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Ananya Vajpeyi, "Place: Intimate Encounters with Cities" (Women Unlimited Ink, 2025)
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- [00:00]
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Lukas
welcome to the New Books Network. Welcome to the podcast. I'm here today with Ananya Rajpayee and we are going to be talking about her book Intimate Encounters with Cities. So, Ananya, this book is charting the way you've come to live, think and write about places. And it goes all the way back to the beginning of your life. Really. It goes all the way back to when you were six months old and your parents took you on a plane from India to Mexico for their job. And I wanted to start right at the beginning with you. Do you remember when you became conscious that you were traveling through places and not just being moved around in space?
- [01:25]
Ananya Rajpayee
You know, it's funny, I, I've never gone back to Mexico City as an adult. I mean, we, my parents and I spent my first three, three years of my life, three, four years of my life in Mexico City. But I feel like I have memories of Mexico and I have memories of then leaving Mexico and being in the United States in Texas and then returning to India and being in Delhi and starting school and meeting my grandparents and all of this. Now how much of that is, you know, photographs, recorded cassette tapes, talking to my parents, hearing about that time and those places from my parents, my family, other people who knew us or who were around us in all those places. It's hard for me to say how much of it is, you know, co constructed with other people and how much of it is actually my own memory. But I think, I think, I mean, what I've been told is that I was pretty traumatized by certainly by the move back to India when I was about five. But I was also, you know, I showed signs of having trouble adjusting when we moved even to the United States from Mexico City because I think the first thing that would have changed is that the Spanish went away. You know, and then when we came to India, then suddenly it was all Hindi and Punjabi and whatever it was, India and the Spanish was gone altogether and the English was Only, you know, in some context. And I remember my mother wanting somehow to preserve the Spanish that I spoke as a baby and as a child, as a, you know, very young child, preschooler. And she tried to find me a Spanish class, which there wasn't any at the time in Delhi, or certainly not accessible to such a small child. She eventually found the Alliance Francaise where they would teach French. And of course it was for grown ups, but, you know, when I was about 8, she took me with her there and she said, look, here's my, my daughter. And she used to be able to speak Spanish. And I think she would learn French very easily, even if you put her in a class full of adults. And, and she persuaded them. And I, you know, I studied French at the alliance Till I was 13 years old. So I think the, you know, one of the ways in which I related to a place and had a sense of a change of place was linguistic. I also, you know, I have very vivid dreams. I mean, this is still the case. And I have sometimes, rarely a category of dream which to my mind is somehow tapping into very deep childhood memories of Mexico. And a few years ago there was this wonderful film called Roma, which was actually set in Mexico City in the early 1970s. And I watched this movie in a hall actually in Istanbul. In Istanbul, it's very difficult to watch, you know, movies in English or in any other language. I mean, they're always either dubbed into Turkish or they are Turkish films. And anyway, I remember watching Roma there with the, you know, with the Spanish being spoken and the, the Turkish subtitles, so no English at all. And I was just sort of, I don't know, I just felt like such a shock of recognition of the place somehow. I just felt like everything was very familiar. Also, the time period was correct. You know, it was the first half of the 1970s. How the city must have been then. And I think, if I'm not mistaken, I haven't checked this recently, but I think the movie is in black and white for some reason, which is part of why it's so artful. And that also, I think, helps give, you know, somebody of my generation, you know, the right flavor of how your memories would be. Because often photographs of the time were still black and white or, you know, Polaroid or, you know, they had a particular kind of grain to them, which this movie also had.
- [06:53]
Lukas
What are you saying about language? Reminds me of one of my strongest reactions across the book, even though the essays are often independent of each other, but so many of them touch on how living In a place involves living in a language or in more than one language. And so, you know, sticking with this experience of growing up across places, was there a moment when you began writing about this experience of place and processing it in your own words?
