Episode 5 Transcript: Sukanya Chatbarti

[Music]

Vincent del Casino: Hi there, and welcome to The Accidental Geographer. My name is Vincent del Casino. I'm the provost and senior vice president here at San Jose State University and the host of this podcast. On today's podcast, we're gonna have a really interesting and exciting conversation with Dr. Shukanya Chakrabarti. She is a professor in the Department of Film and Theater here at Santa Jose State university. She has done some fantastic work at the intersection of theater and film and the way in which we think about identities in everyday life. So come on board. This is going to be a great conversation.

Vincent del Casino: Thanks for being here. I really do appreciate it. Welcome to the podcast.

Sukanya Chakrabarti: Thank you so much for having me, and I'm-

Vincent del Casino: So, I always like to start, you know, get a little sense of the journey kind of intellectually for you, but there's also obviously a geography to your travels, right? Having studied undergrad and master's degrees in India and then moving to a little known school up the road called Stanford, I think. So what took you into the questions you've had and why did you end up pursuing them the way you did? I'm just curious.

Sukanya Chakrabarti: Yeah. So, you know, as you said, I was born and raised in Kolkata and I spent my entire life under my master's in Kolkatal. I did my undergrad and master's and English literature, but I was always into storytelling and I was really interested in inviting storytelling, which is why I was like always interested in theater. And, you you how to sew stitches. Send children to like singing classes, dance classes, theater classes. So it was very part of the culture to like practice theater. But at the same time, there was always this disconnect. Like it was always understood and assumed that that is a hobby and that is not something you pursue as a career, right? And so, you know, I was always into storytelling. I thought, okay, maybe I have to do something with literature and stuff. But at the same time, I was felt. Like I was constantly being drawn by the potential of the state. So at one point, I was actually working for a publishing house in Demi after my masters. And it was an academic publishing house. And I was editing other academic books. And this thought struck me that life is short. If I had to do something, I had do it now. I mean, I'm really passionate about theater, but how do I make it sustainable? Because it's not easy to like, you know, for artists to try, you now, like, you know in the practical world. And so I was like, oh, but I'm also into higher studies. So maybe I'm going to pursue a PhD in theater today. And that was just a thought. And then wiping back to another. And this was like in 2007 when the recession had hit. And I wasn't even sure if plan was tenable and you know, I started applying to UK schools first and then I realized that they don't have much scholarship and it was impossible for me to first see a PhD without a scholarship. So as a friend who had gotten into a PhD program in the US, oh you know if you get accepted into a PhD program, they fund it for me. Oh that's a good idea. Okay I'll start checking out. You know, PhD programs and things like that. And that's when I started applying and all of a sudden, the world just opened up because, you know being in Kolkata all my life, I mean, we did have a lot of cultural expressions and like lot of theater, but again, you know we didn't have a separate theater department. We were doing theater in the English department and it just didn't feel right. Well funded or you know there is a national school of drama in India but I was saying kind of Hindi language focus and um and so I mean like all of a sudden I'm thrilled to find these uh PIC programs in the U.S. Which are like you know such fast. I mean, even the faculty were so exciting, right? Like the kinds of research that was going on. And so I started applying and then I had contacted Professor Chisha Madden from Stanford and her research was quite in alignment with what I needed to pursue. And she was like, yes, I urge you to apply. And they go, well, this is encouraging. I think I'll apply. And then you got into the fight. I get into the fire.

Vincent del Casino: In Calcutta, it's a really interesting city, you know, and it shows the complexity of India. The image of it from the outside of what it is, because I've been there, what it is on the inside, versus delhi, which has that. And so you focused your energy and your interests academically in that city as well, you know back to your background. How did you start to think about what eventually would become your book right? The In Between Worlds book, which is a great title, by the way, because it gives you that sense of what this is about. But what motivated you in that? How does the city itself inform more thinking? Because I think there's a real intellectual link here between the city, itself, and the way you've been thinking about this work.

