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Ghazala Wahab
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New Books Network.
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Praveen Zani
Welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host Praveen and I'm the founder of the Twice Told Podcast. Today we'll be speaking with author and editor Ghazala Wahab about her latest book, the Hindi Heartland. Ghazala is the editor of Force magazine and as author Born a Muslim, Some Truths About Islam in India. The book went on to win a Book of the Year award in Nonfiction at the Tata Litfest and atta Galata in 2021. She has also co authored Dragon on Our Managing China Through Military Power with Praveen Zani in February 2017. Our latest book, the Hindi Heartland, came out in July 2025.
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Thank you Ghazala for coming online and welcome to Swapbook Twice Told.
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Ghazala Wahab
Thank you so much for asking me.
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Praveen Zani
To the concept of Twice Told Twice Told is an idea where we like to interview authors and quiz them for their impressions and ideas about writing a particular book. You had a set of ideas and notions that you expressed when you wrote this book, that was the first time I read this book and formed some impressions. That was my impression. Now when author and reader both connect together in person or in our instance online, we're discussing this book. We hopefully generate enough insight for both of us. We learn something new from this endeavor, take away something back. And that's why the idea of twice told wait so. And we are, we are extremely happy and I would say honored to have you online today to be discussing the Hindi Heartland successor, as you mentioned, to Born Muslim. So folks, those of you are joining in, I believe Gazala requires no introduction as the author of Born a Muslim and now the Hindi Heartland, she's an editor of Force magazine and we are very happy to be having this conversation online today. So Ghazala, my first question would be why did you decide to write a book beginning with Born a Muslim and later the Hindi Heartland?
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Ghazala Wahab
Actually, Born a Muslim was not my first book. My first book came before that, which was Dragon on Our Doorstep, Managing China Through Military Power. So that was essentially a defense insecurity book in which I handled the chapters on internal security. So I did chapters on Kashmir, I did chapters on criminal violence and the military services. So while I was working on that I realized both the chapter on terrorism and communal violence there was some meeting ground that both chapters had. This book came out in 2017, but I had started to work on it along with my co author in 2016. Sorry, in 2015. So that was the time when the new government in India had come. It had been in power for a year and the government had forced put the focus of defense services on terrorism. The government had decided that terrorism is a primary threat to India. So all attention should be on terrorism and by terrorism read Islamic terrorism or jihadi terrorism. So that once that book was out of the way, it came out I was thinking more and more about idea of terrorism and how it was continuously linked with Islam. So that was the starting point of one Muslim actually. Subsequently the scope of the book expanded and I started looking at Islam and the Muslim experience in India. But the the seeds of the book lay in understanding why so many Muslims were being associated with terrorist violence or why there was so much of unrest within the Muslim community both in India and outside India. Eventually I came back only to India and the focus of the book was confined to India. But so after Born of Muslim was out in the public domain, this subject stayed with me. The subject of radicalization stayed with me. And after Born a Muslim I also realized that though while writing that Book I was focusing essentially on radicalization among Muslims. But there was another kind of radicalization which was happening which was almost like a subterranean level and that was radicalization amongst the Hindus of India. I had touched upon this briefly in Dragon on Our Doorstep, on the chapter on terrorism, because these incidents, or these attacks or the Samji Haka Express, the Malikong attack, they had happened and they were linked to Hindu extremists. So I, I did touch upon it there, but I had not really gone into the causes for why this kind of behavior was happening amongst the majority community. One would think that the majority would be secured in their numbers. The, the numbers itself is a big source of strength. So, but that was not the case in India. So when the Hindi heartland was being conceptualized, when I was looking at this book as a concept, my primary concern was to see why after all these years we got independence After a brutal sundering of the nation in 47. It was unprecedented and really terrible violence which followed the independence, the partition violence. Yet after that though there have been a lot of communal violence in India. The decade of the 1950s was relatively all right, but say 1960s onwards, there was continuous violence in India in some part of the country or the other. Yet despite that, for some very strange reason extreme, with the exception of Bihar, this belt, the Hindi belt, including up Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, they had been relatively quiet. There was sporadic violence in Uttar Pradesh, not so much in Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. Probably in entire three or four decades there were two or three riots in the state of Rajasthan in Lady and in Uttar Pradesh there were a lot of small scale incidents of violence, but nothing which was on the scale of let's say Jamshedpur or Bhagalpur or even West Bengal or Gujarat. So I, I, I realized that whatever the popular perception of this region B, that it is backward, it's economically and socially backward, it's communally polarized. That communal polarization doesn't reflect in on the streets and especially in the state of Uttar Pradesh until the decade of 1980s, in most incidents of communal violence, the majority of killings were done by the, the police, the pac, the provincial armed constabulary. It was not that a mob had gone berserk and a mob killed another people from another community. So the hard work of actually executing people, of carrying out killings was done by the police, whether it was in Muradabad or Meerat or Malayana. So most of the people died in police firing and not so much at the hands of the mob as we saw in other parts of the country. Bihar was an outlier. Bihar was only state where you actually had large scale violence. And then I realized that this violence started with 46. You know in popular perception we remember Noah Khali in Bengal and Gandhi went there and he sat on fast to death in Noah Khali. So we all remember that. It's part of our history. Even in school when we talk about partition we are taught this incident but we are not taught that a few weeks before Noakhali there was large scale violence in Bihar. And it was so huge that, that Gandhi was forced to say publicly that Congress parties are responsible for this. And I'm shocked by the behavior of congressmen. They are behaving in this beastly manner. And at least 10 times more people have died in Bihar than they died in Bengal. And the majority of people who died in Bihar were Muslims. Probably that is why this incident of violence of this pre independence or pre partition violence fell through the cracks and our history books. So I. So my focus on working on the Hindi heartland was to understand how this radicalization happened, what was the source of it and why it has been successful in some parts of the this region and not so successful in other parts of the region. So to answer your long, so your small question by long answer the book. The tenor throughout the book is to identify how this polarization happened. What was the source of it, how history was used to polarize the people of this region. Because history was a very handy tool in this process because 600 years of Muslim rule in this area, in this region. So that is why the structure of the book is the way it is. There is a section which is on the contemporary situation in the region. Whether it's geography or the society, religion, caste, economics, culture and languages of course. And then there's a quick race to the history starting with the arrival of the first Muslims in this region. The Delhi Sultanate coming and right till the end of the Mughals and coming of Mara, first Marathas and then the British. So and then after that post independence politics and society. So I, I, I thought of this structure to trace why this region became what it did both in terms of social and economic backwardness as well as communal and caste divisiveness.
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Praveen Zani
Understood. Now my next question would be about your childhood growing up and how did that influence this book? The Hindi heartland.
