Q: In an online discussion on your work, you mention that poetry was never your area of interest and that you were never enamoured by it until Fossil. How did the use of poetry and coming out of your comfort zone affect your writing process as a whole?

While poetry has always fascinated me, I never pictured myself as a poet until Fossil came along. I don’t think there’s anyone who is completely immune to the effect poetry has—poems are the first form of literature we’re exposed to, and the musical intonation they have forms the basis for our primary response to rhythm, rhyme, and alliteration. Unlike other literary works, poetry heard during childhood (mostly as children’s rhymes, gibberish and songs) does not require a literary bent of mind or prior knowledge of art and culture, making it rather accessible and universal.

I remember a lot of my batchmates dabbling in poetry when I was in college, that left me in awe. My entry into writing poetry, however, wasn’t spurred by reading poems. It happened tangentially, with the genre of nature writing acting as a gateway. The representation of everyday nature in poetic prose was something that spoke to me, especially following my exposure to a wide variety of poets and writers in the genre such as Mary Oliver, Wendell Berry, Melissa Harrison, Paul Evans and Robert Macfarlane. It allowed me to develop a sort of poetic sensibility that wasn’t restricted to a written text, but concerned itself with the poeticism of the world itself.

Fossil is a part of the Tasmania-run global arts project ‘Lost Rocks’, a unique collection of forty three books that utilizes creative interpretation to foster geological consciousness. When the theme and the title were intimated to me, the idea of fragmentation as a metaphor immediately sprung to my mind, and in that moment I knew that I wanted to experiment with narrative poetry. It was an incredibly rewarding process that drove home the importance of the economy of words one must adhere to in poetry. It also revealed a fundamental difference between prose and poetry, which is that the former is often concerned with describing events in detail, whereas the latter is a form more conducive to appreciating the moment and being observant of the finer sensibilities of things. Furthermore, the project enhanced my awareness of structure, rhythm, and metre, for which I’m very grateful. Put simply, poetry is concerned with the study of “lines”, their orchestration and arrangement, and it is this study that I attuned myself to during the writing of Fossil.


Q: The lines “Here in the Himalayas,/contradictions are the bedrock/of continuity” from your poem “Incipience” capture the passage of time which brings about transformation and the constancy in inconstancy underlying the idea of the mountains. How do you associate the idea of change with the ideas of creation and growth?

We’re conditioned to think of mountains as symbols of stability. Popular vernacular poems such as Sohanlal Dwivedi’s “Khada Himalaya Bata Raha Hai” (in Hindi) for example, use the perceived immobility of the Himalayas to exemplify virtues of steadfastness and firmness. When you grow up in mountains, however, you come to realise that this commonly-held view is not necessarily true. Mountains may seem ostensibly “still,” but there is nonetheless an undercurrent of life running through them: even the silences are haunting. In geographical terms too, they are constantly in movement, and never as dead or rigid as one might consider them to be. This was something I found myself coming back to while writing Fossil—fossils may seem dead to us but they are constituted by an idea of aliveness, and if you take it in a metaphorical sense, mountains can be thought of as fossils in their own right too: fossils of time past.

Here I would like to add that in literary studies too, it is common to think of texts as “finished” products to be analysed and deconstructed. I take issue with this sort of overtly clinical approach because any text is much more than the condensed copy of what you hold in your hand. There is always a wider myriad of dynamic forces at play, all of which are primarily characterised by an ever-evolving idea of “movement”. The very basic unit of life, which is breath, is itself constituted of movement, not stasis. It is this very sense of movement that undergirds all life processes and fuses the concepts of change, creation, and growth. That is, movement is common to all three ideas, which I explore at length in Fossil as well.


Q: It’s quite clear that you are attached to the Himalayas because you grew up there. In addition, there is an obvious adoration that is reflected in the way you talk about it. Do you ever feel that your personal connection with the Himalayas disrupts the critical foundation on which you base your work?

