The monsoons were delayed this year, by a tropical cyclone near Oman, the strongest cyclone ever recorded in the area. The rains set in at the end of June, three weeks late. The monsoons, as always, began swelling rivers, unsettling seas, raising the levels of dams, breaking the branches of the jamun tree outside my windows, shattering glass somewhere, setting afloat whole villages, and making trees and plants so luminous that they seemed to be imparting light to a dark sky. A need for recurrence exists together with a need for the new.
In India the new has not often been seen as a disjunction, especially in the arts. In the traditional music, dance, and certain forms of theatrical performance, the new is seen within a flow of continuity. This traditional other is always standing close beside those of us whose practice is in the more contemporary modes. It is a fruitful opposite.
In India today and in many parts of the world, there is a false new as well. This is a writing where information does all the work, so it can hide the depletion of thought and feeling which is behind it. I would like to speak of the genuinely new as something which allows unknown connections to arise in the relationships between things; which has abandoned something, and so made space for the new to enter; and which is above all new because it has risen from inside the self.