Over nearly two decades, the opulence of the Jaipur Literature Festival has only grown and the prestige of attendance has attained unparalleled heights. Yet Torsa Ghosal, of Kaya Press’s imprint Kulhar Books, returned in 2025 with critical realizations about JLF’s core agenda. Reflecting not only on the nationalistic undertones celebrated but also on what was conspicuously absent, Ghosal points to the festival’s failure to meaningfully represent Muslim and Arab voices, and to a troubling insincerity in engaging with the moral crises of our time. | · BOOKS & ARTS Review · Jaipur Spiritually Chic Over nearly two decades, the opulence of the Jaipur Literature Festival has only grown and the prestige of attendance has attained unparalleled heights. Yet Torsa Ghosal, of Kaya Press’s imprint Kulhar Books, returned in 2025 with critical realizations about JLF’s core agenda. Reflecting not only on the nationalistic undertones celebrated but also on what was conspicuously absent, Ghosal points to the festival’s failure to meaningfully represent Muslim and Arab voices, and to a troubling insincerity in engaging with the moral crises of our time. "Year of the Snake" (2020), digital drawing by Chaaya Prabhat. Since launching in 2006, Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been repeatedly called the “Kumbh Mela” of literature festivals. Kumbh Mela is a Hindu religious event held every six to twelve years at the confluence of the three rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati, where devotees convene in numbers unmatched by any other religious gathering in the world. The Kumbh analogy signals JLF’s massive scale and popularity. Indeed, the book festival is a mela, a social spectacle, that brings anywhere between three to five hundred speakers to Jaipur, shuttles them between the venue and the various four- and five-star hotels lodging them, and swishes them off to party in the city’s gorgeous palaces and forts. 400,000 visitors and around 4000 vendors thronged the festival grounds in 2024 according to estimates. Until recently, the staunch religious underpinnings of Kumbh had no direct equivalent in a festival that branded itself as an international “literary show,” and that has hosted a diverse assortment of luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Orhan Pamuk, Kamila Shamsie, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama. But over the last few decades, Hindu religious identity has increasingly defined national belonging and nationalist policies in India. This year’s Maha Kumbh Mela was attended by 4 times as many people as the previous iteration of the event, blazing proof of the upthrust in religious fervour among Indians and diasporic Hindus. JLF’s programming was not immune to the pulls of religious nationalism. The festival kept the crowds sated on pageantry and celebrations which often obscured the ways in which panels and talks questioned the nationalist agenda. Supported by a SALT travel grant , I was at JLF to scout authors in my role as an acquiring editor for Kaya Press’s brand new South Asian imprint, Kulhar Books . Working with Kaya’s managing editor Neelanjana Banerjee and the rest of the Kaya team, Kulhar editors—Rajiv Mohabir, Jhani Randhawa, and I—aspire to publish stylistically and politically imaginative literature; works that unsettle formulaic expectations caging and sanitizing South Asian literary expressions in America. Courtesy of the author. My first afternoon at JLF I heard the British author Sheena Patel speak about her desire for “the now to be captured” in her writing rather than telling a “timeless story,” and in a similar vein, my intention was to get a sense of “the now” of the literary-cultural scene in South Asia, intuiting that the festival would offer some—even if narrow—opening into the ideas and themes dominating the space. Flipping through the festival program, I tried to locate sessions on literary writings from and about South Asia with a focus on contemporary translated literature and newer voices, a task that proved to be somewhat at odds with JLF’s broad-ranging, political establishment- and celebrity-friendly slate of events, a host of which staged flaccid conversations on Hindu mythology, Hindu national and political identities, excitement about the potentials of AI and digital technology, corporate and startup success, even wellness practices. The festival has a “flashy, dazzling quality,” notes Mrinalina Chakravarty in her 2014 book, In Stereotype , which examines the hackneyed tropes found in literary representations of South Asia. At this year’s edition, social media influencers, Bollywood celebrities, and politicians predictably clinched the largest platform—the front lawn. Educator-philanthropist-billionaire Sudha Murthy’s talk in the lawn was attended by her son-in-law, U.K.’s former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Sunak went viral for greeting the lawn’s audience with folded hands in a “namaste,” obeying the nudges of an elderly woman whom Indian media variously identified as his mother and aunt-in-law. A forty-five-minute session on the same stage was allocated to politician and author Shashi Tharoor unpacking the experience of living as Shashi Tharoor. Influencer Prajakta Koli blurted unprompted that her rom com novel contains “discrepancies” that she hoped readers would not pick up. JLF is often “a theatre of the absurd,” as Chakravarty observes, and the “incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious” raise questions about whether the festival coheres. JLF does not cohere— purposefully so. Vendors selling gorgeous brass jhumkas, wooden handicrafts, linen quilts and clothes form the backdrop of high-spirited debates and book launches. It is a carnival, almost in the Bakhtinian sense, a heteroglossia boasting of eclectic interests and priorities, but without the revolutionary zing Bakhtin associates with carnivalesque entertainment. JLF makes no pretence of renouncing hierarchies among speakers, vendors, volunteers, media persons, and spectators. There is a distinctly feudal quality to the “royal” warmth the green vest-wearing volunteers and interns shower on the invitees, riffing on the grand, luxurious image of Rajasthan in both the global and desi imagination. Rajasthan is after all the province where celebrities like Liz Hurley and Priyanka Chopra have hosted their weddings. Like crazy rich desi weddings, the happy hodge podge at JLF trades in stereotypes about South Asia’s mystique and splendour. JLF has a controversial history with respect to free speech, which Amitav Ghosh points out , shows how literature has become “embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances…overtaking, and indeed overwhelming writing itself as the primary end of a life in letters.” As far as frenzied public spectacles in India go, none in recent times can compete with the individual and collective performances of the Hindu religious identity at the Mahakumbh, and the book festival arena is a porous zone. The five-day programming at JLF, what speakers thought permissible to say or not say, the audience questions, the popularity of sessions were all rooted within a broader cultural sphere that in 2025 was flooded with giant billboards starring the tight-lipped smiles of India’s Prime Minister alongside his brother in arms, the ascetic-politician Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Both their portraits were pasted onto scenes showing millions on the banks of a river, coloured a shade of blue so rich that I could tell it could only have been achieved after going through layers of digital filters, if the raw photograph was ever of the muddied brown Ganges I have known and swum in. The hoardings carried taglines like “Message from Kumbh, The Nation Must Unify” and “Sanatan Pride, Maha Kumbh Edition.” Courtesy of the author. Desi internet was trending Kumbh news and memes, minting new viral heartthrobs—hot Sadhus and Sadhvis—through WhatsApp forwards and Instagram reels, plus supplying shock and cringe content, that I and surely other festival attendees dutifully consumed. Young people are showing interest in scriptures, Malashri Lal remarked at a session launching mythologist Sunita Pant Bansal’s A Comprehensive Guide to Indian Scriptures . The slim book introduces Hindu sacred texts like the Puranas, Vedas, and the epics “as it is,” the author insisted, “without my opinion.” The aim is to demystify and correct beliefs about Hindu religious texts. Why, then, does the jacket say “Indian scriptures” rather than Hindu scriptures? A young audience member asked after admitting he was “nervous and worried” to raise the question. And if the book is on Hinduism, have texts from Nepal been included? The publisher Dipankar Mukherjee, who was also on stage, chivalrously swooped in to field the question, rationalizing that they were “trying to be somewhat politically correct to ensure the book reaches the right audience…Where they [the scriptures] started to become codified, recorded that’s part of current India.” He subsequently plugged the festival co-director William Dalrymple’s latest book, crediting Dalrymple for completing “half our work” tracing the influence of Indian traditions and philosophy on other cultures. Mukherjee’s blithe verbal acrobatics for swapping Hindu with India not only aligns with the religion-nation nexus the country’s government has openly adopted in the last decade but also follows the money as it were. Writing for New York Times, Anupreeta Das claims that book festivals are all the rage among India’s youth. On the surface, the hipness of literary festivals bodes well. Das notes young people “are increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English. For these readers, books open worlds that India’s higher education system, with its focus on time-consuming preparation for make-or-break examinations, often does not.” But what are the young people reading in these various languages? What kinds of worlds are books unlocking? The answers are not straightforward. Trapped in a long, slow-moving queue formed in front of a toilet in Amer Clarks, women were commiserating about the shortage of bathrooms at the venue. Interrupting this communal bonding, a woman in her early twenties started to hype up her novel that retells the Hindu epic Ramayana. Ramayana has become something of a foundational text in the Hindu nationalist imagination. The woman pitching her retelling to a captive, pee-holding audience explained that her book followed the love story of the Hindu demigod Lakhsman whom “feminism” has unfairly sidelined. Her pithy spiel echoed a pervasive cultural sentiment wherein Hindu culture and Hindu Gods need constant protection from the evil eyes of liberals and heretics. Another young woman asked for the book’s title to order on Amazon. Some days later, while looking up the book, I stumbled upon the author’s public Instagram grid that featured side-by-side photos of her in JLF and at Mahakumbh. Completing the spiritual chic circuit of JLF-Mahakumbh, she follows in the illustrious footsteps of others like Sudha Murty who took a holy dip at Kumbh days ahead of her JLF session. Browsing the aisles of bookstores and catalogues of Indian publishers gives an impression that pop spirituality is booming in India. OMTV, an “Indic storytelling” app, surveyed its users and found that around 80% of those consuming spiritual content are aged between 18 and 30. At the same time, The Crossword Bookstore on JLF festival grounds had eager customers crowding pretty much every corner, picking up new and old titles, not just the spirituality laced ones. And in an offline and online public sphere dominated by Maha Kumbh , JLF still managed to hold some conversations offering critical and nuanced perspectives on political Hinduism. Courtesy of the author. But among the nearly three-hundred delegates, the festival included just a handful of Indian Muslim speakers. Bollywood celebrities like the director Imtiaz Ali, Huma Qureshi, and Javed Akhtar were part of this roster. Mujibur Rehman, who used a comparative framework drawn from histories of Black resistance to talk about the political marginalization and de-Islamization of Indian Muslims in Shikwa-e-Hind (2024), was challenged by a middle-aged, ostensibly Hindu, ponytailed thought leader among the audience. “I have lots of confusion about the premise of your book…Should we continue to call Muslims minorities with twenty percent population?” the man asked. Rehman told the man his book answers the question and supplemented his response with analogies underscoring how minority identity and minority rights are not simply pegged on numbers or even the success and visibility of a select few. India’s constitution despite its secular promises is inherently majoritarian, he argued, which informs the cultural landscape where Indians clapping at America’s flag do not invite suspicion, but an Indian Muslim boy clapping at Pakistan’s flag is interpreted as sedition. Kashmiri Muslim, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi literary authors were largely absent from this edition. Some absences can be blamed on logistics—Pakistan passport holders have immense difficulty procuring Indian visas at present, unless of course they are Maha Kumbh enthusiast Hindus. Then they are handed Indian visas swiftly . State rules force compliance but even state policies cannot explain all erasures. Theatre actor and director MK Raina who comes from a Kashmiri Pandit family, spoke about owing his career to the state of Kashmir’s policy of allowing free education right from the 1940s, commented on inequities in contemporary India, and criticized the unrealistic portrayals of Kashmir in Bollywood. He left the stage when his co-panelist, the Rajasthani singer and thespian Ila Arun, started enacting a lengthy sequence from an Ibsen play she adapted and partly set in Kashmir, where a character “hurts the mother” and “hurts the motherland.” Raina’s abrupt departure was first extrapolated as resulting from his frustration about the supposed misrepresentation of Kashmir and later as following from his irritation with Ila Arun for hogging stage time. Multiple sessions addressed Israel’s war on Gaza, but the sessions recycled a small group of speakers that included the Indian American author Pankaj Mishra, Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh, Pulitzer-winning American journalist Nathan Thrall, and Israeli British historian Avi Shlaim. The number of Arab authors featured was in the low single digits. A JLF official reportedly interrupted an interview between the Press Trust of India and the Palestinian envoy to India Abed Elrazeg Abu Jazer on the grounds that the festival’s PR team hadn’t sanctioned it. JLF’s speaker lineup suffers from issues common in invite-only prestige events. The curators turn to the same authors and cultural delegates year after year, and even each year, the same names reappear across sessions. The festival seems to be battling two opposing drives: an impulse to represent a diversity of relevant ideas and a desire to wring the most out of a trusted clique of speakers, resulting in conversations that sometimes feel repetitive, sometimes tokenistic. Although the festival is held in the state of Rajasthan and makes decorative use of Rajasthan’s crafts and colours to create Instagrammable corners, Rajasthani authors and Rajasthani literature are not at the forefront. The festival is a shimmery tamasha that, like high-budget high-gloss Bollywood films, is fun to dip in, so long as one is willing to forgo critical questions. The scale of the festival remains something to marvel at. But other literature festivals that have cropped up in India after Jaipur, such as the Kerala Literature Festival and Mizoram Literature Festival , have made more emphatic attempts at grounding their events in their local cultures. JLF, on the other hand, is happy to remain the Chicken Tikka Masala of festivals, palatable to a wide-ranging, somewhat international audience, seemingly representative of South Asia, with a desi man and a Scottish one claiming credits for its origins. Courtesy of the author. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Review Jaipur Jaipur Literature Festival JLF Kumbh Mela Hindu Nationalism religious nationalism Religion Contemporary Literature Literature & Liberation Pop Spirituality Elitist elitism tokenism Representational Space representation suppression 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. 1st Aug 2025 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:

For years, “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” a rallying cry from the 1970s by Zeinab Shaath, was a lost cultural artifact until it was recovered in 2017. In 2024, British-Palestinian label Majazz Project and LA-based Discostan released an EP with the titular song, sitting with startling ease alongside contemporary Palestinian music. BOOKS & ARTS The Tortured Roof For years, “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” a rallying cry from the 1970s by Zeinab Shaath, was a lost cultural artifact until it was recovered in 2017. In 2024, British-Palestinian label Majazz Project and LA-based Discostan released an EP with the titular song, sitting with startling ease alongside contemporary Palestinian music. VOL. 2 PROFILE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR From the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath (1972). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 From the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath (1972). SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Profile Palestine 2nd May 2025 Profile Palestine Zeinab Shaath Music Culture Art Art Activism Resistance Peaceful Resistance Methods of Resistance Majaaz Project Discostan Artifact History Egypt Lebanon Poetry Lalita Punjabi Politics of Ethnic Identity political activism Displacement Nakba Gaza Political Organizing Guitar Acoustic Composer Composition Liberation The Urgent Call of Palestine Rally Protest Poetry Ismael Shammout Palestine Liberation Organization Culture and Arts Division Music Video Occupation Militarism Discovery EP Collaboration Freedom Freedom of Movement Memory Conflict Censorship Genocide Anti-Zionism Communication Community Folk Music Global Protest Muqata Shadi Zaqtan Tamer Nafar Palestinian Music Hip Hop 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. Fifty-four years ago, a sixteen-year-old girl named Zeinab Shaath sat in her bedroom in Alexandria, Egypt, with a guitar and a poem. Her older sister had handed her “The Urgent Call of Palestine,” written by Indian poet Lalita Punjabi, and told her that she couldn’t come out of her room until she had composed music to accompany the words. Shaath came from a politically active family. Her father left Palestine in 1947, just months before the Nakba led to the displacement of 750,000 Palestinians , but he always maintained that they would all return one day. Her Lebanese mother was constantly hosting Gazan students at their home and organizing many fundraisers for Palestine. The musician had been singing for a few years but was hesitant about starting the project. She had never composed music before and was still determining how to become more involved in political organizing. Nonetheless, she got to work. Two days later, she had composed a track that elevated the defiant tone of the poem. Across a fervently strummed acoustic guitar, Shaath sings in an unwavering, golden vibrato that builds intensity and verve as the song progresses. “Liberation banner, raise it high,” she declares in the song's last few seconds. “For Palestine, let us do or die.” Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. Shaath’s powerful voice and unequivocal message resonated widely. In the early 1970s, “The Urgent Call of Palestine” became a rallying cry heard (and subsequently censored) around the world. Shaath’s sister played it on her radio station where it immediately gained popularity. Shaath went on to perform it—and a collection of other musical adaptations of Palestinian protest poetry—everywhere from Beirut to Berlin to Baghdad. The song especially moved Palestinian artist Ismael Shammout , who ran the Palestine Liberation Organization's (PLO) Culture and Arts division in Beirut. He filmed Shaath singing the song in what some historians consider the first Palestinian music video. The master copy of the footage, along with countless other cultural artifacts by Palestinian artists, were stolen from Beirut in 1982 during a mass looting by the Israeli Occupation Forces. “Urgent Call” seemed lost for years until Israeli scholar Rona Sela fought to have it declassified in 2017, by which time momentum around Shaath’s work had lessened. But in March 2024, Shaath started a new chapter in her career: an EP of songs, first released via the PLO in 1972, including “Urgent Call,” was reissued as a collaboration between the Palestinian-British label Majazz Project and the Los Angeles-based label Discostan. Arshia Haq and Jeremy Loudenbak, who run Discostan, discovered the EP via the UK collector James Shambles and then reached out to Mo’min Swaitat, the archivist and label runner behind Majazz Project , to see if he wanted to co-release the album. Swaitat had encountered the record already and felt it was “the greatest Palestinian record we’ve ever had.” Haq and Loudenbak were piqued by the record’s contemporary resonance. “When we play the music in record stores, people stop and listen,” says Loudenbak. “[The state] attempted to erase these songs from the cultural imagination, but they have had an incredibly long life.” “I’m struck by the very hopeful voice of a 16-year-old calling us together.” In March 2024, Arshia Haq, Jeremy Loudenbak, Zeinab Shaath, and Mo’min Swaitat met with me via Zoom to discuss the project . Haq and Loudenbak were in Los Angeles, Shaath in Cincinnati, and Swaitat in London. Shaath and Swaitat reminisced about their homeland. Shaath recalled the beaches her cousins visited until the early hours of the night in 1993 after the first Oslo Accord , which gave them slightly more freedom of movement, as well as the green almonds and olives they brought to her family when they visited Egypt. Swaitat traced his love of music to the memory of the weekly wedding songs he had heard played from car speakers, which created a “psychedelic orchestra” of sound and would continue playing in the streets until 3 am. Of course, their grief emerged in lockstep. By the time we spoke, Shaath had lost 27 members of her extended family in Palestine since Israel’s attack on Gaza began in October of 2023 . Swaitat, meanwhile, had been on the phone all night: Israeli forces had just invaded Jenin. Album cover. Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. Teenage Shaath originally composed “The Urgent Call of Palestine” at a historic moment for Palestinians. Six years before she wrote the song, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) came into being, intending to restore an independent Palestinian state from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And just three years before, Israel occupied Gaza, the West Bank, The Sinai Peninsula, and East Jerusalem after the Six-Day War of 1967 . The amount of Palestinian land that Israel controlled doubled during this conflict, despite later attempts from Egypt to regain control of some of the land. Over half a century later, Shaath’s protest music is just as relevant. Israel has been imposing a land, sea, and air blockade on Gaza since 2008. As of October, 2024, airstrikes in North Gaza continue, even as the ambit of Israel’s attacks has expanded to Lebanon. Incomplete estimates claim that Israel’s systematic campaign of genocide since October has killed over 50,000 Palestinians , according to official numbers. In a piece about Palestinian rap, Vivian Medithi writes that it can feel frivolous to over-emphasize art’s radical potential in such times. And yet, Medithi argues, Israel’s censorship of Palestinian art, music, and culture—especially at protests—is proof of its power. After all, cultural expression is a means of record-keeping, a counter to Israel’s attempts to control narratives about their genocide and occupation in international news and social media. Swaitat explicitly calls Shaath’s project a “failure of the Zionist plan” because it so clearly documents Palestinian resistance, connecting Palestinians across the world. “One of the main targets of Zionism is Palestinian identity and knowledge systems, which is where we save our memory,” he says. “They don’t think of us as a group of people who should exist, and they don't want us to have any control over our cultural heritage or communication.” Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. In addition to the poem written by Lalita Punjabi, the three other tracks on Urgent Call are adapted from poems by three Palestinian poets. As she sings their words, Shaath takes on various identities. A proud parent of eight demanding that history remember him and his family. A political prisoner dreaming of returning to their homeland, and a Palestinian citizen finding the strength to survive in the stones of their walls, in “every drop of rain dribbling over the ceiling of the tortured roof.” Shaath’s plainspoken cadence unites these disparate perspectives She sings alone on each song, her vibrato piercing across simple chord progressions strummed on an acoustic guitar. And yet, the songs feel communal, not only because the various perspectives she adopts offer multiple entry points into the music but also because the sparse folk arrangements use candid, repetitive language that encourages the listener to sing along. “Because these songs are composed in direct language, they can be held and carried by people of different ages, from children to people of an older generation,” says Haq. “The musical compositions lend themselves to being repeated, almost like mnemonics.” On “Resist,” Shaath’s call to action is clearly stated and deeply felt: “They slapped down a paper/And a pen before my nose…The paper they wanted me to blemish/Said ‘Resist’/ The pen they wanted to disgrace/ Said ‘Resist, oh, resist.’” On “I Am an Arab,” Shaath repeats the titular phrase with such force that it lingers long after the song finishes. Shaath also directly involves her audience. With her arrangements so minimal and vocals so rich, it feels as if Shaath’s looking you in the eye, candidly asking rhetorical questions: “Can’t you hear the urgent call of Palestine?” “Are you angry?” It is often argued that Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land is too complex for the average person to comprehend. Shaath’s phrasing cuts through this fallacy with defiance, her vocals evoking longing, fury, and grief to make the reality of Palestinian suffering entirely clear. Beyond Shaath’s efforts to involve the listener in these specific songs, a broader sense of community informed her activism, too. Not only do the lyrics come from translated works of numerous poets, but they were also written at a time of tremendous creative innovation and organization by other Palestinian artists. Many Palestinian artists were spurred into action following the Six-Day War of 1967. The Third Cinema Movement in the 1960s and 1970s established a transnational anticolonial framework for artistic expression. In 1973, the League of Palestinian Artists was created to unify the output of artists across Palestine and “bring a sense of political urgency” to their work: the sound of an entire movement of artists refusing to be silenced . In addition to the organizing and art happening around her, Shaath also looked to Americans protesting racism and segregation in their country, as well as their government’s involvement in Vietnam, for political inspiration. “I would sing ‘ We Shall Overcome ,’ which is used in the U.S. in Black activist spaces, but it was also a Joan Baez song,” Shaath says. “It was very much relevant to us as Palestinians. We sang that, and everyone would sing with me.” You can hear the influence of activists like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez in the plucky, acoustic folk melodies she deploys on the project, as well as her use of guitar and English lyricism. “I used English lyrics because Arabs and Palestinians all know our own history,” she tells me. “We needed the world to know. Even though it’s not a Palestinian or Arab instrument, I thought the guitar would be attractive to the outside world. I felt that people would listen to a song much more than they would read a whole book.” The title track of Urgent Call was—and continues to be—uniquely global in its construction, production, and impact. An Indian woman wrote a poem in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. A few months later, a Palestinian woman living in Egypt transposed the poem into a song that moved hundreds of thousands around the world. Over decades, it became part of an artistic anti-imperial movement that thought beyond borders and saw all struggles as intertwined. This year, American and British archivists are bringing it to entirely new audiences in their countries and beyond. Zeinab in Lebanon. Image from the personal collection of Zeinab Shaath. For Shaath, it’s surprising—and saddening—that her music still resonates so widely. “It blows my mind after all these years,” she says. “Our suffering is still continuing, that’s what it means.” Which also lends credence to Palestinian music as a valuable form of resistance: it must continue. Indeed, Shaath is part of a cohort of Palestinian musicians who recall the past, commune with fellow activists, and create by thinking with street protests. Palestinian rapper Muqata’a samples records his grandparents listened to and had to leave behind when they fled their homes. Oud players in Egypt today revive music that initially served as a protest against Israeli occupation in 1967. Alternative musician Shadi Zaqtan pioneered the Palestinian blues genre to express his sorrow at the ongoing genocide. The daring of this work lies in the strategies of truth-telling in composition: most of these musicians use the most direct, unflinching language possible to document their stories. Often, their work sits alongside darker, more personal reckonings about the reach of their work.“For most of my life, I stupidly believed that art exists to change the world,” Tamer Nafar, often credited as the grandfather of Arab hip hop, has said . “Now, I think about art more like the black box flight recorder on an airplane: it won’t navigate the landing; it’s here to document the crash.”∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

Jamil Jan Kochai reads and discusses "A Premonition; Recollected," a short story published by SAAG that reads like a single, long-drawn breath. The story subsequently appeared in Kochai's acclaimed collection "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories." | · INTERACTIVE Live · Afghanistan Chats Ep. 1 · On A Premonition; Recollected Jamil Jan Kochai reads and discusses "A Premonition; Recollected," a short story published by SAAG that reads like a single, long-drawn breath. The story subsequently appeared in Kochai's acclaimed collection "The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories." Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. In November 2020, SAAG Chats kicked off with an Instagram Live reading and discussion of "A Premonition; Recollected" between its author, Jamil Jan Kochai, and Fiction Editor Hananah Zaheer. The story was originally published in SAAG Volume 1. Subsequently, the story appeared in Jamil Jan Kochai's acclaimed collection The Haunting of Hajji Hotak and Other Stories , a finalist for the 2022 National Book Award, and winner of the 2023 Aspen Words Literary Prize and the 2023 Clark Fiction Prize. Here, Jamil Jan Kochai and Hananah Zaheer discuss the balance between brevity and density in the story, and its inspiration both from the nature of memory and the War on Terror in Afghanistan. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Live Afghanistan Short Story SAAG Chats The Haunting of Hajji Hotak Language Disaster & Language Disaster & Faith Flash Fiction Fiction National Book Award Peshawar Logar War on Terror Memory Discourses of War Allegiance Pashto Farsi Narrators War Crimes Militarism Short Stories 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. 13th Nov 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:

ADVISORY EDITOR Seyhr Qayum SEYHR QAYUM is a painter, photographer, and mixed-media artist currently at the Pratt Institute. She is based in New York City. ADVISORY EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

"The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." COMMUNITY Indentured Labor & Guyanese Politics "The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." Gaiutra Bahadur The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized. RECOMMENDED: Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur. The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized. RECOMMENDED: Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Guyana 2020 Guyanese Election People's Progressive Party Cold War Politics Black-Indian Tensions in Guyana Cheddi Jagan Black Solidarities Forbes Burnham Coolitude Fictional Essay Khal Torabully Avant-Garde Destabilizing History Irfaan Ali David Granger Ethnically Divided Politics Indentured Labor Labor Indo-Caribbean Georgetown Gaiutra Bahadur is an essayist, critic, and journalist. She is the author of Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture , which was shortlisted in 2014 for the Orwell Prize, the British literary prize for artful political writing. Her work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, New York Review of Books, The New Republic, The Guardian, The Nation, The Virginia Quarterly Review, Lapham’s Quarterly, Dissent, The Boston Review, The Los Angeles Review of Books, Ms. Magazine, Foreign Policy, The Washington Post and The Griffith Review . She is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Arts, Culture, and Media at Rutgers University in Newark. 11 Oct 2020 Interview Guyana 11th Oct 2020 Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History Neilesh Bose 4th May Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec FLUX · Poetry Reading by Rajiv Mohabir with Marginalia Rajiv Mohabir 5th Dec Romantic Literature and Colonialism Mani Samriti Chander 13th Nov Six Poems Rajiv Mohabir 31st Oct On That Note:

“When I say that language has failed us, I mean that there is no amount of information you can give a society that necessarily means it will be compelled to act.” COMMUNITY On the Relationship between Form & Resistance “When I say that language has failed us, I mean that there is no amount of information you can give a society that necessarily means it will be compelled to act.” Iman Iftikhar · Sharmin Hossain · Kalpana Raina · Maira Khwaja · Suneil Sanzgiri The second panel from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, which marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. Here, Iman Iftikhar, Sharmin Hossain, Maira Khwaja, Kalpana Raina, and Suneil Sanzigir discuss how the varied forms of storytelling they use inform and are informed by their politics, resistance, and solidarity and how they feel it is most useful. This panel picks up from where Panel 1, "What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity?" ends. What follows is a discussion of form & storytelling with: Iman Iftikhar, a researcher, educator, co-founder and manager of Kitab Ghar, an Associate Editor at SAAG, and an editor at Folio Books. Maira Khwaja, a journalist, multimedia producer, and researcher at the Invisible Institute . She is also an Associate Producer of We Grown Now dir. Minhal Baig, April 2024, Stage 6 Films & Sony Pictures Classics. Kalpana Raina, a co-translator of For Now, It is Night: Stories by Hari Krishna Kaul (Archipelago Books, February 2024) Sharmin Hossain, an abolitionist organizer, artist, and the Organizing Director at 18 Million Rising that organizes Asian Americans. Suneil Sanzgiri, a filmmaker, researcher, artist, whose first solo exhibition, Here the Earth Grows Gold , opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. Photographs courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Quintet Performance The second panel from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, which marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. Here, Iman Iftikhar, Sharmin Hossain, Maira Khwaja, Kalpana Raina, and Suneil Sanzigir discuss how the varied forms of storytelling they use inform and are informed by their politics, resistance, and solidarity and how they feel it is most useful. This panel picks up from where Panel 1, "What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity?" ends. What follows is a discussion of form & storytelling with: Iman Iftikhar, a researcher, educator, co-founder and manager of Kitab Ghar, an Associate Editor at SAAG, and an editor at Folio Books. Maira Khwaja, a journalist, multimedia producer, and researcher at the Invisible Institute . She is also an Associate Producer of We Grown Now dir. Minhal Baig, April 2024, Stage 6 Films & Sony Pictures Classics. Kalpana Raina, a co-translator of For Now, It is Night: Stories by Hari Krishna Kaul (Archipelago Books, February 2024) Sharmin Hossain, an abolitionist organizer, artist, and the Organizing Director at 18 Million Rising that organizes Asian Americans. Suneil Sanzgiri, a filmmaker, researcher, artist, whose first solo exhibition, Here the Earth Grows Gold , opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. Photographs courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Quintet Performance SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Panel 2 of the event "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse" held on 30th March 2024. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Panel Language Solidarity Films Film-Making Capital Investigative Journalism Criminal Justice Abolitionism Solidarity: Across the Disaster-Verse Prisons Police Personal History The Petty Self Kashmiri Struggle Translation India Anti-Colonialism Two Refusals Goa Hybrid Multimedia Sham-e-Ali Nayeem Portuguese Nationalism Afro-Asianism Bandung Conference Angola Mozambique Sita Valles Portuguese Communist Party Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola Angolan Liberation Youth/Police Project Act of Listening Stop and Frisk IMAN IFTIKHAR is a political theorist, historian, and amateur oil painter and illustrator. She is an editor for Folio Books and a returning fellow at Kitab Ghar Lahore. She is based in Oxford and Lahore. SHARMIN HOSSAIN is a Bangladeshi-American queer Muslim organizer and artist, from Queens, New York. She is the Organizing Director at 18 Million Rising , building national Asian American political power that contributes to movements for racial justice, abolition, anti-militarism, and democracy through political education, and deep base building. She was the Campaign Director of the Liberate Abortion Campaign, managing the coalition of more than 150 reproductive justice and rights organizations, groups, and abortion providers fighting for abortion access. KALPANA RAINA is a senior executive with extensive financial and management experience in the US and internationally. She serves on the boards of Information Services Group , and Words Without Borders. Her collaborative translation project of stories from the Kashmiri language, For Now, It Is Night, was published in Winter 2023 by Harper Collins in India and Spring 2024 by Archipelago Press in the United States. MAIRA KHWAJA is an educator and multimedia producer. She is the director of public strategy at the Invisible Institute . Her work centers on the Youth / Police Project , where she works with young people most affected by policing in the South Side to shape new discussions and efforts around public safety. She was a 2021 Leaders for a New Chicago award winner. She worked as an associate producer on We Grown Now (dir. Minhal Baig), a film about children in now-demolished high-rise public housing. Her work has been published in the South Side Weekly , The Funambulist , and The New York Times . SUNEIL SANZGIRI is an artist, researcher, and filmmaker. Spanning experimental video and film, animations, essays, and installations, his work contends with questions of identity, heritage, culture, and diaspora in relation to structural violence and anticolonial struggles across the Global South. His first institutional solo exhibition Here the Earth Grows Gold opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. His films have circulated at film festivals and institutions globally, including at the International Film Festival Rotterdam, New York Film Festival, Hong Kong International Film Festival, Criterion Collection, among others. 17 Apr 2024 Panel Language 17th 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. Ten Rupee Note Ria Modak 17th Feb The Cost of Risk in Bombay’s Film Industry Nihira 5th Aug What Does Solidarity Mean? Azad Essa · Heba Gowayed · Tehila Sasson · Suchitra Vijayan 8th Apr Dissident Kid Lit Saira Mir · Shelly Anand · Vashti Harrison · Simran Jeet Singh 20th Dec Two Stories Nabarun Bhattacharya 6th Oct On That Note:

During the general election, prominent Indian political parties vied for villagers' affection in the Sundarbans, albeit turning a blind eye to the ongoing climate catastrophe. As demands for climate-conscious infrastructure and humanitarian relief go unappraised, people in the region are reckoning with the logical consequences of that apathy. | Dispatch · THE VERTICAL Dispatch · Sundarbans Sinking the Body Politic During the general election, prominent Indian political parties vied for villagers' affection in the Sundarbans, albeit turning a blind eye to the ongoing climate catastrophe. As demands for climate-conscious infrastructure and humanitarian relief go unappraised, people in the region are reckoning with the logical consequences of that apathy. Backwaters, courtesy of Radhika Dinesh. In Satjelia village, nearly a hundred kilometres from Kolkata, the largest city of eastern India, every family lives with memories of disaster. In the last week of May, they were again in panic with the announcement of Cyclone Remal hitting the eastern part of India. They spent sleepless nights at the makeshift relief centre fearing that their homes will again be lost, their crops will again be destroyed, and their land will turn unfit for agriculture for a long time with saline water flooding fields. “I still haven’t been able to recover fully from the losses I suffered from Cyclone Alia in 2009,” says Srimanti Sinha, who lives in a small hutment about a kilometre away from the river. Her home was swept away in the cyclone. Every time there is a storm, she is reminded of that time. “We keep praying that the water levels do not rise up enough to breach the embankment again.” This time, though, just before Cyclone Remal hit eastern India, candidates for the 2024 general elections paid the village a visit ahead of voting on 1st June. Every major party had fielded a candidate for the region with the main contestants being from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), the Trinamul Congress, and the I.N.D.I.A alliance. The candidates spoke about violence, religious issues, development, ending corruption, and building a strong nation. Somehow, they managed to skip over far more immediate concerns . In Satjelia, the demand is for stronger dams and embankments to protect the land from floods. The people also want support for farmers to reduce migration for work to faraway states like Kerala and Andhra Pradesh. “What [politicians] have spoken about is important for us too,” Sinha says. “But I wish they also spoke about what we need here the most.” Satjelia is situated in the middle of a ring of islands in the Sundarban delta: home to the largest mangrove forest in the world and over four million people. Like Sinha and others in Satjelia, people in several parts of the delta have suffered losses from cyclones and steadily rising water levels. In the past two decades, the sea level in the Sundarbans has risen by three centimeters a year, according to satellite imagery and media reports , which is among the fastest coastal erosion rates globally. In 2021, Cyclone Yaas destroyed over three lakh homes as seawater breached embankments in many parts of the state. Before that, tropical cyclones—whether Fani (May 2019), Bulbul (November 2019), or Amphan (May 2020)—battered this region. Each time, embankments were breached, and saline water entered agricultural land, causing immense loss of earnings and subsequent distress migration. Among these, Amphan was the most severe, killing over 100 people and leaving hundreds of thousands homeless. After repeated losses to their land and belongings, most young people from islands like Sagar and Mousuni have migrated to the country’s southernmost states, Kerala and Tamil Nadu, over a thousand kilometers away, in search of new livelihoods. They now work as daily wage labourers and contract workers at construction sites, in factories, and on large fishing vessels. Those still living close to the water in Sundarban are desperate to move away, but they receive little to no assistance from the government. After big storms, there are announcements of relocation for victims. According to people in the villages, however, not much of that is seen happening. Bapi Bor, who lives in Bankimnagar, a village on the island near the Bay of Bengal, says homes are flooded even during high tides in parts of the delta, including Sagar Island. Sagar Island is a hub of climate refugees, being one of the largest islands in the delta. People have shifted here from small neighbouring islands like Lohachora and Ghoramara, which have been sinking in the past two decades. Now, as the water levels continue rising and Sagar Island keeps sinking, these refugees are again on the verge of losing their homes. The Sundarban delta, despite being one of the most ravaged areas by climate change globally, has been met with staggering apathy from the Indian political class. Meanwhile, a tussle between the central and state government in West Bengal has further exacerbated the poor quality of life in the Sundarbans. Many small dams throughout the islands were maintained by local construction labourers, whose work was compensated with money from the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act of 2005. This national program for employment security ensured 100 days of work for people in rural India. “That money has stopped coming from the central government as they have accused the state government [of West Bengal] of corruption,” says Tanmay Mandal, a member of the village council in Rangabelia village near Satjelia. He explains that this is a serious problem for the islands since much work was done under that scheme, from maintaining earthen embankments to planting mangroves. On paper, the major political parties acknowledge the climate crisis—to varying degrees, as would be expected. BJP’s manifesto mentions it briefly, focusing more on “nature-friendly, climate-resilient, remunerative agriculture” and “coastal resilience against climate change.” The manifesto of the Indian National Congress has more detailed plans with a 13-point program under the heading “Environment, Climate Change and Disaster Management.” Meanwhile, the Trinamool Congress manifesto is more specific to Bengal and includes the crisis of the Sundarban delta. They mention specifically that “TMC will implement strategies to protect the rivers of Bengal, including all the vulnerable riverbanks of the state, from erosion and to safeguard communities from floods.” And yet, as the campaigns in West Bengal became more fervent, climate change remained a curio of the manifestos. In the speeches and rallies, it was lost amidst loud rhetoric about religion and rising prices. To be sure, this indifference is not limited to the delta. As the general elections rolled on from 19th April to 1st June, several parts of India were hit by a heat wave that claimed over 56 lives, of which 33 were polling officers. That tragedy, too, had little impact on the campaigns. According to Samir Kumar Das, a professor of political science at Calcutta University, the unfortunate reality of climate change is that it is only discussed when there is controversy. In other words: when the display of apathy becomes untenable, and crises become political liabilities. “The media is usually after the spectacular stories,” says Das. “But rising water levels or distress migration happens slowly. So while we see a lot of coverage after a storm, we have no idea how many people had to migrate eventually.” Across the board, political attention remains woefully inadequate as floods, heat waves, and droughts increase with the impact of climate change. In the face of such a fragmented and superficial political response, Das proposes a larger comprehensive approach, such as a central policy for distress migration. At the same time, Das notes that the climate crisis is being discussed more as it is increasingly affecting the cities in the form of a water crisis and unbearable heat waves. “The media cannot ignore it now,” he says. Das sees a shift in people's response to the crisis in the Sundarbans. “People are more vocal about what they need,” he observes. “Alms after a storm are not enough to satisfy them.” Instead, people are asking more difficult questions about the dams and infrastructure that are indicative of the broader scope of the problem. Some, of course, are intervening themselves. “It could be the beginning,” Das suggests, “of a new kind of pressure the political organisations can feel.” Then again, who can say how long it will take for apathy to become untenable? ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Dispatch Sundarbans Climate Change Satjelia Calcutta Cyclone Remal Cyclone Alia Elections 2024 Indian General Election West Bengal Refugee Crisis Refugees Climate Migrants Trinamul Congress I.N.D.I.A alliance Dams Embankments Rural Farmers Sundarban Delta Mangrove Forest Cyclone Yaas Tropical Cyclones Cyclone Amphan Agriculture Wage Labor Migration Kerala Tamil Nadu Contract Workers Bay of Bengal Bankimnagar Climate Refugees BJP Disaster Management Congress Riverbanks Erosion Manifesto Campaign Promises Electioneering Mitigation Sagar Island 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. 24th Aug 2024 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:

"In Ayodhya’s sacked Mogul masjid / vultures scrawl Ram on new temple bricks. / Brother, from this mandir of burning" | · FICTION & POETRY Poetry · Guyana Six Poems "In Ayodhya’s sacked Mogul masjid / vultures scrawl Ram on new temple bricks. / Brother, from this mandir of burning" Artwork by Kareen Adam for SAAG. Monoprinted, digitally-animated collage, ink on paper (2020). Ghee Persad I. You know straight away it’s ghee and not oil but you can’t eat it without gambling for the price of home-feelings, you may soon lose a toe, then a foot, then your leg. Call it faith—like drinking Ganga water? Call it an offering, like this sweet, that stood at the bronze feet of the ten- weaponed, tiger-riding Devi. You’ve recounted the tale of how she slew the demon-headed asura who made a compact with the gods so strong they trembled in heaven, how sugar is also divine and terrible. II. First hot the karahi with ghee and paache de flouah till ‘e brown-brown den add de sugah and slow slow pour de milk zat ‘e na must get lumpy. Like you mek fe you sista fust picknki ke nine-day, how you tuhn and tuhn ‘am in de pot hard-hard you han’ been pain you fe days, but now you see how ovah-jai you sistah face been deh. You live fe dis kine sweetness. You eat one lil lil piece an’ know dis a de real t’ing. Like when a-you been small an’ you home been bright wid bhajans play steady, how de paper bag wha’ been get de persad became clear from de ghee you been hable fe see you own face. III. You pass though ever kind watah, there is always new life to celebrate. Seawall At Morning Georgetown, Guyana 2019 What starts at night startles the dawn: rain water replenishes the trench lotus stalks and petals stand tall Seawall signs painted Namasté in acrylic Beyond, the sea silts brown as mud as a frigate soars wings of stone. And beyond: a ship with sails from 1838 I look twice— an oil rig? Another form of bondage? Pandemic Love Poem One by one the yellow jackets leave their nest, a hole covered with decaying leaves that warm the ground and an inert queen they’ve fed all autumn. What sleeps inside will one day burst into a wind of wings. What will wake a sleeping queen? Beneath my waist growing larger, the sting of nights one by one, when I am stranger and stranger to you. We sleep in a converted porch, wooden siding, the wall that insulates what’s inside it which is not you, nor is it me. The bedclothes stiffen with cold. Remember me? One by one peel the yellow sheets from our nest. Prick me with your heat from sleep. Place a cardamom pod under my tongue. Come, dissolve with me. Sita ke Jhumar स्टाब्ब्रुक के बाजार में अंगूठिया गिरी गयल रे। स्टाब्ब्रुक के बाजार में अंगूठिया गिरी गयल रे। हमसे खिसियाई बाकी हमार गलतिया नाहीं । सास करइला चोखा खावे, ससुर दारू पिये। ससुराल में परदेसिया रोटी थपथपे अउर दाल चउंके। आमवा लाये भेजल हमके जीरा लाये भेजल हमके। बाकरा ठगल हमके संगे जाने ना माँगे है। गिनिप लाये भेजल हमके जमुन लाये भेजल हमके। ससुराल में परदेसिया, मासाला पीसे अउर बड़ा तले। ओरहन पेटाइहे हमार माइ के, बाबा से खिसीयाइहे। साँइया खिसियाई हमसे गलतिया नाहीं हमार रामा। स्टाब्ब्रुक के बाजार में अंगूठिया गिरी गयल रे • stabroek ke bajar mein anguthi giri gayal re stabroek ke bajar mein anguthiya giri gayal re hamse khisiyayi baki hamar galtiya nahi saas karaila choka khawe sasur daru piye sasural mein pardesiya roti thapthape aur daal chaunke aamwa laye bhejal hamke jira laye bhejal hamke backra thagal hamke sange jane na mange hai guinip laye bhejal hamke hamun laye bhejal hamke sasural mein pardesiya, masala pise aur barah tale orahan petaihai hamar mai ke baba se khisiyai hai saiya khisiyaiyi hamse galtiya nahin hamar rama stabroek ke bajar mein anguthiya giri gayal re • Me ring fall from me finga a Stabroek. Me husban’ go vex. He mudda’ wan’ eat karaila chokha, he faddah suck rum steady. Me na nut’in’ to dem. Me does clap a-roti an’ chounke de daal. Me husban’ send me a market fe buy mangro an’ fe get jeera. Backra been tek me ‘way wid dem come, me na been wan’ fe come ‘way. Me husban’ send me mus’ buy guinip an’ jamun. Me na no one fe he mai-baap. Me does pise de masala me does fry de barah. ‘E go sen’ complaint to me mumma an’ vex wid me faddah. Me husban’ go vex wid me but nut’in’ me na do. Me ring fall from me han’ a Stabroek. • My ring slipped from my finger, in Stabroek market. My love will be angry for what was his fault. His mother’s eaten karaila chokha his father’s sucked rum. I’m a stranger in their home, clapping roti, spicing daal. My love sent me to buy mangoes, he sent me to buy jeera. Backra kidnapped me; I didn’t want to go. My love sent me to buy guinips, to buy jamun. I’m a stranger in their home, grinding spices, frying barah. He will complain to my mother, gripe to my father. My love, it’s not my fault. My ring fell off in Stabroek market. IN SHIPS [HONORING MAHADAI DAS’ “THEY CAME IN SHIPS”] West— They came dancing and despondent hungry gaunt alone do not forget the field or your blood I lost the yokes of rage in chains. Janam Bhumi In November of 2019 the Indian courts allowed the Modi administration to construct a Ram temple at the site of the demolished 16th-century Babri Masjid built by the Mogul ruler Babur. On August 5, 2020 they broke ground for the new mandir. Jai Sri Ram, now god of murder. What is real, Rushi, the forest is now deforest, home its own undoing? Trench lotuses hard as dicks release truth, even the skinks and hawks shrink back into scarcity. What of shanti—? In Ayodhya’s sacked Mogul masjid, vultures scrawl Ram on new temple bricks. Brother, from this mandir of burning, each sunrise mantra shoots itself a poisoned arrow. Each snake prays. The unlit path sparkles maya. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Poetry Guyana Indo-Caribbean Bondage Colonialism Mahadai Das Babri Masjid Ayodhya Historicity Georgetown Pandemic Creole Guyanese-Hindi Ram Temple Oceans as Historical Sites Personal History Antiman The Taxidermist's Cut The Cowherd's Son Cutlish Histories of Migrations Code-Mixing Multilingual Poetry 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. 31st Oct 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:

Violent clashes along the Assam-Mizoram border have a 150-year-old history. The recent border flare-ups may appear most visibly in the superficial disputes of state parliaments, but they have, in truth, roots in both militarism and political economy—particularly the illicut trade of the areca nut—that undergird the construction of ethnic identities. | · FEATURES Reportage · Assam-Mizoram Assam, Mizoram, and the Construction of the "Other" Violent clashes along the Assam-Mizoram border have a 150-year-old history. The recent border flare-ups may appear most visibly in the superficial disputes of state parliaments, but they have, in truth, roots in both militarism and political economy—particularly the illicut trade of the areca nut—that undergird the construction of ethnic identities. No Man's Land: The disputed region near Singhua saw violent clashes between the forces of Mizoram and Assam leading to the death of 6 Assam policeman on duty on the 26th of July 2021 in Singua, Assam, India. Courtesy of Abhishek Basu. In July 2021, violent clashes along the “no-man’s land” border between Assam and Mizoram erupted, the latest in a conflict that dates back to over a century . This time, however, the clashes were accompanied by a battleground along party lines. In the lead up to India’s 75th Independence Day, Mizoram, the only remaining non-Saffronised, Congress-backed state in the northeastern region of India, seemingly became a target for India’s ruling party, the BJP, and its project to establish politically motivated “peace.” The seven sister states in the northeastern part of India are well acquainted with sporadic bouts of violence along their borders. The dispute along the border between Assam and Mizoram centers around contentious claims about where the exact border lies. Mizoram claims 509 square miles of the inner-line reserve forest under an 1875 border demarcation, a claim Assam rejects based on a demarcation in 1933. In turn, this contentious space has long become a locus for the political aspirations of both regional and central ruling parties and powerful groups. Following the violent clashes in July 2021, news reports quoted villagers in Mizoram as describing the situation as “a war between two countries.” The optics were indeed strange: two police forces of the same country—albeit different states—engaged in a violent shootout against each other. 48 hours before the first clashes, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah had met with the Northeast Democratic Alliance (NEDA) to discuss the possibility of a border settlement. Over the next few weeks, the series of police firings that began in Kareemganj, Hailakandi, spread to the Cachar district of Assam. The renewed conflict has deeper roots: on a macroscopic level, contemporary political, cultural, and economic structures continue to bolster the active construction of enemies, within and without, for both the Assamese and the Mizo populations. What appears to be behind the violent clashes along the 165km-long fluid border—alarming in breadth and scope—in the region is a complex game of both ethnic identity politics as well as the central government’s agenda of putting an end to the Burmese supari or areca nut (often called betel nut) trade, an economy in which locals from both states are involved. The import of Burmese areca nut is now illegal in Mizoram , but continues to feature in vested economic and political interests that make up the fragile peace along the Assam-Mizo border. Assam has unresolved border disputes with all four of the largely tribal states that have been carved out of it since Independence. This past November, at the border with Meghalaya, the Assam Police killed six people . In each case many diverse communities in the hilly and forested northeastern region are imbricated, with many array of exports; in each case, the conflict is oversimplified in mainstream media narratives which ignore how identity and political economy become intertwined, and few point out the common charge placed on Assam: that much of its incursions occur without consent and punishment, and regularly trammel either already-codified or customary rights that communities have over their lands. Recently, much was made of an agreement between Assam and Mizoram in the form of a joint statement. While the statement by both the state governments to amicably resolve the matters of unrest along this border have reached the third round of talks, a high-level delegation from Mizoram expressed that "there has been huge unrest among the areca nut growers in Mizoram on account of problems being faced in the transportation of their produce to Assam and other parts of the country." The joint statement also seemed to flatten the nature of the conflict, simply stating that "economic activities such as cultivation and farming along the border areas would be allowed to continue regardless of the administrative control presently exercised by either state at such locations... subject to forest regulations and after informing the deputy commissioners concerned." The problem of the in-between in this region, however, cannot be mitigated with such generalities which highlight a kind of identity performance about border disputes that tie into political parties' agendas. This past December, the opposition in the Parliament of Assam staged a walkout , aggrieved about the perceived lack of action against Mizoram after a school in Cachar district of Assam was allegedly occupied by Mizo students. Meanwhile, the plight of local areca nut farmers goes generally unnoticed in Parliament. December 2022, six vehicles carrying areca nut into Mizoram were set ablaze , allegedly by Central Customs and Assam Rifles, which regularly prevent