You’d be interested to learn that I had my PhD viva on this very day five years ago. The reason I mention this is that when I submitted my thesis, I began the Acknowledgements section by crediting the Himalayas foremost, even before my supervisor, who is traditionally credited first. It is to this extent that I adore, venerate, and cherish the Himalayas. I never feel bored when I’m in the mountains—something about them is constantly inspirational to me.

It was during my initial years of university education that I was introduced to the important concept of “critical thinking”. During that phase, I learned the merits of objectivity and criticality, but as I progressed further in my studies, I somehow felt that the approaches towards cultivating a “critical disposition” themselves became formulaic. I felt dissatisfied with this kind of thinking that assumed an “automatic” dismantling of texts as the highest and most relevant kind of criticism. There’s a widely accepted notion that you must quash adoration, wonder, and pleasure and only engage in negative criticism to produce something of value: a notion I find flawed. I was therefore glad to discover more like-minded but still revolutionary academics such as Jane Bennet, Rita Felski, and Elaine Scarry, none of whom advocate discarding wonder and pleasure as a method of critically attuning to texts. Reading older authors such as Rabindranath Tagore further encouraged me to disregard enchantment, wonder and love as the “required opposites” of a critical disposition. I realised that wonder and adoration are themselves political in nature. I am reminded of Elaine Scarry’s marvellous treatise On Beauty & Being Just, which argues that beauty, aesthetics and joy are among the first emotions humans feel, so to negate their importance is to go against human nature. Instead of diluting critical attention, the beauty an object or an entity holds heightens our “perceptual acuity” towards it, as Scarry puts it so well.

Similarly, Rita Felski acknowledges that ideologically attuned readings certainly serve an important purpose, but there’s an equally pressing need to bring back joy and pleasure in critical work . This is reiterated in an essay “On the Hatred of Literature” by Jon Baskin, a literature student expressing frustration and disaffection with the prevalent trend of being negative in literary criticism. Another essay “What’s Beyond the Guilt Tax” by Sumana Roy also comes to mind, which asks us to consider how we can teach literature without doing away with wonder and delight.

Going back to your question, then, I don’t think my criticality has ever been hindered by the love I have for the mountains. Wonder and enchantment can take multiple forms. Tourists, for example, may come to Shimla and click selfies at the Mall Road, but when you’re dwelling there, as I did, you can’t help but also get engaged with the everyday life and politics of the place.  play a Here too, love and beauty play a very important role . Every single day, the mountains in front of our house presented breathtaking sunsets and other glorious vistas, always graded and slightly different from the previous day. This constant dynamism was a major source of inspiration to me. It made me think about the notions of change and heritage conservation (both natural and cultural) in creative ways. Instead of disrupting it, my personal connection with the highlands augments my criticality. I care for the Himalayas because I love them, and I am critical of the current Himalayan predicament because I wouldn’t like their enchantment to vanish away under the onslaught of human degradation.

Studying literary theory in my college years made me interested in the postcolonial perceptions of Shimla. A common trend I noticed was the assumption that postcolonial theory made about the love contemporary society had for Shimla and other hill stations, reasoning it to an uncritical Anglophilia. I found it utterly limiting to condemn and reduce the experiences of a whole people to such a reductive narrative. This prompted me to question what I could do to renew my critical attitude towards Shimla (and the Himalayas in general) while also studying common people’s enchantment for these places. For that, I had to go beyond rigid scholarly perspectives and delve into the association of human senses and emotions with landscapes. How do people enjoy a particular landscape when they are walking on the Mall Road? What is it about the acts of walking that leads to an appropriation of history from the colonial past to postcolonial present? Could everyday forms of engagement like eating, photography, meeting and cinema-going tell us something about the ways in which colonial heritage acquires a fluidity about itself? How, in other words, does perception of a place change in relation to its beauty, development and the evolution of human senses themselves?

To put it in another way, as literature students we should be aware that there can be multiple and equally valid ways of interpreting history, landscapes, and cultures. Love and adoration towards any place or subject doesn’t automatically signify an uncritical attitude towards it.


