Awkward Symphony

I often worry about being self-indulgent as I write. Yet I feel compelled to write.

My worry emerged when I was writing my doctoral thesis as I attempted to write in what I thought was conventional academic style – technical and objective. But my supervisors asked me where was “I” in the thesis, where were the visceral details of the people, places, and practices that “I” was writing about.

I had kept myself out of the writing, afraid my personal voice will take away from the rigor of my academic voice. Now, I had no clue what to do with the license for creative play in critical work. Why would anybody want to hear what I have to say. And what if the dam of my personhood broke, the dam that kept my thoughts from flooding. Writing about others felt like a safe way to play with my voice, so I began with writing short-form pieces on my field experiences. But the more I wrote, the more afraid I became of my personal voice taking over. A voice that drones on and on about something no one cares about. A dull voice.

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In 9^th grade, we had to choose one extra-curricular (as opposed to doing most). I was trained in semi-classical Indian vocals since I was six years old, and people often told me I had a beautiful voice. I auditioned for the school choir, and I got in. I chose dance instead. The people I was friends with at the time had chosen dance. They told me – dance class is basically a free period. The teacher is disinterested in teaching us anything.

Dance class was indeed a free period. We would sit around on the floor, talking about random nothings – latest band, current trends, school yard gossip, who was dating whom. I was at the periphery of these conversations – listening in but not sharing, or perhaps, not feeling like I could add to the conversation. One day the dance instructor selected a few people from our class for the school’s annual day. I was not selected. My friends nudged me to ask the teacher to include me. I asked. The instructor seemed to mull over the question. I could feel my classmates’ gaze on me. It was a small class, and everyone heard my request. The instructor without looking at me, said, “I don’t know, you seem dull”.

The memory came rushing back to me in a Yin Yoga class. We were holding the pigeon pose, upright, my neck stretched out. Already self-conscious and struggling to get into the pose, tears from the memory threatened to overflow. Breathe in. Breathe out – I told myself.

 We transitioned from the pigeon to spinal twists, and the memory seemed to wring out.

The dance studio in school was in the basement, right below my regular classroom. The underground space it occupied spatially and, in my memory, felt like I was entering the underbelly of who I was as a teenager. For 14-year-old me, a free period felt like freedom. I imagined sitting around gossiping with friends, like in the hippest TV show on Indian channels at the time, Hip Hip Hurray, a show I watched on the sly, away from the disapproving eyes of my parents. The show was about teenage angst, first loves, and contradictory friendships. The characters were often seen idling, discussing things about life that at the time felt immensely more important than any class or grade.

After being called dull, I spent most of my two years in dance class, in a shell, where I listened but did not share. I yearned for the music room I knew – large, airy, and bright with natural light. I yearned for a chance to sing and share my voice. I thought of how excited the teacher was when he heard my audition. I thought of my sister, who though two years younger than me, was also selected for the school choir. Earlier I was embarrassed that she and I would be in the same class. But now I craved for the safe, loving, familiar space that was music. In choir, my voice mattered, not alone but in symphony with the other voices singing alongside me.

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After the Yin class, which brought out the memory of my teenage humiliation, I wondered about the resonances between my sonic voice and my intellectual voice. I attended a seminar by David Scott, an anthropologist at Columbia University, where he began by asking “what do we think is the shape and animating force of an intellectual life? What is the style of an intellectual mode of living?” Scott declared that the questions arose in relation to his intellectual friendship with Stuart Hall. Stuart Hall’s literal and figurative voice, Scott shared, was his mode of thinking and being in the world, a relational, dialogical way of being with others – where we hear what others are writing and saying with a generous ear, not a critical one. Scott referred to this as receptive generosity – a giving that is also a kind of a receiving.

Receptive Generosity. The words struck a chord. In choir, we were trained to listen with a receptive ear. At the end of the seminar, I walked up to David Scott to ask a question. In conversing with him, I realized I was frustrated with my voice – with not knowing when the “I” in my writing has taken over. I recognized my frustration, but Scott and others in the room read it as fatigue. Why are they reading my frustration as fatigue? I am not fatigued, I tell them – I am frustrated. They seem to mull over my statement and eventually agree.