Sukanya Chakrabarti: For sure. You know, again, being into embodied forms of storytelling, I've been very hyper-aware of space. I think that really unites or kind of has this true line of connecting my different kinds of interests and works. And so when I was in Kolkatao, I mean, again, I didn't look at the city from an outside perspective because I was immersed in it. I grew up in it and it was part of me. But when I left Kolkata, that is when it struck me how places shape you. I don't know, and I had never paid attention to that until I left the place. And so, and of course, like, you know, everything becomes so immersive in a space like, you know culture, language, music, theater. That all of that had become a part of me and my interests without me consciously trying to invite them, right? And then I leave, I come to the MySchools, which is like, you know, in terms of miles, I don't even know how many miles, but I don t say that we have a time difference of 12 and a half hours, and it's vast, right, in term of geographical dislocation. But at the same time I felt more connected to my roots in a strange way because it kind of made me think about the place and how it shapes you from my grad apartment in Stanford. And even the starkness of the differences and the ways in which we try to build homes in places that are not homes, right? Kindness bring in objects, or bring in music, or kind of stimulate a sense of home in cases that are not home, essentially. And that kind of led me to look at spaces, essentially, but also my book, as you mentioned, In Between Morales. I've also been very fascinated with this idea of the liminal space. Yeah, I. You know, got introduced to that concept as a grad student here at Stanford. And I remember my mind literally flowing because I see how this is like such a rich space to say you can do anything and everything. And, you know. And that is such a fundamental concept in performance. Um, and, and perhaps really informed my research, my outlook, my world view. And I really see that there is such great potential in being in that in-between space, because then we get a really good perspective of the spaces we inhabit or the spaces we depart from since we go to.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah, I think there's a, you know, in the broad liberal arts of social science and humanities, there's spatial turn that happens in about the 90s going into the early 2000s. And that concept of liminality of in-betweenness, you know of unclear where those borders are and borders are so stark and there was attempt to do that. So when you unpack that in- betweenness, what are some of the indicators of that for you? How do you see that operate? In the context of your research, what does it mean and what does that look like?

Sukanya Chakrabarti: Yes. So, you know, my research is very focused on this particular group of folk performers from the Bengal. So in a way, extending local, like it's very localized in West Bengal and Bangladesh. But I am actually looking at the immense kind of potential that their performances spring in terms of nurturing a sense of in between this, in a political situation that is so fraught with this kind of us-then-divide. I was beginning to think about their performances more from like a very haptic sensibility, like you know, again, I'm a very kind of touchy, feisty person, and like, you know. And I started thinking about, you now, the sensorial aspects of their songs, how they create space through sound. And how they create locality to music and through philosophy. And it's so rooted in the land. There are so many metaphors from Bengal, from the landscape of Bengal in the songs. And at the same time, they're so universal because they have a very spiritual context and content. And so I was very fascinated by this kind of grazing of the local and the global. I learned in this idea that folk has been imagined as something that is in the past, or has been romanticized as then kind of. Yeah, so I felt like I want to study this idea of the folk, which seems like a misfit in a world that is globalized and technologized. And then the more we studied, the more fascinated I became with the idea of folk-ness and how that is performed and how spaces are created, in the context of tourism industry, why do you kind of create folk and how do you create folk-ess? And what are the ways we are creating this kind of divide between tradition and modernity? Especially in a world that is gradually getting globalized, gradually, this is what really fascinates me, that on the one hand, there is this intense discourse on nationality, nationalism, borders, like us, them, and on the other hand, you're liberalism, trade, free trade, and of course, travel, everything has opened up. At the same time, this kind of simultaneous need to protect boundaries, right? And I think they're cause. Nationality, but at the same time that fascinates me that how we kind of create borders that also make them porous.

Vincent del Casino: Well, it's my I started in the air section of tourism and geographies in Southeast Asia. And I've actually since gone back and written about that very much around representational politics and the ways in which representation actually manifests itself in the real world. And actually, as opposed to the representation being the thing after it is actually the thing before and people start to see through it and the ways in what they imagine. But in that, which is really interesting, a lot of pull out a little bit in opposition here, is that says that the vernacular is, and a febrile in general, you know, or just these things that go on, but really they're informing and informed by all this stuff. So how does that play into your sense of understanding simulation, your paper in the urban geography, and I'm geeking out right now, it's a geographer, but this. This concept of the City of Joy, what state cartography, choreography means, get that Freudian slip, I said state cartographer, state choreography, how you're thinking about public space in Kolkata within the context of this simulation. So what was going on and how are you thinking about that in this paper?

