Episodios

  • Remembering not to forget

    Remembering not to forget
    May 23 2025
    "I'd never attempted a memoir. For me, writing something so personal and putting it out there for the world to see was difficult because I was reliving those days. But that's when I realised, I don't want to forget those days. A lot of people want to move past grief. You want things to be normal. But there is no normal after this. This is the new normal and I have to learn to live with it. My husband and my mother in law became statistics of the COVID wave but they were so much more. Like love, grief is universal and everyone experiences it in some form or the other. I wanted to make the book a medium for me to put down my grief for myself and my children but also for those who want to be able to look at their own grief too. I felt that I could articulate my grief so I should. Those who cannot articulate their grief feel like they have found a voice through this book" - Andaleeb Wajid, author, 'Learning to Make Tea for One' talks to Manjula Narayan about survivor's guilt, family ties, the exhaustion that comes with writing a memoir about loss, and how different it is from writing fiction for young adults Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 m
  • Of trances, theta states, and shamans

    Of trances, theta states, and shamans
    May 17 2025
    "Every part of India has shamans; you could say its part of folk culture. They call Himachal Dev Bhoomi because every village is home to several deities. Every village also has its main deity and a shaman, who is the medium of that deity. He can communicate with that deity when he goes into a divine possession trance that is ritually invoked. The villagers communicate with their devis and devtas for everything and in pooch sessions, the shaman or goor will answer questions as the deity. To a westernised mindset, this sounds like superstition. But you cannot ignore the lived experience of millions of people across centuries and say 'Yeh bakwas hai; this is nonsense!' Scholars like Sudhir Kakkar and Oliver Sacks accepted that the sacred healing rituals of shamans are far more effective than modern psychotherapy because they take the whole field of the person - family community mythology - into consideration" - Documentary film maker and author of 'Shamans of the Himalayas', Anu Malhotra talks to Manjula Narayan about the strong connection that villagers in Himachal have with their local deities, divination, altered states of consciousness of shamans, and how the belief system persists despite the onslaught of modernity and migration. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    55 m
  • Of spiritual churning and identity umbrellas

    Of spiritual churning and identity umbrellas
    May 9 2025
    "Any place where a guru goes and spends time becomes a dera; it gets a sacred connotation. Deras are reflective of our larger tradition of argumentation, philosophy and contestation. In India, there is nothing singular about our world; everything is very plural. So, any sort of broad brushing or monolithic thinking about deras is unhelpful. All deras are not Dalit. But I was surprised to see Gail Omvedt's Seeking Begumpura at one. Some are doing very much for Ambedkarite thought. They have a lot of Ambedkar in their libraries and their sanctum sanctorums too have big portraits of Ambedkar alongside their religious iconography. Ravidassias constantly tell me that Sant Ravidas is their spiritual guru but Ambedkar is their political one. All this made me take deras very seriously. " - Santosh K Singh, author, The Deras; Culture, Diversity and Politics talks to Manjula Narayan about the varied character and caste and class affiliations of the deras of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal, the Ad-Dharmis, the Ravidassia deras of Punjab and the grand Ravidas temple in Banaras, the connections between the local and the global, and also the great need for sociologists to get their ideas out into the wider world beyond the Academy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    50 m
  • Company Painting: A transformative moment in Indian art

    Company Painting: A transformative moment in Indian art
    May 2 2025
    "To earlier academics, it seemed like Company Painting was not really to be taken seriously. The Modernists didn't look at it because it's too early and the Court Painting specialists didn't look at it because it was too late. It just sort of fell in the gap. Perhaps people were less inclined to rescue it from that gap because they had difficulty in coming to terms with its hybrid colonial status. You cannot get away from it being a product of Empire. But rather than telling the story of the patrons' perspective, you have to look at how Indian artists respond. This is a historical moment where artists trained in the Indian court ateliers realised that there is this alternative source of patronage with a completely different set of demands. And when they made the transition from Court to Company, they transformed themselves and they transformed Indian art. With artists like Sewak Ram, we've got a wholly new approach. It is exciting to see the artist as much an agent as the patron in creating the hybrid form. The book and the show at DAG attempts to cover the whole spectrum of Company Painting and its trajectory in the very brief period from the 1770s to its fizzling out by 1850" - Giles Tillotson, editor, 'A Treasury of Life; Indian Company Paintings c 1790-1835' talks to Manjula Narayan about the works of outstanding artists like Mihr Chand, Sita Ram and Ram Das, the depiction of different communities in work by Tanjore artists, Louisa Appleby's album commissioned in the vanished settlement of Maidapur, and his hope that more albums with named artists will soon come to light Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    51 m
  • Sojourn in South Korea: In the land of the morning calm

    Sojourn in South Korea: In the land of the morning calm
    Apr 25 2025
    "South Korea is strategizing its soft power through K-Drama, K-Beauty, K-Pop and now K-Cuisine. There was a conscious strategy from the government of the country and the private sector. So the craze for Korea that we see today is no accident." Vasudev Tumbe and Sudha Huzurbazar Tumbe, authors, 'Seoulmates; Korea Through Indian Eyes', talk to Manjula Narayan about their six-year stay in South Korea, its punishing work culture, beautiful public places, numerous fantastic public toilets, contradictions in terms of being safe for women but having very few women in senior positions in the work place, and how Koreans save very little money and as a result, often can't afford to retire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    1 h y 3 m
  • Of Bakharwals, Jonangis and more

    Of Bakharwals, Jonangis and more
    Apr 18 2025
    "How to keep kids engaged through the book is the most important job of the illustrator. Every page was approached through that angle. That's why I've included as many dynamic poses of dogs as possible — running, jumping out of the page almost!" says Chandrima Chatterjee, illustrator, 'The Little Book of Indian Dogs'. "I've always been aware of Indian dog breeds but I wanted to introduce my daughter to them and there was absolutely nothing out there that one could read out to a toddler. So I thought let's do it. I wrote it and then I found Chandrima," says Anusha Ramanathan, writer of the book that weaves wonderful factoids — did you know Indian dogs don't drool? - about a range of breeds like the Chippiparai, Rajapalayam, the Kombai and the ever popular Indian pariah around a simple story that both children and adults who read out this book to them will enjoy. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    48 m
  • Intrepid Americans in India

    Intrepid Americans in India
    Apr 10 2025
    "I thought it would be interesting to write about early Americans in India because, at that time, there were no border controls, no surveillance, no way of monitoring people who crossed borders. The Americans were not conscious state actors unlike the British, French, Dutch or even the Danes, who were all supported by their respective governments. I was interested in these brave individuals from a faraway land who just marched into a new life. My curiosity about them got me going. And because these people were outsiders and did not come with institutional backing, apart from the missionaries, they were able to see the problems in Indian society, the divisions and the hierarchy, far more quickly" - Anuradha Kumar, author, 'Wanderers, Adventurers, Missionaries; Early Americans In India' talks to Manjula Narayan on the Books & Authors podcast about Ira Scudder who set up the Christian Medical College, Vellore, the Alters of Landour who have contributed in many ways to India, Satyanand Stokes who introduced apple cultivation to Himachal Pradesh, and Black soldier Herman Perry, who worked on the Stillwell Road, among many others. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    52 m
  • Delhi underbelly

    Delhi underbelly
    Apr 3 2025
    "The system of policing in India has so many constraints that unless the person has a special kind of inner motivation to pursue something, it's going to be very hard to get results. Inspector Prashant Kumar has that. He is an amalgamation of a real person and some fictional tropes. I've had the desire to write crime fiction for a very long time and as a journalist, I got to hang out with a lot of Delhi cops over a period of about two years. The police have miserable lives, most of them. Their work involves constantly seeing the worst side of humanity; they see the worst tragedies, death. There's also work pressure and the work load. It is extremely stressful and it leaves most officers with absolutely no time for family. All of this has its personal cost and I wanted to bring it all in. Now, I think twice before judging the police. A lot of them try very hard to make things work, to be fair, to complete investigations, to respond to emergencies, and some are very heroic too" — Rudraneil Sengupta, author, 'The Beast Within', talks to Manjula Narayan about his police procedural set in Delhi that zooms into the mansions of the rich and the abject slums of the poor, looks at the workings of child traffickers, and examines the edge of violence amid the rapid change in the capital's ever-receding rural fringe Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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    44 m
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