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India Booked | Chronicling Lives
90 Plays4 years ago
In this episode of India Booked, host Ayushi Mona talks to Vikram Sampath, the best selling author of four acclaimed biographies, ‘Splendours of Royal Mysore: the Untold Story of the Wodeyars’ on the Mysore royal family; ‘My Name is Gauhar Jaan: The Life and Times of a Musician’- the biography of India's first recording superstar Gauhar Jaan of Calcutta; ‘Voice of the Veena: S Balachander - A Biography’, the story of eminent veena maestro late Dr. S Balachander and ‘Savarkar: Echoes from a Forgotten Past, 1883–1924’ which is the first volume of a two-part biography about the legendary Indian revolutionary leader– Vinayak Damodar Savarkar.
Vikram walks us through the process of research and the writing of a biography (calling it a ‘love affair’) and the surprisingly vexing events that follow post publication. They discuss the account and impact of each of his biographies and lives of the misunderstood and forgotten characters in it, the troubles writers face and about their extensive presence online, the issue with the lack of nuance and the binary perspective of people.
Tune in to find out more about his relation with music and history, his wish to be its ‘night watchman’, and about the Archive of Indian Music, which is India's first digital sound archive for vintage recordings of the country.
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Transcript
Introduction to 'India Booked' Podcast
00:00:11
Speaker
I'm your host Ayushi Mona and you're listening to India Booked, a podcast where we lean into the idea of India through its literature and we speak to authors who bring this to life.
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello everyone, I am Ayushi Mona, your host on India Booked, a podcast where we look at India through the voice and eyes of its literature.
Meet Vikram Sampath: Historian and Author
00:00:40
Speaker
Today, I have with me Vikram Sampath, who's authored four books. Before I give you a bio of Vikram, let me tell you, assuming this biography has not been easy,
00:00:51
Speaker
Not only is Vikram an accomplished historian and an author, he also does a fabulous job at the archive of Indian music. He writes for a bunch of publications. I have read bios of him which convey that he also has a day job. He lives out of Bangalore. He studied at Bipulani. I'm yet to meet someone who sort of juggles so many hats and makes it look so effortless.
Vikram's Journey: Finance to Full-time Writer
00:01:19
Speaker
So Vikram, welcome to the show and really please tell us yourself what all is it that you do? Thank you Aayushi, thank you so much for that very kind introduction. I thankfully don't have a day job anymore and I'm a full-time writer so that's one thing knocked off from the many bios that you managed to read but yes it's just been I think a series of serendipitous occasions where I've just
00:01:47
Speaker
gone with the flow from my engineering and finance and corporate days to working with the government of India. And then finally, you know, actually pursuing what I really love, which is history and writing history. And alongside also pursuing my passion in classical music, which I don't of course pursue as a practicing musician anymore, other than just singing for myself and my near India ones.
Gohar Jan: The Forgotten Gramophone Celebrity
00:02:13
Speaker
but translating that into the whole idea of creating a national sound archive for India for particularly vintage recordings of this country. In between, yes, Jaggle also with curating festivals, culture festivals and literature festivals and so on. So variety, as they say, is the spice of life and too much of monochromatic life makes it very boring for me. So I do need this variety to keep myself alive.
00:02:41
Speaker
I think that's great for us because thanks to your multi-faceted interests, we've got to read and learn about some of these things that you're fascinated by. I want to start with your book on Gohar Jan, Life and Times of a Musician. This is the book that to begin with, just to give context to distance, right? It's a book that you were awarded for. I think you got the Yuvapura Skar for it.
00:03:07
Speaker
It's apparently the film rights for it have been purchased by Ashutosh Gavarika. It's been adapted on theatre by Lilac Dubey. So there are multiple cultural sort of, you know, reproductions of this film. Discovery of Gohajan and fascination for writing a book about her release time. Yeah. So like I mentioned earlier, serendipity, I think that's what rules my
00:03:35
Speaker
life and also particularly my literary career.
00:03:38
Speaker
And it was very, very, it was a happy accident where I found, you know, mention of Goharjan when I was researching for my first book, Splendors of Royal Mysore on the history of the royal family of Mysore. And there, there was this small little file that spoke about the visiting musicians who came to Mysore. And Mysore was a hub of culture. The Maharaja was so cosmopolitan that not only, you know, Carnatic musicians, but, you know, Hindustani and Western musicians were also invited to the court. They were encouraged to
00:04:08
Speaker
collaborate with each other and come up with joint pieces and so on and so forth. So in that whole milieu of melting pot that Mysore had become of culture, there was this little mention of this lady from distant Calcutta who had come here and the file said she was the first gramophone celebrity of India, somebody who had a very fantastic lineage of an Armenian, Christian, Anglo-Indian,
00:04:33
Speaker
sort of parentage and data converts to Islam and becomes a tawaif. So they were probably just about a couple of lines, you know, of her life story.
Impact of Gohar's Music and Biography Writing
00:04:43
Speaker
And the files that were there, the letters, you know, they were pleading while on the one hand, the bio data said, you know, very glowingly that she was the first gramophone celebrity of India and highly respected and celebrated in her time. The letters that she wrote to the Maharaja's government seem to convey a completely different picture.