Sukanya Chakrabarti: Sure. So, you know, this paper evolved from a conversation we were having at Stanford. I was part of this working group called Creative Cities. While I was a grad student, and then even beyond that, I was also part of that working group. And a lot of conversations emerged around public spaces and other ways in which we see them, create them, choreograph them. And because I'm scouting from a performance studies background. I was really looking at the performance of spaces. So, you know, I have been thinking a lot about, you know, how spaces shape people who inhabit those spaces. But I was also thinking about how spaces perform. Like, you now how spaces have character, have, like, you, know, are costuming or, you know, have like, as I mean, You know, to them. And I was looking very closely at the city of Kolkata because from there, I've really thought about the spaces there. And then during the pandemic, everyone was, of course, thinking about how all of a sudden, we're now restricted to this one room or on Zoom. And then space becomes a very rich conversation again. And so a bunch of guys who were part of that. Working group started thinking about the ways in which the pandemic has affected the performance of space. Right. I public spaces, especially in the context of pandemic, where you know, there are so many rules and regulations on what the public space now entails, or like who can inhabit the public space or, and, you know that really led me to the standard urban geography paper where I was again looking at Through the likes of Sorkin's idea of like disunification and like, you know, homogenization of a space and a city. And I was looking at how the state choreography or the ways in which the state wants to represent urban spaces can gloss over certain particularities that might reveal something that does not conform to the performance that has been preset, right? Right. Yeah, so we have a kind of planning to kind of really probe into what are those particularities and where have they come from and you know what is the history of Tenochtitlan Singapore and especially with Kolkata being this really interesting city which was built by the British right that it was just three villages at one point and then the British come and then they actually created the city which is why it's even more interesting to me that in a post-colonial context when we are trying to decolonize, you know, from Calcutta to Kolkata, but at the same time, like the Chief Minister of West Bengal had made a comment that I wanted to turn Kolkatta into London. With a very optimistic kind of outlook, that was like such an interesting statement to me, and that again led me to of look at these like. You know, perceptions, we have about the first world, the developing world, like, you know, who simulates whom and, you're talking whose image and who performs who choreographs and.

Vincent del Casino: And Kolkata is a, it's a pretty politically intense city. For sure. It's, I, when I got there, I was, you know, there was an image that one has, but then when you're in, you now, I went to some of the archives, we got to, you really dug in, you know I was actually there as part of an academic enterprise of, you know thinking through space and how we teach geography and history in K-12 actually. And we had a bunch of teachers who were going. But its history is rich with political dissent, right? I imagine that's coming up in the performances, right, you know, where are these different identities, which. As you point out, like, three villages become a city. There's an intentionality of urbanizing communities, right? So it must be just so rich for that sort of questions and the intensity of, I guess. He's, yeah, I'm fast as.

Sukanya Chakrabarti: Absolutely. I mean, again, politics has been so kind of imbued in the fabric of the city. And again, like I said, if you're in the city, you don't realize, I guess, something odd or something different. Until the week, oh, it's very particular to Kolkata that we see so many slogans. And it's politically charged. And, you know, communism being of. Big part of the fabric of the city, and we grew up in a communist government, and, you know, so it's very interesting to me the ways in which even the culture has evolved and shifted to the 80s and the 90s.

Vincent del Casino: Yeah, well, and as you said, you know, getting to even just delhi, it gives you like this different view. So how does so obviously, you still have a passion of being an artist as well, like and performing. And and you most recently, you just put something together. And tell me how that continues to inform one year kind of academic trajectory, but how you think about you. Your world is an artist and why you keep your foot in that sort of world.