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Ghazala Wahab
I grew up in the Hindi heartland. Actually I grew up in the heart of the Hindi heart, an idea of an Agra. And you can see the extent of my mobility that from Agra the maximum I could travel for education and Work was Delhi. So I have not been extremely mobile. I have not been able to leave this region after all these years, even for work. I have traveled to various parts, but always came back to this region. And once I decided to kind of invest in my own property and settle down, so to speak, it was also in this region in UP So that is the kind of connect I have with this region. It's not so much that I love this place, it's also because I, I identify very closely with this and maybe it has to do with my growing up years because my family was, has been living in Agra for many, many generations. As far back as my father could remember, I mean we were sitting and tracing our family tree and as far as he could remember four generations back, we've always, always lived in Agra. So maybe that is what connected us so deeply with Agra, with the food there. The eating habits are I suppose unchanged. Our Sunday breakfast even today is got from outside. It used to happen from my grandfather's time. And it's always, you know, a very famous breakfast in Ala where you get which is a puri, which is filled with some kind of dal d and potato curry and jalebi. So that has been a standard breakfast for, for as long as I remember. So I suppose food connects you to your place of, your place of not just birth but the place of your habitat. So that has been one connection and the other connection has been the culture, the language we are comfortable speaking, the way we speak at home, which is a mix of Hindi, Urdu, smattering of English. And we are comfortable in, in the way we know our neighbors, people all around us, extended families. The, the way the festivals are celebrated, whether it's Holi or Eid or Ramzan or Diwali or whatever, even you know, things like Ram Navi. There's a famous Ram Bharat which happens in Agra. So all of this has been part of my growing up years and I still kind of remember seasons by the festivals that has been ingrained in me because that if it's Saban, so I know that there would be teach celebration and our neighbor used to have the tea celebration where all the neighborhood unmarried girls were invited. I used to go too, or if it's you know, end of October. So we know now the festive, the season would start with viali melas in various parts of the city. So basically all of this has influenced the way I I viewed the place where I grew up. And it added to the affinity. And I think that is one of the reasons that no Even members of my family who do travel outside, go outside, they keep coming back especially on occasions like festivals and specific seasons. If there's a season like winter, so you have, you know, a non veg breakfast, punahari and all that. So you come back and you yearn for that. So I think all of this has influenced my, my equation with, with the Hindi bed.
- [17:31]
Praveen Zani
The passion with which you speak informs your book. And that's what was my biggest takeaway, that this was a live pulse of the Ganga Jamni Tahzeeb. And I love how you have compiled an exhaustive book. This will be a valuable resource on studying and understanding the Hindi artland for years to come. My next question would be about why was one particular language Hindi chosen and why is it that this language is used as a political construct? I'd like to hear your thoughts on it.
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Ghazala Wahab
See this polarization that I'm talking about, the, the very overt manifestation of this polarization was the language. When, when the British came and they were looking for a, a language, I mean they had replaced Persian with English but when they were looking for a lingua franca which ordinary people would speak and they wanted to teach their own personnel who were coming from England who had joined the East India Company. So the language that they were trying to construct which they thought would be spoken by a large number of Indians was Hindustani. And they tried to create various kind of presees for their personnel so they could learn the language. And one way of learning the language is to, you know, create short stories or you know, something which is of interest. So people who read it easily. And while this was happening they, they got some people, scholars to build this, this reservoir of literature for teaching purposes. So nothing, no great literature, but basically readers. But when this process was going on they realized that within this language lived two, two different religious identities. So there was one language which was, and both were Hindustani, but there was one form of Hindustani which had a preponderance of Persian Arabic. And it was written in which is an Arabic script. And then there was another. The language, the vocabulary was roughly similar but it had a little bit more of Sanskrit in it and it was not being written in. I mean a lot of people were still writing it in Arabic script but there was a growing clamor that this should be written in a, in a script in which Hindu scriptures were written. So that was dev mati. There were other contenders at that point. I mean, you know, a lot of people were using the Kathy script, a lot of people were using your other scripts also. But at that point, because people, suddenly, the Indians and the British also realized that this can be an issue by which we can divide the people. So they decided to separate the language and create one for the Muslims and one for the Hindu. And that is how Hindustani written in the nastalic script with a preponderance of Urdu and, sorry, Persian and Arabic words became Urdu and the other one became Hindi. And the script was separated and Nalgari or Dev Nalgari became the script for that language. So the people who were proponents of these two languages also started to identify themselves and with the language which they thought was closer to their religion. So the Muslims, and especially, you know, Muslim reformer like Sir Syed Hur and he is called a reformer not because he was reinventing Islam, but reformer as in he was reinventing or reforming the Muslim society, pushing them towards English education. So he threw his weight behind the Muslim version of Hindustani which was. Which had udu sorry, which had Arabic and Persian nouns, more of that. And the, the others and the square. The leader of the other side of the Hindi side was Bhatti Indu Harishchandra, the renowned Hindi poet. So. So there was a lot of tussle between the two groups also because the language then became the determinant of government employment. Because the British had systematically eroded the Indian manufacturing because they wanted to supply their own manufactured goods into India. They were exploiting India as a market for their manufactured goods. Agriculture had more or less collapsed, especially in the Hindi belt because the focus had shifted to cash crops like indigo and opium, cotton to some extent. So the source of employment was then only the government job. And the government job was linked to the knowledge of language. So that is, that further led to the division between the two communities on language because then they identified each language with their religion and especially their religious scriptures. So Hindi for Hindus and Urdu for Muslims. And the famous slogan of that time was Hindi, Hindu, Hindustan. So that is how the language leads to, was identified with religion and subsequently with the nation. So that division that I'm talking about, which kind of runs through the theme which runs through the book, the first manifestation of that was the language understood.
- [23:34]
Praveen Zani
Now, would you say that economic opportunism was the first motive and communal polarization was a byproduct of it. In this attempt, especially from the Indians, when we speak about Bhartindo Harishchandra or when they created these two very different language streams, was, was their primary motive purely opportunism?
