In the 2010s, local blessing pills made in the Arunachal Pradesh town of Tawang were replaced by those made on the Indian mainland. The shift in production is also a story of nationalist transformations in this borderland. THE VERTICAL Tawang's Blessing Pills In the 2010s, local blessing pills made in the Arunachal Pradesh town of Tawang were replaced by those made on the Indian mainland. The shift in production is also a story of nationalist transformations in this borderland. Bikash K. Bhattacharya Spend a week traversing circuitous trails, deep gorges, and high mountain passes in Arunachal Pradesh of the recent past, and you might have come across something otherworldly. Situated atop a hill in a small town called Tawang, a region that has long been disputed between India and China, is a majestic 400-year-old monastery with intricate and colorful artwork. It is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India. Every three years, monks and volunteers here would chant the mani dungyur mantra one hundred million times. They would do so to bless mani rilbu , red globule-size pills made from roasted barley flour, herbs, and a fermenting agent called phab gyun . “We would sun-dry these pills for weeks and chant the mani dungyur mantra round the clock seeking blessings from the deity Avalokiteshvara,” recalls Rinchin Norbu, an octogenarian who volunteered in the Tawang monastery in the 1960s. These pills, which were highly valued by Tibetan Buddhists and took weeks to make, were eventually distributed to the public because they were believed to ensure the well-being of the people. The practice continued until the 2010s when these local blessing pills were replaced by ones made on the Indian mainland. Intriguingly, this shift in production also tells the story of nationalist transformations of this borderland. In 1959, Tawang became a major asylum route for Tibetans fleeing Chinese occupation . The 14th Dalai Lama entered India via Tawang and a large number of Tibetan refugees who followed him settled here. Thus, the population of the region grew to include Indigenous Himalayan tribes who follow Tibetan Buddhism as well as ethnic Tibetan refugees. Upon settling in India, Tibetan refugees started rebuilding famous Tibetan monasteries across the country, from Himachal Pradesh in the north to Karnataka in the south west. These monasteries produced various blessing pills of their own, which started to circulate among the Himalayan Buddhists. They have become so popular since the late 1990s that they have replaced the mani rilbu made by the Tawang Monastery. Eventually, by 2010, the Tawang Monastery decided to stop making mani rilbu due to lack of demand. Thus, Tawang blessing pills, among the most prominent locally-produced Tibetan “power objects ’ in the region, disappeared. Today, Rinchin Norbu mourns the disappearance of the Tawang mani rilbu tradition. But his 37-year old son Leki Wangchu, who is an ardent supporter of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, says he has always preferred blessing pills produced by Tibetan monasteries in mainland India over Tawang’s mani rilbu. “The pills from Dharamsala [Himachal Pradesh] are produced by doctors and monks trained in Sowa Rigpa [Tibetan medicine]. Most people these days choose these national jinden [pills] made by Sowa Rigpa experts rather than local mani rilbu. The mani rilbu produced in Tawang Monastery was only a local tradition brought over from Tibet by some monk in the nineteenth century,” Leki tells me emphasizing the ‘Indianness’ of the mani rilbu from Dharamsala in contrast to the obscure Tibetan origin of Tawang mani rilbu. Sowa Rigpa was recognized by the Indian government as an “Indian system of medicine” back in 2010. The popularity of the practice is rising across India following its government recognition. Anthropologist Steven Kloos has captured in rich ethnographic details the tussle between the Himalayan Tibetan Buddhists and the exiled Tibetan community in India over the ownership of Sowa Rigpa. He wrote in the journal Medical Anthropology Today , “While Tibetan medicine had been known and practiced for centuries in the Tibetan-influenced Indian Himalayan regions, it was only with the arrival of Tibetan refugees in India in 1959 and their subsequent institutionalization of Tibetan medicine there that this health tradition developed into a ‘medical system’ with sufficient standards, popularity, and political clout to be recognized by the Indian state.” While Leki Wangchu attributes the decline of Tawang mani rilbu to the rising popularity of standardized Sowa Rigpa medicine, the disappearance of various local, spatialized care practices is also triggered by the rise of right-wing nationalism in the region. In the last two decades, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS), the ruling party in India and its affiliated cultural organization that champion Hindu majoritarian religious and cultural nationalism, have made a strong ideological inroads in Arunachal Pradesh. As their vision of ‘greater India’ gains acceptance in this borderland, there is an increasing tendency among the locals to assert “Indian” identity through various means, including through purchase of commodities made in India or consumption of cultural products associated with the Indian mainland. Sowa Rigpa's increasing popularity rests to a considerable extent on its supposed “Indianness” following its recognition by the Indian government. For old-timers like Rinchin Norbu, however, the locally made mani rilbu was much more than just a medicine. It was a care practice deeply rooted in the relations humans and local deities share in this landscape and their local understandings of disease etiology. People here believe in a range of deities and spirits connected to mountains, rivers, and other geographical features of the landscape, such as yulha (land deity), tsen, and nyen (deities of the mountain). Some of these deities are like human beings with worldly emotions such as anger and jealousy. “If you contaminate the dwellings of yulha or tsen, or offend them by visiting their places in ungodly hours, they may catch you and cause illnesses such as skin disease and nerve pain,” Rinchin Norbu tells me, “If you eat mani rilbu the spirit will leave you.” Not only did mani rilbu help the local people navigate the anxieties of unpredictable encounters with local deities and spirits, but it was a traditional way of co-production of care in a specific landscape. “The production of Tawang mani rilbu itself was a localized collaborative process between monks, nuns, and lay people, as well as Avalokiteshvara, the divinity that blessed these pills,” writer Yeshe Dorje Thongchi, an acclaimed writer and novelist from Arunachal Pradesh explained to me. In contrast, Rinchin Norbu says, the blessing pills brought over from outside are “just medicines” with no relations to the landscape. “They aren’t as effective as the Tawang mani rilbu we used to make simply because these pills [and their makers] don’t know the local deities causing illnesses in our bodies.” The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has triggered new spiritual practices intended to reify a sense of homogeneous “Indianness.” They often emerge at the expense of long-standing local traditions that relate to place, community, and tradition. The replacement of Tawang mani rilbu by blessing pills made by Sowa Rigpa practitioners from the Indian mainland is just one of many such examples.