00:05:02
Speaker
that of her aging diva in the last phases of her life, who was literally pleading the king, the Maharaja and his government that, you know, please don't cut my income tax, increase my salary. You know, in the typical official babudam, there was like rejected, rejected, put across these requests that she made. And then suddenly she died. I mean, two years was all spent in Mysore from 1928 to 1930.
00:05:31
Speaker
And there was not even any mention of the cause of death. And even after her death, there were lots of papers in the files which showed how she owed so much money to some baker and confectioner and some medicine shop and all of that. And all of these people were getting to the Maharaja's government asking for repayment of arrears. So I thought, I don't know, it was just an instinctive and an impulsive thing for me. And that's what usually works with me. Anything I take upon an impulse always works.
00:06:01
Speaker
And I said, this lady's story is something that is dying to be told. And I had no clue at that time sitting in that archive in Mysore as to how to go about this whole journey. Because here was a Tawayef, a courtesan who died way back in 1930 with no legal heirs, with no students, nothing known.
00:06:21
Speaker
And I just stumbled upon her and then to trace her back from the place of her death to reconstruct the story of her life was literally like looking for a needle in a haystack. And that's exactly what happened over the years that I followed up with. I literally chased her across the length and breadth of India from
00:06:42
Speaker
Asam God, where she was born, to Banaras, Rampur, Dharbanga, Calcutta, where she lived for most of her life and came to be known as Gaurjan of Calcutta, Bombay, where she found love interest, Madras,
00:06:54
Speaker
Mysore where she died and also outside India I tried to you know look for clues about her in Berlin in London and so on so it was literally like putting together pieces of a jigsaw puzzle and that's how the rubric of her life came together in this book and somebody who was India's the subcontinent's rather the subcontinent's first commercially recorded artist, commercially recorded woman in 1902
00:07:21
Speaker
someone who cut 600 records in her lifetime in almost 15 languages, someone who was the original page three diva of her times, the rock star kind of a lifestyle, hedonistic lifestyle that she led. For someone who had so many achievements to her credit, she literally was forgotten and walked the alleys of Hindustani music like a barely discernible ghost. And so to resurrect her was something that was really very rewarding and
00:07:50
Speaker
All the accolades that you mentioned, I think they came because of that because here was a story which I really think was very providential. It was just waiting to be told. It was dying to be told and I was just chosen as a medium to tell that story of hers.
00:08:05
Speaker
I think that's such a fascinating account, you know. So before this Vikram, I've interviewed two authors on my podcast and both of them wrote about, you know, one was definitely a biography. I'm not giving into details because that episode was not released yet. And the second was on Akbar. And I asked both these gentlemen about, you know, why this particular figure or this moment of time in history and, you know, so on and so forth. And they said that
00:08:34
Speaker
You know, their interest was very much from the point of view of themselves being obsessed or ardent fans, if I can even, I can call them ardent fans, but the point was that they were devoted figure.
00:08:51
Speaker
So much more interesting perhaps to also look at now this other lens which I'm hearing from you which is to talk about someone who you know it's just a glimpse and then you take an interest and sort of build upon it. For me when I was reading the book right of course everything that you mentioned right
00:09:11
Speaker
from her lifestyle to the fact that, you know, that she dabbled into this world of music and the notch world and, you know, her relationship with her mother, Malka Jahan and all of these things, right? And just the music scene of that time, right? Which I had no inkling of, right? And her thalim, all of that. Two things stood out for me. I think the lens, right, with PitKoan is not voyeuristic. It's not
00:09:39
Speaker
racy if I can use that word. It's very much for the love of music. I think perhaps some of it comes from the fact that you yourself love music and hence you look at her as an artist first and as a you know a personality or a diva later and you know so I think for me that that's the first thing that really stood out and the second thing that stood out for me right is that in the process of really unearthing these characters
00:10:07
Speaker
and as serendipitously as you mentioned them, you come across a certain baby of information surrounding the person as well, right? So not only I just learned about Gaurajan, I learned about a certain evolution of Hindustani classical music or garanas or gramophones, right? It's not something that we
00:10:28
Speaker
speak or think much of. So what is that like for you, right? When you sort of go into this journey of finding that needle in that haystack, you're collecting not just her story, but you're collecting so much, so many stories and so many point of views and so much data. How do you grapple with it? And I think that's as a historian, I think that's everything you write, of course. But I'm just very fascinated in this particular case. Yeah.
00:10:58
Speaker
That's a fascinating question, Aayushi. And I've often said in several of my talks and interviews that for me, a biography is very similar to falling in love. And you take up a subject only because at the very first instant, there is that spark, there is that interest in the subject. And that is why you decide as a writer to
00:11:25
Speaker
to actually invest your time, your emotions, your money, your efforts, all of that into pursuing this subject. And quite like it happens in a love affair, and it's a very weird kind of a love affair where your love interest is in a relatively unboobable position, either they are dead or they are probably in a stage in life where you can't really boo them. But then still you pursue, and in the course, just like it happens in a love affair,
00:11:53
Speaker
pursue your subject, talk them everywhere. You gather every little information about them, their letters, their enemies become your enemies, their friends become your friends. All of that happens and sometimes, like it happens in an affair, midway they can be disillusionment. You may feel that this subject is simply not worth the initial interest that I had in him or her and the affair might just drop off. But then if one continues and goes on, then it carries on and then
00:12:21
Speaker
Of course, the most difficult part of a biography writing is the final one, where after having invested so much of yourself into it, you need to make this very dispassionate stand, almost like a bystander, a third party, when you're committing it to print. Otherwise, there's a very thin line between a biography and a hagiography.
