A response to The Harper Review’s winter 2025 proposition, “Should the ivory tower endure?”
Dear editors,
I recently spent over 20 hours travelling from my New York City apartment to a small, rural village in the South Indian state of Karnataka called Banasandra. Its inhabitants number around 2,000—even less if you exclude the populations of Muslims and Dalits who live on the village’s edge, as most residents do—and the language they speak is Kannada.
My connection to Banasandra runs deep. It’s where my dad grew up and where some of my family still lives to this day. My dad was on the trip with me, of course. I didn’t feel confident enough to visit alone, in large part because my ability to communicate in my mother tongue is, at present, not nearly as good as I wish it was. My dad and I spent our days eating the usual favorites of masala dosa and vegetable pulao, as well as chicken that’d just been slaughtered on our family farm and custard made of milk our cows had produced immediately after birthing calves—a delicacy in these parts. We visited temples dedicated to village deities believed to protect the locals from plagues, natural disasters, and ill-intentioned outsiders. And we spent countless hours sitting in the front yard of the family home chatting with other relatives and friends about, among other things, the Congress Party’s excessive welfare policies, my younger cousin’s hopes of pursuing a master’s in engineering, and the villagers’ preference for drinking water that came from the old well as opposed to using the newly installed filtration system.
During long walks, we passed by small shops, school buildings, and houses, many of which were constructed of mud and possessed no toilets or running water. While taking a detour into the coconut fields, my dad told me stories of how he grew up herding water buffalo and cultivating silkworms, how he sometimes went hungry if his sister forgot to bring him food while he was out working in the fields, and how he got his first pair of shoes at the age of 12. He explained to me the physical punishments disobedient students would endure at the hands of their teachers, the arranged marriage practices that stripped men and women of their autonomy, and the practice of a ritual said to protect against evil spirits in which men who’d worked themselves up into a frenzy would kill a goat by biting its neck.
It was in Banasandra that I began to understand what the “real world” is like—and how naturally these practices come to humans living in environments of extreme scarcity.
Soon enough, I returned to New York. Here, my friends and I have access to endless food items that we will never need to know how to produce. We don’t do manual labor and so instead must worry about which ClassPass plan will best help us ensure we’re getting our heart rates up frequently enough. We complain of the maleffects of dating because we have too many potential partners to choose from, not too few. We spend our time philosophizing, not because we believe it will help us discern pragmatic solutions to the trials we face, but simply because we enjoy it. We don’t believe in gods because we believe in ourselves. We are entirely disconnected from the harsh realities faced by much of the world around us and, oftentimes, completely unaware of them.
New York is my ivory tower, and I hope it endures. Why? Because life is pleasant here.
Blissfully,
Surya Gowda
Image: Manohar, Black Buck, mixed medium, 1615-20 (Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York).