∎ Spend a week traversing circuitous trails, deep gorges, and high mountain passes in Arunachal Pradesh of the recent past, and you might have come across something otherworldly. Situated atop a hill in a small town called Tawang, a region that has long been disputed between India and China, is a majestic 400-year-old monastery with intricate and colorful artwork. It is the largest Tibetan Buddhist monastery in India. Every three years, monks and volunteers here would chant the mani dungyur mantra one hundred million times. They would do so to bless mani rilbu , red globule-size pills made from roasted barley flour, herbs, and a fermenting agent called phab gyun . “We would sun-dry these pills for weeks and chant the mani dungyur mantra round the clock seeking blessings from the deity Avalokiteshvara,” recalls Rinchin Norbu, an octogenarian who volunteered in the Tawang monastery in the 1960s. These pills, which were highly valued by Tibetan Buddhists and took weeks to make, were eventually distributed to the public because they were believed to ensure the well-being of the people. The practice continued until the 2010s when these local blessing pills were replaced by ones made on the Indian mainland. Intriguingly, this shift in production also tells the story of nationalist transformations of this borderland. In 1959, Tawang became a major asylum route for Tibetans fleeing Chinese occupation . The 14th Dalai Lama entered India via Tawang and a large number of Tibetan refugees who followed him settled here. Thus, the population of the region grew to include Indigenous Himalayan tribes who follow Tibetan Buddhism as well as ethnic Tibetan refugees. Upon settling in India, Tibetan refugees started rebuilding famous Tibetan monasteries across the country, from Himachal Pradesh in the north to Karnataka in the south west. These monasteries produced various blessing pills of their own, which started to circulate among the Himalayan Buddhists. They have become so popular since the late 1990s that they have replaced the mani rilbu made by the Tawang Monastery. Eventually, by 2010, the Tawang Monastery decided to stop making mani rilbu due to lack of demand. Thus, Tawang blessing pills, among the most prominent locally-produced Tibetan “power objects ’ in the region, disappeared. Today, Rinchin Norbu mourns the disappearance of the Tawang mani rilbu tradition. But his 37-year old son Leki Wangchu, who is an ardent supporter of India’s Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) party, says he has always preferred blessing pills produced by Tibetan monasteries in mainland India over Tawang’s mani rilbu. “The pills from Dharamsala [Himachal Pradesh] are produced by doctors and monks trained in Sowa Rigpa [Tibetan medicine]. Most people these days choose these national jinden [pills] made by Sowa Rigpa experts rather than local mani rilbu. The mani rilbu produced in Tawang Monastery was only a local tradition brought over from Tibet by some monk in the nineteenth century,” Leki tells me emphasizing the ‘Indianness’ of the mani rilbu from Dharamsala in contrast to the obscure Tibetan origin of Tawang mani rilbu. Sowa Rigpa was recognized by the Indian government as an “Indian system of medicine” back in 2010. The popularity of the practice is rising across India following its government recognition. Anthropologist Steven Kloos has captured in rich ethnographic details the tussle between the Himalayan Tibetan Buddhists and the exiled Tibetan community in India over the ownership of Sowa Rigpa. He wrote in the journal Medical Anthropology Today , “While Tibetan medicine had been known and practiced for centuries in the Tibetan-influenced Indian Himalayan regions, it was only with the arrival of Tibetan refugees in India in 1959 and their subsequent institutionalization of Tibetan medicine there that this health tradition developed into a ‘medical system’ with sufficient standards, popularity, and political clout to be recognized by the Indian state.” While Leki Wangchu attributes the decline of Tawang mani rilbu to the rising popularity of standardized Sowa Rigpa medicine, the disappearance of various local, spatialized care practices is also triggered by the rise of right-wing nationalism in the region. In the last two decades, the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangha (RSS), the ruling party in India and its affiliated cultural organization that champion Hindu majoritarian religious and cultural nationalism, have made a strong ideological inroads in Arunachal Pradesh. As their vision of ‘greater India’ gains acceptance in this borderland, there is an increasing tendency among the locals to assert “Indian” identity through various means, including through purchase of commodities made in India or consumption of cultural products associated with the Indian mainland. Sowa Rigpa's increasing popularity rests to a considerable extent on its supposed “Indianness” following its recognition by the Indian government. For old-timers like Rinchin Norbu, however, the locally made mani rilbu was much more than just a medicine. It was a care practice deeply rooted in the relations humans and local deities share in this landscape and their local understandings of disease etiology. People here believe in a range of deities and spirits connected to mountains, rivers, and other geographical features of the landscape, such as yulha (land deity), tsen, and nyen (deities of the mountain). Some of these deities are like human beings with worldly emotions such as anger and jealousy. “If you contaminate the dwellings of yulha or tsen, or offend them by visiting their places in ungodly hours, they may catch you and cause illnesses such as skin disease and nerve pain,” Rinchin Norbu tells me, “If you eat mani rilbu the spirit will leave you.” Not only did mani rilbu help the local people navigate the anxieties of unpredictable encounters with local deities and spirits, but it was a traditional way of co-production of care in a specific landscape. “The production of Tawang mani rilbu itself was a localized collaborative process between monks, nuns, and lay people, as well as Avalokiteshvara, the divinity that blessed these pills,” writer Yeshe Dorje Thongchi, an acclaimed writer and novelist from Arunachal Pradesh explained to me. In contrast, Rinchin Norbu says, the blessing pills brought over from outside are “just medicines” with no relations to the landscape. “They aren’t as effective as the Tawang mani rilbu we used to make simply because these pills [and their makers] don’t know the local deities causing illnesses in our bodies.” The rise of Hindu nationalism in India has triggered new spiritual practices intended to reify a sense of homogeneous “Indianness.” They often emerge at the expense of long-standing local traditions that relate to place, community, and tradition. The replacement of Tawang mani rilbu by blessing pills made by Sowa Rigpa practitioners from the Indian mainland is just one of many such examples.∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Courtesy of Mihir Joshi. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Reportage Arunachal Pradesh Tibet Hindutva Hindu Nationalism Tawang Monastery Indigeneity Buddhism Asylum Himalayas Himalayan Tribes BJP Steven Kloos Blessing Pills Medicine Health Chinese Occupation of Tibet Space Indigeneous Spaces Spatial Relations Respatialization Labor Northeast India Sister States BIKASH K. BHATTACHARYA is an independent journalist and researcher with bylines in YES! Magazine , LGBTQ Nation, BuzzFeed, Earth Island Journal, Mongabay, The Third Pole, and The Diplomat among others. He has reported from northeast India, Myanmar, and Timor-Leste. 7 Jun 2024 Reportage Arunachal Pradesh 7th Jun 2024 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. Thomash Changmai An indescribable journey of survival (2022) CGI (blender 3d) Artist Mumbai AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 15 Nov 2024 th · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION X Marks The Ghost The first case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mumbai, India was reported on 11th March , 2020. Thirteen days later, a nationwide lockdown was announced – bringing India to a grinding halt. Except that is not what actually happened. Those who could afford it shielded themselves within their homes, rations packed to the rafters and N-95 masks stockpiled. For the over 600 million internal migrants in India –those whose homes are in villages but who work in informal labor markets in the city–the lockdown announcement triggered a mass exodus. Droves of people fled the cities they worked in to return to their rural communities, largely on foot. With their wages coming to an abrupt standstill, they left deeply fearful of what lay ahead. Much has been written about the lack of statistics regarding this exodus. Many lives were lost to hunger, fatigue, heatstroke and, of course, disease. Yet “ there are no numbers ,” Santosh Kumar Gangwar, then Indian Minister for Labour and Employment, stated the same year when asked to enumerate the tragedy’s scale at a national level. Migrant workers have already long been considered “fringe figures” within the Indian urban social network. With the rupture caused by the pandemic, their existences have only been further invisibilized. The initial guidance provided by India’s central government was to ensure that migrants did not leave the cities. However, given the sheer volume of panicked people desperate to rush back home, this guidance was impossible to actually implement. When the stay-where-you-are orders failed, the center tried creating quarantine camps at state borders .This, too, did not prove successful. Attempts to build a database of the departing migrants were also abandoned halfway. The pandemic was already seen as an arithmetic problem : a problem of numbers where a solution could purportedly be reached by just pinning down the right formula. This notion was only compounded upon by the use of terms such as “rate of infection” and “doubling time” in the media, which made the actual lack of data and data collection efforts regarding migrant workers result in a particular kind of disenfranchisement. Despite the magnitude of the exodus, India’s national mood was to dismiss the migrants’ long march as simply an aberration. Since the event was caused by the deep distrust that migrants displayed in the state’s ability to provide them with safety nets, any acknowledgment of the tragedy’s nuances would misalign with the government’s narrative of complete control over the crisis. A Vocabulary of Ghostliness In retrospect, the lack of numbers eventually became an object of interrogation. A particular trope came into play within the media discourse surrounding the migrant exodus: a vocabulary of ghostliness. Words used to describe the state of the migrants essentialized their identities to solely their forced absence from the labor market. News reports in publications like the BBC and God Save the Points , spoke of “ghost workers” and “ ghost towns .” In a Telegraph India essay written shortly after the first lockdown, academic Manas Ray describes the migrant workers trekking to their native villages as “ghost mutineers stalking the country in search of a home.” “These lives are, of course, not entitled to the city's culture and taste, to its intellect and leisure; these are gross lives,” Ray writes further. The word “gross,” a mathematical term for excess, is specifically used here to capture the unnumbered migrants’ lives. “What seems like a relatively stable social order is constantly being modified, added, subtracted, maintained, and cleaned by the invisible labor force mostly made of migrants,” Ray continues. While terming the migrants as ghosts evokes a certain poignancy, it also dehumanizes and homogenizes a diverse, marginalized group of people. Although the tragic scale of the exodus could not accurately be enumerated at the time, it is now possible to retrospectively analyze Indian media archives and give an approximate number to the verbiage that was in play. As an intervention into this archive of absence, I formulated a dataset containing newspaper (e-paper) stories that appeared when I ran a Google Search with the following phrases as keywords: Migrant Haunting Mumbai Migrant Ghost Mumbai Covid Haunting Mumbai Covid Ghost Mumbai I delimited the database both spatially and temporally. The city of Mumbai became a stand-in for the urban, chosen for being the country’s financial capital. Temporally, I limited the selected articles to those published between 15th March, 2020 and 10th August, 2021. I downloaded the text from these news articles from relevant pages of search results as raw TXT data and eliminated the duplicate results, making sure that each webpage was represented only once in the TXT data file. This data was subsequently input into a Word document where, using the “Find” feature, I located the words “haunt” and “ghost,” highlighting the sections they appeared in. I further transferred these sections to columns to see the frequency of the words and the contexts they were phrased within. Finally, I color-coded repeated phrases, numbering each occurrence. My goal through this exercise was to locate patterns within this particular media discourse which evoked a metaphoric vocabulary of ghostliness. The data I analyzed for these patterns encompassed roughly 106,000 