Nina Bhattacharya sits down for a chat with Sailaja Joshi, founder of Bharat Babies -- a publisher of Indian children's books.
The next MiP episode is with Sailaja Joshi, co-founder of Bharat Babies! An indie publisher specific to celebrating South Asian voices/stories!
Here’s an interview via The Aerogram soon after Bharat Babies came to fruition and tune in to a new episode with Sailaja herself as they celebrate 5 years and counting!
NB: The work you’re doing now is material that academics down the line can research — looking back and examining texts. Like, there will actually be a body of literature out there with South Asian Americans in them for someone to study.
SJ: Part of the push I also felt was that I didn’t think I was doing enough. It takes so long for any manuscript to get anywhere, for any research to be done, and nothing felt actionable. Nothing felt relatable. Everything felt like it was taking such a long time, and it wasn’t going to go anywhere. I wrote both of my theses, and I remember thinking this is great, but now what? What am I going to do with this eighty-page document?
Leaving was the best decision I ever made. Quitting and leaving something helps you to understand your failures, helps you to understand yourself, and helps you to rise and succeed. While the work I was doing on South Asian American women is still completely underrepresented in the social sciences, I think of the work that I’m doing now as sort of an extension of that. It is still working with the same communities and thinking of them in a critical way. It’s just presenting that information in a very different format.