the export of areca nut from Mizoram and Tripura by seizing them at the border. Regardless of the party responsible, an areca nut growers' society in Mizoram, Hachhek Bial Kuhva Chingtu Pawl (HBKCP) argues that farmers are suffering because the Assam Police are unable (or unwilling) to verify if areca nuts from Mizoram are local or foreign. The Mizoram government too has come under fire for its laxity with smuggling, or care for farmers. Despite the entangled politicking and trade relations between Assam and Mizoram, however, there is a deeper history of the Mizo peoples being seen as the “other.” This has only intensified in recent years, as has the illicit trade of the areca nut. Whether borne out of an acute sense of cultural or political difference, the stereotypes that circulate in Assam deploy the Mizos’ native language, their Western convent education, or their land use, to construct notions of fundamental differences in identity. Who “they” refers to, however, as is often the case, is vague and context-dependent. The Assamese in general seem to mean the Mizos, but locals often mean politicians, police mean locals, and locals may also mean their wives, many of whom hail from villages across the border. In 2021, we visited the village of Lailapur, in the Cachar district of Assam, where residents had pelted stones at policemen from Mizoram who had previously clashed in 2020 with residents of Vairengte, a town in Mizoram’s own Kolasib district, exemplifying how any border is insufficient to explain the blurred nature of the conflict. Imtiaz Akhmed a.k.a. Ronju, was born and grew up in Lailapur. He is one of several truckers who ferry goods such as areca nut and black pepper between Assam and Mizoram (goods that are smuggled into India from Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, or Indonesia). He also has a Mizo wife, and claims that their son has the cutest mixture of the facial features of the two sister states, while simultaneously asserting that there are fundamental differences between the Assamese and Mizo peoples. A few locals of Lailapur who helped set up an electric pole for this shed/post of the Assam police officers wait for permission to go and have lunch at their homes on the other side of the police barricades, in Lailapur. Courtesy of Abhishek Basu. From Ronju’s perspective, the areca nut trade is at the core of the conflict on a local level: “What can we do if the betel nut is cheaper on that side? They [the Mizos and the Burmese] have been in this business for long enough to establish a monopoly. A kilo of betel nut sells for INR 128 there, while it's INR 300 here.” But despite the monopoly, working in Mizoram has its advantages for Ronju. “I have big connections with ministers [in Mizoram] who make life easier for me by way of permissions. I get supari here for the Assam State Police at times too! Currently, my truck, loaded with tatka [tight] Burmese supari, is waiting at the border because of the blockade. The Mizos themselves will help unload it on this side though,” he cackled. Ronju emphasizes difference, but his family and work hint at complex aspects of lived reality in towns along the border. Of course, the complexities are often cynically flattened by local political parties who rely on enflaming the conflict. Soon after the initial clashes last year, Assamese politicians and ministers arrived in Lailapur. The press, both local and national, flocked to them in front of a police barricade. The Organizational Secretary of the Assamese political party Veer Lachit Sena (VLS), Srinkhal Chaliha told the media, “We will not tolerate any threat. The Assamese people will give an appropriate reply!” Locals and groups most impacted by the clashes observed the spectacle. They crowded on both sides of the narrow highway that leads to Lailapur and ends at the Assam Police barricade, located 5 kilometres away from the actual border. Several witnesses shook their heads in disappointment over what they perceived to be the Assam government's cowardice: to many, not giving statements at the border itself, or not strongly condemning repeated acts of aggression from the Mizo side of the border—where many local civilians are believed to have been seen by the Assam State Police officers—seen equipped with light machine guns (LMGs) provided to them by alleged extremist groups backing the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) government. It is important to note that Mizoram is the only state among the seven sister states of Northeast India that has yet to turn saffron, or be in alliance in any way whatsoever, with the right-wing BJP (despite short-lived alliances with the BJP and MNF part of the BJP-led coalition at the Centre, in Mizoram the party has historically allied itself with Congress ). The strong response expected from the Assamese government to counter repeated jibes from the Mizos, however, never materialized. Ronju, a local businessman, explained: "One call from the Mizo Church and MZP (Mizo Zirlai Pawl, a powerful student organization with a long and antagonistic history with the Centre and a shared relationship with the ruling MNF), and you will find village after Mizo village come together in solidarity, bearing arms like LMGs (lightweight machine guns) that too! There's nothing like that here in Assam. We're too divided." He added that he was proud of having driven through the perilous Mizo terrain all the way to Aizawl, the capital of Mizoram, several times. Ronju, who is a seemanto-bashi or a border resident, holds similar views as many of the locals standing along the highway leading to the barricades. They expect the Assamese government to take a strong stance in the face of perceived Mizo homogeneity and solidarity, as well as support from the Church. The juxtaposition of Mizo identity and Assamese nationalism is reflected in geographical landmarks along the border: the last Indian symbol on the Assamese side is a temple and on the Mizo side, a Church. Many locals on the Assamese side of the border as well as the second in command of the CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force, India's largest Central Armed Police Force) battalion posted in Fainum, Assam, talk about Mizos as if they were a warrior tribe. They believe that Mizos kill on a whim; accentuate their cultural differences, food preferences and eating habits; and speak Mizo instead of Hindi or English. Such sentiments strengthen the perception that there are fundamental differences between the two communities, despite their obvious closeness either in proximity, occupation, or familial ties. "They believe they are Mizos first. For them, the [Indian] nation is secondary. Someone needs to sit down and reason with them," says S. Debnath, Barak Valley resident and former member of the Forum for the Protection of Non-Mizos. Debnath believes Mizos feel like this because of particular state practices: “There's the case of the Inner Line Permit mandatory for anyone wishing to enter Mizoram, which makes them [the Mizos] feel like they have a sovereign right to their land. They allow the Burmese in when it comes to the business of Burmese supari, but not people like us who are from other states of India." Mizoram also enjoys other affordances that allow Mizos to take autonomous decisions, like the Inner Line Permit (ILP), which evidently frustrates the residents of the Hindu-majority Barak Valley of Assam. Debnath, like several others, does not consider metrics such as Mizoram's literacy rate, population size, and economic growth that are used to explain their sovereign status—most of which comes from tribal autonomy guaranteed over the Lushai Hills, provided for in Schedule Six of the Indian Constitution. Mizoram has one of the country's highest literacy rates. Its Oriental High School is among the first convent schools established by the British in Silchar, an economic hub in the contested Barak Valley of Assam. The school also has residential quarters for their mostly Mizo staff and teachers who form a large part of the closely-knit Mizo community in Assam. Since the Mizo Church is reluctant to involve itself in the local politics of the region, the staff and teachers at Oriental High School have been asked not to share their political opinions and to stay entirely professional. Rati Bora, another seemanto-bashi , has two sons who work on farms on either side of the border. Her son who works on the Mizo side earns more than his brother, presumably because Mizoram’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the country. On July 26, 2021, Rati Bora heard the shots fired by policemen on both sides of the border and feared for her life. Her sons begged her to evacuate. She left home with her family members and elderly parents and headed for her sister’s house in the neighboring town of Silchar. The incident was terrifying for border residents like Rati at that time. Now, however, the local tea shops opened by a few families dwelling right beside the police check post in Dholakhal are flourishing, she says. Rati Bora overlooking her patch of green, now taken by the CRPF to establish camps and diffuse tensions between the two states of Assam and Mizoram. Singhu, Assam, India. Courtesy of Abhishek Basu. We watched as four local boys from the Cachar district of Assam struggled to set up an electric pole. The pole would serve as a post for the state police that would be stationed there at night for a few weeks. Later as the boys crossed the police barricade to eat their lunch of bhaat (rice) at their homes, we watched as onlookers stared at them with suspicion. Young men from bordering villages must always keep their aadhar ID cards on themselves, and even guests visiting their homes must carry their identification documents. The performativity of nationalism takes on a certain intensity for residents of this region. Locals like Ronju and Rati are intimately familiar with this performance, and with an eye to the cross-border trade, tend to hold a more nuanced view of the changing economy of Silchar. “[Despite the suspicion and discrimination], at least now seemanto-bashis from Lailapur and Sighua villages are getting some recognition,” says Rati. “Previously girls wouldn't ever want to get married to boys from here, like my two sons. Now at least there's a chance. It's not so remote anymore… there are so many SUVs and Boleros zipping by,” she says, referring to the many politicians she had seen in her area. Taking us away from the blame game at play in this region is the plight of the injured policemen of the Assam State Police, a few still waiting for doctors to remove pellets shot from the handmade guns of Mizo locals. Stuck in a rut because of delayed discharge papers and an inaccessible, unresponsive healthcare system, the policemen have issued multiple statements on maintaining peace and order in the region that are very similar to those of their politicians. Some policemen wrap the pellets removed from their bodies in delicate tissue paper and keep them in their pockets as a token of pride. Some of them eagerly share videos they recorded on their smartphones or shared by villagers on the Mizo side of the border. Until a time comes when the region’s employment issues are solved instead of vague assurances that the help mandated by the Employment Guarantee Act; until a time comes when roads are developed, middlemen are erased, the indigenous industry is promoted excluding the existing large tea and oil businesses; until a time comes when Assam helps itself and not its vote-banks, it will not be able to hide behind the central government’s exclusionary tactics of us and them. Like the rest of India, the northeast too may well fall into the trap of not asking the right questions to those in power, especially at a time the Indian economy is reeling from the shortages of resources in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. It comes down to the possibility of the Assamese being able to reclaim everything considered “illegal” about the Burmese areca nut trade. This involves cracking down on people like Ronju, their very own, who act like oil in these cracks. It is not enough to just roll the areca nut by placing it below your tongue, it is to recognize that cultures when living in proximity, obviously are bound to inform and resemble each other. We saw many a xorai or a casket-like plate in almost every Assamese household we went to, and were offered the traditional areca nut and paan, or betel nut palm. Such an act is a symbol of “welcoming outsiders,” they told us. This contrasts starkly with an occasion in one of our interviews with Debnath where he lowered the volume on the television upon hearing a TV anchor complaining about protests organized by Mizo student organizations against the draconian Indian Citizenship Act: the same legislation designed to kick out “outsiders” from Indian soil. For the Mizos, it is Bangladeshis who are the outsiders and indeed they often consider even the moniker of “Bangladeshi” disparaging. Meanwhile, for Debnath, it is the Mizos who are more of an “other,” more so than those who agree to live illegally in India. The dynamics between the Mizos, the Bangladeshis, the mainland Assamese, and the active construction of the “other” is at the heart of this story and the continuing clashes. To fully understand what’s going on at Lailapur, it is important to understand that this polarized strand of history is deeply etched in the memory of the Mizos of this generation. At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that there are two competing narratives—one told by the natives and the other by government officials. The first tells a tale of the oral ethnocultural history of the tribe linked to the land and forests: the narrative of many Mizos and organizations like the MZP. The second is the “official” history of state formation: the Assamese state narrative, if not that of India writ large. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Assam-Mizoram Border Dispute Betel Nut Trade Northeast India Hachek Bial Kuhva Chingtu Pawl Areca Nut Northeast Democratic Alliance Amit Shah Sister States Nagaland Arunachal Pradesh Meghalaya Tripura Assam Rifles Mizoram Assam Cachar District Myanmar Burma Black Pepper Lailapur Nationalism BJP Inner Line Permit Silchar Veer Lachit Sena Ethnically Divided Politics Political Agendas Political Parties Mizo Zirlai Pawl VLS Mizo National Front Mizo English as Class Signifier Convent Education CPRF Central Reserve Police Force Forum for the Protection of Non-Mizos Seemanto-bashi Employment Guarantee Act Mizo student organizations Indian Citizenship Act Performative Nationalism Manipur 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. 25th Feb 2023 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:

Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. BOOKS & ARTS Ritwik's Trees Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. Sumana Roy I always put it down to coincidence, the easiest way to explain things. Ritwik Ghatak and I were born on the same day, though half a century apart, and plant life would come to frame the way we both experience the world. I am fifty years old now, exactly the age Ritwik died at. Writing this essay with that awareness—strange as it is confusing—takes my thoughts in directions they might not have otherwise. There’s a tree in Sahaj Path , the first tree I ever saw. That can’t be true, of course, because I would have been about three then, in my first year at school. It is in the generic nature of trees to not be remembered, but this is slightly different. It’s not a blob of green that I remember as a tree; it’s black, black as soot, like burnt tree trunks. The tree, though, is not burnt—it is alive; a human sits inside it, as dark as the tree and its foliage, as dark as its shade. Sounds a bit childish, I know, but no other living form had enchanted me like this. I say ‘living’ with caution and affection, for I would discover a living likeness of the soot-black tree soon. On a bus from Siliguri’s Court More to Bagdogra, where my father’s sister lived—a journey we made no more than twice a year, in spite of the short distance, for the lack of availability of transport and time—I would see it. The bus was moving slowly, its speed curtailed by the rush of workers emerging from the Chandmoni Tea Estate. There it was, outside the window to our left—it hadn’t moved since the last time I’d seen it. A tree exactly like Nandalal Bose’s. Ritwik would have seen that tree in Sahaj Path . It is with such a tree that Meghe Dhaka Tara begins, its branches spread wide, without shyness or self-consciousness, as if to expose its leaves to all the light it could get. It is to the right of the screen, Nita walks out of its shadow. I could also rephrase this: the tree releases Nita into the world after protecting it from the glare of the world, perhaps of life. It is tempting to see the tree as analogous to the protective womb, after which the human is left on its own. For the first forty seconds of the film, the camera looks at things that don’t move—the trees. The camera shows no interest in looking for a human, such is its initial indifference to the centrality of the human figure in art. A woman in white emerges out of the shade and shadow of the trees, a black-and-white contrast emphasised in a black-and-white film; so similar to Nandalal’s linocut. The canvas begins to move. A train passes by. A man is singing, aa aa aa aa . His back is to the audience. The camera isn’t interested in his face. It takes in the vegetation by the riverbank. Sharp, tall grass pierces the top half of the frame; it pokes the sky. From looking for punctures in the sky, we are dragged downwards to the earth, to a torn slipper on a human foot. The camera has become plant-like—it is moving like trees do, in the north–south axis; like plants, it has become indifferent to the human face. After the restoration of attention to human affairs, to the crises of poverty, particularly new poverty (surely there must be a term equivalent to nouveau riche for those suddenly rendered poor by catastrophic circumstances), the camera seems to long for a sighting of the plant world again. Only four minutes have passed. It’s enough to give us a sense of the family whose life we will be following; it’s also enough to tell us that human lives will be complemented and annotated by the histories of their changing neighbours, plant life. ‘Nabin Sangha’ enters the frame. Humans, tall and small, chew the foreground, but it’s only as much real estate as the mouth occupies on the face. Behind them is the sky, made jagged by the uneven height of trees. It is not just an assemblage of different species of trees that we see, but a more urgent history of settlement, of planting. Pollinators, mostly two-footed ones like those in the foreground, are responsible for their settlement on this land. Ritwik is giving us a history of dislocation, of people as much as of plants. The name of the neighbourhood club, common in Bengal and other spaces that came to accommodate Bengalis evicted by the forces of history, is telling—the plants are as ‘nabin’, new, as the humans here; they might soon be propagated to other places, near and far. In Ritwik’s films, we see a new kind of horticultural unit, one that emerged so naturally that it hasn’t been recorded in our architectural or ecological history. Neither garden nor forest, it is as domesticated as it is wild. In Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, we find both an admiration for the beauty of the garden and an instinctive rejection of it as a unit foreign to landscapes and geographical formations such as ours. In practice, both he and his son Rathindranath—who would adopt favourite characteristics of Japanese, Italian, French and Mughal gardens into Santiniketan’s Uttarayan, the cluster of four houses that Rabindranath would design and live in—were internationalists, welcoming of travelling flora from other continents. As a concept, though, Rabindranath seemed to be suspicious of the garden, the way the unit had come to be imported from outside the Indian subcontinent, particularly Europe. The controlling impulse necessary to design and execute gardens would have challenged his ethics and aesthetics. They would have been too neat, too premeditated. ‘Bon’ over ‘bagan’ for him, the forest over the garden, though he would have been thinking of the jungle more than the forest, a space then still outside human intentionality. Satyajit Ray, in his foreword to Ritwik’s book Cinema and I , writes about the latter’s lifelong preoccupation with the Partition, how it shaped his films, gave them their subject and energy. What hasn’t been noticed is how the post-Partition Bengali family is seen through the concomitant new ordering of plant life. Land had been