Q: You also dabble in photography. It holds time still, in a way. We look back at childhood photos, or photos in general and the nostalgia that we associate with it jumps out of the frame. Is there any nostalgia associated with the landscape when you photograph it?

In academia, generally speaking, nostalgia is not considered a good word. Literary theory is deeply suspicious of nostalgia and for good reason, because even though nostalgia conveys a sense and assertion of an emotional relationship you have with a place or a person or an entity its may be questionable. And it is this idea that becomes the basis for the concpet's criticism. Having said that, several critics from philosophy, literature, sociology and geography backgrounds have also given a new vocabulary to understand nostalgia. For instance, if you look at the work of the geographer Alison Blunt, where she studied the Anglo-Indian society of Mccluskieganj, she introduced a term called “productive nostalgia” in her paper on the community. The term, as defined by her, refers to an emotional disposition or orientation that allows you to associate and care for the landscape that you're living in, a kind of nostalgia that is not directed towards the past, but is oriented towards the future. In another nuancing of the concept, the Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht gave the term “solastalgia” to understand climate crisis. It refers to the emotional distress caused by the environmental damage taking place around you.

So, there are different registers in which nostalgia is understood and conveyed, and perhaps you could say that in a basic way, it enters everyday photography too. But going back to your question about photography having the power to hold time still, I recall a contrasting statement to this sentiment. The American critic Susan Sontag observes that photographs are a “testament to time’s relentless melt”. That is, every photograph testifies not so much to the idea of time being held still but actually the opposite – that time is relentlessly moving and melting ahead. This is very crucial to understand, as photographs ostensibly only capture a moment in a fraction of a second, but looking back at those photos, we’re not only beholding that frame but are transported to the environment or context of memories surrounding that particular moment when the photograph was captured. Thus, when we behold a photograph, it’s not just a moment that we are remembering, instead it is a culmination of many other things that existed at that moment, the smells, the gestures, the sounds. Thus, a photograph in our mind is rendered alive, dissolving the claims to stillness.

For these reasons, I don’t think of photos as only working with stillness. Whenever I see some images of my childhood, on the surface level, yes, there can exist a simple kind of joy, which one might want to label nostalgia. But my own work however, hasn't been about nostalgia, but rather about attuning myself to the particularity of the moment that I am capturing. It is about sharpening my perception of that scene in front and so I’ve always carried a small camera with me for over a decade now. The act of taking photos allows me to better understand the moment, and the first aspect that captures one’s attention is the beauty, oddity or peculiarity of the scene (they may work together too). One of the key camera features I admire is its zooming capacity. A camera’s lens is often called a third eye, and that’s because our vision can't perceive all the minute details of an entity, especially when you're studying an artefact or a building. The zooming-in feature allows you to perceive novelty, that’s why it is also my personal favourite. So for me, photography is more about capturing the present instead of nostalgia. It also acts as a kind of a tool for documentation in my research, to remember the places and people I visited, and the objects that rivetted me.

The last point that I wish to make is related to my earlier observations on movement, which again provides an alternate perspective to the stillness of a photograph. While the act of photography generally requires a kind of immobility, what fascinates me is that when I look at my work more critically, it is movement via walking that leaps out as the central anchor to my photography. Walking is the basis of most of my photos. In this regard, living in the mountains gives me a certain kind of privilege as compared to the plains. The mountains, with their diverse topography, portray a different view in a different frame because of the general unevenness of the landscape, thereby allowing you a different perspective of the same thing. The same structure that your lens is trying to capture becomes alive in a completely new fashion, propelling me to become aware and self-reflexive. The different perspectives also elicit dynamic responses from viewers. Thus, instead of thinking through nostalgia, I believe that all of my photography reckons with the present moment through an attention to framing and detailing. A photograph is not an end to itself, it is always an entry point and is always alive.


Q: Along the same line of thought, as a musician and a photographer, how do you feel that your vision is unique? Does that impact the way you construct the landscape with your words?