- [07:32]
Ananya Rajpayee
I began writing, you know, creatively very young, I would say as soon as I could write. So maybe even as early as six or seven years old. I had diaries, I wrote poems, I wrote stories, I made up stuff and sang it or recited it or I read a lot as a child. I mean, I was, you know, a child of academic parents and, and there was just a lot of books in the house. And they were very particular about bringing me books to read, taking me to the library. I went to their, you know, they taught in these colleges in Delhi University. I used to go to their college libraries. We would go to the British Council library, we would go to the American Library. We would go to a neighborhood like lending library where you could walk. And they always took me to the book fair, which would happen annually, it still happens in Delhi, the World Book Fair. And they were keen that I, you know, my mother was keen that I somehow retain my Spanish, which of course didn't happen. But then I, I learned French, subsequently, I learned Italian, etc. So there was that. But they were, it was important for them that I was reading both Hindi and English and you know, I was speaking and writing at least those two languages. Also listening to Punjabi, which was my mother's family language, and also studying French quite a lot. It was pretty difficult as a small kid. I mean, it was a grown up syllabus, right? It was not, it was not for children. And yeah, I had a pretty multilingual environment and exposure and that was something that my parents valued a lot and I think tried to give me whatever openings they could access in their immediate environment. Also we traveled even as, as a child. I remember that we traveled within India, outside India. You know, my father was a poet and his work was constantly being translated into European languages. So we had books in the house that were in Russian or in, you know, in Spanish or in, I don't know, there were some Nordic languages, some Scandinavian languages, Swedish and so on. And of course, if you live in India, then, you know, people speak lots of Indian languages. And what I didn't realize till I had grown up and become an adult is that I also had a fair amount of exposure to, you know, non standard Hindi, for example, like more historical sort of layers of Hindi which my father, you know, because he was a scholar of, Of Hindi literature, through the history of Hindi literature, you read these earlier versions of the language, you know, and, and some of the great literary works of the medieval period are, you know, composed in, in those languages. And now I can study them as a scholar with other scholars. But really the earliest exposure I had to them was, you know, through my dad singing songs, reciting poetry, a lot of the, the devotional poetry of the medieval, so called saint poets, the bhakti poets. I mean all of that is, you know, from the 15th, 16th, 17th, 18th centuries. So it's just an older register of the language that we now speak. And I think the formal element of my kind of linguistic education, apart from the foreign languages that I was learning on the side, really began in my masters because I was in a, in a department at, for my MA at Jawaharlal Nehru University JNU that was, it was called the center for Linguistics and English in the school of languages at the time. And so I started taking courses in linguistics. We had some good teachers, good scholars there. And I became more interested, you know, formally in, in, in linguistics. And of course eventually I, I moved out of English and, and European languages and I, you know, retrained to be an Indologist. And then philology became sort of a big, a big part of, you know, how I work and how I approach text. And so there's some sort of formal, you know, approach to linguistics and philology and languages comparative comparatively, looking at different languages.
- [13:18]
Lukas
One of the ways that language and place come together in quite a few of the essayism is the way that language opens a window onto the lives of others. And in particular there is a recurring theme about language and the pain of others. At one point you write that in the ages before language, it was impossible to have knowledge of other people's pain. We couldn't fathom the pain of others without language. Can you say more about that? I mean, what, what is it that language does to allow you or allow any of us to fathom the pain of others?
- [14:07]
Ananya Rajpayee
Well, I mean, this is a complex question and I mean at one level, I mean any doctor will tell you this, that it's not really possible to express linguistically physical pain or physical suffering. You know, you can't quite articulate exactly what you're going through or you know, you might be able to say a little bit about the magnitude of it, but it's very hard to, for that to convey something meaningful to another person. You know, it's like when you're having a headache, it's all consuming, but the person next to you, who's not having a headache is not able to sort of quite understand in a visceral way that right now it's very difficult for you to, you know, go watch a movie or go out to dinner or whatever it is, right? So there is. At the core of it, there is an inexpressible expressibility, an inexpressible core of individual experience that it's easiest to understand. When talking about pain, I think. I mean, arguably, you can't really even express happiness. You can't even really quite, you know, express anything except through some kind of a. You know, it's a. Asymptotics are sort of an approach to what is actually happening. You're able to, you know, approach it through language, but maybe you never quite arrive at it, but. Or you, you know, you use metaphors and you use analogies and you use images and you use. You know, you substitute one thing for another in order to try and convey something. But one good way to think about it is if you're in a place where the language is a foreign language and you really don't understand what is going on, what people are saying. I always try to circumvent that using all. Whatever linguistics and training I have at my disposal. I try to immediately decipher the. The linguistic environment as best I can through borrowed terms or through some kind of like a familiarity with at least the family of languages that one is in. If I were in some completely other environment, I don't know what would happen. I think I'd feel really thrown. So going to unfamiliar places where the language is not known to you is. It's a way of radically experiencing, you know, both the otherness of others and the solitude of the self, in a sense, you know, and another interface where, I mean, I. I love dogs and I have dogs, and I. You know, with animals, you really feel it that, you know, at some level you are communicating with them. You do understand them, they understand you. You have a relationship. You know, they seem to have moods and they seem to be able to convey needs and so on. But, you know, really, when push comes to shove, you don't know what they're thinking, you don't know what they're feeling, you don't know what they're going through. And that's the kind of. It's just an insuperable sort of gulf between you and them. I don't know, maybe it's like that with babies as well, you know, at some level. And then you just, you know, it. It's I always find it a bit startling that something that is so much my own and so beloved to me as my puppy, let's say, is also a complete unknown, you know, at some level of. Of consciousness, of experience, of sensation. And I think pain is like that. I mean, people who've written about. I'm sorry, I'm meandering all over the place, but people who've written about torture, you know, and how, you know, the outcome of torture is usually supposed to be information, right? You're being interrogated, and they're trying to get the truth out of you through torture. And many victims of torture, you know, describe this sort of thing, and there you really radically, you know, the pain effectively sort of breaks your ability to articulate thought or sensation in language. It just interrupts that link. So it actually has the opposite effect of what it's supposed to have, which is to elicit the truth from you or elicit information from you or whatever
- [19:34]
Lukas
it is on the barrier between our experience of pain and those of others. So the examples of the puppy or of the baby. So I think many of us go through adult life feeling like language helps us to some extent to bridge the gap, to find some working model to understand the lives of others and communicate and make decisions on that basis. But is there something illusory about that? Do we overestimate the ability of language to really bridge my pain and your pain? And what does that mean for someone like yourself who is writing about the pain builders?