words in total, including headlines, by-lines, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions over the four keyword searches. It is important for me to say that by no means did I conduct a perfect academic study which incorporated all the work that has been produced relating to the migrant exodus. The formulation of the data set was restricted by resources, paywalls, and availability of time so it is meant to be indicative rather than declarative. Therefore, this is not a quantitative analysis, but a qualitative exploration of the use of a specific vocabulary and its implications for understanding a certain media archive. Why is it necessary to think about the vocabulary used to describe this, or any, tragedy? First, without numbers, we have no other way to understand the scale of the lives lost and destroyed. Secondly, understanding language allows us to understand who is permitted to be forgotten or remembered, and who media discourse renders invisible. The absence of numbers of lives can then be understood by investigating who is made a ghost–who is seen to haunt rather than live as a full human being–and how. When we cannot account, we must articulate. There is a long tradition in the social sciences of using the vocabulary of ghostliness and hauntings to explain societal relations. In a 1919 essay titled The Uncanny , Sigmund Freud describes how any change in the way society functions bring with it a sense of deep unsettlement. Karl Marx takes this even further at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto , where he terms communism itself as a specter haunting Europe, invoking ghosts to signify societal churn. More recent scholarship in anthropology has built on tradition, hypothesizing how societies often tell ghost stories as a way of integrating uncomfortable memories into the cultural fabric. In scenarios with no actual historical record or archive, hauntings and ghosts become a means to combat “ institutional forgetfulness. ” With the COVID-19 pandemic and migrant crisis in India, we can see deliberate institutional forgetfulness in action. Here, the vocabulary of ghostliness becomes a tool to grasp public sentiment. Even three years removed from the worst of the pandemic, which disproportionately ravaged the Global South , understanding its impact on human lives is to grapple with ambiguity–intellectual, pragmatic, and experiential. It is to be faced with something that is not quite historical, not quite normal, and not quite visible. It is to engage with a ghost. Gloomy Sunday, 2023, courtesy of Thomash Changmai. In the depths of the night, a lonely soul weeps, Tangled in shadows, where despair seeps. A heart, heavy with the weight of solitude's sting, A melody of sorrow, a dirge I sing. (Inspired by the song Gloomy Sunday composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress and published in 1933.) Accounting, Articulating Within my data set, the word “haunt” in various conjugations (haunted, haunting, et cetera) occurred 29 times. The term was used most often to describe images of the migrant exodus and how the city folk were haunted by the visuals of it. To ascribe a numeric value: out of the 29 references, 11 referred either to “haunting images” or “haunting visuals.” As anthropologists Benjamin Smith and Richard Vokes write in their 2008 article “ Haunting Images ,” the photograph and the ghost “are never far apart.” The two can be interchangeable in their function, “standing in for relationships that cannot or can no longer be performed directly,” and share the similarity of embodying present absences . They further activate an “emotive force through their representation of absent objects, kin and places.” Images from the pandemic are rife with this emotive force as they represent moments of death and tangible devastation, evoking significant grief, and by extension of the vocabulary of haunting, horror. Through images, citizens of the city are forced to reckon with the structural collapse of urban labor networks. In my study, a second pattern emerged: the use of the word “haunting” to describe memory and recollection. There were four references to being “haunted by memories.” Comparing it to the previous pattern, where photographs produced ghosts, memory here is where the lost “normal life, or the remembrance of normality,” resides. During the pandemic, the phrase “new normal” was commonplace. In such an unprecedented time, recent memories felt historical, and indeed haunting given the sense of loss they invoked. The word “ghost” itself appeared in my study 28 times. 21 of these occurrences concerned a place, with 11 referring to “ghost towns,” nine to “ghost villages,” and one to the ghostly nature of abandoned roads. In media discourse during COVID19, the term ghost town was clearly used to describe the emptied urban centers, while ghost villages referred to the rural settings where the population had previously been sparse due to internal migration. During the pandemic, these became the sites of return for the working class who were seeking safety and familiarity. In five instances across the data set, “ghost” was an epithet transferred to the laborers themselves leaving the cityscape. Coupled with migrants already being othered and alienated, this deployment of the language of haunting only served to further exacerbate their marginalization and cement their erasure. A 2022 report from the World Health Organisation suggested that India’s real COVID toll may never be known. According to the report, more than 4.7 million people – a nearly ten times higher statistic than estimates by Indian officials – might have died from COVID-19 infection between 1st January, 2020 and 31st December, 2021. It is not a stretch to postulate that the missing numbers from India’s state statistics might be deaths that occurred in villages or at the homes of those who could not afford medical treatment. Data paucity within India is not a new phenomenon, and it is well-documented that the ones left out are often from marginalized communities . A poem written by Indian filmmaker Kireet Khurana during the lockdown turns attention to the migrant crisis with the following stanza: “Hum to pravasi hain, kya is desh ke vaasi hain? Agar nahi hain insaan to maar do abhi, de do farmaan” (We are migrants, are we (not) residents of this country? If we are not human, kill us now, Give the command) The stanza juxtaposes “ pravasi” (migrant/traveler) with “ desh ke vasi ” (residents of the country). The value of this wordplay comes from the etymology of the terms and their meanings. The root word for both pravasi and vasi is the same–“vas” meaning abode. Therefore, a vasi is one who is of the abode, so its negative suffix pra(vasi) implies one who is separate or othered from their place of abode. However, the term desh ke vasi (residents of the country) often signifies being a citizen. Citizenship and residency are therefore interchangeable in this context. The poem questions