Simply put, music is the most important thing in my life: if someone were to ask me to survive with one thing for the rest of my life, it would be music. Music is central to everything I do. It has been a part of my being since day one. My mother is a folk singer and my whole musical disposition has been because of her Himalayan folk songs that I have listened to while growing up. Also, being a visually oriented-individual, one of my biggesr artistic inspirations is Sanjay Leela Bhansali. His cinematic and musical expertise have inspired my craft for the last many years. A point that often emerges in his interviews is that even before he starts thinking about the action and plot for his films, he needs to have a background score in his mind. I was fascinated by the idea that sound can be the basis of creation, and this is a line of enquiry I love exploring through my own compositions. An English anthropologist, Tim Ingold, has written extensively on the human senses and their relationship to landscapes. He compares the sense of sight with the sense of sound, and says that with sight we are always at the edge of things, but with sound, we are always in things. He suggests therefore that the sense of sound is much more capacious, as it allows us to be immersed by the virtue of it being a sound, but with a painting or a photograph or anything to do with vision, one has to be “at an angle” to it, as it were. And this relates to Bhansali’s view of filmmaking too, because the director realises that there is something more complete and organic about music and sound even as he is so proficient in visual vocabulary. Although it is sight that we usually privilege (and I recognise this as a photographer myself), if we go back to various indigenous cultures, we find that it is sound that is the source of life. Human heart beat (or for that matter any creature's heartbeat) is first and foremost a sound. 

All of these ideas point to music possessing an abstract, powerful quality. I always try to look for some kind of melody or rhythm in the writing that I do as well. I know that most of us write silently or have to be silent when we write, or that a certain silence is automatically intertwined within the art of writing. But when we are writing, even in that silence we can “hear” each word and if something doesn’t fit well, we know it might not “sound” right. Therefore, I think that sound and the act of listening are crucial to all forms of creativity. The 19th century critic Walter Pater said that all art ultimately “aspires to the conditions of music”. What is most pronouncedly exemplified and embodied by music is a sense of harmony and tonality. Whenever we see something beautiful, that beauty strikes as having a musicality of its own. I try to nourish that in my writing as well, which becomes a tedious process because good writing doesn’t seem to appear immediately (in a fluent manner). I believe writing is ultimately a craft and it takes time to let in a rhythm to it. This doesn't only have to do with poems in metre and rhyme since even in blank verses have a  music of their own. In my long poem “Incipience” (which you cite above - but also in other poems), I tried breaking the line in a way in where I could cultivate some sort of cadence. Both actively and subconsciously, I seek such precision and that rhythm which invariably impact my writing and photography too. So, I don’t look at my practices of writing, photography and music as unrelated to each other, for there’s often a strand of commonality in them.


Q: There is a binary that you reconcile in your work- that of geology and myth. How do you go about reconstructing that duality and presenting it as one unified whole?

It’s interesting that these two concepts bear resemblance to each other and gets reflected in my work as well. Geology relates to the real world. A myth is a myth because it is fantastical, it doesn’t necessarily bear relation to reality. However, we know that myths have been there since the beginning of mankind or at least, since the beginning of language. Myths are ways, processes or literary artefacts through which people convey symbolic meanings about life and living. The one aspect that relates both these together is simply the notion of temporality. There’s something known as “deep time” which many contemporary nature writers regularly speak about. Deep time doesn’t mean the time measured by the human body, which is at most around a hundred years. Rather, deep time is the time measured and kept by earth. Earth itself has traces and memories, and a way of keeping time that goes back to billions of years right from its foundation. It’s telling that even though myths obviously come up much later (with human language and culture), their ways of understanding time relate to the longevity of deep time. In Hindu myths for instance, we speak of yugas composed of millions of years. All of this is fantastical of course, but you can’t help but think about mythic time as deep time itself.