00:12:47
Speaker
You don't have to just be an educator lawyer for your subject, but also bring the warts and all and all the failings that this person might have had as a human being, which they are bound to have if they were human enough. So that particular part is very important. Everyone cuts off these emotional cords with the subject and doesn't make it an extolling, hisiographical account of the person. And equally important, like you mentioned very beautifully, the picture that one gets to paint of
00:13:17
Speaker
the era in which they lived. So for me, biography is not just the story of the person, and it's not a cliched subtitle that most biographies have, including mine, the life and times. You know, when you say the life and times, most people forget the times without, you know, concentrating only a linear chronological narrative of the life of the person. So the times are equally important where it's the period in which they lived which contributed to their life, it affected their life,
00:13:44
Speaker
They were the product of the circumstances in which they lived. So all of that also gets painted in the process. And so for me, it's historical writing, but seen through the eyes of an individual.
Exploring Savarkar's Complex Legacy
00:13:56
Speaker
But it's not just that individual story. It's also a painting of the times, the social, cultural, political happenings that were going on, which influenced my subject in some way. And in turn, my subject influenced the times in some way. So it's a reciprocal kind of process.
00:14:14
Speaker
But I think, like in the case of Gohar, like you rightly mentioned, the whole era of Hindustani music, how it changed towards the turn of the 20th century, the arrival of recording technology, a new technology that came in from Europe, the gramophone technology. And very importantly for me, a huge discovery too, that the role of women in adapting to this technology and across India, Gohar was of course the first, but across India it was
00:14:43
Speaker
almost for the first two decades of recording, it was women like her who belonged to the Tawaif and the Devdasi community in South India who took the recording and became superstars. And it also brought to fore this whole campaign of vilification against these women who were finally abolished from the performance space and branded as mere prostitutes and the anti-notch campaign that was launched. And one of the reasons why their music probably lies scattered in
00:15:12
Speaker
Choflee markets and Chor Bazaars and all that across India, but their life stories have been willfully consigned to the dustbins of history and purged literally from national as well as musical consciousness of this country. Music had to be purified, music had to be made accessible to middle class, respected households.
00:15:32
Speaker
So these debased women had to be literally excised from the musical performance space. So all of this also comes together in a story such as this, which I think is very important. And we cannot understand Gohar's life, its turbulence, its turmoil, its highs, the joys, all of that, unless one looks at the context such as this in which she lived and
00:15:58
Speaker
circumventing these challenges till went on and became what she became, achieved what she achieved. So many times I also say that, you know, with every biography, I feel a biographer dies multiple deaths because he or she, if they've taken to the task, you know, with all earnestness and sincerity, I think they live an entire life, you know, the highs and lows, the joys and sorrows of their subject. And with them a part of you,
00:16:24
Speaker
also dies somewhere. And it takes a lot of effort to come out of that, you know, obsession that you have with the person. They literally haunt you all the time. You're very like it did for me. And then you know, you, you, it, you literally have to again, break that emotional chord and move on to the next love interest. So yeah, promiscuity is the only antidote for a biographer, I would say.
00:16:49
Speaker
I think this is such a fascinating analogy, you know, and I think to everyone listening to the podcast as well, please do check out the book because there are so many interesting inflection points and of course for, I mean, not giving away spoilers or taking away from anyone's reading experience. How does, you know, a Christian woman end up with a Muslim woman? Actually, after living this very die in a poor and absolute shambles, right? So that's something
00:17:19
Speaker
I want to just reiterate to people. But we come to this whole analogy, right, of a biographer. And I think towards the end, right, you mentioned there's this whole aspect of moving on and dealing. And much like, I think, like a relationship or a love affair, once it's sort of done and dusted with, you always wonder what it really was like. And then you have to deal with how you see the person now speaking objectively versus how you dealt with them when you were
00:17:48
Speaker
treating them as one obsessive point around which your life evolved. So, kudos, you've done it multiple times. Yeah, as I said, promiscuity is the only antidote to the obsessions of a biographer. We are voyeuristic. Aayushi, I think that without that sense of voyeurism to get into the skin of your character, I don't think you could do justice to particularly the research.
00:18:13
Speaker
Yeah, and of course, I think it's so important, right? It's a matter of urgency, I would almost say, to reach out to this maligned and forgotten and misunderstood characters. Because unfortunately, I think we live in this world where we have three films left releasing on Bhagat Singh on the same day.