Sukanya Chakrabarti: You know, I think evolving as an artist and a scholar, I feel like a lot of my questions are kind of around the idea of post-colonialism and how coloniality has shaped us. And I also look at colonialism spatially in a lot of ways because the architecture left behind by the British. You know, juxtaposition with the newer architecture that is informed by global influences. And so it kind of really makes me think about space, but also what it does to subject-hood, right? Like, you know I grew up speaking two languages. I mean, I grew speaking Bangla mostly, but in my school English was the medium of instruction. And so I always felt this kind of shape shifting, like duality, or like, you know, I see like I dream in that love, like, oh, you're, I'm actually like, when I used to be in Kolkata, I think my relationship with English was more like functional. Like it was more, like a language that I would use to convey something official or like some beautiful vision. Whereas Bangla was the language of emotions and dreams and poetry and literature. And I always felt that kind of duality in me. Like, you know, if I were to have a very serious argument, I would switch to English, like if I were to write poetry, I would write Bangla. This kind of, like, influence of colonialism has been also a very embodied experience for me. And then I got this opportunity to work on this production, which was like so close to my heart for all the other reasons that you talked about. It's called Bukkik Obscenities and it premiered in Sogo Rap in New York and Off-Broadway production last year in January. And then. It was just so life-changing for me because all my life, I had never imagined witnessing actors speaking Bangla on a mainstream American stage and being received so well by the general audience members, right? It was like a dream. It was never something that I thought was possible. Simply because of the ways in which I kind of compartmentalized my psyche, my life, and then this happened. And it made me realize that there is such universality in particularity. It was so specifically set in Kolkata, the PA public obscenities, the director, until right arm. Is also a Stanford graduate. We had, like, our parts had briefly crossed at Stanford, but he graduated before me. And then we started talking about this project, because it came as part of a fellowship program and it sparked off, and then we started talking how intentionally we create space that actually gives people the experience of being a girl. Typical Bengali drawing room in Kolkata. I don't know if you've had a chance to look at the state pictures, but if you do, you will have a sense of what a typical Benghali drawing room looks like. It was such a deliberate kind of, again, designing of the story is set in Kolkhata. The premise is that an anthropologist and like, you know, a researcher, a Bengali-American, goes back to Kolkata with his black boyfriend and goes back his ancestral house, Kanindra Phan's house, and things. It's more like kind of investigating the nature of desire, the nuances of, you what desire means in a queer context? But also in a post-colonial context. And the title is actually taken from, you know, the Petal Court temple is kind of inherited from the British, which defined obscenity. And, you, know, and it kind of makes us question, you know what are these different ideas that have been left behind by the British administration and, you now, how time has shaped us in terms of how we are in the world. You know, what desire means, what obscenity means, you know what queerness means. And, but it all happens in that kind of space where there is a dining table, there's a visual kind of bed, there's fridge, there's fine, there is like, but all the set pieces are functional. So I mean, the idea was to make it as naturalistic as possible. And like hyper naturalistic and getting into like the nitty-gritty is like really the specifics like you know a typical dining table would have homeopathy or box or like like digestive medicines or like you do something that's so specific to the culture and the cultural fabric of Kolkata and that that that was such an interesting project for me because I felt like even the playwright and the director, um, shire, confidentiality. Was saying unapologetic about the use of specificity in terms of space, but also in terms one way. And there were certain scenes that were deliberately and consciously left untranslated. Like we did have super titles in most of the scenes, but also the idea was to kind of experience language and culture through our bodies. Like, again, like, you know, And a lot of that experience is very common to immigrants in this country, right? So many immigrants come to this country without knowing English, but they kind of experience it through the body. And we were kind of switching that over to this big and having actors speak in Bangla. Having a broad audience from all over. Demographic was pretty big. I'm not howling And just seeing how, you know, how that has affected different people differently, right? Different people come into that space with different experiences, different emotions.

Vincent del Casino: When I went to see Kite Runner, you know, and there was an Afghani community in the road, and Afghani was spoken, it was very interesting to watch those reactions, because obviously you're going to engage that language differently. But it was such a wonderful way to learn, too, because I imagine they're probably And that discomfort is actually helpful, I think. I shouldn't know every single thing, but I can learn from that experience. And that's a really powerful way to get people to get outside themselves. Because I do remember the first time I studied abroad, just like you, that's when you really realize what it's like to grow up in the United States. You go somewhere else and you realize people have a perception of what that is, all of that. And you're having to comport yourself in a very different way. And it challenges you, so that's really awesome. How does that all play into your teaching here and how do you think about engaging students and thinking about how you bring your art and your intellectual work to the classroom?