In one of my poems titled “Shakti”, I was imagining the way Shakti Peeths were formed. As the well-known myth says, Sati jumped into the fire and Shiva picked up her dead body and danced in the cosmic ocean. Then, Vishnu’s Chakra chopped off Sati’s body and wherever Sati’s body parts fell in the subcontinent's geography, Shakti Peeths came into being. Interestingly, these Shakti Peeths are centres of great energy and aliveness. At the Shakti Peeth of Jwalamukhi in Himachal's Kangra Valley for instance, perennial flames leap out from inside the earth that no one has been able to scientifically explain. These flames are considered the earthly form of Sati’s tongue. Then, there are many narratives across India that talk about the concept of ‘swayambhu’ which roughly translates into ‘self-born’ or ‘self-manifested’: a shivling stone or godly statue appearing on its own at such and such place. So clearly, there’s a mythic angle to all such stories, but there’s also a geological facet to them. At the level of temporality, then, geology and mythology mingle together in highly creative ways.

I wish to add here that the beauty of Indian mythology lies in the fact that every region in the subcontinent thinks about myths in different ways. You will come across people in Central and South India that Rama or Arjuna fall in their home states, but you’ll also meet people in the  Himalayan states claiming that those sites happen to be in their respective landscapes. One needs to therefore have both a creative and critical bent of mind to appreciate the inherent multiplicity and contradictoriness of myths. I am making this point because we are well aware how politicians and people in power often use the fusion of mythology and geology to become dogmatic, thereby nullifying the inherent multiplicity of myths – something that we must resist actively and creatively.


Q: In your poem “Shaligram”, you refer to a fossil that comes alive with the creator’s DNA. Also, in “Incipience” the river Beas is said to be “empowered” by its etymology. Historically people have found shelter on a river bank, so in a way, rivers carry their stories. My (one of the interviewers) hometown is 30 minutes away from the Beas River and I have my memories associated with the water body. The landscape thus carries memories, and your work finds a way to articulate those memories that hardly get talked about. How do you view this notion of the inanimate coming alive in the face of the memories thrust upon it?

Growing up as a child in the Kullu Valley, the river Beas was literally in the backyard of our home. It was a constant part of my life, its roaring flow being heard every second. Before I answer your question, I’d like to point out that in a way, the inanimate is always already animate, regardless of one’s memories, a point again noted in nature writing. Robert Macfarlane, a dear friend, mentor and among the most celebrated writers of our time is currently working on a book titled Is A River Alive ? that tackles this question head-on. Other writers also argue that despite the ostensible inanimate nature of non-human landscapes, 
everything under the sun is endowed with a certain kind of sentience (and some of that  might not be immediately palpable to us). Timothy Morton for instance - labelled as the "Prophet of the Anthropocene" - observes in one of his books Being Ecological that humans tend to regard “design” and craft as something that only they do, but their understanding is incorrect, since nature itself is always designing. He gives provocatively gives the example of the Black Hole whose designing by celestial forces has nothing to do with humans.

Your question on aliveness and the inanimate becoming the animate also takes me back to my PhD when I was researching Fantasy Fiction where one segment of my thesis was studying artefacts in the genre. One of the things that drove me to Fantasy Literature was this massively thriving landscape of artefacts and objects that more than often seemed to thrum with an energy of their own. From Harry Potter to The Lord of the Rings, almost every great piece of Fantasy Literature (especially in the Western tradition) highlights the role of artefacts that are inherently alive. In Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials, possibly the last great fantasy trilogy of the 20th century, the titles of all books derive from magical objects (The Golden Compass, The Subtle Knife, The Amber Spyglass), pointing to their significance to the narrative arc. There are hundreds of other such examples as well. But even if we leave fantasy and simply focus on our real world, we find that the wind, sunlight, clouds and basically in earth’s realm has the power to shape us – meaning that they are alive in themselves.

But when you are speaking about human memories (referring to the final part of your question) the simple answer would be that the thing which I consider alive becomes “doubly alive” because I am using my memory and trying to think through that act of aliveness about the inherent aliveness of the particular thing. As a result, the thing also becomes much more susceptible to creative manoeuvring. In the context of the “Shaligram” poem, I pick up the Shaligram (a fossil-stone venerated as a form of Vishnu) and start running on how it came into being, what it must have witnessed during all of its millions of years of formation.