- [23:58]
Ghazala Wahab
The primary motive was government Jobs because that was one big source of security which continues till this date. I think we are one of those few countries in the world where government jobs still hold so much of primacy that people are willing to gripe for a government job. So that was the primary focus. But while they were doing that, I won't say it was so much of opportunism. It was basically desperation because the, the economic avenues were so limited. So whatever was available, the pool was so small, so that you had to have a good share for yourself and your community if you had to be the leader of your people, of your community. So that was the primary goal or the primary objective. But it was, it's very difficult to say that where it stopped and where communal divisions crept up. Because see, after 1857 though, the majority of people who participated in The Rebellion of 1857, by virtue of sheer population numbers, were Hindus. But in popular perception it appears that or and British also encouraged this kind of thinking, that it was a Muslim British affair, that the Muslims were fighting because Mahadu Shah Dakar was a leader of the rebel rebellion, so he was fighting to restore the Muslim Mughal Empire. So that was a popular perception. And a lot of Hindus at that time, time, especially in Delhi and laboring areas, took advantage of this situation. And they also created the narrative that it was the Muslims who wanted to, who were ungrateful, who wanted to throw the British out. And the Hindus supported the British and they were aligned with the British. So British, obviously they knew what the truth was. I mean, they suppressed the surveillance of the new how many people from which community participated. But they allowed this perception to grow because in this they saw the possibility of division. Because they realized that if this division is not allowed to fester or it is not allowed to widen, then we could have trouble on our hands, there could be another rebellion. And this worry, this anxiety that the two communities and Muslims should not come together was so strong in their head that when non cooperation movement happened and the two communities, Gandhi was able to, you know, bring them together and kind of marry their differences. He said, we support kalapat and you support non cooperation. So it was a bit, bit of a shock for them. Which is why subsequently, when the following decade, when civil disobedience happened, they ensured that the communal division remained. And you know, they were not able to overcome the differences. So Muslims sacked civil disobedience out because they were not happy with the Congress Party and its policy. And meanwhile the British had also propped up the Muslim League. And so they were trying to Project Muslim League as a rival to Congress and then finally quit India happened. And once again Gandhi was able to bring the two communities together. And if you see I have quoted some British correspondence from that period in the chapter on freedom movement, they were really very, very worried and they thought that it was the end of the British supremacy in India. So that was a level of anxiety. So this division between the two communities was a very important part of their policy of administrating India, administering India. And it remained post 1857 until 1947.
- [28:12]
Praveen Zani
Understood. Now my next question would be looping back a couple of generations behind about geography and its influence on spreading Hindi or various dialects of Hindi across this vast region. So what are your thoughts on geography enabling the spread of this one language mutually intelligible across such a vast region?
- [28:35]
Ghazala Wahab
See, language is also a consequence of, I mean as much a necessity to communicate as it is a consequence of technology. So if you are, if a new technology comes, then you need a new world to describe that technology and what that technology does for you, whether it is as something as simple as a door. So when people started building draws to their houses, they needed a word for that and a ready made word came from Arabic, so darwaza. So it became accepted everywhere because then people did not bother to invent their, a word in their own particular languages for that because it was a handy word and everybody understood it. So that is how this language which we call Hindavi developed in this region. Because this region, if you see it's except for the boundaries of this region where you have, you're in Rajasthan, you have deserts and in the southern part you have low, you know, plateau area. Otherwise in the north you have high mountains. But ensconced in between this region it's a flat land. So there was a lot of mobility among people. Moreover, all the invaders who came and who were, who made India home and who were, who established their empires here and were governing India from Delhi or Agra or basically this region, the, the, the principal territory which they occupied was basically the Hindi bears. So there there was unity of the region because that was a part of the empire, give and take a few territories here and there were proudly, this was the, this was the area. Then this unity of geography also led to unity of economy because then the trade would happen within this region. So intelligibility amongst languages was bound to happen because you treat, you're dealing with people from who are speaking a different language or a different dialect of say of the same language. But the vocabulary is roughly the same so even if your grammar differs a bit, you are able to understand broadly what one is saying to the other person. So I think that is how intelligibility amongst all these languages grew, whether it was Braj or Avati or Bhojpuri. And over a period of time, from within these languages, a very distinctive language started to get culled out. So in the urban areas or in the Delhi and the western belt, it was called Khari Voli. In the eastern region, eastern up Bihar, it was called Avadi. But roughly the vocabulary was roughly similar, the manner of speech was different. Which is why if you see both Tulsi Das's Ramayan and Malik Muhammad Jaisi's Padmabad are written in Avadi. But you, you see, one is written in Nagari and another is written in Nascalik. So it's a language.
- [32:12]
Praveen Zani
Is the same understood?
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Praveen Zani
Now my next question is going to be slightly controversial, but do you believe that this geography is the very reason why you also have a common perception or acceptance of caste and patriarchy and all the other norms that come with it?
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Ghazala Wahab
See I Caste is pan India. It's not specific to the Hindi belt. In fact, if you see the southern part, Tamil Nadu especially, or Kerala, the preponderance of caste is. I mean it defines the society there, the reformers. The earliest reformist movements against caste happened in Tamil Nadu post independence movement. So it, it's nothing. It has, it's not specific to the Hindi heartland. The other thing that you're talking about, which I forgot about which, what is the other thing? Patriarchy. Patriarchy again it's pan India. See the, the reason we think it is very specific to the heartland is maybe because of the way we perceive it and also because in popular culture, especially in movies, there's a huge reflection of the Hindi belt. So you see when you see a film like I can't think of any name right, Uncle Ami or Batwara. So you, so you see the. It's a Bollywood film but you see the cult, the cultural reflection is of the Hindi belt. It's of this region. So that is why it seems that the patriarchy is very strong here and this region is more patriarchal than other parts of India or the caste division or caste violence is more pronounced here. It is true there are pockets in the Hindi belt which has seen vicious caste violence. Bihar for instance. But Bihar has seen a two way violence. There has been a caste backlash against the upper caste. Also there was creation of these multiple Senas where there was a sunlight army and there was a Randi. So they had. Because the, there was a rebellion by the Sultans in this region. So we, we, we look at Bihar as a volatile state primarily because the weaker caste, the Dalits were retaliating. They were not accepting the violence being meted out to them. In other parts of India this retaliation was not that strong. I suppose the one mechanism of retaliation was leaving the religion as happened in Tamil Nadu, in mass conversion or as happened in Maharashtra. So I think because of the violence here we tend to think that this area is more caste ridden and the politics here is more caste ridden. But I, I do not think it is correct. Even today if you see Karnataka politics even within the upper caste, upper caste, the savannas also there are so many caste divisions. I mean Lingayat and Vocalikas and I mean I don't even know the names. So it's not specific to the Hindi belt.
- [36:41]
Praveen Zani
The impression of the Hindi heartland coming across as a casteist place is primarily because of the films and the culture that they espouse. Which is why this conversation is so important because of the kind of stereotypes and tropes that we have been filled with popular culture and media. Now my next question is about Bihar. And Bihar is a case of gerrymandering by creating separate states out of it leaving as you'd quoted. I forgot. Who was it? Bard, Balu and Lalu. Why was this created what seemed like otherwise a perfectly prosperous state. You've carved out all of its mineral rich resources into separate states leaving behind this morass. Why?
