XXVII Interview with… Sindhu Rajasekaran, Author

Sindhu Rajasekaran (she/her) is an author & researcher. Her debut novel Kaleidoscopic Reflections was nominated for the Crossword Book Award, while her latest book of nonfiction is the best-selling Smashing the Patriarchy - A Guide for the 21st century Indian Woman. Sindhu's fiction, poetry & essays have been published internationally by literary magazines and leading platforms. She's currently pursuing her PhD in Creative Writing at the University of Strathclyde, where she's a recipient of the Dean's Global Research Award. She's exploring queer South Asian pasts, creative epistemologies & queer decolonial storytelling. In her conversation with The Empty Set below, Rajasekaran joins us to discuss history, identity, and fiction. Read on! 

Follow Rajasekaran on IG and Twitter.

_______________________________________________

________________________________________________________________________

Much of our conversations concern themselves with what I suppose could be the delimitations between certain kinds of truth - production pursuant to historical truths, political truths and self(authored/Othered) truths. Staring broadly, how does your praxes as a writer, and your relationship with writing, bear on all of this? 

I’ve always questioned ways of knowing, you know? Even before I knew the word “episteme” I felt uneasy about the purported truth value of everything. There must be, I thought, many different ways of knowing; so there can be no absolute. 

As a writer – my fiction is inherently ambiguous, searching, existential, rambling even. I construct characters and narratives only to deconstruct them in a sense. Truths and untruths coexist in my literary universe, self-consciously so. However, it was in non-fiction that I truly had to put myself to the test. Originally trained as an engineer, I came into the humanities in my early twenties without a concrete understanding of critical methodology or theory. I was an intuitive writer-turned-theorist writing from what I knew/felt, constructing subjective truths, and going back to find ways to validate those truths with “fact,” theory, whatever I could find. 

Funnily enough, this backwards way of writing essays helped me see through the purported purpose of academic essays – like they were meant to prove something. I mean, the whole point is that everything is so complex, that you can only see what you’re seeing through your subjectivity. No matter how objective one claims to be and reads all the most objective thinkers who came before, knowledge is subjective – especially in the humanities. By the time I was in my mid-twenties I started to see my work as part of the poststructural interdisciplinary realm.    

I’m sure I’m already rambling – but that’s how I came to think so much about truth(s).

Speaking of delimitation, disciplinary borders exert, to be euphemistic, certain pressures on what is both contained and curtailed, what’s in the set as set, and what isn’t, in all its abject allure. What tensions, potentials, and frustrations have you encountered between writing creatively and writing critically? 

Ah, more truths! Even though I convince myself often that I’m being somewhat radical with my creative writing, I’m still working within forms. I haven’t yet eluded forms altogether, although I hope to elude them someday. With fiction and creative non-fiction one can chip away at boundaries, change the outpost, pretend there are no borders, momentarily flourish in that space of possibility, but at the end of the day, the publishing industry will slot your work as a novel, collection of stories, poetry, or non-fiction, and all those dreams of existing outside forms will crumble. 

With critical writing, now that’s a space I’m currently tackling. I recently published a paper on queering postcolonial women’s writing from India, and I found myself dialling back my (wild) writing style to fit within academic convention. The irony of course is that queering inherently entails that I question all sorts of normativity, and post/de-colonialism requires me to construct an alternative methodology that resists the centre (whatever that is now) – yet, as you point out, the teratogenic reality of my life is inescapable, and I end up existing/writing within a knowledge system that both confounds and excites me.

I’ve had this existential conversation with many academics and something my PhD supervisor Prof. Churnjeet Mahn once said has stuck with me. That to challenge/change the way criticality is done, one must shift citational networks. That makes sense to me. For if I rely on those who radically challenged disciplinary borders before me, I stand a chance to effect some change, however small, in my writing.

Gloria Anzaldúa is one of those amazing theorists who questioned disciplinary boundaries. In her writing, poetry and prose both bleed into one another, as she self-consciously constructs a (feminine/queer/feminist) theory. I’m now channelling her in my critical writing. 

Our conversation made me think of a rather unfashionable, albeit useful, term: bricolage. How does bricolage as both an ethos/method and a product influence your own understanding of the ellisions/fissures between history, fiction, anthropology and ethnography? What does it mean to “read not for facts, but for traces”?

I don’t mind the word bricolage, to be honest. 

The elisions/fissures between history and fiction have always been an interesting space for me. Even before I consciously began my current historical fiction project, I’ve been collecting bits of information, narratives, traces, etc., from the colonial archive for years about Indian women (especially when it spoke to the theme of sexuality). But I didn’t know how to use all of that. It strangely existed in a place between fact and fiction. Even though I was meant to think that everything I had in front of me was “fact” – because it was either recorded by ethnographers or written by historians of repute, I was uneasy about the sort of knowledge it propagated (which in my eyes was racist, sexist, homophobic, et cetera). 

So, when I started writing my historical novel about queer South Indian women set in the late 19th century, I began using the information I’d collected, but not as evidence. It seemed to me that the colonial archive was in fact a bricolage of sorts, full of “traces” – where different bits of factoids and experiences and prejudices and speculations were woven into “fact” for the purposes of imperialism – here: to highlight the sexual perversity of heathen Indian women and why they had to be civilised/ and their bodies examined/surgically corrected. 

Soon enough, I discovered theorists who think critically about archives and conduct narratological studies of history – in a way, Jameson’s “always historize” took on completely different meanings for me, and I started to see history as a coming together of a diverse range of opinions. Nothing absolute about it, and I was free to make my own bricolage. 

We spoke a bit about your redressing (in the sense of a polemic or critique, but also a re-dressing as in a change of aesthetic or artistic sensibility) what you called the Colonial Moment in India. Can you expand on what attracts and repels you about this historico-cultural network, and your retro-futuristic interfacing with it?

The colonial moment, what attracts me to it? That’s a great question. Coming from a country like India, colonialism isn’t the only historical trauma that I have had to contend with. I come from an inter-caste family of Dalits and Brahmins and that comes with its own intergenerational traumas. And as a queer woman there are yet more layers of discrimination that I’ve had to deal with (both historical and contemporary) despite all my privileges. So why the colonial moment? 

I think a big part of it is to do with where I grew up in India. Madras was home for many years, and it was the typical postcolonial city with edifices built by the British (architectural. linguistic and cultural). Colonial history was everywhere, and I couldn’t not be interested in what that former time was like. Am I an Anglophile? Maybe. English was always a big love of mine (the language I mean). Madras was/is a literary city. History was one of my favourite subjects too – and Madras’ history was colonial history (the city was founded by the British).   

So it is, I think I somehow had this fascination for the colonial moment. But that’s the good part. As soon as I started digging into the archives, out of curiosity mostly, I was confronted with narratives that immediately made me uneasy. What version of the truth was I reading?  

Yet, through the eyes of British officers in the late 19th century, I could also see other truths of the past. As traces. Even as they categorised women outside heteronormative upper-caste marriages as “prostitutes” – they also recorded their evidence. That women were in same-sex relationships, that they were poly-amorous/androus, that they had loose morals, etc. Coloniality forced the “natives” to abandon these sexually liberal mores because Victorian morality deemed them scandalous.

Contemporary Indians have “postcolonial amnesia” and have forgotten these pasts. These stories of queer women who confounded patriarchies of all sorts. Who fought the mighty and sang songs and survived. My aim is to retell these stories. A sort of retro-futurism if you will. 

It seems to me that archives have this feverish intensity and de-intensification about them. On the one hand, ‘truths’ of all kinds disappear, reappear, are marginalised or made apocryphal as well as being produced in, by, and against the Archive. On the other hand, there is a necrotic and repressive intensity pervading the Archive as not only a reliquary or ossuary of valency, but the site which bears and can answer - at all - the burden of proof demanded by inquiry. What has surprised, inspired, and angered you most in terms of ‘proofs’ you’ve found or encountered in the Archive?

Digging the archives for lost texts, bodies, subjects, can sometimes feel like a convoluted process. I mean, at the end of the day, my “historical desire” (to borrow historian Anjali Arondekar’s phrase) becomes evident through such an endeavour. I’m finding what I’m looking for, but so is everyone else. 

The archive, as you say, has become a reliquary of valency. Even as I question the validity of the archive, I still use “traces” from it to substantiate my work – which seems rather self-defeating. Could I not rely exclusively on oral narratives, folklore, or other sources that exist outside the archival network? Not easily – because most of that too from the time period of interest to me exists mainly in the British archive. I must note though that this is not to say I’m radically opposed to the archive’s very existence or that I want all archival material to be transported immediately back to India, or that everything in the archive is epistemic violence. Because India is currently reediting its history (as it always has) and looking to the colonial past through India’s contemporary lens will also thow up various conundrums. 

How, in your view, is decolonisation more a question of class than it is race? Many, I think, assume the opposite…

From the point-of-view of India, decolonisation is a contentious term. To the Hindutva far-right, it is the process of delegitimising the colonial past altogether, including some valid criticisms of Indian society that the British made (regarding the inequalities of caste, suppression of women, etc.). On the other hand, for marginalised and far-left folks, decolonisation is nothing but an elitist project that the privileged obsess about. Because the issues of caste and class are not usually part of this retrospective decolonisation. 

Of course, to decolonise, one must factor in a whole gamut of things. It is complicated and doesn’t easily offer itself to a two-line definition. Which is both a problem and a possibility. 

It seems that myth-making is never far from either the practice of history and/or its critique. Pitfalls abound, like sentiments of pre-colonial utopianism. What relationship might a colonist in India have to myth (making and busting) versus a British archivist?

Exactly. There was never a utopia in India. Not for all people. Thinking of pre-coloniality as glorious is a convenient starting point for many though. Research papers are written that way in India. Several contemporary texts read that way in the popular imagination too. While this myth making may serve the purpose of increasing some people’s self-esteem in the global arena by undoing certain effects of colonialism, it doesn’t speak for all people (most of the people, really) – because it’s blind to the issues of caste, class, gender, etc. 

If anything, it seems to me that myths bear themselves out most strongly not in the past, but in the future. During our chat, you said a bar I like: “writing the myths in her”. What interests you in the practices pursuant not only to an archeology of the future, as Jameson might have it, but rather with myths of the future?

Anzaldúa’s words those: “writing the myths in me.” I should add, myths for the future, of the future. Indian metaphysics constantly talks about the cyclical nature of time, and I feel that my myth-making fits into that scheme of things. We are the stories we hear of our pasts and futures. 

What challenges and surprises have you encountered in terms of thinking and (reproducing) histories of feminisms in India across time?

I will tell you more about this as time goes on. I’ve just written one chapter spanning about 2000 years (2500 BCE – 500 BCE) and I have written more than I thought I would. It’s turning into a saga. Finally, maybe I’m pushing the form!

This might be a strange question, but what, personally, do you find more productive: writing and thinking from a position of oppression, or a position of agency? My career has made me consider this often…

Great question, and I’d like to know more about what you think about this. 

After much contention, I have opted to think and write from a position of agency – with that of oppression always trailing me whether I like it or not. I find that given all my identity markers, people always expect me to come at things from a position of oppression, and I surprise them when I don’t. And I like the element of surprise. 

Folklore, folk, and their lore often resonate and are recalled via the frequency (in every sense) of certain voices. How, for you, do forgotten feminisms and these voices within folklore coincide? Could you talk a little about your praxis of re-imagining your foremother(s)?

In Tamil culture, folksongs are part of everyday life. People have traditionally sung them while they worked, when in love, at play, they sang during all sorts of occasions: weddings, funerals, etc. So, I’ve heard many a folksong growing up (in popular culture), and the ones sung by women have always drawn me. They seemed to tell secrets, but how were they secrets when they were sung so openly? 

Secrets, because they were all about agentive actions or desires – in people’s personal and professional lives, and their aftereffects. If society was always rigid and didn’t allow women to live as they wanted, then how could they have felt those emotions/had those experiences? That’s what got me interested and I dug deeper – and found many fascinating insights into the past ~ because these songs are usually passed down as is, with minor variations. 

What intentional strategies, what ‘hyperstitionalities’, can one bring to bear in making myth become history?

That’s a tough one to answer – because everyone is bound to have their own intentions as to why they engage in such myth-making. I’d like to believe that my intentions are honourable, and when I’m doubtful, I’m usually honest about that with my readers – I explain my intentions in a self-conscious manner (with all sorts of contradictions present). So, I suppose, I’d say it’s important to be honest with one’s intentions when creating “hyperstitions.”

What surprises, inspirations, and anger has emerged from your ongoing efforts to de-centre queerness from the West?

This is now an on-going process for me. A friend of my mine who works in critical literacies, Dr Navan Govendar, often talks about how pronouns that the queer community comes up with for non-binary folks is drawn from European languages, when in fact, many Asian & African languages traditionally have non-binary pronouns – which go unnoticed by the global metropole. Also, another thing that stems from the West is the need to “come out” – like one’s queerness doesn’t exist or is suppressed until one comes out of the closet. This isn’t true for everyone – especially in the Global South, where queer lives and narratives are diverse and go beyond the “closet.” 

We spoke a lot about fluidity and variability which does not default on intensity and meaning on its own accord. Could you elaborate on your assertion: “name the desire, not the person”?

There’s an excellent book by Madhavi Menon, Infinite Variety – A History of Desire in India. It was an eye-opener for me. In it, Menon delineates how India’s queer history is as old as time. The reason why we don’t spot it as easily is because all people with queer desires did not identify themselves as “different” or name themselves as X or Y – because they never saw their queerness as abnormal. They were simply in love, or they felt lust. As fluid beings, everyone was entitled to explore all their emotions (of course, this isn’t to say India was always utopia, but that queer folks constantly found ways to subvert, survive and thrive). 

I mentioned, as I often do, Benjamin’s essay on translation, as well as Derrida’s book-essay On The Monolingualism of the Other. I’ve been thinking about this in conjunction with AI and language. But without getting sidetracked, in our conversation, you said that if asked - and putting crudely - you “might think in English, but feel in Tamil”. How does this effect and affect your praxis? And, also, how does translation/transliteration both serve and betray you?

“I have but one language – yet that language is not mine” wrote Derrida. I suppose my problem is that I have two languages – and I’m not sure which one makes me, me. Tamil and English are both beautiful languages, but Tamil is definitely more fluid – more space for multiple meanings to exist between and within words. English is more restrictive, or binary, and doesn’t naturally lend itself to such fluidity, I find. That’s why I always feel my deepest emotions in Tamil, but when I write them down, I write in English. English because it gives my feelings some structure, some “rationale.” But that’s the very thing I don’t want to be doing, I want to intuitively write my thoughts down without filtering it through literary conventions or logic… My aim now, as a writer, is to find a way to integrate Tamil and English into my writing. I want them to coexist in the text as they do in my mind.

Translation/transliteration are romantic activities for me. I enjoy dwelling in that space of many meanings. The potential. The moment I translate though, I feel like I’ve betrayed so many ideas (because Tamil is so fluid) and that definitely has an “affect” on me and my writing. 

Having studied together, it felt to me that there are, then and since, overlaps in our careers in terms of what I like to think of as terms of engagement. How we find a discipline, lines of flight within it, demarcated for you, prohibited from you, within and without areas of inquiry, that are integral and disintegrating to the whole notion of epistime. Its the feelings, expectations, assumptions, and rebellions of and against fealty, allegiance, and performance of certain shows of identity as scholars and creators coded in certain ways in certain spaces. Is it possible to remain - in every possible way - undeclared and still  get enough attention to not only work, but also survive? My fear is that the former is a myth that serves the latter…

This is so interesting, isn’t it? When we were getting our Master’s, I remember that you were into theory per se, and so was I. My identity markers didn’t define me. I imagined that I was embarking on a quest of knowledge that went beyond that – after all, we were reading philosophy. But soon enough, I saw that within/outside academia, the codes that you mention of what allegiance and performance one is expected to perpetuate became glaringly obvious. Often unsaid, but definitely there.  

I’d like to know more about your journey on this aspect. How did you navigate these spaces? I know your research subject during your PhD defied many of those “expectations.” Since, you have also begun writing about African film/lit. Was that unexpected, or something you naturally got to? In my case, as I mentioned when we chatted, I set out to be a “literary writer” whatever that was. Not a brown, queer, feminist writer – although, that’s how the world sees me and reads me. I've learned to be fine with that because that still doesn’t define me fully. It is definitely a part of my identity and I have no qualms about people seeing me like that.

In what three main ways are you a “literary nomad”?

Literally, because I’m literary (or claim to be). I’m a nomad because I move every couple of years. I’ve called various cities home in India, the UK and Canada. This bears a lot on how I write, what I write about, and my language. So, this phrase is close to my heart.  

I think a lot about Fanon and the end of The Count of Monte Cristo. I think a lot about Fred Moten and Nietzsche and the problem of resentiment. How would you advise someone who's trying to do this stuff, how to write and think and discourse without resentiment? 

I haven’t yet read The Count of Monte Cristo (now on my tbr). I did a lot of Nietzche in my nihilistic years, of which I had many. Master-slave morality has always interested me, in it that I have wanted to read/unread the effects of colonialism, caste, the patriarchy. Resentiment is interesting – even as my aim in both my creative and critical work is to demolish value systems that I find suffocating, I’m always also mindful not to sound hostile. It’s easier to do this in fiction. I’m not sure I have entirely succeeded in doing that in my non-fiction. I wrote a book titled Smashing the Patriarchy – where I radically critique and blame the patriarchy for a ton of things. I’ve tried to be fair, but my frustrations show. 

My father would often allude - sometimes proselytise like a prophet, if he was in his humour - that inheritance and iniquity are the same thing. An heirloom is a curse is a treasure is a debt. What’s your view on inheritance? What does it mean to have, want, fear, give or keep them for you?

An heirloom is a curse is a treasure is a debt – I love that. I’d like to quote your dad somewhere! I feel that way about all the intergenerational things I’ve inherited – ambitions, traumas, objects (like jewellery and journals teeming with stories), songs, rituals, religion, marginalisation, and privilege. 

It’s complicated!

You mentioned that often, translation is itself an heirloom in the sense that you inherit a specific way of reading, speaking, a code of and from your familial milieu itself. How does this relate to your interest in the connotations of words in families? 

My first novel was the result of all that you mention. Emotional resonances of words, symbols, objects – what they meant within my family for generations and what they mean to me now. Are my ambitions the same as that of my ancestors? Will they be happy with what I’ve done with my life? Are they still guiding me with signs? I obsess about this stuff on and off the page. 

Could you talk a little about how all of the above relates to your two current and upcoming books?

I’m working on a historical novel and a book of historical non-fiction; both are in the queer feminist space and set in India. I suppose I’m employing the same methods/techne/intuitions while researching and writing them - which is rare for me, to work on two projects simultaneously but in very different ways.