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Nayanjot Lahiri, "Searching for Ashoka: Questing for a Buddhist King from India to Thailand" (SUNY Press, 2023)
00:47:40
An interview with Nayanjot Lahiri
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Hello, everybody. This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder of the New Books Network, and if you're listening to this podcast on the New Books Network, I bet you like to read. I know that I do. That's why I founded the New Books Network. So as readers, we need to know what to read. And I have a podcast to recommend for you. That being the Proofread podcast, do you have a goal to read more this year? How about a goal to read more of what you love and less of what you don't? The Proofread podcast is here to help you. Hosted by Casey and Tyler, two English professors and avid readers with busy lives, Proofread helps you decide what books are worth spending your precious time on and what books aren't. They have 15 minute episodes that give you everything you need to know about a book to decide if you should read it or skip it. They offer a brief synopsis, there's fun and witty commentary, and there are no spoilers and no sponsored reviews. Life's too short to read a bad book, so subscribe to the Proofread podcast today. And by the way, there's a new season coming soon.
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Hi, I'm here to pick up my son, Milo. There's no Milo here.
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Who picked up my son from school?
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Streaming only on Peacock.
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I'm gonna need the name of everyone that could have a connection. You don't understand. It was just the five of us.
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So this was all planned.
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What are you gonna do?
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I will do whatever it takes to.
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Get my son back. I honestly didn't see this coming. These nice people kill each other.
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All her fault. A new series streaming now only on Peacock.
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Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Hello and welcome back to the New Books in Indian Religions podcast, a podcast channel here in the New Books Network. I'm your host, Dr. Raj Balkaran. More importantly, my guest today is Dr. Nayanjot Lahiri, who is professor of history at Ashoka University, will be speaking about a brand new SUNY publication called of course Searching for Ashoka Questing for Buddhist King from India to Thailand, welcome to the podcast.
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D
Thank you for having me, Raj.
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C
Oh, it's my pleasure to have you and really so many of our colleagues. Now listen, we were chatting a little bit before the podcast just to listeners sometimes like to have a little peek behind the curtain. So Dr. Lahiri was mentioning something that a great many, I'd say, maybe even the majority of my podcast guests have mentioned. Little might you know it from our conversations, but what were you mentioning to me just before we started recording?
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D
So I was mentioning to you the fact that this is actually my first podcast. So you've done 200 plus podcasts with all kinds of people. But I've actually, you know, shied away from podcasts, wondering whether I would be able to pithily summarize or highlight, you know, the important elements of my work. But you've just been so persuasive and tenacious about saying, no, no, we have to do this here. I am doing it with you.
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C
Yeah, by tenacious, I think, I think perhaps, you know, what I do is I present an opportunity to people and I have no idea how I landed where I am with this particular piece of this strand of my work in the world, but the opportunity is simply to bridge and to promote. And academics are notoriously like many professionals, self effacing and allergic to self promotion, obviously. And so I can do the dirty work for everyone and get the word out there on your podcast. But so many, many, many of my guests, and you wouldn't know it from the conversations at all, unsurprisingly, because what they wrote, the book, their life's work is the production and the dissemination of knowledge. And I've been told I'm fairly user friendly, so the conversations are fairly fluid, I suppose, but no welcome. And I'm glad I was. I've had this conversation so many, many times. And sometimes I can sense in the email I can sense reticence, but the reticence, for whatever reason, they push through. And at this point the podcast has a phenomenal track record. But in the earlier days it took a little bit of massaging because, you know, what was a podcast. You know, so many of the guests on this podcast, for those of you listening don't quite know what a podcast is and have never listened to a podcast. And it's phenomenal that for whatever reason, the South Asianists are all willing to participate in this podcast. Anyhow, thank you for sharing that. For those interested in a peek behind the curtain searching for Ashoka, tell us about the genesis of this Project. How did this project arise for you?
