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

Since this performance, Lal has been prolific: aside from his collaborations with Rajna Swaminathan, Ganavya, and others, he released raga shorts “Shuddha Sarang” in 2021 and “Bhairav” in 2024, as well as the EP “Raga Bhimpalasi” this August. INTERACTIVE Between Notes: An Improvisational Set Utsav Lal Since this performance, Lal has been prolific: aside from his collaborations with Rajna Swaminathan, Ganavya, and others, he released raga shorts “Shuddha Sarang” in 2021 and “Bhairav” in 2024, as well as the EP “Raga Bhimpalasi” this August. As part of SAAG's live event In Grief, In Solidarity on June 5th, 2021, the raga and jazz pianist and composer Utsav Lal performed a set that kicked off the proceedings. With his quick-fingered approach, glimmering with deep pauses leading to swift digressions that slide through and between notes, Lal—who has been called “ the Phil Coulter of raga ” —began the event by offering a set that was at once meditative and immersive. Lal has performed solo at the Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Kennedy Center, and Steinway Hall, among others, and has been honored as a Young Steinway Artist, amongst others. He has seven solo records, including a historic world’s first album on the microtonal Fluid Piano (2016). In 2023, Lal performed for SAAG's Volume 2 launch event as part of the “ Vagabonds Trio, ” which includes himself, Rajna Swaminathan, and Ganavya Doraiswamy. The performance heralded both a new volume of SAAG and Rajna Swaminathan's latest album, Apertures . Buy Lal's latest release, Raga Bhimpalasi: Indian Classical Music on the Piano, here . ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Brooklyn Raga Jazz Piano Music Performance Live Performance Improvisation Rajna Swaminathan Ganavya Carnegie Hall Fluid Piano Vagabonds Trio Raga Bhimpalasi Classical Music UTSAV LAL is an Indian-American pianist-composer often known as the "Raga Pianist". Hailed by numerous media outlets as a ground-breaking performer, Lal has performed solo at the Carnegie Hall, Southbank Centre, Kennedy Center, Steinway Hall, among others, and honored as a Young Steinway Artist, amongst others. He has collaborated with Martin Hayes, Dennis Cahill, Winifred Horan, Australian Contemporary Circus Theatre CIRCA, Talvin Singh, George Brooks, Rajna Swaminathan, and has 7 solo records, including a historic world’s first album on the microtonal Fluid Piano (2016). Lal holds degrees in Contemporary Improvisation from the New England Conservatory of Music, and Jazz from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland. Live Brooklyn 5th Jun 2021 On That Note: Quintet 25th APR “Apertures” with the Vagabonds Trio 19th MAY The Aahvaan Project · Performance 5th JUN

JOURNALIST Anumeha Yadav ANUMEHA YADAV is a journalist and researcher who works on labour, and the effects of social and economic policies on working-class and rural communities. Her work has been published extensively in The Hindu, The Indian Express, Al Jazeera, The Guardian, and Caravan , amongst others. JOURNALIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. FEATURES Whose Footfall is Loudest? The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. Thawda Aye Lei Never in my life did I think that flip-flops could be fascinating. Only after a memorable incident entailing a particular pair of flip-flops did I begin to pay attention to them. An incident, yes! The one that will stay with me my whole life. It made me realise that certain footwear could carry more meaning than just “footwear”. It happened after Amay passed away. Before she drew her last breath, Amay had been struggling with lung cancer for nearly three months. At the time, we were living in a small town. Hoping that we could still save her, we sent her to a hospital in the city. We buried her there when she died. Without Amay, our journey back to our small town was desolate. My heart felt empty, as if there was nothing left for me to hold on to. Everything around me went pitch dark, as if I had been pulled into a black hole. When it was decided that all of Amay’s belongings would be given away to needy families, I acquiesced. I didn’t want to cling to her stuff—after all, I had lost Amay as a person already. Even then, something that belonged to Amay was discovered unexpectedly. A pair of flip-flops. Under Amay’s bed, lying still and quiet in the darkest corner as if they were hiding, were a pair of her flip-flops. They must have been separated from Amay when she was taken to hospital. When I looked at them carefully, I saw that the soles were worn out and the heels were ragged. Amay was a frugal woman who always budgeted carefully and spent wisely. Apart from a new pair of flip-flops for some occasions, she wore these worn rubber flip-flops on a daily basis—when she did household chores and went grocery shopping—for many years. If the straps were broken, she would replace them with new ones herself. If only one strap of her flip-flop was broken, she would keep one new strap for later