divided; how could the creatures of land, humans and plants, live in older units anymore? ‘Unit’, after all, is the root word for ‘unity’, and, with that gone, how were we to find plants except in fragmented and foraged units? This is what Ritwik—like John Clare, who was disoriented by the Enclosure Act of 1809, the privatisation and fencing of shared land—records in these scenes: broken sentences, broken song, broken land, its broken vegetation. Orchards, forests, gardens, fields, they are units of unbrokenness, a way of looking at the world where looking becomes equivalent to owning. The ambition of the zamindar was to own as far as his eyes could see. The philosophical idea of the plantation must owe to this, the idea of unbroken rows of the same plant, as well as the ownership that comes from this manner of control and ordering. The people in Ritwik’s films do not have the luxury of such a ‘vision’; time limits their lives as much as space does. They live from day to day, and, in Meghe Dhaka Tara , from month to month, salary day to salary day. In this, they are like trees, they who live outside capitalism, outside mortgages and pensions and EMIs. In these films is the ‘bagan’, garden. But the architecture of Ritwik’s gardens is arbitrary, its scope and ambition limited by space and poverty. What can the gardens of a homeless people look like? Indifferent to expectations of geometry and species that had given form and beauty to gardens in Japan and Italy, for instance, these borrowed spaces became an archive of their ad hoc living. Grammatical gardens are a record of ambition and purpose, the gardens in Ritwik’s films are a record of foraging and found plants, found and functional art. The trees are not here to add beauty, just as human faces and bodies do not exist to draw attention to the beauty of their anatomical form. They are just there—like the sky is, or like shadows are, because they are. Our eyes meet them like they do relatives of our own species, without formality or introductions. Yes, they are relatives, for they live alongside humans in residential spaces, by the well and by a stream, bringing shade to a tin-roofed house, fruit to a half-starved family, outliving the human who brought them here. My heart bustles in recognition when I see them, for I grew up in such a neighbourhood myself. In Siliguri’s Ashrampara, my neighbours, families whose memories and eating and living habits were formed by the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh before they, like seeds, were flung into spaces unfamiliar to their ancestors, created such gardens. Chilli plants by a streetside water drain, pumpkin and bottle gourd vines climbing on to tin roofs of kachcha toilets, unseasonal marigold flowers from a leftover garland used to worship a goddess, fresh coriander from seeds scattered near the well, where they grew beside ghritakumari, and there, often, a banana plant offering fruit, flower or stem, and always, always, an assembly of kochu leaves, waiting to be devoured. Roses became fences, valued more for their thorns than their flowers, to keep strangers away more than to attract; the tulsi that would, every Saturday, bring together a congregation hungry for the airy sweetness of batasha, thrown up into the air, Hari-r loot, then gathered from the earth and put urgently inside mouths; shandhya malati and nayantara, that flowered better when neglected; and greens, so many kinds of shak that it seemed the Bengali had evolved from the cow. Every morning, flower thieves, with a lanky bamboo pole in their hands, collecting flowers for their gods, never missing an opportunity to break a branch from a tree to plant in their garden—finding and foraging, planting and pollinating. From the ‘sangha’ to ‘sansar’, the club to the room, Ritwik makes this migration through song: ‘ Ghorete bhromor elo gunguniye ’. The bee’s come singing into the room. Where there is bee, there must be flower? What we have instead of the glamour of flowers—and I’m struggling to remember whether the camera ever pays attention to flowers at all—is bamboo. The strips of bamboo and the stripes of the saree that the women wear mirror each other all through his films until he’s established, almost naturally, that the refugees of his world are like bamboo: this is their habitat, they will stick to each other to form clusters, they will be chopped off from time to time, used, repurposed, taken away from their family, but the roots will allow growth again, life and height, length and the seeking of light, until they are dismembered again. The stripes in the women’s sarees run parallel to each other, like the strips of bamboo in the walls of the room do—the ends of both, saree and fence, have to be cut abruptly. Sometimes they continue on to men’s bodies, to the stripes of their lungi. Perhaps no other filmmaker has documented the culture of everyday bamboo design in eastern India with such an artist’s homely attention as Ritwik. These moments of distraction from the thoroughfare of human traffic are almost akin to a tendril looking for support, for something to hold. The varying rhombuses of bamboo fences give the eye this hold, this pause. The ninth minute of Meghe Dhaka Tara is long, the eye spans and embalms the frame, it takes in details of the weave of the bamboo before it moves to something that Ritwik’s camera turns into its relative: hair, hair on the heads of women, Nita’s in a bun, Gita’s left open, the craft and compulsion of human hands on bamboo visible, as it is in the bun; the freedom of the bamboo groves, alive and loose, as in Gita’s open hair. Nita’s name bears the etymological impress of ethics and morality, a human-brokered life; Gita’s name derives from song, it is freer, as much as music is free, or freer than morality. Ritwik’s eyes look for echoes, they find it—echoes of bamboo in the sarees, particularly those that Gita wears, where the shadow-and-light serve-and-volley dims and glows. About a quarter of an hour has passed. Ritwik returns the trees of the first scene to us, we now see more of them, more of their bodies; we see more of the river, too, which pushes the trees out of the frame slightly, gently. What takes up space are the shadows of these large-bodied trees, their girth a visible birth certificate, a mark of fixity, perhaps even of constancy, who can tell, in contrast to the river whose water moves, like the people in the film. The brother—played by Anil Chatterjee, in one of the most unforgettable characters in cinematic history—sings, his accompanists are birds, they cry, though I don’t know why the English language calls their tongue ‘bird cries’. Like a musician uses caesura, Ritwik uses music: for a break between stanzas. In the film’s first scene, Nita emerges from the trees, not exactly like Venus from the sea in Botticelli, but the shared lineage of human and the elements, plant and person, is established right away. A little more than a quarter of an hour later, she walks from the right to the left of the screen. Her brother sits under a tree, rehearsing. Ritwik ensures that we see him as part of the tree trunk, the bodies of humans assimilated by the camera’s angle as once was possible in mythology; Nita, too, is part of this gift of the gaze: she, her brother’s lone audience, melds with the aerial branches of the tree. She, provider, sister, daughter, girlfriend, has to become more than one species. This is why Nita moves out of her Krishnachura- and Radhachura-like body to become bamboo soon after, the transition happening as soon as she gives some money to her brother. It’s Nita’s birthday. A Jagaddhatri Pujo will take place. Ritwik has decided to abandon subtlety. Jagaddhatri, as her name indicates, is a goddess of the earth; according to the Kena Upanishad, she asks the elements, Agni and Varuna and Vayu, to move a blade of grass. Ritwik takes Nita, her father and brother to something like grass. Coconut and betelnut trees, tall, and taller than the hills in the background. They walk on the unlaid road, through marshland and paddy fields, the stalks ankle-deep in water. Other species crop up on the screen: boatman, shaluk, lotus. ‘Poetry of the earth is never dead,’ one of the characters says. Jagaddhatri; the plants. Ritwik doesn’t leave it there—like Bibhutibhushan in Pather Panchali , he emphasises the beauty that can be had by those without money, like Apu’s sister Durga in the novel, like Nita’s singer-brother in this film. ‘Dhanyo khetra’, the blessed land, the land of such agricultural bounty is a phrase central to Ritwik’s vision. For the Bengali audience, there would also be the cultural conditioning of ‘ Dhono dhanye pushpe bhora ’ of D.L. Roy’s song, the celebration, in spite of Partition, of the plentiful plant life that made Jibanananda’s ‘Rupashi Bangla’. Children run out of a small school a few scenes later. As if to frame this freedom, Ghatak allows a branch to graze the frame from the left. To him, the plant world is a metaphor that emphasises, by contrast, the unfreedom of social life. ‘How do you all stay indoors in the evening? I find it difficult to breathe,’ says Gita, to which Sanat, still undecided between the two women, ‘music’ and ‘morality’, offers to take Nita out for a walk. Their house is framed by trees, their father by an umbrella, the heads of both mirroring each other, as it is possible only in a drawing book. Sanat complains about Nita being chained down by responsibilities, to which she offers a stronger metaphor for the loss of freedom: ‘Besh toh, make a glass frame and put me inside it, like a wax doll.’ And, almost immediately, two opposites are offered: marshland and meadow, there is freedom in both, even if there is stickiness. For when Nita stands up to go, leaves stick to her saree. Over and over again, Ritwik turns her into a tree, a giving tree. A job has been found, she requests her brother to drop her off at Sealdah. The landscape changes; it’s thornier, wilder. The tree is different—it is no longer on the right side of the screen but the left; it has more branches than leaves, it is less spread out, some of its branches even amputated. Soon, the camera is on the brother. He’s singing, entering the world of plants, whose bodies are flecked by light and shade; wild grass waits nearby in every frame. Nita, though, was doing the opposite, emerging from the trees. The camera refuses to move; it has become the tree. Nita passes by, he asks her for twenty-five paise, to shave, and the camera begins moving. The brother runs after her, his shadow slightly thinner than the older, time-fed trees. The branches offer shade, they also stand rooted while humans are rendered homeless. The camera, momentarily happy to be a tree, now begins running—it, too, is scared of becoming homeless. Catching up with her, he realises that it is not his sister, only someone in the same generic white saree with a slim border. The unknown woman smiles. Her eyes are downcast, instead of the goddess’ halo, her bust-sized image: the white saree with the border running like a train line whose other track has been eaten by time or water; the echo of that thin horizontal line in the vertical strap of her handbag, a marker of her working woman status, a new self in a new land. Not halo but branches of trees crowd the frame. She is of the trees, even if she has a face, even if she is human. The woman smiles. The brother laughs. He begins singing. Another tree appears. Now it’s to the right of the screen. He is standing under it and singing. The camera moves with him as he walks. His shadow moves. The shadows of the branches remain still. He moves from right to left, a bit like the Urdu script at first, and then like musical notation, the arohan and abarohan, travelling to and fro, to and fro, the return to the ‘sama’, the home. But where is home? Do shadows return to the trees at night? Ritwik changes the composition of the halo that announces a goddess’ status. The branches of trees a little while ago, now it’s smoke from the mother’s cooking that frames her face, so that the halo is diffused, a blur, in spite of the branches of the trees right behind, as distant as cloud. Another woman enters—her hair is open, her saree is striped, the bamboo seems to be emerging out of her body, she goes out for a walk by the lake. It is Gita, with Sanat. Nita is walking back home. Irregular dots of darkness fill the screen—blobs of tree heads, their fraternal twins lying as shadows on the ground, more restful. Nita’s face is dark, light falls on a portion of her hips. Books clutched to her chest, she walks; her sister and boyfriend are sitting by the water, singing. Nita looks, then looks away, and walks past the scene. The camera moves to the sister and her new audience. Her shoulder-length hair has been left open. For a moment, they look like branches of the tree behind her—both move. The camera moves too. Gita is laughing after her flirtatious sermon to Sanat about staring at her with his mouth open. Nandalal’s tree, from Sahaj Path , is behind her. Its many branches make her look like a many-armed Durga; the man is made to look like Mahishasur. She jumps, he follows. We are inside stripes again: bamboo walls, fences, light and darkness. The composition is of an afterlife of the plant world—wooden windows with sticks inside them that keep animals away and divide the sky and the view. The sister in the striped saree enters through the gate; all is bamboo and wood, even the sister. Ritwik takes care to emphasise their form and texture, a continuation of their life, a life made possible by a new host and a new environment, like the refugees of Partition have had to adapt to. Bamboo and smoke, different as they are in behaviour, move in various patterns and orientations, making the walls of the house look like a happy museum of the afterlife of trees themselves. From inside the house, various kinds of plant life emerge, among them, paisleys trapped inside diamond-shaped cages on Gita’s blouse. Things change, Sanat and Gita are married, living in a flat in the city: the bamboo patterns, Nita’s saree, now in a dark colour. Instead of a house scavenged and salvaged from bodies of plants, we see a skylight in iron frames. The soft stripes of bamboo and clotheslines and sarees have given way to the stern lines of glass and steel, staircases and doorframes, ventilators and windows. Nita’s bag is now a pattern of checks. The door curtain, in all likelihood a Manipuri weave not uncommon at that time, has diamond-shaped rhombuses. As soon as the door opens, the camera moves to the solid lines of the threshold. These lines are bureaucratic, they keep apartments sturdy, they want to serve ambitions of permanence; how different they are from bamboo, in whose DNA it is to be ad hoc. Smoke cruises up here, too, but it’s not the smoke of Nita’s mother’s kitchen; not clay oven but ashtray. Ritwik is showing us the props of culture: a Bankura clay elephant stands beside truncated shadows of window bars, tuberoses in a vase on the table, puppets on the wooden cupboard, nature is being diminished here, everywhere. But the camera is restless for the lines in Nita’s home, its stripes: clothes, clotheslines, serrated tin roofs, bamboo nailed together, diagonally falling shadows. These are informal lines and rhombuses that derive from the grace of the natural world. It is the freedom of this informality that allows shadows to enter frames before human figures, shadows picking clothes from ropes and wires, slightly ghost-like, more like trees. Ritwik relies on the light-and-shadow opera to highlight the human drama through the eaters of light, the trees. After the light and night of ‘ Je raate mor duwarguli bhanglo jhore ’, of ‘ shob je hoye gyalo kalo ’, of everything turned dark, the camera moves like a plant, like the eye, searching for light. And then it moves like writing in the Devanagari script: trees and houses, conical tops, roofs, tin, concrete, all of these in a rush, so that it seems like the camera wants to escape from homes and the homeless for now, till it rests and waits, on foliage, on plants, to the ad hoc gardens that connect inside our eyes to indulge the sense of what is now called ‘social forestry’. The father, leaning against a tree for support, speaks to a doctor about Nita. One displacement happens after another—Nita, first rendered homeless by history, now moves out of the house to a bamboo room nearby, her equivalent of a temporary tent, her ‘nirbandhobpuri’, a town without friends; then she has to leave home for Reid Chest Hospital, another instalment of displacement. Ritwik begins making her more tree-like with greater urgency, as if that could protect her. After the audience’s discovery of her tuberculosis, we meet the trees—they take over the screen, Nita’s head now a blob emerging from the lower bottom of the screen. She’s being displaced from the screen too, history repeating itself over and over again. In a darker saree now, she’s the colour of tree trunks and branches, until she merges with the tree trunk in a scene. Ritwik is cutting out something else simultaneously—shade and shadow. By the ninetieth minute, the shade of trees is gone. There’s just bare land, the shadows of the trees far away are like birds whose shadows don’t reach the earth. A train cuts the screen. She, like the trees, doesn’t move. A couple of minutes later, she opens her umbrella standing under a tree, a double umbrella as it were. Every now and then, Ritwik’s camera surveys the land: palms of various kinds, a leafless plumeria, after the news of Gita’s pregnancy. In the foreboding of both birth and death, Ritwik turns to plants. After the camera shows us Nita’s blood-stained handkerchief, we see trees moving wildly in a storm, and her curly hair, as if they were relatives. The vegetation around Reid Chest Hospital is different—a coniferous-looking tree stands to the left of the frame, it offers no shade, only the fur of fog and the skin of the sky. Nita is sitting, her brother comes with news about Gita’s son, their two-storeyed house, until she breaks into one of the most famous dialogues in Bangla cinema: ‘ Dada, aami kintu bachte cheyechhilam ’, Dada, I did want to live … The camera loses balance as it were and surveys the trees. That’s how the film ends—with tree and tree and tree, almost like how it began, except for the woman who has gone missing from life, from the screen. ******* Fifteen seconds into Subarnarekha , no image has been given to us, nothing except the auditory, ‘Vande Mataram’. The first visual: trees, slim, unrevealing of age, a bamboo in the middle, another an arc; the cohabitation of various sizes, even shapes. The Indian flag goes up on the bamboo pole; another bamboo, bent, serves as trellis over a gate. In bamboo as flag pole, Ritwik is hoping for the new Indian nation to have the tensile strength of bamboo, to be flexible, supportive and all-purpose, for all its citizens to make whatever they can of it. For the moment, though, there’s chaos and uncertainty, differences more than unity—a teacher in a new school teaches English and history, another Bengali and Sanskrit, history and historiography available only to those living in English; Dhaka versus Pabna; caste divisions. A child’s mother is lost. The word ‘udbastu’, refugee, floats around. Gandhi’s assassination emerges as newsprint in a newspaper office. Nabajibon Colony, the new settlement for those without homes, is constructed almost entirely of bamboo, as if the new (‘naba’) life (‘jibon’) must have the plant’s resilience. Ritwik draws the opposition between the old and new through metaphor. Both the sarod and the ektara are musical instruments that derive from plant life, but he gives us classical music before a Baul’s song. Hence bamboo—for the people, like the people; the roofs, doors, windows and walls of the houses in Nabajibon Colony, the Baul’s musical instrument. In the first ten minutes of the film named after a river, we see bamboo being split and cut everywhere. Partition, people, plants. A bamboo republic. Ghatshila’s plants enter the census of our imagination: bamboo, banana, papaya, species that grow easily, often on their own, without care, like these people must. When the little girl Sita asks her brother whether Abhiram, the boy who has lost his mother, will come with them to the new place, we are given no answer, only a sign, almost Buddha-like—she plucks a flower and leaves. The mill, where her brother has found work, is beside a sal forest. After reaching Ghatshila, the first thing Sita says is, ‘Dadamoni, come and see how beautiful the garden is …’. The little boy Abhi is still crying. An oleander—poisonous oleander—stands behind him. Rabindranath’s song sprouts: ‘ Aaj dhaner khete roudrochhayay lukochuri khyala re bhai, lukochuri khyala ’. Sunlight and shade are playing