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D
So this book is actually, it's a sequel to my earlier book, which was Ashoka in Ancient India. That was my first book on Emperor Ashoka. Now, Ashoka, as you know, maybe a lot of the listeners would know, but just in case there are some who don't, he was the third emperor of the Maurya dynasty, and he actually ruled for a pretty long time by all pre modern standards, or even by modern standards, I would say from 269 BCE till about 232 BC when he died. Now, you know, when I was doing that first book, when I was researching it, I went to all kinds of places. Buddhist holy places, both in North India and Nepal, you know, hills and the river areas of Karnataka and Andhra and Gujarat, even museums where some of the edicts of Emperor Ashok have been preserved. And while doing, I also noticed that he was remembered in various ways in those places. So my travels had shown me this kind of intertwining of his life and memory in a variety of those places. So at some point after I had finished and published Ashoka in Ancient India, I think in a year or so, I started intensely missing Ashok because he really, as would be evident in a conversation as we go along, he was, was really quite a unique and unusual guy, forget being a ruler in many ways. And I felt it would be interesting to look at how he has been remembered but also forgotten across the centuries. So I went back to many of those places in order to understand, you know, how memories of him were shaped over time. And I then went beyond the Indian subcontinent. I looked at his memorialized forms in parts of Myanmar, in Thailand, and also in Sri Lanka. So this book is an outcome of journeys that began during my first work, Ashoka in Ancient India.
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C
Thank you. Now, before we touch on some of the particular rememberings and forgettings of Emperor Ashoka, say a bit more about what you teased just now in terms of him being. Him being literally remarkable in some sense or unique, or to what do we attribute the fact that he's so compelling a figure, other than, of course, his enormous political and social influence, what is it about him that's so captivating?
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D
So, you know, I think if we were to just juxtapose him with many other ancient rulers, rulers who are actually or figures who are remembered for their military exploits, Alexander of Macedon being one example, or Julius Caesar being another example, you know, you would realize in looking at the life and you know, what Emperor Ashok put out, that he is remembered not for such exploits but because he chose to speak to his people. So it's not that he didn't fight military campaigns. In fact, he fought a very successful military campaign in Kalinga in eastern India. But it was a slaughter. And the enslaving that resulted from that which made him feel that his military success was a moral failure. So, for me, that is one thing that was unique, that here is a ruler who has won this big military, you know, conquest over a large part of eastern India. But he paints himself as a villain of the carnage because of the collateral damage. And he then sees that as a watershed in his life, both in terms of governance and in terms of what he believed should be his own priorities at a personal level. So he then went on to elucidate very novel forms of governance and norms of public and personal conduct. But what is unique is that he's a communicator par excellence. He puts out in the public domain for his people on surfaces that have survived till this date. You can see the words of Emperor Ashoka in more than 50 places across the Indian subcontinent, but beyond in Afghanistan as well, where he talks about all kinds of things, including reducing the suffering not only of humans, but of other living beings like animals. He talks about how a more dignified death can, you know, can be brought to prisoners who are on the death row. He speaks about how tours of pleasure should be, you know, should be replaced by tours of Dhamma, Dhamma being morality. And that's what he, you know, tried to do. So, you know, that's something that actually makes him quite unique. There have been many emperors before him in India, but they're invisible to us because what they got recorded hasn't survived. So if you think of his grandfather Chandragupta, who figures in the indica of Megastha Athenes, a classical scholar, that's why we know him. We don't have anything of Chandragupta in his voice recorded. So Emperor Ashoka makes himself visible through his words and words which, you know, it's not just the communication which is important, but the words themselves are quite unique in terms of the messaging, what is it that he's putting out in the public domain? So, you know, that's why, I mean, to find a cerebral ruler. Cerebral men are always very fascinating. But to have a cerebral ruler in ancient India talking, you know, volubly about things that you don't associate with governance is really quite remarkable.
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C
One of the greatest marketing and branding campaigns of the ancient world, no doubt. So do we get a sense in your Perspective is, was Ashoka's moral qualms, you know, the stance that he took, you know, is it at all possible that some of that was positioning for sociopolitical purposes? Or do you get the sense that I was entirely born of an innate transformation or sort of a moral high ground that he was trying to establish?
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D
So I really do think that he was very ambitious in terms of putting out a series of messages which he believed that no ruler before him had done, and putting administrative heft behind those new forms of governance. I don't think it was really trying to, you know, work out the challenges of such a large empire, because the empire was already very much there, apart from eastern India, which he conquered. This part of Eastern India known as Kalinga, which he conquered. So, I mean, he, his grandfather and father had already established a very large empire. But I think he was very keen to make sure that his message was seen as something that was beyond one community. You know, the irony is, Raj, that while he is remembered as a Buddhist emperor par excellence, if you look at many of his edicts, you know, many of the messages that he put out, they are addressed in, to people in a way that makes it seem that he's reaching out to all communities. So the Brahmans are mentioned just as the Shramans are, which would include Buddhists and Jains and others. He talks about proper respect to parents, to the aged, you know, the sorts of things that you don't normally hear rulers talking about. He has an environment edict in his letter years where he talks about reducing the suffering and showing compassion to animals of all kinds, putting down certain days on which those creatures can't be killed, and so on and so forth. So I, I, you know, my sense is that it is, you know, he's putting out there a new way, a new way of moral governance, which is, which is quite unique. And that's for him, a spiritual victory. So he is ambitious. He is looking for a place, you know, in terms of his legacy, but it's not a place which any ruler before him, as far as he looks at his, has occupied.
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C
Fascinating. So tell us a bit about how your book is structured.
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D
So how is my book structured? So, you know, the book is, I mean, the sort of, I would say the core of the book is made up of, you know, the various reconceptualizations of the emperor that I followed in India and elsewhere. So there are several chapters of the book that are about Ashok in spots across India, from Jahanabad in Bihar to Kanganahalli in Karnataka. There are other chapters that have emerged from sites and cities in Sri Lanka, in Thailand and in Myanmar. And in every instance, beyond a sense of curiosity about how Ashok was remembered from South Asia to Southeast Asia, I think setting out on this trail, and I try to capture that in my chapters, you know, I try to show that it's helped me to understand the nature and the working of historical memory. So, you know, that's what the bulk of the book is all about. But my introduction actually is about. About Emperor Ashok's own ideas. I figured that there would be a lot of readers who may not have dipped into my first book. So I also decided to talk in the introduction about the historical king and what emerges from his words. Since this book is about remembrance, I also look in that chapter on how, you know, how Ashok looks at the past. How does he remember? What is it that he, you know, what is it that he chooses to remember and not to remember? And, of course, eventually there's a conclusion in the book which ties all this out, you know, which tries to see whether all the reconceptualizations are actually distinct or whether there are common elements in the various remembrances across a variety of geographical spaces and times. And the truth for me is that actually both ways of seeing Ashok's afterlife are possible. There is diversity, and that's what emerges from the structure and the content of my book, that there is diversity in the images of him. It's a very substantial diversity, but the derivation of each of those is recognizably from a core. And if I was to define that core, it would be that Ashok actually never stopped being remembered as the exemplary Buddhist king. So his remembrance is very much a remembrance in the religious domain as an archetypal Buddhist king.
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C
And would you say then perhaps. Well, arguably, then, is this not how Ashoka was attempting to be remembered? Isn't this the extent to which he's remembered in these various contexts in different ways? As an exemplary book Buddhist king, would you say that is what he was striving overarchingly to be remembered as?