- [20:26]
Ananya Rajpayee
So, you know, as I've described in the. In one chapter, in the book, the chapter on Amsterdam, the Society of the Spectacle, they called it, I actually undertook a research project and a writing project when I was living in Amsterdam, you know, two decades ago, that had to do with looking at visual images of photographs, film mainly, you know, visual media around experiences of war and genocide. So I was looking at a lot of war photography, and I was looking at, you know, footage, for example, from when the concentration camps were freed at the end of World War II and things like this. And, you know, trying to understand what you could know or learn about what people went through using the image, using the visual image, as opposed to, you know, relying on linguistic forms of testimony or memory or documentation of these traumatic events that had, you know, overtaken and destroyed people's lives, entire countries in many cases. And, you know, one of the authors I keep talking about, W.G. sebald, the German writer, I mean, this is primarily his mode of investigation into the history of, you know, modern Europe. You know, two things. One is Walking through places, through cities, through landscapes, through both contemporary and historical sites. And the other is using photographs in his case. I mean, it's a very artful use. They're not, you know, photographs are not sort of documentations of what he's writing about. They're often found objects in themselves, and he just pulls them out of old albums and, you know, sticks them anywhere. And they're more evocative than representative of what he's writing about. Right. And they're entirely fictional. They're a fictional device in some sense, but they're meant to be seen as though they were a documentary device. Right. So. So, you know, he's a writer that I have consciously, unconsciously learned a lot from. And so both walking through places, trying to understand and translate and move between languages, you know, focusing hard on linguistic communication and the breakdowns in linguistic communication, the limits of communication in language, and looking at non linguistic, Non linguistic ways of, you know, modes of cognition, which could be visual or oral or, you know, sensory in some other sense, but not linguistic, especially photographs. Those are all elements that have, you know, that, that I've kind of used in a very serious way as a writer. I mean, you know, as a scholar, you have a different set of tools. I mean, you're going to the archives, you're looking at manuscripts, you're reading text closely. You know, you have other kinds of hermeneutic tools and tools for interpretation and reading and commentary and critique, but those are all primarily constituted in language, you know, and that's, that's fine, you know, that, that serves the purpose there. But for the kind of writing I'm interested in, which is partially philosophical, partially historical, partially sort of descriptive, you know, reportage almost, and which also has a lot to do with human interactions and meeting people and talking to people and being close to people, all of that requires, you know, some form of connection and mutuality and understanding. And in, in that language is very, very helpful. But there are also limits to human language where the experience overrides what the language can convey. You know, another, another place where you can think about this is if you go into a deep depression, for example, right. And you are just unable to convey anything to anybody. Right. And so I've become interested more and more also in psychoanalysis and in, you know, looking at sort of aphasia, amnesia, aporia, you know, these, these forms of breakdown where even the internal discourse is no longer accessible to you, leave aside being able to communicate it to others.
- [26:27]
Lukas
So I want to build on this discussion that we're Having about how to describe pain in ourselves and in others, to the why, to the kind of what that might do. And there's a passage that I would like to bring up. You spoke about Sebald, and you mention a few times concentration camps in Europe as sites, as places to think and feel in. And in the particular case of the camps in the Balkans, you say that there's a specific kind of horror of going to places and writing about them where evil now appears normal. And you link that to what you call your most painful experience of Kashmir. And in your words, which till today conceals its wounds in lovely flowers and snow peaks, like a woman concealing your gashes and bruises of domestic violence, with clever makeup on her face and clothing that hides most of her body. So insofar as there are tools to reveal those gashes and bruises, what is that doing? What is it for? I mean, I'm asking also because your writing has both aesthetic and political motivations. And so hearing more about what it is for to reveal that suffering and violence, I think, would be something interesting to get more into.
