ON RECORD
-THE INTERVIEW
INTRODUCTION
Mihir Vatsa is the author, most recently, of the travel memoir Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau (Speaking Tiger, 2021). He is a former Charles Wallace Fellow of Writing at the University of Stirling, UK, and is presently a PhD researcher at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Delhi.
1. Tales of Hazaribagh: An Intimate Exploration of Chhotanagpur Plateau became one of the most widely mentioned non-fiction books of 2021, is listed as one of the Top 10 books (non-fiction) in 2021 by ThePrint. What were your expectations when you were writing the book and how were they met after being published?
Thank you – it is a great feeling. I had not expected the book to have such a good reception. When I began writing Tales, I thought I was writing it for my people in Jharkhand, people like me who wanted to read something that could explain the plateau better, something that looked at the particulars of what I think is a very particular landscape. Of course, as a writer, you want to give your best to whatever you are writing, but my mind was also a bit provincial. I didn’t think the book would appeal to people outside of Jharkhand. I was also briefly disheartened by the comments that accompanied some initial rejections. The primary concern with publishers who were hesitant with the book was that its topic was ‘too niche’, so when Speaking Tiger picked it up, I was just happy that the book was going to be published! My editor, however, had full faith in it, a bit more than me myself. It was when the book began to travel from Hazaribagh to the rest of the world, and when the reviews started coming in, that I felt that I had done good work. Today I see Tales placed in the US Library of Congress. It is being read by all kinds of people, students and bureaucrats alike. Feels good.
2. You begin your book by talking about how your mental health was affected within the cityscape. How would you relate the environmental space to its effects on your mind?
I think all of us have some kind of relationship with spaces that contain us. Even at the smallest level of our personal rooms, the size, the wall colour, the décor not only reflect our personalities but also have specific effects upon us. Tales does begin with my mental struggles in Delhi, but by the time I started writing the epilogue, I had come to realise something crucial: I didn’t hate Delhi per se; instead, I hated myself in it in 2016.
The operative phrase in your question, I think, is ‘your mind’, because among all the stimuli that a space offers, it is the mind which does the selection and combination. We can call cities impersonal and the country intimate, but we must also return to the person or voices that are claiming so. What I am trying to say is that beyond seductive binaries of city/country, impersonal/personal and inside/outside are thinking and feeling people who create such divisions and are then caught in it. Connection with space is a reciprocal act. We may project some of ourselves—our desires and insecurities—onto a polluted city, a bald hill or a swift river, but we need to come back to ourselves to understand what we are projecting and why. This completes the reciprocal cycle. That’s how I understand my relationship with spaces.
3. Your book provides historical and spatial accounts of the Chhotanagpur Plateau, yet often the narrative has an astute personal touch. How did you maintain a balance between the objective and factual, and the personal elements within your writing?
I guess I wanted the Mihir in the book to be closest to the person I am. I knew Tales would be a first-person narrative, but I didn’t want to make it about me. The subject was always Hazaribagh. During writing, whenever I felt stuck or challenged by the twin-axes of travelogue and memoir, I would immediately think about how I behave and speak when I am in the Alto with a friend, you know, telling them about places we set out to visit, while keeping them entertained with anecdotes and occasional humour. Like a friend. The Mihir in the book is not a geographer or a historian but someone who is curious and wants to share his curiosity, findings and lessons with you, the reader, an imagined friend. That’s how, I think, Tales became an ‘intimate’ exploration.
4. There has been growing commercialisation of picturesque spaces like the ones you have described in your book. How do you gauge the possible effects of growing urbanity and commercialisation in Hazaribagh?
You have asked a rich question, thank you. I will answer it in two parts. Let’s address the commercialisation bit first and then we’ll come to urbanisation.
Two phenomena are attached to commercialisation of natural places: aspiration and tourism. I think the desire for financial mobility among people and all the symbolic effects which are associated with it is what we see all around us. Hazaribagh is not different in this regard. Just for context, Jharkhand is one of the country’s poorest states: there is no other way to sugarcoat it. Terms like ‘tourist spot’ or ‘paryatan sthal’ bring attention and footfall, which then contributes to the local economy. When I say local economy, I mean ‘local’ in its smallest forms: the village and individual households. Today, many village groups residing close to natural sites in Hazaribagh want such places to be recognised as ‘tourist spots’, so that through tourism, the economy may improve. Besides, these aren’t villages that fall along national or state highways, rather, they are quite far-flung into the forest or the escarpment. Electricity, mobile network and roads are new additions. Young villagers are literate, and a few are graduates too. Agriculture is an occupation, yes, but today we feel the need for alternatives more pressing than before. Jharkhand is also relatively stable now, emerging from decades of insurgency. Now, it is easy to erase people from the landscape and view the plateau as ‘untouched’, but hardly any place is truly untouched in India. So, as long as commercialisation serves local needs and helps with financial mobility, however slight or significant, I don’t have many reasons to be suspicious about it. I am mindful of my privilege here: I am educated enough to do this interview, I have resources to meet my needs, I don’t live with a waterfall but visit it, and so on. I get suspicious when cement enters the forest. It is when planners uncritically import a tourism paradigm from one place to another in order to project a natural site as a tourist spot. In chapter five, I highlight this practice in the context of the hot spring Suraj Kund, where a rest house has been built for no reason. It says in the template that an accommodation building must be constructed, and so it was constructed. No one stays there. It remains locked. The plan actually was to build a resort spa. But the question emerges: for whom? Who are these visitors? It is in situations like this that we need to ask ourselves and the state what tourism means for Hazaribagh, or Jharkhand. I am also suspicious of us as Indian citizens. Do we really know how to behave in natural places? Making nature trails or building stairs and rest-stops are good ideas. They invite people in. And that’s the danger too, isn’t it? They invite people in! Are we mindful enough not to enter the forest holding packets of chips, or to take back the empty shampoo sachets after bathing in a waterfall? I don’t think so. We are not there yet. Tourist behaviour should conceptualise nature’s commercialisation into tourist spots. Hazaribagh may well want to emerge as the next best tourist hotspot, but is it ready to handle it? Ten years ago, I wanted Hazaribagh to be a tourist destination, but now I have come to realise that there are plenty of factors involved when we are dealing with natural places. Ecotourism has emerged as a nice catchword, but this word needs to be properly grounded in Hazaribagh’s context, as it should be elsewhere too. It is like walking a tightrope, putting everything in balance, but the walking needs to happen now. Hazaribagh, unlike Shimla or Darjeeling, has the chance to do tourism right.