- [37:25]
Ghazala Wahab
See the. The movement for Jharkhand's separation or Jharkhand's identity as a separate state goes back to pre independent period. It's very and in fact much, much before independence, many decades before independence there has always been a movement for creation of a Jharkhand state. So this didn't have anything to do with caste or anything to do with post independence politics. The various Jharkhand parties have been promised by successive government, even by the British India government that their concerns would be addressed and they would be, you know a separate state would be created for them. Then subsequently after independence of the Congress governments also used to assure them that different their concerns would be addressed. So of all the states which were created in this region, the new states which were created whether it was Chhattisgarh or Uttarakhand, Jharkhand were actually one movement which was historic movement it sustained through the British period and after independence also Uttarakhand was a consequence of caste. Actually it was a consequence of post Mandal politics. So this was, this was a demand which was raised by the upper caste because they did not want the government jobs to go to the backwards and the Dalits. So this one state was created primarily because of the caste factor. And Chhattisgarh was purely administrative decision because a tribal, you know, a majority in population dense forests. And so it was not being. It was difficult to manage this foreign from one capital city Bhopal which was very removed from the eastern part of the state. So they created it as more as an administrative unit. But I do not agree that Jharkhand was a consequence of any politics. This was a sustained movement by the people of Jharkhand for many many decades.
- [39:49]
Praveen Zani
The impact of this of carving out Jharkhand from Bihar left behind, as you mentioned Bad Balu and Lalu. So what was apart from the economic significance what else were the repercussions felt by the leftover Bihar state?
- [40:06]
Ghazala Wahab
See Bihar is unique in the sense that it is divided between north and south by the river Ganga and it has one tiny state, has so many rivers. I don't remember the numbers. Now I've mentioned the oak especially the northern part of Bihar which is north of Ganga. So it is hugely flood prone because all these rivers they come from Himalaya and they drain into Uganga and before the drain into Ganga. They drain into two other rivers, Kosi and Sari in fact. So it has always been prone to. To a lot of flooding which ensured that this part did not have large land holdings. And people had to abandon their land during the monsoon and either live on the bunks or migrate to other places for employment. So this ensured that this region, this part remained underdeveloped because even the agriculture could not sustain and it could not sustain the population dependent on agriculture. So they had to perforce get into, you know, resort to petty labor. Whether in Bihar or outside Bihar. And obviously there was since there weren't any industries in Bihar. See we keep saying that there are no industries in up There are no industries in Bihar. These were the agrarian regions and post colonialism these were the granaries of India. They were feeding the entire empires. So the focus. And in. Apart from that in UP you had small scale industry. So you had small scale manufacturing here. So those were the economic models. Now after the independence for some reason the government did not invest in building any manufacturing in this territory. It just focused on natural resources, exploitation of natural resources. Whether they were agricultural resources or mineral resources. And I think this is lazy thinking. It's evidence of your poor imagination, your poor. Your poor visualization of your future. And the second part was that because over a period of time you did not have any manufacturing in this area, in this region especially Bihar. So you did not have trade, manpower, whatever trade labor you had at one point of time they were sent out of India as indentured labor to various British colonies. So there was the migration of some kind of trained population or some kind of skilled population from this region. So what was left behind us were those who were unemployable even by the colonists. So that is that led to poor human capital in this region. So once the mineral rich Jharkhand was separated from Bihar, north Bihar suffered the most. Because now for employment these people had to go out of Bihar. So they had to move to UP and, and then from UP to the west part of the country mostly Bombay and Calcutta or even South India or Punjab as farm laborers. Because the only skill they had was the physical strength. I mean the only thing they had to offer was physical strength. So they were. They could only do labor work. And the southern part of Bihar had large land holdings because of non flooding RA rivers, a lot of rivers. So extremely fertile land. And that was one of the reasons that this. Well entrenched landholders, the. The Samidars of this region or the. I'm forgetting the Word Basically the, the land holders. So they resisted land reforms. There is a sweet division of land, land reforms which happened in UP but that they didn't happen in Bihar. So Bihar had this very skewed population Lakes in south South Bihar where you had rich zamitas, rich land holders and gumihars. That's the word I was looking for. So you had gumihar and you had labors, laborer class. And that labor class was forced backward and throw Khalid. So to ensure that they remain in their place, violence was meted out to them. A lot of them were forced into bonded labor. So I think it has been a vicious cycle. And when the politics grew, developed a post independence politics developed in this region. The politicians also realized that by mobilizing this population for a political purpose they were able to get dividends at the hustle. I mean they were able to reap electoral benefits without actually doing anything for the upliftment. So they had no incentive to do anything beyond that. And people also they were politically empowered and that empowerment gave them a false sense of empowerment. So they also did not think in terms of social and economic benefits as they should be demanding for them the political empowerment that they are part of the ruling dispensation whether in the state or subsequently at the center, that itself was enough for them. So even today if you see the, the educated or the talented human capital from Bihar migrates outside the state and they do phenomenally well as in government services, in administration, in academics, they do very well. But those who prefer to stay back are mostly into politics and from lower level to higher level they engage in politics and assertion of their authority on the weaker class.
- [46:39]
Praveen Zani
I love what a meta answer you have given because this one answer answers so many other questions. I mean it's easy or I hope it is right. However, to infer that Bihar's caste based activism is a consequence of its rivers and its flooding.
- [46:58]
Ghazala Wahab
No, I think the caste race activism is the flooding is in the north part north of Ganga. But this activism or the most volatile part of Bihar which has seen a vicious caste violence and also the growth of the left wing extremism after Naxalbari exploded in Bengal. This, all of this is not really in the north part of Bayar north part. It is all in the southern part which is a prosperous one which is where the Bhunihars rule, which is where the caste divisions and the class divisions are extremely pronounced. This is where this rebellion by the subalterns has happened historically. So the north part is basically comprises migrant population they spend part of their, part of the year tilling their land, small pockets of land and part of the year outside the state working as labor or whatever in other parts of the country.
- [48:05]
Praveen Zani
Okay, okay. Interesting how this plays out because I would infer that because of the flooding that they were resource deprived which is why there was more competition. But however, it's interesting that it's a southern part which is far more settled where there's ample amount of fertile land where caste differences are most pronounced.
- [48:25]
Ghazala Wahab
Because of the fertile land, the holdings are big which empowers the land holder. The Bhoomihat were really, you know, they're like Terrence there tyranny is. So even today it's. So the caste hierarchy is very, very pronounced in this part and caste actually equals class in this part. It is the lower caste perforce are the poor.
- [48:53]
Praveen Zani
I see. If we speak about land reforms as a whole, how has it panned out across the Hindi heartland?