- [28:10]
Ananya Rajpayee
Yeah, you know, I. At one point in my life, I did a lot of research into the Holocaust. And, you know, I remember watching Lanzman's film Shoah, and I remember watching, you know, going to the Holocaust Museum in D.C. and many Holocaust museums I've visited in Germany, in Czechoslovakia, and, you know, wherever one finds these kind of memorials and museums in the Netherlands and so on. I've always resisted actually going to a concentration camp, you know, to. I think there is an opportunity recently to go to, I want to say, Dachau maybe, or I. Yeah, somewhere near Munich, just outside Munich. And I, you know, my partner and my friend were going, and I just declined to go with them and just hung around, you know, somewhere else for the hours that they were gone. And I certainly don't. I feel like I never want to go to Auschwitz, you know, although I've seen hundreds of images of it, and I know what it looks like in a sense, but I just don't want to go in there. But I did at one point have a research project where I was looking at. Well, it's a long, complicated story, but, you know, Agamben appears in one of my essays in this book, Giorgio Agamben, the theorist. And long before I met him, 10 years before I could meet him in person, I wrote a long paper that I had a fellowship to write as a letter to him. And it was written as a letter because it was trying to investigate whether what he was saying about camps, refugees and the state of exception in sort of continental theory born out of the historical experience of the world wars and of totalitarianism in modern Europe, if that could be generalized to other parts of the world. Right. And so this, this essay or this, this monograph, actually it was a, was a short monograph. The, the, the kind of conceit was that it was written as a letter to the, to the European philosopher of camps and refugees. But it was titled, you know, Prolegomena to the Study of People and Places in Violent India. Because within my lifetime I've seen, you know, three or four really shocking sort of pogroms, you know, in 1984 in Delhi, which was at the following, at the heels of the assassination of the Prime Minister Indira Gandhi by her Sikh bodyguards, there was a kind of mass murder of Sikhs in Delhi in November 1984. In 1992, in December, the Babri Mosque was demolished by, you know, majoritarian Hindu lumpen mobs. And you know, subsequently we've had the sort of rise of Hindu nationalism over the last 30, 40 years. And then in 2002 there was mass violence against Muslims in Gujarat which actually brought a certain set of people to power who now rule the country. At the time it was, you know, an aberration to have this kind of inter religious violence post partition, you know, and, and so one of the things that I was trying to investigate was that when the separatist movement began in Kashmir in a major way in the early 90s, one of the things that happened was that the minority Hindu community in Kashmir either fled or was driven out by Muslim groups, I mean, who were branded as terrorist groups by the Indian state. And I mean, depending on who you ask, it was a kind of ethnic cleansing or an attempted ethnic cleansing where the Hindu population, which was in a minority in the state of J was driven out of the valley of Kashmir in large numbers and people were put into refugee camps or transit camps. And in fact, a generation or two later you find that there's been no rehabilitation or return, you know, that people who left left in a sense for good, although at that time they may not have thought that. So I actually went in 2005 to visit some of these camps in Jammu for Kashmiri Hindus. And I also traveled to Kashmir to Trishrinagar proper. And you know, the city was full of the houses of these pundits who had left and the houses had not been occupied by others. I mean, you know, it was a very kind of. They were just in this kind of suspended state where you know, they were being kept as though their owners were about to come back imminently at any moment. And, you know, neighbors were often sort of hands off of these. These places. Nevertheless, those people had fled en masse as a community in fear and lived in very difficult circumstances in other parts of India and other parts of even. Even Kashmir itself. And I went to visit one of these camps and I was struck by many things. I mean, the, you know, they were just. They were just, you know, they were very small, almost single room dwellings for families. And they were made of brick and they had, like, tin roofs and they were in straight lines like barracks or like, you know, slaves would have lived in plantations, you know, a century or two ago. And they had no. They carried no memory of the homes that people had left behind, right? The landscapes, the mountains, the forests, the gardens, these beautiful wooden houses with these sloping roofs that you have in Kashmir proper. You know, these people were just living in makeshift tenements of the most sort of basic, sub basic, almost, you know, condition that they were thrown into. And. And they, you know, they had completely lost