hide-and-seek on the paddy fields … What grass was to Jibanananda Das, paddy is to Ritwik. It’s to the paddy fields that his homeless want to return. Paddy and bamboo, related sub-families. We see a barren landscape from time to time, stony, bare-branched trees, but in their forms is still the intimation of being alive—unlike the ruins of the aircraft from World War II, with its exposed steel rods, weeds around it, the camera making it look like a foreigner, a UFO, the runway unfriendly, trees pushed to its corners, like eyelashes in the eyes. Sita and Abhi run through a place with different kinds of plant life: the bare and low, spiky and tender leaves. Some of these are inside the ruins of the airfield’s buildings; no roof or inhabitants, no windows, no doors, only frames, like the leafless trees. Ritwik is intentional. The little girl is called Sita for a reason, the story of her name from the Ramayana is abridged for us in a dialogue—how the Sita of the epic was found in an agricultural field, her link with ploughing cultures, and, though we are not told this yet, how Sita returns to the earth after her test by fire, a premonition of what is to happen to the Sita of this film. ‘Sita is the daughter of the earth …’ We are shown that earth: of rocks, river, bark, stone and trees with tiny heads, and tiny human heads half-hidden among large rocks. Outside their house are lonely species: a few palms, shrubs, skinny young trees, standing without discipline or order. They are at home. Abhi returns from the city, educated and eager to finish writing his novel based in Ghatshila, for which he has found a ‘big publisher’. Both he and Sita are surprised to find each other grown up, their bodies longer, their hearts in longing, they walk through the sal forest. The trees are tall, very tall—the camera, so long habituated to a sparser population of trees, goes a bit mad, it begins moving from left to right, taking in the trees one by one, until it is overwhelmed. This is Ritwik’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’—the uncountability of this unit of plant life, its impress, its freedom and rush, its nurturing and caging. The sense of time—and space—in the forest, where one can’t tell when the first tree was planted, that this is a history very different from those that have been written about human lives, allows Abhi to begin talking about his novel. It might have been classified as autofiction today. He begins narrating the story of his life, third person to himself. Walking towards the trees, he raises his arms—they become branches, and he a tree for a moment. The camera then moves to the back of his head, so that he, like the other citizens of the forest, becomes part of this republic of faceless beings, the trees. He asks her a question, to which she says ‘no’. Light and its opposite fall on her face, and the camera integrates her into the blur of trees behind. How long has she felt like this, this ‘love’, Abhi asks Sita, without using the word. ‘A long time,’ she replies. The camera goes berserk in trying to capture this sense of Time—Ritwik does a few 360 degrees, all we see are the trees of this forest, long trunks, and then the river. Abhi and Sita return to bamboo, to home, to the vines that are growing on bamboo trellises, to the houseplants. Occasionally, we spot oleander, a palm or two, overgrown green in the pilot’s clubhouse, or a flower vase on a table when someone says ‘caste is everything’. When Abhi’s mother dies and he recognizes her from memory, Ritwik takes us to the child Abhi and where is he? Swinging from a tree, like only a little boy can. Twenty seconds later, after the graceful undulations of the roots from which the little boy was hanging, and the shade of the banyan, both unquantifiable and amorphous, we see the sternness of electric poles in a railway station. Their relationship is shown through plant metaphors: trees skirt the agricultural fields as they talk, while the tanpura, made from a gourd, is strung; when the wedding is fixed against her wishes, a dry palm leaf scratches the frame; when Abhi leaves and Sita asks whom she should share her sorrow with, the camera shows treetops far away. The wedding day arrives. The alpana of paddy stalks, grain and leaves sit on the floor, leading our eyes to Sita, whose face is painted with stylised designs from the agricultural world. And suddenly she’s gone. A woman says that she was scribbling something. The camera focuses on the alpana, its details, leaf and leaf and stalk and leaf, and the plant alpana grows and glows towards light. Years pass, trees and peace have disappeared from their lives in the cramped city. Listening to her sing, the little son asks, ‘Ma, what do the dhaaner khet, the paddy fields, look like?’ The song will return at the end of the film, but, before that, there are other plants. Haraprasad, having lost everything that he valued, returns to Iswar and tells him that he’s a ‘baajey-pora taal gaachh’, a blasted palm tree. The landscape turns barren gradually. In the end, though, the little boy Binu, orphaned, stands with Iswar, his newly found maternal uncle, under a tree. They have just got off the train, Iswar has been asked to vacate his residential quarters. Homeless once again, the camera turns to a tree. And then to song and soil, to the wave on the paddy fields—the literal and the figurative find a home: ‘ Dhaaner khete dheu …’ The film ends as it had begun—by resting on plants. ******* Water in instalments, river, rain, ripple, inside boat, on plant, on tree. Water and sand, mother and child, river and bank. Trees by the river, like ripples of heads. Three minutes of this survey of life by the river Titas, and our eyes rest on an old tree at last—we meet its relatives, not on land, but their reflections on water. Soon more, not alive but their afterlife: boats, trees now travelling on water, unimaginable during their life on land; bamboo, fence, wall, house, basket, where grain is being winnowed, thatched homes. They come alive again, rounded trees and dancing papaya plants. They return to water, to boat, its wood, but mostly its bamboo, arcs and shelter, fish caught and put in baskets, covered with a flat woven bamboo piece. To land again, where the tree’s roots are, where they provide the shade necessary for dance and home, for celebration under trees. The canopy—tree branches become Ritwik’s sky; two tree branches connect two corners of the screen, like a ceiling connects walls; men fight with them too, with bamboo. Ritwik begins to make us see, again, the optical osmosis between plant and person ... ... an unconscious woman in a man’s arms, horizontal, is like the tree branches in the following scene; the floral patterns on the bride’s forehead, the wedding garlands, the eating and rejection of light, darkness and luminosity, how Ritwik’s camera catches light falling on the flowers in the garden and those on the wedding saree, the shola kadam flower on the topor, the groom’s crown. These are echoed visually by the houses of bamboo and straw, as if they too were topor-like, and the palm tree behind the small temple. At the moment of leaving her parents’, the bride weeps holding a plant—the holy basil in the tulsi mancha—and her butterfly tiara makes her plant-like. There is no getting away from this way of seeing. Ritwik shows us the boatman’s katha, its stylised botanical patterns; he warns the husband about his wife’s beauty gathering attention with a proverb borrowed from—what else?—the plant world: ‘ Lau er opor najar lagau na kintu ’, be careful that the bottle gourd doesn’t catch attention. A close-up of the woman’s middle-parted hair is turned into a relative of the sugarcane leaf’s long midrib; shadows of leaves dance on the bodies of women so that their bodies and limbs become branches. Ram’s aged, scraggly beard is not very different from the straw hanging from the roof. There’s the stamp of the botanical everywhere: flowers on dhaak, diamond patterns of bamboo designs in kitchens, straight lines of jute sticks, bow and arrow; a galaxy of water hyacinth amidst which sit planets of boats, boats of potatoes. Tree shadows lick the water everywhere, old trees snuggle up to their shortened noon shadows, the dheki moves up and down and up and down, avoiding the hand that feeds it grain, crushing grain. Men and women erupt in anger, the violence of the plant idiom: ‘ Tomarey kauwa ja, oi dhaan khete giye kauwao ta ’, telling you something is like telling the paddy field … The little boy’s name is Ananta. Infinite. He runs through the paddy fields blowing a paper horn. Nabajibon, paddy, bamboo, it is to this that Ritwik returns, this is how history is reborn. ∎ I always put it down to coincidence, the easiest way to explain things. Ritwik Ghatak and I were born on the same day, though half a century apart, and plant life would come to frame the way we both experience the world. I am fifty years old now, exactly the age Ritwik died at. Writing this essay with that awareness—strange as it is confusing—takes my thoughts in directions they might not have otherwise. There’s a tree in Sahaj Path , the first tree I ever saw. That can’t be true, of course, because I would have been about three then, in my first year at school. It is in the generic nature of trees to not be remembered, but this is slightly different. It’s not a blob of green that I remember as a tree; it’s black, black as soot, like burnt tree trunks. The tree, though, is not burnt—it is alive; a human sits inside it, as dark as the tree and its foliage, as dark as its shade. Sounds a bit childish, I know, but no other living form had enchanted me like this. I say ‘living’ with caution and affection, for I would discover a living likeness of the soot-black tree soon. On a bus from Siliguri’s Court More to Bagdogra, where my father’s sister lived—a journey we made no more than twice a year, in spite of the short distance, for the lack of availability of transport and time—I would see it. The bus was moving slowly, its speed curtailed by the rush of workers emerging from the Chandmoni Tea Estate. There it was, outside the window to our left—it hadn’t moved since the last time I’d seen it. A tree exactly like Nandalal Bose’s. Ritwik would have seen that tree in Sahaj Path . It is with such a tree that Meghe Dhaka Tara begins, its branches spread wide, without shyness or self-consciousness, as if to expose its leaves to all the light it could get. It is to the right of the screen, Nita walks out of its shadow. I could also rephrase this: the tree releases Nita into the world after protecting it from the glare of the world, perhaps of life. It is tempting to see the tree as analogous to the protective womb, after which the human is left on its own. For the first forty seconds of the film, the camera looks at things that don’t move—the trees. The camera shows no interest in looking for a human, such is its initial indifference to the centrality of the human figure in art. A woman in white emerges out of the shade and shadow of the trees, a black-and-white contrast emphasised in a black-and-white film; so similar to Nandalal’s linocut. The canvas begins to move. A train passes by. A man is singing, aa aa aa aa . His back is to the audience. The camera isn’t interested in his face. It takes in the vegetation by the riverbank. Sharp, tall grass pierces the top half of the frame; it pokes the sky. From looking for punctures in the sky, we are dragged downwards to the earth, to a torn slipper on a human foot. The camera has become plant-like—it is moving like trees do, in the north–south axis; like plants, it has become indifferent to the human face. After the restoration of attention to human affairs, to the crises of poverty, particularly new poverty (surely there must be a term equivalent to nouveau riche for those suddenly rendered poor by catastrophic circumstances), the camera seems to long for a sighting of the plant world again. Only four minutes have passed. It’s enough to give us a sense of the family whose life we will be following; it’s also enough to tell us that human lives will be complemented and annotated by the histories of their changing neighbours, plant life. ‘Nabin Sangha’ enters the frame. Humans, tall and small, chew the foreground, but it’s only as much real estate as the mouth occupies on the face. Behind them is the sky, made jagged by the uneven height of trees. It is not just an assemblage of different species of trees that we see, but a more urgent history of settlement, of planting. Pollinators, mostly two-footed ones like those in the foreground, are responsible for their settlement on this land. Ritwik is giving us a history of dislocation, of people as much as of plants. The name of the neighbourhood club, common in Bengal and other spaces that came to accommodate Bengalis evicted by the forces of history, is telling—the plants are as ‘nabin’, new, as the humans here; they might soon be propagated to other places, near and far. In Ritwik’s films, we see a new kind of horticultural unit, one that emerged so naturally that it hasn’t been recorded in our architectural or ecological history. Neither garden nor forest, it is as domesticated as it is wild. In Rabindranath Tagore, for instance, we find both an admiration for the beauty of the garden and an instinctive rejection of it as a unit foreign to landscapes and geographical formations such as ours. In practice, both he and his son Rathindranath—who would adopt favourite characteristics of Japanese, Italian, French and Mughal gardens into Santiniketan’s Uttarayan, the cluster of four houses that Rabindranath would design and live in—were internationalists, welcoming of travelling flora from other continents. As a concept, though, Rabindranath seemed to be suspicious of the garden, the way the unit had come to be imported from outside the Indian subcontinent, particularly Europe. The controlling impulse necessary to design and execute gardens would have challenged his ethics and aesthetics. They would have been too neat, too premeditated. ‘Bon’ over ‘bagan’ for him, the forest over the garden, though he would have been thinking of the jungle more than the forest, a space then still outside human intentionality. Satyajit Ray, in his foreword to Ritwik’s book Cinema and I , writes about the latter’s lifelong preoccupation with the Partition, how it shaped his films, gave them their subject and energy. What hasn’t been noticed is how the post-Partition Bengali family is seen through the concomitant new ordering of plant life. Land had been divided; how could the creatures of land, humans and plants, live in older units anymore? ‘Unit’, after all, is the root word for ‘unity’, and, with that gone, how were we to find plants except in fragmented and foraged units? This is what Ritwik—like John Clare, who was disoriented by the Enclosure Act of 1809, the privatisation and fencing of shared land—records in these scenes: broken sentences, broken song, broken land, its broken vegetation. Orchards, forests, gardens, fields, they are units of unbrokenness, a way of looking at the world where looking becomes equivalent to owning. The ambition of the zamindar was to own as far as his eyes could see. The philosophical idea of the plantation must owe to this, the idea of unbroken rows of the same plant, as well as the ownership that comes from this manner of control and ordering. The people in Ritwik’s films do not have the luxury of such a ‘vision’; time limits their lives as much as space does. They live from day to day, and, in Meghe Dhaka Tara , from month to month, salary day to salary day. In this, they are like trees, they who live outside capitalism, outside mortgages and pensions and EMIs. In these films is the ‘bagan’, garden. But the architecture of Ritwik’s gardens is arbitrary, its scope and ambition limited by space and poverty. What can the gardens of a homeless people look like? Indifferent to expectations of geometry and species that had given form and beauty to gardens in Japan and Italy, for instance, these borrowed spaces became an archive of their ad hoc living. Grammatical gardens are a record of ambition and purpose, the gardens in Ritwik’s films are a record of foraging and found plants, found and functional art. The trees are not here to add beauty, just as human faces and bodies do not exist to draw attention to the beauty of their anatomical form. They are just there—like the sky is, or like shadows are, because they are. Our eyes meet them like they do relatives of our own species, without formality or introductions. Yes, they are relatives, for they live alongside humans in residential spaces, by the well and by a stream, bringing shade to a tin-roofed house, fruit to a half-starved family, outliving the human who brought them here. My heart bustles in recognition when I see them, for I grew up in such a neighbourhood myself. In Siliguri’s Ashrampara, my neighbours, families whose memories and eating and living habits were formed by the agricultural produce and rivers of Bangladesh before they, like seeds, were flung into spaces unfamiliar to their ancestors, created such gardens. Chilli plants by a streetside water drain, pumpkin and bottle gourd vines climbing on to tin roofs of kachcha toilets, unseasonal marigold flowers from a leftover garland used to worship a goddess, fresh coriander from seeds scattered near the well, where they grew beside ghritakumari, and there, often, a banana plant offering fruit, flower or stem, and always, always, an assembly of kochu leaves, waiting to be devoured. Roses became fences, valued more for their thorns than their flowers, to keep strangers away more than to attract; the tulsi that would, every Saturday, bring together a congregation hungry for the airy sweetness of batasha, thrown up into the air, Hari-r loot, then gathered from the earth and put urgently inside mouths; shandhya malati and nayantara, that flowered better when neglected; and greens, so many kinds of shak that it seemed the Bengali had evolved from the cow. Every morning, flower thieves, with a lanky bamboo pole in their hands, collecting flowers for their gods, never missing an opportunity to break a branch from a tree to plant in their garden—finding and foraging, planting and pollinating. From the ‘sangha’ to ‘sansar’, the club to the room, Ritwik makes this migration through song: ‘ Ghorete bhromor elo gunguniye ’. The bee’s come singing into the room. Where there is bee, there must be flower? What we have instead of the glamour of flowers—and I’m struggling to remember whether the camera ever pays attention to flowers at all—is bamboo. The strips of bamboo and the stripes of the saree that the women wear mirror each other all through his films until he’s established, almost naturally, that the refugees of his world are like bamboo: this is their habitat, they will stick to each other to form clusters, they will be chopped off from time to time, used, repurposed, taken away from their family, but the roots will allow growth again, life and height, length and the seeking of light, until they are dismembered again. The stripes in the women’s sarees run parallel to each other, like the strips of bamboo in the walls of the room do—the ends of both, saree and fence, have to be cut abruptly. Sometimes they continue on to men’s bodies, to the stripes of their lungi. Perhaps no other filmmaker has documented the culture of everyday bamboo design in eastern India with such an artist’s homely attention as Ritwik. These moments of distraction from the thoroughfare of human traffic are almost akin to a tendril looking for support, for something to hold. The varying rhombuses of bamboo fences give the eye this hold, this pause. The ninth minute of Meghe Dhaka Tara is long, the eye spans and embalms the frame, it takes in details of the weave of the bamboo before it moves to something that Ritwik’s camera turns into its relative: hair, hair on the heads of women, Nita’s in a bun, Gita’s left open, the craft and compulsion of human hands on bamboo visible, as it is in the bun; the freedom of the bamboo groves, alive and loose, as in Gita’s open hair. Nita’s name bears the etymological impress of ethics and morality, a human-brokered life; Gita’s name derives from song, it is freer, as much as music is free, or freer than morality. Ritwik’s eyes look for echoes, they find it—echoes of bamboo in the sarees, particularly those that Gita wears, where the shadow-and-light serve-and-volley dims and glows. About a quarter of an hour has passed. Ritwik returns the trees of the first scene to us, we now see more of them, more of their bodies; we see more of the river, too, which pushes the trees out of the frame slightly, gently. What takes up space are the shadows of these large-bodied trees, their girth a visible birth certificate, a mark of