- [49:01]
Ghazala Wahab
See the one state which saw very definitive land reforms after independence was Uttar Pradesh. Which is why if you see the, the dynamics, the social dynamics of Uttar Pradesh even the, the lower caste Dalits are, they have pockets of power, economic power also. If you see, let's say western up so in western UP a lot of land is also held by people who we call Jacobs, which is a Dalit community. So the land holders, they're tillers, they own, they till their own land. So this has been the consequence of land reforms where land was divided amongst all people. So this has led to, you know, there has not been any large scale caste violence in UP and that has been a factor of economic empowerment of the lower castes also. So this is how the land reforms held. If land reforms had happened in Bihar also this social inequities that we see even today, probably they would have been flattened a bit. As far as Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan was concerned, they were not, they were largely the royal states. You know, they had many kingdoms there. So the line reforms did not happen in the way they happened in Bhupi. Because when the, after independence and even before independence the, the rulers or the maharajas had given a lot of land in for usage to manage the land. You know, it was on revenue sharing basis. So a lot of land was parceled out like that or the, or to tillers who used to pay in kind for the land usage of this land. So while on one hand it did empower the tillers to some extent but it also harden the hierarchies. So if you see in state like RA and Pradesh, the Class hierarchies even today they exist and they exist in a very. Almost like an anachronism in a modern time. You will usually. How, how does something like this even exist? You still behave like their kings existed by the sun. You know they your huzoor and sarkars and you know, stuff like that. So this sort of. And which is why you see the violence in these states is not large or mass scale violence as you see in Bihar. It is a more subtle violence which is geared towards telling the weaker community or the weaker caste their position in the society or enforcing hierarchy. So you can't sit on a horse, you can't sit on a chair or you can't eat in a plate. You know, things like that. So it's the violence, it's more as a means of setting an example for the larger community. So that's the difference between these two states which were principally states and UP and Bihar which were part of the British India.
- [52:38]
Praveen Zani
Where he speak about the opium factories spread across Malwa and the parts of Uttar Pradesh and Bihar and Bihar, not to mention Bihar as a Bengal. The cultivation of diet go dyes. What do you think was the consequence socioeconomically across the region by forcing people to cultivate cash crops and that too addictive such as opium has that now corroded society first because this was the very melt which under Mughal influence was.
- [53:10]
Ghazala Wahab
A manufacturing powerhouse and also a granary. It had huge, huge agriculture produce say when the British shifted to cash crops like indigo and opium. Apart from the fact that opium led to mass a large scale addiction to opiates, the other consequence was erosion of the fertility of the land. Because since the time of the Delhi Sultanate it was understood that one has to exploit the land to the best of its capability. You have to cycle the crop, you have to maintain a crop cycle. So you do one crop one season, then you do another crop and then come back to the earlier crop the following season so that the land remains fertile and it is not overused. But the British obviously their interest was not on preservation of the land because the, the earning that they, whatever they were earning from India was being riveted to the home country. So in India was, I mean they were always outsiders in India. India was not the country where they were living and they were investing in the either in the land or in the people. So for them it did not matter whether this indigo farming was actually rendering the land becoming being infertile over a period of time. It so happened that the preponderance of droughts increased after the British because the land would stop yielding crops and in. Because they were not interested in Indian food crops because they, they. They were not consumers of Indian food crop to a large extent. So they did not see any value in that. So famine, famines and droughts and all that was a consequence of this. So this led to progressive impoverishment on of this region. On the one hand you, you completely destroyed the manufacturing and on the other hand you destroyed the agriculture. I mean they destroyed the agriculture. So this economic impact of the colonial rule in this region is Bihar and UP has been devastating. And even up full decades after independence the Indian, the successive Indian governments actually did not really understand what they should be doing. Their economic model was largely based on the British model. So they were looking at large scale manufacturing in big cities which the British had established. British had established mills in Maharashtra. So they focused on that because they felt that big industries. See the vision was thinking big. You, you create big dams, you create big industry. So they did not realize that the, the, the. The core of this region was its small hand crafts in waste manufacturing. That was the call that that was the asset. Not only the asset, that was the, that was the core of this region. The, the trade, the, the skills of the people of this region were in these crafts. So when you, when the government did not address this industry, when the government decided to focus on the large scale industrial manufacturing it actually disincens, disincentivized preservation of these skills. And all this small scale industry from the Mughal period they were family run enterprises. So the skill was passed on from father to children and after marriage to the wife. So it made no sense to then preserve these skills. Because if these skills were not yielding results then why waste money on that or why waste your time on that? You might as well go and, and work as a laborer somewhere or at a construction site. So that, that has been a very sad consequence of our colonialism and post independence short sighted policies understood.
- [57:44]
Praveen Zani
Safe to say that the Hindi heartland is today facing a de. Deindustrialization once again after East India Company did what it did.
- [57:53]
Ghazala Wahab
I think deindustrialization happened long ago. It happened during the British colonial rule and the industrialization has not happened after that. So what? There was partial resurrection of Indian crafts industry especially in UP also because there was a demand for this kind of handicraft items because they were all luxury items whether it's hand woven silks or tie and dye or you know, iron smelting and all that brassware. But the thing is that the government did not invest in developing skills, of furthering skills in this area. It just supported them as, as an indulgence. So there would be Festival of India, let's say in Paris. So these people would be, the craftspeople would be taken there to showcase their craft there and they would make some sales, get some orders and come back. So if the government had invested in promoting this in a, in a sensible way, then they would have kept abreast with the changing trends. They would have invested in skilling the people, they would have invested in subsidizing certain raw materials. I mean I, there's a chapter on economy in the book where I'm talking about the Banaras silk weavers. And they, even today they have to buy the yarn at the market price which increases the cost of their, the woven silk. And silk weaving by hand takes many, many weeks. So in any case the cost is high. So if your raw material itself is so high and there's taxation on that, so your, your supply, your customer base shrinks. Very few people, the elite, only elite can buy that. Similarly in Muradabad, the brass industry, there's so much of taxation at every level. I was thinking when I was talking to a few economists that why should the government handhold, why shouldn't the industries be competitive? I mean that is the idea of free market. They should be competitive. But then I was told that actually even the freest of markets they nurture their core assets. And this economist gave me the example of French wine and they said the government protects its wines. So though it's a free market, but they ensure that their vineyards are protected, the family owned vineyards are protected. There is a markup on the produce from those family owned vineyards. So all governments do that. We are talking of FDA's and we are talking of free trade, free trade agreement. The Prime Minister has just come back from UK and you see the protectionism inbuilt in the fda. They're pushing their liquors, the whiskeys in India. So if this is not government support to their industry, what is it? If in, in India you give corporate tax holidays to big corporate houses, so what is it? You get subsidized, subsidized land to big corporate houses. So that is government support to them. So if you are to support one kind of industry, why can't you support another kind of industry? It is not that the same principle of competitiveness or free market is applying. You are using the same broad brush for everything you are not. So I think that is a flaw because we think if it's a small scale industry, the government should not support it or the government should have a hands off approach. But if it's a large scale industry because a large corporate sector also kind of benefits the government in other ways. So it is a good Tokyo. Completely unrelated to this. I'll give you another example because I edit Force magazine and I deal with the defense industry. So I'll just give you a small example that I, I, I go to a lot of defense exhibition all over the world and the big, even a country like the United States, when it comes and participates in a defense or aerospace show, it takes a huge pavilion and it takes that pavilion only for it a small scale private sector industry. So they subsidize that stands inside that pavilion for their small scale units, defense units with somebody who's making some small part, some boards or nuts or whatever and they, they help them. The government of India also takes a pavilion but they only showcase the government industry, the public sector industry. Is there no private sector Indian industry is allowed to, to participate or be part of the government pavilion? This is a very strange kind of approach. I mean within the, within your own industry you have, you're distinguishing between what is a government owned industry and what is the private sector. Though even a private sector, if it supplies something to, let's say a customer in Germany, the benefits of foreign exchange is going to come to the country only. So I think our policies are very skewed. I'm not an economist, so I have not been able to understand the merit of this sort of tunnel vision when it comes to nurturing your own industry.