With respect to urbanisation, I feel that in the next two or three decades, Hazaribagh town will become Hazaribagh city and this city will cover the entire tabletop of the plateau, leaving only the escarpment forest intact. Considering that five rivers originate from the tabletop as just streams, unchecked urbanisation will severely impact their courses. These streams are seasonal and vulnerable to infrastructural activity. There used to be one Chano River, a short-running tributary of Konar, which is all but gone. Its earlier depression on the land has become a slow-moving, patchy drain. Then there is coal mining in the southern part of the district, down the escarpment. Many people from that region have had their lands acquired for mining and many families have shifted up the tabletop into the town. This movement will only increase and so will pollution. I am not sure if the existing forest cover and the land elevation alone will continue to keep the climate pleasant. These are two major ecological concerns that I presently have for Hazaribagh. We have seen urbanisation’s impact, perhaps more visibly, upon Hazaribagh’s indigenous art-forms Sohrai and Khovar. These were traditionally painted on mud walls of rural huts. However, now these huts are increasingly converting into cement homes, even in remote villages. I recently went to a village where there used to be a cluster of mud huts painted in a distinctive Sohrai style. The owners were demolishing the huts to construct a structurally sound cement home. Again we need to be aware of our privilege here. We who live in strong, cement homes should not be preaching heritage conservation to people who have dreamt for long of having a flat roof over their heads. Of course a part of me was sad that the mud walls would go away, so I requested the lady to keep one small hut intact. I was very happy to see on my last visit that while they did build their concrete home, they also kept one mud hut on the property. I looked inside and the art was still there. ‘Bhaiya, you had told me not to demolish the entire thing, so we left this one out,’ the homeowner said. It was an emotional moment. Now, this is not to say that the artforms will die out. Artists have successfully adapted the art onto cement walls and canvas, but cement walls do not hold natural mud drawings and so the artists use acrylic colours. It is an interesting shift in medium. I would be happy if we could have some hundred or so mud homes preserved across Hazaribagh’s villages, even if just to demonstrate the stylistic chronology of the art. There is Viraasat Trust in Hazaribagh which is currently doing good work to ensure this continuity.
5. The anecdotes and stories in your book often include adventures or memories with your mother, grandmother, relatives and friends. How have these factors affected your spatial and political perception since you often include satire in your writing as well?
I think the people in the book, besides being co-travellers, perform an important, orienting role towards my absorption of the landscape. There is Mr. Imam in the second chapter who takes me to the back of Gibraltar House and shows me, in the dark, the clearing made for the new bypass road. Without him, I couldn’t have gone to the manor in the first place. In the fourth chapter, arriving for the first time at Salparni Waterfall with my extended family turns the place into a fundamentally familial space. It was just us with the waterfall and the forest— that’s how the place presented itself to me and all later comparisons are made against that first impression. In the sixth chapter, my idea of time and my mother’s idea of time didn’t gel with each other. Travelling with mother, especially, was to see the plateau through her consciousness: how might a woman approach the land, what might be her red flags? In the last chapter, some parts of the exploration become possible due to me liaising with the district administration on their projects. Swachh Bharat Abhiyaan, for example. Such projects took me to places and people I perhaps wouldn’t have gone to myself. Temple roofs that couldn’t be built, the blasted bridge at Murki, the sadness of Ichak: these stories and effects came from people. Satire, when it occurs, is directed either at the government or towards civil ignorance, and its purpose is to show and explain, not ridicule. There is no point being combative when the bigger goal is to get your argument across. Satire, then, is not aimed at finishing off your opponent. There is no opponent here— we share the same country, same state, same district, we go to the same lake and the same hill and the same waterfall. I don’t think anyone likes to see litter in natural spaces, be it a desk worker at an office or the country’s PM. People can be frustrating when they don’t agree with me, and sure, that frustration makes for occasional satire, but they are my people in the end. We need to work together—not because it’s a great platitude to use, but because we cannot afford not to.
6. What are your upcoming plans and should we be expecting another work from you soon?
Well, the most immediate thing on my mind is to complete the PhD. My research is very much related to the plateau itself, and in some ways, it is a continuation of the same curiosity which made Tales possible. In this respect, I find myself lucky. Besides research, I intend to continue writing about Jharkhand, maybe Delhi too, now that I am back in the city. I have a few poems which I want to edit and publish. I feel I have ignored poetry enough and that it’s time that I returned to it.