use. After several years of daily use, Amay’s toeprints were imprinted on the flip-flops. Tears started rolling down as I looked at them. These flip-flops showed me beyond a doubt how Amay went through hard times in her life, and how she endured pain and suffering. That pair of flip-flops I inherited from Amay would stay with me for many, many more years. Since then, I’ve been drawn to stories, memories and lives that could be revealed by well-worn flip-flops. We might change clothes every day, but a member of a low-income household, who could barely afford an extra pair of flip-flops, had to rely on the only pair they had. Flip-flops were a poor person’s comrades-in-arms on a thorny road. Flip-flops gave them strength. They were as close to them as their own skin. “My flip-flops are my fortress!” poet Hla Than declared. After the military coup in February 2021, I collected more intriguing stories of flip-flops and their owners. A small, underdeveloped country suffering from economic asthma under COVID-19 was hit by a rogue political wave. This spring, the future of the nation became as blurry as the spring mist itself. If someone looked far into the future, they would only see a parched land. The military claimed that the 2020 election fraud made the coup inevitable. Prior to the election, “The Sound of Heels,” an election campaign song by the National League for Democracy (NLD), was very popular. It became the NLD’s triumphant anthem following the party’s landslide victory in the election, but it vanished into thin air after the military seized power. The song was dedicated to the State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the NLD, to whom her supporters referred as “Amay”. The song was about how her efforts gave Myanmar, an ostracised society under long years of military rule, a chance to step onto the world stage. On 1 February, the clack-clack of heels were silenced by the bang-bang of military boots. Before long, the whole country was completely under the boots. The voices of mourning mothers, the tongue-clicking of dismayed youth, the moaning of farmers out of their stubbled fields and workers out of their factories got louder and louder each day. “Join the CDM now!” As soon as the rallying cry put people on alert, all those different voices merged together—ineffectual whines turned into battle cries reverberating across the sky. If someone had ever questioned whether footwear could be frightening, the answer would have been “yes” if they were military boots. In the first week of the Spring Revolution, civil servants joined the CDM en masse. The main action of the CDM was that no employee should go to work. In some political cartoons, military generals in jackboots trampled doctors, school teachers and workers. “Stop going to office, struggle out of the dictatorship!” was the slogan of the strikers. They warned each other that if people continued to work for the military state, many precious lives, beautiful things and human values would be smashed under the boots. That’s how footwear became a central character in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. There was more to come. Within a week of the coup, thousands of young people took to the streets. In response, the military hired a group of jingoists and staged counter-protests. Some anti-coup protesters started shouting that they were out on the street on their own volition, and that they had not been paid by anyone. To drive home the point that they were from well-to-do families and that they could not possibly be bought, they came to the protests in expensive outfits and shoes. This, however, only highlighted the dire situation of most of their fellow protestors, who couldn’t afford fancy outfits. There were messages on social media condemning some affluent protesters for talking down to people from underprivileged backgrounds, including those hired by the military. In opposing tyranny, people simultaneously learned to smash any form of discrimination based on wealth or class. Day by day, the revolution gathered strength. It soon turned into a nationwide protest of people from all walks of life—rural and urban. Their footfall echoed in the streets. Now street surfaces seemed totally covered by an array of flip-flops and shoes that it would be difficult for anyone to gain a foothold there. Spring was in full bloom. On roads where fallen ones would be laid to rest, columns after columns of rallies continued to march over and over again. One of the non-violent protests was known as “Lace your shoes up!” In the early days of the Spring, security personnel seemed uncertain about whether they should use force against protesters. They tried to push the crowds off the roads, saying the people were obstructing traffic. The youth reacted by making their protests mobile. They moved around in small groups and continued to protest. They crossed the road when the light was green. They stopped when the light turned red. They shouted rally cries. As soon as they had the chance, they sat on the road, lacing up their shoes