In June 2025, I read two books by professors I admire: Paths Made By Walking by Dr Amina Tawasil and This Place/That Place by Dr Nandita Dinesh. Both authors carefully present what they have witnessed about people and places that are demonised. Tawasil focuses on her time learning from religiously conservative women in Iran, while Dinesh explores the relationship between two people from opposing sides of a conflict, presumably related to Kashmir and India. Reading the two books allowed me to learn about projects that my professors have spent considerable effort and time working on (and perhaps given me a chance to speculate on their opinions that professors in institutional settings have to obscure if not aligned with norms). In this note, I’ll focus on This Place/That Place and its approach to dialogue.
A wedding is about to start, readers learn at the start of the novel. But, the ruling authority makes a major legal change to the way most things work. The wedding is put on hold.
It’s just this is…so typical. This mentality. That Place knows what’s good for This Place. …
It was only a matter of time. The signs were all there. The increased number of troops, the veiled language, the vilification in the media, the increased number of lynch mobs. We knew it was coming.
What Place is the character referring to? Why are the Places not named? The rest of their conversation sounds eerily similar to the actions the Indian government took when they removed Jammu and Kashmir’s compromised autonomy in August 2019. Dinesh’s use of This Place and That Place goes beyond trying to circumvent censorship from a ruling authority. If Indians hear the word “Kashmir,” they are supposed to think of the labels terrorists, separatists and stone-pelters. The allegory This Place/That Place might offer distance from that immediate association and perhaps a chance to be curious and listen to the dialogue between the characters. And, while rooted in the specific context of Kashmir/India, the use of This Place/That Place could make the novel relevant to other settings where a dominant group claims to know what is better for a group that it subordinates.
Most of the novel revolves around the interaction between a character from This Place and a character from That Place. They witness a range of emotions within the novel’s 24 hour sliver of their life under a government-imposed lockdown– from tenderness, anxiety, cynicism, fear and affection. Dialogue between groups that oppress and who are oppressed sounds beautiful. “If only we get to know each other better, things could be better,” it is often said in liberal approaches. However, for Paulo Freire, that is not dialogue because
“dialogue cannot occur between those who want to name the world and those who do not wish this naming—between those who deny others the right to speak their word and those whose right to speak has been denied them. Those who have been denied their primordial right to speak their word must first reclaim this right and prevent the continuation of this dehumanizing aggression” (p. 88).
Nandita wrestles with practicing Freirean dialogue in the novel through the conversation between the two characters. Take this instance:
I’m not them.
No you’re just–
I’m just from there
…
Being from the land of occupiers, and being one yourself, are two different things.
But.. it’s a fine line isn’t it? Is the occupied only the government that allows this to happen, and the person who is on the streets, holding the gun to carry out the government's orders? Or is it also the person from That Place who knows what is happening and doesn’t do anything about it? ….
The person from That Place, the powerful group, is questioning herself and her complicity with her government’s actions in This Place. The conversation is charged, honest and necessary. “identity that dialogue seeks to construct, it is nevertheless an identity riven by difference.” Nandita’s book is a form of “problem-posing education” and is difficult in necessary ways. A 24.5 hour travelling performance adapted from this novel would be a compelling way to question the way This Place / That Place is understood.
References:
Dinesh, Nandita. This Place That Place. Melville House, 2022.
Lissovoy, Noah De, and Courtney B. Cook. ‘Active Words in Dangerous Times: Beyond Liberal Models of Dialogue in Politics and Pedagogy’. Curriculum Inquiry, vol. 50, no. 1, Jan. 2020, pp. 78–97. DOI.org (Crossref), https://doi.org/10.1080/03626784.2020.1735922.