My voice frustrates me. My writing voice is often called into question, with the questions asking exactly opposite things. Where are you in your writing? Or why are you in your writing? I was unclear about the balance between myself and others. I was unclear about my voice, about how to harmonize between myself and others. And those who read me, were unclear about me. The word dull rings through my head.

In the school choir, we were divided into soprano, alto, tenor, and bass voices. I was selected as part of the soprano. I had a clear pitch for harmonizing. A pitch receptive to listening for other tonalities. A pitch I abandoned for idle, passive listening – frustrating me and sounding like fatigue.

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My sister and I started music lessons when I was six and she was four. It was a non-negotiable extra-curricular in our household. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, after school, we were ushered into our living room, where a vocal instructor trained us with the Hindustani semi-classical sargam, his hands dancing along the harmonium. I can still recite the sargam without thinking about it. But the unrestrained vocals of my childhood that would bore me immensely, now strain with effort. Is this why the frustration sounds like fatigue – because of the effort to train an abandoned voice?

My singing voice developed earlier than my sister, mostly because I was older. But my sister stayed with her voice. She continued to sing, and I abandoned it. Why? Teenage angst, not wanting to do the same thing as my sister, not feeling like we both could be good at singing and share in it. When we walked into school, we both went our separate ways, rarely acknowledging each other. Yet, everyone knew we were sisters. I struggled to find a way to distinguish myself, especially since she was already a self in my mind. My teenage identity was shaped by – if she was doing it, I would not. I did not want to harmonize, if she was harmonizing as well. For my teenage self, the beauty of my voice could not be real if we both had beautiful voices. And then there was the comparison – those who heard us, judged us – she sings better than Vrinda, I heard them say.

At the start of that school year, we were auditioning for the school choir. My sister clear in her intention, auditioned first and was chosen. Hesitating till the last minute, I finally gathered the courage to sing. I sang a ghazal I knew well – aaj jaane ki zid na karo. When I finished, the teacher loved it. But the students sitting around me were sniggering. One of them asked, why did you sing that song, Vrinda? Who are you yearning for? The song loosely translated said – don’t ask to leave just yet as my heart is not yet full. Without realizing, the ghazal I knew well, opened me up to ridicule. I was teased for weeks for singing it and for following my younger sister to audition.

I retreated into the background stifling my voice – literally and figuratively. I chose dance, not to distinguish myself, but to find a hiding space. Only to be left wide open, unprotected.

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In dance class, I sat at the peripheries of conversations, listening in with nothing to contribute, nothing I felt I could contribute. But I heard my lack of contribution. I heard it then and I hear it now, when the channels of time loosened during a yoga class, where unexpectedly the school-time memory emerged and unfolded through my body.

To me, my voice feels like an uncertain stumbling and rolling over – like when you begin to roll down a hill, and gravity takes a hold, and your body involuntarily gains momentum. My tenor feels untrained, and my words I think are unheeded. But in my fieldwork as a doctoral researcher, I found that there is a voice in me to which others respond.

In David Scott’s posthumous epistolary conversation “Stuart Hall’s Voice”, I read about his rendition of the listening self – a self that listens by being receptively present to others. The voice of such a self is forever orienting and reorienting itself to the world around. I do this, I thought. But in the orienting and reorienting, I am afraid of both losing myself and bringing too much of myself.

At a doctoral workshop, there is some reference to being reflexive on the field, of asking questions of ourselves and moving forward with awareness. As I hear this, my well-trodden frustration compels me to ask a question, even as I hate the feeling of all eyes on me. I rush through the question. I ask – how can we be reflexive on the field, in our encounters with others, without bringing in too much of ourselves. An abstract question. The speaker asks me to clarify – can you tell me more, she says. Worse nightmare ever – having a public conversation. That old fear threatens to emerge, causing a temporary stumble over my sentences. I pause to take a breath. Then I use an example from my field experience in South Africa – I asked a non-profit employee about the value of their work in supporting employment in the informal economy. The question seemed to make them uncomfortable, and they asked me what brought me to a South African township. I share my observation with the speaker – my training told me that I should keep myself out of the conversation as much as I could, but my instinct seemed to say that sharing my work and experiences of fieldwork in India’s informal, rural settlements would help.

