Dr. Rajorshi Das is a poet, scholar, podcaster, and incoming Teaching Assistant Professor in the Centre for Sexual Diversity Studies at the University of Toronto. This interview asks after the wondrous entanglements of their PhD dissertation, “Messy trans and queer storytelling: (un)doing Indian exceptionalism,” which they defended this past spring at the University of Iowa. Their work can be found in the GLQ (2025) and Interventions (2024). We called twice, between NYC and Rajorshi's parents' house in Kolkata.
I learned about your work because of Kareem Khubchandani, whom I wrote for editorial recommendations. I hope it's alright that I share what Kareem wrote back to me: "Rajorshi is the junior scholar focused on queer diasporic lit."
Thanks to Kareem for the recommendation. It's a very sweet one—although I don't exclusively focus on diasporic literature in my work. One of my dissertation chapters focuses on writers and editors, situated in India and the US, who were doing the kind of archival work that put Indian queer literature on the multinational publishing map in the late '90s and early 2000s.
Yes—when we emailed, you explained that you've written on Gayatri Gopinath, Jasbir Puar, and Ocean Vuong, among others, but you've since moved away from literary articulations in the diaspora to focus more on trans activist literature in India, especially in your dissertation. Our opening question is, What about Asian American literature inspires you? But let me add, how did you come to make that move? How have your literary curiosities and inspirations traveled over time?
When I think of Asian American literature, it's a very interesting category for me because, in India, I was reading some of these works, but I did not instantly think of the category “Asian American” because that's not necessarily how I was reading it. I was reading it more as South Asian diaspora, like Agha Shahid Ali or Suniti Namjoshi, and others who are writing from North America. Especially in the case of Ali, that was a way in which he was also negotiating a sense of loss in relation to India, Kashmir, and the occupation of Kashmir. So I was always making connections between how Ali was writing versus, let's say, George Abraham, who is writing now in relation to Palestine, and how Vuong or others are writing in relation to Vietnam and their experience of living in the States. But these are also very different and distinct experiences.
Ali's work seems to me more rooted in South Asia. I wanted that kind of rootedness in my work—especially in the grassroots, working class activism in the region—as somebody who has grown up in India and been involved in activism in India. I'm not saying that it cannot be working class across diaspora; it is. I just felt more invested in India as we know the land to be. But also, because it would be tricky to categorize writers like Ali within the Indian diaspora. He's from Kashmir and I'm not sure if he would have wanted to be included in the term, Indian. That was one of the reasons why I thought, okay, let me be a little more specific in my dissertation. Then it changed a bit.
At the same time, I was drawing from literary strategies that have been used by writers across North America, because that's where I was doing my PhD. Not just Ocean Vuong, but also Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and others. I kind of approached Asian American literature through the lens of queerness, and colonialism. That's how I realized, oh, these are conversations already happening in the diaspora. Diaspora is not at the center of my dissertation, but it’s something that I can draw from to inform my understanding of messiness and storytelling in India specifically.
What kind of literary strategies do you mean?
For instance, I have taught Vuong, Ali, Abraham and Piepzna-Samarasinha Samarasinha, also Trish Salah in my General Education Literature classes because of how they use language, the English language, and used specific genres. In On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Vuong is constantly drawing attention to each sentence, and punctuation, and the role of English as a colonial language. His novel breaks into poetry to showcase the kind of pain that the narrator goes through when he loses a friend and lover. Here, the traditional genre of the novel is not enough to write about the pain. But his metaphors associated with the Vietnam war are messy and politically subdued as compared to what you see in Salah, and Abraham’s treatment of Palestine. Abraham’s “Broken Ghazal, Before Ghazal” does not intend to move with pain per se. It is meant to indict and show the power of refrain toward a political goal. He is more direct than Ali whose treatment of Kashmir is poignant but seems to shy away from naming India as an occupying power. And these are literary strategies, depending on your position and also the aspirations and vulnerabilities that you carry.