00:18:33
Speaker
right and then there are these millions of stories which are absolutely fascinating but unfortunately they're either like extremely geographically polarized so for instance if there is somebody like a Krishnadev Raya right great king but you won't hear about him as much as say Mughal so you won't you won't be taught that right in your CBSE book or I mean I for one and I think
00:18:57
Speaker
just sort of jumping into your book on Savarkar. And again, it also has a very interesting subtitle, Echoes of the Past, much like life print. Right. Hi, Savarkar. And I'm sure most people feel very recently, I was not thought about Savarkar in any of my books. And, and it wasn't something that I grew up reading about to me, largely in terms of education. And for most of us, we study history in school, and then
00:19:26
Speaker
neither in the Bazaar history of what we read, right, nor in our formal education and nor in our cinema or in our stories,
00:19:37
Speaker
or what we see on screen. Did we really hear of Savarkar till, of course, and I think you've spoken multiple times about how many Shankar I had lied due to this moment of serendipity. Savarkar, another one of history's enigma. And now a polarized enigma, right? So I am just going to hand it over to you and really ask you to walk us through your journey of writing the first book
00:20:03
Speaker
on the second still, but how did, you know, one of these most pretentious political thinkers sort of leave our public imagination completely, and now is any other forefront of it in part of these rabid discussions? No, that's very, very true and pertinent what the point you raised. And somebody, you know, like you mentioned, it was the whole fracas that was created by Manishankaraya. And then of course, the whole, you know, the
00:20:33
Speaker
Savarkar's portrait being unveiled in the central hall of parliament by Vajpayee's government that led to protest. That led me also to actually get deeper into who this man really was. I have half a Maharashtrian lineage and so from my mother's side, I did know that there was somebody like this, but honestly, like you mentioned, even I had not read about him in my CBSE history textbooks, nor was he ever a
00:21:00
Speaker
a point of discussion or consideration till then. It was only after all of this debate that came about that he slowly and steadily started, I think, intruding contemporary political discourse. And right now, I think, sits very, very polarizingly right in the middle of any contemporary political talk that happens. In election rallies, he's invoked. And in the last Maharashtra elections last year, you had
00:21:29
Speaker
the BJP going hammer and tong saying they're going to give Bharat Ratna to him if they're elected to power. And so somebody who died in 1966, for him to actually intrude today's political discourse, I found it very, very incredible. But at the same time, as a historian, when I went back and saw what was the academic output, what is the intellectual output about Savarkar that people have,
00:21:56
Speaker
And if a young man or woman today wants to go and read about him and understand what is all this halabalu about him, all about, you know, the very, the last biography that was written on him was when he was alive and somewhere in the sixties by this gentleman called Dhananjay Kere. And since then, till now, till 2019, when my book came out,
00:22:17
Speaker
I'm quite amazed that there's been a singular lack of academic interest in the man who causes so much of polarization, who causes so much of extreme reactions on all sides, his lovers and haters, but then nobody really bothered to investigate what is it about this person that you hate or you love, including his
00:22:38
Speaker
Proponents, I don't think they dedicated any time to understanding him or his thoughts and his writings. And he was a copious writer because thousands and thousands of pages that he wrote of his own life, of his thoughts, his views. He was a political ideologue. He was a poet, journalist, a political commentator, playwright. So several multifaceted, that adjective fits him the most.
00:23:04
Speaker
But to read all of that, to understand that, and also a political ideologue who popularized the whole concept of Hindutva and what it means today in India today and its political climate, I thought it was very much essential to trace those roots, even as people may adore Hindutva or hate it or whatever they made as an individual's choice.
00:23:29
Speaker
But to understand where did this all come from? What was the context in which it came? Why did it come? Who brought it up? I thought that was very important. And it's very, very fascinating and quite alarming for me at the same time that historians had not gotten down to this task other than highly propaganda-driven books, which either vilified him to the extreme or eulogized him to the extreme. There was really very little research-based work on him. So yeah, like I always say, my characters come choosing me.
00:24:00
Speaker
particularly those who are maligned, misunderstood and forgotten, Savakkar also came knocking and I did dedicate, I mean, it's a work in progress, so present continuous tense, but for the first volume, at least again, about three, four years, which meant looking through tons and tons and tons of Himalayan tons of paperwork around him in archives in India and also outside India, in the British Library, in the National Archives of UK,
00:24:29
Speaker
in France, in Germany, and within India, National Archives of India, the Nehru Memorial, where there is an entire set of Savarkar private papers. And nobody has really accessed these ever. And that's, again, very, very, very intriguing for me. And lots and lots of work in Marathi, many of which he has written himself. Others have written on him.
00:24:53
Speaker
which mainstream historians have happily neglected, either willfully or because of their lack of knowledge of the language. And since I do understand Marathi, so it was an added advantage and with help from friends who translated and so on. And alongside interviews with people, his family, his opponents, everybody.
