching on political violence. It was beautiful, beautiful work.
Ranjit Hoskote 25:50
Absolutely.
Am Johal 25:51
Recently, Ranjit, you gave a keynote at the Goa Art and Literature Festival, and I was able to read the text from it, "Gaza is Everywhere." And I'm wondering if you could just speak a little bit to kind of the ideas in that text and you know, the political moment, in terms of what you're trying to, to share?
Ranjit Hoskote 26:10
You know, that keynote came out of a deep sense of sadness that so few people in the art world, in the world of the arts in India, were already looking at this question. I mean, I realize that we have very crucial burdens of our own here. But my point with that keynote was that the world cannot be divided in this way. And that something that happens in Gaza is going to have consequences everywhere. And something that happens here can have consequences there. So it really that address was really for me a cry from the heart. But it was also informed by the sense of how the more closely we look at a transnational connections between, let's say, corporations and states, you realize, for instance, that an Indian Corporation has been manufacturing drones that the IDF is using in Gaza against the Palestinian civilian population. Meanwhile, weapons manufactured in Israel are being brought across here, as well as Pegasus surveillance technology perfected in Israel, which has been used in India against dissenters and dissidents and opposition politicians.
So this formed for me the bedrock of this of this set of preoccupations. And we like to think about how we are mobile and can form transcultural, solidarities. But we're up against this other kind of transnational set of linkages. And I just really wanted to share with my immediate audience and then in a larger, larger sense, the fact that we are—we cannot regard ourselves as complete unless we recognize and speak to the vulnerability of others elsewhere. And that, to think that there is a distance between them and us is really a big mistake. And although I don't refer to Leibniz at all, in the text, it's informed by my long term preoccupation with Leibniz's philosophy, and that incredible image that he has, of, you know what does it mean to stand in the presence of the other? It is to stand in the presence of the brimming face of the other, and to recognize the other's vulnerability. And that is the ethical relationship that we formed with the other. To me, that's, that's, that's almost an article of faith. So that's where this came from. And, you know, we were literally bombarded with the news of what was going on. And I was appalled that so few people, whether in literature, or in the visual arts here in India had had anything to say about this. And I just thought this is the same country that was at the forefront of the Non-Aligned Movement. We had this tremendous sense of, you know, "a will to globality" as Okwui Enwezor, used to phrase it. And suddenly there was a strange privatism in the sense that it wasn't a place to speak. I don't know what it was, but I just, I just found that revolting and I had to speak up. But also to make the case that there are very many forces that want to tell us as writers that we are marginal, we tell ourselves that we're marginal, and it was just a way of thinking through in public with others that, you know, if we want to impose that marginality on ourselves that's, that is tragic, and that we do need to go out there and claim some space in this, in the hurly burly of the public sphere.
Am Johal 29:14
The question I have for you is, you know, given the kind of political aesthetic exhaustions, we have all around us in the world in deep flux, all the geopolitical aspects of the planetary interconnected world we live in—you know, what do you find hopeful or excited about in the kind of agency and artistic movements in India or elsewhere, given the right wing drift that's going on? There's clearly a shrinking space, but also you and many of your colleagues are working in within this context and how artists, or yourself, situate yourself into this context?
Ranjit Hoskote 29:53
Two ways of responding to that. For one, I'm actually I'm very hopeful about what I think of as interstitial spaces. And the embodiment of that in very concrete terms was, for some of us, a project and Ravi Agarwal, the artist and activist and I co-convened. It was called State of Nature. We wanted to think about the environmental catastrophe but also to make sure we didn't fetishize it, to make sure that we also saw that public health urgencies, the destruction of forest cover, interspecies relationships, that all of these were closely connected and also connected to political changes. So we brought together a set of people from across disciplines, poets like Ruth Padel, anthropologists like, like Rahul Ranjan and Amitangshu Acharya, activists. People who are, you know, either working very, very quietly on specialized areas or people who are seeking new spheres of articulation. And what we really wanted was for all of these people to not speak in terms of statistics, and you know, all the other forbidding paraphernalia of expert culture. And, you know, people responded to that I think those conversations which are now online, rippled out in a certain way, and had further, you know, resonances. It became a strange, incremental additive, additive project, which, you know, just expanded the conversation, could have policy outcomes somewhere, but at least ensures that dialogues on this, on the subject don't turn into yet more archival material. And that they really feed back into life in certain ways. So that's an example, I'm thinking of, that kind of project in what I think of as interstitial spaces between the discursive and the artistic and the ground of policy. So that is something I'm very hopeful about.