the disenfranchisement of migrants by declaring “if we are not human, kill us now,” criticizing the political leadership's unwillingness to provide migrant laborers with humane means of returning to their native communities. In his celebrated essay collection Politics of the Governed , historian Partha Chatterjee categorizes individuals afflicted by infrastructural disenfranchisement as occupying a fringe space. In this fringe or margin, they reside within the city but cannot rely on it for social safeguards. Thus, they are rendered beyond the comfort of being a vasi . This only became more explicit in India through the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite numerous assurances by the government that migrant workers would be safe within the cities , a precedent of haplessness and lost livelihoods led to large masses attempting to leave cities. For most migrant workers, the uncertainty of a treacherous journey back home was preferable to relying on the state for sustenance. The distrust created by constant erasure simply could not be erased by politicians’ promises and press broadcasts. Specters and those who witness David Torri , an anthropologist of shamanism, describes the ghost as first and foremost a story: it “needs listeners more than it needs witnesses.” As researchers charged institutionally with the creation of knowledge, the onus is upon us to bear witness to the lacunae within archives and acknowledge our failures in listening to those who fall through the chasms of documentation. India’s COVID-19 migrant exodus was a humanitarian crisis born out of rightful mistrust held by laborer populations towards urban administration. The ghosts resulting from this exodus, and further exacerbated through media discourse, are not new, but have always existed – the pandemic simply made visible the cracks within India’s neoliberal urban apparatus. Indian cities have continued to grapple with their failure to integrate migrant laborers into their social and cultural fabric in the three years since the pandemic. Despite the significant cost to human life, there has been no socio-political change aimed at remedying the gap between those seen as citizens of the city, and those essentialized as mere bodies for labor. “I felt betrayed twice: by society, because no one around me lent a hand – my landlord kicked me out – and by the state,” a construction worker from Kanpur, Ram Yadav, said in a 2022 documentary made by The Guardian . At the time of the lockdown, he vowed never to return to the city he’d left. A few months later, however, he had no choice but to head back to Delhi. By November 2020, large sections of migrant workers , much like Yadav, had returned to the cities they had left. There was no newfound love for the urban–just desperation in the face of limited job opportunities within rural communities. The disenfranchisement they continue to face is deeply institutionalized. Within most archives their experiences are secondary. The fact that there are no numbers is potent; the state does not account for the working class body, neither in life nor death. In life, they have no stability or voice in the functioning of the very urban centers that rely on their migrant labor; in death, they are merely erased. This erasure reaffirms migrant workers as Chatterjee’s term of fringe figures, or outsiders to the city’s social and cultural fabric. Devoid of agency, the migrant becomes the object of urban anxieties, rather than a subject experiencing them. The city is thus simultaneously run by migrants yet haunted by their absence, with the urban populace haunted in particular, albeit at a comfortable distance, by migrants’ trauma. In other words, the laborer is subject to the whims of the megacity and those who administer it. They become the “other,” pitied by middle-class citizenry, yet still not seen by them as human or equal. As Jacques Derrida puts it in his book Specters of Marx (1994), disjunctures in society, like pandemics, make apparent the anxieties of a place, and the “ghosts” that emerge here are testimonies to alienated labor. By reconciling these specters through scholarship, at the least, we can move forward towards marking the absences within existing records. It is an attempt to integrate significant institutional failure into cultural memory. The production of knowledge is never perfect, but the use of alternative vocabularies as interventions allows us to pinpoint deliberate erasures. Fully understanding the effect of a crisis, of course, does not encompass just metrics, even if imprecise, for its impact. Yet, it is an honest start. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features Mumbai State Government Narrative Internal Migrants Migrant Laborers Ghost Workers State Erasure Vocabulary of Ghostliness Data Paucity Shamanism Complicity Cosmopolitanism Displacement Alienation Institutional Forgetfulness Precarity Refugees State Modernization Narratives Archive Pandemic Kireet Khurana Migrant Traveler Health Epidemic Town and Gown Rural Urban Media Discourse India COVID-19 Archive of Absence Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

AUTHOR Sumana Roy SUMANA ROY is the author of How I became a Tree , Missing: A Novel , Out of Syllabus: Poems , My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories , among others. Her newest book is entitled Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. AUTHOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” COMMUNITY Quintet Priya Darshini · Max ZT · Shahzad Ismaily · Moto Fukushima · Chris Sholar “Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” The closing set from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, capped off two stimulating panels and marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. The performance by the quintet of Priya Darshini (vocals), Shahzad Ismaily (piano, drums/percussion, synth, guitar), Moto Fukushima (bass, shamisen) & Max ZT (hammered dulcimer), and Chris Sholar (electronics, ableton) ushered in new emotional registers, and another period of interpretive possibilities for SAAG, as reflected upon by Darshini. Their set showcases many of the songs from Darshini's debut album, as well as songs about hope and solidarity, and a showstopping rendition of a composition of Emily Dickinson's "Hope is the thing with feathers." Event Photography courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What Does "Solidarity" Mean? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 2: On the Relationship between Form & Resistance ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Brooklyn Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse Jazz Music Classical Music Experimental Music Vocals Hammered Dulcimer Drums Guitar Electronics Composition Contemporary Music Shamisen Alternative Jazz Love in Exile On Becoming House of Waters GRAMMY Periphery Emily Dickinson Atahualpa Yupanqui Protest Song PRIYA DARSHINI is a vocalist with a fresh, imaginative and fascinating sound influenced by Carnatic and South Asian classical music, and deeply syncretic global traditions including Americana, folk, and jazz improvisation. Her debut album Periphery (Chesky Records, 2020) was nominated at the 63rd Annual GRAMMY Awards for Best New Age Album. Based in Brooklyn, Darshini also serves on the Board of Directors of the International Wildlife Coexistence Network , and is a trustee of the Mumbai-based non-profit Jana Rakshita which aids underprivileged pediatric cancer patients, Adivasi children's education, amongst other initiatives. MAX ZT is a Chicago native now based in Brooklyn who had his first encounter with the hammered dulcimer at the age of two. He has been lauded as the “Jimi Hendrix of dulcimer” by NPR , and performed with musicians like Ravi Shakar, Tinariwen, and Jimmy Cliff, among others. Max ZT and Moto Fukushima together form the Brooklyn-based power duo, House of Waters. The band has released two albums, with its debut album, Rising , reaching #2 on the iTunes World Music chart, and the second album hitting #4 on the iTunes Jazz chart. Its sophomore album, On Becoming (GroundUP Music, 2023), was recently nominated at the 66th GRAMMY Awards for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. SHAHZAD ISMAILY is a largely self-taught composer and musician, having mastered a wide array of instruments. Ismaily has recorded or performed with an incredibly diverse assemblage of musicians and has also composed regularly for dance and theater. He was a two-time nominee at the recent 66th GRAMMY Awards, for both Best Alternative Jazz Album for Love in Exile (Verve Records, 2023) with Vijay Iyer & Arooj Aftab, and Best Global Music Performance for the track "Shadow Forces" from Love in Exile . Most recently, Ismaily is part of the new quartet Beings which will release its debut album There is a Garden (No Quarter) in July 2024. MOTO FUKUSHIMA is a Japanese artist currently based in NYC. He is a six-string bass player, composer, and shamisen player. Along with Max ZT, Fukushima forms the duo House of Waters. The band has released two albums, with its debut album, Rising (GroundUP Music, 2019), reaching #2 on the iTunes World Music chart, and the second album hitting #4 on the iTunes Jazz chart. House of Waters' sophomore album, On Becoming (GroundUP Music, 2023), was recently nominated at the 66th GRAMMY Awards for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. CHRIS SHOLAR is a world-renowned music producer and composer and one of the most in-demand guitarists in the world of R&B and Hip Hop music. He has worked with Stevie Wonder, Beyonce, A Tribe Called Quest, Frank Ocean, and Snoop Dogg, amongst many others, and as performed at numerous concerts, and arenas, including Carnegie Hall, the Glastonbury Festival, and the NFL Super Bowl Gala. He is a two-time GRAMMY Award winner from his collaborations with Jay-Z and Esperanza Spalding. Live Brooklyn 25th Apr 2024 JOSH STEINBAUER is an award-winning filmmaker, musical composer, and visual artist. His work has been shown in Heaven, Third Ward, No Moon, Gen Art, H. Lewis galleries, Harvard Art Museum and American Folk Art Museum , and published in Nowhere Magazine, Terrain, The Offing, Moving Poems, Scroll.in, BrooklynOnDemand , and the Times of India, amongst others. Some of his portrait drawings are currently exhibited at the Long Island City Artists' (LIC-A) newest show Drawing Beyond the Surface , curated by Jorge Posada. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

With the rise of militant insurgencies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pakistani state now finds itself in a double bind. Following brutal crackdowns on the PTM at the hands of the state, it is not state-supported groups but Ulusi Pasuns that have emerged at the vanguard of resistance against militancy. THE VERTICAL Swat Youth Vanguards AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR With the rise of militant insurgencies in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, the Pakistani state now finds itself in a double bind. Following brutal crackdowns on the PTM at the hands of the state, it is not state-supported groups but Ulusi Pasuns that have emerged at the vanguard of resistance against militancy. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Reportage Swat Khyber Pakhtunkhwa Pakistan Pashtun Tahafuz Movement PTM Manzoor Ahmad Pashteen Pashtun Nationalism Kabul Chowk Swat Public Uprising Swat Ulusi Pasun Aftab Khan Yousafazai Taliban Militancy Insurgency Police Action Community Building Internet Platforms Social Media State Violence Peaceful Resistance State & Media Student Movements Student Protests Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Reportage Swat 24th Feb 2024 On August 2, 2022, Aftab Khan Yousafazai, a young software engineer from Khwazakhela, a village in Swat, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, returned home. For the young engineer, who grew up during possibly the bloodiest recent chapter of militancy-driven conflict in northwestern Pakistan, the return could not have come at a more inauspicious time. Yousafzai had been away studying software engineering in Abbottabad, another district in the mountainous North. Having finished his degree, he planned to spend leisure time with his family and friends while awaiting his results. The retreat proved to be short-lived, however. Less than a week after his arrival, on August 9, 2022, grainy videos of an injured police officer and other people in the captivity of Taliban in the mountains of Upper Swat surfaced on the internet. The videos triggered fear and panic in the region, as well as the rest of the country, where memories of a brutal insurgency in the scenic district were still fresh. Having seen bloodshed as a child—the district descended into chaos under the Taliban’s reign of terror from 2007-2009—Yousafzai was no stranger to militancy. At its peak, the crisis displaced two million people from the district during a huge military operation to quash the insurgency. The resurgence of militants was unnerving for someone already traumatised by the horrors of Taliban rule. His family and friends were equally distressed, exchanging feverish voice notes and messages with Yousafzai regarding the best course of action. Like many of his ethnic Pashtun peers, who had come of age in the wake of the War on Terror amidst a conflict that shattered—and continues to do so—lives and livelihoods in the border region of Pakistan, Yousafzai had latched for hope onto the Pashtun Tahaffuz Movement (PTM) in his varsity days. The PTM and its outspoken leader, Manzoor Ahmad Pashteen, represented the collective anguish of a population caught up between militant insurgencies, military operations, and their bloody aftermath. The young Pashteen took centre-stage in Pashtun nationalism and delivered a scathing critique of Pakistani state policies in the Northwest. He had an immediate, widespread appeal among the