at a leisurely pace. Policemen watching them were speechless. In the following days, there were “harvesting onion” and “collecting rice grains” movements. Loose onions and grains of rice were deliberately poured out in the middle of a road so everyone could help pick them up and put them back in the bags to annoy the police. Spring flowers of a variety of colours were seen everywhere. New and creative forms of revolutionary activities shone here and there. Some people found fault with these kinds of protests. Young people were not serious, they said. Others pointed out the generation gap. Older people did not understand the state-of-the-art techniques of young people. In reality in the early days of the spring, people of all ages managed to build mutual trust and solidarity. They were full of energy, enjoying the calm before a storm. The fresh, green spring would soon turn into a fully-blown parched summer. The intense heat made wall tiles rise up and crack. A heatwave also pervaded throughout the democratic movement. The forces, standing up hand-in-hand against the junta, were hit with a bloody gust. A volley of gunfire across the sky set a flock of roosting birds on a chaotic flight. A group of soldiers and police chased down the protesters who were retreating into a neighbourhood, and beat them to death like blood-starved beasts. Even the black asphalt road began to weep, blood streaming down all over her face. After blood was spilled, the style of people’s revolutionary art also changed. Each time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street. Some flip-flops were upside down, others in the gutter, and many of them unpaired. And yet most of them looked well-worn. When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them. The abandoned flip-flops didn’t look great but they could be invaluable to their owners. In this way, I learned, rather accidentally, that flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions. In the 1988 uprising, flip-flops were scattered everywhere on the road. In the 2007 Saffron Revolution, there were many flipflops drenched in blood. Following the 2015 student protests, hundreds of flip-flops were on the road again. There was even a shoe charity campaign in 2021. It emerged after some people began to question on social media what kind of shoes would be most suitable for protests if they were to escape from violent attacks. A number of shoe donors came forward. In some places, many pairs of “used, feel free to take” shoes in various sizes were on offer. Some people who owned extra pairs of shoes shared them with their comrades. They exchanged metta in sharing shoes. They looked after each other. They became more united, realising that people were cut from the same cloth. On top of physical violence, people also suffered from psychological warfare by the regime. The longer a revolution dragged on, the more volatile revolutionary morale could become. And yet, crackdowns notwithstanding, most protesters decided to continue with their struggle. Some bid farewells to their parents and friends. “In the event that I am killed I donate my organs to anyone in need,” some people wrote in their wills. “Don’t push this person any further, / at land’s end / my flipflops are my fortress,” read the last lines of a poem by Hla Than. People prepared for a last-ditch fight. Oaths—that they would not back down no matter what—were sworn. They glued pictures of the coup leader on the roads and marched on them. The senior general’s face was smeared with hundreds of footprints. The murder of protesters became more commonplace. The number of martyrs multiplied every day. People shed new tears before old tears dried on their cheeks. They were placed under curfew. Internet access was restricted. Arrests and detentions under various charges became more frequent. People felt less and less secure. There were no more grounds for them to take a stand, so it seemed. They became afraid of nightfall. What they feared more probably was the nightfall over their future. One day I saw a photo of a pair of slippers on social media. “These belonged to a mother. They were left during a protest.” They were white and size 37. The straps were white, but not pure white. The left and right slippers must have been thrown into disarray when the wearer was attacked. There was a line of blood on the pavement that stained one of them. I learned that the owner was a 50-year-old schoolteacher. She was shot to death at that spot by the military terrorists. A bullet that hit her hand took her life as she had a heart condition. “She wasn’t feeling very well when she went to the protest,” said her daughter in an interview. The alleged “2020 election fraud” brought dishonour to members of the education department who had overseen the polling stations. That’s why she believed that it was her duty to protest the coup on the front line. Before she left home, she had comforted her daughter that the security forces would go easy and not use violence against school teachers. Sadly, the gun barrel does not