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D
No, I don't think so, because, you know, there are two avatars that you see in Emperor Ashoka's words. So if you look at the way he fashioned his own image. So, you know, there are two images, they're very strong images. The first is as a new kind of ruler, which foregrounds his new modes of governance, the fact that his realm is not just about people, but it's also. It includes all others. It's about soft diplomacy, vis a vis those who are on the borders or beyond his empire. So there's a great deal it's about a direct form of governance where he asks reporters to come and talk to him about any problem at any time, even if he was in the Haram, even if he was eating, and so on and so forth. The other avatar of Emperor Ashok, in his own words, is that of a Buddhist. So he offers a glimpse of himself as a Buddhist, how he moved to that religion, his visits to various Buddhist sacred places, ranging from Mahabodhi in Bihar to Lumbini, where the Buddha was born, to other places as well, and also as a spiritual regulator and protector of Buddhist unity. Now the first avatar of Ashok is entirely forgotten, and it is this Buddhist avatar which actually never gets to be forgotten. And, you know, it gets a life of its own. So the Buddhist avatar takes many forms across Southeast Asia, even across India. And ironically, although Emperor Ashok's edicts refer to areas to the west of his empire, right up to Egypt, the areas to the east of his empire never figure. So, for example, any part of Southeast Asia, even in a generic sense as Suvarnabhumi, doesn't figure. But the funny part is that that's where he is remembered. So there is actually a disjunction between, I would imagine, how he wanted to be remembered and how he came to be remembered, and he wanted to be remembered by the way, by his own successors. So there's this anxiety that his form of governance should be followed by his sons and grandsons and so on and so forth. There's no evidence at all that they followed his path.
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C
So you mentioned this in passing in your response to how the book was structured. Maybe we can highlight it once more. What would you hope to be the primary takeaway conclusion gist the reader arrives at upon reading this book.
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D
So I think it would be that the historical Ashoka is qualitatively different from the remembered emperor. So in the case of the historical Ashoka, we learn a great deal about how he wanted to appear to his subjects, to the generations of rulers who followed him. So there is his own self crafted image which is immortalized in his own words. But then, you know, there is memory, and memory always depends upon the existing expectations of different cultures. And the major takeaway in relation to Ashok is that when we say he was remembered across the centuries, we are also saying that he came to be reinvented. So every culture takes things from, you know, that you see relating to Ashok and fashions them for its own reasons. Now, earlier I used to think that these reinventions have to do only with the ancient past because so little survives. But I now realize it's equally true for the modern past. So if you think of Mahatma Gandhi, you know, the Indian that most people beyond India are familiar with, and arguably the greatest Indian ever, in 1921, when he went to Gorakhpur and gave a speech, he mentioned certain key things. And within a few weeks in the newspapers of that area, there were reports of what villagers were saying about Gandhi, which was very different from anything that Gandhi had said. But it was said that this is what Gandhi said and this is what we should do. So what I realized from my own work is that there is a historical remembrance pattern, and I've seen that in relation to one king in antiquity, but it happens to be true for a large number of other Persona and phenomena. I did not find actually a great deal of the historical Ashok in the remembrance of the Buddhist king, but I think there is a Buddhist avatar of Ashok, the historical Ashok, and that's the theme which knits together all the remembrances of the king and the reconceptualizations of him. So that is one basic fact. So that's the major takeaway that Ashok is visible, but he's reinvented. This is a real good story about Bronx and his dad, Ryan, real United Airlines customers. We were returning home and one of.
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The flight attendants asked Bronx if he wanted to see the flight deck and meet Captain Andrew.
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I got to sit in the driver's seat.
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I grew up in an aviation family and seeing Bronx kind of reminded me of myself when I was that age.
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That's Andrew, a real United pilot.
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These small interactions can shape a kid's future.
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It felt like I was the captain. Allowing my son to see the flight deck will stick with us forever.
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That's how good leads the way.
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C
Yeah, this, I mean, one. One wonders whether or not this isn't. This isn't a pervasive cross cultural phenomenon that we see where various movements, various social movements political movements will draw upon and recast historical figures. Or divine or semi divine figures for some reason. What comes to mind, I mean, it's not entirely unrelated, is the story of Rama and the myriad ways in which the story morphs throughout South Asia and Southeast Asia. There are certain core elements that you can't have a story of Rama, for example, without an exile. But yet this figure is cast and recast throughout history and in modern times for various aims. So another thing I wanted to ask you about was the style of your book, which I find quite engaging insofar as you're not just writing as an historian and as an archaeologist, but the style is very much, how would one say, one gets a sense that you are letting us into your world and your voice and your perspective, in a sense. Do you want to say a little bit about the style of the book?