In conversing with the speaker, I seemed to arrive at an opening. I don’t remember her response now, but I remember recognizing that conversations in the field and in the classroom need individuals to inter-locate, and this was not possible without dialogue. The dialogue between me and the speaker, revealed nodding heads around me. Later, a fellow participant tells me, she resonated with my question. She faced similar issues of being unsure of how much to share of herself in the field.

The workshop also included group work where I come back to my concern, in a group where I was the only woman. This time I am clearer in my articulation. One group member asks – why did you not phrase it like this earlier. I did not understand it during the lecture, but I do now, he continues.

Because I was thinking through my question as I was speaking.

My group member advises – you should write down what you want to ask before asking in class. It is more efficient, he tells me.

I think about his advice – I wonder if knowing this as a teenager might have prevented me from asking my dance teacher to include me in the annual day performance in a dull, unsure voice. Of, how if I took the trouble to refine my questions, to ask efficiently and clearly – paying more attention to what I am saying – others would pay heed to me. In a sense, I would move towards a centering of the form of what I am asking. As I think about this, I am reminded of Susan Sontag and her emphasis on the gratification of our consciousness through experience. I want to engage in work, where there can be a gratification of my concerns, not as a final answer but as an ongoing, evolving conversation. My frustration was with what Sontag points out as a binary between form and content, and the academic style of abstraction. I was being asked to take full authorship of what I was saying. I was trained up till now in rational critical thinking to take full authorship while knowing how to remove myself from the content as far as possible. And I realized I am uncomfortable with that authorship, with a subordination of my voice. My voice though untrained, cannot be abstracted from me. The knowledge I gain through dialogue is an experience, of knowing and not knowledge of a firm fact or opinion. It is an ethos of praxis, of reflection and action with others as Paulo Freire calls it, and it’s frustrating. Knowing what the sargam is, after all is not the same as singing it. Auditioning for the choir, is not the same as singing in the choir.

I respond to my group member’s advice – the question was not really a question when I first asked it but a raw, unshaped thought taking form in conversation. The clarity you hear now is because this is an evolving conversation. He looks away, uncomfortable and unwilling to let go. Speaking to the other men in the group, he says – don’t you always write down your questions before asking them? The other men, quietly nod and move on to the next topic of discussion, leaving the discomfort of this dialogue behind.

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In a workshop that I am teaching, I am asked a question about the content. The workshop was on Philosophies of Postcolonial Development, and I cited Gandhi’s philosophy of Satyagraha as an initial thought. A queer identifying student interrupts me to ask, why am I drawing on Gandhi. The class falls uncomfortably silent. As a teacher, I could have moved on without a response, by brushing off the question. The discomfort in me could have compelled me to move on without a response. Instead, I stay with the pause, and I ask them – tell me more. And they tell me about their feeling of dissonance when they read Gandhi. They tell me about their locations and prompt me to think about mine.

Tell me more. A simple inquiry, an opening. I think of receptive generosity – a giving that is also a receiving. I flip it to realize, it’s also a receiving that is a kind of yielding – to the ambiguity of dialogue – where having a conversation is a resolution, in bringing our voices together, through our bodies, identities and locations.

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My sister tried to convince me for years to return to my song – I never did, until now. Now, she is no longer here to hear my song. She cannot hear and bear its tentative expression, its shaky pitches and uncertain tenor. Yet, I practice and remember the riyaaz of our childhood. I receive the memories, and I let my lungs feel the strain of the sargam, just as I let my writing feel the strain of ambiguous questions. The inconvenience of the straining makes me vitally present. It’s an emotional and intellectual wringing of sorts, that right now finds an awkward symphony between my voice and those of others. But the elegance of the symphony will arrive, with praxis. So, I let what compels me, to sing and to write.