Chandrahas, many thanks for doing this interview. Could you tell us something about the backstory and genesis of Arzee?

My pleasure entirely. About Arzee: in 2004 I was on my way to work one morning (after I finished my studies in 003, I returned to Bombay, where I’d spent nine years when I was growing up, and worked for two years a cricket writer for Cricinfo) when I saw a very short and good-looking man, about my age, crossing the street in front of me in Behram Baug in Jogeshwari. Sometimes faces immediately suggest stories, the shape of a life–surely more imagined than real, but anyhow they set something ticking in the brain.

In those days I wasn’t capable of anything longer than short stories. I thought of a story about a very small young man who’s both teased and loved by his friends, who himself loves the city and yet fears it, who wants all the normal things in life but feels he may not get them, who’s oversensitive to insult, yet has some secret source of power that allows him to hold himself up against the world. Even the fact that he is good-looking is double-edged. He feels it some kind of cruel joke that he such a small size and handsome, so people look at him all the more and make him uncomfortable.

A year later, when I gave up my job to start a different kind of life, I hadn’t yet written this story, but I was still excited by it. So I picked it off the hanger of my story cupboard, and wore it for about a year as I wandered around Bombay, and tried to set up a life in book-reviewing and literary criticism. Often I would go in the middle of the day to the old cinemas, as people go to the Noor in the novel. Finally felt I had all the elements in place: the protagonist, the cinema, his circle of friends and acquaintances, his mother, a sense of the shape of the story and the part of Bombay where it’d be set. Of course it would be a long time before all of these were to be properly realised on the page. I made many mistakes as I proceeded and had to return to correct them.

I don’t remember when I thought of the name “Arzee”, but it was fairly early on. It was one of those things that just arrive by themselves and seem instantly right.

What might you describe as some of the challenges a writer faces in finding his or her voice?

I think that the problem of writing fiction is that everything—character, plot, the narrative on the level of individual sentence and paragraphs, what to say and what to leave out—is completely up to the writer, but this is a freedom rife with difficulties (like most freedoms). In order for everything to make sense the book has to have a certain key, a certain unity of perspective. It takes a long time to find and control a voice: a voice that suits the book and brings out all its colours and mysteries.

Voice works as a kind of filter, a compositional key: some kinds of things have to be wrong for the book if other kinds of things are to be right. If you look at a page of your proofs and cry out, “That’s absolutely stupid!”, it actually shows that you have a sense, set up only by the success of other passages or scenes, that something here is contrived or flat by the standards or expectations that the novel itself has set up. What we think of as a voice actually arrives only in spurts and dribbles: an inexact phrase being replaced by a more exact one, an effect of smoothness and speed being produced by the deletion of two paragraphs one spent a week over. It’s the scrubbing and polishing, as much as the heat of first composition, that creates the voice. You just keep working till you get there.

Also, just as one grows up in the sense of becoming a more worldly and independent person, one also grows up in work. As you keep working and thinking and living, you learn to see why something might have a certain superficial charm but is overall just not a good idea, or that a text’s themes and preoccupations and tone can be realised on a number of mutually supporting levels—that the brew can always be made thicker and stronger.

In similar vein, what were some of the challenges you faced in bringing Arzee to life, both the book and the characters?

Hmm. Let me try and make some notes and observations about the various aspects of the story.

Structure: perhaps the main structural problem was that of balancing the external world of the story with the internal world of the protagonist’s mind. The book is told in the third-person. We see Arzee from the outside, even though the narration tracks his thoughts quite closely and is always tied to him. I thought it necessary to balance out the more considered language of the narrator with bursts of interior monologue on a higher pitch at key points in the story. This was the sound of Arzee thinking, circling, doubting, suspecting, dreaming.

Tone. It was absolutely necessary that the story had a double tone of pathos and humour, laughter and sadness (one journalist disastrously quoted this phrase as “slaughter and sadness”). Although the book was told mostly through the eyes of Arzee, the narration also had to rise above him to allow for a point of view upon Arzee. Sometimes the narrator himself has a joke at Arzee’s expense, as when he gets bored of hearing Arzee ramble on and on and leaves a blank passage in the dialogue, explaining that “there wasn’t anything he said that he had not said already”. While Arzee’s mother always feels for all his troubles, the gangster Deepak is always having a laugh at his expense. The reader was meant to laugh at Arzee as much as he or she sympathised with him.

Time. The book’s action takes place over two weeks, so how time was managed in the book was very important. Early on, Arzee is excited and everything happens very fast. Midway through, everything slows down and Arzee experiences time as an enormous burden. The story had to be given legs—an ability to leap just as Arzee does when he jumps over a wheelbarrow on the street and “almost does not come down” – then a kind of stasis.

Cast. It was always going to be a short book, so it was essential that the characters around Arzee be dealt with quite economically, and contribute something very specific to the story. Sometimes they make just the single appearance. Some of the key characters are persistently present even when absent, such as Arzee’s mother and the hairdresser Monique. I felt this was true to life—one is always having imaginary conversations with the people with whom one is closest, one doesn’t always need them to be physically present. All, or most, characters in the book are brought together in the final chapter, when Arzee recovers his sense of the fullness of life and the power to dream.

Dialogue. I feel this is one of the biggest tests of a fiction writer’s skill. Of course, there are many good writers who have no great love for dialogue at all, and we read them quite happily: we go to them for other things. But I really like books where you feel you can hear someone talking, as if right there in front of you. In real life, talk is always a mix of relevant and irrelevant things. Sometimes a single phrase, or even a pause, opens out a person’s nature completely. In fiction, you’re a little hamstrung because you can’t convey such things as a person’s accent, the pitch of his or her voice, the way someone runs words together or stops upon a syllable, the gesture that accompany their conversation – these are the things that make the talk of a real person so interesting. You have to think carefully about dialogue to make up the deficit. Indeed, dialogue becomes fuller and more satisfying when certain kinds of gaps are left in the conversation—less is more. I don’t think I’ve ever got so much pleasure in my work as from writing dialogue, especially the exchanges between Arzee and Deepak and the long conversation in Phiroz’s house between Arzee and Phiroz’s daughter Shireen.

Who are some of your literary influences, and how do you negotiate those influences as a writer?

One can’t be a writer without first being in love with certain books and certain writers. But one’s influences are so many. I’ve never felt powerfully dragged along in the wake of just one writer or model. It’s like having a hundred teachers, none of whom casts a very big shadow on your work. Sometimes reading another writer shows you not what to do, but what not to do—you see how something complicated can actually be quite simple. On a list of writers I love and admire for different reasons, I suppose I’d put Bibhutibhushan Bandhopadhyay, Willa Cather, Chekhov, IB Singer, Jose Saramago, Orhan Pamuk, Dostoevsky, Sandor Marai, Bohumil Hrabal, and the pair of Egyptians Mahfouz and Alaa Al Aswany.

For a fiction writer, reading a good work of fiction by somebody else inspires feelings of both admiration and a kind of jealousy. You think, “My work had better be just as good, else I won’t forgive myself!” In her essay “Reading Barthes and Nabokov” Zadie Smith writes, “The novels we love best have an architecture. Not only a door going in and another leading out, but rooms, hallways, stairs, little gardens front and back, trapdoors, hideen passageways, et cetera.” The beauty and complexity of novels makes one hungry for them, and one wants to build one’s own house too to be similarly beautiful and durable. Influences of other writers are like the influences of one’s parents or one’s family: one carries them along and in some way can’t escape them, yet one becomes one’s own person and influences others in one’s turn. I certainly think of writers I love ardently—Bandhopadhyay and Cather, for example—as family. I feel I know how they’d react to certain situations.

In your literary journal, the Middle Stage (I won’t describe you as a blogger because that really does not say much about what you do), you talk about literary criticism as a species of literature. How has your work as literary critic and reviewer influenced your writing? In particular,how has writing weekly essays on the Middle Stage and connecting with readers through the site/blog contributed to your formation as a writer?

I was lucky to receive an education (in Delhi and Cambridge) that showed me that the best literary criticism has the same love of language and metaphor, hunger for ideas, and distinction of prose style that we take away from literature itself. Or to put it another way, it may possess not just the reflected glow of literature, but its own bright personality. Working on creative work of my own and reflecting upon the creative work of others and seem to be to be allied activities. Writing about other books—especially books that I feel strongly about, whether positively or negatively—has helped me figure out my own theory of fiction, what I think works and what doesn’t. It has also given me a much fuller and richer life in literature than I would have if I were just a writer of books.

The Middle Stage occupies a big place in my writing life, because I started putting up posts on it in 2005, around the same time as I left my job to begin life as a full-time writer. I’d spent a number of years studying literature at university, and had lots of ideas that couldn’t be expressed through conventional reviews. Three or four paragraphs on the internet was the perfect form for them, and I loved linking to other pieces, thereby compressing two or three hours of reading into a small entry. The sense of having one’s own home on the Web—a space to which you gave everything you could, for no material reward, purely for the love of work—was a big part of my early days as a writer, although these days I’m regrettably not always able to find as much time for my blog as I should.

I feel a good literary blog—several are listed on my blogroll—can provide a really powerful lens on literature, as much as a good literary magazine or weekend review supplement. It’s a place where the contemporary and the classic, the familiar and the obscure, the hyperlink and the long quote, can be brought together, routed through a reader’s strong sensibility. At some point, when I have a little more time, I would really like to immerse myself in work for the blog once again.

As I write in the review of Arzee the Dwarf, I suspect you are a bit of a flaneur, recording on your travels within Bombay its sights and sounds. Could you share some thoughts about your relationship with the city and its role in the book?

I love the city: its different neighbourhoods, the energy and industry of its people, its sense of life as a pitched battle, its acute awareness of space, the immense and often debilitating pressure it exerts upon human consciousness, the beauty of its hundreds of old buildings and its views of the sea, its dozens of relatively inexpensive pleasures, its many-voiced and multilayered history. Just the feeling of standing at the door of a local train at night, looking at things run past and feeling the wind on my face, sets my thoughts going. I’ve lived about half my life here, in two separate chunks, so I feel I can read Bombay in a way I can’t, for instance, read Delhi, where I went to university.

For all that is a concrete jungle, Bombay actually has great natural beauty: the sea and lakes and creeks and backwaters, hills and mountains. It’s India’s most democratic city: people of different classes and cultures mix more easily here than anywhere else in India. For all these reasons Bombay is a treasure trove of narrative material.

Arzee loves it too, as he has never known any other place, and it has given him whatever he cherishes most in his life, in particular the Noor cinema, which is his home in the world. He has a romantic relationship to the city, and loves the routine of the same walks on the same streets at the same hours. In the novel, circumstances make him explore the city more widely than he previously had—Arzee’s map of Bombay expands within the timespan of the book. Bombay is also linked to pride in his own self, to his ego: if life doesn’t work out as he wanted it to, he would rather leave Bombay than feel as if he is being mocked by the city.

In a related vein, the novel, in a sense, may be described as an act of translation and transcription, of bringing the rhythms of life in Bombay to the page. How did you seek to achieve that transcription?

I just tried to depict as strongly and vividly as I could the places that are most important to the book: the cinema and the kind of people who are seen there; the darkness of its auditorium and the heat and light of the projection room; the run-down apartment where Arzee lives and the chawl where he goes to meet Deepak and Phiroz; the low stone wall by the gutter where Arzee likes to stand and think; the salon where Monique works and the small anonymous offices where operations like the betting syndicate and Mehndibhai’s mysterious activities are run from. Arzee’s life is ordered by the life of the cinema, so there is a definite rhythm to his day, a rhythm different from that of most other people in the city. To bring alive the shape of his day was also to bring him to life.

Any advice for an aspiring writer?

A few things maybe. Read as widely and as unsystematically as you can. Mark up all the books you read unless they’re borrowed. Learn to hate certain kinds of books just as you love other kinds, to develop an ear for insincere or fraudulent work. Spend time in secondhand bookshops. Try to listen as carefully as you can to people. Love language and be interested in the history of language, the origins of words and their changing sense across time. Learn to recognise cliches and other kinds of deadwood in language, and to edit these out ruthlessly in our your own work. Always read a piece one last time before submitting it—it shows that you care, and allows you to eliminate minor infelicities. Take some kind of course in either reading or writing if you haven’t already. Try and spend some time at your desk every day so that it becomes second nature to be there.

Finally, borrowing from your interview technique, any non-writing related advice for our readers?

I don’t know…there are so many things. I’m sure I’m more in need of advice from people than able to dispense useful thoughts for them! But a few things maybe. Keep a diary—it’s one of the best things you can do for yourself. It allows you to return to older versions of yourself that you might otherwise lose. Love someone deeply, and put your arms around them often, but don’t get so close (metaphorically speaking now) that the mystery of the life and mind of another disappears. Think about the self—this is just a extension of my own advice to myself at the beginning of my fourth decade in this world—about both the pleasures and perils of ego, about the power you have to be a positive force in the world. Run as often as you can—it’s one of the things that people seem to leave behind when they get to adult life. It’s great for both body and mind—great when you want to work some puzzle, out or escape from some negative cycle of discontent or resentment. Many of the plot problems of Arzee were solved while running! Use a fountain pen to write—words are such fine things that they deserve this little touch of style. Eat lots of fruit. Follow the English Premier League, and support Tottenham Hotspur. This is a very strange bouquet of advice, but there you have it!

Photo credit: Aparna Jayakumar 

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Adam, many thanks for doing this interview with us! Could you tell us something about the origins and history of Lost Weekend?

Lost Weekend started when Dave Hawkins, Christy Colcord and myself found ourselves unemployed in the summer of 1996. We had all been working in the music industry and agreed that to get a “real job” at this point in our lives was to be avoided at all cost. We came up with a simple idea for a small business that we thought would be good for the neighborhood: a big, well-stocked independent video rental store that would satisfy ravenous film fanatics and casual new release renters alike. Dave came up with the name Lost Weekend, which was inspired. After a year of searching for a space, buying stock (VHS was still the format then), finding fixtures and calling all of our friends to get it up and running, Lost Weekend opened its doors on August 1, 1997 with a mountain of credit card debt and virtually no idea what we’d gotten ourselves into.

Could you share your thoughts on some of the challenges in running an independent video rental store, in light of the existence of  video rental megachains as well as internet-based video rental companies?

The challenge has been going up against the major chains you refer to. Aside from maintaing the usual websites to keep people updated on our stock and goings-on, our store is not participating in the internet revolution. We cannot compete with Netflix, which revenue-shares with the studios and thereby gets movies for free. We can’t compete with Blockbuster and Hollywood for the same reason. And we can’t compete with iTunes because we don’t have the power and servers and time to deliver films over the web. So we simply don’t try. We are a neighborhood, walk-up mom-and-pop that is run by people who know and love film. We’ve somehow managed to outlast Hollywood Video down on Cesar Chavez and we proudly display dozens of scissored Blockbuster cards on our wall like so many big-game heads. Go figure.  

Articles and readers’ reviews about Lost Weekend note the fact that, in contrast to a purely for-profit ethos, Lost Weekend embodies and encourages a collaborative ethos built around a shared appreciation for art, music, and culture, forging links between various cultural communities in San Francisco.

We try to be the best film library out there, though we are a bit limited by our space and relitively shallow pockets. In terms of the way we do business, we are fair and accommodating to our people. I know for sure we don’t make nearly as much on late fees and replacement costs as the majors.

We support a lot of the various film festivals that happen in the city. And our contribution to SF’s music, art, film and student scene is evident in our staff. Most everyone who works for us is involved in some other creative outlet. We are happy to be someone’s “McJob” while they pursue their other interests. And we always take them back after time off for tours, installations, school, whatever. We pay a decent wage, feed our staff and provide health insurance to full time employees. I am proud of that. 

Lost Weekend is, among other things, a repository and treasure trove of rare film, out-of-print titles, and boasts a capacious, catholic, and eclectic collection. Is there a philosophical vision that motivates your acquisitions and expansion of collections?

Only our own taste, which fortunately varies wildly between all of us. Sure, we have the entire Criterion Collection, but we also just picked up Leprechaun 2 because we love movies you hate to love and movies you love to hate. I have to say, Lost Weekend has been accused of snobbery and I must call bullshit on that. Also, credit belongs to our regulars for some of the great stuff we carry. We write down their suggestions for titles every day and actively seek them out. This kind of collaboration in “curating” the stacks has been really successful, and cool.  
 
One of the pleasures of browsing the collections at Lost Weekend is encountering the logic and taxonomy of classification. You have film organized by genre as well as by director and nation, staff picks, special two-for-ones, and so on. Did this evolve naturally or is there an idea behind it?

We get bored alphabetizing. It’s easier and more enjoyable to break things up. We have a new section called 80s Teen, with all those Reagan Era, big hair high school angst movies. I’d like to do a Biopics section in Drama and a Post-Apocalypse section in the Sci-Fi area. Maybe a shelf for Parodies and Rom-Com movies in Comedy. I’m just thinking out loud here. This is how it all starts. 

Lost Weekend is a San Francisco and Valencia institution. How, in your view, does Lost Weekend reflect the shifting contours of life in the area and city?

Well, the internet came. And then it left. Then it came back again. We noticed trends on paper, but like a lot of Mission District residents, even relatively recent arrivals, we really felt it just walking around. At a certain point, a bunch of our more eccentric customers just disappeared, which was a drag. Even after just twelve years in the same location, you see patterns of post grads coming in and new families moving away. Businesses come and go. But through all of this, we have changed very little. And I think that’s why we’re still around. I mean, we have a jukebox that plays vinyl 45s and a Defender video game from 1983. I assume people like this about us. 