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Ghazala Wahab
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Ghazala Wahab
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- [65:30]
Praveen Zani
You see an Autonix and yet your book has hit the nail on the head. When it came to the north north India's de industrialization how it had a fantastic artisanal class and if these questions were addressed instead of looping going back into caste and land based politics things would have transformed but clearly they didn't. So you've already answered most of those questions in your book which is why reading the Hindi heartland is I would say extremely important for anyone wanting to understand this region. Now moving from economics into sociology could you tell us about how has the middle class in the Hindi heartland evolved across the generations? Or is this a new phenomena a middle class that is?
- [66:18]
Ghazala Wahab
No, I don't think middle class is a new phenomena though some sociologists kind of put the emergence of the middle class after independence and they look at the emergence of middle class to the economic reforms. But while you would have seen it in the book also even in the Mughal period when the administration expanded so the people who are part of the administration the scribers you know those are small the money lenders, the small businessmen owners also businesses of people who were under the system. I mean they would be all middle class. I mean I, I, I don't imagine them to be royalty or part of the royalty they, they, they this would comprise the middle class and similarly during the colon colonial period the people like poets, the writers, the, the Kahan, you know people who were the cops and wheels of the government they would all be middle class. So I think there has been a section of a middle class a certain group of population especially in the urban areas this there always existed some middle class. Maybe the number was not so huge, maybe the population of poor was greater and the middle class was smaller. But I think there a lot of worse has happened on, on the the erosion of the Mughal power after Aurangzeb and they attribute it to the growth of the middle class because the middle class became more powerful and almost they did not the Mughal rulers they did not understand the emergence of this chaos of people which was politically and economically assertive. So I, I, I think this class existed all the time always post independence. What has happened is the Emerg, the emergence of large industry and industrial houses, the people who are employed by these industrial houses. It led to a substantive upward mobility and expansion of the middle class. So now we see the middle class as a, as a very, as a largest part of Indian population, the biggest segment in India today is the middle class. So it looks like it's a recent phenomena, but I don't think the presence of the middle class is a recent phenomena. The other thing is that because this class emerged out of economic building and economic prosperity, it kind of grew more insecure and it became more vulnerable to erosion of that economic prosperity, which had lifted it from the. From the, you know, category of the poor to the middle class. So this segment of our population had being more, you know, helping, more receiving of the idea of treating everybody who's opposed to them as adversary, as an enemy. So the radicalization that. That is a running theme through the book. As you would have noticed that the earliest recipient of this radical thought was the middle class. They were the first ones to. To safeguard their own interests, to safeguard their newfound prosperity. They were the first ones to label other, especially the Muslims, as enemy. So I think over the period of time, the, the outreach by the rss, the, the ministrations of the RSS within the Indian society has been in this category of people. The biggest success story has been this group of people, the middle class. So I think that is how the middle class has emerged in India.
- [70:38]
Praveen Zani
Is this the same class that helped evolve Urdu from Kariboli?
- [70:44]
Ghazala Wahab
I think Urdu evolved Kariboli. And Urdu, at least in the Delhi region, was roughly the same language. And the, this, you know, in the Shah Alam's tenure, the Mughal emperor Shah Alam, he. He used to call this language udu. And basically it was not really the language he used to call it Delhi udu. UDU was referred. UDU was a control. It was a cant area. So this was. That was the meaning of the word. So he used to call Delhi this exalted, you know, exalted language of the exalted city. So I think Karibali was spoken in this region, and it was roughly the same language. And this is a language which is attributed to a very large extent to the poetry of Amir Khusrov, because he came from this region and he incorporated elements of drudge into the locally spoken version of Urdu and, or Hindabi. And that sort of poetry, that sort of writing led to the growth of this language, which was khadi boli, a very polished version of the local languages, elitist version of the local languages were refined complex vocabulary which would be used to express complex ideas. So if you see the poetry of this period especially or before that meet, you see the difference, you see the evolution of the poetic thought and the language. So I think that was a consequence of this. And you're right, this, this group of people or this segment of the population would be called Marill Glass, called poor also because he was always in debt. But his friends and everybody, they would be called Miri Grass.
- [72:49]
Praveen Zani
Thanks to the East India Company and their machinations, the creation of a Hindi artificially removed from Hindustani and creating a separate language called Urdu, one designated quote unquote for Muslims. Do you believe these were the seeds which would eventually culminate in the fruit we know today as Partition?
- [73:12]
Ghazala Wahab
The language, as I said, was the earliest manifestation of the division. Once the languages were divided, they were increasingly linked with religion. So which is why when the script was to be decided for Hindi, they said it should. It's not Nagri, it's Devanagari. Devnagari is language of the script of the gods. So it was increasingly associated with religion. Similarly, the Muslims, the, their affinity or their love for Nastalik stemmed from the fact that it was linked to Arabic. I mean it was an Arabic script. So the language created this very porous grounds in which once, you know, this revisionist history started pouring on, was being poured by the British. It just absorbed everything as fact. And our own legacy of living in harmony with one another even if we were not always in love with other. If Hindus and Muslims didn't love one another, but they did not hate each other to kill each other, so they were living together separately and it didn't matter to them because there was so much of social and economic interdependence. If you see that historic bit in the book, the businesses, the trade, everything, the cultivation, everything was so closely interlinked between the two communities that they could not but cooperate with each other. And they saw the merits of cooperating and because it immediately translated into prosperity. But when the British came and the religion had already shown this sorry language had already shown the difference and they saw the success of this venture, they just continued to try open wider and more wider and eventually we just believed, especially Hindus aligned with the organizations like Adizamaj and subsequently Hindu Madhava started to believe that the 600 years of Mughal rule was the darkest period of their history. And countless of women were raped and millions of men were killed and without any evidence of anything, there was no public, you know, no statistics of any kind. In fact, the first census of India was done by the British 20 years after, 10 years after 1857. So I how these figures, how these concepts grew and became so well entrenched, it's a marvel understood.
- [76:09]
Praveen Zani
So on the Internet I discovered this one phrase without lies, you could fill in whatever you want, say this project, it will eventually die. Now speaking about this artificial construct of a language which is not even a hundred years old today, in the age of the Internet, with so many, with the Hindi heartland discovering its own former dialects, be it Audi, Braj, Myithili, Kaithi, all the other dialects now coming up and more and more content being produced in these forms and not so much this artificially constructed Hindi. What do you believe is the future for this sanitized language, Hindi?
- [76:47]
Ghazala Wahab
Actually, the future of Hindi is for everybody to see. The people who are native Hindi speakers do not speak the language any longer. They prefer to talk in English. So, and they do not learn the language formally. I mean, even if the government is forcing us the three language formula in the school, then they are forced to study Hindi till at least class 10th, not 12. I study till class 12. But even today, despite having studied Hindi, class 12, I have forgotten how to write it very confidently. So I have to really think when I'm writing in Hindi that my mantras are correct or not. So that is the unfortunate part because after my school, my work and everything whatever I needed to do in life was always done in English. So I started to think in English, I started to express myself in English, write in English. So this is the biggest vein of the Vivi's tragedy of this language. This is not the case with other languages as you mentioned, or Vaikali because these are the mother tongue of the speakers of medley or Bhojpuri. So even if they adopted Hindi as their official language at home with the family members, they continue to speak in the language they always spoke in. And now because of YouTube and social media, there is a resurgence in content in these languages. And you see everybody is in this music. There's a thriving music industry in these languages now. And people who are native speakers of these languages, they only listen to these songs. I mean, I'm surprised that a taxi driver or a truck driver, he doesn't like to listen to Bollywood songs as much as he likes to listen to Bhojpuri songs when he's driving. So I'm very surprised that all these songs are so famous and, but these guys are not listening to them. So I think the, the, the Problem is that because Hindi was artificially created and it created. It was a British enterprise. But within India it was the language which was. The vested interest in this language was the Brahmins, essentially the Brahms. So they tried to Sankatize this as much as possible. So if you see the Hindi literature which subsequently emerged in the 20th century it is so Sanskritized that without, without assistance you cannot read it. You can't read the poetry in Hindi, you can't read novels in Hindi without somebody helping you with the. With the language. And if you need help to read fiction, work of fiction then obviously your interest is not going to develop. So most speakers of Hindi language they do not read Hindi classical literature. They would probably read racy novels, you know, just which you pick up from the railway station which in any case doesn't use a pure language, which use a pidgin language, you know, it's a mix of Hindi. Go to Punjabi or English and everything. So their language today the growth or the sophistication of Hindi as it should have evolved has not happened. And as a language it remains stunted because of that. I remember when I was in school, in my. In class, I think when I was in class ninth, I think the English novel which was prescribed to us was Treasure island. And anybody would want to read it even without teachers, assistants. And the one prescribed to me in Hindi, I don't even remember the name. And it was, it was a novel all right, but it was a moral kind of a tale which was the. The whole purpose of that novel was to show how Western civilization of western behavior, Western clothes is bad and a woman who wears western clothes is not respected in the society. And if you wear saris, you. So there were two characters, one woman who was always dressing Indian clothes. So for a 14 year old, I mean this is not the kind of book I would enjoy reading. I mean I read it because it was prescribed to me but it was not something I was enjoying it then similarly In I think last 10th or 11th, I'm forgetting which year we were reading Lot of the Rings in English and in Hindi we were reading Karambhumi. Now I know Karambhumi by pension is a fantastic novel and one must read. But you see the comparison. I mean in English you're reading a book which is so engaging and in Hindi you are again reading a. A moral tale, a tale which. So the literature in Hindi has. The purpose of Hindi literature has always been to. To sermonize. So for young people it was not interesting to read as an adult I would read and I, I have read subsequently in my adult quote, I've read a lot of pension and I really admire and have a lot of respect for his writing. But as a school going child, you see that you just compare the two. So it is automatic where my interest will grow, which kind of literature in which language I would want to read. So that is a. This is not the case in Bangla or in Tamil or in any other language because the native literature itself is so interesting. Or this is not the case in Urdu also because the Urdu literature, whatever be the state of Urdu literature, the Urdu poetry because of Bollywood and also of the poetic. So Mushay, it engaged people in such an extent that that interest never wavered. So even if you don't know how to read and write the script, your, your, your attachment to the language remains. And which is so for all the naysayers that keep saying UDU is dying to his time, I think it is not dying. I mean there's always a growing interest in the language primarily because of the poetry and to some extent also because of the films. So I think Hindi suffers because of this. We have tried to straightjacket the language. We've tried to treat it as a language which is above all other languages. So the vocabulary has to be so difficult. Which is why you hear people say that, you know, the Hindi which is written is not the way we speak because there is no meeting ground between the language we speak and the language we write.
- [83:58]
Praveen Zani
I recall reading in the book about former president Gyani Zayal Singh. Until the end of his life he could never really write his name as Zail in Hindi. He always had to write it as jail. And he also mentioned that to understand Hindi you required a dictionary or a grammar book, which was not the case with mother tongues. Which is yes. Which explains why Hindi never formally never received that kind of love that naturally originated languages received and therefore it had to be imposed upon now.
- [84:31]
Ghazala Wahab
Absolutely, you're right.
- [84:33]
Praveen Zani
I still have so many more questions to ask but in the interest of time I must. It's already 10 o' clock for you. I will ask you my last. What are your thoughts for the Hindi heartland as a region? And what advice would you give to people from people in this region with respect to their future culturally, socially, economically?
- [84:54]
Ghazala Wahab
I think everything, culture, social, society, economics, everything hinges on whether we are able to live together in harmony or not. Because in the absence of harmony between communities, between Hindus and Muslims, what is happening is there's a permanent state of tension, permanent state of strife. In the society. All of this impacts the economics because investment, it affects investment. If the society is peaceful, if there is no threat or no fear of any disruption, only then people would come and invest in your industry, in your society. So everything depends on that. Today what is happening is despite being a democracy, our democratic process itself has actually push some people processes and they have analyzed them to such an extent that those who were not slaves to their religious belief are now fearful of stepping out in the middle age realm. They want to stay on the margins because they are the security from the the margins. So this kind of divided society cannot be good for the future of any country. So I think we need to understand this. And you know, India is unique primarily because of its diversity. Our population is not mumbled a multilingual society. We are a multi ethnic society. So we cannot have one, you know, one nation, one election, one language, one law, one this one that cannot have one of anything. We have to have multiplicity of everything. We should have. We should be able to create space for everybody to a biggest strength. And that has always been our strength.
- [87:09]
Praveen Zani
Through ages with this. Shall we field a few questions from the audience if there are any.
- [87:15]
Ghazala Wahab
I think they're also tired.
- [87:17]
Praveen Zani
Go ahead. Vedant.
- [87:18]
Vedant
Yeah, so my question was sort of mainly about D. I'm trying to like put it into words is it's really about you know, ever since I moved back to India myself I was in the US for a while and what really struck me about the you know, the Hindi belt is how it is so sort of dominant in terms of the media with Bollywood and it is so dominant in terms of the political landscape as well, but yet seems to have struggled so much economically and that and or that really seems to be the discourse around the Hindi belt that there is a lot of economic hardship. And I was wondering through your research what, how.
- [88:03]
Praveen Zani
What was.
- [88:03]
Vedant
How did that dichotomy even happen? How is there so much political power yet so so much economic hardship in the Hindi belt? If you could share some light on that through your research.
- [88:14]
Ghazala Wahab
See from. We have to again go back to the medieval times. The coming of the Mughals or Muslims in India. The political power Even in the 13th century, 14th century onwards it flow few from the Hindi bed from denning the. The biggest empires which were. They were anchored in this region and from here they spread their tentacles to other parts of the country. So the. The importance of the Hindi belt from political. From the perspective of political and military power goes back to that period. And when the British came they displaced the Mughal Emperor though he was powerless in any case. But whatever happened in 1857, the Mughal emperor was based in the Hindi, he was based in Delhi. So Delhi was the center of power even then. So the British created their capital in Calcutta and in the beginning, but once they displaced the Mughal Emperor in Delhi, within a few years they fell into propelled to come to Delhi to stake their claim to the Indian empire. Because even in their mind, this was the center of politics in India. So I think the importance of this region goes back to this history and subsequently when the constituent assembly was formed and when the constitution was being written, the majority of people came from this region. Which is why in popular perception, the idea of India comes from this region. Whether it is a language Hindi or whether it is even the popular food which we associate with India. If you go outside India and you're talking of Indian food, to a very large extent the food that you are talking about comes from this region. Or clothes, fashion, whether it's salvar, kamis for women or lehenga or, or whatever, ghararas or sherwanis or bankala. I mean, so the popular, all markers of populism, they kind of come from this region. So that gives it a disproportionate importance in the larger, larger perception of the country. And to a very large extent the Hindi film industry has contributed to this because the early people who were working in the Hindi film industry, even though the earliest people were the Parsis from Gujarat and Bombay region, but the language which they adopted to make their films in or the theater was Urdu. And subsequently, when even, you know, after independence or before independence, also the early writers, the script writers largely came from this region, the Upper, not Bihar so much, but some parts of Rajasthan. The songwriters, the actresses. Even before the Punjabis came, okay, Punjabi actors were there, I'm sorry, not actors from up, but actresses. A lot of female actors came from the Hindi belt. So, so the, the idea, the cultural idea which was being espoused about the country kind of emanated from this region. I'll give you an example of film like Shode. Now Shole was region agnostic. I mean you, it's not mentioned where in India Ramgarh is based though it was shot in Karnataka, but Ramgarh could have been anywhere in India. But you see the culture which was being shown through that village, the celebration of festival or the clothes or the language that they spoke, it came from this region. So I think that is why it has, politically, culturally, there has been a disproportionate contribution of this region in our thinking as far as economic backwardness is concerned. We've spoken about it at length.
- [92:38]
Vedant
Brilliant. Thank you so much. And I did have a follow up question based on what you said about Bollywood actually, because now we're living in a time where, you know, the film industries in the south, like the Telugu film industry, the Tamil film industry, Malayalam, they're all making films that are making inroads not just in their own local states, but also across the country as well, becoming major blockbusters in their own right. Do you feel like. And also, you know, of course there's the fact that a lot of these states now are really pushing their own local languages. So like in Karnataka, there's a big push for Kannada to be embraced more in Mumbai, Marathi and so on and so forth. Do you feel like this kind of upswell of, you know, embracing of local languages will translate in northern states or in the Hindi belt where, you know, there might be a push for people to embrace Bhojpuri or other local languages more?
- [93:38]
Ghazala Wahab
See, languages will always be, will always be associated with your employability. So if Bhojpuri cannot get you a job, nobody will invest in Bhojpuri. It will remain a language of comfort, a language which is spoken and you listen to your music or you read your literature in that language. But for employment purposes, you will have to learn, whether you like it or not, the language which gets you employment. And unfortunately in India or pan India, the language of employment remains English. So I, I don't think this consciousness of, or a push for your native language will go beyond parochialism. So it's politics, it's good politics, it gets you votes. But for an ordinary person, any kind of learning has to benefit you in terms of how much you can earn from your learning. So I don't think this push will go very far. As far as, you know, films from Karnataka and Andhra and Tamil Nadu making waves in pan India, it is true, a lot of films from these parts of Bahubali and a lot of other films, they've done phenomenally well and they've done better than Hindi language films across India. So. But does it really translate into any kind of cultural embracement by the audience? Are they, you know, accepting or adapting the culture that is being shown in those films? Whether it's in terms of food or clothes or mannerism or anything. I think that would be the marker of the lasting influence of these films. They are doing well because they are well made films and good films. So people are enjoying watching them. But are they influencing them in any way? I don't know.
- [95:46]
Praveen Zani
All right.
- [95:46]
Vedant
Thank you so much, ma'.
- [95:47]
Ghazala Wahab
Am. Thank you.
- [95:48]
Praveen Zani
Any others? I guess our question, our Q and A session could have gone for far longer, but it's not right on my part to hold you back for so long. Thank you for quoting this book, Gazala, this we again, I'm saying we just have just touched the surface. We just scratched the surface. There's so much more that we've covered and there's so many more questions. But this is such a. A rich and insightful, thought provoking book as a successor to Born a Muslim, as you say. It's fantastic. One of the best books on India I have read this year. Thank you for that.
- [96:24]
Ghazala Wahab
Thank you so much. You're extremely generous and I don't know what else to say. I'm speechless.
- [96:30]
Praveen Zani
Are there any other books in the.
- [96:31]
Ghazala Wahab
Pipeline now after I. I am working on another one. I have signed a contract, but too early to talk about it. I just started work time there in time. Yes. Thank you.