I earlier referred to Macfarlane’s ongoing project. But if you look at his preceding work (Underland) as well, it too sheds light on the theme of aliveness. In one chapter, Macfarlane observes that "ice has a memory", and it is at least one million years old. He further states that the colour of that memory is blue, and this is not an imaginative or romantic understanding of ice: ice literally has a memory because scholars researching glaciers, icebergs, snow and many of these forms study ice's material constitution in order to discern knowledge about climate conditions that were there long years ago (in the "deep time" of ice, as it were). It should also be noted that the idea of humans at the centre of things is fairly modern in origin, a notion that owes itself to human capacity for language and memory. But this notion too is being debunked by nature writing since it recognizes that not only memory but a language as well is not the prerogative of humans alone. A book titled, The Language of Trees: A Rewilding of Literature and Landscape by Katie Holten for example (among many others) explores the tree-language and vegetal communication through underground fungi.

As for my poetry, I think that when I am using my memory to understand an artefact or a supposedly dead thing like a fossil, it actively opens up the imaginative sphere for newer permutations and combinations of ideas. For it is through literary metaphor that memory intervenes in and around everyday materiality. And language combined with memory and metaphor is at the heart of all creativity.


Q: In today's age, when urbanization has been encroaching into every part of our lives, what's your take on this whirlwind that's allowing everything? Also, climate change is another crucial problem that's affecting everyone, especially the mountain regions. How do you, as a scholar, negotiate these harsh realities in your work and your life?

The immediate emotion one feels is simply that of sadness and a deep sense of distress. In your question about nostalgia and photography, I had mentioned Albrecht's term "solastalgia", that it refers to an emotional condition or emotional distress caused by environmental degradation. That's something that I observe in many other people too who care for the mountains, because it's clear to everyone that things are changing at a very rapid pace. Of course, there are still people who think that climate change is a hoax, and one desperately hopes that such conspiracy theories are diluting away. Interestingly, some years ago, UK’s The Guardian newspaper decided to opt for “climate crisis” instead of “climate change”, highlighting the urgency of the matter.

We have to understand that humans exist because of nature. Nature doesn't exist because of humans. This is also true for my areas of expertise—fantasy. Fantasy literature is a lot about landscapes and how landscapes shape the magical imagination. Similarly, my work on the Himalayas also focuses on how ecology is at the heart of all vernacular forms of art and culture in the mountains. But increasingly, we are witnessing ruptures between landscape and imagination, something which I try to capture both through my writing and photography.

Since 2013, when I held my first exhibition, I have been hosting many displays in and outside India, as I strongly believe that the visual has a greater impact on people than the verbal, even though a substantial literary culture around environment exists. As a scholar, I additionally feel that just because we have had the privilege of learning and thinking through certain critical lenses like feminism, Marxism, post-colonialism, ecocriticism, and queer theory etc., we shouldn’t automatically believe that everyone would also understand academic diction. It is our responsibility to find newer ways of circulating and sharing our thoughts with the larger spectrum of society. Thus, along with photography and music, I regularly use popular forms and mediums of communication such as newspapers, online portals and social media platforms to shed light on matters related to landscape, aesthetics and everyday living in creative ways.

And finally, I would just like to emphasize the role of everyday wonder and the importance of finding the extraordinary within the ordinary. Many self-help discourses underline the value of becoming an "extraordinary person" by overpowering the ubiquitous. And while there might be some value in that opinion, it is indisputable that in order to become a sensitive citizen, artist, scholar or practitioner, it is in and through the ordinary things, ordinary conversations and the ordinary natural world that we find a sense of wonder and enchantment. And this is because it is because daily life is lived at the level of ordinariness. Extraordinary interventions accomplishments certainly matter, but the temporality and affective power of the ordinary far outweighs them. I feel that if in whatever ways and towards whatever thing or person or creature or place (or all) we can cultivate an enchantment, we can also find hope in an otherwise crumbling world.