youth of the region whose sentiments found a vociferous advocate in him. The Pakistani state came down hard on the PTM, and as a result, it became a common umbrella for all those who had had enough of the state’s oppressive tactics in the name of security. Yousafzai and his friends kept their distance from the movement despite vowing support for it to avoid arrests and controversies attached to the PTM. With the resurgent Taliban threatening peace in his valley once again, however, the time for indecision ended for him. The young men felt the need to demand an immediate response to such dire circumstances. It was in this state of mind that Yousafzai shared a Facebook post calling for the public to attend a protest in Kabul Chowk against the return of the Taliban. On August 12, 2022, locals turned up at the venue in decent numbers. A few days later, Yousafzai and his friends named their nascent movement Swat Ulusi Pasun or Swat Public Uprising. “We want to have nothing to do with either the military or the militants. Only the masses are suffering in this war,” Yousafzai told me in an interview recently. What started as sporadic militant attacks in the summer of 2022, soon surged into a pattern that suggested a second militant uprising in Swat, as the district witnessed kidnapping for ransoms, murders and roadside bomb attacks throughout September. Swat Ulusi Pasun ’s largest gathering congregated on October 11, 2022, when thousands of people returned its call to protest in Nishat Chowk of Mingora, the largest city in Swat. Among those in attendance were the PTM chief Manzoor Ahmed Pashteen, as well as leaders of several mainstream political parties. Since then, the Swat Ulusi Pasun- inspired peaceful protests have been sweeping large parts of northwestern Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, where the Tehrik-e-Taliban Pakistan, or the Pakistani Taliban, are carrying out attacks with renewed vigour. Motivated by the PTM’s peaceful opposition to militancy and military operations, large gatherings of tech-savvy youths have travelled across large swathes of territory in the province and its restive tribal belt. Wherever there is a major militant attack, youths take to the street in protest and, most of the time, pillory the military and its leadership for the resurgence of the Taliban with provocative slogans. “No one could fight back a peaceful public resistance,” said Yousafzai. Soon after their inception, these protests began to include individuals from institutions such as the police—they, too, were threatened by the Taliban’s activity. In January 2023, a massive suicide blast at the mosque inside the heavily-guarded compound of Peshawar Police Headquarters killed more than 80 and injured 250 others. This attack prompted members of the police force to protest as they, too, blamed the state for its failure to provide security to people. On February 1, several police personnel gathered outside the Peshawar Press Club to protest the militancy and even went to the extent of chanting slogans against the military for its alleged double dealings with the militants. Such protests have happened in the wake of terrorist attacks in Swat, Lower Dir, Bajaur, Khyber, Waziristan, and Peshawar—districts in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province—where large numbers of residents took to the streets to raise their voices against growing incidents of militancy. The rising tide of peaceful resistance in northwestern Pakistan is yet another chapter in the battle against terrorism in the region. In the initial phases of Taliban militancy, Pakistani authorities forced local elders to raise militias or lashkars to combat the onslaught of militancy in their villages and towns. One morning in October 2008, reporters in Peshawar were called to the Badaber police station in Peshawar city’s outskirts for an unusual press conference. We were made to sit inside the cramped building of the police station, waiting for the arrival of Abdul Malik, Mayor or Nazim of the Adezai Union Council. He was detained earlier in August on suspicions of having links with the Taliban after an attack on a police patrol in his village. Mr. Malik was to renounce his links with the Taliban in the press conference upon his release. The wait for Mr. Malik’s arrival took many hours as police personnel tried to reassure the anxious reporters that he was not in their custody and would be presented as soon as an intelligence agency handed him over to them. It was only around noon when Mr. Malik was brought to the police station in an unmarked car. A bulky man with a salt and pepper beard, Mr Malik briefly chatted with reporters and denied having any links with the Taliban but did not open up about his detention. The press conference ended abruptly as Mr Malik left the building surrounded by police security. A few weeks later, he set up the Adezai Aman Lashkar , or Adezai Peace Militia, to combat militancy in the area. Soon after, another lashkar was set up in Bazidkhel village by a local elder Muhammad Faheem, who was engaged in a deadly war in the Khyber agency—a tribal area bordering Afghanistan—with the militant outfit Lashkar-e-Islam . A similar pattern of arming the locals to fight militants was used across entire swathes of the tribal belt and Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province. However, militants’ retribution against the lashkars was harsh. Abdul Malik was killed in a suicide attack in 2009, while bullet-riddled bodies of Mr. Faheem and some of his close associates were recovered from a vehicle in June 2012 in mysterious conditions. The peace militias in other parts of the tribal belt and the rest of the province also did not fare well. Hundreds of tribal elders associated with these anti-Taliban militias were eliminated in ruthless, targeted killings, IEDs, and suicide attacks. The severity of militant rage against lashkars could be gauged from the fact that barely a month after Yousafzai and his comrades set up the Swat Ulusi Pasun, on September 12, 2022, militants killed Idrees Khan in a remote-controlled bomb blast. He was the former head of a peace committee in Swat. On September 16, another former peace committee member was shot dead in Charbagh Tehsil. This was the situation that gave rise to several avatars of Ulusi Pasuns or Public Rising. Youths like Yousafzai had not only witnessed the horrors of militancy but also seen the militants exacting brutal revenge on those who sided with the state. Besides the nonstop violence, however, they had also seen a massive public outpouring of support for PTM’s anti-war rhetoric across Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. This is what inspired them to pursue peaceful resistance. Amidst the state’s crackdown against the PTM, arresting its workers and leaders, and the attendant media blackout of its protests, the emergence of Ulusi Pasuns have provided alternate platforms for people to raise their voices against Talibanization. They are PTM multiplied, local platforms for disgruntled youths—armed with mobile phones and using social media for mobilisation—to rally around their resistance to oppression at the hands of militants and the state. For Yousafzai, this journey for public mobilisation has been full of twists and turns. Unlike most educated youths who try to land a government job soon after graduation, he found himself centre-stage in the biggest youth uprising against systematic violence in Pakistan. Before sending that Facebook post calling for a protest against the Taliban in his native Swat, he had applied for two government jobs, expecting calls for interviews. This seemed unlikely now. One night in August, he was detained for several hours and released after a public outcry against his detention. Soon again, he was arrested a second time, spending 16 days behind bars on charges of disturbing public peace and bailed out by a local court. Yousafzai recalls receiving threatening calls from the Taliban labelling him as a stooge of the Pakistani intelligence. “I argued with the caller on the phone saying the Ulasi Pasuns have nothing to do with intelligence and after all, we are only demanding a peaceful life, right to education and work for our children.” Yousafzai is currently heading the Swat Ulusi Pasun and coordinates activities of similar volunteer organisations, which he has helped organise at the tehsil level. He coordinates these activities through WhatsApp groups, with an eye on the direction that Taliban militancy may take. However, his political activities have also created ripples in his own family life. His father, currently in the United States, is not happy with Yousafzai’s political campaigning and wants him to give up his advocacy and return to a normal life. Despite opposition and pressure from his family to return to “normalcy,” Yousafzai remains steadfast in his commitment to finishing what he has started. ∎ Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

REPORTER María Constanza Costa MARÍA CONSTANZA COSTA is a political scientist, journalist, and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA). She is also a columnist for international news at Panamá Revista . REPORTER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“Take Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun.' Well, it's a working-class family, and it's about upward mobility, but systematic racism is preventing them from having upward mobility. I remember seeing the film first and not even realizing that it was a play. Of course, it's a story about economic apartheid, but I only later saw the resonance in the tradition when I read August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, and later, Lynn Nottage.” | Interview · COMMUNITY Interview · Bangladeshi Diapora Theatre & Bengali Harlem “Take Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun.' Well, it's a working-class family, and it's about upward mobility, but systematic racism is preventing them from having upward mobility. I remember seeing the film first and not even realizing that it was a play. Of course, it's a story about economic apartheid, but I only later saw the resonance in the tradition when I read August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, and later, Lynn Nottage.” Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. How do you give dignity and humanity and a platform for people that are not being represented in the arts, in film, TV, and theatre? SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Interview Bangladeshi Diapora Bangladesh South Asian Theater Working-Class Stories Bertolt Brecht August Wilson Amiri Baraka Lorraine Hansberry Avijit Roy Mel Watkins Black Solidarities Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 11th Sep 2020 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Literary theorist Aneil Rallin rejects the conventions of academic, scholarly writing being didactic. Instead of kowtowing to the distrust of playfulness in academia, he brings to the fore in his research poesis that can purposely by “playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative.” | · COMMUNITY Interview · Radical Rhetoric Radical Rhetoric, Pedagogy & Academic Complicity Literary theorist Aneil Rallin rejects the conventions of academic, scholarly writing being didactic. Instead of kowtowing to the distrust of playfulness in academia, he brings to the fore in his research poesis that can purposely by “playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative.” Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. Along with scholars like Trinh T. Minh-ha and Susan Griffin, I want to reject the notion that academic scholarly writing has to be pedantic, or that it can't be playful or elliptical or weird or whimsical or mixed-genre or creative. There seems to be a distrust in academia, of playfulness and creativity, it's not seen as serious or critical or important. But, I like bringing together lots of different forms, critical writing and anecdotes and notes and analysis and snippets of conversations and fragments and juxtapositions. RECOMMENDED: Dreads and Open Mouth: Living/Teaching/Writing Queerly by Aneil Rallin. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Interview Radical Rhetoric Politics of Citation Rhetoric Rupture Composition Queer Spaces Pedagogy June Jordan Susan Griffin Politics of Location Location Adrienne Rich Complicity Complicity of the Academy Academia Nature of Credibility Corporate Queer Identity Gloria E. Anzaldúa Eunice de Souza Women's Participation Gender Gender Studies Women and Gender Studies in India Queer Activism Nature of Radical Activism Universities Experimental Methods Trinh T. Minh-ha Whimsy Playfulness Centering the Silly Fragments Mixed-Genre Multimodal Personal History Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 18th Jan 2021 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

WRITER Larayb Abrar LARAYB ABRAR is a reluctant third-culture kid based in Toronto. She is an editorial intern at Chatelaine and her work can be found in Xtra, among others. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

FILMMAKER Rasel Ahmed RASEL AHMED is a filmmaker and Assistant Professor of Theatre, Film, and Media Arts at Ohio State University. FILMMAKER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

VOL. 2 ISSUE 2 . Heading 6 Heading 6 . Heading 6 Heading 6 . Heading 6 Heading 6 . Heading 6 Heading 6 . Heading 6 Heading 6 . Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE Article Author Subtitle Article Author

ARTIST Khadijah Rehman KHADIJAH REHMAN (b.1992) is a visual artist based in Lahore, Pakistan. She graduated with a BFA in Painting from the National College of Arts (2017) and works in both traditional and digital mediums. Her work has been on display in galleries locally and internationally, and ranges from gouache paintings and embroideries to digital explorations. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE