by Arushi Vats
Arushi: I want to start this conversation, in some ways, at the beginning of the creative process. Subash, how did this idea of narrating the story and situating it in the personhood and character of Miksam emerge? How did it lead to the braiding of other voices in the narrative of Ningwasum?
Subash: I think the voices that tell the story and are a part of it, are first and foremost coming from a place that imagines Indigenous sovereignty and self-determination. It’s the core—I mean, there are science fiction elements to it like time travel for example, and I suppose Mochu has a lot to say about technology or techno-futurism. The voices of the characters, the voices of the protagonists are primary. These characters are inspired by the struggles that people in our part of the world are going through at the moment—the struggle for self-determination, sovereignty, and most importantly, trying to figure out a just future for everyone, coexisting with all non-human lives, instead of just exploiting nature. An approach that incorporates the idea of respecting, or regarding nature as thesupreme being and taking it forward is a part of it.
The present gives voice to the characters in my story. And the voices come from a place that is in the future. Where they have agency, they have technology and Indigenous values, languages, the traditions and culture passed down from my ancestors. But this also begs the question: what kind of values and traditions we, in the present, would like to pass down? Because, we are also ancestors in the making, right? So what do we want to pass down to the future generations?
Mochu: My book is called Bezoar Delinqxenz, which extended from the video project GROTESKKBASILISKK! MINERAL MIXTAPE. And they have slightly overlapping content, but to a very small degree. They are sort of interrelated, but not dependent on one another.
In the book there is a chapter, a fictional recreation of the premise of Indian nationalist Bal Gangadhar Tilak’s science fiction book called The Arctic Home in the Vedas (1903). He wrote a science-fiction book, basically locating the civilisational origins of Hinduism in the Nordic regions. And I envisioned a corrupted version of that project in one of the chapters. Because the video and the book are also about the resurgence of a lot of historical ideas within the internet and how there’s a lot of civilisational theatre going on in Reddit forums and other such sites, where of course, there are all sorts of right-wing ideas; such as in Zionism, Nazism, or Hindutva. Any kind of civilisational claims made by any of these governments, groups, vigilantes, paramilitary groups, mercenaries and so on, this scheme is very active online. The point was to think about some of the historical texts that these online debates are based on, and the book by Tilak is one of them.
Another literary figure that’s very prominent in such networks is H.P. Lovecraft, the American author of horror. Some of Lovecraft’s stories were re-read in the 80s, such as through John Carpenter’s The Thing (1982), where there’s an alien entity that is discovered in the snow in Antarctica. So I make up a story in the book, where Tilak goes to the Arctic to find Hinduism but instead, gets infected by The Thing. Here, the whole project of supremacy gets corrupted by an alien force. There’s a kind of fusion of these two modes; something from the recent late-twentieth-century popular imagination bites back into this idea. And the alien is a shape-shifting entity in the film, so what happens is that the civilisational project starts to get controlled by this amorphous entity. And that relates to sound basically in the way that the human bodies get controlled, or ventriloquised as if they were puppets—their civilisational speech gets hacked by this foreign entity. This foreign entity in my book is largely a stand-in for the destructive and strange terminal power of history itself. Just like in stop-motion animation, where you have clay that moves, you keep shaping that clay to move and you give voice to that clay. The whole of the civilisational project that was mentioned in Tilak’s book––its premise gets reanimated through the voice, and the voice is something attributed from elsewhere—this is the framework of ventriloquism that is present.
But then it gets complicated, where it’s not even a sound, but it’s a form of silence that emerges—the speech, or the propaganda speech, gets taken over by a form of radical silence. And the silence comes from the idea that, at an interplanetary or intergalactic scale, the globe does not have an Other. The world, the Earth as such, the planet itself, is singular. So, in the absence of the Other, there is a lack of political framework to think of the Earth as a political entity, because you cannot compare it to anything else. This is a problem brought about by Fermi’s paradox, which says that the universe is entirely silent, that we have no other known civilisational project other than that on Earth. And this is a problem posed by the existence or the observation of unidentified flying objects, which came into Communist discourse during the so-called Fourth International Posadist organisation in Argentina, where this group of Trotskyists who were almost winning the elections in Argentina, started getting into ufology. And they lost their votes because of that in the ‘70s. This kind of a utopian idea that one cannot discuss the future of humanity without considering justice for the entire universe—not just between countries or between regions within the Earth— that there should be justice for all beings all over the universe, so therefore, one needs intergalactic communism…
This kind of a scheme came back into prominence on the Reddit forums, where intergalactic communism became a discussion point, standing against the supremacist views of the right-wing governments, which were saying that certain civilisations are superior than the others. So, that’s the premise: how do you move from thinking about subatomic particles and intergalactic civilisations, all the way into the discussion of cultural supremacy?
