Zubaani: Rewriting Narratives

Welcome to Season 2 of the Zubaani podcast by nonprofit ⁠⁠Peerbagh⁠⁠. Season two takes a deep dive into the topic of intergenerational storytelling with writers Salma Hussain and Upasna Kakroo as cohosts.Episode 3, Season 2: Rewriting NarrativesIn this podcast episode, we discuss retellings that are being written for South Asian settings. We also talk about what makes these retellings authentic. The episode also talks about the colonial impact in defining hierarchies in art and writing. This has led to an odd othering of South Asian stories in the West, and we talk about desi writers who continue to subvert that.Dog noises and nods in the episode belong to Pluto (mom: Salma)Books and other trivia discussed in this episode:Runaway Dosa (Suma Subramaniam)Waiting for Father (Aftab Yusuf Shaikh)Ayesha At Last (Uzma Jalaluddin)From Waris to Heer (Haroon Khalid)In Other Words (Jhumpa Lahiri)The Broken Spell - Indian Storytelling and the Romance Genre in Persian and Urdu (Dr. Pasha Khan)1947 Earth (film by Deepa Mehta based on Ice Candy Man by Bapsi Sidhwa)Bento, The Shape of Home, issue #3 (Peerbagh)Bridgerton (TV series, Netflix)James (Percival Everett)Omkara (Film by Vishal Bharadwaj based on Shakespeare's Othello)Why: Research shows intergenerational storytelling is like a resource (similar to air, clean water) but it is inequitably distributed. Whether you live in the subcontinent or the diaspora, colonial rule and its subsequent conflicts have left the South Asian subcontinent wounded. There is intense loss of human stories that tell the stories of our resilience, empowerment, or those that celebrate joy.About: Peerbagh is an award-winning 501c3 nonprofit organization working with a mission to diversify bookshelves and build storytellers. The nonprofit creates storytelling events and produces the world’s only South-Asia-inspired children’s print magazine, Bento.  Episode art by Ira Nagar. Research for the expert by Imtiaz Ali.This podcast has been made with the support of the City of Austin's Elevate Grant and Michigan Humanities.