My Sydney sojourn in Darlingji trail

Have been basking in the winter sunshine in Melbourne and then shivering in the cold rain in Sydney — but at least one is away from the Delhi heat — and muggy monsoon evenings. Nice to be wrapped up in winter coats, cosying up near a fireplace.

We are here for a galaxy of conferences — looking at the India-Australia relationship in a holistic fashion. So we’ve been rushing from one place to the other discussing everything from terrorism to economics to cinema.
We tend to forget that there is a huge interest in Asia within Australia and it might be worth cementing those bonds further. What could be a better way than to get together a bunch of people from Asia and Australia, including academics and “independent” writers (like me!), and we can all examine how close the countries are, not just geographically but also through ideas.
Some of the intelligentsia in Australia have been vigorously pushing this agenda for a while. This roll of honour includes the indefatigable Dr Marika Vicziany, who along with her husband Dr Oliver Mendelsohn was one of the first who came to Uttar Pradesh 20 years ago and analysed the dalits as a political force, tracing Mayawati’s rise before it became fashionable to do so. She has been a powerhouse who has also lived in Mumbai for six years and has been a passionate Indophile. That book was The Untouchables, published in 1998, and today she is working on a myriad issues, including a study of the goddesses worshipped by the Koli fisherfolk in Mumbai. This means she is shortly going to knock on the doors of the Archeological Survey of India to possibly persuade them to preserve some of these temples, including the ancient caves at Karle.
Along with Ms Vicziany at the Asia Centre in Monash University we engaged in a really heated debate over the problem of terrorism in India. The bright and thoughtful presentations of the Ph.D. students who are studying terrorism in India, at Monash, and examining the impact of displacement, marginalisation and migration from neighbouring countries were an eye-opener.
Meanwhile, the recently opened sumptuous Australia-India Institute had also invited my husband Meghnad Desai to speak on “India: Can the Elephant Run Any Longer?” This was the first Satyajit Ray Memorial Lecture, and though Meghnad laughingly rued that he would have preferred to speak on cinema the evening gradually took on a sombre mood. The audience in the packed hall pondered over why India’s growth story was being questioned when in the past few years we have chugged along at comfortably high growth numbers. He gave a robust analysis on what has gone wrong. And then our host Prof. Amitabh Mattoo, the director of Australia-India Institute set in a grand Victorian building, gave a glittering, formal dinner. I was a little nervous, as I had been asked to give an after-dinner address on my first book Darlingji: The True Love Story of Nargis and Sunil Dutt. It was my “maiden” post-dinner speech — but the evening rippled with bonhomie. What is it about Indian cinema, and two wonderful iconic filmstars, that always livens up the mood?
Mr Mattoo, who has been a former vice-chancellor of the University of Jammu as well as a leading academic and writer, has the exciting mandate to promote greater “knowledge exchange” between the two countries. And if the intense interaction that evening is anything to go by, he seems to have settled down really well. Also attending the evening’s discussion was the soft-spoken and very helpful Dr Subhakanta Behera, the Indian consul-general.
And now we are in Sydney for the 19th biennial conference of the Asian Studies Association of Australia, hosted by the University of Western Sydney. The wonderful thing is that Sydney is completely “British” including a Hyde Park, a Bond Street, even an Oxford Street, and somewhere I believe there is even a Windsor Castle. So I am feeling completely at home.
Meghnad donned once more his economist hat and analysed the Indian economy while his co-speaker was Kumaraswamy, a professor from the Jawaharlal Nehru University, who looked at Indo-Iran relations. And I had the happy coincidence of presenting a paper on Indian cinema. Except that this is based on research for a book planned for 2013 on Devika Rani and Himansu Rai. It’s always a relief when people appreciate the pioneers of Indian cinema and temporarily suspend their angst over the anomalies of present-day Indian films.
But for me the real highlight has been that my last two novels, Witness the Night and Origins of Love have just been released in Australia — and I have managed to zip about doing book signings and interviews in both Melbourne and Sydney. The highlight was an interview on the books and arts daily show on the ABC network. This means my book has been discussed on three national networks thousands of miles apart: BBC, ABC… and Doordarshan!
It seems the Australian media is taking the surrogacy debate very seriously, and I do hope something good will come of it since many of the commissioning parents for the babies born to Indian surrogates come from Australia. So I have also done a piece for a woman’s website as well as an article for the leading weekender, Sunday Life.
Will this start a trend of book launches for Indian authors here? Lots of people here (including my publishers) have hoped that it will… aaaaah these are the joys of globalisation.