discriminate—it was loyal only to the finger that pulled the trigger. One bullet after another shattered our dreams. Karl Marx’s slogan “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” echoed loudly among the masses. The daughter wept violently over the slippers left by her fallen mother. This reminded me of how I cried whenever I saw my amay’s flip-flops. What of her? Would she become interested in footwear too? In revolutions, footwear is often prematurely parted from its wearers. The group in military boots stood firm, determined to put an end to the civilian resistance. The people had no weapons, nor sturdy shields. Their flip-flops wore thin. Even then, the hot, bloody roads couldn’t be worse than hell. No one seemed to mind the intense heat under their soles. With or without footwear, their way out of hell would be an arduous journey. ∎ Endnotes : Hla Than’s poem was translated by Ko Ko Thett. This essay appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. Never in my life did I think that flip-flops could be fascinating. Only after a memorable incident entailing a particular pair of flip-flops did I begin to pay attention to them. An incident, yes! The one that will stay with me my whole life. It made me realise that certain footwear could carry more meaning than just “footwear”. It happened after Amay passed away. Before she drew her last breath, Amay had been struggling with lung cancer for nearly three months. At the time, we were living in a small town. Hoping that we could still save her, we sent her to a hospital in the city. We buried her there when she died. Without Amay, our journey back to our small town was desolate. My heart felt empty, as if there was nothing left for me to hold on to. Everything around me went pitch dark, as if I had been pulled into a black hole. When it was decided that all of Amay’s belongings would be given away to needy families, I acquiesced. I didn’t want to cling to her stuff—after all, I had lost Amay as a person already. Even then, something that belonged to Amay was discovered unexpectedly. A pair of flip-flops. Under Amay’s bed, lying still and quiet in the darkest corner as if they were hiding, were a pair of her flip-flops. They must have been separated from Amay when she was taken to hospital. When I looked at them carefully, I saw that the soles were worn out and the heels were ragged. Amay was a frugal woman who always budgeted carefully and spent wisely. Apart from a new pair of flip-flops for some occasions, she wore these worn rubber flip-flops on a daily basis—when she did household chores and went grocery shopping—for many years. If the straps were broken, she would replace them with new ones herself. If only one strap of her flip-flop was broken, she would keep one new strap for later use. After several years of daily use, Amay’s toeprints were imprinted on the flip-flops. Tears started rolling down as I looked at them. These flip-flops showed me beyond a doubt how Amay went through hard times in her life, and how she endured pain and suffering. That pair of flip-flops I inherited from Amay would stay with me for many, many more years. Since then, I’ve been drawn to stories, memories and lives that could be revealed by well-worn flip-flops. We might change clothes every day, but a member of a low-income household, who could barely afford an extra pair of flip-flops, had to rely on the only pair they had. Flip-flops were a poor person’s comrades-in-arms on a thorny road. Flip-flops gave them strength. They were as close to them as their own skin. “My flip-flops are my fortress!” poet Hla Than declared. After the military coup in February 2021, I collected more intriguing stories of flip-flops and their owners. A small, underdeveloped country suffering from economic asthma under COVID-19 was hit by a rogue political wave. This spring, the future of the nation became as blurry as the spring mist itself. If someone looked far into the future, they would only see a parched land. The military claimed that the 2020 election fraud made the coup inevitable. Prior to the election, “The Sound of Heels,” an election campaign song by the National League for Democracy (NLD), was very popular. It became the NLD’s triumphant anthem following the party’s landslide victory in the election, but it vanished into thin air after the military seized power. The song was dedicated to the State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the NLD, to whom her supporters referred as “Amay”. The song was about how her efforts gave Myanmar, an ostracised society under long years of military rule, a chance to step onto the world stage. On 1 February, the clack-clack of heels were silenced by the bang-bang of military boots. Before long, the whole country was completely under the boots. The voices of mourning mothers, the tongue-clicking of dismayed youth, the moaning of farmers out of their stubbled fields and workers out of their factories got louder and louder each day. “Join the CDM now!” As soon as the rallying cry put people on alert, all those