fixity, perhaps even of constancy, who can tell, in contrast to the river whose water moves, like the people in the film. The brother—played by Anil Chatterjee, in one of the most unforgettable characters in cinematic history—sings, his accompanists are birds, they cry, though I don’t know why the English language calls their tongue ‘bird cries’. Like a musician uses caesura, Ritwik uses music: for a break between stanzas. In the film’s first scene, Nita emerges from the trees, not exactly like Venus from the sea in Botticelli, but the shared lineage of human and the elements, plant and person, is established right away. A little more than a quarter of an hour later, she walks from the right to the left of the screen. Her brother sits under a tree, rehearsing. Ritwik ensures that we see him as part of the tree trunk, the bodies of humans assimilated by the camera’s angle as once was possible in mythology; Nita, too, is part of this gift of the gaze: she, her brother’s lone audience, melds with the aerial branches of the tree. She, provider, sister, daughter, girlfriend, has to become more than one species. This is why Nita moves out of her Krishnachura- and Radhachura-like body to become bamboo soon after, the transition happening as soon as she gives some money to her brother. It’s Nita’s birthday. A Jagaddhatri Pujo will take place. Ritwik has decided to abandon subtlety. Jagaddhatri, as her name indicates, is a goddess of the earth; according to the Kena Upanishad, she asks the elements, Agni and Varuna and Vayu, to move a blade of grass. Ritwik takes Nita, her father and brother to something like grass. Coconut and betelnut trees, tall, and taller than the hills in the background. They walk on the unlaid road, through marshland and paddy fields, the stalks ankle-deep in water. Other species crop up on the screen: boatman, shaluk, lotus. ‘Poetry of the earth is never dead,’ one of the characters says. Jagaddhatri; the plants. Ritwik doesn’t leave it there—like Bibhutibhushan in Pather Panchali , he emphasises the beauty that can be had by those without money, like Apu’s sister Durga in the novel, like Nita’s singer-brother in this film. ‘Dhanyo khetra’, the blessed land, the land of such agricultural bounty is a phrase central to Ritwik’s vision. For the Bengali audience, there would also be the cultural conditioning of ‘ Dhono dhanye pushpe bhora ’ of D.L. Roy’s song, the celebration, in spite of Partition, of the plentiful plant life that made Jibanananda’s ‘Rupashi Bangla’. Children run out of a small school a few scenes later. As if to frame this freedom, Ghatak allows a branch to graze the frame from the left. To him, the plant world is a metaphor that emphasises, by contrast, the unfreedom of social life. ‘How do you all stay indoors in the evening? I find it difficult to breathe,’ says Gita, to which Sanat, still undecided between the two women, ‘music’ and ‘morality’, offers to take Nita out for a walk. Their house is framed by trees, their father by an umbrella, the heads of both mirroring each other, as it is possible only in a drawing book. Sanat complains about Nita being chained down by responsibilities, to which she offers a stronger metaphor for the loss of freedom: ‘Besh toh, make a glass frame and put me inside it, like a wax doll.’ And, almost immediately, two opposites are offered: marshland and meadow, there is freedom in both, even if there is stickiness. For when Nita stands up to go, leaves stick to her saree. Over and over again, Ritwik turns her into a tree, a giving tree. A job has been found, she requests her brother to drop her off at Sealdah. The landscape changes; it’s thornier, wilder. The tree is different—it is no longer on the right side of the screen but the left; it has more branches than leaves, it is less spread out, some of its branches even amputated. Soon, the camera is on the brother. He’s singing, entering the world of plants, whose bodies are flecked by light and shade; wild grass waits nearby in every frame. Nita, though, was doing the opposite, emerging from the trees. The camera refuses to move; it has become the tree. Nita passes by, he asks her for twenty-five paise, to shave, and the camera begins moving. The brother runs after her, his shadow slightly thinner than the older, time-fed trees. The branches offer shade, they also stand rooted while humans are rendered homeless. The camera, momentarily happy to be a tree, now begins running—it, too, is scared of becoming homeless. Catching up with her, he realises that it is not his sister, only someone in the same generic white saree with a slim border. The unknown woman smiles. Her eyes are downcast, instead of the goddess’ halo, her bust-sized image: the white saree with the border running like a train line whose other track has been eaten by time or water; the echo of that thin horizontal line in the vertical strap of her handbag, a marker of her working woman status, a new self in a new land. Not halo but branches of trees crowd the frame. She is of the trees, even if she has a face, even if she is human. The woman smiles. The brother laughs. He begins singing. Another tree appears. Now it’s to the right of the screen. He is standing under it and singing. The camera moves with him as he walks. His shadow moves. The shadows of the branches remain still. He moves from right to left, a bit like the Urdu script at first, and then like musical notation, the arohan and abarohan, travelling to and fro, to and fro, the return to the ‘sama’, the home. But where is home? Do shadows return to the trees at night? Ritwik changes the composition of the halo that announces a goddess’ status. The branches of trees a little while ago, now it’s smoke from the mother’s cooking that frames her face, so that the halo is diffused, a blur, in spite of the branches of the trees right behind, as distant as cloud. Another woman enters—her hair is open, her saree is striped, the bamboo seems to be emerging out of her body, she goes out for a walk by the lake. It is Gita, with Sanat. Nita is walking back home. Irregular dots of darkness fill the screen—blobs of tree heads, their fraternal twins lying as shadows on the ground, more restful. Nita’s face is dark, light falls on a portion of her hips. Books clutched to her chest, she walks; her sister and boyfriend are sitting by the water, singing. Nita looks, then looks away, and walks past the scene. The camera moves to the sister and her new audience. Her shoulder-length hair has been left open. For a moment, they look like branches of the tree behind her—both move. The camera moves too. Gita is laughing after her flirtatious sermon to Sanat about staring at her with his mouth open. Nandalal’s tree, from Sahaj Path , is behind her. Its many branches make her look like a many-armed Durga; the man is made to look like Mahishasur. She jumps, he follows. We are inside stripes again: bamboo walls, fences, light and darkness. The composition is of an afterlife of the plant world—wooden windows with sticks inside them that keep animals away and divide the sky and the view. The sister in the striped saree enters through the gate; all is bamboo and wood, even the sister. Ritwik takes care to emphasise their form and texture, a continuation of their life, a life made possible by a new host and a new environment, like the refugees of Partition have had to adapt to. Bamboo and smoke, different as they are in behaviour, move in various patterns and orientations, making the walls of the house look like a happy museum of the afterlife of trees themselves. From inside the house, various kinds of plant life emerge, among them, paisleys trapped inside diamond-shaped cages on Gita’s blouse. Things change, Sanat and Gita are married, living in a flat in the city: the bamboo patterns, Nita’s saree, now in a dark colour. Instead of a house scavenged and salvaged from bodies of plants, we see a skylight in iron frames. The soft stripes of bamboo and clotheslines and sarees have given way to the stern lines of glass and steel, staircases and doorframes, ventilators and windows. Nita’s bag is now a pattern of checks. The door curtain, in all likelihood a Manipuri weave not uncommon at that time, has diamond-shaped rhombuses. As soon as the door opens, the camera moves to the solid lines of the threshold. These lines are bureaucratic, they keep apartments sturdy, they want to serve ambitions of permanence; how different they are from bamboo, in whose DNA it is to be ad hoc. Smoke cruises up here, too, but it’s not the smoke of Nita’s mother’s kitchen; not clay oven but ashtray. Ritwik is showing us the props of culture: a Bankura clay elephant stands beside truncated shadows of window bars, tuberoses in a vase on the table, puppets on the wooden cupboard, nature is being diminished here, everywhere. But the camera is restless for the lines in Nita’s home, its stripes: clothes, clotheslines, serrated tin roofs, bamboo nailed together, diagonally falling shadows. These are informal lines and rhombuses that derive from the grace of the natural world. It is the freedom of this informality that allows shadows to enter frames before human figures, shadows picking clothes from ropes and wires, slightly ghost-like, more like trees. Ritwik relies on the light-and-shadow opera to highlight the human drama through the eaters of light, the trees. After the light and night of ‘ Je raate mor duwarguli bhanglo jhore ’, of ‘ shob je hoye gyalo kalo ’, of everything turned dark, the camera moves like a plant, like the eye, searching for light. And then it moves like writing in the Devanagari script: trees and houses, conical tops, roofs, tin, concrete, all of these in a rush, so that it seems like the camera wants to escape from homes and the homeless for now, till it rests and waits, on foliage, on plants, to the ad hoc gardens that connect inside our eyes to indulge the sense of what is now called ‘social forestry’. The father, leaning against a tree for support, speaks to a doctor about Nita. One displacement happens after another—Nita, first rendered homeless by history, now moves out of the house to a bamboo room nearby, her equivalent of a temporary tent, her ‘nirbandhobpuri’, a town without friends; then she has to leave home for Reid Chest Hospital, another instalment of displacement. Ritwik begins making her more tree-like with greater urgency, as if that could protect her. After the audience’s discovery of her tuberculosis, we meet the trees—they take over the screen, Nita’s head now a blob emerging from the lower bottom of the screen. She’s being displaced from the screen too, history repeating itself over and over again. In a darker saree now, she’s the colour of tree trunks and branches, until she merges with the tree trunk in a scene. Ritwik is cutting out something else simultaneously—shade and shadow. By the ninetieth minute, the shade of trees is gone. There’s just bare land, the shadows of the trees far away are like birds whose shadows don’t reach the earth. A train cuts the screen. She, like the trees, doesn’t move. A couple of minutes later, she opens her umbrella standing under a tree, a double umbrella as it were. Every now and then, Ritwik’s camera surveys the land: palms of various kinds, a leafless plumeria, after the news of Gita’s pregnancy. In the foreboding of both birth and death, Ritwik turns to plants. After the camera shows us Nita’s blood-stained handkerchief, we see trees moving wildly in a storm, and her curly hair, as if they were relatives. The vegetation around Reid Chest Hospital is different—a coniferous-looking tree stands to the left of the frame, it offers no shade, only the fur of fog and the skin of the sky. Nita is sitting, her brother comes with news about Gita’s son, their two-storeyed house, until she breaks into one of the most famous dialogues in Bangla cinema: ‘ Dada, aami kintu bachte cheyechhilam ’, Dada, I did want to live … The camera loses balance as it were and surveys the trees. That’s how the film ends—with tree and tree and tree, almost like how it began, except for the woman who has gone missing from life, from the screen. ******* Fifteen seconds into Subarnarekha , no image has been given to us, nothing except the auditory, ‘Vande Mataram’. The first visual: trees, slim, unrevealing of age, a bamboo in the middle, another an arc; the cohabitation of various sizes, even shapes. The Indian flag goes up on the bamboo pole; another bamboo, bent, serves as trellis over a gate. In bamboo as flag pole, Ritwik is hoping for the new Indian nation to have the tensile strength of bamboo, to be flexible, supportive and all-purpose, for all its citizens to make whatever they can of it. For the moment, though, there’s chaos and uncertainty, differences more than unity—a teacher in a new school teaches English and history, another Bengali and Sanskrit, history and historiography available only to those living in English; Dhaka versus Pabna; caste divisions. A child’s mother is lost. The word ‘udbastu’, refugee, floats around. Gandhi’s assassination emerges as newsprint in a newspaper office. Nabajibon Colony, the new settlement for those without homes, is constructed almost entirely of bamboo, as if the new (‘naba’) life (‘jibon’) must have the plant’s resilience. Ritwik draws the opposition between the old and new through metaphor. Both the sarod and the ektara are musical instruments that derive from plant life, but he gives us classical music before a Baul’s song. Hence bamboo—for the people, like the people; the roofs, doors, windows and walls of the houses in Nabajibon Colony, the Baul’s musical instrument. In the first ten minutes of the film named after a river, we see bamboo being split and cut everywhere. Partition, people, plants. A bamboo republic. Ghatshila’s plants enter the census of our imagination: bamboo, banana, papaya, species that grow easily, often on their own, without care, like these people must. When the little girl Sita asks her brother whether Abhiram, the boy who has lost his mother, will come with them to the new place, we are given no answer, only a sign, almost Buddha-like—she plucks a flower and leaves. The mill, where her brother has found work, is beside a sal forest. After reaching Ghatshila, the first thing Sita says is, ‘Dadamoni, come and see how beautiful the garden is …’. The little boy Abhi is still crying. An oleander—poisonous oleander—stands behind him. Rabindranath’s song sprouts: ‘ Aaj dhaner khete roudrochhayay lukochuri khyala re bhai, lukochuri khyala ’. Sunlight and shade are playing hide-and-seek on the paddy fields … What grass was to Jibanananda Das, paddy is to Ritwik. It’s to the paddy fields that his homeless want to return. Paddy and bamboo, related sub-families. We see a barren landscape from time to time, stony, bare-branched trees, but in their forms is still the intimation of being alive—unlike the ruins of the aircraft from World War II, with its exposed steel rods, weeds around it, the camera making it look like a foreigner, a UFO, the runway unfriendly, trees pushed to its corners, like eyelashes in the eyes. Sita and Abhi run through a place with different kinds of plant life: the bare and low, spiky and tender leaves. Some of these are inside the ruins of the airfield’s buildings; no roof or inhabitants, no windows, no doors, only frames, like the leafless trees. Ritwik is intentional. The little girl is called Sita for a reason, the story of her name from the Ramayana is abridged for us in a dialogue—how the Sita of the epic was found in an agricultural field, her link with ploughing cultures, and, though we are not told this yet, how Sita returns to the earth after her test by fire, a premonition of what is to happen to the Sita of this film. ‘Sita is the daughter of the earth …’ We are shown that earth: of rocks, river, bark, stone and trees with tiny heads, and tiny human heads half-hidden among large rocks. Outside their house are lonely species: a few palms, shrubs, skinny young trees, standing without discipline or order. They are at home. Abhi returns from the city, educated and eager to finish writing his novel based in Ghatshila, for which he has found a ‘big publisher’. Both he and Sita are surprised to find each other grown up, their bodies longer, their hearts in longing, they walk through the sal forest. The trees are tall, very tall—the camera, so long habituated to a sparser population of trees, goes a bit mad, it begins moving from left to right, taking in the trees one by one, until it is overwhelmed. This is Ritwik’s interpretation of Wordsworth’s ‘Ten thousand saw I at a glance’—the uncountability of this unit of plant life, its impress, its freedom and rush, its nurturing and caging. The sense of time—and space—in the forest, where one can’t tell when the first tree was planted, that this is a history very different from those that have been written about human lives, allows Abhi to begin talking about his novel. It might have been classified as autofiction today. He begins narrating the story of his life, third person to himself. Walking towards the trees, he raises his arms—they become branches, and he a tree for a moment. The camera then moves to the back of his head, so that he, like the other citizens of the forest, becomes part of this republic of faceless beings, the trees. He asks her a question, to which she says ‘no’. Light and its opposite fall on her face, and the camera integrates her into the blur of trees behind. How long has she felt like this, this ‘love’, Abhi asks Sita, without using the word. ‘A long time,’ she replies. The camera goes berserk in trying to capture this sense of Time—Ritwik does a few 360 degrees, all we see are the trees of this forest, long trunks, and then the river. Abhi and Sita return to bamboo, to home, to the vines that are growing on bamboo trellises, to the houseplants. Occasionally, we spot oleander, a palm or two, overgrown green in the pilot’s clubhouse, or a flower vase on a table when someone says ‘caste is everything’. When Abhi’s mother dies and he recognizes her from memory, Ritwik takes us to the child Abhi and where is he? Swinging from a tree, like only a little boy can. Twenty seconds later, after the graceful undulations of the roots from which the little boy was hanging, and the shade of the banyan, both unquantifiable and amorphous, we see the sternness of electric poles in a railway station. Their relationship is shown through plant metaphors: trees skirt the agricultural fields as they talk, while the tanpura, made from a gourd, is strung; when the wedding is fixed against her wishes, a dry palm leaf scratches the frame; when Abhi leaves and Sita asks whom she should share her sorrow with, the camera shows treetops far away. The wedding day arrives. The alpana of paddy stalks, grain and leaves sit on the floor, leading our eyes to Sita, whose face is painted with stylised designs from the agricultural world. And suddenly she’s gone. A woman says that she was scribbling something. The camera focuses on the alpana, its details, leaf and leaf and stalk and leaf, and the plant alpana grows and glows towards light. Years pass, trees and peace have disappeared from their lives in the cramped city. Listening to her sing, the little son asks, ‘Ma, what do the dhaaner khet, the paddy fields, look like?’ The song will return at the end of the film, but, before that, there are other plants. Haraprasad, having lost everything that he valued, returns to Iswar and tells him that he’s a ‘baajey-pora taal gaachh’, a blasted palm tree. The landscape turns barren gradually. In the end, though, the little boy Binu, orphaned, stands with Iswar, his newly found maternal uncle, under a tree. They have just got off the train, Iswar has been asked to vacate his residential quarters. Homeless once again, the camera turns to a tree. And then to song and soil, to the wave on the paddy fields—the literal and the figurative find a home: ‘ Dhaaner khete dheu …’ The film ends as it had begun—by resting on plants. ******* Water in instalments, river, rain, ripple, inside boat, on plant, on tree. Water and sand, mother and child, river and bank. Trees by the river, like ripples of heads. Three minutes of this survey of life by the river Titas, and our eyes rest on an old tree at last—we meet its relatives, not on land, but their reflections on water. Soon more, not alive but their afterlife: boats, trees now travelling on water, unimaginable during their life on land; bamboo, fence, wall, house, basket, where grain is being winnowed, thatched homes. They come alive again, rounded trees and dancing papaya plants. They return to water, to boat, its wood, but mostly its bamboo, arcs and shelter, fish caught and put in baskets, covered with a flat woven bamboo piece. To land again, where the tree’s roots are, where they provide the shade necessary for dance and home, for celebration under trees. The canopy—tree branches become Ritwik’s sky; two tree branches connect two corners of the screen, like a ceiling connects walls; men fight with them too, with bamboo. Ritwik begins to make us see, again, the optical osmosis between plant and person ... ... an unconscious woman in a man’s arms, horizontal, is like the tree branches in the following scene; the floral patterns on the bride’s forehead, the wedding garlands, the eating and rejection of light, darkness and luminosity, how Ritwik’s camera catches light falling on the flowers in the garden and those on the wedding saree, the shola kadam flower on the topor, the groom’s crown. These are echoed visually by the houses of bamboo and straw, as if they too were topor-like, and the palm tree behind the small temple. At the moment of leaving her parents’, the bride weeps holding a plant—the holy basil in the tulsi mancha—and her butterfly tiara makes her plant-like. There is no getting away from this way of seeing. Ritwik shows us the boatman’s katha, its stylised botanical patterns; he warns the husband about his wife’s beauty gathering attention with a proverb borrowed from—what else?