In this conversation, the poet and curator Ranjit Hoskote recalled a childhood split between Bombay and Goa, finding roots in a 1970s Indo-Iberian society that left a lasting imprint of multilingualism and environmental awareness. This inheritance inoculated him early against parochial and xenophobic definitions of identity. Pankaj Mishra observed that this baseline of "vernacular cosmopolitanism" was further enriched by a remarkably vibrant, crossdisciplinary literary community in mid-1990s Bombay, where the lines between Anglophone modernists and radical regional writers seamlessly blurred.
That seemed to regress, Hoskote observed, after the 1992 demolition of the Babri Masjid mosque by Hindu nationalists, a crisis that forced him to realize that a life of the mind cannot proceed in a political vacuum. Looking ahead to an increasingly digitalized and polarized landscape, Hoskote and Mishra lamented a fragmented contemporary audience, but they saw hope in the unexpected solidarity of alternative cultural spaces.
The GGD Conversations series is a collaboration between the Georgetown Global Dialogues and Equator.