I don’t know, did I just drift a lot?
Arushi: No, that’s perfect, because I was thinking about what you were saying in connection to Subhash and how the future is actually a very important modality in your work, Subash. It’s a sense of what visions of the future are available and possible to us… How do we make these possible? And Mochu, in your work, for instance, there’s a very strong exploration of the fact that Hindutva civilisational projects, or any form of supremacist civilisational project wields the future as a threat against which people must mobilise their sentiments, whether it’s xenophobic or any form of supremacist sentiment. And so, we are thinking about what are these competing visions of future that are available to us.
I think in the video, Mochu, there is this very clear reference to the future as this abstract threat that’s wielded by supremacist imaginaries. I’ve been thinking about that a lot as it is a very terrestrial, and territorial understanding of the future. Similarly, Subhash, in your work, the understanding is far broader in terms of a cosmo-political understanding, versus just a particular territory or a particular community or nationhood. I really want to know how the future has sort of become this mediality for you to think about with respect to Adivasi imagination and Adivasi politics.
Subhash: I’m always fascinated by this line by Octavia Butler: the only lasting truth is change. My practice focuses on just futures, but certainly not on utopia. I mean that it does expect instances susceptible to corruption and degradation, and that’s why we have stories, myths and folklores infused with history passed down to us by our ancestors. They are like memory palaces that remind us of deviations and degradations that are always kind of lurking around. In a way, those memory palaces help us navigate and maintain our never-ending endeavour to keep working towards a just future and a just present, right? We will work towards it, but my practice doesn’t necessarily imagine a utopia. It imagines challenges and threats like what Mochu explores in his work. But there is an expectation that there may be a deviation. What was the other question you asked, Arushi?
Arushi: . I was very interested in what it means to visualise a future that is—looking at Ningwasum and its sense of time—not linear. So, to wrest this future away from something that is distant, far, or on the horizon, into something intimate. I was also very struck by the idea of time traveling as an extension of weaving, bringing these ideas in extreme proximity and in a relationship with one another. The practice of weaving, which is a community practice, is also a source of thinking about time traveling, and thinking about accessing not just the future, but accessing many, many different moments and times. For example, Miksam is traveling to a timeline that’s not the future. What led you to think about really deconstructing this idea of a linear time, that is also so important for, you know, supremacist civilisational claims by majoritarian groups that supposedly imagine this past of social domination that was lost and if they don’t fix it now, through domination and subjugation, they will enter into a future where they are subjugated.
It’s very difficult to not look at both these works through the lens of this moment, even though, as you mentioned, Nepal has a very different history but is also located at an intersection of a neo-colonialism of the current moment, and internal colonisation…
Subash: Yeah, and Brahmanical patriarchy…
Arushi: Absolutely, so, it’s very difficult not to view both Mochu’s work and your work through this moment that we are in right now in India, where you have an extremely vitriolic, Brahmanical, Hindu-fascist state that’s mobilising the language of decolonisation very frequently to make sort of civilisational claims of dominance and ascendancy. So, basically, a long, roundabout way to ask, what made you think about the sense of disturbing this linear flow of time in the narrative?
Both laugh.
Subash: This is where what Mochu was saying earlier meets my practice or my narrative–– even the work of Larissa Sansour… I think this is the point, yeah, where it all meets—storytelling of how we suffered, the idea of these claims… In my work, the future Indigenous civilised community, Indigenous nation, has developed a technique to travel in different timelines, and they can travel back and forth. So the idea to bring those capabilities and to imagine these kinds of time travel was, in the same vein, to separate the idea of how we use the notion of time, or even the notion of life; or how we use imagination to facilitate the conversation so that we can manipulate our present and then, impact the future, which in turn helps to facilitate the future that we imagine. So, in my work the time travelers are not allowed to intervene directly, but they can come and inspire, or in a very indirect way, can manipulate the present situation. But also, the idea of having a time traveler who comes to our time to think about possibilities in the future, becomes the main reason to imagine time as non-linear, not rigid but ductile. So that we can weave, we can weave in the way that we want to weave. We can weave the future in a way so we will have agency and sovereignty.
Mochu: Why does the future appear as a threat? Because it’s tied to the problem of thermodynamic entropy and the reason for that is some structures in theology and religious imagery of what you can call Brahmanical supremacy. Civilisational supremacy often proceeds in parallel with the logic of entropy and the entropic form, because what happens with the direction of time, for example, even in the scientific image of the Big Bang, which has been critiqued for this reason, is that there is this original sort of event and then chaos descends from that. So, the beginning is always ordered, and then it moves towards disorder. This is very crude and probably even by current understanding of entropy, it’s kind of wrong also, but it’s the conventionally held direction of time. As time passes, entropy increases and things go towards some kind of disorder as time passes; it is the civilisational call to return. It’s always to find some order that was there in the beginning.