—the plant world: ‘ Lau er opor najar lagau na kintu ’, be careful that the bottle gourd doesn’t catch attention. A close-up of the woman’s middle-parted hair is turned into a relative of the sugarcane leaf’s long midrib; shadows of leaves dance on the bodies of women so that their bodies and limbs become branches. Ram’s aged, scraggly beard is not very different from the straw hanging from the roof. There’s the stamp of the botanical everywhere: flowers on dhaak, diamond patterns of bamboo designs in kitchens, straight lines of jute sticks, bow and arrow; a galaxy of water hyacinth amidst which sit planets of boats, boats of potatoes. Tree shadows lick the water everywhere, old trees snuggle up to their shortened noon shadows, the dheki moves up and down and up and down, avoiding the hand that feeds it grain, crushing grain. Men and women erupt in anger, the violence of the plant idiom: ‘ Tomarey kauwa ja, oi dhaan khete giye kauwao ta ’, telling you something is like telling the paddy field … The little boy’s name is Ananta. Infinite. He runs through the paddy fields blowing a paper horn. Nabajibon, paddy, bamboo, it is to this that Ritwik returns, this is how history is reborn. ∎ SUB-HEAD Largely unrecognized in his lifetime, Indian filmmaker Ritwik Ghatak created a devotional body of work that confronts alienation and Partition, while attending to humanity’s final asylum in the embrace of lifeforms between garden and forest. As his feminist protagonists withdraw, growing increasingly reclusive and almost arboreal amid narratives of class and betrayal, Sumana Roy reflects on Ghatak’s decisive critical creative and technical choices as embodiments of his ethos. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Ephemeral III (2025), watercolour on acid-free paper, courtesy of Sonali Sonam. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Review Kolkata Ritwik Ghatak East India West Bengal Arboreal Cinema 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. 12 Mar 2026 Review Kolkata 12th Mar 2026 SONALI SONAM (b. 1995, Bihar) is a visual artist whose practice draws from the discipline and visual language of miniature painting while engaging with contemporary experiences of space, memory, and perception. She studied Painting at Kala Bhavana, Visva-Bharati University, Santiniketan, and later completed her Master’s degree at the College of Art, New Delhi. Provocations on Empathy Clare Patrick 13th Aug Spiritually Chic Torsa Ghosal 1st Aug A Man's World Nidhil Vohra 2nd Mar Lights Out in Kinshasa Vrinda Jagota 17th Feb Saffronizing Bollywood Kaashif Hajee 15th Apr On That Note:

“Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” COMMUNITY Quintet AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Loneliest star, shining so brightly / For no one to see. / Loneliest star, tell me your secret / You shouldn't keep it.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 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 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 Live Brooklyn 25th Apr 2024 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 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:

Fleeing violent persecution in Pakistan, Ahmadi Muslims have scattered across the globe—including to Brazil. In Petrópolis, a city historically associated with exiles, one missionary imam and his family spent 11 years constructing an Ahmadi mosque open to all. While promoting pacifism, the Ahmadiyya community continues to express itself politically through international missionary activity, including in Israel. Fleeing violent persecution in Pakistan, Ahmadi Muslims have scattered across the globe—including to Brazil. In Petrópolis, a city historically associated with exiles, one missionary imam and his family spent 11 years constructing an Ahmadi mosque open to all. While promoting pacifism, the Ahmadiyya community continues to express itself politically through international missionary activity, including in Israel. Prithi Khalique, antage of Baitul Awal. Acrylic painting and graphic artwork, 12 x 8 inches. Artist Petropolis Sana Khan 21 Jan 2025 st · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION The Ahmadis of Petrópolis The Baitul Awal mosque is a surprise. Located in Petrópolis, Brazil, a mountain city of about 300,000 , a little more than 40 miles outside Rio de Janeiro, the mosque's expanse belies its unconventional setting. A handsome white structure that rises from a fringe of gardens, it sits halfway up a mountain slope with houses hanging off. A sign says that it belongs to the Ahmadi Association of Islam in Brazil. When you assume its vantage point, looking in the direction it faces, you see a shallow valley that blurs into the Serra dos Órgãos mountain range. Brazil may not be a country known for its Muslim population, but it is where enslaved Muslims from West Africa led one of the most important revolutions against slavery in the Americas in 1835. Roughly around the same year—sources vary—Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was born in Qadian, Punjab, then part of British India. In 1889, Ahmad established a new Islamic movement called the Ahmadiyya Jamaat and declared himself its first caliph. One year prior, slavery was finally abolished in Brazil. The fifth and present caliph, Mirza Masroor Ahmad, has governed the Ahmadiyya community since 2003. Wasim Ahmad Zafar, an Ahmadi Muslim imam and missionary from Rabwah, Pakistan, organized the construction of the Petrópolis mosque. He has lived there with his family since 1993; before this, he was posted in Guatemala. Among Islam's heterogeneous adherents, Ahmadi Muslims distinguish themselves by explicitly subscribing to a missionary ethos, sending emissaries around the world to proselytize. Despite having outposts in virtually every country of the world, they make up only about 1% of Muslims. “The Ahmadiyya Jamaat isn’t another school of thought,” Zafar said in an interview. We spoke in Urdu after lunch at his home. “Our school of thought is Islam.” According to Ahmadi Muslims, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was sent to unify the Muslim community in response to its fragmentation during the late colonial period. They view him as the messiah and mahdi, a ruler prophesied to arrive in the end times to integrate a variegated global faith. Although they preach nonviolence, they have been subject to violent persecution from many other Muslims. Meanwhile, the community has also experienced a fracture, with the 1914 separation of Lahori Ahmadis. “In the whole world, there is only one Muslim community with a caliph,” Zafar said. “And to have a caliph, this assures us that Allah Ta’ala is with our community.” There is a disconnect between how a large number of Muslims perceive them—as foreign to Islam—and how they perceive themselves—as torchbearers of its essence. Ahmadi Muslims regard their centralization under a living caliph as evidence of divine sanction and yearn to bring others under the umbrella. The community even has a motto: "Love for All, Hatred for None." The Baitul Awal Mosque, located in Brazil's Petropolis. Courtesy of the author. This April, following Eid ul-Fitr, Zafar and his family hosted the 30th jalsa salana , or annual assembly, at the mosque. It was presented as an inter-faith exchange, with speakers including a Jewish woman leader, Black Buddhist monk, Umbanda priest, and representative of the civil police. His sons, Nadeem, Ijaz, and Takreem, alternately emceed, translated speeches into Portuguese, and sang Urdu ghazals, and the woman sitting in front of me teared up. Zafar presented a single red rose to every speaker. Afterwards, the women of the family served a meal in the garden that they had prepared. I spoke to Zafar's youngest daughter, Aila, a dentistry student who had invited her friend, an Indigenous biologist-in-training who talked about the jewelry she makes out of insect wings. For our interview a few months later, the women cooked another meal. Zafar's wife, Anila, and their daughters-in-law, Nida and Maria, brought chicken curry, chickpeas, pulao, parathas, salad, fruit, and gajar ka halwa to the table. They served it in their home, which is situated next to the mosque. Zafar pinched red chili powder from a bowl and sprinkled it over his plate. He had just returned from a jalsa tour of sorts: from Virginia, to Toronto, to the global Ahmadiyya headquarter s in the town of Islamabad in Surrey, England, where 43,000 guests had joined. In keeping with the Ahmadi motto, outsiders are encouraged to come as they are to the mosque. This stands in contrast to the majority of mosques, which police women's dress, yet can also feel geared towards conversion. “Some time ago, a women’s group came, with girls too. It’s obvious that non-Muslims will be without dupattas, with bare heads. I uploaded photos of them like that and some Muslims messaged me saying that I did something wrong allowing these women inside,” Zafar said. “So I responded to them with love, saying that if we don’t allow someone inside and don’t show them the beauty [of our faith], how will they realize it?” The first time I went to the mosque, the weekend before Ramadan, I was wearing a jumpsuit covered with red zebra stripes. No one seemed to mind. I was struck by the hedge in front landscaped to read “Paz,” or peace, and the second-floor library with copies of the Qur'an translated into 60 languages as widely ranging as Bhojpuri and Russian. Select copies of the Qur'an written in multiple different languages housed at the Baitul Awal Mosque. Courtesy of the author. Ijaz, Zafar's middle son and a civil engineer who aims to improve Petrópolis' resilience to landslides, led a tour of the mosque, showing the visitor apartments built into it. His youngest son, Takreem, brought freshly brewed chai and biscuits from the house. He said that he wanted to be a missionary like his father and perhaps go to Africa. For the Zafar grandchildren, the third generation here, the garden is a playground. Switching between Urdu and Portuguese, they run around looking for hummingbirds and butterflies. As of 2024, Zafar said that there are approximately 53 Ahmadi Muslims in Brazil. He claimed that the community used to be larger, but many professionals moved on to Canada or the US for work. His missionary activity in Brazil involves traveling — he has visited all 26 states — and using political platforms to increase awareness of Islam as a religion of peace. Several Brazilian converts appear to be married to members of his extended family who are based in the country. The community's small numbers in Brazil do not seem to deter Zafar. "Our work isn’t to bring people in, unless their hearts are in it,” he said. Since its beginning, the missionary tradition has been a fundamental aspect of Ahmadi Islam. The earliest overseas Ahmadiyya mission dates to 1913, in London. By 1920, missions had spread to the Middle East, Southeast Asia, China, West Africa, the Caribbean, North America, and Europe, according to historian Nile Green . For many communities around the world, the Ahmadiyya community was their first introduction to Islam. I wondered if, and how, this family in Petrópolis thought about the damage evangelical missionaries have historically wrought in Brazil, from incursions into Indigenous territories to pro-Bolsonaro pentecostalists in favelas. Green notes how the multiplicity of religious organizations that emerged in South Asia at the turn of the twentieth century worked in a competitive religious marketplace, borrowing methods from Christian evangelicals and contributing to the “ market production of sectarianism. ” Ahmadi Muslims made a point of building mosques in their new territories and taking advantage of the technologies available to them, founding and distributing newspapers to disseminate their beliefs. Newspaper articles tend to follow Zafar's travels. After the interview, he pulled out a binder to show me Portuguese clippings he has collected about the community since the 1990s. "The media here is so good,” he said. "They write what we believe, even when it’s different from what they believe.” But he added, "In freedom, they [Brazilians] have gone very far. And they don’t want any prohibitions. With affection and love, we want to show them that freedom happens within a limit. If you go outside of the limit in the name of freedom, then it will not be freedom.” He drew a parallel with the need for traffic rules while driving. "This is a simple matter that we’re trying to teach them. It will take time, but with love, we’re guiding them.” This kind of paternalism is perhaps intrinsic to the missionary project, regardless of religious tradition. A clipping from a local newspaper covering the Ahmadi community in Brazil. Courtesy of the author. Zafar opened the mosque in 2016, having begun the process in 2005. It took a long time to get permission from the Petrópolis city council to build it, because the neighborhood it is in was zoned as residential. Designed by a Pakistani architect, its construction was funded by the Ahmadiyya community. "We do dua that Allah brings faithful people to our masjid and it fills up," Anila Zafar told me. Pakistan has the world’s largest population of Ahmadi Muslims. Here, the competitive marketplace of Islamic variants has hardened into institutionalized persecution of non-Sunnis. Declared non-Muslims by the constitution in 1974, Ahmadi Muslims are forbidden from basic Islamic practices, such as saying salam, playing the adhan from their mosques, or referring to their mosques as such . They have to identify themselves on their documents, which leads to discrimination at school and work, affecting livelihoods and economic mobility. In recent years, they have again lost the right to vote , as well as, Zafar chuckles at the absurdity of this, to carry out qurbani , or sacrifice animals for the hungry, on Eid ul-Adha. The latter contributes towards zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam. Most gravely, they face a constant threat of arbitrary arrests and detention by the state and state-sanctioned extrajudicial violence, disappearances, and murder just by virtue of their interpretation of Islam. Zafar was born in Rabwah, Pakistan, in 1959, the city created post-Partition as a home for the Ahmadis . When he was a teenager, he began the seven-year-long process of missionary training, where he had a scriptural education in the Quran and hadiths, as well as in how to cultivate qualities important to a missionary such as patience and restraint. His family is originally from Qadian, the birthplace of Ahmadi Islam, and his grandfathers on both sides converted. While he acknowledges his pain at the mistreatment of Ahmadi Muslims in Pakistan, this also shores up his faith: "We forget that any prophet meets disbelief and resistance from the people,” he said. His preferred method of arbitration lies in the spiritual realm, even though he engages with the political sphere in Brazil—a duality ingrained in the Ahmadi Muslim approach. When we first met, he had just returned from Brasilia, the capital, where he said he had been providing a Muslim perspective on Palestine. Although the Ahmadiyya caliph has released statements in support of Palestine , pointing to the Ahmadi Muslims who live and have suffered in Gaza, the community continues to maintain a mosque in Haifa, Israel . "I've heard of it, but I've never seen it," Anila Zafar said. "There is one in every country…We have a presence everywhere." There does not seem to be a point at which the community will boycott Israel, closing their center or reducing their missionary presence there. What does it mean to be a persecuted Muslim minority with a missionary presence in Israel, supportive of Palestine but also conveniently painted by Israel as the “ good Muslims ”? "If there is oppression in Palestine, if all this is happening in Pakistan, should I gather a group here, go on the road, bother people, what’s the use of that? If I break some car windows here, will that have any use? That’s why this isn’t what the Ahmadiyya community does. If we have certainty in our hearts, that there is God, and Allah Ta’ala loves us, then what else do we need?” Wasim Zafar asked. He referred to an incident in Pakistan in 2010 in which Ahmadi mosques were attacked and over 90 Ahmadis were massacred. Following that, he stated, there were no Ahmadis on the roads protesting because of their motto. They chose peace, he said. To him, the conflicts that have affected Muslim states are further proof of their dividedness. According to Zafar, the fate of places like Palestine and Iraq, and the reason for their experience of oppression, has been the lack of unity among Muslim states. The reason the Arab countries have not been able to handle Israel is also a result of their lack of unified leadership. This focus on division within the Muslim world echoes the position of the global Ahmadiyya leadership, departing from mainstream clerics in places like Pakistan and the United States who frequently point to empire's excesses to explain contemporary crises. The German immigrants who initially settled Petrópolis recreated an alpine community in the subtropical Serra dos Órgãos mountains. Similarly, the Zafars and the community they have built have rooted themselves here, bringing with them perceptions, leanings, and desires from their homeland. Anila Zafar leads the women's wing, which was meeting the afternoon I was there. "Women can understand what other women say better," she said. She closed her words with a Portuguese-Urdu-Arabic mashup: "Vamos fazer dua.” Let’s make dua. It may not be surprising after all that there is an Ahmadi Muslim mosque in Petrópolis. The city, named after the Brazilian emperor Dom Pedro II, is associated with exiles. Probably the most famous is Stefan Zweig, the Austrian writer who overdosed on barbiturates along with his wife Elisabet, upon realizing that they could not leave behind the horrors of war in Europe, even when in the mountains of Brazil. Their house is now a memorial to exiles. Petrópolis is also synonymous with its many house museums. There is of course the Brazilian royal family's summer palace , comprising a dual escape: from Napoleon in Europe and from the heat in Rio. Then there is the Franco-Brazilian aviation pioneer Alberto Santos-Dumont's house without a kitchen. Finally, just down the road from the mosque where the Zafars live, there is the House of Seven Errors, whose right and left sides are purposely incongruous—not unlike the curious intersection of a community persecuted at home, while willingly serving as missionaries abroad. Among this list of house-museums and exiles, settlement and flight, lies the Ahmadi Association of Islam in Brazil. Courtesy of the author. 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 SANA KHAN is a writer and editor living in Rio de Janeiro. A former Asian American Writers' Workshop fellow, her writing has been nominated for Best American Essays and Best of the Net. PRITHI KHALIQUE is a visual designer and animator based in Dhaka and Providence. Profile Petropolis Brazil Ahmadi Ahmadiyya Baitul Awal Mosque Persecution Religious Conflict religious divide Pakistan Lahore Punjab Ahmadi Association of Islam Brazil Ahmadi Association of Islam pacifist pacifism Jalsa sectarianism messianic faiths Islam extrajudicial violence Extrajudicial Killings syncretism religious syncretism Atlantic forest diaspora missionary missionary faith dawa market production of sectarianism Mirza Ghulam Ahmad Mirza Masroor Ahmad Ahmadiyya Jamaat 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: