Golchakkar: The Non-Indian in Indian Literature
The latest panel of Golchakkar Series with Kaushik Barua and Dipika Mukherjee: A conversation about Non-Indian characters from writers of Indian origin; of authenticity, appropriation, cultural anthropology, and more.
The Chakkar welcomes to our reading series, GOLCHAKKAR. Every month, we will host an online panel discussion of Indian artists in conversation with the world.
The Non-Indian in Indian Literature - Kiran Bhat in Conversation with Kaushik Barua and Dipika Mukherjee.
Join world traveller, polyglot, and author Kiran Bhat as he interviews various Indian writers who want to take that question in mind: how do we write without borders? How do we write for the sake of the world? This month, we invited Kaushik Barua and Dipika Mukherjee to discuss what it means to write Non-Indian characters from the Indian-origin perspective. The wide-ranging conversation scaled issues of cultural and anthropological research, authenticity, appropriation, and more.
Participants
KAUSHIK BARUA is the author of two novels. Windhorse (HarperCollins, 2013) is a work of fiction set in the Tibetan resistance movement from the 1940s to the 1970s and fuses individual stories with the narrative of a community in exile. No Direction Rome (HarperCollins, 2013) is a dark comedy on the anxieties and disenchantments of the millennial generation. He won a Sahitya Akademi award for his first novel Windhorse. He is currently studying the performance and adaptations of the Ramayana across the Mekong region for a non-fiction work and finalizing a political satire on the post-truth world (both books forthcoming 2022). He has worked in the international development sector for the last two decades, managing rural development projects across West Africa, the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
DIPIKA MUKHERJEE is the author of the novel Shambala Junction, which won the UK Virginia Prize for Fiction, and Ode to Broken Things, which was longlisted for the Man Asia Literary Prize as Thunder Demons. Her short story collection is Rules of Desire. Her work is included in The Best Small Fictions 2019 and appears in World Literature Today, Asia Literary Review, Del Sol Review, The Commons, and Chicago Quarterly Review, among others. She writes a literary column for The Edge in Malaysia and is Contributing Editor for Jaggery. She is on the curating team and a featured writer in My America: Immigrant and Refugee Writers Today, a popular exhibit at the American Writers Museum in Chicago showcasing the vitality of migrant and refugee voices in American discourse. Her website is at dipikamukherjee.com
KIRAN BHAT is a global citizen formed in a suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, to parents from Southern Karnataka, in India. An avid world traveler, polyglot, and digital nomad, he has currently travelled to over 130 countries, lived in 18 different places, and speaks 12 languages. His list of homes is vast, but his heart and spirit always remains in Mumbai, somehow. He currently lives in Melbourne.
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