So, the time travel paradigm is about asymmetry of time, which is to say that one is only able to move forward in time, you cannot move backward, unlike in space, where there is an option to move in several directions. In space what happens is that there is a restriction on the direction of movement because of gravity. If you’re close to a very large object, you can only move in one direction, you cannot move in any direction that you want.
But if you, for example, leave the Earth and go outside its gravitational field, you can move in all directions. But if you’re in a gravitational field, there is only one direction you can move in. You need to exert a force to move in a single direction, otherwise you’ll get pulled back. Similar to this, if movement in time is only possible in one direction, it implies that there is a very large temporal object close to you. This is generally considered to be the Big Bang, and it’s because one is moving away from the Big Bang in time that the direction is only one—if you move sufficient distance, you can move in all directions, and this will cause an improper chaos. So, the movement towards the future is always a fearful thing as long as you are tied to the idea of an original order. So, time travel, or the freedom to move in time, in the case of Subhash’s work, for example, an Indigenous future would mean a freedom to move freely across scales of time. And that, always in a civilisational narration, would imply a chaotic freedom because of the increase in entropy.
So, I think this is the kind of a premise that I close the book with because the characters are actually wondering about their own existence and their own commitment to the project of time. This is how I write it. the entire schematic of time’s direction seems to have broken down, and I also refer to this book by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky called Definitely Maybe (1977). In that, they introduce the idea of a homeostatic process where the universe regulates its own, like a thermostat. It kind of raises this question of what is the relationship between reason and entropy? If civilisation proceeds along the lines of reason, is there any force that prevents it from advancing beyond that point? And that is why the structural condition of history seems to be of something that terminates acts of reason before it advances to a certain point. So, my book is a historical civilisational fiction about these possibilities. Because otherwise, the problem is what do civilisational projects actually want? What is this order they’re talking about, what is the kind of view that they are leading to? This is something that has confused me, or I’ve been trying to think about, given that you can only move in one direction––how do you avoid chaos?
And what is the answer to that? I mean, the answer to that, in a technological sense and by that I mean politics as a technology itself. Because, for example, in the kind of caste hierarchy that is built in South Asia, I see it in the way that Lewis Mumford talks about the Myth of the Machine, where it’s a particular kind of technology which enables labour to happen, and that is more foundational than the labour itself. So, actually, the formation of the state and the politics becomes far more fundamental an idea of a machine or a technology than actual, you know, machine-like objects. What has happened in South Asia, is that this kind of primitive technology hasn’t been replaced by any other form, and this was a very common, slavery-based sort of tech, which was earlier also there, you know, in several societies. So, I’m currently thinking about examples where more advanced technology, which does not involve slavery, has been used in the past. And how that can sort of come in now, how to do that now? Some of my future work, I’m thinking in this direction, and that’s why I was thinking of the direction of time and civilisation.
Subash: Mochu, can I just jump in? I just wanted to touch upon the entropy that you were talking about. I really love particle physics. I mean, I don’t understand it, but I love it.
Mochu: I think entropy is a tricky one for everybody, but yeah, let’s see, let’s just jump in.
Both laugh.
Subash: Yeah, I mean, I’m not going to define what entropy is, but , I have a very vague sense of theoretical physics. What I was trying to say is the way I kind of approach my artistic practice, it’s more than I use this science fiction element as a tool to basically imagine what we want to imagine, and not going deep into, like, you know, hard sci-fi kind of things, like, you know, Liu Cixin for example, I love their work, but it’s so deep and hard sci-fi. What I usually kind of love to do are things that, being fiction, may not align with the idea or even the well-accepted theory of science and physics. But I also found it interesting when you say, like, when you go against the arrow of time, and it all becomes chaotic but then I also thought, maybe, chaos can be beautiful as well, maybe there is something there to explore more. I would love to explore that more in the future—beautiful chaos. It just came to my mind.
Mochu: Yeah, absolutely. I was only talking from the point of view of, trying to think from the exploitative point of view. Which is to say that: what is the fear of the civilisational project towards chaos? I love chaos, but I’m just thinking, what is the cause of that fear? So, like you and me, we like chaos. But what is the cause of this fear in a civilisational sense, for the ruling class you can say? And in that sense, I was saying that anything that goes towards an entropic excess is considered a sort of something fearful. I think that it is not an aesthetic problem… chaos, but it’s a real, you know, the conflation of chaos and degeneration… some kind of degeneration. The civilisational project always sells itself as a sort of eternal thing, like an immortal fantasy of immaterial, bodiless, spiritual perpetuity, all these kinds of ideas.
Arushi: I was also very drawn to the fact that essentially the sense of how civilisational projects of domination find it so easy to latch on to nationalism, or structures of national imagination. Primarily due to the fact that as postcolonial nation-states, they’re very invested in this construction of a long-standing, glorious past that needs to be retrieved. And so, in many ways, agitating against their own infancy by trying to sort of demonstrate a wider access to history as a recurrent imagination of a civilisation. And there I was also very interested in the sense of entropy in your works. For instance, Subhash, in Ningwasum, this idea of what it means to have the ability to not age or to not grow old. But the fact that Miksam’s mother chooses to age, and then Miksam has to have that dialogue in order to unfold the implications of that choice. So, there’s a sense of embracing the limits of the mortal body and the limits of life. For you, Mochu, this very interesting thing that’s there in both the book and the video, but I think more in the book, is this idea of the archeological imagination that’s at play in making claims of civilisational or historic presence and legitimacy. It’s difficult not to think about the Hindutva project with Babri Masjid, for instance, from its demolition, desecration to the construction of a temple there, in this fabricated claim, to make a restoration of a perpetual birthplace. And that the mobilization of this sort of imagination, Mochu, of an archeological imagination that’s laying claim to something that is eternal, and should remain fixed, and eternal, should remain ordered, should remain sort of intransitive.
Mochu: Archeological claim is one of the details, I think it’s the kind of storage of cultural memory. It ties into the preservation of memory through artifacts or through reproduction. It’s a kind of approach, let me say, that goes along with the bloodline kind of thinking, so what does not get propagated through the bloodline basically resides in technical artifacts, such as cultural objects like art, and so on. So, I think that, and again, this goes into the sense that, the destruction, the narrative that is brought about by the current governments, and also the decolonial discussion on the repatriation of museum objects… all of them point to this, retrieval of order in some kind that, you know. Colonial artifacts need to be returned because it’s an original civilisation. Now this starts matching the sort of same narrative as the governments. So, you’re going back, but you go back to the civilisation you prefer and that can keep going back thousands of years.? So it is actually the problem of the direction of the civilisation impulse itself.
Arushi: The thing that I think about quite a bit is how instead of trying to necessarily alter the infrastructure of existing museums and the model of repatriation, which is tied to the idea of the nation-state, whether we need to really re-imagine what a museum looks like. Because we encounter the fact that communities do believe in the forms of museums, but their imagination of that form is very different… whether it’s possible to think of sites of community organising as generative of just archives. In the UK, the post-Tate futures movement and many others, really pushes us to abandon reformative impulses and think abolitionally.
Mochu: Yeah, museum as a term is loaded with that problem—the fundamental idea is to arrest time. Russian cosmism thought of the entire universe as arresting time. Nikolai Fyodorov wanted to convert the whole of the universe into a museum, so you could resurrect every life ever lived and then stabilised and made into museum objects. Anything that deals with kinesis, or movement, would cease to be a museum. The idea with a museum is to stop movement and that’s where the civilisational story comes in.
Subash: It’s a very interesting conversation about museums and arresting time. I am going to speak from the community where I come from—the museum itself is a very colonial idea, the looted objects were everyday objects, used in daily lives of people from various parts of the world. It’s not that people stopped using these objects in Nepal, they were and still are part of communities in Nepal. But the colonial and imperial powers made something different out of it, something that defamiliarised the objects and art to its people. I talk about stories, myths and folklores quite often in relation to my practice. Contrary to the idea of the museum, the stories play a more important role—not as something from the past but also acting as memory palaces, right? So, instead of using the idea or the structure of museums, the idea of using stories, using folklore as memory palaces that the communities relate to, is what I strive to practice and explore in my works. And it connects to the ways in which people from my community navigate through time and must navigate the future. And you had raised the idea of aging in my work, Arushi… so, in the future one can live four or five hundred years but Miksam’s mother chooses not to and chooses to die a natural death. The idea was that future communities would be dealing with those advanced technologies, but they would also be exploring or debating or fighting with the idea of what it means to live forever. It came from a thought that something that is closer to nature would be the way or direction to move forward.
Arushi: I am very moved by what both you have shared—I recently saw Ariella Azoulay’s film UnDocumented: Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), which discusses these aspects of looted matter as displaced and frozen, and its normalisation through display and photography—it’s kind of good to being with Larissa Sansour and close with Ariella Azoulay and this seems like a good point to put a pin in this and hopefully gather again.