Ocean Vuong and Agha Shahid Ali, both of whom you mentioned, also appear in your dissertation in relation to “messiness.” First question, you cite Vuong early on when writing about the messy relationship with your mom—how did Vuong’s writing clarify this for you?
Yeah, that's a great question. In fact, when I had the first draft of my introduction, it was more anchored around On Earth. There's this very powerful line in the novel, where the character, Little Dog, says something like, “I'm a mess, Ma.” I think he's trying to explain what writing means to his mother who does not read English.
That encouraged me to begin my introduction with a personal note, unpacking my messy relationship with my mother who I also call Ma. But mess, need not have a negative association. It can be something that you see as untidy, that doesn't make sense or that seems incongruent—that has its own process. It can be very strategic, and makes sense if we approach it not from a deficit mentality. Messiness then requires labor, and requires a certain degree of rigor.
In the dissertation, I tried to first unpack my own messy relationship with Ma. She was born and brought up in Bangladesh, and only moved to India later and became a naturalized citizen through marriage. So it's very easy for me and my father to renew our passports, but for her, there's more inspection and surveillance. She's someone who is not very comfortable with my sexuality, even though I know she loves me. At the same time, she's someone who buys earrings for me, and stitches my blouses. So these are some of the interesting contradictions, which are part of our relationship.
At the same time, I felt that contradiction is not necessarily the word that explains what's happening here. I felt somehow that some of her approaches had to do with her own upbringing in a rural part of Bangladesh, being part of a political family, because her father was part of the Awami League. But at the same time, she comes from a privileged caste background though did not get an English school education like I did. At the same time, she understands gender fluidity because it is prominent here. Those factors also contributed to how she perceived sexuality and queerness, and not necessarily through certain markers. So it would be okay for her to see me wear certain kinds of clothes, but only in private, not necessarily in public. At the same time, I cannot have some discussions with her, even in the so-called private space of the home.
In your reply, there’s an insistence on the phrase, “at the same time.” How does this phrase, a gesture to temporal synchronicity, help you think about the region and the need to theorize messiness there?
I didn't notice the usage of the phrase until you pointed that out. I was thinking about how some of this work, labor intensive work, whether it's from activists on ground or activist storytellers—has a method of messiness. All of that is happening simultaneously, at the same time, because often when we are trying to understand politics—and I mean the ideological work that we do, inside or outside the university—we often are unable to reconcile with contradictions. Certain people think as if politics needs to be pure. Just because one person is supporting one cause, they also have to support, you know, the other X, Y, Z.
And for me, it was very important to point out that all of this is happening simultaneously precisely because it's messy. If you pay attention or embrace that messiness, you'll be able to understand why there are these contradictions, how they can be traced back to identity as a process, which then facilitates certain decisions or actions. I think unconsciously then I was also insisting on the fact that it has a temporal dimension. It's all happening at the same time. One can think about Stuart Hall's “conjuncture” as a theory of how these contradictions are kind of clashing against each other at a certain time frame. And then what kind of possibilities emerge from that coming together. I'm not saying it has to be resolved or anything.
You also named Agha Shahid Ali earlier. You’ve written about Ali’s refusal to be included in Hoshang Merchant’s anthology of gay writing from India. Could you unpack that moment for us in relation to messiness?
I didn't necessarily think about Ali as somebody who was messy in writing so much, but maybe in terms of other decisions. That's where I suppose his refusal to be part of Hoshang Merchant's edited anthology comes into the picture. I don't know what Ali was thinking; I can only speculate. Akhil Katyal reads it in his book The Doubleness of Sexuality as something that could have to do with Ali's father’s Kashmiri nationalism, and perhaps a degree of reluctance to out him through that anthology—though the word gay became a kind of a metaphor in Merchant's book and the way Merchant approached the word. I was arguing that maybe Katyal’s was not the only reading here. Maybe there was more to it in that decision.