their cultural identity, their social capital, their historical memory, their, you know, their place in the world. They were utterly displaced, but at the same time, you know, they were not being subjected to any violence. They were not being ill treated, they were not being, you know, shot. They were not even. Their properties, in theory, were still there. They were not being sort of occupied or expropriated or whatever. And I began to think that, you know, things are not as they appear, right? I mean, there is the. The space of the concentration camp which is designed not for people to survive violence and displacement and to continue living, but rather it is designed for people to go in there and die there and be killed there. You know, it is a place of death. Whereas in many other contexts, refugee camps are actually spaces for life to continue. Howsoever altered it is right. Howsoever unrecognizable it is relative to an earlier life. It's still a place for shelter, rehabilitation and survival. It's not a place for the end of living. Right? And that seemed to me to be a fundamental difference between an internee in a concentration camp who is marked for death and a refugee in a refugee camp in some other national or whatever historical context, including within India, right, where people are not being singled out to be destroyed. People are being sort of in some way, in some very convoluted and perhaps ineffective way, you know, saved or given, you know, a secure kind of spot till such time as they can be reintegrated into social fabric and, you know, given a place again, which is, you know, the full place of citizenship. So I. What I was trying to work out was the difference between, you know, a Jew in a concentration camp and a refugee in some other conflict zone. You know, the intent of extermination versus the intent of rehabilitation. Right. So how do we conceive of the space of exception differently than in our history versus in the history of Europe that, you know, a government writes about or Sebald writes about or whatever? That was a kind of comparative question that I was trying to address. And that is, you get some idea of it in some of the essays in this book.
- [39:22]
Lukas
Can I review to a few other examples in the Indian case that I found very striking in some of the essays, the attention to architecture and social space. I mean, it. It rings through a number of the essays. And in the Indian context, for example, there is a passage where you describe how the architecture in Mumbai reveals an Indian progressivism from a certain kind of time. And then you also, on the flip side, you also analyze public space to show, for example, what you call the unapologetic unwillingness of upper castes to share public. To share space with untouchables. The logic there seems to be less one of life and death, but one of the social order that wants to impose itself upon a place. And my question is, what is it about observing place and the way that space and buildings are laid out that seems to reveal actually some things about the way society works that direct observation of people sometimes cannot?
- [40:55]
Ananya Rajpayee
Oh, well, there's. I suppose there's many ways to answer that. I mean, look, if somebody is sent into detention or somebody's deported or somebody's sent into a camp or a camp like space. I mean, it could be Guantanamo Bay or, you know, something like that in our own time. That is a different form of excluding a certain community or, you know, a certain class of people from the world of the living, right? But in a complex society, and all societies are complex, but India is, you know, India has particular complexities and also ways of reading those. And caste is one of. One of that sort of a grid that. One of those grids that help you to understand segregation, inequality, hierarchy, power, you know, class, all of caste gives you an entry into the complexity of the. Of the social world in India. And caste is such a thing that it really permeates and structures space, you know, and you don't have to. You don't have to physically remove people, right? They can be who they are in their body, in their neighborhood, in their occupation. But it's still perfectly clear that, you know, they're somehow disenfranchised or they're inferior or they're excluded or they are, you know, subject to certain kinds of punitive regimes, etc. Obviously, this was much worse in the past. And, you know, Ambedkar's contribution and that of, you know, the Indian Constitution and of the coming of democracy to India in the 20th century, all of that has been to, in a way, really create the idea of public space and an egalitarian space to which equal citizenship gives everybody access.
- [43:33]
Lukas
I want to ask about the flip side of this way that places can exclude, which is that places can also elicit our love. At one point, for example, you describe New York, defining the romance of the metropolis for you because it's a city that one can love even more intensely than a human beloved. What difference does it make to you individually and know, to societies if people love a place?