Challenges of Writing on Polarizing Figures
00:25:16
Speaker
So it was literally, again, bringing together a very holistic picture of this man, his contribution to the whole
00:25:24
Speaker
you know, idea of liberation of India and his failings, his achievements, all of that. And in fact, unlike Boha Jan, where I was looking for the proverbial needle in the haystack, here there was a problem of plenty. So there was, I think more than, even now in my personal collection, I must have more than a lack of pages related to him, which I've gathered from several places to read all of that, understand it, distill and
00:25:53
Speaker
a narrative that is interesting and inspiring and also exciting for a reader who's not necessarily, you know, all, every reader need not be necessarily ideologically inclined or whatever. So generally a fascinating story of a
00:26:08
Speaker
enigmatic character. That was the challenge and it continues to, as I say, continues to be a challenge as I scurry through volume two and hope that it comes out by the middle of next year. I had hoped that it comes out this year by the end of this year, but thanks to COVID and lockdown and the inability to travel for research without which books like this cannot just come out. It's just impeded the whole timelines and process, but
00:26:36
Speaker
But yeah, it's left me deeply again, you know, impacted in a different way, his life and his story that like in Gohar Jan's case, the times here, you know, it's also been stories of so many other, you know, fascinating men and women. And I wonder why these stories were always hidden from us, why the story of India's freedom struggle has been presented in this very,
00:27:02
Speaker
simplistic and a very linear, a very monochromatic way to us in our textbooks. Why, where are those alternative narratives? Where are those suppressed stories? And that's why subtitle I thought needs to be echoes because these are so distant and so suppressed in some distant forgotten past that they just come back to us only as echoes and historian can only reconstruct them to that extent alone and not entirely as it were considering there's been so much of
00:27:31
Speaker
willful, you know, whitewashing that's happened over the decades. Absolutely. And I think, you know, there's a tendency for us to write, obviously, either portray or continue to talk about people and heart where, you know, we see clean lines or where, you know, it's easy to present them in a particular light and just portray them in a particular manner. I, for instance, would feel more comfortable talking about somebody, right?
00:28:00
Speaker
who does not confuse me because now here is this man who's presented in this whole conversation around Hindutva, in a particular light, tying it back to several aspects, right? Whether it's being called, you know, a colonial stoge or whether it is the fact that he himself is an atheist and he writes against a lot of Hindu believers.
00:28:26
Speaker
Now it's difficult for somebody and for any, for someone to I think reconcile the idea of multitudes and I'm sort of trying to listen my head as I speak to you Vikram as well. Is that, that is very difficult for us to imagine people with multitudes, right? Life would be so much simpler if this one man or who is here a proponent of a certain ideology also
00:28:49
Speaker
takes the check boxes for everything else that's spoken about in that ideology. But this man is very much individualistic and while he's a revolutionary, he's also an atheist. Very driven by a certain rationalist school of thought, which again in the whole Indian scheme of things is very difficult.
00:29:09
Speaker
How do you have a hero who refuses to believe in a god? Or a hero who says that the cow is just a docile utilitarian animal? Or someone who thinks that it's okay to, you know, get out of the British jail, even if it means apologizing to them, perhaps, I don't know, and just get out of here so that you can actually go out and work on liberating yourself. No, these are, there are of course certain ideas that we've, you know, been just
00:29:38
Speaker
It's always thrust upon us that, oh, things have to be in a particular light. And when some character has multitudes and has so many nuances, it's so much more difficult to understand them. And then obviously people pick parts of their personality or what they said publicly or wrote publicly. And then in retrospect, just fit it into the narrative that they are trying to proclaim. Very little to do with the man himself.
00:30:05
Speaker
I think of course and I think this has been widely spoken but for me as well I found the book very rational and not really and again right if you have a lack pages and you're actually visiting and meeting people and reading then it's fair for you to portray these things. It's surprising and people who know next to nothing about the man and know passing mentions of him through history
00:30:31
Speaker
decide to sort of become custodians of how that man is portrayed, right? And that is I think where the problem begins, important characters and remembered characters in history. The next set of people to sort of know about them are people who know them from people who don't really have an authoritarian understanding on their character in the first place. I don't know if I have like sort of blabbered a bit, but I think essentially I think what I'm just
00:31:00
Speaker
trying to say is that as readers perhaps and as audiences in general, we should question a lot more and question how even if somebody has 20 million followers on Twitter does not make them the arbitrary authority on specially historical figures because history is anyway so fluid. No, it's so beautifully put. It was not a blapper at all. I think you hit the nail on the head and this is a
00:31:28
Speaker
diurnal trouble I face and I've just given up these days because as late as probably yesterday on Twitter there was some fight that was going on about the same thing and you know you get to get bored to death because I've written an entire book of 600-700 pages explaining everything and then someone says oh but he wrote Mercy Petitions and then pulls up one line from that and says oh but you know he said I'm your most obedient servant or something so see he was actually
00:31:56
Speaker
not realizing that that's probably the way the language of the times was written to a colonial master. Even Gandhi's letters would have similar kind of address or letter endings. And that doesn't mean that Gandhi was a British stooge or whatever. So these types of, like you mentioned, nuances, which is what is very important when one studies the past, the past by its very nature is not present now.
00:32:22
Speaker
whatever of it reveals itself, one just gets to reconstruct it. And so to get so absolutist about it is a problem. And in today's time of polarities and lack of nuance, where we are back to that bushism of, you know, if you're not with us, you're against us, people also want very clear binaries of yes or no, yes or no. The way television news these days comes,
00:32:48
Speaker
Within a few seconds that you're given to talk, you have to take a stand. You have to say yes or no. It can't be a maybe. It can't be not 50 shades, but several shades of grey. But it has to be black and white and people, their positions, their ideologies.
00:33:04
Speaker
have to be boxed into these very strict, you know, pigeonholes of black and white, whereas real human beings are not like that. And particularly human beings like this, who, as you rightly mentioned, with multitudinal kind of shades to their character and their philosophy, someone who reads about them also needs to appreciate that fact and say, yeah, you know, they took contradictory positions on many things, and that's how the person is.