different voices merged together—ineffectual whines turned into battle cries reverberating across the sky. If someone had ever questioned whether footwear could be frightening, the answer would have been “yes” if they were military boots. In the first week of the Spring Revolution, civil servants joined the CDM en masse. The main action of the CDM was that no employee should go to work. In some political cartoons, military generals in jackboots trampled doctors, school teachers and workers. “Stop going to office, struggle out of the dictatorship!” was the slogan of the strikers. They warned each other that if people continued to work for the military state, many precious lives, beautiful things and human values would be smashed under the boots. That’s how footwear became a central character in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. There was more to come. Within a week of the coup, thousands of young people took to the streets. In response, the military hired a group of jingoists and staged counter-protests. Some anti-coup protesters started shouting that they were out on the street on their own volition, and that they had not been paid by anyone. To drive home the point that they were from well-to-do families and that they could not possibly be bought, they came to the protests in expensive outfits and shoes. This, however, only highlighted the dire situation of most of their fellow protestors, who couldn’t afford fancy outfits. There were messages on social media condemning some affluent protesters for talking down to people from underprivileged backgrounds, including those hired by the military. In opposing tyranny, people simultaneously learned to smash any form of discrimination based on wealth or class. Day by day, the revolution gathered strength. It soon turned into a nationwide protest of people from all walks of life—rural and urban. Their footfall echoed in the streets. Now street surfaces seemed totally covered by an array of flip-flops and shoes that it would be difficult for anyone to gain a foothold there. Spring was in full bloom. On roads where fallen ones would be laid to rest, columns after columns of rallies continued to march over and over again. One of the non-violent protests was known as “Lace your shoes up!” In the early days of the Spring, security personnel seemed uncertain about whether they should use force against protesters. They tried to push the crowds off the roads, saying the people were obstructing traffic. The youth reacted by making their protests mobile. They moved around in small groups and continued to protest. They crossed the road when the light was green. They stopped when the light turned red. They shouted rally cries. As soon as they had the chance, they sat on the road, lacing up their shoes at a leisurely pace. Policemen watching them were speechless. In the following days, there were “harvesting onion” and “collecting rice grains” movements. Loose onions and grains of rice were deliberately poured out in the middle of a road so everyone could help pick them up and put them back in the bags to annoy the police. Spring flowers of a variety of colours were seen everywhere. New and creative forms of revolutionary activities shone here and there. Some people found fault with these kinds of protests. Young people were not serious, they said. Others pointed out the generation gap. Older people did not understand the state-of-the-art techniques of young people. In reality in the early days of the spring, people of all ages managed to build mutual trust and solidarity. They were full of energy, enjoying the calm before a storm. The fresh, green spring would soon turn into a fully-blown parched summer. The intense heat made wall tiles rise up and crack. A heatwave also pervaded throughout the democratic movement. The forces, standing up hand-in-hand against the junta, were hit with a bloody gust. A volley of gunfire across the sky set a flock of roosting birds on a chaotic flight. A group of soldiers and police chased down the protesters who were retreating into a neighbourhood, and beat them to death like blood-starved beasts. Even the black asphalt road began to weep, blood streaming down all over her face. After blood was spilled, the style of people’s revolutionary art also changed. Each time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street. Some flip-flops were upside down, others in the gutter, and many of them unpaired. And yet most of them looked well-worn. When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them. The abandoned flip-flops didn’t look great but they could be invaluable to their owners. In this way, I learned, rather accidentally, that flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions. In the 1988 uprising, flip-flops were scattered everywhere on the road. In the 2007 Saffron Revolution, there were many flipflops drenched in blood. Following the 2015 student protests, hundreds of flip-flops were on the road again. There was even a shoe charity campaign in 2021. It emerged after some people began to