- [44:07]
Ananya Rajpayee
Well, you know, I mean, arguably attachment to a. A homeland or a place or, you know, a motherland or a fatherland or whatever you call it your. Your hometown or your. Your village or your, Your home. I mean, that is. That is the basis in a sense of civilization, isn't it? And that's what people are fighting over, and that's what people are, you know, claiming and invading and taking away and exchanging and so on and so on. A lot of the. The pathos in, I don't know, in Indian, in the Indian imagination, in the literary imagination and cinema and music and, you know, across the arts is about, you know, missing home, wanting to be among your people, in the place that you associate with, I don't know, childhood, with innocence, with love, with shelter, with safety, with, you know, your near and dear ones, your family. And this sense of being, you know, again, I go back to Sebor, very different. The flip side, as. As it were of. Of, you know, being, you know, a place, being unheimlich, you know, not feeling where you don't feel at home. You feel sort of estranged and alienated in many ways. This is a very central theme for the Indian imagination, I think, because we are dealing in a big way in a world historical kind of transition from an agriculture, agricultural and rural society to, you know, we're becoming urbanized now. This is the largest population in the world. It's the biggest country in the world. It's the largest democracy in the world. It's a hell of a lot of people undergoing fundamental changes to how they live, where they live, where they can work, you know, where they are tied to, where they. Where they no longer belong. The state is undertaking these massive, unbelievably complex exercises in determining identity, citizenship, property ownership, voter IDs, your address, whether you have papers to prove by that you're an Indian citizen or not. This is happening every day as we speak, you know, on a scale that is unthinkable in human history, actually. And it's causing, you know, so much pain and difficulty and so much conflict, right, because people are attached to their. To their places, and people feel they belong to their places, and their places belong to them, and they have every right to be there. They have memories there. They have their forefathers and their previous generations and, you know, who. Who lived. Have lived there, and they expect a future for their children, you know, in that same place. But mind you, as recently as 1947, you know, we went through the partition and, you know, half the country sort of was lost. Their homes, was displaced, right? It was one. It was the biggest sort of mass migration in history, and millions of people were displaced. So the question of home is a very sensitive, emotional and, you know, how should I put it? I mean, it's. It's. It's like, you know, you know, putting your hand on the pulse of, like, what makes people tick, right? What. What shows whether they're alive or not is whether they get to be at home. And, of course, this is playing out, you know, in the worst conflict that is ongoing currently in the world, you know, where. Where people's homes are just being sort of denied to them, and it's. It amounts to denying them their very right to exist as a people. So this is something that I think if you're writing a book about, you know, with a. With a title like Place, then a question of being out of place, going places, feeling like you're in the right place, feeling displaced. All of these are part of the kind of discursive universe, right? That and the imaginative space that one is navigating. And at some points it is very political. At other times it is very, you know, personal or emotional or, you know, I mean, there are different registers where you can discuss this idea of a relationship between a person and their place.
- [50:08]
Lukas
I want to bring up the personal dimension of that more. And this phrase, out of place, it reminds me of the moments throughout the book when you describe what it is to walk through different cities. And there is one moment when you describe traveling to forget Roman rather than to remember. And you talk about that as a brief season of Freedom. And you end that paragraph with saying that this is how the world must feel to a man. And I wanted to ask you to say more about that. What it is to move through the world as a man in your imagination, and what that reflects about all the other moments when you've moved through cities without that kind of simulation.
- [51:07]
Ananya Rajpayee
Yeah, I think. I think what I was getting at probably in that. In that passage was that, you know, being a woman or being in a woman's body, I think, automatically restricts your mobility, it restricts your freedom. It puts certain constraints on what you can do, where you can go, how freely you can mix with others, you can go into unknown places, you can explore, you know, what you're curious about, because as a woman, you always have to weigh the danger to yourself. You always have to weigh the risk. You always have to, you know, prepare for things to go wrong because you, you know, you're physically vulnerable. And you also know sometimes even if you're not physically vulnerable, you know, there are. There's such a superstructure of societal expectations, conventions, norms and judgments that would rather that you stayed home and stayed behind, you know, closed doors and closed windows and did not. Did not venture out with the kind of freedom that I imagine, and I. I think, probably not incorrectly, that a man can simply assume as a default, like, you know, if he wants to go, he'll go. Of course, there are some very, very dangerous places where nobody can go, you know, without an element of risk. But for a woman, that risk is a default. You know, it's not like that. I think for men in most countries, in most places, at most times of day or night, it's not dangerous by default. Whereas as a woman, even if you're, you know, even if you're a seasoned traveler, even if you are physically fit and alert, even if you are aware of the dangers and you know, what to do if you get in trouble, you know, even if you are basically a very, you know, brave person or you are a, you know, you're the kind of person who doesn't hesitate to, you know, try new things, etc. Even if you're that kind of person. And I'm not really. I mean, I'm. I tend to be quite cautious, actually. Even so, you are always at odds with the kind of range of possibilities that really ought to be equally available to you as to a man. But they're not. And you know it, right? You know it in your. You've been taught that you've been. You've been told that you've been reminded of that. And you know it. And, you know, many times you, you know, you come up against a wall that, you know, I can't go any further down this road because it's too dark and it's too lonely, you know, and if something happened to me, nobody would know to come and help me, you know. So, yeah, there's a, you know, I, I can't be a traveler in the same way that a man can be. I think I might be much more adept than somebody else, man or woman, for example, if I know the language right, I might have an advantage. But in terms of just sheer physical safety, I think things are always, you know, just more risky if you're a woman, that's it. In a very practical thing, I'm going
- [55:14]
Lukas
to ask you to connect this to another theme, which is that of time travel. So in a number of moments, you talk about why historical monuments, for example, have this enduring value amidst the kind of transience of our lives. Or at one moment you talk about how sometimes you didn't quite know whether you were a medieval traveler or a modern flaneur. And so there is this time travel element in a number of the pieces. Does this, does being a man or a woman matter in terms of this time travel? Would a man time travel differently?
- [56:04]
Ananya Rajpayee
Well, I'm guessing that if one were in Istanbul in the Ottoman heyday in the 16th or 17th century or something like that, I mean, there's probably not that many women traveling around, right? Or similarly in Venice or in, in India or, you know, wherever it is. I mean, the women are at home. It's the men who are traveling, who are sailing, who are conquering, who are building, who are exploring, who are writing. So in a sense, one is privileged that, you know, we live in a time when, at least as a mental exercise, one can time travel. Even as a woman, I don't know if, you know, you could say that in an earlier age. Although they've always been pioneering women, they've always been exceptional women. They've always been women who've gone out and done things when you least expected it, 100 years ago, 150 years ago, 200 years ago, and so on. But I think that, well, you know, the. So it's two different things. One is the monumentality of the monuments, you know, which gives a certain sense of stability and helps to orient you if you are walking in a city, right? So you know where the Eiffel Tower is, or you know where the Taj Mahal is, or, you know, where you Know, the Bosphorus is, or whatever it is, you know, you know, where. You know, I mean, in New York, you know, you know, where Manhattan is and versus where Brooklyn is or whatever it is. Like, you know, you can orient yourself relative to a landmark, you know, and monuments have that function. And you also expect them to be there the next time you go, even if it's years later. Right? You expect to see that same building in that same place, whatever else has changed. And, you know, one of the things about the Twin Towers going down on nine, 11 was that, you know, it's just almost like an unthinkable thing for these massive structures to disappear, never again to stand in that place. But there's a question of stability. There's a question of recognition, of orientation, a kind of spatial, you know, a compass, an anchor, like something that helps orient you, basically. But there's also the historicality that comes with the historical monument, right, because it takes you back to the time when it was. When it was built or for the purpose for which it was built, maybe centuries ago or decades ago or whatever it is. And so the monument both gives you stability in. In spatial terms, but it also gives you a sense of the passage of time and the movement of history and the pastness of the past at the same time. So it's kind of static in one sense, but it's also a dynamic experience to interact with the monument. You go into a fort or a palace and you imagine, you know, a battle taking place or what it must have been like to live in this. In this, you know, massive, beautiful, palatial building. Or how must it have been for the women, how must it have been for the slaves? You know, whatever it is, there's a. I think monuments are like a good heuristic for a historian also for a traveler. You know, they have a cartographic value. They also have a chronological value.
- [60:32]
Lukas
And on a personal level, is there a way in which the stability of places offers more of a consolation for mortality than the transience of language or people who fade often with much more rapidity than. Than places do?
- [60:52]
Ananya Rajpayee
Yeah, I think. I think, yes. I mean, you know, if you're able to see the same thing as being there a long time after you first saw it, if you're able to find your way, even if you go back after a long time. To me, that's always very reassuring, right. People age, people die, people move away, or you lose touch with them, you no longer are. Have that relationship with them that you, you know, can find them. I mean, they might still be in that same place, but you can't really go and meet them because they're not part of your life anymore or whatever. So language I'm less likely to think of as transient because actually, in a way, you know, as a historian or as a philologist or as a scholar of, you know, classical languages, I would say that, you know, texts survived for centuries. And, you know, the epics and the great poetry and the scriptures and, you know, all these texts of the past, which are 3000, 2000, 1500 years old, sometimes in languages that we have lost. Right. Have nevertheless survived. And the people who wrote them, the people who they were written for, the people to whom they were meaningful, are long gone. Sometimes in Indian texts, you don't even know who the authors are. In Sanskrit literature, we have almost no biographical information on the authorship of most texts. Majority, I would say, 99% texts. You have no idea of what the life of the author actually was or anything about them to characterize them as real persons in time. But the text survives, you know. And I mean, I feel this as a scholar working with the ancient texts of free modern texts. But I felt it again when, you know, my father died. And as I told you, he was a poet. And it gives me great comfort and great solace that his poetry is always with me, you know, till I die. I have his poetry. So there's a level at which he's present to me. You know, his thoughts, his ideas, his words, his style, his language, his voice. Even in my memory. It's all right here. You know, he may have died, but his work lives in some very real way. And that, to me, is extremely comforting. It's extremely valuable. And it suggests that, you know, we have to think about time and history. Not in a. Not in a simple way as moving, you know, unidirectionally, the arrow of time, you know, and that whatever's left behind is lost forever. It's not the case. I mean, I think. And I. I try to play a little bit with that in my writing, you know, by moving constantly between different temporal moments and not necessarily in any sort of logical order. I mean, the logic is not the logic of time itself. The logic is the logic of emotions, of memory, of, you know, some other theme that I'm trying to illustrate.
- [64:58]
Lukas
Both of the themes that we've been revisiting throughout this conversation. Place and language touch very heavily on another core element in the book, which is that of loss. And you've just talked about this now as well. You were just talking about your father's poetry and how it gives comfort and solace that the language endures. And you were talking about why it's reassuring to go back to a place that you've known even if the people have changed. That's one side of it. I wonder if there's also another side of it, which is that there is a fundamentally melancholic side to how places and language endure in a way that people don't. Because the places, even those we love, become filtered through the memories of people we've once known. And perhaps the same for language. I wonder if you see those as two sides of the same coin or if it depends on, you know, one's mood. Depending on that, you know, kind of we. We. Our mood map of a place or. Or the text might lead us to one view over another or how that fits together in where you end up with. In terms of loss at the end of these. These essays, I think.
- [66:29]
Ananya Rajpayee
I mean, you know, other people who've talked to me about my book have in the last few weeks, I've said that there's this overwhelming kind of theme of loss. And there is a kind of melancholic mood in a lot of the essays. I think that's correct. I mean, that's a correct reading. It's patently the case. I think that, you know, one is looking at the transience of the world. The transience of human emotions, experiences, relationships, constructions, human life. I mean, it's, you know, a life that is inevitably unfolding in time. And that means that it has a beginning, it has an end. And travel is sort of, you know, metaphorically another kind of journey through space. Whereas life itself is a journey through time. And there's inevitably loss in this journey. A leaving behind of people and places and one's own younger self. I suppose. I mean, one sort of, I think, false impression that travel allows is that you can go back to a place you can revisit, you can go again and again, right? I mean, I've been to New York, I don't know, dozens of times. Or I've been to Istanbul, you know, dozens of times or whatever. You know, many of these places I have indeed returned to. But I'm saying that there is something misleading about that because actually, you know, every time you return, you're different and the place is different and how you feel about it and what happens is different. And some people are not there anymore. And some things have changed. You know, they can change in a very dramatic way. For example, if there's a coup or there's a. There's a war or there's a change of government. And I've. I've seen that happen too, with. With Turkey in the last 10, 15 years, couple of times, you know, and. Or with the U.S. i, I suppose you could say now, but the. The transitory nature of. Of time, of life, of experience, of consciousness, I think is something that philosophically I'm very interested in and that I try and explore in more concrete ways through, you know, the tropes of travel, also the tropes of history in my other writing. These are constantly in dialogue in my head. And, you know, there's one essay about Delhi called the Indo Persian Sublime, where I describe this medieval poet, Amir Khusrov, you know, who kind of invents the kind of modern Hindi that we speak in its earliest form way back in the 13, 14, hundreds. And, you know, at one point I wanted to write a novel, actually I was still in my 20s, in which he would be a living character in Delhi and he would be sort of just still hanging around in the streets of Nizamuddin, you know, where he. He was 700 years ago. And that, you know, my protagonist would, like, have a friendship with him and they would talk and they would discuss stuff, but he was not, you know, he would not be real in the same way that my protagonist would be, because protagonist would be contemporary. You know, I mean, I. I was just toying with this idea that in a way that the poet lives forever, but in a way, you know, nobody is able to escape the human condition, which is essentially that of mortality. And this is something that never leaves me. You know, this, this. This consciousness of. Of. Of mortality, I think.
- [71:32]
Lukas
Yeah, sure, Nanya. I think this interplay of what endures and what is lost comes through in. In many of the pieces. And perhaps one. One image that I'll leave the listeners with is the death rituals you performed after your father's death, which you described as transforming the dead person's presence into a collage of memories. There's an ambiguity there about what remains and form and what is forever lost. And on that note, Shala, thank you for being here today and thank you for this book.
- [72:13]
Ananya Rajpayee
Thank you so much, Lukas. It was a pleasure talking to you and, yeah, thank you for reading the book.