So here, mess or messiness can be an optic, where I as a researcher am embracing the messiness of this entire process and then trying to unpack what could have led to that decision. And that's something that I do throughout my dissertation, especially when I think, okay, this doesn't make sense. Then I pay attention to why it is not making sense or why somebody uses certain myths in a certain way to achieve a certain end. I do that especially with regard to Ruth Vanita's use of Hindu myths versus A. Revathi's use of Hindu myths. Some of the myths are very similar, but in one (Vanita's) case, it celebrates Hinduism in a way that ignores the violence of the caste system. Revathi is more rooted in an anti-caste vision, and yet does not necessarily reject all Hindu myths. And that would be very different from Living Smile Vidya's approach to Hindu myths, which is a complete rejection. So one needs to understand where these approaches are coming from. Even though they may feel messy, they are very strategically deployed because there is a political aim into what you want the book to be, or who your target audience is. The readership counts here, and of course, books have a life of their own. And that's where the podcast also came into play. I wanted to trace that through some of the podcast interviews that I did.
Let’s talk a little more about the methods and archives you used. How did the concept of “messiness” travel and thread through the podcast?
When I was initially thinking about the methodological part of my dissertation, as somebody who has been trained in literary studies, we obviously rely more on close reading. And in some cases, of course, other kinds of reading. But I wanted to also talk to people, writers and organizers who have inspired me over the past couple of years, to understand what it means to do the kind of politics that they are doing. I needed a different kind of method, and initially, I even thought of doing an ethnography. But then, in the English department, we don't necessarily do that, the way an ethnographer in Anthropology would do that, like I may not be able to spend a year in India to do that. I was also constrained by the pandemic, because at that time when I was preparing for my comps, we were in the first phase of COVID with less safe options to talk face to face.
I thought the best way for me to approach it would be through podcast interviews, which then were done largely virtually. So that was also a messy process in the sense that I have to be very mindful of the kinds of access that people have. Let's say if I'm hearing a certain kind of hesitance in their voice, I cannot assume that it’s coming from the question itself, but sometimes also from the surrounding that they are in, like when people are being interviewed from their natal houses or public space, they may not be able to share certain things with you.
The post-interview process was also very messy because some people realized that they said certain things and didn't want it in the published version. Often when, let's say, an ethnographer doing interviews, it may be more of a private collection as opposed to a public podcast. Then the process involves certain ifs, and buts, or dos and don'ts. That involved a degree of care, which perhaps I wouldn't have been able to do if I was just relying on close reading. Let’s say people wrote something 10 or five years back, they may be in a completely different positionality now. Sometimes the shifts didn't make a lot of sense to me, but I was able to understand why people were making certain decisions as I spoke with them more and more.
You’ve called your materials, “trans activist literature.” What constitutes that term? Does “trans activist literature” challenge ideas of “literature” that may be received from or more intelligible to the university?
That's a great question, because I was thinking, what is activism? What is literature? What is activist literature? I didn't really define them, and I don't think I can. It's more about how these texts are circulating, and what they're trying to do. It's perhaps a very traditional answer, because everybody talks about gender as something that you do, and not what you are. But I believe that's also something true of literature. Maybe you would think of Dickens’ Hard Times as activist literature in Victorian England. But I don't think, for me, that is activist literature now. It’s about the time, the situation, the positionality.
And at the same time, not every text that I've included is necessarily activist literature. Sometimes I've included them to have a harsher criticism of their process, or to compare them against a more grassroots anthology or text—for instance, in chapter one, when I discuss s editorial approaches. I wanted to think through the lens of what Anjali Arondekar describes as abundance. It's abundantly available to us, so you don't think of certain communities as in deficit, or approach them from a deficit perspective. But at the same time, just because someone is doing grassroots activism doesn’t mean that activism is anti-caste or anti-right-wing. So, I had to bring in other work. The word activism has to be a certain kind of activism, at least from my perspective, because everybody is an activist. I had to be mindful if writers have the reputation of being anti-Muslim, for instance, in the Indian context. There is a vast difference in just being an activist, and being somebody who is more radical and willing to take chances and make certain political decisions that might even make them vulnerable, such as a lot of people who are currently incarcerated in India, including one of my professors, Hany Babu.