00:33:29
Speaker
Instead, today, our attention span is less. In 140 characters, people want to surmise on history, lack of nuance, complete polarization. In all of this, I think history becomes a casualty. And we want very quick, quick fix, fast food kind of answers, dominate Maggie, which is not possible. And of course, it's nice to indulge in such diatribes on social media on Twitter. So like I mentioned just yesterday, some eminent journalist and a very, another very
00:33:59
Speaker
famous, you know, businessmen, they were fighting and I got dragged in it where they said, you know, please explain Savarkar and the other members. No. And so I said, look, there is absolutely no point. I have said this ad in Phoenician. I've written an entire book. I have given multiple talks. I have written several articles. So please read it because stand upside down on my head and try to explain. But if somebody's thought process has been so opaque, you're so biased, you've made up your mind,
00:34:29
Speaker
One way or the other, for or against him, there's nothing on earth that facts can shatter and change that opinion. So it's futile, it's a waste of your time to kind of convince everybody and it's really not necessary to convince anyone.
00:34:43
Speaker
So I also keep saying each and every time like I'm really not here as an advocate of Savarkar and you know to whitewash or be an apologist for him to take on this huge mantle of you know undoing the historical wrongs that was done to him or any such thing. I'm just bringing facts and figures and documents out and it's up to the discerning public the readers to make up their minds.
00:35:06
Speaker
After reading all this, after seeing the appendices, after reading those petitions, after reading about Hindutva, somebody still thinks he's a villain, he's a stooge, he's a coward, he's a traitor, he's whatever. They're most willing, they're most free to do what they want to do. And I'm not here to convert anyone to becoming a Savarkar Bhakta or whatever.
00:35:26
Speaker
So, but then the openness to be able to read. So, love or hate the man, but please do so after reading about him. Don't be so close as to make an opinion without even being amenable to facts, without even keeping the windows of your mind open. Two documents and archival papers that are screaming their head off, you know, waiting to be read and told.
00:35:48
Speaker
And when someone has distilled it and brought those one lakh plus papers into a cogent readable form, please do me the favor of at least just reading it and then making up your mind. I had actually never thought of this writer's dilemma of suddenly by virtue of being the sort of almost the only authoritative voice accessible in public and popular literature.
Modern Authorship vs. Past Literary Figures
00:36:11
Speaker
Now you suddenly have to be dragged in every debate because hey this guy has written a book he'll tell us the right answer because I am too lazy to read it myself. I tell you I mean you know suddenly traveling in the middle switch on the phone after getting out of the aircraft and I have these tons of missed calls from
00:36:30
Speaker
this news channel and that news channel and then I realized oh my god has Savarkar again come in the news today as someone made any comments and it would be that you know Rahul Gandhi would have said something against him or Modi would have gone to cellular jail to pay obeisance or some other thing would have happened and all these news channels say oh Savarkar so there's one Bhakra you catch him and he will you know tell the whole history I didn't finish him and there'll be another somebody who will say the same things
00:36:58
Speaker
Stooge cover, traitor, and from channel to channel like a traveling salesman, you really need to go and say in story.
00:37:06
Speaker
You know what, I will just record this whole thing on YouTube or podcasts like this. Just play it in my absence because just don't bother me anymore. Every time this comes up, should he be given Bharat Ratna or not? I mean, that's a prerogative of the Prime Minister of India. I'm nobody to... Like you said, I think along with the other problem that writers today face, I always wonder, writers today have become more performers than writers because the whole cult of
00:37:33
Speaker
literature festivals, which I am also guilty having started one in Bangalore myself, has made writing a performance. You know, in that one hour that you sit on stage and hold fort, you're supposed to entertain, inspire your audience, and there are parallel sessions. So if you are boring and dull, they'll always slide away to some of the parallel sessions. So to hold their attention, you need to don the hat of a great actor, orator, all of that, which
00:38:00
Speaker
a writer need not be very good at. I mean, writers by nature, at least I am a very introvert, very, to not enjoy, you know, standing under the headlights. So it's difficult for us to sit there and pontificate like this. So I wonder, as kids, we've all read so much of R.K. Narayan, particularly, you know, in Indian English writing, but we've seen so little of him. If there's a photograph of R.K. Narayan, I don't know how many of us would
00:38:26
Speaker
recognize who he is, read all of it, Malgury days and Mr. Sampath and all kinds of things that he's written, fascinating books, but we would not know or identify him as a person. And he was not the one who would jump on stage and talk for hours about how he wrote, what he wrote, etc.
00:38:43
Speaker
But the converse has become true now where writers have fantastic Instagram accounts. They're all over the place. You know everything about the author's life, personal life, everything, what books are coming up next. But I don't even know how much of that translates to actual reading. How many of these people who flock to a session of an author actually buy the book and actually read it also? I doubt it. So this is a conundrum which I don't know. So in addition to this trouble that authors face,
00:39:12
Speaker
The problem if you take up contentious political figures is you also get drawn into contemporary political debates and skirmishes in which someone like me might just not have any interest. I mean, whether it's the BJP or the Congress or the left parties, I wouldn't care any less for any of them. And so to be drawn as spokesperson for one or the other and then defend your protagonist and talk for or against this, just
00:39:40
Speaker
it becomes a collateral damage that you face for all the hard work that you put in resurrecting that person's life.
00:39:48
Speaker
I actually have so many things to say about what you just said. I just realized that I did not mention Bangalore Literature Festival in your very, very tiny bio, despite joking that your bio is extensive. I also realized that reading has become as performative as writing. I mean, I run a book community with over 5,000 people. I don't understand.
