Joya Chatterji was the first woman director of the Centre of South Asian Studies at Cambridge between 2009 and 2019. In her new book, Shadows at Noon: The South Asian Twentieth Century (Penguin India), she talks of the 1971 India-Pakistan war as her first political memory, looking out from the darkened windows of her Delhi home.
The book is a juxtaposition of South Asian families – including her own, where kids are indulged but not daughters-in-law, to bandit households like Phoolan Devi’s that were on trees, to the crisis in the former Nepali royal family – from the British Raj through Independence and Partition to popular culture representations.
The Ramayana, she says, “In many ways, is like a Hindi movie” with a moral centre, the ‘pure woman’ committed to an upright man, even patriarchy, and the inevitable “baddie”. But the big argument of the book is why throw all of one’s might behind a single-toned ‘Indian’ identity when in reality we all lead South Asian lives. And also continue the quibble of who makes the “best” biryani!
Excerpts:
Why did you choose to write a book that straddles both historical scholarship and popular history-writing?
The story to be too important to be limited to the 4,000-odd readers of the average academic work in history. It deserved a larger audience – hence the aim to write in an accessible voice. But because that overarching argument is so novel and controversial, I knew it had to be grounded in rigorous research. Otherwise it could easily be brushed aside.
Why is it politically significant, especially now, to develop the vision of a South Asian Twentieth Century?
There is a question mark over the nation worship that is the new civic religion in this part of the world. What The South Asian Twentieth Century seeks to do, captures all that and more: to draw a subtle comparison with ‘the American century’, ‘the Age of Extremes’ (on Europe’s ‘short twentieth century), and so on. I am also making, and invite the reader to make, global comparisons and connections.
You have shown in great detail how food – in terms of dietary prohibitions, and purity and pollution – has been central to the caste order, and the sectarian politics.
States have tried to nationalise diets but with limited success. The market has had a larger hand to play in standardising diets, in elevating rice and (to a lesser extent) wheat to the top staples consumed right across South Asia.
The refugee movement has also been important. The place of Punjabi food in Delhi is only the most obvious example of it, while in West Bengal, eastern varieties of dishes (hotter, more spicy) are devoured by western Bengali non-refugees with enjoyment, but some bafflement. Regional variations across environments persist, of course. The case of biryani is a great example here. Every rice and meat-eating region across South Asia has its own ‘best’ biryani. Each is different from the other. We also have the strange story of the very popular ‘veg biryani’, and debates about whether it is okay to make biryani with potatoes or not.
Would you say that the book is informed and underpinned by a tragic sensibility, as seemingly suggested by the title?
I have recognised on reflection that I do write books in tropes. Indeed, I see tragedy in South Asia’s Twentieth Century. Not as in Greek tragedy, in which characters are doomed from the start, because the unfolding of South Asia’s tragedy was not inevitable.
You claim that the term Bollywood to describe the Bombay film industry acquired currency only in the neoliberal period and is misleading in the comparison with Hollywood that it presupposes.
The Bombay cinema of the ’40s to the ’80s was fundamentally precarious. Producers were dependent on loan sharks, distributors and exhibitors. Women stars were hard to find, given the societal concerns about women’s purity. Filmmakers had to entertain, with song-and-dance or complex fight sequences with mythological tropes. For instance, director-producer-actor Guru Dutt nearly went bankrupt after he made a movie that pushed the boundaries. He personally took all the risks, while exhibitors broke even or made a modest profit on most films. This was Bombay cinema not only because it was set in Bombay, but because it was never about realism, it did not resemble Hollywood remotely: in shape, form or content.
In the 1990s, Bombay cinema was recognised by the state as an industry, and as such, was free to seek loans from banks, and given state support for the purchase of raw stock. It then began to boom, and in doing so, it sought out novel markets: an audience in the diaspora, in conjunction with the multiplex-theatre viewing booming middle-class public, as well as the large halls of old. This conjucture, I believe, turned ‘Bombay cinema’ into Bollywood, a hybrid form much more in tune with the realism of Hollywood (but not entirely). Its biggest hitters outdid, and continue to outsell, many Hollywood movies.