Bhanu Kapil: The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers

In 2011 I interviewed Bhanu Kapil for BOMB‘s website to celebrate the 10-year anniversary of her book The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers.

Read the full interview here.

Excerpt from her introduction to the book:

—The project as I thought it would be:

an anthology of the voices of Indian women.

                              . . .

—The project as I wrote it: a tilted plane.

Katherine Sanders: What does it mean to be vertically interrogated?

Bhanu Kapil: You are inverted, always, above the place at which you are caught. Caught living.

KS: Who or what is your personal interrogator?

BK: The interrogator, in colloquial or contemporary life, is a torturer of some kind. This is a time in which torture is very real for so many people, and so it is difficult to answer the question casually. Perhaps I would not have used that word as part of the title for the book I wrote, the book your question is connected to.