00:40:15
Speaker
because it's so much about it as much about programming as it is about reading but again taking away from what how much is read and and how much is understood and what is bought right all of these are such difficult questions and
00:40:32
Speaker
And hence, you know, it genuinely is difficult to be a writer in this age and day. And I do also want to, and since you mentioned Arkin and Iain, right?
00:40:47
Speaker
I mean, in Arkinarayan and Asi Rajagopalachari, both had versions of Mahabharata. I've read both. Now, if they were to write that in today's day and age, I mean, say, take Asi Rajagopalachari, right? It would become like a very contentious issue of discussion, right? It would get led with religion versus mythology versus conversation, centrolling and all of that, right? I think they were lucky to have just lived in a time when they didn't have to face it.
00:41:12
Speaker
I mean, even an author like Ruskin Bond, right, who's literally the poster boy, poster man for simple reading, simple living in the hills, has a very, very active Instagram
S. Balachandar: The Bold Veena Maestro
00:41:25
Speaker
account. I'm sure that's managed by the publishing house. But it's become so performative and I find it so funny when I see Ruskin Bond's Instagram account, which was emoji and things like that. I'm like, Mr. Bond, do you know they're doing this to you?
00:41:42
Speaker
I agree. Oh, God. Yes. But really, Vikram, I don't want to harp too much about your book with Savarkar. I think there are dozens and dozens of YouTube videos and articles. Somebody should really go and read the book themselves as well as the second part that comes out next year.
00:42:04
Speaker
Because as I think we've discussed it, right, it's very fascinating character from history in general. So I think that I think the last piece, right, is your obvious obsession with music and interest in music. And I think while I started speaking about how, you know, I got introduced to you via
00:42:27
Speaker
the whole aspect that I wanted to discuss Mysore and Sprenders of Royal Mysore. Between Sprenders of Royal Mysore, which you I think wrote very early on and did such an intense research on the rich heritage of Mysore,
00:42:44
Speaker
Right and and of course that segwayed into your book on Gohar Jan. One to actually touch upon now that we're almost inching towards the end on Voice of Davina which is your again your biography of S Balachandar. And you've also written a lot of articles on CMS Subalakshmi,
00:43:01
Speaker
And the archive of Indian music has a lot of these great recordings that are publicly accessible as well. Again, where did this interest with S. Balachandar start? Because he also is not, you know, one of those absolutely talented, yes, but also not the most graceful figures, right? Like he's considered eccentric. True. And so, yeah, I think I owe a lot of my interests and
00:43:29
Speaker
non-existent talent in music to my parents and my maternal grandmother who, you know, I was a single child and for a single child without siblings, the two best friends that they had, they got for me was, one was books, the other was music. And so they noticed quite early in life that, okay, this little boy is able to reproduce all the jingles, et cetera, on television, the MS Hublakshmi songs that used to play at home, quite a bit of fidelity.
00:43:58
Speaker
grandmother literally dragged me to music class when I was five or six years old and it was I went very reluctantly because it ate into my playing time but very soon the bug caught me and I continued you know training in Carnatic music for a very long time a little bit of dalliance with Hindustani music also somewhere in the middle though I thought Carnatic was where my heart was and I had the fortune of training under several you know gurus initially in Bangalore with
00:44:27
Speaker
with one DB Nagaraj and thereafter with the eminent gurus like Shrimati Bombay Jaishri and also Dr. Jayanti Kumaresh. And at some point in my life, I really wanted to also take up music as a full-time career and become a professional artist for various reasons. And I think it's music's gain that I didn't end up becoming a professional musician. But the interest of music along with that of history, I thought it was also important for someone to play the role of
00:44:55
Speaker
being music's night watchman because there was music in India, again, hardly had documentation. It's all anecdotal. It's word of mouth, a lot of hearsay and so on and so forth. So these two biographies, Gohar Jan and S Balachandar came, one with that motivation. Balachandar was further a little more personal because one of my gurus, Jayanti Kumaresh, he was her guru. And so in many of the music classes,
00:45:24
Speaker
she would talk about him and she would show some of his papers and speeches and letters. And here again was a man who had the daring to stand up to the musical establishment, the Carnatic music mafia circle, so to say, just as all arts, whether it's Bollywood or anything has a inner mafia, which runs the whole establishment. There was, is, and probably will always be a set of
Preserving India's Musical Heritage
00:45:49
Speaker
power brokers in any establishment who decide what is classical, who decide things. There's not always scruples which are followed on various accounts. And here was a man who was willing to take on the cudgels much on his own peril for his own career and reputation and stand up and challenge the powers that be. The repercussions were something he faced. He of course died early, but also he ended up becoming something of a pariah in the musical for a moment.
00:46:17
Speaker
where, you know, despite again, someone who taught himself the Veena, he didn't even have a Guru, he started and he used to play on a plethora of other instruments, which he taught himself, all of it. International chess player before he even reached the age of nine or 10, and someone who taught himself the whole art of filmmaking and made some classic films in Tamil, you know, in the 1940s and 50s, when usually it was mythological films that were being made here, someone who was making
00:46:45
Speaker
Agatha Christie kind of, you know, detective novels and thrillers. Someone with so many shades to his character was again completely sidelined and thrown under the bus. And so that's what again motivated me to kind of resurrect his story. One was also, it was an offering to my guru Jayantiji, but also it was that his story was very fascinating and it needed to be told. And that's how that came up.