Sukanya Chakrabarti: Yeah, thank you for that question. You know, I have always identified as a teacher in all sorts. I mean, I make it sound more poetic and I think of myself as a prism and like, you know. But also like, my mother was a teacher and somehow I kind of feel like I always wanted to be a teacher and an artist and a scholar. So I had to kind of combine all of that. But, moving on... Like I mentioned earlier, that theater was never an option for me as a career of sorts, but also the kinds of theater we were studying as part of our English curriculum were all very Eurocentric, and, you know, to me, it felt like theater only needs Ibsen, Pinter, you know? Beckett and, and so I felt like, oh, maybe I don't, I mean, I don't know why I'm drawn to this audio. But, you know, it seems like great theater is only composed of white men, you're right. And then I come here to do my PhD. And then, all of a sudden, I see like my world opens up. And I have to say, like, one of the teachers I encountered at Stanford really changed my perspective and life. And she really inspired me to, like think of myself as a teacher, a scholar, artist, and getting his shamer up on. She's now in UC Santa Barbara, but before that, she was an artist-in-residence at Stanford. She taught playwriting classes, and she was very active in the 60s and 70s, like, you know, the Hispanic cultural kind of revolution movement, and, you know, she made me realize that the more focused you are in your kind of essay. Background in your truit, the more universal it is. And so when I started thinking about teaching, I was like, oh, I have to now teach like Becket Pinter about it. But instead, I realized that, you know, theater is so much more than that, right? Like theater has that lineage, of course, like we kind of think about theater pedagogy through a very Western lens. In Red Digger. Life, but we are gradually departing from that Eurocentric lens and we are opening up. And so my interest is now in contemporary theater and in kind of multi-control global theater where we can include several voices. Being at Stein was a state that just allows me the freedom to explore that wide gamut of what theater may or may not be and what we want theater to be. We don't have to fit into a mold that theater has been defined as, but we can redefine theater, we can expand on it. And the students that we have are so diverse and come from all sorts of backgrounds, all sorts languages, the linguistic backgrounds, Ojibwe. And it just makes me so happy to see each of them. Contributing to the storytelling experience and bringing in content and results. So right now, a part of my mission as an educator is also to kind of decolonize curriculum. I now have been really engaged in connecting theater history from a broad global perspective and not just focus on Eurocentric perspective so that we don't just grow up believing Greeks were the only people who did theater or like. Theater originated from the Greeks. It's such a misconception. And so I really am dedicated to the idea of expanding theater in the classroom. And so, I teach theater history, but I teach the history from a global perspective. And I love that, you know, students really get exposed. I mean, a lot of us, including me, didn't realize that, oh, it's not true. It's theater did not originate from the Greek. I mean that was theater. You know, each other. The arts of the word.

Vincent del Casino: Storytelling is essential to the human condition.

Sukanya Chakrabarti: Exactly. So I kind of make these little tiny changes in the syllabus in the ways in which I kind-of design my PowerPoint. The more students see women of color, you know, BIPOC, queer artists, even in terms of visibility, like, you, know, it changes the perception of what theater can or cannot be, right? Like, it just, like opens up the space more and makes things to the site.

Vincent del Casino: Well, I think, you know, there's been a big shift in the higher education, in my opinion, to not only recognize that students come with their own stories, but that it's actually essential for them to start to see themselves in their learning, in their education, because it creates a sense of belonging immunity that otherwise you could remain pretty distant from the material. So I think what you're doing is a brilliant contribution to what is a really important way for us to think about the future of higher education. And it needs to be everywhere. It's not just in theater. It's gotta be in the sciences and the engineering. We have to find ways for students to start to share those experiences. And I love the way you point out how particularity has a sort of universal quality to it. It's a really profound moment. Like I hadn't thought of it that way, but that the... People can see themselves. That's not my particularity, but I have a particularity. And there's some resonance and there's some difference, but it's value. And I think that's what becomes critical.

Sukanya Chakrabarti: Exactly. And I also think that just letting students feel like they are singing is just such a profound experience. Like I had students come up to me and say that I had never thought that there are like there is Hispanic theater, for example. I'd never thought there's Indian theater and that can be done in America. And you know, because of the ways in which we have and trained to think and now just. Allowing ourselves to open up and reimagine and rethink the landscape of theater has been very frustrating, yeah.

Vincent del Casino: That's awesome. Well, I want to thank you so much for taking the time. This has been an absolutely incredible conversation and I really appreciate it. I've learned so much just in the short period of time. I imagine he did in for a long much longer, so.

Sukanya Chakrabarti: Thank you so much, Vinay, for so wonderful and very enriching. Thank you, so much.

Vincent del Casino: Thank you.