In some ways, the people you encountered may have been more opaque to you, or ephemeral, than a copy of Hard Times on the table. Did you adopt a kind of radar for what their political commitments overall are? Or do you rely on other testimonies of those people?
I didn't want to say it out right, but in one or two cases, I knew that a person’s ideologies may not match with mine. I was thinking, okay, do I interview them? I eventually did but I didn’t get the answers that I was looking for. And that’s okay. You have to talk to people who don’t share your values but have a threshold, I suppose. Again, in some cases, I realized through common circles that certain guests have turned out to be vocally right-wing later.
Also, when I was revising my dissertation, the genocide had already started. So I was also looking at who was saying what on my social media. Some people turned out to be surprisingly Zionist and anti-Muslim, and I didn't know that when I engaged with their work. The trick with social media is that it's very fragile, and it can change very quickly. Of course, if a post is public, you can still cite it. I did that with a few scholars to hold them accountable precisely because of their position in queer literature or theory.
Did you draw from other archives as well for the dissertation?
I had started by looking at traditional archives and libraries in universities. Cornell had Hoshang Merchant's manuscript archives. But I didn't necessarily engage with them beyond a certain point, because while the decisions there could have been unpacked, I felt there is a lot of joy in talking to the person directly. I interviewed Merchant in 2022, I think. It was so much fun. This was my second interview with him actually, and he opened up quite a bit.
Thanks to the support that I received from the grad college through several fellowships, I was able to go to Hyderabad to do the interview. That also made me spend more time in communities in West Bengal. That's why the fourth chapter takes a turn to auto-ethnography. Initially, the plan was just to have fun with friends or acquaintances at LGBQ+ events. But there was a certain kind of care I hadn't experienced earlier in queer and trans circles, or kothi and non-binary circles in India, which I found there, and I wanted to write about it. And that became its own method. I thought given the fact that I was entering certain spaces as a very privileged person, I needed to discuss a different kind of literature being produced through them—which may not be written in English, or published in the form of a book or a monograph. Rather, they may be pamphlets, open invitation calls to come to certain events or impromptu dance performances. That's why often the distinction between text and performance also becomes very blurry in my work.
In the process of the dissertation, how did you come to identify and listen to your own joy and put a priority on it?
I had a very supportive mentor in Elizabeth Rodriguez Fielder, who let me do the things that I genuinely wanted to do and believed in. Where Kareem’s comment may be relevant, is that initially I wanted to work on English literary texts, but beyond a certain point, I was not finding the joy in just reading the texts. I wanted to be in a space where people could talk to each other, and then I also felt that people whose books have been circulating as Indian queer literature come from very privileged positions. I don't want to name them; of course, people know who is privileged because of their surname, which also give away your caste, right? So that pushed me to look for other kinds of texts. From texts, I realized performance is something that I have to think about, because most of the works on and by Indian trans and hijra communities have been centered around performance, and issues of livelihood.
As I read more and more queer or color critique, Jose Esteban Muñoz’s work and others, I realized performance is where I wanted to go. All these activist spaces are also spaces of performance or spaces where people are dancing without necessarily thinking, I'm being watched. Kareem's book has been very remarkable in that sense. I’m referring to Ishtyle, which talks about the transnational nightlife in India and the U.S. Obviously people are being watched, but that's not the primary concern, but rather the desire to dance in community and sometimes to dance for certain people too. That's something I wanted to write about but centering the grassroots. And my mentor was very supportive in that regard. I think it matters who is on your committee or their vision of the idea of your dissertation. In my case, I got a lot of freedom to pick texts, do texts.
You shift between terms in the dissertation; there's pink-washing and then saffron-washing, homonationalism as well as Hindu-homonationalism. There’s a rigor in which you theorize messiness in the context of cultural capital, or caste capital. When messiness travels from India to the diaspora, how does the language of the optic evolve? Can you tell us more about how to calibrate the messiness differently, based on the context?
First of all, thank you so much for reading the dissertation. It's still amazing that someone actually read it. I mean, someone outside my committee and, you know, some select friends who I know read it. But yeah, thank you so much for that labor.
To give an example, when I talk about Telangana in chapter three, I have to be mindful of how people are approaching the question of self-respect or Swabhimana. That Swabhimana is very much rooted in the region and in the anti-caste traditions of that area, but at the same time, it also disidentifies, and I'm using the word the way Muñoz theorizes it, in the sense that they don't completely align with the anti-caste traditions of intellectuals like Periyar. A lot of the organizers of the 2015 Hyderabad Pride Walk, which later came to be known as the Swabhimana Walk, and which was documented by Moses Tulasi's film Walking the Walk, were a coming together of people from disparate ideologies, but it was completely led by working-class hijra and trans workers. Many of them were sex workers. During the podcast interview, Rachana Mudraboyina, one of the organizers, explained to me that anti-caste activists share a very tricky relationship with sex work because in devadasi traditions and various other contexts, sex work was and is caste-based labor, so it's often perceived as slavery. But in the past, a lot of people like Namdeo Dhasal and others have tried to go beyond the traditional Ambedkarite and Periyar's opposition to sex work by embracing sex workers. So maybe, there is a slight distinction there between the work and the worker, and it's a struggle. It's still happening. That needs to be distinguished from a Gandhian supposedly anti-colonial opposition to sex work, or a Leftist intellectual opposition to sex work as work. So unless one understands the region, unless one understands the investment of trans sex workers in Telangana, one cannot understand self-respect.
And that requires an optic of messiness. At the same time here, what's amazing about the walk is that people like Mudraboyina, Vyajayanti Mogli and others who were part of the organizing group—they also practice messiness. Of course, they may not be calling it messiness. But when I see the work that they are doing, I feel like they're deliberately practicing messiness, because we are invoking local customs festivals to bring people together and make them feel that, okay, this is pride, but it's not necessarily the pride that we see often in the so-called West. It's different, it's more rooted. So you can come here and do different things. Of course, there is also the criticism that I cite from people like Kancha Ilaiah, who don't want some of these festivals to be embraced by the working-class Bahujan. “Bahujan” is a word that literally translates to “majority,” but here, following Kanshi Ram, it refers to a coalition of sorts between people from different oppressed groups, or people who care about oppressed groups. But, in the interview that I did with Tulasi, the director, he mentions that many of these festivals were appropriated by mainstream Hinduism, so they may not be necessarily Hindu in origin. It is now perceived as Hindu, and the state gives a lot of money or showcases these festivals as state festivals. So here, there is a practice of messiness, where you don't want to give up on certain codes, even though these codes may seem mainstream at this point. So it's a delicate balancing that they do. That's what makes messiness work, at least in this context. It may not work in other contexts.
In the diasporic context, one can look at how organizations such as Anjali Rimi’s Parivar Bay Area have collaborated with or supported grassroots community groups in India. In fact, Mudraboyina was on their team earlier. I don’t discuss Parivar in my dissertation much, but it’s interesting how Rimi shares her proximity to both Democrats like Harris and Biden as well as Indian right-wing like Laxmi Narayan Tripathi. Unlike many trans organizations in India which maintain a distance from right-wing trans or hijra leaders, Rimi does not mind sharing her proximity with Tripathi on social media. Messiness is helpful here, so that I don’t ignore associations that may romanticize Hinduism or Harris’ Indian roots at the cost of downplaying the caste and anti-Muslim violence in India and in the diaspora, and the ongoing genocide of Palestinians.
Is Swabhimana located specifically outside the university? I see it as a thread throughout your work, this deep commitment to interdependency with queer and trans spaces outside the university. You write that academia cannot aspire to being a place of trans joy, due to its ingrained need for productivity and accumulation. And how when you go back to Kolkata, you feel alive and joyous in the presence of fellow trans-Kothi activists. Could you describe your practice of moving in and out of the university during your PhD, and the energy you experience in these different locations?
So when I was writing a significant portion of my introduction, we—I’m thinking of the U.S. in this context—had already gone into genocidal mode. I was deeply disillusioned by the responses from U.S. universities, because the protests hadn't started yet. They started rather later in Columbia, CUNY and other places. I was wondering, is there a place of resistance and love within the university? Because at the end of the day, even when I am writing, I'm doing this work also for my own academic profile, my career. There’s that pressure to publish in certain journals or with certain people and then get a job, so on and so forth. But how does that do anything? Is it supposed to do anything to at least make sure that we are not doing the same shit that people have been doing, whether it's India in the context of Kashmir—upper castes continuously trying to annihilate Dalit and other caste-oppressed communities, or in the U.S., where they are funding the destruction of Gaza? One has to recognize that without the money and the backing that Israel has right now, none of this would have happened.
That's where the fourth chapter happened, because I wanted to return to the spaces which have nourished me over the years. I come from very elite university backgrounds. I did a large part of my education in Calcutta University, then in Delhi University. I was briefly also enrolled as a PhD student in Jawaharlal Nehru University. All these spaces allowed me to meet some radical people and build connections. But at the same time, there are spaces outside those universities which are perhaps even more important. A lot of these battles are being led by people who may not have gone to the university or may not have finished their schooling. And yet they are the ones who are leading these struggles for dignity, for work, or stable work, something as basic as dignified livelihood.
Of course, the university has been under attack, whether it's in India or the U.S. Hany Babu is still in jail. Students like Sharjeel Imam are still in jail in India right now. The Polis Project carried his prison letter a few months back.
But I wanted to show how the university is not the only site of knowledge production. I write about how Sintu Bagui or Sumi Das are organizing in Seoraphuli and Coochbehar with or without academic support. What is happening beyond the metropole or the city? I don't think I have gotten really deep into it, because I'm still a very city-bred person.
You also use this term standpoint. You quote Patricia Hill Collins, that “standpoints may be judged not only by their epistemological contributions, but also by the terms of their participation in power relations.” I really admire how throughout your work, you're engaged in this powerful critical interrogation of your own standpoint in relation to being an upper caste scholar and as you write, not trying to reproduce savarna ways of knowledge production. You even close the article published in Interventions with this very emphatic moment that goes, “The queer savarna then must die. However, I don't see it happening anytime soon.” Can you tell us about this injunction? Why did this feel crucial for you to say?
It's a very contradictory statement, because if I'm writing as a queer savarna, clearly I'm not practicing that kind of dying, right? I think I derived that idea from Manmit Singh’s understanding of “Rahao,” which is a pause. They are in conversation with Shaista Patel's work and the pedagogy of pausing. But at the same time, how much of that practice should you do? If you're writing, if you're getting published, aren't you also not pausing and centering yourself? And to be honest, this was my comprehensive exam article. And I was like, should I publish it? Should I not publish it? And eventually I did send it out because I thought, okay, I'm going to be in the job market. So I need to send something out. That's how the article happened.
The idea of annihilation also comes, most importantly, from Bhimrao Ambedkar, in the Annihilation of Caste, where he talks about annihilating the caste system because it segregates laborers through the segregation of work. When Ambedkar was writing the book, I think he was also thinking about Hindu society as a whole. This was much before his conversion to Buddhism, so you can see a shift in his own thinking where he perhaps did not even believe that Hinduism could be redeemed. And that explains his later decision. His strong radical critique of Hinduism, you know, gave people like Gandhi and others a lot of pain. That's why there were vehement disagreements between these two contemporaries. Again, that's where messiness can be helpful in unpacking the optic. Like, okay, this guy may have led this so-called non-violent movement. I'd say so-called because there's a degree of violence in that entire rhetoric of non-violence. But then when you think of Ambedkar, it seems very decolonial, and not just anti-colonial, in the way that he is thinking of completely changing the premise of Hinduism, which is the caste system.
So, these are some of the conversations that one needs to have when one is thinking about death, which of course is metaphorical in this sense, but it also means, do you continue to publish on this topic or do you stop? And maybe because self-criticism could be its own centering of guilt. So then how much of that is needed? Or have you reached that saturation point where it's no longer required? I'm sure if I ever publish a book, it will not have the same degree of it. It will still have the standpoint—Collins, and the standpoint theorists like Sandra Harding and others, and more recently, Shailaja Paik has talked about Dalit feminist standpoint—that is important, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you can appropriate it, to take up so much space that it becomes only about you.
It reminds me also of the way your work has this very life-affirming and life-saving quality to it. I’m thinking of how you end the dissertation, you write, "Mess is an inevitable part of life. It is untidy, wet, sticky, and chaotic. It exhausts both Ma and me, demands unpaid labor, but also teaches us how to love and hold hands—metaphorically or not—and not give up on life.” I'm curious, from this standpoint of having completed the dissertation, how has all of this labor and work influenced your life more broadly? When you say “messiness does not give me hope, even as it gives me clarity”—has it offered you a kind of clarity that is also the will to live with which you close your dissertation?
I'm glad that you thought it was more positive and life-affirming, because when I was writing the conclusion, I was actually thinking the other way around. I had this entire conversation happening with my therapist, and I was trying to find something to hold on to before submitting the document to my committee members, because we were in the second year of this genocide, and it's still continuing and it just keeps getting worse when you think there cannot be anything worse than what has already happened. That's why I was wondering, what is the point of all of this? What is the point of even trying to theorize mess? We can call it what it is, but at the same time there are people who are getting killed and people who are being starved, whether it's in the Biden era or in the Trump era. For them, messiness may not be useful. For them, clarity may not be useful. Messiness is perhaps only then useful for certain scholars, because it's also a little distant—some scholarship is distant, not because scholars are not invested in what is happening on the ground, but because they have a certain purpose. We are part of the academic industrial complex, and so the purpose of the book or the article is not about doing something good or creating a moral compass of sorts—maybe that is the purpose for a few scholars—but at the end of the day, it's often about more and more knowledge production, through a very mechanized manner.
So right now, I don't see a lot of hope, honestly, in embracing messiness, beyond seeing it as an optic that helps me understand actions, and reactions, or afterlives. It's helpful to me as a researcher, and may not be that helpful to me as an ally of Palestinians or as an anti-caste ally. At the same time, of course, I love having conversations. I haven't published a podcast interview since December, but I'm going to do one soon. I love those conversations and I love that part of it, and I hope I can do that irrespective of whether or not I'm in academia. There is some possibility of political change, yes. But it also depends on the state machinery and how brutal it can get, or what it will do, or whether or not it will listen to certain stakeholders. I think that's what makes the situation a little bit scary—when you think that despite the large-scale protests or despite the resistance, this is not ending, and why? We can discuss these questions and their messiness may be very helpful, but may not help in achieving a certain desired end.
What do you hope to talk about next on the podcast? And what questions are on your mind going into the fall semester?
I know I'll be very busy with teaching soon, so I'm hoping that in the next couple of months, I'll get to do a few interviews. I want to talk to people about the question of race and racism in the Indian context, which I think has come up a little bit in some of my earlier conversations with Davidson and Pavel who founded the Chinki Homo project. But I don't think I've explored that enough. I also need to be more in conversations with people who are currently in West Bengal, because that's where I am right now. I'm hoping to interview some more activists from the region. And also, maybe approach some people from the diaspora. And yeah, also I think, despite my best attempts, most of the people who are on the podcast are still Hindus, from different castes but still Hindus. I'm hoping that I will get to interview Indians who practice other religions. All that’s in the back of my mind.
Winona Guo is a PhD student focused on Asian American literature at Columbia University, and author of Tell Me Who You Are (2019).