00:47:10
Speaker
and between that and Gohar Jan and Gohar Jan changed my life completely because and it was thanks to her that you know I managed to give up that day job and actually
00:47:20
Speaker
take up to writing full time because it gave me new opportunities. It enabled me to complete my PhD in history from the University of Queensland in Australia and also to set up this private trust called the Archive of Indian Music. Now, while researching about her, I also wanted to hear her music and I realized that there were no 78 RPMs there, no machines that played that.
00:47:42
Speaker
And I started searching for those in all these flea markets and shanties and so on, which is where the valuable cultural inheritance of India lies rotting. And during a fellowship to Berlin, I went there and then I noticed that almost all over Europe, in Vienna, in Paris, in Berlin, in London, there was a national sound archive in each place. And many of them had valuable holdings of Indian recordings, not only of music, but also voices of Indians.
00:48:11
Speaker
And most of them asked, doesn't India have a National Sound Archive? And do not have one. And all our records lie unattended in these places. And so on. Coming back, I even tried with the previous government. This was 2010, 2011. And so to try and impress upon them the need for setting up something like this. And that I dedicate myself to.
00:48:34
Speaker
doing this for them, but it never went anywhere. And that's when Mr. TV Mohan Das Pai, who was then with Infosys, he told me that, why do you want to run behind governments and all of this? You set it up as a private, public charitable trust in private, and I will give you the seed capital. And so he very generously donated money. We imported all the machines needed to digitize these records. And in 2011 and now we've collected
00:49:04
Speaker
I know it's a miniscule amount, considering the amount that is lost. About 15,000 records from across India. And these range from classical, Carnatic and Hindustani music, folk music, theater recordings, political speeches, early cinema recordings, all of these. And digitizing all of these all the time, I have a technician who does that, slowly, five, 10 records a day.
00:49:30
Speaker
And we keep uploading it on SoundCloud. Also on SoundCloud, if people go and type archive of Indian music, you would already have about 3000 plus something tracks and about five black followers who are following us there and who keep listening to it. Completely non-commercial. Everyone can listen free of cost. I don't know. Again, nothing out of this, but it's just that the music of this country, the night watchman that I should become.
00:49:53
Speaker
to preserve this heritage because this is the inheritance of every young man and woman of this country. It rightly belongs to them. And so 50 years from now, we may be an economic superpower, we may be a military superpower, but culturally, if we lose our inheritance, I think we would be a very, very poorer nation if we don't have the sense of culture, nationality, identity, and so on. Especially considering the rich heritage we have been bequeathed upon.
00:50:24
Speaker
So to that effect, this archive came up. It was a very, very rookie attempt. It's still by the grace of God continuing. And I don't know how long it will continue because money is a finite quantity. And so that's one reason why it somehow managed to go on so far.
Conclusion: Encouragement to Explore Vikram's Works
00:50:44
Speaker
And I need to see how long it goes and how to
00:50:47
Speaker
keep the show going with the archive. But I'm glad even if we manage to resurrect some of these records, brought some of this, I hope at least this government looks at this favorably or somebody, some corporate house, someone takes it up, because I seriously do not have the time and bandwidth anymore to devote to this. But I wanted to assume larger role and become that happy national sound archive of India, where not only gramophone records, but
00:51:14
Speaker
All India radio has huge collection. Someone who can sit and put all of this together in one place. I mean, the Modi government talks a lot about digital India and so on. So digital India should also be used to preserve our culture and heritage and digitize all of this and make it available forever for posterity. And I think that someone can take it up or the government picks it up. I think it'll be nothing like it. And I'll just be happy that I lit the first match today.
00:51:42
Speaker
That's a beautiful thought and also very commendable to be doing this. I really hope it's fun and someone somewhere out there who picks this up and takes it up. I think it's just
00:52:03
Speaker
a matter of time and I hope you find somebody to carry on the legacy as you said because it's not your or mine, it's an entire country. Thank you so much Vikram for doing this episode. When I think we began, I had no inkling of this would pan out but it's been an extremely enjoyable conversation. I hope I've lived up to your expectations.
00:52:28
Speaker
No, I truly, truly had a great time. I learned a lot and I also laughed a lot. All of these anecdotes and of course, having read your books, it's just amazing to see the breadth of the world that you're doing and I wish you all the best. Thank you, Ayushi. Thank you so much. Really enjoyed speaking to you.
00:52:50
Speaker
completely a different flavor of an interview and thank God I didn't get asked, you know, but Savarkar signed mercy petitions. What do you have to say about that? Because that would have really ticked me off and I would have wound up the interview midway.
00:53:05
Speaker
Okay, so now I know what not to say when I request you to do another podcast with me when you release the second book. To everyone really listening to this podcast, please go check out Vikram's books. They're available on Amazon, Flipkart, everywhere online at independent bookstores. Vikram's also signed a three book deal. So we're going to read a lot more from him. So just keep space in your bookshelves or your kindles or wherever it is that you read.
00:53:34
Speaker
Thank you Aayushi. Thank you so very much.