John Zubrzycki is a Sydney-based author, journalist and researcher, and has written books on India. He has written “The Last Nizam: An Indian Prince in the Australian Outback “ and “Jadoowallahs, Jugglers and Jinns: A Magical History of India” opening a Pandora of unheard stories from the subcontinent. The author is in India as part of Australia Fest, a six month long celebration of Australian culture and creativity. John Zubrzycki was in conversation with Majid Alam where he talked about his love for Indian history, why magicians thrills him and the Indian diaspora in Australia. Here is an excerpt from the interview.
Talking about your book Jadoowallahs, Jugglers and Jinns, you seem to have affinity for magicians for jinns. These myths are unheard of in history textbooks. Why did you have an affinity for such subjects?
I like exploring parallel histories. Magic is a parallel history. It comes up again and again and again when you look at religious text, when you look at development in cultures through the centuries even in the plays at princely courts in different time in Indian history it crops up in art crops up in so many different Sphere. So I wanted to explore the magical heritage and I discovered unsurprisingly to me that it was a very rich heritage something that is very unique to India it has huge influence from the rest of the world.
While you talk about jinnns, jugglers or magicians, there isn’t much sources to talk about and neither do we find a rich history on it. Isn’t that makes your task difficult?
No, not at all because you are finding the sources that other people have ignored and people know magic as popular culture. But in fact popular culture like folk theatre folk art music magic and any of these performing arts it’s really internal part of India’s heritage and there is material out there.
What you talk about is subaltern history. We find historians increasingly writing about subaltern history nowadays while many others still stuck writing about kings, queens and princes. Why do you choose to write on subaltern history?
Partly because I think it is undervalued. There are so many areas in history that are yet to be explored. Magic and some other form of popular culture are great example of that. For me when I tell people about the book, you find a lot of references to magicians, conman and charlatans, but you won’t find the reference of Motilal Nehru, Madam Cama and Subhash Chandra Bose.
Does the ideas and motivation behind your book have to do with the journalistic career of yours?
Yes, very much so. I am a journalist by profession and also studied history. I really wanted to bring that history alive and my journalistic training enables me to do that to pick out really interesting stories that can illustrate certain aspects of the bigger picture. People identify with the personality so whenever I can I tell the stories through people making the magic.
Some of the writers from Australia like Patrick White or Richard Flanagan have a different genres from yours. Where did the influence come from?
I wouldn’t say I have got a particular writer influencing me more than books on Indian history by David Gilmour and Charles Allen. Charles Allen is probably my favourite writers in the Indian history. I like his approach to Indian history where he looks at South India with a geographical cultural entity. William Dalrymple is another one.
Writing on magicians and jinss have lot of fantasy and imagination to it. Have you thought of writing fiction on these histories?
Fiction and non-fiction are two completely different disciplines. There are few writers who can do both but I am not one. I prefer to just find a good story or good series of stories and make them readable and accessible without sacrificing accuracy and depth of research. You do a lot of archival research and then you sometimes might get accepted material, a paragraph or a page spending hours in an archive.
Do you find a point of convergence between the Indian and Australian literature?
I think that the interactions have been much more now than it has been in the past. You have got the Australia fest in India which has hosted several Australian writers including me. There are some very good Indian Diaspora in Australia actually producing some great works and great fictions these days. Talking about Roanna Gonsalves, who won a very important award for her short stories. She is from Goa originally but living in Australia now her stories reflect the experience she had as an Indian arriving in Australia coming into that big culture. There are a lot of other Australians come to India inspired by what they see and wrote a fiction like in my case decided to write on the fascinating history.
Have you thought about your next book?
Yes, it will be on India but I am still not sure if I would discuss it. The idea is at a very early stage. I am working on two books on India at the moment.
You started writing about India with your first book “The last Nizam” and since you have been writing on India. What was your inspiration that made you write on India?
It was an amazing story about the last Nizam going to Australia and buying a half million acre ship station so that he could drive bulldozers through the desert and it was the story of tragedy in loss. But it was also the story about an end of an era, the princely era and the man couldn’t fit into this culture and found Australia more to his liking but he was unable to look into his affairs and end up losing most of what he inherited.
This article was originally published in The Statesman on 14th February, 2019.
The Other 