In this episode, I am in conversation with Neha Dixit about her new book, ‘The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian’- an outcome of 9 years and more than 900 interviews to tell the story of an ordinary working-class faceless Indian woman, from the early 1990s to the present day.

We also discuss her journey as a journalist since 2007 and her extraordinary resolve to report the ground realities of the ‘New India’ in the face of increased corporatisation of the media, ongoing law and order cases and criminal cases against her that take years in the court of law (two days after recording this episode, she had to appear for a hearing in Guwahati), imminent threats and intimidation.

References:

1. Neha Dixit: Journalism, Twitter, Scroll, The Wire, Outlook
2. The Many Lives of Syeda X: The Story of an Unknown Indian by Neha Dixit
3. The Other Side of Silence: Voices from the Partition of India by Urvashi Butalia
4. Operation #BetiUthao: The Sangh’s Stolen Child Crusade
5. A Chronicle of the Crime Fiction That is Adityanath’s Encounter Raj
6. For Haryana Police, the Holy Cow Is an Excuse for Extra-Judicial Killings
7. Muzaffarnagar riots: This graphic narrative tells the story of the courage of seven rape survivors

What does education do? Whose needs are being met by education? What does education mean to different people? Why did schooling fall short in providing equality of opportunity? Vishal Vasanthakumar joins us in this episode to illustrate the complex issues involved in the provision and purpose of education in India.

References:

1. Vishal Vasanthakumar: LinkedIn, Twitter, Cambridge Website
2. Following Fish: Travels around the Indian coast by Samanth Subramanian
3. Slouching towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
4. Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity by Katherine Boo
5. Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty by Patrick Radden Keefe
6. Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets by Svetlana Alexievich
7. The Shadow of the Sun: My African Life by Ryszard Kapuscinski
8. China in Seven Banquets: A Flavourful History by Thomas David DuBois
9. The forms of capital by Pierre Bourdieu
10. The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good? By Michael J. Sandel

Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay stands among very few freedom fighters who imagined 'Freedom' in transnational terms meaning to end exploitation everywhere and of every form. She espoused an expansive idea that will contribute to individual as well as collective growth and evolution. Very few Indians could match her in terms of her travels to countries across the world (England, Germany, Denmark, China, Japan, United States, Srilanka, etc), the relations she forged with leaders worldwide and the multiple fields she straddled in(nationalist politics, socialist politics, women’s movement, education, refugee rehabilitation, theatre, cinema, renewal of handicrafts).

In this episode, I am in conversation with Nico Slate to talk about his recent biography ‘Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay: The Art of Freedom’.

Nico Slate is a Professor of History and Head of the Department of History at Carnegie Mellow University. His research focuses on democracy and social movements in the United States and India. He is the author of six books: The Art of Freedom: Kamaladevi Chattopadhyay and the Making of Modern India (HarperCollins India and the University of Pittsburgh Press, 2024); Brothers: A Memoir of Love, Loss, and Race (Temple University Press, 2023); Lord Cornwallis Is Dead: The Struggle for Democracy in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2019); Gandhi’s Search for the Perfect Diet: Eating with the World in Mind (University of Washington Press, 2019); The Prism of Race: W.E.B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Paul Robeson and the Colored World of Cedric Dover (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014); and Colored Cosmopolitanism: The Shared Struggle for Freedom in the United States and India (Harvard University Press, 2012).