[Reader-list] seed grant report

[hansa thapliyal]

we are, two of us, vipin and hansa, working on a project collecting, on 
audio, stories about the growing up of a bunch of boys in a suburb of delhi-
these are areas- ghaziabad, sahibabad, that are mapwise, situated in UP(as 
policemen never tire of teliing you to haul you up for very many things- 
"yeh u.p. hai, dilli nahin") but the life of these areas, through jobs, 
through aspiration,  even through this stated difference, is very linked 
with delhi. on other sides is the village- where some of their parents 
migrated from- .
the boys and a girl, now all adults, belong to different castes- gujjars, 
jaats, brahmains, some are "service class" children, some belong to rural 
elite families. their stories reflect the experience of growing up in this 
context, conscious of the village city difference, not completely belonging 
to either.
the stories are invariably comic(no other mode of story telling is 
entertained by the group).
the strokes are broad, characters are often personas(that they adhere to 
studiously when in the group)their particular contexts are given form in 
this method of storyteliing and everything, fathers, households, families, 
the village, the city, jobs- are lampooned-it is a mode where all events in 
their lives, as long as they are part of the gang is made into group 
entertainement.

the criticism of the self finds a funny tangent in bitching- endlessly and 
relentlessly adding every detail in each others life to make it expressive 
of the personas that have been created around them.
nostalgia is of course also a part of it, a ferocious re re retelling of the 
way they were- when they were younger, more energetic, more free to be 
iconoclastic? but the story telling continues somewhere in the present too. 
Like in a sprawling soap- characters that were left behind are encountered, 
and knit in somewhere again. new characters, often from the city and so 
eventually still outsiders, enter in and out of their lives and their 
stories. despite everything so far, a core group of them remain situated in 
the suburb, somewhere very much with each other.

we have collected conversations and stories on some 45 hours of tape. there 
are stories of cricket matches- played endlessly in the sahibabad sun, or 
competing with city teams in delhi. there are stories of shrewd money making 
in school that are also stories about second hand clothes markets in delhi. 
there are stories of
schools- stories with moods of oppression, of hated teachers and smart 
subversive kids, of the endless question of english, there are stoires about 
relatives from the village- and how they are viewed in these contexts- how 
they provided them with a foil to the creation of middleclassness that was 
happening in that suburb. and somewhere how these other contexts stay with 
them, despite all the advances into the city- shape them and their way of 
looking at the world
there are stories about fathers and sons and disappointment and violence.
and conversations where you can hear the characters as voices, the parent, 
the son, the engagements with and cruelties to each other.
and change- the stories of poor schools told in the confines of a car 
travelling confidently into the city-
the beeps of mobiles, the conversations on mobiles, the shifts in language.
the problems we are faced with are about boundaries- it is one thing to 
tell- very idiomatic, evocative and 'telling' stories to a friend and the 
friend of a friend, and another to transmit them to the public at large, as 
they are-
knowing the presence of a recorder while you are with friends is different 
from recognising eventually the formal nature and the onesidedness of 
recordings.
we need to joust with the business of not treating them completely as 
subject and pinning them down.
so far with our work we get the feeling some robust form of fiction is 
required eventually.
we are hoping to create for ourselves, with this grant, the grounds or 
different stages(the noun) for the fiction.
any suggestions on form would be very welcome.

as our presentation, we hope to give a soundscape still, but supplemented 
with a good amount of writing that will chart that shift into fiction.



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