You have a devoted following of members, whose relationship to Lost Weekend seems to be more than just that of customers. Could you share some thoughts about that.

We know of many couples who met at the store. A few even got married and had kids. And let’s be honest, a lot of couples broke up at the store over late fees or what movie to get. But our regulars are our friends, and friends know that if you bake cookies for us or bring coffee, late fees seem to magically disappear, or at least get radically reduced. Unless it’s The Secret. We always charge full-on for The Secret.

What would you identify as some especially significant moments in the history of Lost Weekend?

Opening the store was huge. After the sun went down, we turned on the neon sign and walked across the street and just marveled at the thing. Also, once the alarm went off and the cops came and nearly shot our lifesize Han Solo cutout. After a tense several seconds, one of the officers said, “Do you guys have ‘A Bridge Too Far’?”

The focus of Professor McAnany’s work has been in the area of communication for development and social change and the international trade of cultural products, especially in Latin America. He worked on the social impact of the Brazilian soap opera on fertility and gender changes in the 1990s. Currently he is working on a history of the field of Communication for Development and Social Change or c4d as it is called. He also is involved with the Center for Science, Technology, and Society at Santa Clara University where he helps in judging panels for the annual Technology Awards Benefiting Humanity and studies these projects for their contributions to sustainable social change. In a conversation with Rohit Chopra, he discusses his journey to his current research project, the contested understandings of development that have shaped the history of c4d, and the challenges involved in thinking about and enabling social change through communication.

Professor McAnany, thank you for this interview. What motivated your interest to undertake this project about an early history of communication and social change?

I came to the field of c4d (Communication for Development and Social Change) at the beginning of my doctoral studies at Stanford in 1965. Wilbur Schramm had just published his classic book, Mass Media and National Development, the year before, and I had run across a copy in French in Belgium where I was at the time. When I read the book I realized that this was the kind of communication studies I wanted to pursue. I ended up studying with Schramm and doing a dissertation with him as well as being his first field manager for a five-year study (1968-73) of educational television in El Salvador. I stayed on at Stanford after I finished my PhD in 1970. Schramm was forced to retire from Stanford in 1973, and I and two colleagues who had worked with me in El Salvador  (John Mayo, Dean of Communication at Florida State, and Bob Hornik at Annenberg East at Penn) got a five-year grant from USAID to continue work on media and development. So we continued to work in field projects in Mexico, Guatemala, and the Ivory Coast over the next five years. We also helped carry on the c4d classes that Schramm had taught before leaving in 1973. Everett Rogers came to Stanford in 1975 to join us in c4d work although we three had separate projects. Mayo left in 1977 for Florida State, Hornik and I left the following year (he for Penn and I for Univesity of Texas at Austin where I had a joint appointment in the School of Communication and the Institute of Latin American Studies).

All this is by way of explaining  my interest in c4d since I studied and worked in the field and taught at Stanford from 1965-1978. I continued my interest in international communication at UT Austin but turned this interest to issues of export of US media and circulation of Latin American television genres like telenovelas (soap operas). I directed many doctoral dissertations on a range of such topics. In 1990 I got involved with a group of researchers at the Population Research Center where we received funding over about six or seven years to study how the overwhelmingly popular telenovela genre may have contributed to various social changes among viewers. It was a historical study that used a variety of methods (census data analysis, survey, focus group interviews, ethnographic studies, historical analysis, and content analysis) to get at a phenomenon that had flourished from about 1970 to 1996 when we undertook field studies. This kind of work brought me back to c4d but from a different angle. Rather than study media interventions, we were studying how media may have affected a national population over time. A challenge to accomplish. We finished the data gathering by 1999 and wrote and published a number of disparate articles and chapters but, alas, the book we had planned and worked on for several years was never completed. I left for Santa Clara University in January 1997 as data collection was being completed but remained very much in contact with colleagues at UT and in Brazil, but we were never able to refocus our attention enough to finish the book that would have brought the many parts of the research together in a more synthetic fashion. When I came to Santa Clara, I was chair of the Department of Communication for six years from 1997 to 2002. I got involved with the new Center for Science, Technology, and Society and from 2000 was a judge of one of the panels for the Technology Benefiting Humanity competition. I found that many of the projects we judged were c4d projects coming from many grassroots groups in developing countries so I stayed with the Awards and have just finished seven years of judging out of the last eight. It has very much brought me back to c4d issues.

This is a long way to answer a short question. I hope that this brief history makes clear my motivation to do this historical work. Schramm is considered the founder of the mass communication field as well as one of three founders of c4d (the other being Everett Rogers and Dan Lerner). I knew all three and worked with two of them so I have a personal perspective as well as a historical interest in writing this history.

You draw attention to the fact that your project speaks to a historiographical demand, looking at the founding texts, authors, and context of emergence of c4d. Could you share your thoughts about this?

There has been some work on the general field of mass communication studies in the US that I cite in my chapter on the founders of c4d, but I point out that no one has done a comparable study of c4d. I feel that I have the experience, the contacts, and the perspective to have a go at what I think the history should be. Obviously, my work is highly selective and interpretive, but I will get it out there for others to consider. One of the problems with trying to write such a study is that c4d has been a field that has been fought over for decades, mainly between those who fund and therefore define development and those who have a more ideal view of what development should be. There were others, more radical, in the 19760s and 1970s who argued that the whole enterprise of development was based on a flawed capitalist system that was doomed to fail.

There is also the difference between theory and practice that needs to be considered in doing a history: some writers of more theoretical work want to concentrate on discourse of other academics; people from the field often think of these academics as being without the necessary experience of how difficult projects are to do and change to be made. Writing a history of the field requires to take all of these divisions and disagreements into account without distorting the reality of the entire phenomenon. No one can do justice to the whole, but I am trying to acknowledge as many facets as possible. Many histories only deal with people—who they were and what they did or said (this is Rogers’ approach that he calls a biographical method in his History of Communication Study published in 1994) and ignore contextual factors, institutional structure, and the dual reality of theory and practice (especially in c4d where field work is often unrelated to theory).

One of the intriguing arguments that you make in the paper which you presented at the 2008 International Association for Media and Communication Research [IAMCR] conference is that we are at a juncture that is similar to, and curiously reminiscent of, the earlier historical moment with regard to communication for development. As you state, “modern ICTs like the Internet and PDAs are being used to promote social change, but they are confronted by the same structural and political barriers for peoples in developing countries as they were fifty years ago.” That was when Lerner published the first theory of c4d, when radio, film and print were the reigning media. What would you say is similar and different about the challenges facing us today from that earlier moment?

My comment in my paper comparing fifty years ago and today is quite simple. Although we have many new ICTs that can do some marvelous things, the problems they confront are by and large very similar to those of fifty years ago, including poverty, disease, discrimination, and racism. The challenges are very much the same as before. In order to create meaningful social change, ICTs and interpersonal communication remain the two fundamental processes that might help, but we have to remember that although communication in some form is fundamental to change, it is not something that we can engineer in some facile way. The enthusiasm for new technologies, new theories, and new approaches has always been regretted later. I am reminded that Schramm acknowledged that his enthusiasm and confidence in mass communication in his 1964 book was misplaced. On the other end of the spectrum, the radical economist, Andre Gunder Frank, who helped create and popularize Dependency theory in Latin America and elsewhere in the late 1960s could regret his naïve belief in revolution and radical change by the Third World in an autobiographical article in 1991.

So in many ways, the problems are as great—greater in some cases—as before. In other ways, the world has changed and both problems and opportunities are different. The new ICTs allow people to access information much more readily and this can mean some real differences in peoples’ lives.  PDAs can help gather important health information and send it via satellite to ministries of health to monitor and intervene in the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Almost everybody now can get access to radio and even television is spreading rapidly to larger sectors of the globe. Whether that is a plus or not remains to be seen. New technologies are a double edged sword as people living in India and China may have experienced with the invasion of television content into their daily lives. So yes, there are profound differences today, but the challenge for change remains constant.

You suggest the need for a range of approaches, methods, and strategies as well as ideological flexibility in approaching communication for development. Could you comment on this.

I had said before that the field is always more a battle field because of difference constituencies (researchers, funders, recipients, etc.), theories (paradigms are displaced but not without a fight) and approaches (big, centralized, top down versus small, flexible and bottom up) and methods (quantitative versus qualitative in measuring success). The work of historical studies, it seems to me (even though I do not claim to be a historian), is to take into consideration all aspects of the historical phenomenon under study in order to validly assess what was happening. Of course, in the final analysis, the author has to give an interpretation of the data that will be uniquely hers/his.

I was trained in the traditional social science methodology of my time at a university that, at the time, was a bastion of quantitative empiricism. While I was still at Stanford things began to change and even some leaders of quantitative  methods (like Lee Cronbach) were critiquing the approach if not throwing it out. But the critical paradigm entered from Latin America and from the likes of Herb Schiller in the US. I worked in the critical mode for some years and still maintain a critical perspective. But I have not abandoned my training in quantitative method although I favor the qualitative because both methodologies serve important purposes in answering different questions. One other perspective that I learned from Wilbur Schramm was a broad approach to communication. At the Institute for Communication Research at Stanford, a doctoral student had to take about half of all of the graduate classes outside of communication. I had classes in sociology, psychology, economics, statistics, business, and engineering in my years of study. This helped me work collaboratively in field projects with a variety of other researchers. In my work on Brazilian telenovelas, my closest collaborators were demographers, sociologists, and Brazilian media scholars. I also worked closely with economists in a number of projects. This forced me outside of the sometimes very narrow and parochial interests of American mainstream communication studies.

With the global ascendancy of neoliberal models of governance, there is increasingly a skepticism about the role of the states and governments in developmentalist projects. Yet what comes across strongly in your paper is the prominent role of the US government in the history of c4d. Based on the history of the field, what roles, specific as well as collaborative, do you think the private and public sectors could play in enabling communication for development today?

I think things are changing in regard to government involvement in c4d. For the first several decades (say 1960-1980) almost all c4d work was tied to central governments. And it still remains so today to some extent. It is not that the central or state governments no longer are responsible for providing services for people, They are and often they are the natural point of entry for large, international projects that deal with health, education, nutrition, agriculture, population, etc. The thing that has changed is the role of NGOs, non-profits, and even individuals in working for change. There is also the growth of huge foundations like Gates, Hewlett-Packard, and Skoll. These and and other high tech billionaire fortunes are entering the c4d field with a variety of funding and an independence of the usual bilateral and multilateral institutions of the UN and World Bank that deal with governments. The best example of a new institution for c4d is Muhammad Yunus’ Grameen Bank and allied  social businesses in Bangladesh. Grameen is not a foundation nor a government agency nor a business in the usual sense. It is a social business in that it is self-financing but a non-profit. It makes money but helps people in its many businesses like Grameen Phone or (soon-to-be) Grameen/Danon Yogurt (for malnourished kids)! The c4d is changing because more people and institutions are getting into the game. I don’t know how this will turn out, but I do know that things are changing.

What contributions do you think scholars in communication can make in c4d?

I obviously think they can make great contributions. But the problems are many. First, c4d is rarely taught any more in the many US communication schools. Much of the work is done by other schools like health, education, environment, engineering, etc. who do the field work related to c4d. There are a number of places in other countries that still or even newly work in c4d. I teach a c4d intro course to upper division undergraduates and relate the course to finalists in the Tech Awards. I have some colleagues who also teach these kinds of courses at both graduate and undergraduate levels. I think we can update our courses through a better focus on globalization which is entering the curricula of many US universities as well as bringing into a variety of communication courses the Millennium Development Goals of the UN. There is an increasing interest in more active learning outside the class room in US universities that could be related to c4d kinds of interest (whether in other countries or in our own communities, communication is a vital element of change in any environment). Just trying to understand social change within the parameters of communication would be a challenge in a whole array of communication courses. In addition to teaching, communication scholars can make contributions by participating in field work—or through their students who do field work; they can help study how communication works in the field; they can do historical research as to how c4d has operated in given countries, regions, or cultures as well as to how it has operated within a given intellectual field like education, health, population, agriculture, etc.  Synthetic studies of this kind can be very useful in summarizing results across many projects; they are not often done. Reach out to other fields that are often trying to include consideration of media or other ICTs in their own research. This was my experience with my demography colleagues in Texas and Brazil. There are, no doubt, many other avenues for work and collaboration. Possibilities are limited only by our imaginations.

Professor Emile McAnany can be reached at emcanany@scu.edu

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A graduate of the Pakistan Air Force Academy, Hanif is also a playwright, filmmaker, and journalist. The head of BBC UK’s Urdu service, he is currently based in Karachi. In this interview with Rohit Chopra, he talks about the curious and varied inspirations for the novel, having to overcome his journalistic training in writing the book, and his scepticism about the category of ‘South Asian’ writing.

How was this book born? Could you tell us something about its genesis?

I wanted to write a book, a novel, for a very long time but didn’t really have any idea where to start and where to end. As a journalist I had tried to investigate General Zia’s plane crash and found it quite amazing that I didn’t find any verifiable facts but came across a number of theories. It just seemed that everyone had a motive. I was quite fascinated by that notion. What if everyone was trying to kill him? And then came the next logical thought, what if I was trying to kill him? So basically the book started out as a prank. When I started the actual writing, I wanted it to be in a thriller mode, a humorous take on the John Le Carre-type novels that I used to love as a young man. It was only when I had finished the novel and it went out to the publishers—and I didn’t really know much about genre—that I found out that I had written what people in the business insist on calling a ‘literary novel.’

One of the powerful achievements of the book is its effectiveness in combining satire and pathos, humour and incisive political insight. Did you feel that the story you wished to tell required a particular genre or mode of writing?

As I said it started out as a prank but after I started writing it, after I had a setting, the details started coming to me. I had grown up during Zia’s time but I had led a very protected life. I was in a military academy. In fact I left the air force a couple of months after Zia died. Since there was complete censorship during his time, all you ever got to hear about him and his regime was through rumours, gossip, and jokes. And these things used to travel really fast. So I think that that must have influenced my style of writing. I come from a small town in Pakistan where being a wit, having a way with words, in a very non-literary kind of way, was as important as being rich or successful. And I think I was really impressed with that. I left the air force and got into journalism. Among my friends from that earlier time were a couple of brilliant cartoonists. I think their influence also lingered on for a very long time.

To follow up with a related question, do you feel that political and social life in South Asia demand certain representational frameworks or strategies from authors and artistes in general?

I don’t know. I am sure there are some very responsible authors who know about things like representational frameworks, and they can deal with such matters. I was just consumed by the idea of telling a story that someone might want to read. I really never saw myself as a South Asian writer— I am just this guy who comes from a village near Okara and who ended up in London via Karachi because he got a job there. Now that I am back in Karachi sometimes I get asked who did I think my readers were when I was writing. And I really think that I was thinking of certain friends from Pakistan who would get a joke or would come up with a better one if mine didn’t work.

Could you share some thoughts on the ways in which you think that your experience of being a journalist has influenced your fiction?

I think in the beginning journalism was a bit of a hindrance. Since I was fictionalizing some real-life events, there was always this nagging feeling at the back of my mind that my journalist colleagues would read it as history and would raise objections at every turn. If you know journalists then you probably know that there is nothing more that they love than to impress other journalists. But at some point I was able to convince myself that I was writing fiction. Some names might be real but I had no obligation to follow any editorial guidelines. I had to go from the journalistic essential of two sources for every fact to ‘no-sources’ required because I was not dealing with the realm of fact.

Journalism also prepares you for instant gratification— you file a piece, it gets published the next day. You sit in a radio studio and broadcast a program. Some people like it, some don’t, most are indifferent, but the next day you are ready to file another story. With fiction you have to learn to do away with those temptations and keep the story to yourself month after month, year after year. You don’t know whether what you are writing is any good or even if it makes any sense. I am trying to think if being a journalist influenced my fiction. Well journalists are great rumor-mongerers and a lot of the action in my novel is driven by rumors that I heard in newsrooms that never made it into print. And as a journalist you also know how to type, proofread, look up the dictionary, etc. That was really useful.

Writers from South Asia have been enjoying their share of the spotlight, both critical and popular, for the last several years.  Do you think the notion of ‘South Asian writing’ is a coherent and viable critical category?

I don’t really think so. The ones I have read, and I haven’t read many, have written about vastly different subjects. They also come from different backgrounds. The media likes to categorize, it wants to spot trends, and then everyone goes with the latest coinage. During just this year, I have read about half a dozen articles in the international press about the new trend called hot new Pakistani writers. And I find it funny that when these articles rattle off half a dozen new names they don’t point out that I am the only debut author. The others have been publishing books to wide acclaim for more than a decade. A literary agent in London told me recently that they were actively looking for central Asian writers because apparently they are going to be the next big thing. So one just hopes that occasionally there are good books from where ever and they get noticed for whatever reason.

Could you share your thoughts about recent political developments in Pakistan and about politics in South Asia more generally? On the one hand, South Asia is home to very old civilizations and cultural traditions; on the other hand, it is afflicted by problems of political instability, poverty, and corruption. Global capitalism has the region in their sights for its markets, while, at the same time, the region is also affected by the vagaries of international power relations such as the ‘war on terror.’ What kinds of futures, in your view, are in store for South Asia?

I wish somebody knew. I just met a seventy year-old trade union leader in Karachi who pointed out to me that what kind of f….d people are we that even after sixty years of partition we still don’t seem too bothered about shedding blood on our borders. A lot of people in Pakistan seem to think that the Taliban burning schools in the northern Pakistan are actually Indian spies. And in India every Muslim is obviously a potential Pakistani spy.

I am not sure if we count Afghanistan as part of South Asia but we seem to be too happy to collude in the destruction of a whole country twice over within two decades. As a citizen I find it truly bizarre that all South Asian countries have their unique set of problems and their neighbours have always, always, tried to add fuel to these fires. There are a lot of well wishing liberals like us who keep moaning that it’s not the people who want to keep this going, it’s the politicians. I don’t think that’s true. My late mother used to say that if your neighbour has red cheeks, don’t start slapping yourself.

But I think we have gone way beyond that. Can you imagine that India was actually envious of Pakistan’s client state relationship with America? Can you believe that India is trying to pay back in Afghanistan for what Pakistan did in Kashmir and Punjab? I have just moved back to Karachi after living in London for twelve years or so I am a bit disorientated. But it’s difficult to think of South Asia as an entity when Pakistan itself seems too busy tearing itself apart.

Your book offers, among other things, a devastating critique of the idea of the Islamic state. Could you elaborate on this?

As I writer I had no intention of doing that, I was desperately trying to recall the details of the period but now that the book is out, I have begun to realise what was going on. I think General Zia was the first modern ruler in Pakistan who started using words like shariat and jihad with a straight face in public discourse. Even mullahs during his time were meek and only demanded a vague version of something called an Islamic system and in Pakistan people interpreted it to mean that they were asking for some halwa [sweets]. There were songs and jokes about it. And they actually took it seriously and started distributing halwa after every little triumph.

The mullahs in Pakistan got rich and influential because they were being given US dollars and weapons and weapons training. So they started thinking that the whole world was a bit of a halwa that they could gobble up after their evening prayers. I still like to believe that Pakistan can never become an Islamic state because it’s too diverse and too poor. Our masses have never looked towards religion for deliverance. And every half-decent election result has proved it. It’s only our military and civilian elites who keep flirting with religion in the hope that they can make a few more bucks in this world and then get some cushy deal in the afterlife as well.

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EXTERNAL LINKS

A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Book website

On Mohammad Hanif’s A Case of Exploding Mangoes
Book review by Chandrahas Chaudhury on The Middle Stage

Professor Gajjala, could you explain the concept of ‘cyberfeminism’? How does it relate to feminist practice more broadly?

Early articulations of the notion of ‘cyberfeminism’ are said to have come from VNS Matrix in their 1991 cyberfeminist manifesto for the 21st century where they draw from Donna Haraway’s work. Cyberfeminist artists and collectives formed at online/offline interestions where the body and technology encounter each other and how these mutually shape voice, agency, and action for the empowerment of women the world over. Thus early cyberfeminism was seen to be a feminist response to a male dominated cyber-sphere where mostly male programmers and engineers seemed to be shaping the social and representational aspects of cyberspace. Sadie Plant, the subrosa collective (especially Faith Wilding), Michelle Wright, Ursula Biemann, Coco Fusco, and several other women artists, scholars, film-makers and activists began to be associated with this notion of “cyberfeminism.”

Cyberfeminism is a concept that came into being at the intersection of feminism, cyberculture, and technoscience. Therefore cyberfeminism relies on interweaving of digital art and computer science.  Engineering, artificial intelligence, media production and representations as well as online marketing and dialogues and counter-dialogues are all within the domain of cyberfeminism. Works by feminist and postmodern scholars such as Donna Haraway. Katherine Hayles, Sandy Stone, and Rosi Braidotti among others informs most of the articulations concerning cyberfeminism.

How does this related to feminism? In a simple sentence I suppose one can say since it is about the empowerment of women through and in relation to technology. However, cyberfeminism is indeed more a product of third-wave feminism where there seems to be an implicit cyber-utopianism and a talking back to second and first wave feminist generations as young cybergrrls and riotgrrls take on tools of “new media” to redefine and re-produce themselves.  As Faith Wilding has argued in her article titled “Where is Feminism in Cyberfeminism?”

“If feminism is to be adequate to its cyberpotential then it must mutate to keep up with the shifting complexities of social realities and life conditions as they are changed by the profound impact communications technologies and technoscience have on all our lives. It is up to cyberfeminists to use feminist theoretical insights and strategic tools and join them with cybertechniques to battle the very real sexism, racism, and militarism encoded in the software and hardware of the Net, thus politicizing this environment.”

Your research addresses the ‘third world’ presence in cyberspace, with reference to cyberfeminist practice and more generally as well.  Your work also engages with South Asian diasporas that span the ‘first’ and ‘third’ worlds. What are the ways in which one can speak of a ‘third world’ online, and how might this complicate everyday understandings of the category of the ‘third world’? What might this imply about the potential of the internet as a space and tool for activism?

The ways in which we speak of categories such as ‘third-world,’ ‘South Asia,’ and even ‘race’ in relation to internet- mediated online/offline environments has to be much more nuanced than in previous times when we engaged these concepts.  There is a continual interplay of economics, politics, culture, and everyday life in these online environments as more and more people– young and old– work and play in these spaces that they inhabit. Cyber-spaces have become the nodes at which various locals connect and dis-connect in the production of the global. Thus those of us who inhabit online networks are also networked into processes of globalization through an interplay of online global audiences and offline located/situated producers. And no matter where we live in the world we are both– global audiences and located/situated producers– in varying degrees.

So rather than say ‘first world’ and ‘third-world’ or even ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ (which I am inclined to use more often these days because of the trans-rural research I do to look at how Modernity and Development are eating into rural spaces the world over) or even global and local, virtual and real, or east and west, we need to develop a different vocabulary to talk about what is happening. Euphoria about “new” media and internet connectivity is concealing the crucial political and economic shifts that are enabled by the ways in which digital technologies have become key players in processes of globalization. For instance, in our academic investigations of identity online, we rarely link the fact that financial transactions occur through digital networks and the specific ways that that impacts who is online and why. In our celebration of online youth cultures and simultaneously the social panics around teens and children having online access we sideline issues related to how the internet and related media shape future generations of consumers.

So– if we are to talk of ‘cyberfeminist practice’ in relation to third-worlds– I would first say that we need to rearticulate what is meant by ‘third-world.’

Having said that, let me lay out my critique (which in my past work has been labeled ‘third world’ critiques of cyberfeminisms) of discourses of women’s emancipation in online spaces.

I draw my critique of discourses of women’s emancipation in online spaces from my ongoing research at two specific global/local, rural/urban intersections. One is a rural/urban intersection in Northwest Ohio where my students and I are collecting oral histories as well as doing user-end research on children and teens use of the internet and computers. This is a low income bi-racial community comprised partly of Mexican-American descendants of migrant farm laborers who came to this region as far back as the 1940s to pick tomatoes and so on, working for daily wages on the neighborhood farms. The area also houses low income white populations. The second research project that provides me a lens for the critique is my continuing collaboration with the core team of officers (B. Shyamasundari, Annapurna Mamidipudi, Seemanthani Niranjana and Latha Tummuru) at the NGO Dastkar Andhra, in exploring the production and marketing of handloom which leads me to look at what discourses are available online for the selling of indigenous crafts and handloom through the internet (considered to be a ‘new’ media outlet).

Sites of activism online are embedded in discourses of development, which in turn are intertwined with discourses of liberal feminism and work easily to reinstate colonial discourses about oppressed third-world women. These colonial narratives about the third-world female Other– or rather the non-urbanized female Other– on the internet take shape through marketing techniques that rely on producing a third-world oppressed Other who has been ‘liberated’ through acts of techno-mediation and liberal feminist handouts. These images are produced under the gaze of the urbanized Global and Multicultural Self who, it is implicitly suggested, will liberate the oppressed Other through their acts of consumption. Thus it is possible for the urban woman consumer to maintain her dreams of suburbia, while also ‘helping the poor and oppressed women,’ i.e., those less fortunate than her. Of course the irony of this kind of online marketing is that it re-instates racist and westernized patriarchies while highlighting the urban and suburban woman’s post-feminist (so-called) freedom of choice and agency.

Yet the contradiction of the interplay between economics and culture is that consumption patterns do indeed shape the existence or disappearance of indigenous cultures and modes of production not endorsed by the discourse of ‘newness’ embedded in mainstream globalization processes. In addition, the euphoric rhetoric about ICTs’ impact on economically disadvantaged communities, given its implicit colonial legacy, recasts ‘third-world’ and rural women as somehow ‘ignorant’ in light of our high-tech information age.  Thus, feminist activists/scholars wishing to use the internet and related digital media within economic systems in order to highlight issues of concern within such communities are faced with a dilemma that is both methodological and lexical.

In 1996, Spivak published her piece on “Woman as Theatre” which was a commentary on the UN Conference on women in Beijing. The conference was a milestone in that the very fact that the conference happened meant that the UN was beginning to center ‘women’s concerns,’ albeit in problematic ways. But how does this sort of recognition, acknowledge and even examine how international NGOs can benefit women NOT likely to be active participants in the social networks of liberal feminism and economic globalization? Spivak writes:

“The financialization of the globe must be represented as the North embracing the South. Women are being used for the representation of this unity- another name for the profound transnational disunity necessary for globalization. These conferences are global theatre. There is, of course, no politics which is not theatre. But we are interested in this global theatre, staged to show participation between the North and the South, the latter constituted by Northern discursive mechanisms” (Spivak 1996, p. 2).

There is a large and growing body of academic work on identity politics in cyberspace, specifically the modes in which online experience is inflected by histories, identity categories (such as nation, race, gender, or ethnicity), and multiple notions of community. Yet instrumentalist understandings of technology appear to dominate in popular media coverage about the social impact of the internet. I would be interested in your reflections on this issue.

In my work I write about the production of identity– raced, gendered, queered, and so on. My efforts researching the internet are currently closely linked to my teaching– pedagogy– where I focus on trying to make my students understand how meaning making in their everyday lives and in online settings are interrelated. I design assignments in class to try and guide students to understand the production of raced/classed identities through online/offline intersections. This examination is layered and multimodal. In my classes, graduate and undergraduate students are asked to interact within online socio-cultural networks.

Researchers studying the production of identity in this manner must engage in the production of culture and subjectivity in the specific context while interacting with others doing the same in order to gain a nuanced understanding of how identities form and are performed in such online spaces. This enables us to talk about the meaning-making that goes on there.

My work occupies intersections of media and critical/cultural studies as I continue to develop critical ethnographic methodologies– under the heading of ‘cyberethnography’ and ‘epistemologies of doing’– for research and pedagogy at online/offline and global/local intersections and nodes.  Communication and the understanding of organizations as well as the role of culture, politics, economic, and everyday life, are central to my research, as I conduct ongoing participant and performative ethnographies in the emerging areas where digital communicative environments impact and shape globalization, and in the emerging areas where development work produces unexpected encounters between the so-called new and old technologies. For instance, the study of ‘emerging technocultures’ for me and my collaborators is as much about emerging forms of handloom technologies as weavers and marketers of handloom negotiate how transnational capital flows to and away from them as it is about the study of emerging forms of digital communicative environments and financial instruments.

Thus I examine how individuals act within communities as their subjectivities are shaped and they are produced as actors or subjects within interdependent global/local hierarchies. I not only ask who gets mapped out and why but seek to understand HOW this happens processually and structurally. I seek to understand, for instance, how what I term ‘voicings’ are produced in either offline development contexts or in diverse online contexts (including development projects using online venues to facilitate their work) and under what conditions ‘subaltern’ speech gets heard. However, rather than stop at a euphoric celebration of this emergence of voice from thus far marginalized groups, I also try to investigate what implications these emerging voicings might have for the existing and emerging structures of power. I wish to understand how voice emerges in any of the contexts I examine in order to understand where oppression shifts to when particular marginalized groups gain voice within structures of globalization.

Globalization processes include material and discursive hegemonies produced at the intersection of the economic, the cultural, and the social, and are mediated in multiple ways through old and new mediascapes. These processes feed into economic and cultural local formations. Global technospaces are produced through and are a consequence of economic globalization. For instance, digital diasporas from regions such as South Asia are a product of transnational commerce. Thus, the theoretical lenses for engaging these contexts continue to be developed, as I immerse myself in various (trans)rural, (trans)urban, online, offline, first world and third world locations. These lenses serve to pose questions and to describe how seeming contradictions contribute to situated praxis within the global-local continuum of everyday economic and communicative practices.

As you suggest, rigorous methodologies are critical for analyzing practices in cyberspace. What are some of the main concerns in trying to frame adequate and innovative research frameworks for studying social life online?

As far as methods go, as an ethnographer of technocultures in diverse enviroments, I actually believe that we must use multiple tools to look at the phenomena at hand. So for me the understanding and critical engagement with the site is very important and this needs to be done through the use multiple, layered, and nuanced tools. Thus descriptive tools such as quantitative analysis tools, survey tools, and textual analysis are as useful as a way to enter the site. A more in-depth understanding can be gained through immersion, ethnographic living with and living in these environments while acts of production that create an awareness of social, political, cultural and a variety of other factors that impact the site to be examine– online and offline– simultaneously helps provide a radically contextual as well as a global understanding of the site being studied.

Therefore the design and entry point into the research need to be clearly mapped out, the location of the researcher at the beginning point for the study need to  stated clearly. As the researcher continues to be drawn further into engagement with the site, there will be shifts. The researcher’s relationship to the object/subject of study will necessarily shift and lead to a re-evaluation of methods at each stage of the research. At each point where there are findings and analyses, we are able to provide insights about the situated nature of technospatial practices and identity production in relation to cyberspace.

After a hiatus from public performance between around 1980 till the mid-1990s, Stephen began playing publicly again in Cambridge and other spots in Massachusetts. Since relocating to San Francisco, he performs regularly at various locations in the city, including Café Euro, Simple Pleasures Café, and Bazaar Café. On June 3, Stephen played a set at Bazaar Café that included songs from his new CD, Modal Soul,  other original compositions, and jazz standards. In a conversation with Rohit Chopra, who was there to hear him play, Stephen talks about his approach to Modal Soul, music as a form of spiritual communication, the mystery of inspiration, the musicians who have influenced him and their contributions to the universe of jazz, and how his work as a psychotherapist informs his understanding of the creative process. 

How might you describe your approach to Modal Soul? What were some of the things you wished to achieve with the album?

There were four main threads that led to recording Modal Soul.

First: Undertaking Modal Soul was my acknowledgement to myself that I was improving as a pianist.

Much earlier in life, when I was in my twenties, I had pursued a career as jazz pianist, composer, and arranger. During this period I released two LPs of solo piano jazz (In my Own Time [1975] and The Seasons: A Portrait of the Life Cycle [1977]), and played college concerts in solo, trio and quartet settings. However, in my early thirties, as I was completing graduate school at Harvard and embarking on a very different career, my ‘playing out’ days came to an apparent end. Over the next twenty years or so, I continued to play and compose, but a career in music was no longer my raison d’être.

In hindsight, given my immature attitudes and predispositions during that earlier time, had I been any more successful with my music career as it existed then, I doubt I would have survived it.

However, it ain’t over ‘til it’s over. About seven years ago, when I was in my mid-fifties, opportunities began to come my way to play out once again. I was pretty rusty, and it took quite a while to blow enough soot out of the furnace that it could become somewhat serviceable. But it did happen. I landed a regular solo piano brunch gig at Club Passim in Harvard Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I played for over a year, and it was during this stint that I realized that my playing was actually improving (what a pleasant discovery!). It came to me that my playing had reached a level that warranted recording Modal Soul.

Second:  I was very much taken by the evolution of digital technology as it pertains to keyboards. As a player and composer I have always felt drawn to bass figures as a foundation for both harmonies and rhythms, experienced both with music of the Baroque and with jazz. Indeed, I was very blessed during those earlier years to have begun to develop a facility with playing, and improvising, walking bass lines on piano. I did a lot of gigs with horn players in which the piano was the rhythm section. Amazing practice, that was. Two bass players I knew, John Neves, at the time a well-known jazz player and teacher at Berklee College of Music in Boston, and John Hart, an utterly competent, journeyman bass player living in Cambridge, MA (both of whom are cited in the liner notes to Modal Soul), picked up on what I was developing and encouraged me, expressing the opinion that I had this wonderful, natural feel for the structure of bass lines, and that if I continued to develop this ability, I would “have it all”–meaning, not fame or fortune, but a form of musical completeness. I am indebted to them both.

Back to keyboards: Modern digital keyboards (the good ones) are things of beauty. The piano sounds they produce are “sampled,” meaning that the tones they emit are actual recordings of exemplary concert-level acoustic grand pianos. Also, the best manufacturers have mastered the technical challenges of meaningfully emulating the keyboard action/feel of excellent acoustic instruments. Indeed, some of them go a step further, offering very high quality digitized samples of other instruments. And . . . the ones that truly fascinated me have the ability to “split” the keyboard (at a player-defined point) so that the left side can be made to put forth sounds of acoustic bass combined with ride cymbal, while the right side can remain in the acoustic piano mode. Voila!: the (meager, yet definite) elementals of a jazz trio!!

I had a few opportunities to try out several of these instruments. With their wonderful “sampled” sounds, excellent action combined with split keyboard capability, the best of them were perfectly suited for the kind of playing that had been developing within me for almost forty years. Instrumentally, I was “home.”

Third: I was originally drawn to the keyboard as a young child, finding in it a safe medium through which I could express emotions that dared not be verbally articulated in an abuse-ridden household. In the process I inadvertently happened upon the vehicle that would preserve my sanity. I would only go half-mad (difficult, but remediable)–not the whole route (beyond hope). This special relationship between the keyboard and me, and the music “we” created, lent, as well, a special seriousness to that which music “holds,” and what can be conveyed through it. While unable to communicate with precision what comes so easily to verbal language, music can “reach beyond” the verbally precise to convey ranges of expression, experience and meaning that are “beyond words”– the unspeakable. As composing started to occur for me in my teens (kind of spontaneously), all my compositions (about 100 at this point, including a four movement piano suite) would come to carry (for me, anyway) this sense of yearning and wonder that transcends the verbal faculty.

Fourth: I wanted to teach myself digital recording. On my two earlier LPs I had served as engineer on the first and had hired an engineer for the second. It is difficult to both play and engineer. There is only so much energy to go around, and the engineering mindset is a very different neurological arrangement than the neurology of “creative, risk-taking, performing musician.” On the other hand, I figured that if I could learn some of the techniques of digital recording well enough, it would free me up from the rigid constraints of time (and money) attendant to using a professional (for hire) studio. I thought this possible trade-off might be worth it. I was nervous about the challenge, but I believe my decision to be both engineer and performer on Modal Soul was the correct one, at least this time around. Perhaps I got lucky.

In summary, as I approached Modal Soul, I was striving to celebrate the level my playing had come to over the past several years of returning to “playing out,” combine a lot of “split-keyboard’ playing featuring simultaneously improvised base lines and melodic lines, give musical voice, through the gravitas of the compositions themselves, to life themes that carry some weight and meaning for me (and hopefully for others), and, if I were fortunate enough to be able to pull off the playing, recording, editing, and mastering chores of Modal Soul, have a CD that approaches a kind of transcendent quality that leaves words behind.

I was struck by the many registers in which the album tracks operate, holding or bringing together seemingly divergent imperatives, like lushness and delicacy. The tracks have an incredibly beautiful structure, yet also reflect a sense of freedom and play. The compositions are contemplative, as the title suggests, yet evoke an immediacy, a sense of being in the moment.  Could you share some thoughts on this?

At one level the themes addressed musically in Modal Soul are unexceptional (as all deeply human themes must be). They can, and do, loom large in the individual life, but they are not unique experiences in the context of the human condition. The experiences of “daring to set forth–in pursuit of any worthy goal” (“Walkin”), expressing one’s love, intimacy, devotion and commitment to one’s partner as a gesture of love (“Emily’s Song”), the emotional hangover of “Act in haste; repent at leisure” (“Lament”), wondering about what one is “called” to do in this life, or whether “callings” even exist and, if they do, how one would ever recognize them (“The Call”), wrestling with personal loneliness as both curse and exaltation (“Alone”), attaining a goal, only to discover that all one has achieved is to be (once again) at the bottom of the next climb (“Staircase”), experiencing a degree of torment and perdition that is somehow redeemed in a profound way (“Modal Soul”), and, metaphorically, holding vigil while awaiting the new dawn (“Awaiting First Light”)–are, along with so many others, held in common by most of us who are embodied in a space-time existence. Yet finding a musical resonance that embodies them is a stirring challenge, and on Modal Soul, the challenge is met often enough to make me smile with some satisfaction. Modal Soul is not without warts and dimples, but bear in mind that one person’s warts and dimples are another person’s beauty marks.

Regarding interlacing elements of structure and play, your comments about Modal Soul are most generous and heartwarming. Song form is important to me. Much (though not all) of contemporary jazz composition presents musical elements as a kind of gymnastic routine, in which one’s ability to improvise is “tested” on an obstacle course–often excruciatingly demanding–of harmonic, melodic and rhythmic elements. Such compositions, or ‘tunes,’ are written as vehicles for improvisation, rather than as complete musical statements unto themselves. The beauty of song-as-composition–as a composition containing it’s own dignity (what I’ve called gravitas)–is often sacrificed, or lost altogether. In such cases, virtuosity trumps musical completeness. There is nothing necessarily wrong with having challenging musical elements in jazz compositions. However, for me, I want, and need, to feel that when I perform–when I am about to play a “song,” “tune” or “composition”–I am approaching a whole train of pre-existing musical thought that is already complete unto itself, and sufficient without me. Should I dare to approach it, I better be damn ready to risk having something, both in the arrangement and improvisation that I bring to it, worth hearing–something that contributes to its beauty, its style, its flair, its essence.

One other point: I don’t possess a profound musical talent, however such talent as I do possess has managed to mature very slowly–along with the rest of me–and, combining with the richness of a much more extended and fuller life experience, is now capable of rendering meaningful musical statements that carry a sense of completeness to them. This process of maturation and fruition continues to develop, within me, on all levels. Given all this, I am a happy camper, indeed. Maybe this “happiness,” that at nearly 62 years of age I am playing better than I ever have through all my 54 years of involvement with the piano, colors the music in a way that makes it more engaging along the lines that you cite in your question. Increasing age certainly brings with it increasing degrees of freedom. One is less bound by conventional anything; life, overall, becomes, moment to moment, more a series of spontaneous, continuous acts of self-creation. Maybe my motto should be “As in life, so on keyboard.”

At the performance at Bazaar Café, you mentioned that at times the muse works in concert with one and at times quarrels with one. Could you speak to the nature of inspiration in jazz, with regard to composition as well as performance.

The immediate question that remains unanswered prior to any performance is whether the Muse will show up at all. There is nothing more hilarious, in a self-defeating way, than to have good technique happening, in the absence of any inspiration. Of course, sometimes the Muse may be there, and energy is rampant, but one’s technique is not up to the task of rendering her inspirations suitable pathways of expression. This is also frustrating–especially for her. Under either circumstance, one would, I think, do better selling shoes. The relationship a musician has with his/her Muse (Euterpe, in this instance–the Muse of music–one of the Nine Muses of Greek antiquity–notice that the words “muse” and “music” are cognate!) is a fascinating intrapsychic adventure. Inspiration–the Muse–is very mysterious, a consciousness unto itself, with an agenda that can run in a very different direction than the musician’s (or composer’s) conscious orientation. In the realm of composition it can make its presence (she can make her presence) felt as musical snippets injected into the mind that are as catchy as Velcro, and dedicated to pester their unwitting host until they are worked with and developed. The force here is possessive. One can’t shake it; one can only tame it (momentarily) by working with it. When turned over and over, such snippets assemble into full-blown inspirations that yield beauty, or simplicity, or stunning discordant atonalities, or complexity, or haunting dissonances within arresting melody, or harmonic progressions that are different, and more inspired, than anything the composer has done prior to this siege or even thought about doing, or rhythmic syncopations that have no apparent precedent, or new chordal voicings carrying unfathomed nuances of emotion. Out of this (often) unruly mix precipitates a new piece, or composition. The fact that the energy or inspiration seems sourced elsewhere is somewhat borne out by the fact that the composer him/herself may well feel a sense of awe, once the piece is composed, as its innate structure and form, now set forth, reveal an elegance that is beyond the composer’s conscious ability to have conceived of a priori. The Muse in all this is the thankless taskmaster, although experiences with her are what composers pray for. In her absence, a composer turns barren. Yet the madness of possession can only be tolerated so long. It finally remits, a relief is felt . . . then, over time, a wondering creeps in as to whether she will ever visit again (along with a worry that she won’t), then arise the deep pangs of longing for her to return.

In the playing/performing realm it’s the same Muse (or maybe her evil twin) but a slightly different dynamic, as jazz performance is largely spontaneous, and the Muse is often moody.

However, let me back up a bit: Especially as a solo player/performer, there are three major consciousnesses in play: the personal identity consciousness of the musician, the consciousness of the instrument (yes, I do believe in ‘machine consciousness’ as a form of consciousness that an be actively engaged and worked with), and the Muse. The personal consciousness of the musician is beset with the prosaic challenges of everyday life–the wratcheta-wratcheta of day in, day out existence. The instrument, especially if the musician has chosen it and cared for it lovingly, has the consciousness of a loyal friend always at the ready to do our bidding. It really wants to “give back.” (On the contrary, if a beat-up instrument is imposed on the player, as in a nightclub setting, or the instrument is one the musician owns but does not take proper care of or respect, such instruments may become saboteurs that await their opportunity to misbehave and thwart the intentions of the musician, often to his embarrassment.) The Muse, on the other hand, is an energy that is capable of using the musician’s neurology mediumistically, “coming through” to realize momentary corporeal existence simultaneous with engaging in expression through the act of playing.

Although, as previously mentioned, there can be no guarantee that the Muse will show up, it is unmistakable when she does. Neurology realigns, the multiple dimensions (more than can be consciously followed) involving (among others) harmony, melody, rhythm, phrasing, voicings, et al., start to orchestrate with each other in ways that are mutually reinforcing. “Lift-off” occurs in which the playing, and the conceptions that inform it, are given immediate execution without any intervening interval of contemplation. The channel is open. The energy streams forth. There is an immediate flow through from conception to execution. Indeed, conception and execution are the same act.

The Muse is nothing if not coquettish. I have had innumerable experiences of her effervescence and her evanescence–her bursting upon the scene and her sudden departures. For instance, occasionally, prior to playing out, I will be filled with a surge of desire to be playing. My hands will be grasping chords on an imaginary keyboard, and my fingers will be engaging in runs in the air. When I feel like this, I know that She is pressing me to provide her an outlet–waiting in the wings for me to let something come through from her. The anticipation is very exciting. I have no idea what she will come up with or, rather, what we will come up with together. Yet I know that we are going to dance! Then again, there are evenings when she is staunch in her insistence to be admitted, only to suddenly vanish halfway through an engagement. (Those evenings can be very long, indeed.) On other evenings, I may be feeling so exhausted from other life obligations, worries, insecurities, etc., that I am simply too piss-beat to venture forth at all. Yet, one aspect of the profession of being a “playing out” musician is that if you have been hired to play, you show up and “make noise” no matter what. It’s part of the deal of being a musician; it’s also part of the discipline. Starting an evening from such a place, it can feel as if I’m facing an evening where I am in waist-deep water in a stream, trying to walk along the streambed against a four-knot current. Molasses. Then, without warning, the Muse sometimes swoops in. Energy changes, conceptual synapses start to shake out and line up, stamina and inspiration are just suddenly there, and things start happening. Some of my best evenings have occurred while coming from a place of exhaustion–even depression–and suddenly catching a wave of the Muse’s energy, and surfing it. It is one of the most ineffable, yet tangible realities for those of us who have been a part of its play. The experience of Her, through various encounters, can take on the ruddy hue of reality.

Could you speak about some of your influences?

There have been many. Here are some who come to mind.

Dave Brubeck: I have to give Dave Brubeck credit for introducing me to small combo jazz. His albums featuring Eugene Wright on bass, Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, and Joe Morello on percussion were wonderful for their time. Brubeck wrote terrific songs, and his polyrhythmic playing, as spurred on by Morello’s boundless creativity and precision, were very inspiring. I heard him in concert at MIT in Cambridge, MA in about 1960 (after Time Out (1959) had been released). Later, his two LP Carnegie Hall Concert (1963) set thrilled me. I think it was through Brubeck that I felt motivated to pursue a career in jazz. His Jazz Impressions of Eurasia (1958) remains on my top ten list of great albums. Once, at a school in Pennsylvania, we were both a part of the same concert series. That was a thrill for me.

Thelonious Monk: I don’t really know if Monk ever said this, or if I just imagined (after all these years) that he did. The quote is: “There are no wrong notes; there are only wrong people to hear them.” Monk was one of those challenges I could not avoid. I was completely ignorant as to his exquisite genius when I first heard him. However, I was determined to befriend him, in the form of his music. I bought a copy of Monk’s Dream (1963-an album on Columbia). It just challenged me silly. I listened to it over and over, and thought I was hearing a stream of fluffs and other technical gaffs. I didn’t see how Monk could get away with releasing music like this. Good God, was I ever ignorant!! Then, little by little, I started to actually “hear” him. He played lines that were so syncopated–that could run from “corny” to taking your breath away without so much as a self-conscious sniffle. His sense of time was impeccable (Ben Riley, his drummer on one occasion when I saw him in New York in 1966, said that to me when I asked him about it), and because it was, he could take liberties with it that exulted in eccentricities of all sorts. That extraordinary sense of freedom and devil-may-care exuberance were just wonderfully liberating. His rhythm sections that were so solid and could swing so hard, his long-term association with alto saxophonist Charlie Rouse, his compositional genius (“Round About Midnight,” “Crepuscule with Nellie” and so many others), his unassuming stage manner (when not playing Monk would sometimes just stand up and, eyes closed, turn round and round in circles, in a reverie over what his group was doing without him), he was one of the most remarkable and, arguably, the most original of all the great jazz artists of the twentieth century. Our paths crossed once, and I learned a lesson from an encounter with him I shall never forget. It’s private.

Bill Evans provided me with some of the most complete musical evenings I have ever experienced. The way he borrowed, and built on, chordal voicings that have their provenance in the music of Debussy and Ravel–that drew, unabashedly, on classical, romantic influences, and then combined these elements with jazz tempos, made a deep impression on me. Additionally, his conception of the jazz trio was that of an orchestration, often spontaneous, of co-equals. Drums and bass were not just time-keepers and pulse providers and harmonic cellar-dwellers; they were co-creators. This was not “soloist as accompanied by . . . ,” but, rather, “The Bill Evans Trio: Bill Evans, Scott Lafarro and Paul Motian together.” Also, Evans was the one caucasian artist on Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, probably a brave move for Miles, and a courageous one for Evans. (I remember hearing Evans on another Miles album that must have been recorded just a bit earlier than Kind of Blue. I can’t remember the name of it. In the mix, the piano playing is unmistakably Evans’s, however the level of the piano in the mix is very low, and apparently no credit was given to Evans for the date. It had me wondering if Miles was himself challenged, at that time, to have a white guy in his group. Maybe Evans was on a probationary stint with Miles, or something like that. I really haven’t a clue. Of course, by the time Kind of Blue came along, any notion of Evans’s being something of a second-class citizen in Miles’ group was long gone. Indeed, Evans wrote those memorable liner notes to the album, where he talks about jazz improvisation and likens it to a Japanese art form. Obviously Miles did not object.) Evans’ work on Kind of Blue continues to inspire me, even after more than nearly fifty years of hearing it. There are always new things to hear! The subtlety of phrasing, gentle yet insistent syncopations, sparse yet elegant lines, the way he teases and toys with the downbeat and shifts so seamlessly through all these moods, is simply one of the most exquisite piano performances in all of jazz, whether in solo or group setting. He is credited with pushing harmonic conceptions into the realm of modal voicings, although it is clear that both McCoy Tyner and Herbie Hancock were no slouches in making their own contributions to this spatial way of conceiving harmonic structure. My personal note? I was able to have an audition with Helen Keane, Bill Evans’ long-term manager, at her apartment in New York City (1972 or so). She was very gracious, and said that she liked what I was doing, and that if I were serious I would need to move to New York. I wasn’t ready to take the risk.

Oscar Peterson: What can I say about him. Coming up as a successor to the great Art Tatum, Oscar Peterson had a range of technical prowess, sense of swing and gifts as an arranger of jazz trios that was astounding. He was an early, post-Brubeck influence on me. His album Affinity (1959) is one of the most cohesive jazz trio albums ever recorded. The compositions  (including “Waltz for Debby” by Bill Evans) are beautifully set forth, with the song form celebrated through a stunning range of improvisations. The Sound of the Trio (1961), recorded live at The Hickory House in Chicago (you can hear the silverware clanking in the background!) is a tour de force of live piano jazz performance in a laid back setting. Peterson’s sidemen Ed Thigpen, on drums, and Ray Brown, on bass were perfect complements to him. Oscar Peterson was a large talent, and his trios were always about him, with quite carefully arranged intros and exits. However his playing is exceptional, and his composing, as on Canadiana Suite (1964) reveals a whole different level of subtlety and sensitivity that is not always evident in his up-tempo playing. Also, he saluted the music of others; for example, his treatment of Leonard Bernstein’s score for West Side Story (West Side Story: Oscar Peterson Trio, 1962) comes damn close to rendering definitive versions of a number of those songs. No pianist I have ever heard swings harder than Oscar Peterson. He inspired me by way of just knowing that such a gifted creature actually could be out there roaming the earth. He was “out there,” somewhere, doing these impossible things on the piano, while I, struggling, was trying to believe that I might actually have it in me to be a good pianist someday-though never that good!  Personal note: Oscar Peterson was my mother’s favorite jazz pianist. It was a special evening, indeed, when I took her up to Lennie’s on the Turnpike in Danvers, Massachusetts (in about 1973?) to hear him. Between sets, I summoned up the courage to go up to him with my mother and introduce them. It was a thrill for me. At the critical moment, I think my mother may have tranced out!

John Coltrane posed a similar sense of challenge to me as had Monk. I came to him through A Love Supreme, and, though I would not have known how to express it, I realize that it was the devotional aspect of his music that transfixed me. Trane taught me that devotional motivation–the energy of spirituality and the urge to achieve some form of union with one’s Creator–were valid reservoirs to draw on in composing for, and performing in, the jazz arena. This was a new kind of calling. A lot of jazz (and good jazz at that) hangs out in the down-and-out gritty of the nightclub: booze, drugs, indulgence, jive, personal tragedy. Much jazz composition draws its inspiration from these themes. Coltrane flipped that on its ear. While he played in nightclubs (where, at close range, I heard him on several occasions), what he brought to those environments was spiritual quest. You can hear this quest in its nascent state on earlier albums (pre-legendary quartet albums), as in Soultrane (1957), once you get the hang of what this questing sounds like musically–his phrasing, tonality, timber. His Ballads album (recorded in 1962) in which he brings the spiritual quest to lyrical expression of ballads (composed originally to express secular love-related themes), made a deep impression on me. Ditto John Coltrane and Johnny Hartman, the one album Trane made with a vocalist (1963). My favorite John Coltrane album is Crescent (1964) recorded shortly before A Love Supreme. This album is a magnificent balance of the fervor of spiritual quest and the lyricism of both elation and suffering on a thoroughly personal, human scale. It is a remarkable achievement. It was through Coltrane that I first came to appreciate McCoy Tyner, a huge influence on me (and just about every other contemporary jazz pianist, if they’re honest enough to admit it). Coltrane’s composing was also top-notch. He could affix the sense of yearning in such pieces as “Naima” and “Giant Steps” among others. He also had a wonderful ear for songs that were not a part of the jazz canon, but could be very exciting as jazz vehicles (“Inch Worm,” “My Favorite Things,” “Every Time We Say Goodbye,” “Greensleeves”, just to name  few). Coltrane really appreciated a good composition.

McCoy Tyner swept me away from the lyricism of Dave Brubeck and Bill Evans. He could play lyrically (listen to Coltrane’s Ballads), but his range was much more (increasingly so with the passage of years) modal and bombastic, combining torrents of sound as a watercolor wash for Coltrane’s heavenly (heavenwards) excursions, and punctuating musical clauses with heavy hits of deep-bass octaves. I was completely fascinated with Tyner’s range and drive-not to mention his technique. Three of his earliest LPs as a leader: the trio albums Inception (1962), Today and Tomorrow (1963) and Nights of Ballads and Blues (1963) had an immense impact on me. They are both rough-edged and brilliant, exuberant portrayals of a young player who is bursting at the seams with fire and originality, and, already frighteningly accomplished, has yet to realize, or even guess at, the limits of his abilities. Over the years, I heard McCoy play many, many times. After Trane died in 1967, Tyner (who had already left the quartet) had a very successful career with any number of groups assembled under his name. In trio settings Tyner had a tendency to be accompanied, on club dates, by drummers who would play much too loud, often burying his pianistic fury under a pile of percussive mush. This didn’t seem to bother McCoy at all. One of the most compelling, original facets of McCoy Tyner’s playing is that he had a way of articulating an improvisational line (melody, loosely) that was completely unique, and has not, to my knowledge, ever been successfully emulated (nor, maybe, could it be). I don’t know how to describe this stunning gift in verbal language. It simply has to be heard (and, perhaps, pointed out by someone who knows of what I speak). Recordings that have goodly portions of this brilliance include The Real McCoy (1967) and Just Feelin’ (1991). Fortunately, McCoy Tyner has been extensively recorded. There must be countless other examples of this wonderful, inimitable highlight. Personal note: I had the opportunity, on several occasions, to express my appreciation and gratitude to McCoy for all that he had accomplished, and for his influence on me. I probably managed this best when I said to him: “I hope that it is a source of deep satisfaction to you as you reflect on how many pianists you have influenced over the years, and how a whole school of jazz piano playing has grown up around you as a result of your wonderful gifts.” We were shaking hands as I said this. McCoy, ever reticent, simply smiled gently in appreciation, acknowledging my compliment.

Lee Morgan was one of the most exuberant spirits in jazz, and, to this day, remains my favorite trumpet player. His energy was irrepressible; his joy in high-energy lyricism unexcelled. His playing was uniformly ebullient! He was also a genius. When jazz “Fusion” appeared on the scene in the early 1970s, heralded by Freddie Hubbard’s LP Red Clay (1970), it took the jazz world by storm (and not without criticism). The upright bass was gone. In its place, a Fender bass. The packaging was slick, and commercial. The “hook”: combine jazz improvisation with infectious “rock” rhythms gravitating around funky bits of musical doggerel. This was the “Fusion” formula. It had its advocates, and it had its detractors. However, Lee Morgan had already opened up this territory in an absolutely unique, beautiful and “unslick” manner almost seven years earlier, with his The Sidewinder (1963).

With The Sidewinder, which had a smaller, though thoroughly devoted following of black listeners, Morgan broke ground. The playing is so lively and the ensemble gels so completely as it spins improvisational gold out of the filaments of rhythmic pulse, rendered all the more infectious through being understated, and all built around true, extended, thoughtful song form. One of the most brilliant-and brave-piano solos in all of jazz is to be found on The Sidewinder, in the title cut. Barry Harris was a bebop-trained pianist, and the sensibilities of bebop could not be more different than those of a driving, unrelenting, though understated, rock beat. Harris’ solo, which always warms me up with appreciation when I hear it, is a masterpiece of having to solve, on the fly, the problem(s) of adapting a style mastered for a whole different branch of music to this new alien world. When it’s his turn to solo, Harris is on his own, with nowhere to hide. You can tell the synapses of terror are starting to crackle at the outset of his solo, as if he’s saying to himself, “Oh ____! What have I gotten myself into? What do I do next!!” He then takes technical motifs from the bebop world and “gets down” with them. His efforts are not altogether unclumsy, but they are all the more precious and dear for that-and . . . he turns it around! It becomes a truly wonderful outpouring, and very successful. His solo–his response to being on the spot–has always inspired me.

Personal note: In the early 1970s, I had the great good fortune to meet, and befriend, Eddie Heywood, who had composed “Canadian Sunset” and “Soft Summer Breeze.” This was on Martha’s Vineyard, where he was living. At our first meeting–the first of many–we spontaneously engaged in a “show and tell” in his piano studio that lasted almost six hours. Over the three years to follow, we put in a lot of time together. He was on the comeback trail as a pianist, and had decided to record an LP. The group he brought to the Vineyard (for rehearsals) included the bassist Bob Cranshaw, who was the bassist on The Sidewinder LP. When we were introduced, I wasted no time in unfurling some questions. It turns out that between takes, Morgan would disappear into the bathroom, emerging some minutes later with the sketch for the next piece to be played. He was composing them on the spot! They are brilliant pieces. Cranshaw also told me that the final run-through of the “head,” or basic melody on “The Sidewinder” cut was recorded separately, and later spliced onto the original. When I met him Cranshaw had long since switched over to Fender bass, having had to give up playing the upright bass due to a back injury. Eddie Heywood’s kindness to me is reflected in my citing him in the liner notes to Modal Soul. He mentored me, and I learned much from him just in the act of being around him, and hearing him play. We loved to swap ideas. He has shown up in my dream life as a loving mentor. We really had a wonderful kinship.

Herbie Hancock’s influence on me has been two-fold-both are wonderful. As a piano “comper” (comping is the act of providing chordal/harmonic underpinnings, as a part of the rhythm section, for other soloing instruments–usually horns–during their solos), Hancock is simply the best. His creativity in feeding rhythmically and harmonically attuned chords, and snippets of this and that, have the effect of pushing soloists to new heights by keeping the rhythmic, and harmonic dimensions burning underneath. No one does it better. A great example of this can be found on Miles Davis’ Four and More (1964). As a soloist, Hancock’s originality and range are also of prodigious proportions. His comping has inspired me for decades. His soloing abilities are so colossal as to have the contrary effect: they discourage me from ever wanting to approach the keyboard again with any pretension of being able to play seriously. He is the only pianist I know who has ever, during an improvisation, “quoted” a John Coltrane solo (in this case one from A Love Supreme), working it into a one of the most remarkable piano solos I have ever heard. (This solo, along with the usual magnificent comping by Hancock, can be heard on Wayne Shorter’s “Speak No Evil,” the title tune and track #4 on Speak No Evil (1964). The quote of the Coltrane solo from A Love Supreme can be heard from 6:39 – 6:52 on this track. It is a complete tour de force.)

One other influence (who will remain unnamed) provided me a “lesson in life”: I went to see a first tier, very celebrated, jazz pianist who was perfoming in a trio setting. He, and his trio, were featured in concert at one of the most venerable concert halls in Boston. Despite his undeniable brilliance as a pianist, I came away from the concert disinclined to like this pianist very much personally-not that it matters, or he will ever care. However, the experience was one of profound disillusionment and disappointment for me. It was painful. The trio concert took place several years back (2005?). Here’s what unfolded. As part of a gracious introduction, the impresario of the concert pointed out, with obvious pride, his son in the first balcony, stage right. He announced that this was his son’s first attendance at a jazz concert. The full house applauded politely in appreciation for the fact of this young man’s initiation into the world of jazz performance (another one won over; we can use all the help we can get!). When, a few moments later, the featured artist came out on the stage, he picked up the microphone. The first words out of his mouth were: “Now wasn’t that just one of the stupidest things you ever saw?” He was serious.  The audience was stunned. The young man, riding high with pride and excitement just moments before, likely felt crushed by this remarkable display of pure cruelty. No one saw the impresario’s reaction. That renowned pianist should be on the hook for paying that boy’s psychotherapy bills when, one day, this esteem-puncturing humiliation likely spills out on the couch. So this pianist, whose musicianship and accomplishments are beyond question, and his legacy thoroughly secure, has influenced me in this other way, as well. The problem is that, as a musician, he really is that spectacular. It annoys me when arrogant people actually have the goods that, in some twisted up fashion, enable their arrogance. I’d rather they not have the gift at all if they are going to carry on as colossal assholes. But some of them do. Go figure. As a postscript to this little anecdote, I simply mention that at this trio concert, the heretofore unthinkable happened: his Muse did not show up to enliven him that night, and his playing was flat and lifeless. I never thought his Muse ever let him down. Guess it happens to the best–and worst–of us.

Vince Guaraldi: Known more for his composing and scoring for the “Charlie Brown” television specials, Guaraldi is special to me personally on two accounts. First, he wrote a gorgeous instrumental piece called “Cast Your Fate to the Wind” that was a “cross over” hit on the pop-music charts–always a rarity for a jazz piece. (Paul Desmond’s “Take Five” did it; Ramsay Lewis’s “In Crowd” did it; Eddie Heywood’s “Canadian Sunset” did it: I can’t think of any other examples.) Second, that song was released (track # 5) on an album that is sublime, called Jazz Impressions of Black Orpheus (1962). This release is simply one of the nicest piano trio albums ever recorded. The exquisite bossa nova score from the movie Black Orpheus, composed by Antonio Carlos Jobim and Luiz Bonfa, is given sensitive and loving treatment by this soulful pianist. His playing is sparse and playful, kind of minimalist, yet the swing is utterly wonderful, and the musical experience is complete. I think that Guaraldi helped me to begin to conceive of the distinction between musical virtuosity and musical completeness. When I play out in San Francisco where I now live, I honor him by playing “Manha da Carnaval” from that album. I wish he were still alive. I would love to meet him.

George Winston: George was originally sized up by some of the critics (if memory serves) as a jazz pianist. But he wasn’t ever one, really. However, what, and who he was, and is, was a ground-breaker. There is now a whole category called “folk piano” that he, single-handedly-OK, maybe dual-handedly-pioneered. I listened to him first on Autumn (1980). I bought Winter Into Spring (1982) and December (1982), in quick succession. Winston’s compositions were lovely and minimalist, and his playing mesmeric. Several years later I saw him in concert a the Berklee Perfomance Center in Boston, and it seemed at that time that he was catering to at least, in part, a jazz audience-but he didn’t really swing easily-and he wasn’t trying to. What I appreciated about him is that, despite taking some critical heat, he knew the path he was on, and he was not deterred. His career shows that he was right. I’ve never heard his music played on KCSM-FM, the Bay Area jazz station in San Francisco (then again, KCSM, thus far, hasn’t, as far as I know, played Modal Soul, either!). But he deserves to be heard. What I learned from him, at a distance, is how to stay true to a vision, critics be damned. There are truly very few visionaries in our world, and the world, by definition, is set up not to understand them. If their spirits are dampened by this lack of being met by the “establishment” in any of its guises, we are all the poorer. George’s was not dampened or, if it was, he wrung it out, let it dry on the line, and kept on going. He plays 150 concerts, more or less, each year, traveling, and spreading that balm of beautiful, arresting piano music wherever he goes throughout the world. That’s a pretty nice legacy.

Kenny Barron is one of the most gifted pianists in jazz, and rightfully considered a gem among the cognoscenti. In his career, he has played man more dates as a sideman than as the headliner. This is easy to understand; he is always in demand because he does everything so well. His comping is brilliant and explosive-the only pianist who, in this department, is on a par, I would say, with Herbie Hancock-and that in itself is saying a lot. His technique is dazzling and not exhibitionistic-totally there in service of his artistry-his soloing so inventive, often fleet-fingered with a deft, light touch. He is a marvel of good taste and apt contribution in any setting. I do not have sufficient releases featuring him. However, one of his CDs, Quickstep (1991) is one of my favorite recordings of all time. His uncanny musical judgment and seemingly effortless execution of a boundless range of musical ideas are wonders to behold. His touch at the keyboard is so deft and light it’s as if he spins silk from moonbeams. In person he comes across as humble, genuinely grateful to have had such a long, productive career. There is nobody more respected.

Ahmad Jamal has the songwriter’s gift. “Poinciana,’ on the LP But Not for Me (1958) is one of the most beautiful, enchanting song-form compositions ever written. As a performer Jamal is a true technical virtuoso, who can, within the blink of an eye, combine hectic, sped up but exactingly articulated lines of Bach amidst an otherwise funky, down home rhythmic pulse. He is also a master “quoter” of snatches of other composers’ songs while improvising. A lot of his playing ping-pongs back and forth, here and there, rounding buoys through a slalom course of musical motifs. When you hear him play several times, you realize that the motifs don’t change that much. It’s really music based on cavorting on a “groove.” That isn’t much of a deterrent to enjoying it, though, because the songs on which the grooving is based are just such good tunes, and Jamal’s treatment of rhythm is so infectious. Jamal demonstrated to me that song form, if the compositions are good enough, can compensate for less than inspired improvisation. It’s a solid lesson to learn, given the fact that the Muse, as far as I know, comes and goes on her own schedule for everyone. (Listening to some John Coltrane out-takes taught me this, as well.)

How has your work as a psychotherapist influenced your understanding of music and playing?

My career in psychology has run a span of nearly 30 years. Involvement in this field as staff psychologist, psychotherapist, addictions specialist, and consultant to industry has definitely, as I’ve gotten older, helped shape my perception of the jazz world generally, the approaches that various luminaries take to their art (sometimes, for some of them, more craft than art), the “returns”—payoffs—various artists are going for in their careers (which is reflected in their art they produce), and, more close to home, my own attitudes towards what I am doing, both musically, and as someone who, at least in some small way, can be thought of, once again, as a “jazz pianist,” and, therefore, involved with the field. Over the years I have also served as psychotherapist to several clients who are active in the jazz field, including pianists, as well as others with careers in different areas of the arts.

During my earlier jazz career I was ignorant about matters psychological. This included an almost complete ignorance about who and what I am (and was then). I had no conscious acquaintance or acknowledgment of principles inherent to my own being—structural elements of my psyche that are near absolute (at least in terms of this life sojourn), by which I must abide if I am to stand any realistic chance of evolving in ways that foster happiness and completeness. As someone with an unexamined life, the arenas of music, generally, and jazz specifically, as areas where I showed some early promise and gained a bit of recognition, were ripe to be abused. What I mean by this is that when a person has certain unacknowledged deficits of character, any area that appears to provide an avenue to “success” can be leaned upon, by the clueless, to provide more of a return than is possible, or healthy. In other words, in my early career I combined a modicum of talent with a misdirected instinctual craving for power, prestige and romance—and “jazz”—read: becoming an object of adulation on a stage and cashing in on it in grandiose, self-destructive ways—was the means through which I was determined to command my craved-for payoffs. This is an oft-told story.

The music I played then, as I developed in those years, was, at times, quite good. The spiritual yearning was there in the playing, and some of the compositions I wrote in those days are still among my best, but , as a house divided (and not knowing it), all my creative efforts were—could not help but be—polluted.

In the process of beginning to gain some knowledge about myself in my early thirties (my hand being forced by the messes I was creating), I found myself reevaluating my career—especially my attitudes I had been bringing to it. Seeing how full of dry rot the whole thing was, how much I had perverted a talent in order to derive unwholesome returns from it, I realized I had to let it go . . . and I did. I wasn’t yet far enough along in education and training to be a psychotherapist, so, while back in school, I became a piano tuner and repairman for several years. The person who just had to be the object of adulation on a stage became the person who was now told “go ‘round the back; take off your shoes by the door; the piano’s over there on the right; let me know when you’re done.” Adjusting to this was a form of going through withdrawal, but I had become keen on gaining some sanity, so I tolerated it, and eventuality became grateful for it.

Once I began to practice as a staff psychologist/psychotherapist/addictions counselor, I found the field so fulfilling and rewarding—especially as I saw that the destructive tendencies of my earlier life were finding some kind of redemptive outlet, that I really did not miss, any longer, being a “jazz musician.” I felt quite liberated from that old pursuit that had (the way I had gone about it) been so constricting of me. What this really tells me, in hindsight, is that I had finally gotten beyond placing an excessive reliance on being a “jazz pianist” as a vehicle to feed and support my addictive appetites. Also (and this happens only when one’s own denial breaks down and one gains the freedom that only comes from facing some hard truths about oneself), I could survey the whole jazz field in a new way, drawing on my growing set of newly minted values to find, if it existed, what the intrinsic worth is of partaking in any artistic endeavor. And . . . (yes, the ‘shrink’ part of me is always operative in me in how I take in and make sense of what I observe) I could gain impressions about how other jazz artists were going about their careers, and whether the music they were producing was consistent with values that matter. I’m overstating this a bit, because it is also the case that I largely detuned from the jazz world when I departed it fully as a performer at age 33. I no longer followed who was up-and-coming, the latest sensation, the most recent newly discovered “monster’ player, etc. That’s one reason why my incomplete list of those who were my influences consists, without exception, of those exceptional individuals whose careers were in flower during the 1960s-70s. Of course, many are now gone, but a small number continue to be fruitful even at quite advanced ages. (Brubeck, Jamal, Hancock, Tyner, Barron). In the jazz world, that’s also a rarity.

The question, largely derived from my earlier music career, as reshaped by some adversity and a lot of psychotherapy, became generalized as: “What is it that makes anything intrinsically worth doing, for its own sake?” The key to safely reentering the jazz arena, once again, as a participant (however modest) hinged on finding the answer to this question, though when I reached a point of being able of frame it, a return to music at the level of playing out or recording was nowhere in my mind (that I was aware of). It was simply a question that I applied to anything, and everything, that was going on in my life.

Of course, one forms opinions, some likely correct, others probably not, about how mental conditions/states of mind affect—and maybe account for—the artistry (and downfalls) of other luminaries in jazz (and many other fields as well). I have some set impressions, but they are private, and it’s not fair, nor would it serve any good purpose, to diagnose and speculate at a distance, let alone in print—and . . . I could be flat wrong. However I can mention briefly, and expand upon, what has been set forth elsewhere (not starting with me). I’ll do this very briefly regarding two luminaries: Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.

Monk was probably schizophrenic, and this rearrangement of his neurology likely accounts for his remarkable re-visioning of harmonic and melodic relations that are crystalline in their beauty and symmetry. His affliction got channeled into this amazing, perfect, idiosyncratic art; his personal keyboard visions (likely) became more real to him than his earthly companions. One can only marvel at how such an unruly affliction of the mind, which likely severely limited his life in the interpersonal sphere (What a great middle name!), could yet yield such beautiful structure and form when channeled through his music. Indeed, his affliction became his art. This was not an insignificant triumph. Consider how it has enriched all of us, and Monk’s music, I dare say, receives as much play today as it ever has.

The attention given to him is so deserved.

With Coltrane, as best I can tell, the energy from his drug/heroin addiction in the 1950s, which forced him to take a break from his career for a while (and could easily have cost him the whole enchilada—which, within ten years, it did, as irremediable hepatitis finally claimed him) was redirected, with conscious intention, into coming back to playing in a new way. All of Coltrane’s playing and composing, from the late 1950s until his death in 1967, can be understood as intentional, devotional music. Unlike Monk, whose channeling of his schizophrenia into art was likely a reflexive act—not arrived at through contemplation of what was bedeviling him (my speculation)—Coltrane’s triumph was in consciously, with intention, redirecting the energy of craving relief through alcohol and drugs into his art as a spiritual quest. This is the truest realization of an often misunderstood process in psychoanalytic theory called ‘sublimation.’ For those who know the term, sublimation is often considered to be an unconscious process, in which energy from a relinquished behavior will, unbeknownst to the host (below the threshold of consciousness) seek a new plane of activity. This phenomenon of “energy” from renounced or thwarted activity ‘A’ becoming manifest in activity ‘B’ is really (to borrow another term from psychoanalysis) a ‘displacement.’ The truest from of ‘sublimation’—the one that Coltrane accomplished—is a conscious redirection of the energy from a renounced activity (drug addiction, in Coltrane’s case). In consciously, with awareness and intention, reclaiming this energy—the life force, the vitality—that had been running him so destructively, and redirecting it into an acknowledged spiritual quest, Coltrane’s course was set. His music, for the rest of his life, would never be the same, because his whole way of relating to it had been transformed absolutely. It is the power of transformation as a consciously sought and realized attainment that makes Coltrane’s music so special. The resonance of Coltrane’s spiritual quest reaches deep into those already embarked on their equivalent of it. It also reaches into those who, though not yet embarked, are capable of being awakened to it. Coltrane’s music stirs resonance and finds correspondence with the yearnings, acknowledged or not, of so many of us. His story is one of affliction redeemed.

His legacy will always inspire.

Regarding how my experience as psychotherapist influences my own understanding and involvement with jazz at this later point in life, I can simply state that this influence is profound. The art a person produces, in any area, always reflects one’s inner state, including not only one’s gifts and talents specific to the art form, but one’s orientation towards life in general. Ethical sense (or lack of it), philosophical ruminations, psychological components of character—both healthy and unhealthy—hopes and dreams, triumphs and defeats, suffering and transcendence, it’s all factored in. It is this inalienable truth that makes any art so interesting and compelling, and personal. Speaking just of my own involvement with jazz at this point, my rapprochement with a former career is not a going back, but, rather, a going forward. In its current state my involvement with jazz as a jazz pianist is an exercise in applied philosophy. Here’s what I mean: Solving the riddle of what it is about anything that makes it intrinsically worth doing, freed me up to start to value, and participate in things, exclusively on that basis. When I moved to San Francisco about a year ago, I had been playing out previous to that for several years. Arriving here, I knew no one involved in the San Francisco jazz scene. What’s more, by temperament I am one of the purer introverts you’ll likely ever encounter in your life travels. My music can assume attributes of both introversion and extroversion, but interpersonally I am an introvert, period. So even if I were inclined to rub shoulders, by way of ingratiating myself with whatever the scene is out here in the Bay Area, it does not play to my strengths to do so. In fact, if I were to do this—something that comes so naturally for those who are outer-directed—I would come off like a stiff. It’s just not my nature. In the “old” career days I would force myself to do it (the “hanging out” routine) because I thought one had to, that there was no other way. I always felt horribly awkward doing it. Because it was not a natural strength for me, I only had mixed success.

But I chose to embark on a different path here in SF (as I had started to do in Boston before moving out here), one that agrees with me completely. If finding my way by dint of charm, charisma (which I inherently distrust), and the force of personality was closed to me, what approach could still be open to an introvert like me? For an introvert, it would have to be—could only be—the music itself that could find its intended audience. How to put this to the test? The answer was easy: find a café in search of an identity, and offer to play there for free on a regular basis, and see what happened. Café Euro, a Russian owned café in San Francisco, became my “venue.” It wasn’t a listening room (it’s basically an internet café), but for ten months I played there most every Friday and Saturday from 6 – 9pm. Over the ten months I logged almost 170 hours of “playing out” time at Café Euro, and I met, among a small group of regulars who would frequently come to hear the music, my friend Don, who really listens to my playing (and who probably, out of those 170 hours, heard about 150 of it). In other words, the music itself attracted—found resonance in— a self-selecting group of listeners, and those were the listeners I was meant to have. No hype; no following the latest “in” trend or “happening” thing, just the enjoyment that comes from a recurring, reliable event that some people actually appreciated for the music’s sake. Even street people, who came in regularly to listen, would sometimes grope around for a dollar from their little stash of dough to put in the tip jar, because they were grateful for what they were hearing, and they really wanted to contribute something. I would try, sometimes, to talk them out of it, but they were in earnest. I guess the music, and the nice ambience, were really starting to reach them. Also . . . and this is a big plus . . . with all that playing out time, I was continuing to get better, to improve as a player. Playing occasionally at Simple Pleasures Café, in the Richmond district, also resulted in my finding my intended listeners there, again, few but self-selecting, who were aware that something in the music was reaching them. “Tony” became my stalwart fan at Simple Pleasures Cafe. I then played a few “open mic” spots at a lovely little listening room called Bazaar Café. These were seven-minute spots. The owner, Les, liked my playing very much, and he offered me an evening to play there. Hence the little showcase where you, Rohit, heard me play, which was also attended by “my” listeners from Café Euro and Simple Pleasures Café. And so it goes. Communicating through the medium of jazz piano to see where the music finds resonance, and the listeners and the fellowship that arise from that, is what it is all about. It is a pure undertaking. The same principle pertains to having recorded, and released, Modal Soul: put out the vibe, and see where it finds resonance. I have at least five more CDs of keyboard jazz left in me. It will be the same with them.

I have no objections if playing out situations come along that will be remunerative. I’m open to it. However, money is no longer a prime motivation for playing out. It once was, but that is all gone now. Playing out and composing were always intrinsically worth doing. They always had “intrinsic worth” to them. They were constants in my life, and have been very companionable throughout the course of a lifetime. I owe them. Money comes and goes, and is no longer the “deal breaker” in determining whether involvement in an art form is worth it or not. The ability to reach people, through an art form, in a way that is moving and stirring to them, is its own reward.

And so, the living experiment of having, once again (at a much later stage of life) a career as “jazz pianist,” only, this time, with its anchorage firmly set in a philosophical principle—maybe a spiritual ideal—rather than in more typical bold-faced commerce, continues . . . It feels good.

 Sudeep is also the author of the critically acclaimed and popular novel Tin Fish (Penguin, 2005) and the recently published Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country (Viking/Penguin, 2008), a work of narrative non-fiction about India‘s present-day Maoist rebellion. His second novel, Once Upon a Time in Aparanta (Penguin, 2008), will be published in August this year. 

In an email interview with Rohit Chopra about Red Sun, Sudeep describes the failings of the Indian state and society that have engendered and sustained Maoist rebellion, the massive denial about the issue, and why prosperous ‘middle India’ needs to be shaken out of its mall-stupor and awakened to the reality of the situation.

What made you write this book? Why did you feel this story had to be told?

I have spent my career as a journalist, both as reporter and editor, tracking India’s economic development, meeting those on the “street”, as well as top ministers, entrepreneurs, and executives from India and abroad; and attending summits from Delhi to Davos. I am a direct beneficiary of India’s ongoing economic liberalization and freedom of expression that India’s urban middle classes have come to take for granted. But there is an issue I did not wish to keep quiet about. Except for perhaps a ‘unity’ based on the rupee, corruption, cinema, and cricket, there is a grave disconnect between urban and rural India and even within urban India. This disconnect is economic, social, and political. Seventy percent of India is away from the ‘growth party’. To imagine that India can be unstoppable with its gross poverty and numbing caste issues is to be in lunatic denial, a display of unstoppable ego.

Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country was a story waiting to be told. There is a fairly large and excellent body of non-fiction writing on the Naxal movement of the 1960s and early 1970s and on various subsequent extreme-Left incarnations through the 1980s, in several Indian languages and in English. But besides the occasional media coverage around the time of major skirmishing between rebels and security forces, there isn’t a book on the movements of today as driven by the Communist Party of India (Maoist) that attempts to demystify the Naxal movement.

The second reason for the book was that there is a great lack of telling the human story about and around the present play of Left-wing rebellion. Typically, one comes by statistics and glib sound bites. The dispossessed and the dead are not numbers; they were–and are–people. With Red Sun I have attempted to humanize a very tragic conflict, of a country at war with itself.

A third reason is that learned writing about Maoism in India (which continues to be interchangeably referred to as Naxalism) is generally restricted to academic journals and analyses by think-tanks. There is a crying need to mainstream it, tell the lay reader, as it were, about what is going on, shake ‘middle India’ out of its mall-stupor and diminish the delusions of grandeur of India’s lawmakers.

There was every reason to write Red Sun. The truth about this wrenching war has to be told.

It helped, of course, that I have a broadminded editor, who is not risk-averse to going against the grain- to publish a questioning book in the blatant bubble of a good news environment. At a meeting with my editor at Penguin to discuss the progress of my second novel (Once Upon A Time in Aparanta, to be published in August 2008), he and I got talking about current affairs, as we often do. During the course of the conversation, I suggested to him that Penguin ought to be doing a book on the Maoist issue, to awaken ‘middle India’, as it were, and I offered to write it. My editor instantly agreed. I wrote a brief, we discussed logistics and likely deadlines, and it was a ‘go’ project from then on.

I am glad that the reception and sales of Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country have borne out the true purpose behind the book. At my book readings and launches, there have been a mix of students, academicians, businessmen, bankers, and other executives, bureaucrats, police officers, security and economic analysts, human rights activists, media, writers, and, I dare say, some Maoists.

And I am quite pleased with what a former chief of army staff told me a few weeks back. He said the problem with Red Sun is that it’s true.

You describe the massive denial in India about the urgency of the Maoist issue. The Maoists are not entirely voiceless. Nearly a third of India, by some counts, is under their control, they do get some media coverage, and bureaucrats and politicians are profoundly aware of the problem. Yet there seems to be a refusal to squarely engage with the issue in all its complexity. What, in your view, are some of the reasons for this state of affairs?

A clarification: Maoists do not ‘control’ one-third of India.  While they certainly control vast forest areas like the Dandakaranya region that encompasses areas of Chhattisgarh, Maharashtra, and Orissa, and other forest areas in Orissa, Jharkhand, and West Bengal, in other areas they operate with less impunity. But that reality, too, is extremely significant, as it all suggests abdication of governance by the state in an area that equals a third of India, lack of a justice system, extreme poverty, and social discrimination, and the state utterly taking its own people for granted.

The thing to keep in mind is that Maoists are not only in the forests of India. They are gradually spreading their influence in the non-forested areas of Vidarbha and Marathwada in Maharashtra, industrial hotspots in Orissa, the plains of West Bengal, plantation areas of Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, and Kerala, and even in the agricultural hotspots in Punjab and Haryana. Maoists are today allied with numerous groups across India, from those protesting displacement on account of large projects to those protesting ill treatment on account of their caste. Maoist sympathizers number many tens of thousands. A former home minister of Karnataka mentioned that he estimates at least 5,000 families in Bangalore to be sympathetic to the Maoist cause. If these numbers don’t seem significant in a country of over a billion, consider that it took only 19 volunteers and a small circle of planners to bring down the World Trade Centre towers, attack the Pentagon, and trigger an attack on Afghanistan, and the still unwinnable global war against terror.

In this context, ‘threat’ is relative. Insurgency in Kashmir and India’s northeast steadily bleeds India, but even as it demolishes the myth of India being a wholesome nation, it does not currently hold the power to demolish India. The Maoist issue, on the other hand, goes to the heart of India. It has the power to implode India: poverty, dissatisfaction, helplessness, and anger make for potent ammunition. We have great islands of prosperity, but great oceans of discontent. Maoism is not India’s greatest internal security threat. Poverty, non-governance, and corruption are. Maoist rebels are merely mirrors of our own failings as a nation.

And perhaps that is why much of media, administration, and even what passes for “civil society” are at some level unwilling to engage in discussion aimed eventually at solving the issue. Perhaps they don’t understand it. Perhaps they don’t wish to acknowledge it, even if they understand the problem.

Because the government of India and governments of various states have no fingers to point at anyone but themselves. There is no ‘foreign hand’, no xenophobia to feed on, no shrill cries of ‘secessionism’ to blame for the abysmal failure of governance, stunning apathy, and callousness of our rulers and administrators, and the indelibility of how badly we treat our own people. Then, there is the development gravy train. An estimated 10 percent of funds reach the intended in India: who needs a developed India if the skim from ‘developing’ India is so lucrative?

The government of India, the governments of the states of India, and in many cases, the people of India have failed utterly in so many respects to raise the condition of hundreds of millions of their own people. We can think of sending a person to the moon, but there is no great joy in being only a little above sub-Saharan Africa in development indices and human rights. Our record shows that we are an innately corrupt, innately caste conscious, racist bunch of people content to vote criminals back to power over and over again. In Jharkhand politicians have used money to upgrade policing facilities to buy SUVs for themselves. In Maharashtra, distribution of relief in suicide zones of Vidarbha is a success in only that it has become a gravy train. Dalits are beaten, raped, and burnt. Such examples are endless. Why are we surprised when there is anger and resentment? Why are we surprised when some are driven to arms when state agencies fail? No less a person than the president of India is on record saying citizens are increasingly taking justice into their own hands because there is a failure of law and order.

In my conversations with various people, I keep referring to the example of a lady called Sabita Kumari, a tribal person from Jharkhand state. She went to the local police to register a complaint about her sister being raped. The police asked her instead to provide sex. Sabita went into the jungle, was recruited by Maoists, and has sworn to kill “at least 100 policemen” unless she is killed first. Poverty did not drive her. Just a simple corruption, of non-delivery, in India’s criminal justice system. The examples are legion.

By the way, Maoists are patriots by their own admission. Some analysts even call them ‘extreme patriots.’ This is worth thinking about, given our past, given that Bhagat Singh, a hardcore Left-wing revolutionary from the time of anti-British protests, the ‘Freedom movement’, has a bust in Parliament, and the Information Ministry takes out newspaper advertisements on his birth anniversary!

Maoist rebels are fighting to be heard, to be given the most basic rights. If they are heard, and their problems addressed, why would there be any reason to fight? We may not like it, but there it is.

Red Sun shows how for significant sections of the Indian population the Indian state is essentially experienced as a criminal enterprise. How does one make sense of this, especially in light of both the ‘India Shining’ narrative that glorifies India‘s imminent ascendancy in the global economy and the celebration of India‘s democracy 60 years after independence?

The good news stories about India are mostly true. It is a vast economy and getting bigger. The actual electoral process–voting–works to a great extent (even if pre-process issues, such as rigging of electoral rolls and intimidation, continue in large parts of India!). There is far greater affirmative action than ever. There is finally space for the ‘India Shining’ narrative, as good news stories about India are coming at a much faster clip than ever.The story in India is vastly different from, say, Nepal. That country was at a dead-end politically and economically, which in great part assisted in Maoists there achieving their goal in 12 years-from the first attack on a government office in 1996 to the present, when they are the power in Kathmandu.  In India, there is some forward movement, in certain pockets even astounding movement. India’s Maoists are the first to acknowledge that their task of national domination is made much more difficult precisely on account of India’s growth. But India’s Maoists don’t really need to win; they just need to be there, to show us where we have gone wrong.We have asked for it. It’s called ‘privileging violence’: unless people take up arms, they are not listened to. It’s all very unfortunate.

True development and governance: these are the greatest weapons against anger and resentment. The state can try to steamroll Left-wing extremism–for that matter, any extremism–and it did with Naxalism in the 1970s. But it has only got worse even with so-called development. Surely, there is a lesson somewhere, and that too is a no-brainer. Again, spread development. Ensure development funds actually reach the intended. Ensure efficient administration, policing, and justice. The government knows exactly what it has to do. It appears to have little will to do it.

And, one must remember what happened to the ‘India Shining’ narrative. The Bharatiya Janata Party coined the phrase as an election platform in 2004, against the advice of some political allies. The BJP-led National Democratic Alliance lost the general elections. It was clearly living in a bubble of its own making.

One of the achievements of Red Sun is that it navigates the labyrinthine terrain of Maoist politics and the Indian state in an impartial manner. The state is brutally repressive in its counter-insurgency measures, but one also finds bureaucrats and intelligence officers who are not unsympathetic to the situation of those who join Maoist movements. The Maoists are opposed to the savagery perpetrated upon India‘s weakest but they are also guilty of violence and extortion. You cull out these shades of grey in extremely effective fashion. How did you seek to achieve this balanced perspective, both in terms of maintaining a critical distance from various viewpoints and stylistically?

You are very kind. For me, the only way to tell the story was tell it straight, tell it from the heart, and present as many viewpoints as possible. That’s how I work. From the beginning I told all those I met or discussed the project on the telephone or email that I was writing a book, and that Viking/Penguin would publish it. When Maoists asked me if I was talking to the police, I said “yes”; if police asked me about my interaction with Maoists, I acknowledged the interaction. But I never traded in information-that would have been unethical, it would also have been folly. This is an edgy situation. It is life and death for people and, possibly, for the country, in the longer term. You can’t mess with it.

Stylistically, I have always favored the ‘feature’ style of writing, as it brings alive a situation, allows an observer and writer to look deeper. It was clear to me that with Red Sun I would adopt the style that the publishing business terms ‘narrative non-fiction’. It goes well with my preferred approach of mixing on-the-road with background research, color with cohesion, and telling the story in as accessible a manner as possible. After all, rebels know why they are rebelling-they don’t need me or anyone else to tell them that. Equally, state agencies know who and what they are fighting. Therefore, the ‘story’ had to be brought out, as it were, narrated to a wider audience. I would very much like those who palpitate if they can’t source fresh celery sticks for their Sunday afternoon Bloody Marys to read Red Sun and palpitate some more.

Somewhat more seriously, I believe I have also benefited from my relatively recent experience as a novelist. I’ve written two these past four years. Stylistically, reportage has, possibly, merged with skills I am learning as a novelist.

One of the more disturbing aspects of the book is its depiction of the use of extreme violence as negotiation, whether by the Indian state, the Maoists, or other disenfranchised sections of Indian society. On the one hand, the official Indian state position completely runs roughshod over their rights of insurgents as citizens. On the other hand, the Left and Marxist perspectives that see violence committed against the state as justified are surely ethically untenable.  I would be interested in your response to this issue.

I’m afraid there is little to debate here. Let’s consider some facts.

Fact One. India has an appalling record in dealing with its own people: in its incarnation as a bunch of princely states; through a series of colonial dominations; and as a country since 1947. India’s human rights record is appalling and so is its human development record–in the overall scheme of things. Caste, religion, and inequity merely add to the general emotional and physical conflagration. And what the Indian state has practiced in Northeast Indian regions of Nagaland, Manipur, and Mizoram is little short of genocide.

Fact Two. Despite all the claptrap of spiritual enlightenment in this part of the world, violence is a way of life. (If there wasn’t such misery and confusion, would there be a need to rise above it?)  The state practices violence, and, as I have mentioned earlier, it privileges violence: unless a person shouts, screams, burns, and kills, rulers do not listen. Violence is used both by the state and rebels-and is ingrained in Indian politics–as justification for their own ends.  All political parties have a record of practicing it and encouraging it.

Fact Three. The Indian Constitution and what it contains is mocked and sidestepped in more ways than it is adhered to. ‘Civil society’, ‘right to information’, and ‘public interest’ are still in their infancy in India.

Fact Four. We have a surfeit of glib intellectuals and political theorists who would shame a caveful of spiders with their spin. We have largely successful elections, given the complexity and corruption of India. That is on account of a handful of efficient and fiercely proud officials and electoral momentum from voters who, with increasing regularity, vote out the corrupt and vile every five years only to have someone equally cynical step in. These people think nothing of burning a bus–with people inside it–if it means they can score a political point. The reality of coalition politics and ‘vote-bank’ or special interest group politics lets such people off the hook.

Fact Five. In five Indian states (not counting the 14 states out of 28 affected in varying degrees by Maoist rebellion or activity, which is a stunning statistic on its own) security forces have the freedom to arrest, incarcerate, and shoot to kill on mere suspicion of “anti-state” activity, with immunity to military and paramilitary. In Chhattisgarh, a law permits the state to jail whoever they deem appropriate, without assigning specific reason. There are close to 50 minor and major terrorist and militant groups active and proscribed in India. Jammu & Kashmir is in a state of war and despondency. Riots and lynching occur regularly across India. Your own assertion adds to this point. India is a very violent place in a very violent part of the world–only our size and dogged aspiration keeps us going, offering us the irony of being a relatively safe haven hemmed in by chaos in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Nepal, and Bangladesh.

As we are on the subject of violence, let’s discuss Salwa Judum, a government-sponsored vigilante army in Chhattisgarh that sets tribal against tribal to combat Maoist influence. Senior police and security officials from even Maoist-affected states like Maharashtra, West Bengal, Orissa, and many from the Center have told me on the record as to what a bad idea Salwa Judum is. So far, there is no move to transplant the Salwa Judum concept into other such states. Even in the Ministry of Home Affairs, there are strong opponents of Salwa Judum even as there are strong proponents.

The truth about Salwa Judum is that it is not spontaneous. It is a monster created cynically from a real grouse that some tribal people and farmers harbored against the heavy-handedness of Maoists in the area. The government tapped into this partial resentment and created Salwa Judum with state support–financial, logistical, and moral.

But by setting brother against brother, Chhattisgarh has created a situation of mutually assured destruction of tribals. Homes are razed, lands are lost, livelihoods are destroyed, and futures erased. It is Vietnam redux, Afghanistan redux, Nagaland and Mizoram redux.

The chaos that Salwa Judum has caused is perhaps the only reason that has kept other states from employing similar methods as strategy. Senior policemen, intelligence officials, and security experts have told me Salwa Judum is a no-hoper. But Chhattisgarh can’t retract it; it has become a prestige issue, a noose.

The Salwa Judum camps are little more than instant slums, laced with sewers, oppression, fear, and dejection. These house wrecked lives of a people who are treated as the lowest forms of life. Think of an abject slum in a city, marry it with scenes of a resettlement camp immediately after a flood or earthquake, populate it with security forces, and you begin to get a sense of it. This hell is created as strategy by the state, mirroring what it earlier practiced in Nagaland and Mizoram in the 1950s and 1960s. It’s absolutely unpardonable.

Perhaps the time has come for Indians to admit that we are not quite as ‘civil’ as we like to think of ourselves; by “ourselves” I mean the bulk of our 1.12 billion. India has numerous achievements and ‘good news stories’ to be justifiably proud of, but as yet they amount to little in the Indian universe. There is little point in benchmarking ourselves with Zimbabwe and Myanmar and breaking out cases of Dom Perignon at the World Economic Forum when we score over that abysmal benchmark.

The language of the postcolonial Indian state resembles the language of the colonial state in documenting its response to insurgencies. The Maoist perspective will probably not be recorded in the official Indian archive for posterity, which is why works such as yours are so important. Do you, as someone who inhabited this world as a journalist, feel that such a history can be written at all?

Any need for documentation has accepted that the Government of India and state governments of India routinely tailor history to their own requirements of expediency, whitewash, hagiography, and posterity.

This is not only with regard to the Maoist perspective, but any perspective that senses a need to be a recorded and heard. (And here, we cannot discount that, were Maoists to come to a controlling interest in India or parts of India, their documentation would become ‘official’ at the cost of other ‘histories’. We will, in all probability, soon see it happening in Nepal, where Maoist history will be ‘true’ history in the same way that monarchic history was for these past 250 years.)

In such an environment, it is imperative to try to bring to the attention of the reading public as many independent perspectives as possible. Such an initiative needs to go beyond media, which in India is becoming increasingly giddy. India is still relatively low on the curve of ‘indie’ projects. I can only hope the trend accelerates. If the much hyped “Idea of India” concept takes root, those who care about the Indian nation-state in its clinical sense, in its need to find a bona fide place in the sun, then such documentation, such histories, as you call them, will become more common.

One of the implicit historical questions raised by your work is whether the deprivation experienced by tribals, Dalits, and peasants has its roots in colonial political economy or is primarily a product of the policies of the postcolonial state. It seems that this is an important topic for historical inquiry. But from another perspective–that of the rights of the wretched of the Indian earth–what does it matter  where the historical roots of exploitation lie?

I would go entirely with the last point that you have raised. That is indeed my perspective. Being a student of history, a practicing journalist, and a die-hard Indian, colonial and postcolonial attitudes mean little in the face of continuing, explosive exploitation. India, alas, is very likely to pay a heavy price.

A related question: can one make the case that these disenfranchised communities are colonized peoples? Is there any glimmer of this line of thinking among Maoist ideologues? They claim that they are patriots and they use the language of anti-imperialist movements. But do they specifically invoke legacies of anticolonial nationalism (regarding which, the extreme Left in India have been considerably ambivalent)?

Thus far, there is no indication of this being the case. India’s Maoists do talk of “imperialist hegemony” when referring to India’s geopolitical interests in Nepal, which is now Maoist-dominated, but accusations of such behavior, in relation to India, are generally placed at the door of United States, United Kingdom, European Union, and such.

There is a ‘colonial’ narrative that exists in northeastern India, especially in Nagaland and large parts of Manipur, that claims India as the aggressor and invader as these areas were historically and ethnically never part of India and Indian-ness prior to 1947. But this is not led by Maoists. It is an intensely local feeling.

The only aspect of this narrative, that of disenfranchised communities being colonized people, exists in some degrees in the arguments of ‘adivasi’ politics, that tribal people in India’s heartland have been colonized by outsiders, their livelihood damaged and identities shattered–in a narrative similar those of American Indians and Australian Aborigines. Tribal leaders and Maoists have leveraged this feeling, but only as a kick-start tactic in overall strategy, not as abiding policy. Maoists are leveraging anything they can anywhere: displacement of farmers on account of industrialization, caste issues, labor unrest, high debt, and despondency among farmers. In this, a Monsanto or Cargill becomes today’s East India Company in Maoist narrative–but it is not unusual; as you know, there is increasing general activism against such businesses by anti-WTO and anti-GM foods lobbies, both in India and elsewhere. In this, Maoists have found common cause.

A last point: the extreme Left in India have not been ambivalent about anticolonial nationalism, but the Left have. There is a big difference.

Let me move to the question of rights here. The Maoists (as, indeed, Marxist and Left movements) appear to bear a profound ambivalence towards the idea of rights as well as toward the institutions of liberal democracy. This tension is brought out very starkly in your book.  On the one hand, the Maoists dismiss the institutions of liberal democracy as bourgeois, comprador, hegemonic hogwash, and the like, and justify the use of violence and vigilante justice. On the other hand, they also invoke the language of rights, including the right of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly, in articulating their cause.

This is a big one. Your observation is spot on, and I agree entirely. With all my anger against India’s venal politicians and bureaucrats, I must acknowledge the fact that I am exchanging ideas with you as a free citizen. That my book, Red Sun: Travels in Naxalite Country, is not as yet banned in India (though I could be in trouble in Chhattisgarh).

It all adds up to an enormous degree of complexity.Some weeks ago I was asked at a literary meet in Mumbai what I thought of the Maoist proclivity for absolute domination of ideology or abhorrence of dissent. And, whether I thought if Maoists were in power, would they allow free circulation of Red Sun as it enjoys now. My answer was: I don’t believe in Maoism, I’m merely writing about it and the cause and effect of deprivation in the context of India’s grand claims. Hypothetically, if a Maoist leadership emerged that was as venal and domineering as India’s current masters, I would in principle have no hesitation to rail against them and to offer an independent narrative.

Two unfairly difficult questions about the future to conclude the interview. Recently, on May 29, 2008, Nepal‘s new assembly, comprised significantly of Maoist rebels who overthrew the royal government earlier in the year, voted to abolish the monarchy. Elsewhere in the subcontinent, the Indian human rights activist, Dr. Binayak Sen, continues to be imprisoned by the Chattisgarh state government for alleged links with Maoists, despite his clear repudiation of Maoist violence. What do you think about the future of Maoist movements in India and of Maoism as an ideology? And what do you think about the future of India?

Permit me to attempt to answer the last question first, and work backwards. I believe India is headed for several years of rural unrest, primarily on account of dislocation in agriculture. This has the capacity of migrating to urban areas. Indeed, this is a history in motion. Caste-related anger, inequity-related anger, rights-related anger, and farming- and landholding-related anger have not been this primed or this vocal for decades. Something has to give. Half a million BPO employees cannot transform 600 million engaged in farming, or 250 million who earn Rs 12 or less a day.

I have mapped an extreme future scenario in Red Sun–one I sincerely wish does not come to pass, but at present there is little reason to rejoice. I believe that, given current dynamics, India will in the not too distant future move into what I call ‘In-Land’ and ‘Out-Land’. In-Land will constitute massive City States (Kolkata and environs; Mumbai and environs, possibly including Pune; Delhi, Jaipur, Chandigarh; Greater Bangalore; Greater Hyderabad; Greater Chennai; and so on) with captive hinterlands for food, commerce, and of course, governance. Outside these gated City States will lie Out-Land, present day rural India, as ever out of sight and therefore, out of mind. It is entirely possible that Maoists or others like them could control this Out-Land. If some turn rogues, they could turn to ‘warlordism’.

This is not far-fetched. It’s already happening; the trends will merely get firmer. Look at the growth of cities, Special Economic Zones or SEZs, patterns of migration, the debilitation and lawlessness of the countryside. We have mapped our future and we are doing everything in our power to validate this future. And the scary part for urban India will be that, unless growth is more equitable, tensions that currently rent Out-Land will steadily move In. And In-Land too could become an unsustainable pressure cooker.

Consider a few points. Rural and urban India will together have will more than 300 million more people over the next two and half decades. Food grain production needs to more than double in the same time. But our landmass will remain the same. Our cities are tinderboxes–Mumbai, for example, is 60 percent slum. Think about it. This is not the time for ‘Shantaram Tours’ of Mumbai’s slums, based on a book by an itinerant Australian ex-thug who spent some years in Mumbai’s slums to write a largely fictionalized work. This is the time to ensure that there is no need for such grotesque display.

As for Binayak Sen, he, journalist Ajay TG, and others in Chhatisgarh will not be released from jail until the Chhattisgarh government can be made to feel less foolish. These people are soft targets. To my mind, Dr. Sen’s imprisonment is nothing but a paranoid reaction of the state. It’s a classic tactic of retaliation to focus on ‘soft’ targets in order to divert attention from real failures–of governance, administration, policing, and socioeconomic development. In addition, there is the grinding exploitation of tribals and the poor that no amount of finessing or propaganda can hide. The government of Chhattisgarh is now engaged in denying legitimate NGOs space to function in rural areas. It’s a stupid, knee-jerk strategy that will bring immense harm. Besides further fracturing society, it will only serve to escalate the conflict. The Chhattisgarh government is quite obtuse; even looking at things from their point of view, they do not appear to realize that the longer they incarcerate Dr. Sen and others like him, the more people who normally would not be empathetic to the cause of Left-wing revolution would be drawn to it. I, for one, hope public pressure leads not only to the release of Dr. Sen and others, but that it leads ultimately to dialogue between the state and Maoists.

As for Maoism in India, as I mentioned earlier it is different from the situation in Nepal in that, Maoists have nearly attained their goal of ruling Nepal, and they have done so rapidly. It took only 10 years for the revolution–in great measure aided by common people–to steamroll the state, the monarchy. For the past two years, Nepal’s Maoists have been in Kathmandu. They are now the single largest party in Nepal’s Constituent Assembly.

The story in India is vastly different, for while Maoist influence is spreading, it’s nowhere near completion with the rapidity of Nepal. But, as I mentioned earlier, India’s Maoists don’t really need to win, they just need to be there, to show us where we have gone wrong.

History shows us that it’s usually easier to rebel than to rule. It has happened in every ancient civilization and nearly every modern one–barring, possibly and notably, the United States. Mao is as good an example as any. He brought off a stunning rebellion, ruthlessly united a country, and then ruled it at whim. Nepal is today dealing not merely with the absence of war, but the chaos of peace, reconciliation, and a scheming monarchy. I expect there will be more trouble in Nepal till things settle down; in some ways it is where India was in 1947.

But history moves on, as it has in Russia, China, and it will in Nepal. In India, Maoist rebellion–indeed, any rebellion, conceivably even a Dalit one–is providing, and will surely continue to provide, impetus to change. The wise ought to see the writing on the wall and ensure socioeconomic, administrative, and judicial delivery so that Mao and his principles needn’t have to show the way in India. Until this happens, rebellion in India is a no-brainer. We have asked for it. It’s all very unfortunate.

At the core, the Maoist or Naxal leadership of today and the 1960s are similar, because what they are angry about is similar to what the educated and privileged were angry about in the 1960s–and that is the true irony of India’s ‘development’. But times have changed, social milieus have changed, the politics has changed, the revolutionary movement and security apparatus too have changed in their methods of reaction and counter-reaction.

The rebels this time around are savvier, better equipped, and more deliberate. The cadre is much more broad-based that in the 1960s. Many grassroots cadre have assumed leadership positions. They don’t like to roll over and play dead.

I call the current state of play in India Maoism Mark IV. This comes after Mark I in the 1960s across West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Orissa, Bihar and Uttar Pradesh; Mark II in the 1980s primarily in Andhra and Bihar; Mark III in the 1990s with the spread into present-day Chhattisgarh and formation of a guerilla force; and the largely consolidated, organized conglomerate of the Communist Party of India (Maoist) of the present day. There will be a Mark V, and many more ‘Marks’, as Left-wing extremism morphs and adapts to the changing contours of sociopolitical and socioeconomic India.

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EXTERNAL LINKS

‘Unification is the only way to advance the cause of the Indian revolution’
Interview with People’s War leader Ganapthy

Karl and the Kalashnikov
82 hours with the People’s War guerrillas

In India, Death to Global Business
How a violent—and spreading—Maoist insurgency threatens the country’s runaway growth

Notes from the Red Corridor
Part reportage and part travelogue, this is an unflinching look at India’s Naxal reality

Free Binayak Sen
An international collaborative effort to seek the release of Dr. Binayak Sen

Shades of grey in red zones 

Himal South Asian’s review of Red Sun

Professor An-Na’im, you have spoken of the need for scholarship as well as journalism that is socially engaged and rigorous. How might scholarship and the media support each other in this regard?

I think scholarship and journalism or media can support each other first by combining commitments to individual freedom and social justice with professional rigor and integrity, each in terms of its own standards. Poor scholarship or weak journalism is not useful for any cause.  But the two are different in conception, methodology and expression, and should not be judged by the same standards. In other words, scholarship should not seek to be good journalism, and vice versa. At the same time, however, scholars and journalists should both work on the basis of a clear understanding of all the relevant facts, history, and context of the issues they are dealing with; and strive to frame their questions or inquiry consistently and fairly.

In this regard, we probably need to clarify what we mean by “neutrality” as a standard of good scholarship and journalism. Absolute or completely neutrality is of course not possible for human beings, but I also don’t think that it is desirable. Whether we are aware of it, admit it or not, claims of neutrality are misleading because we always have some purpose or agenda in mind, if only to maintain the status quo. What scholars and journalists can and should strive to avoid is being biased or patrician, by prejudging an issue or failing to consider both sides of an argument before coming to a conclusion. This is probably what people mean when they speak of neutrality, which does not mean that the scholar or journalist has no personal opinion or position on the issue at hand.  Rather, the point is that we should try our best to frame the questions fairly, seek all relevant information, and avoid presenting them in ways that prematurely influence our audience.

Often, media professionals and scholars seem to approach issues very differently. Mediapersons often complain that academics view their work as superficial without due consideration for the constraints under which they operate. On the other hand, scholars point to the anti-intellectualism in the media. What might be the deeper sources of this tension, for instance, with regard to coverage of human rights, secularism, or religion? Could these be productive tensions?

This tension is not only unavoidable, but in fact necessary for each of these two fields to achieve its objectives and serve its legitimate purposes in society. Some of the differences that underlie this tension are to be expected because they are inherent to the nature and functions of scholarship in contrast to journalism. It is true that journalists have to operate under constraints of space and time, which do not permit them the benefits of extensive and profound examination of the issues, as scholars are able to do. But the constraints under which journalists operate are integral to their primary role of informing the public at large about current debates and concerns. Given the wide range in levels of education, intellectual engagement, and emotional orientation of their audiences, journalists could not perform their proper function or role in society at all if they tried to be as nuanced in their analysis or careful in presenting them as scholars are able and expected to do. 

In reporting about human rights, secularism, or religion, for instance, journalists have to frame issues at a high level of generality and balance to be accessible and influential among the widest possible range of readers or listeners. They should be able to present sufficient breadth and clarity to enable people to make up their own mind about the issue at hand, without being so complex in their analysis or nuanced in presentation as to defeat the purpose. 

Regarding human rights, for example, journalists are best at verifying the facts and reporting them accurately and clearly, while scholars are trained to engage in deeper philosophical or social scientific analysis of the concepts, norms and their practice or application. Scholars can help us understand the historical roots and philosophical and policy implications of the relationship between secularism and religion, and journalists can present the findings and conclusions of scholars to the widest range of public opinion to inform public policy. Neither should try to perform the role of the other. Society needs both set of professionals to do what they are supposed to do, each according to their own functions and methodologies. If journalists and scholars are good at what they are trained and situated to do, they should be able to cooperate for the benefit of society at large.  

In your work you seek to engage public constituencies in various national and global contexts, from Indonesia to America.  Toward this end, you utilize media formats that complement scholarly texts.  What are the ways in which this approach contributes to the goals of your current project on Islam and the secular state?

In working with colleagues in various projects, we attempted to integrate communications and media strategies with the concept and basic methodology of the project because we believe in what we call “scholarship for social change”.  Since our explicit objective in all these projects has been to influence public policy and behavior, with due regard to the human agency of Muslims and citizens, we have deliberately sought to bring our findings and conclusions to the attention of the public at large. We do not believe it sufficient to produce a good idea, or substantiate a strong argument, without striving to bring that into the public domain in ways that motivate and empower people who are persuaded to struggle for the practical application of those ideas or arguments in practice, whether through official action or private practice.

But we have also consistently found that this is easier said than done, very much for the sort of factors and constraints I have outlined earlier. The fact that we think our work is relevant and practically useful does not necessarily mean that journalists would be keen to cover or disseminate our findings and conclusions. Part of our difficulty may have been that our findings and analysis were presented on websites and in books in English, while the readers who are more likely to be interested in what we do speak other languages.  We tried to address this issue by translating the Islam and Secular State manuscript into several languages of Islamic societies that can be downloaded and printed from the project’s website free of charge. Since we still did not receive much feedback from readers, it seems that another limitation is that the website format is not easily accessible to our constituencies, while books are too expensive for them. We still believe so strongly in the role of the media in our work that we keep working to overcome such limitations and to facilitate our cooperation with journalists.

What specific critiques might you have about current media coverage of human rights issues, international law, war, and conflict?

The question is whether, despite the increasingly globalized nature of media, coverage is still dictated by national interests or the interests of powerful nation-states such as the US. An example would be the mainstream US media coverage in the build-up to the invasion of Iraq, where the media did not distance itself sufficiently from a US state department position.

I would first recall here the points made earlier about some of the limitations of the media that are in fact necessary or relevant to its proper role and function in society.  Still it seems to me that journalists can do better in informing themselves about the broader issues of human rights, international law, war, and conflict around the world. As I said earlier, I don’t think it is appropriate for any of us, whatever function or role we play, to be “neutral” about human rights in principle.  Journalists have the obligation to investigate and verify the facts as best they can, to present a balanced view of all sides and perspectives of an issue, but that should not mean pretending to be indifferent about the outcome, as if describing a football game. I do believe that journalists have an obligation to be socially responsible in their reporting on human rights issues. As I emphasized from the start, no cause is served by weak journalism, but good strong media must seek to uphold the principles of human rights and social justice.

It is important for journalists to avoid taking sides in a conflict, or prejudging an issue, but there is no question in my mind that they must be totally uncompromising in upholding the rule of law in international relations and condemning flagrant violations of international law like the invasion and colonization of Iraq by the United States and its allies since March 2003.  Living in the United States, I was particularly distressed to see American journalists exhibiting bias and prejudice for either chauvinistic so-called patriotic reasons, or out of concern about their ability to have access to information. The notion of so-called “embedded journalists”, whereby a journalist would live and move with units of an invading army, seems to me to mock and contradict any notion of independence and impartiality. 

Similarly, what critiques might you have about scholarly work in these areas.  While recognizing that media and scholarship are not subject to identical forces, is it the case that the same kinds of ideological factors– whether in US, India, or Saudi Arabia-often also influence scholarly work in problematic ways?

Much of what I said about the media above applies to scholarship: risks of undeclared bias or prejudice, sometimes not acknowledged to scholars themselves, and ethnocentric assumptions that essentialize the “other” to fit preconceived notions or models of analysis. The risks of such factors are probably greater with scholars because they tend to assume that they have been “trained” to overcome or avoid them. To be clear on the point, these concerns are as true of so-called “Third World” or non-Western scholars as they are of Western scholars.  There is “orientalism” and “orientalism in reverse” that seeks to recapture and finally appropriate the “true and authentic” identity of “oriental” intellectuals and political elites (Mehrzad Boroujerdi, Iranian Intellectuals and the West: The Tormented Triumph of Nativism, Syracuse University Press, 1996, 11-12).

Another concern that applies to scholars in particular is the myth that true scholarship must be neutral, and that advocacy for social change diminishes the intellectual purity and authority of scholarship. The illusion here is that scholarly neutrality is possible or desirable, and can be achieved by simply refusing to take a position, which is of course an actual position in favor of the status quo.  Scholars who insist on that view tend to be privileged elites who are keen to avoid questioning the basis of their privilege.  Again, this can be as true of so-called non-Western as of Western scholars.

You strongly emphasize the importance of practice and process in developing values of secularism and civic engagement. What might be some strategies by which media and scholarship could be attuned to this perspective?

The primary rationale of my emphasis on practice and process is respect for the human agency of the subjects of the theory I am trying to develop — the values and traditions of secularism in the instance of the current project on Islam and the secular state and the future of Shari’a. Another main reason is that an effort to “theorize the experience” of persons and their communities is more likely to be accepted by its subjects as legitimate and practical than a hypothetical theoretical construct. The actual methodology of this approach is to devise a theoretical framework through observation and “translation” of the daily experiences of persons and their communities.

Both the rationale and methodology of this approach clearly indicate possibilities of strong partnership between media and scholarship.  Media strategies can help articulate the practices and process by which scholars can develop theoretical frameworks, and then communicate that information to the public to motivate and inspire action that can reinforce the theoretical framework.  For instance, the role of state funding and supervision on religious education in schools or tax breaks for private religious schools need to be negotiated through practice over time. Competing views and policy priorities about controversial educational issues, like the exclusive reservation of physical exercise facilities for female students by Harvard University, can be presented and debated through various media outlets. Whenever it is wise to try a new policy on an experimental basis, the media can play a critical role in publicizing the policy and engaging people in following its progress and eventual assessment for the policy to be either terminated or extended. This can happen for various models of regulating the relationship between religious organizations and political parties, or the role of Islamic religious endowments (waqf) in funding electoral campaigns of political leaders or their parties.

Photograph: Courtesy Emory Law School

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Professor Nunes, in your view, how does digital culture relate to the broader realm of popular culture? How has digital culture transformed our sense of what constitutes popular culture?

I think in part I was trying to address that with the area theme for Communication and Digital Culture this year. I don’t know if I can say when the change occurred — if we are even talking about a line that divided the two realms — but certainly aspects of digital culture are increasingly integrated with what we traditionally think of as mass culture or popular culture. The idea of television shows with web tie-ins or alternate reality game tie-ins, for instance, has become increasingly commonplace. There is now much more interpenetration of digital culture and popular culture.

Part of what we have been trying to address in some of our panels in the Communication and Digital Culture area is how does one define ‘mainstream’. Does it make sense to talk about ‘mainstream’ as distinct from the digital? Can we define what might be a ‘digital mainstream,’ and how we might view that? Is it about content or is it a set of practices mirroring how one interacts with media, reflecting the expectations of consumers across paradigms of convergence culture? Our panel discussions brought a lot of this, with its problematic implications, to the foreground: the idea of the changing world of what it means to be a media consumer.

Numerous panels at this conference reflect the centrality of media to culture. I’d be interested in your reflections on the extent to which theoretically and substantively media seems inseparable from culture and the ways in which we might conceptualize that relationship.

I am not a historian of popular culture, or of this organization for that matter, but I think one of the points to be foregrounded about popular culture as it is addressed within the academy is the extent to which it is tied up with the study of mass culture, and the degree to which mass media provides a grounding for mass culture in the 20th century.

Long before the rise of any kind of “new media studies” presence within the framework of popular culture studies, you certainly have numerous works on dime store novels and television and movies and comic books. There’s a well-established precedent for this overlap in the study of popular culture and the study of mass media and mass produced objects. That highly disputed division between high art and low art, between high culture and low culture, marks a nexus of sorts between media studies and cultural studies.

My interest in digital culture lies very much in that connection between these two realms, an attempt to take media studies and cultural studies and look at the ways in which they overlap. We are at this schizophrenic moment of increasing consolidation of media companies at the same time that the idea of media production is increasingly moving from a small group of individuals who have access to the production apparatus to a large group of people who may be only marginally involved in media production but who are actively engaged in consumer-producer involvements with mass media ,such as with alternate reality game tie-ins with television shows. So I think it is a very interesting moment for media studies and cultural studies. In particular, we need to be thinking media as an expression of multiple cultures, and which cultures are reflected in these expressions.

Aside from the fact that the media is the object of scholarly inquiry, how, in your view, can the worlds of professional media and academia productively engage with each other? Should the two be separate, as some might argue?

There was a presentation yesterday by Ted Gournelos as part of the first panel in the Communication and Digital Culture area, which was looking at issues of convergence culture. A number of presenters on the panel were taking a stance that was a bit oppositional to Jenkins’ definition of convergence culture. Gournelos was making the point that in contrast to the Habermasian model of consensus culture that Jenkins seems to imply in his use of the term, “convergence” must also take into account conflicts of culture and conflicting investments in the production of conflicting public spheres.

I think we are once again at a moment where there is a sort of euphoric celebration of the way in which the role of media producer and media consumer continue to blur and how that blurring might give rise to a productive and liberatory social space. And this kind of rhetoric does work its way into the academy. There is oftentimes a rather naïve celebration of the proliferation of these idealized communities — as in its older form in the mid- 1990s, as theorists “waxed utopic” over the social and cultural impact of the internet. The popular uptake of these new media interactions is depicted as a kind of mediated populism — a proliferation of democracy online. I think we are in stage 2 of that same kind of euphoric uptake that we saw a little over a decade ago. You hear it all the time in these celebrations of what it means to be involved in Web 2.0.

Some academics have valorized this as a revolutionary moment without taking into consideration things like the free labor provided by individuals who have been putting content online, and the way in which this may play into certain corporate structures. I think there is always going to be a bit of a friction between an academic approach to media and culture and the way in which media corporations are making use of media and culture. There is a degree to which the academy should provide that critical lens, that critical reflection, that calls attention to what euphoria often elides or overlooks.

That does not mean that there cannot be opportunities for interesting academic work that steps outside the ivory tower, so to speak, and has its eye toward media production. I guess I am just a little suspect of what happens when production gets melded into certain corporate ideologies or corporate strategic planning.

How might we think of the internet as a cultural and political space? The everyday perception of the internet is that it is a neutral space, which itself is an outcome of a certain kind of thinking.

Some of my earlier thinking about the internet — and I was as guilty of this as a number of other first-generation internet culture writers — reflected a willingness to look at the internet as public sphere without fully taking into consideration what it means when the public sphere is entirely subsumed within corporate or state structures.

I think right now what’s going on in China with the Tibet protests is very telling. Just the other day I heard a report on NPR: the degree to which some rather clever computer engineers in China have successfully managed to shut down external communication and internal communication in China, the degree to which the state government can filter Google and Yahoo and can completely shut down access to YouTube or other international sites that it finds questionable — this really makes the case that any strong argument for the internet as public sphere that does not take into consideration corporate structures or state structures that can override or predetermine communication is, I think, a little naïve.

Again, I don’t want to come across as saying that it is impossible to have democratic communication by way of the internet but you always need to be aware of the ways in which these political structures and informatic structures delimit what it means to have democracy online.

Image: Sunil Krishnan

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