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D
So, for me, it was very important to make it evident that this book actually blends travelogue and history and archaeology and does it in a way that I'm looking for readers who are not academics to actually engage with it and to make also evident that knowledge is often very provisional. What you see as evidence can be interpreted in a large number of ways. And, you know, I try to make that also evident and to just tell you a little about my own sort of intellectual evolution. I began as a completely academic historian, writing for a select few in prose that was often clinical. Clinical and often off putting, I would say. And then I, you know, I discovered a whole new story about how the Harappan, the Indus civilization was discovered, the first, you know, civilization of India in the Bronze Age. And I wrote out a few chapters in my academic style and I sent it to my editor and he said, you know, you cannot be talking about such things in this style. And he said, now you please take a sabbatical from academic WR and read the following works. He told me to read Virginia Woolf, and he told me to read E.M. foster, and he told me to read the essays of all kinds of very, you know, interesting people. And he said, you know, just this is something that you should teach your students to do very early in their lives, but you should do it now. And after that. I've actually never written in an academic way, so even my first book on Emperor Ashoka tries to reach out to a larger audience. And I hope I've tried to do that here as well. So even though there is method there, you know, it's not sort of in your face making, you know, making a kind of allusion to all the things that I have read, you know, to. I Don't. I didn't want to just put off readers. I wanted to just put a lot of things in the footnotes, but also to make them feel how exciting it can be to try to go searching for a figure in places where you have never researched before. This was the first time I actually researched beyond India, in Sri Lanka, in Myanmar, in Thailand. So for me, too, it was like. Like being an undergraduate all over again. And I wanted to capture some of that in, you know, my book. So when I talk about Thailand, for instance, and I mentioned that, how retrospectively simplistic was it on my part to be so excited about the name of Ashoka springing up in all kinds of places, including, you know, in the name of an avenue which is in the Sukhumvit area of Bangkok, which I then realized was actually named not after this Ashok, but an Ashok Mantri, and, you know, a minister of the government there, a modern minister. So, you know, that that's the fun of doing research, but it's also the idea of actually reaching out to a whole lot of people by including sculpture, by including images, by talking of paintings, by discussing religious literature, often in an iconoclastic way, to make sure that, well, you know, my voice is also there, apart from what I am talking about from the ancient scriptures.
- [32:10]
C
Yeah. Well, certainly the part of the reason why I resonate with the New Books Network and why I do so many podcasts, although it's a labor of love, is really the New Books Network has in common something that I have in common with my own work, which is rendering accessible how do we share what we are doing to a broader public. Now, in my case, the vast majority of my teaching is continuing studies, so that's sort of what I do day in and day out. But. But beyond that, even when teaching undergrads, which I do maybe once or twice a year, I'll have an undergrad class. How do we communicate the depth, how do we communicate the complexity, but in an accessible way? And also, is it possibly the case that we can dedicate years and decades of our life to study without some emotionalities and passion behind it? And so I think it's crucial, in my view, it's crucial to adopt a style which communicates one's enjoyment or investment in material. My two academic books are published by Rutledge. They're both loosely on the Devi Mahatma, the first one, the Goddess and the King and Indian myth. So it's essentially, it's my PhD dissertation, tweaked a little bit, as is customarily the process to publish an academic book, and it's without question a scholarly work. And one of the reviewers, in a review where this person was reviewing, I believe, three or four different monographs that had come out on the Goddess in relatively short time, mentioned, much to my surprise and probably to the surprise of, you know, the editors and the peer reviewers at Rutledge in the Hindustani series, that this person is writing from the perspective of a bhakta, of a devotee. But it doesn't seem to affect their scholarly analysis. And I think to myself, what on earth in the writing indicates a confessional stance? Surely truly nothing else, it would have been excised or pointed out, as you know. But in my perspective, that reviewer was mistaking passion for the material for devotionalism. And certainly there are probably other lenses at play in terms of who writes how. But nevertheless, I think it's crucial to have passion for what one is doing and to communicate that. And it's infectious. It comes across to readers, it comes across to students. They become excited because of your excitement. And above and beyond that, we seem to be arriving at a space in scholarship where there is space for the voice and the perspective of the researcher while still steering quite clear of peddling perspective as fact. Do you see what I mean? Is it my imagination or do we seem to be arriving at a certain space in scholarship?
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D
So as far as I see it, this space has been there for a while. I'm thinking, for instance, of Carlo Ginsburg's the Cheese and the Worms, you know, which is about 16th century Miller who faced two inquisitions and ultimately, you know, was hanged for heresy. Now in that book you get a sense of. And this is published as far as I remember, in the late 1970s, if I'm not mistaken. You get a sense of, you know, of Ginsburg having to deal with different data. And he's telling you, well, this could be it or that could be it, but I'm not sure, I don't know. You know, that gets communicated through his writing. But I think as far as South Asian historians are concerned, that isn't quite so common. You know, it should be. And. But there are people who are now, you know, working in that way. Ramachandraguha happens to be one of them. You know, there are others like Partha Chatterjee and so on and so forth, some of whose writings have, you know, had this element of both passion and accessibility. But I completely agree with you that this is, you know, this is very, very important. And just as you can see it in Many parts of the world, you know, in history writing, this should become much more common. In South Asia, it isn't as common or, you know, it's not as. You don't see it as much as one would like to. I think Indian historians have been very good. South Asian historians have been very good when it comes to best of social science methods, you know, and so on and so forth. But when it comes to writing accessible prose, I think both in the academy in the west that works on South Asia, and when you look at South Asian historians who work in India, there, you know, that isn't as common. It's not around as much as it should be. There are, though, now a lot of scholars who do work with history but write in an accessible way. And I'm thinking not just of people like Dalrymple, for example, or Ira Mokhoti, people, you know, worked on the Mughals or the early modern or the modern itself. But one of my own students, Devika Rangachari, she did a PhD thesis on gender, you know, in. In early Medieval India. And then she went on to write a whole lot of books for young adults on different aspects of Indian history. And she's now written this book on the Maurya dynasty, which is a book which had lots of fun in it. It's a. You know, it's a book that I would recommend to my undergraduate students. So, you know, accessibility is really very important, and I'm glad that both of us feel the same way. I get really put off with if it takes about 10 pages to understand the argument of a particular scholar. And if I, you know, as an academic, I'm sure this must be putting off a whole lot of readers who dig history but don't dig prose like that.
- [39:21]
C
Yeah, and certainly there. Certainly there. There are various skills available to various people. And for some individuals, perhaps it's just a question of lacking an ability to write accessibly. But nevertheless, perhaps that should be something that should be. You know, we gain the tools we need as academics, and perhaps accessibility is one of the tools that ought to be acquired. And then sometimes one gets a sense that someone is writing this way purposefully. And I'm not sure when inaccessibility was the mark of brilliance, but it seems that there's a turn of it, that accessibility, obviously, assuming that the thinking is there, this cogence, and the argument, assuming that it's good scholarship, obviously, then it seems to me that accessibility is the metric of brilliance, because the ability to communicate something in a manner that others can understand beyond the Subfield. To me, this is a mark of really internalizing and grokking the implications of one's own research and also thinking with respect to analogs in other spaces and other fields. But accessibility podcasts, that's why we're here. So I'm glad you accepted this invitation to render accessible your work to a larger audience. Who might most be interested in this book? What subfields, what sort of readers, thinkers, you know, you know, who's the book for?