Am Johal 31:41
I'm wondering if you could share about anything you're currently working on in terms of your, your, your writing and curatorial work.
Ranjit Hoskote 31:49
Okay, two things. One is, it's, I have to say it's not vanity, it's more of a sense of humility. I've just been amazed at the generosity of friends and colleagues who have translated the Gaza keynote into Hindi and Urdu into Marathi. And it's gone out and spoken clearly to audiences in these languages. And they've come back with incredibly thoughtful, critical, energetic responses. And I really, I really am—happy would be pushing it, but I'm just quietly grateful that you know, that this ability to communicate across languages is, is strong. To me, that's a sign of hope, or how we need to do these things in multilingual, South Asia. So that's one.
The other project that I'm caught up with is the translation of the Urdu poet Mir Taqi Mir, who lived at the end of the 18th and the beginning of the 19th century. A figure I've always been fascinated by it, because he is such a contemporary character. He is someone who lives in the time of the meltdown of empire, is an internal migrant, he's a refugee. He's born in Agra but moves to Delhi, Delhi is assaulted annually by Northwestern invaders, and the Mughal Empire is crumbling. And he then moves to Lucknow. So this, is this is someone whose poetry is often thought of as a poetry of, of love and transience. I mean, as I read it, it's an intensely political poetry. It's a poetry of displacement and dislocation, trying to identify spaces of belonging, and the question of how to be a poet and how to lay claim to some larger public utterance, even in such a situation. And I respond to his language because, you know, we're now seeing Urdu through the very, very poisoned contaminated lens, of committal politics. There's a certain Hindu ultra, ultra reactionary tendency that tends to see Urdu as really a Muslim language, and Sanskritized Hindi, as the properly Hindu language. We know this is nonsense. And what I love about Mir's work is that he comes out of what I think of as the end of a Hindiri continuum. This very, very richly mixed, wonderfully hybrid spectrum of languages across northern and parts of southern India. So when you read him, you know, there's Braj [Bhasha], there's Awadhi, there's Persian. It's, you know, it might just be a verse of two lines, but it just leaps out there and speaks to the diversity and plurality of India.
Am Johal 34:19
Ah, Ranjit, it's been so wonderful to be in your presence. Morning for me, evening for you. Wondering if there's anything you'd like to add?
Ranjit Hoskote 34:27
I'm very curious about what you've been working on, Am.
Am Johal 34:30
Well I just released a book a few weeks ago called Oh, My Friends, There is No Friend: The Politics of Friendship at the End of Ecology.
Ranjit Hoskote 34:39
It's a fantastic book, and I've been sharing it with people.
Am Johal 34:42
Oh, great, yeah. And we're really happy. It's open access. And I'm just finishing teaching a class on political violence and the right to move where the contemporary political moment is, of course, very much in the classroom every week.
Ranjit Hoskote 34:54
Absolutely.
Am Johal 34:55
And it's an intense time to be teaching and being around but it's wonderful to be in conversation on what's going on in the rest of the world. And so Ranjit thank you so much for joining us on Below the Radar.
Ranjit Hoskote 35:07
Thank you. It's, it's been I mean, I seem to have babbled on and on most of the time. But it's been, it's, it's wonderful to see you again, even if online. Thank you so much. It was, it was wonderful.
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Kathy Feng 35:24
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Ranjit Hoskote. To find out more about Ranjit’s work, head to our show notes. If you would like to support our podcast, you can donate at the link in the description below. Your generous donation will help support the podcast's activities and associated public events with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement.
Thanks again for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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