Joya Chatterji was the first woman director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge in 2009, a post she held till 2019. In her new book, Shadows at Noon (Penguin India), she talks of India’s war with Pakistan in 1971 as her first political memory, looking out from the darkened windows of her Delhi home.
The book is also a remarkable layering and juxtaposition of South Asian mores and families, including her own, where kids are indulged but not daughters-in-law, to bandit households like Phoolan Devi’s that were on trees, to the crisis in the former Nepali royal family, from the British Raj through Independence and Partition to popular culture representations.
The Ramayana, she says, “in many ways, is like a Hindi movie” with a moral centre, the ‘pure woman’ committed to an upright man, even patriarchy, and the inevitable “baddie”. But the big argument of the book is why throw all of one’s might behind a single-toned ‘Indian’ identity when in reality we all lead South Asian lives. And also continue the quibble of who makes the “best” biryani!
Excerpts from a conversation:
Why did you choose to write a book that straddles both historical scholarship and popular history writing?
There are two linked reasons. I felt the story to be too important to be limited to the 4,000-odd readers of the average academic work in history, I felt it deserved a larger audience – hence the aim to write in an accessible voice. But because that overarching argument is so novel and controversial, I knew it had to be grounded in rigorous research and scholarship. Otherwise, it could be brushed aside like a stray thread on a fresh kurta.
You begin the book with the personal memories and impressions of your growing-up years in Delhi in “the frontier of the city”. Could those experiences have led you to become a historian?
It was not quite like that. I had a great teacher when I was about eleven, and she read to the class from a primary source. This so transported me in space and time that I was thereafter hooked to that mode of time travel. It was only after experience that I began to recognise Delhi as a palimpsest of historical sites. Before that, I had seen these cherished relics as the familiar spaces we Delhi-ites used as our landmarks, as ‘eating the air’ spaces, or places of play, love and leisure.
Why is it intellectually pertinent and politically significant, especially now, to develop the vision of a South Asian Twentieth Century?
There is a question mark over the nation worship that is the new civic religion in this part of the world. What ‘The South Asian Twentieth Century’ seeks to do, captures all that and more: to draw a subtle comparison with ‘the American century’, ‘the Age of Extremes’ (on Europe’s ‘short twentieth century), and so on. I am also making, and inviting the reader to make, global comparisons and connections.
Sanjay Subhrahmanyam has pioneered what he calls “connected histories” for Early Modern South and Southeast Asia. Are you, through this book, doing the same for South Asia in the 20th century?
Yes, there is a relationship with ‘connected histories’, but more importantly, to ‘disconnected histories’, which both Sanjay Subhrahmanyam and I have worked on from very different angles of vision and points in time.
You have shown in great detail how food, particularly in terms of dietary prohibitions, purity and pollution, has been central to the caste order, and the sectarian politics of Hindu versus Muslim.
I think states have tried to nationalise diets but with limited success. The market has had a larger hand to play in standardising diets, in elevating rice and (to a lesser extent) wheat to the top staples consumed right across South Asia.
The refugee movement has also been important. The place of Punjabi food in Delhi is only the most obvious example of it, while in West Bengal, eastern varieties of dishes (hotter, more spicy) are devoured by western Bengali non-refugees with enjoyment, but some bafflement. Regional variations across environments persist, of course. The case of biryani is a great example here. Every rice-and-meat-eating region across South Asia has its own ‘best’ biryani. Each is different from the other. We also have the strange story of the very popular ‘veg biryani’, and voluble debates about whether it is okay to make biryani with potatoes or not. The variety of responses (always heated, always certain) gave me a strong sense that regional food traditions not only thrive but are zealously defended.
Would you say that the book is informed and underpinned by a tragic sensibility. The title of the book also seems to suggest this…
Yes. I have recognised on reflection that I do write books in tropes. (I don’t start out intending to do this!) And indeed, I see tragedy in South Asia’s twentieth century. Not as in Greek tragedy, in which characters are doomed from the start because the unfolding of South Asia’s tragedy was not inevitable.
You claim that the term Bollywood to describe the Bombay film industry acquired currency only in the neoliberal period and is misleading in the comparison with Hollywood that it presupposes.
The ‘Bombay cinema’ of the 1940s to the 1980s was fundamentally precarious. Producers were dependent on loan sharks, distributors and exhibitors. Women stars were hard to find, given the intense societal concerns about women’s purity. Director/producers had to entertain, with song-and-dance (in the talkies era) or complex fight sequences with mythological tropes. For instance, director-producer-actor Guru Dutt nearly went bankrupt after he made a movie that pushed the boundaries.
He personally, and his studio, took all the risks, while exhibitors, for the most part, broke even or made a modest profit on most films. This was Bombay cinema not only because it was (for the most part) set in Bombay, but because it was never about realism, it did not resemble Hollywood remotely: in shape, form or content.
In the 1990s, Bombay cinema was recognised by the state as an industry, and as such, was free to seek loans from banks, and given state support for the purchase of raw stock. Bombay cinema now began to boom, and in doing so, it sought out novel markets: an audience in the diaspora, in conjunction with the multiplex-theatre viewing booming middle-class public, as well as the large halls of old.
This conjecture, I believe, turned ‘Bombay cinema’ into Bollywood, a hybrid form much more in tune with the realism of Hollywood (but not entirely). Its biggest hitters outdid, and continue to outsell, many Hollywood movies. This is my personal take, of course.