question on social media what kind of shoes would be most suitable for protests if they were to escape from violent attacks. A number of shoe donors came forward. In some places, many pairs of “used, feel free to take” shoes in various sizes were on offer. Some people who owned extra pairs of shoes shared them with their comrades. They exchanged metta in sharing shoes. They looked after each other. They became more united, realising that people were cut from the same cloth. On top of physical violence, people also suffered from psychological warfare by the regime. The longer a revolution dragged on, the more volatile revolutionary morale could become. And yet, crackdowns notwithstanding, most protesters decided to continue with their struggle. Some bid farewells to their parents and friends. “In the event that I am killed I donate my organs to anyone in need,” some people wrote in their wills. “Don’t push this person any further, / at land’s end / my flipflops are my fortress,” read the last lines of a poem by Hla Than. People prepared for a last-ditch fight. Oaths—that they would not back down no matter what—were sworn. They glued pictures of the coup leader on the roads and marched on them. The senior general’s face was smeared with hundreds of footprints. The murder of protesters became more commonplace. The number of martyrs multiplied every day. People shed new tears before old tears dried on their cheeks. They were placed under curfew. Internet access was restricted. Arrests and detentions under various charges became more frequent. People felt less and less secure. There were no more grounds for them to take a stand, so it seemed. They became afraid of nightfall. What they feared more probably was the nightfall over their future. One day I saw a photo of a pair of slippers on social media. “These belonged to a mother. They were left during a protest.” They were white and size 37. The straps were white, but not pure white. The left and right slippers must have been thrown into disarray when the wearer was attacked. There was a line of blood on the pavement that stained one of them. I learned that the owner was a 50-year-old schoolteacher. She was shot to death at that spot by the military terrorists. A bullet that hit her hand took her life as she had a heart condition. “She wasn’t feeling very well when she went to the protest,” said her daughter in an interview. The alleged “2020 election fraud” brought dishonour to members of the education department who had overseen the polling stations. That’s why she believed that it was her duty to protest the coup on the front line. Before she left home, she had comforted her daughter that the security forces would go easy and not use violence against school teachers. Sadly, the gun barrel does not discriminate—it was loyal only to the finger that pulled the trigger. One bullet after another shattered our dreams. Karl Marx’s slogan “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” echoed loudly among the masses. The daughter wept violently over the slippers left by her fallen mother. This reminded me of how I cried whenever I saw my amay’s flip-flops. What of her? Would she become interested in footwear too? In revolutions, footwear is often prematurely parted from its wearers. The group in military boots stood firm, determined to put an end to the civilian resistance. The people had no weapons, nor sturdy shields. Their flip-flops wore thin. Even then, the hot, bloody roads couldn’t be worse than hell. No one seemed to mind the intense heat under their soles. With or without footwear, their way out of hell would be an arduous journey. ∎ Endnotes : Hla Than’s poem was translated by Ko Ko Thett. This essay appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Artwork by Mahnoor Azeem. Ink collage on cardstock. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Myanmar Military Coup Spring Revolution Saffron Revolution Hla Than Aung San Suu Kyi National League for Democracy Amay Sound Low-Income Workers Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring Student Movements Student Protests Incarceration Military Crackdown Military Dictatorship Military Operations Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics THAWDA AYE LEI is a Burmese writer who has published four novels and two short story collections. She is currently working as a researcher on gender- and media-related studies for Burma-based international NGOs. In 2021, she enrolled in the PhD program in Political Science at McMaster University, Canada. 24 Feb 2023 Essay Myanmar 24th Feb 2023 MAHNOOR AZEEM is an illustrator, writer, and recent graduate of the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is based in Lahore. 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:

JOURNALIST Azad Essa AZAD ESSA is a senior reporter for Middle East Eye . He worked for Al Jazeera English between 2010-2018 covering southern and central Africa for the network. He is the author of Hostile Homelands: The New Alliance Between India and Israel (Pluto Press, February 2023). He is based in New York City. JOURNALIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Jayeeta Chatterjee JAYEETA CHATTERJEE completed her BFA in Printmaking from Kala Bhavana, Visva Bharati University, West Bengal. Through her practice, she highlights the issues within the domestic and monotonous lives of middle-class women, particularly from lower-income groups living in small towns. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“We're not post-colonial. We're post-colonized...Even if purportedly colonialism ended, it didn't end for the languages we speak, for the passports we hold, for the laws that govern our lives. To claim post-coloniality is a mirage.” COMMUNITY Inventing South Asia Manan Ahmed Asif “We're not post-colonial. We're post-colonized...Even if purportedly colonialism ended, it didn't end for the languages we speak, for the passports we hold, for the laws that govern our lives. To claim post-coloniality is a mirage.” We're not post-colonial. We're post-colonized...Even if purportedly colonialism ended, it didn't end for the languages we speak, for the passports we hold, for the laws that govern our lives. To claim post-coloniality is a mirage. RECOMMENDED: The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India by Manan Ahmed Asif (Harvard University Press, 2020). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Karachi The Loss of Hindustan Intellectual History South Asia as a Term Experimental Methods Language Postcolonialism Karachi University Chachnama KK Aziz Michel-Rolph Trouillot Nationalism Postcolonialism as Myth South Asian Studies Columbia University Partition Manan Ahmed is an Associate Professor of History at Columbia University. He is a historian of South Asia and the littoral western Indian Ocean world from 1000-1800 CE. He is the author of four books, including The Loss of Hindustan: The Invention of India, and Disrupted City: Walking the Pathways of Memory and History in Lahore . Interview Karachi 2nd Sep 2020 On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

FICTION EDITOR Jever Kohli-Mariwala JEVER KOHLI-MARIWALA is a fiction writer based in Brooklyn. She was raised in Mumbai and is a former Chief Editor of the Yale Daily News Magazine . She has also worked at the Innocence Project . FICTION EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

RESEARCHER Tehani Ariyaratne TEHANI ARIYARATNE is a feminist researcher with ten years of working experience in the human rights and development sectors in Sri Lanka and South Asia. Her research focus areas include women's labor and environmental justice. She is the Chief Operations Officer for Fearless Collective , a South Asia-based public art project with the aim of reclamation and self-representation for women and marginalized people around the world. RESEARCHER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

VOL. 2 .333 Jaan-e-Haseena An essay about the varied temporalities and intensities of māṭam—a form of ritual mourning in Shia Islam—as a way to mark how grief, when dislocated from its centers, takes on different velocities and visual registers. Start Now Paul and Ondine In the Kashmir Valley, the spirit of Kashmiriyat remains resilient. Yet, the ongoing struggle for autonomy often overshadows the region’s many intersecting identities, both religious and sexual. When even the majority struggles to assert itself under New Delhi’s authority, what space remains for those at the margins to live and be who they are? Start Now I Sayed and Rasel This essay traces the afterlife of queer activist Xulhaz Mannan's words. Through the collapse of Hasina's regime, the co-option of gender rights, and the silencing of queer life, it asks: can a new Bangladesh emerge if it continues to deny the existence of those it has tried to erase? Start Now Larayb Abrar and Anamitra Bora From Assam’s National Register of Citizens offices to Lahore’s streets, trans and queer communities confront policing, displacement, and erasure while continuing to build worlds of resistance, care, and possibility.
 Start Now Zara Mannan Zara’s poem moves through the swagger, danger, and bruised glamour of urban Pakistan to show that being both woman and legend can make you a spectacle, a liability, and a survivor all at once. Start Now

PERFORMER, ACTIVIST Jaan-e-Haseena JAAN-E-HASEENA is a Lahore-based performance-activist, musician, and video-artist whose work explores the radical potential of cultural production for trans liberation in Pakistan. Her debut song “Izzat” became the official anthem of the Sindh Moorat March, catalyzing a community of resistance and chosen kinship. Drawing on her upbringing, her art emerges from a politicized consciousness shaped by sectarian violence, digital queer discovery, and grassroots organizing. PERFORMER, ACTIVIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER mourning in schizophrenic time Oct 27, 2025 Jaan-e-Haseena LOAD MORE

POETRY EDITOR Palvashay Sethi Palvashay Sethi is a writer and teacher based in Islamabad. POETRY EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE