In Conversation with Ameena Hussein at the Jaipur Literature Festival, March 8th, 2022

I have the huge privilege of being in conversation about the Earthspinner with the brilliant Sri Lankan writer and publisher Ameena Hussein at the Jaipur Literature Festival. The session is on 8th March, at 1230 pm IST, at the Mughal Tent, available online.

It's fabulous to be talking to each other again about a new book. We were in conversation in 2016 too, in Galle, Sri Lanka, where we met. I found her one of the most interesting and lively conversationalists about literature I've encountered.

I loved Ameena's own new book, IBN BATTUTA IN SRI LANKA.

It is an effortless intertwining of history, family memoir, travelogue. The spread of Islam in the second century meant hospitable networks worldwide, enabling Ibn Battuta to travel far and wide, including to SL. With a blend of very engaging detective work, map reading and travel, Ameena reconstructs Ibn Battuta’s journeys in her country. Tongue-in-cheek vignettes place modern day Sri Lanka against the past: where places rich with ebony, cinnamon, pearl fishing, and ship-building have become towns of “used car dealers and good looking tuition masters. young men with winsome smiles and names like Jagath Sir or Dushy Master”.

One particular passage made me think how THE EARTHSPINNER and her book were in some way connected: “We passed Kudirimalai Point, which today is reduced to a narrow headland overlooking the sea. We made a short stop to investigate the ruins of the reportedly massive equine sculpture that had stood on the headland and is now in the vicinity of a navy camp. Remains of a large hoof, covered with shrubs and thorn bushes, the only sign that a huge horse sculpture ever existed, looked out over an expanse of sea.”

I hope very much you will tune in to our conversation.

A Tagore in Nainital

Sudakshina, from Chitra Deb's 'Thakurbarir Andarmahal' Earlier this month, I went to Abbotsford , a historic estate in Nainital, for the Himalayan Echoes literary festival, run by Janhavi Prasada. The festival took place on the extensive lawns of the estate, which is now run as an elegant hotel, but originally it was a family home and the place had been acquired from its British owners by Janhavi’s great grandfather Jwala Prasada and his wife, Purnima Devi, in the late 19 th century. Janhavi’s new book, Nainital Through Stories, Memories, History mentions this in its first few pages: From Nainital Through Stories I was intrigued to learn that Purnima Devi was a niece of Rabindranath Tagore. She was born (according to Wikipedia) on 13 May 1884, at No. 6, Dwarkanath Tagore's Lane, Jorasanko, Calcutta, to Hemendranath Tagore (1844–1884) of Jorasanko. Hemendranath was the older brother of Rabindranath Tagore, and son of Debendranath Tagore, founder o...

Begum Anees Khan

Once a week around midday, Maulvi Sah’b would come in through the gates of our school in Hyderabad and class would divide briskly into two and troop off to different parts of the building. Those who were Muslim would be at religious instruction classes with him for the next half hour while the others trudged through moral science lessons. Something similar happened during language classes. We would hear a singsong chorus of “A-salaam-aleikum, Aunty”, from the Urdu classroom as we sat at our Sanskrit or Telugu lessons. Through my nomadic childhood, I’ve been at many schools. None exemplified the idea of secular India as intensely as this Muslim school in Hyderabad. Begum Anees Khan, who made it so, died in Hyderabad on August 16. Her passing feels symbolic, as if it signifies the death of a quixotic idea. Anees Khan was not given to seeking the limelight or making speeches. She never spelled out her secularism. It was instinctive: instead of words, there was act...

THROWING IT OUT AND STARTING AGAIN

One evening in 2007, just as I was sitting down to dinner in Delhi, my then-brand-new publisher phoned from London. In the marvelously parenthetical, elliptical manner that was to become familiar to me over the next few years, he began talking of symphonies. Had I considered, he wanted to know, how symphonies are structured? “Not really? Well, as it happens . . .” After around ten minutes of his apparently aimless lecture on music, my interrupted dinner stone cold, the penny dropped: On the brink of publication, he wanted me to rethink my opening chapter. (Read it here in Catapult) After I hung up, I returned to my plate of congealed food in silence. My husband and I were to drive up to our hill home at dawn—a holiday to celebrate the end of my endless first novel. And now at the eleventh hour this bombshell about the opening chapter. Even a novice knows that changing an opening chapter is rather more difficult than changing a concluding chapter because it means having to lo...

anuradha roy

Search This Blog