Barkha Dutt: belief

Transcript context

…How do you feel when you read Kipling? Is it offense, like, “Oh, these colonial bastards,” or is it, “This was just a thing of its time,” or, “I can’t enjoy this anymore,” or you side with it in some way? What’s your gut emotional reaction? I’m able to separate writings from their time. I know this is a politically incorrect thing to say, but I don’t look at Noddy and Golliwog and Blyton and say, “Oh my God, how racist.” I probably should. I probably would if I were a child growing up today. It’s the same for Kipling. All of us knew the poem “If — ” by heart, by rote. We could all recite it. We learned it in this decontextualized way. A lot of our education was completely decontextual. We would just read it as a bunch of words. Oftentimes, we didn’t know what they stood for, what they represented. We had no idea, and because we imbibed them in a decontextualized way, they became part of — they’re more childhood associations rather than illustrations of colonization. Of course, yes, words matter, language matters, context matters, but I’m able to separate timing and literature. I would never enjoy Austen today, but hell, Bridgerton is the most-watched series on Netflix. I haven’t watched it because I don’t want to watch women forcing themselves into corsets, looking for an ideal man, but why is most of the world watching it? I think there’s something to be said about entertainment for its own sake, memory, nostalgia, words that formed you, shaped you, that you could have a good laugh at, not take too seriously. For lack of a better word, I’ll refer to Anglo-American liberalism. Do you think Anglo-American liberalism has a future in India? Say the views of someone like Ramachandra Guha, who is not a Hindu nationalist, broadly liberal. Maybe in the 1990s, people expected Anglo-American liberalism would become much stronger in India as the country globalized. It doesn’t seem that’s happened. What does the future look like for that strand of thought in India?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.