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D
So I think first of all, the book is for those who like good stories. You know, there are all kinds of fun stories here. But also for those who are interested in the pasts of Asia, especially since, you know, I'm writing about a figure who resonates in Southeast Asia, East Asia, you know, I don't look at China, but he's very much a part of the Chinese universe and so on and so forth. So I imagine it's also a book which would interest people who are interested not just in Buddhism, but in religion as such. And the third audience would be people who are interested in the question of memory. That is, you know, how does memory work? How historically do you recover the remembrance of phenomena or a Persona, and what does it tell us about various people? So I think it's. It's for all kinds of audiences. It's there for. I've written actually for the general audience who's interested in, you know, the Indian past and the Asian past. But it's also a book that would interest specialists who are. Who work in religious history, who work on South Asia and so on.
- [42:32]
C
So for my final question today, unless there was something else you wanted to. To mention about the book, which you're welcome to, of course, one wonders, what are you working on now or next, is this work that you're continuing?
- [42:45]
D
Suraj? What I'm working on now is entirely different. I spent so many years with Emperor Ashoka. Right. So I think I've.
- [42:55]
C
You need some time apart now.
- [42:57]
D
Yeah, yeah, I've had. I need my space. Right. But on a more serious note, you know, looking back, I think that I have actually worked on great civilizations like the Indus civilization or this big emperor, the most well known emperor of ancient India. And these are domains that include, you know, cities and civilizations and domesticated spaces and so on and so forth. But in ancient India, as. For a long time after that, actually a lot of the land was made up of forests and wilderness and people lived there, and even those who lived in cities actually while traveling, lived in forests and so on and so forth. So my, my project now is to try to see how different would the ancient Indian past look if I looked at it from the perspective of forest. So as a kind of pilot project for the last two years, I've been working in a tiger reserve. So this is the Bandhavgarh Tiger reserve, and it's in Madhya Pradesh, which is central India. And I've been looking at the archaeology that is there, ranging from ancient caves to water reservoirs that were created in the forests to early medieval temples and so on and so forth, and looking at how people actually engaged with forested landscapes. So going beyond cities and civilizations in domesticated spaces to look at spaces that I have never worked with. So it's a project which I hope will complete my education or at least extend my education. I, you know, I like to work on different things and to work in places about which I know very little. And through this process of, I mean, it was difficult to get my permissions because it's not easy from the perspective of the forest department, to convince them that you actually want to work on the archaeology of the forests. But once I got my permissions, I've sort of had really a blast walking around the jungles, because otherwise I couldn't even get off a jeep in a jungle, you know, without these permissions. So looking at how perspectives change, how in the ancient period people built into the hills, and in medieval times they are building on top of the hills. So you know, how the views of the forested landscape change, the engagement changes and so on and so forth. So that's what I'm working on. Very different from anything I've done up till now, perhaps.
- [46:02]
C
Different indeed. And also there are, there are themes, right? There are themes that run through the interests and the type of work. And so it sounds fascinating. And you never know, maybe we'll have you back on when that work is published. Thank you for appearing on the podcast today.
- [46:19]
D
Thank you. Great to be on this podcast. And it was not, you know, difficult at all. It was very enjoyable for me. Thanks.
- [46:29]
C
Oh, good. Oh, good. Well, this is the exception. The previous 270 podcasts were excruciating. People leave very much a jarred in a front. No, I'm kidding. That's good. I'm glad. I'm very, I'm, I'm very glad. They, they, they say I'm user friendly, whatever that means. Good. I'm glad that you agreed. And for those of you out there listening, who are colleagues who may at some point receive an invite from me, contrary to how smooth these conversations go the vast majority of these guests are first time podcast guests. So just say yes, that's your job. We have of course, been speaking with Dr. Nayanjotlahiri on this really fascinating new Sunni publication, Searching for Ashoka, Questing for Buddhist King from India to Thailand. Until next time, keep well, keep listening, keep reading, keep thinking and reflecting, keep remembering and perhaps even reflect on the ways in which you remember and the ways in which we remember the past. Take care, Sam.