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

ARTIST Bibi Hajra BIBI HAJRA received her Bachelors degree in Architecture from the National College of Arts, Lahore, and received her MA in Urban Studies from an Erasmus Mundus program. An architect, teacher, and visual artist based in Lahore, she addresses themes such as urban segregation and development, consumerism, pop culture and recently religious symbolism/aesthetics and the city. She has taught urban theory and instructed at an architecture studio. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

In the absence of a legal foundation for abortion care, solidarity amongst communities of color requires meticulous attention to history and strategy. THE VERTICAL Universalism & Solidarity in a Post-Roe Landscape In the absence of a legal foundation for abortion care, solidarity amongst communities of color requires meticulous attention to history and strategy. Sharmin Hossain ON JUNE 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the constitutional right to abortions protected under the 1973 landmark ruling, Roe v. Wade . The decision, issued in a case concerning Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortion, has opened the doors for dozens of states to take steps to ban it outright. As I’m writing this solidarity note, at least 15 states have abortion bans in effect: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. The prohibitions range from a complete ban on abortions to banning abortions at 18 weeks of pregnancy. These states are among the poorest in the country, with large populations of Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities. In the absence of safe, timely, and affordable abortion care; people are forced to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to access medical care or carry pregnancies to term against their will. This is a gross violation of human rights. Abortion bans can be traced to the brutal legacies of slavery, where Black women were treated as sexual chattel. Hence, they are rooted in white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, anti-Black violence. Such racist laws deny systematically marginalized communities the right to control their bodies and futures. About 60% of people who need abortion care each year are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Against the backdrop of this country’s legacy of racism and discrimination, Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ communities, people with low incomes, and those living in rural areas tend to face greater barriers to quality health care, childcare, and job opportunities. Oriaku Njoku, Executive Director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, shares: "This [abortion] is not something where it's either: make a choice to choose to be a parent or not to choose to be a parent. There are so many things like access to food, access to a living wage, access to insurance, your race, your gender, your ability to make money for your family." According to the World Health Organization, almost half of the 121 million pregnancies across the globe each year are unintended. Each year, over 44,000 people die from unsafe abortions, and millions more suffer serious, often permanent, injuries. Restricting access to abortion drives pregnant people to use unsafe methods. For example, Pakistan has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, but the lack of access to abortion care makes it one of the deadliest places to get an abortion. This much is clear: abortion access saves lives. This is why reproductive justice advocates have been fighting for the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, or not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. The reproductive justice framework calls for every possible effort—whether through policies, social services, and community relationships—to address intersecting oppressions, create alliances across identities, analyze power systems, and center the most marginalized among us. Reproductive justice allows us to understand access to abortion as a critical piece of economic, healthcare, and gender justice battles: the way we treat birthing people and families impacts how we build stronger and healthier communities. For example, the right to contraceptives only ensures that people can get a prescription for them. But for a low-wage worker who is uninsured, how can they afford to take a day off and pay for the contraceptives? By thinking outside of the rights framework—where we are only fighting for the right to abortion—reproductive justice acknowledges the socio-political and economic inequalities that are disproportionately faced by BIPOC communities. South Asian American communities in general and survivors in particular, live at the intersection of multiple oppressions which make the overall consequences of lack of abortion access, particularly grave. Without access to healthcare resources in the many languages spoken across South Asian diasporas, and culturally imposed shame and stigma around accessing reproductive healthcare, South Asian communities experience marginalization at multiple levels. Even apart from the lack of policies that support access to hospitals and clinics trusted by South Asian communities, there is simply no insurance for healthcare needs specific to these communities. Lack of such policies work as barriers to healthcare and reify the long-established history of racism and its many inequities. For South Asian survivors the consequences are even more grave. People in abusive relationships are far more vulnerable to sexual assault, birth control sabotage, reproductive coercion or control, and misinformation about their reproductive rights. In most cases, murder by an intimate partner is the leading cause of maternal death during pregnancy and the postpartum period, as mentioned in the SOAR Collective Statement . The Liberate Abortion—a coalition of over 150 member organizations—is currently one of the largest BIPOC-led reproductive justice and rights coalitions in the United States. Liberate Abortion was founded out of the realization that the struggle against the threat to abortion access cannot be fought by a single organization, healthcare provider, organizer, or donor. This is why the coalition focusses on community mobilization, electoral organizing, changing cultural narratives, federal outreach, and policy reform. The staff, leaders, and members coordinate with stakeholders such as movement partners in legal defense and practical service delivery spaces, cross-movement partners, funders, members of Congress, and the Biden administration on information sharing and strategy. Although the coalition solely focuses on abortion funds and clinics in the United States, frontline activists from the Latin American Green Wave movement have joined the coalition to share lessons from their campaigns to expand abortion access across the continent. In the last two years alone, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia have decriminalized or fully legalized abortions. The Supreme Court’s attack on the right to abortion access leaves several fundamental human rights open to contestation. These include the right to vote, racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and a host of other rights intertwined with the right to liberty protected through Roe v. Wade . As access to abortion gets further criminalized by politicians and companies that sell our data to anti-abortion lawmakers and legislators, privacy activists and lawmakers need to also shift their approach. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the past 15 years have seen a shocking spike in arrests and prosecutions for crimes related to stillbirths, miscarriages, and alleged drug and alcohol use during pregnancy. The legal advocacy and policy support group If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, documented over 61 cases that occurred between 2000 and 2020 in which people were criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly self-managing abortions or helping someone else get one. Only this year in August, Facebook gave Nebraska police access to a teen’s private messages which they used to prosecute her for getting an abortion. The fight for reproductive justice includes battles against surveillance and policing. These are the tools of the right wing to expand their control over bodily autonomy. For South Asian Americans this is a critical time to shift away from calls for increased policing to visionary organizing that is rooted in the desire to build safer communities. Some of the ways we can express solidarity are to get involved in volunteer services and mutual aid networks. Abortion fundraisers like the ARC-Southeast are coordinating funding and logistical support for people who need abortion access in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. For the South Asian & Indo-Caribbean diaspora, HEART to Grow is sustaining a reproductive justice fund for Muslims across America, while domestic violence organizations like API Chaya ally with abolitionist efforts that close youth jails across Seattle. The fight for reproductive justice must be both localized and nationalized—to aid and abet folks seeking abortion access, while electing prosecutors, judges, and elected representatives committed to the long-term strategy of ending criminalization, punishment, and harassment by the state, institutions, and individuals. Perhaps Roe was never enough to safeguard abortion rights or protect abortion access for all people. We are building a future in which abortion is liberated for all of us, no matter where we live or how much money we have, no matter our race, age, gender, or sexual orientation. We need to organize, build power, and create a country where our values are reflected in democracy. We will continue to provide life-saving care for those who need it the most, and we will continue fighting until every one of us has access to the care we need, when we need it, without stigma or fear. We need to develop networks of solidarity. ∎ RESOURCES : If you are a person who needs abortion care, reach out to a provider immediately . If you’re looking for an abortion provider, go to INeedAnA.com . Campaigns like Abortion On Our Own Terms are supporting folks with knowledge on self-managed abortions, while organizations like PlanCPills are distributing and providing information on how to access abortion pills online. We must all be vocal and support people who have abortions and providers who provide care every day. This means funding local abortion clinics to keep the clinics open, volunteering and donating to local abortion funds to ensure that people have support, funding, and access to care, telling your own abortion story, and listening deeply to the stories of people you love. ON JUNE 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the constitutional right to abortions protected under the 1973 landmark ruling, Roe v. Wade . The decision, issued in a case concerning Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortion, has opened the doors for dozens of states to take steps to ban it outright. As I’m writing this solidarity note, at least 15 states have abortion bans in effect: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. The prohibitions range from a complete ban on abortions to banning abortions at 18 weeks of pregnancy. These states are among the poorest in the country, with large populations of Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities. In the absence of safe, timely, and affordable abortion care; people are forced to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to access medical care or carry pregnancies to term against their will. This is a gross violation of human rights. Abortion bans can be traced to the brutal legacies of slavery, where Black women were treated as sexual chattel. Hence, they are rooted in white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, anti-Black violence. Such racist laws deny systematically marginalized communities the right to control their bodies and futures. About 60% of people who need abortion care each year are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Against the backdrop of this country’s legacy of racism and discrimination, Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ communities, people with low incomes, and those living in rural areas tend to face greater barriers to quality health care, childcare, and job opportunities. Oriaku Njoku, Executive Director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, shares: "This [abortion] is not something where it's either: make a choice to choose to be a parent or not to choose to be a parent. There are so many things like access to food, access to a living wage, access to insurance, your race, your gender, your ability to make money for your family." According to the World Health Organization, almost half of the 121 million pregnancies across the globe each year are unintended. Each year, over 44,000 people die from unsafe abortions, and millions more suffer serious, often permanent, injuries. Restricting access to abortion drives pregnant people to use unsafe methods. For example, Pakistan has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, but the lack of access to abortion care makes it one of the deadliest places to get an abortion. This much is clear: abortion access saves lives. This is why reproductive justice advocates have been fighting for the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, or not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. The reproductive justice framework calls for every possible effort—whether through policies, social services, and community relationships—to address intersecting oppressions, create alliances across identities, analyze power systems, and center the most marginalized among us. Reproductive justice allows us to understand access to abortion as a critical piece of economic, healthcare, and gender justice battles: the way we treat birthing people and families impacts how we build stronger and healthier communities. For example, the right to contraceptives only ensures that people can get a prescription for them. But for a low-wage worker who is uninsured, how can they afford to take a day off and pay for the contraceptives? By thinking outside of the rights framework—where we are only fighting for the right to abortion—reproductive justice acknowledges the socio-political and economic inequalities that are disproportionately faced by BIPOC communities. South Asian American communities in general and survivors in particular, live at the intersection of multiple oppressions which make the overall consequences of lack of abortion access, particularly grave. Without access to healthcare resources in the many languages spoken across South Asian diasporas, and culturally imposed shame and stigma around accessing reproductive healthcare, South Asian communities experience marginalization at multiple levels. Even apart from the lack of policies that support access to hospitals and clinics trusted by South Asian communities, there is simply no insurance for healthcare needs specific to these communities. Lack of such policies work as barriers to healthcare and reify the long-established history of racism and its many inequities. For South Asian survivors the consequences are even more grave. People in abusive relationships are far more vulnerable to sexual assault, birth control sabotage, reproductive coercion or control, and misinformation about their reproductive rights. In most cases, murder by an intimate partner is the leading cause of maternal death during pregnancy and the postpartum period, as mentioned in the SOAR Collective Statement . The Liberate Abortion—a coalition of over 150 member organizations—is currently one of the largest BIPOC-led reproductive justice and rights coalitions in the United States. Liberate Abortion was founded out of the realization that the struggle against the threat to abortion access cannot be fought by a single organization, healthcare provider, organizer, or donor. This is why the coalition focusses on community mobilization, electoral organizing, changing cultural narratives, federal outreach, and policy reform. The staff, leaders, and members coordinate with stakeholders such as movement partners in legal defense and practical service delivery spaces, cross-movement partners, funders, members of Congress, and the Biden administration on information sharing and strategy. Although the coalition solely focuses on abortion funds and clinics in the United States, frontline activists from the Latin American Green Wave movement have joined the coalition to share lessons from their campaigns to expand abortion access across the continent. In the last two years alone, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia have decriminalized or fully legalized abortions. The Supreme Court’s attack on the right to abortion access leaves several fundamental human rights open to contestation. These include the right to vote, racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and a host of other rights intertwined with the right to liberty protected through Roe v. Wade . As access to abortion gets further criminalized by politicians and companies that sell our data to anti-abortion lawmakers and legislators, privacy activists and lawmakers need to also shift their approach. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the past 15 years have seen a shocking spike in arrests and prosecutions for crimes related to stillbirths, miscarriages, and alleged drug and alcohol use during pregnancy. The legal advocacy and policy support group If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, documented over 61 cases that occurred between 2000 and 2020 in which people were criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly self-managing abortions or helping someone else get one. Only this year in August, Facebook gave Nebraska police access to a teen’s private messages which they used to prosecute her for getting an abortion. The fight for reproductive justice includes battles against surveillance and policing. These are the tools of the right wing to expand their control over bodily autonomy. For South Asian Americans this is a critical time to shift away from calls for increased policing to visionary organizing that is rooted in the desire to build safer communities. Some of the ways we can express solidarity are to get involved in volunteer services and mutual aid networks. Abortion fundraisers like the ARC-Southeast are coordinating funding and logistical support for people who need abortion access in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. For the South Asian & Indo-Caribbean diaspora, HEART to Grow is sustaining a reproductive justice fund for Muslims across America, while domestic violence organizations like API Chaya ally with abolitionist efforts that close youth jails across Seattle. The fight for reproductive justice must be both localized and nationalized—to aid and abet folks seeking abortion access, while electing prosecutors, judges, and elected representatives committed to the long-term strategy of ending criminalization, punishment, and harassment by the state, institutions, and individuals. Perhaps Roe was never enough to safeguard abortion rights or protect abortion access for all people. We are building a future in which abortion is liberated for all of us, no matter where we live or how much money we have, no matter our race, age, gender, or sexual orientation. We need to organize, build power, and create a country where our values are reflected in democracy. We will continue to provide life-saving care for those who need it the most, and we will continue fighting until every one of us has access to the care we need, when we need it, without stigma or fear. We need to develop networks of solidarity. ∎ RESOURCES : If you are a person who needs abortion care, reach out to a provider immediately . If you’re looking for an abortion provider, go to INeedAnA.com . Campaigns like Abortion On Our Own Terms are supporting folks with knowledge on self-managed abortions, while organizations like PlanCPills are distributing and providing information on how to access abortion pills online. We must all be vocal and support people who have abortions and providers who provide care every day. This means funding local abortion clinics to keep the clinics open, volunteering and donating to local abortion funds to ensure that people have support, funding, and access to care, telling your own abortion story, and listening deeply to the stories of people you love. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Artwork by Hafsa Ashfaq. Digital media. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Op-Ed United States Roe v Wade Reproductive Rights Legacies of Slavery Human Rights Abortion Access Low-Income Workers The Right to Contraception Liberate Abortion Latin American Green Wave National Network of Abortion Funds Gender Violence South Asian SOAR Internationalist Perspective 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. 23 Feb 2023 Op-Ed United States 23rd Feb 2023 Battles and Banishments: Gender & Heroin Addiction in Maldives A. R. & R. A. 28th Feb Climate Crimes of US Imperalism in Afghanistan Shah Mahmoud Hanifi 16th Oct Chats Ep. 9 · On the Essay Collection “Southbound” Anjali Enjeti 19th May Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History Neilesh Bose 4th May Pakistan's Feminist Wave: A Panel Zoya Rehman · Amna Chaudhry · Tooba Syed 27th Sep On That Note:

“I think of works like Shona N. Jackson's Creole Indigeneity, and fleshing out the narrative of brown movement. And, importantly, doing it in a way that decenters the United States, because, with indentureship we're talking about the movement from South Asia largely to the Caribbean.” COMMUNITY Romantic Literature and Colonialism “I think of works like Shona N. Jackson's Creole Indigeneity, and fleshing out the narrative of brown movement. And, importantly, doing it in a way that decenters the United States, because, with indentureship we're talking about the movement from South Asia largely to the Caribbean.” Mani Samriti Chander I couldn't imagine devoting any more time to Keats and Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron. So I turned to Brown Romantics where I looked at how Romantic ideas, philosophies, politics, and techniques were mobilized ends towards nationalist ends by 19th century writers in India, Australia and British Guyana. RECOMMENDED: Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell University Press, 2017), by Manu Samriti Chander. I couldn't imagine devoting any more time to Keats and Wordsworth and Shelley and Byron. So I turned to Brown Romantics where I looked at how Romantic ideas, philosophies, politics, and techniques were mobilized ends towards nationalist ends by 19th century writers in India, Australia and British Guyana. RECOMMENDED: Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell University Press, 2017), by Manu Samriti Chander. 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 Romanticism English Postcolonialism Gayatri Spivak Postcolonial Poetry Romantic Literature & the Colonized World Colonialism Race Post-George Floyd Moment Black Solidarities Indigeneity Creole Indigenous Space Vijay Prashad Ruhel Islam Hufsa Islam Browntology Brown Left Kinship The Undercommons Diaspora Guyana Australia Subaltern Studies Intellectual History Internationalist Perspective Indigeneous Spaces Egbert Martin Henry Derozio Immigration MANU SAMRITI CHANDER is Associate Professor of English at Rutgers University-Newark and is a member of the Executive Committee of the Newark Chapter of the Rutgers AAUP-AFT. He is the author of Brown Romantics: Poetry and Nationalism in the Global Nineteenth Century (Bucknell UP, 2017). He is currently working on The Collected Works of Egbert Martin , with the support of a Fulbright U.S. Scholar Grant and his current project Browntology is under contract with SUNY Press. 13 Nov 2020 Interview Romanticism 13th Nov 2020 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:

Periyarism, an anti-caste ideology that originated in Tamil Nadu, is under attack in Malaysia as witnessed during the Hindutva-led disruptions of the International Youth Rational Forum. Diasporic Tamils in West Malaysia are especially losing ground in the fight against the spread of Hindutva ideology. The legacies of corrupt Malaysian politicians and the demolition of Tamil Dravidian religious sites—calling for religious homogenization—has hindered the Periyarist agenda, but they have not culled the struggle to preserve Tamil tradition and dignity. Periyarism, an anti-caste ideology that originated in Tamil Nadu, is under attack in Malaysia as witnessed during the Hindutva-led disruptions of the International Youth Rational Forum. Diasporic Tamils in West Malaysia are especially losing ground in the fight against the spread of Hindutva ideology. The legacies of corrupt Malaysian politicians and the demolition of Tamil Dravidian religious sites—calling for religious homogenization—has hindered the Periyarist agenda, but they have not culled the struggle to preserve Tamil tradition and dignity. OCTO, BLUES OF MALAYA (2024). 23.5” x 35.5”. Artist West Malaysia Miriyam Ilavenil 20 Dec 2024 th · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Struggling for Self Respect To counter the growing influence of Hindu extremism within the West Malaysian Tamil Hindu diaspora, Karunchattai Ilaignar Padai ( Black Shirt Youth Movement ), a new Periyarist coalition in the country, organised the International Youth Rational Forum . It was meant to educate the public on the anti-fascist and rationalist principles of Periyar’s Dravidian ideology. The forum held on December 24, 2023 , welcomed several prominent Periyarist speakers including Tamil Nadu’s SM Mathivathani and Sri Lanka's Sathees Selvaraj. It was initially scheduled to be held at the MySkills Campus in Kalumpang, Selangor, but on December 18, 2023, the director, Pasupathi Sithamparam, received harassing phone calls from Hindu extremists. Fearing backlash from donors he revoked permission forcing the organisers to find a new venue within a week. The following day, 27 Hindu organizations urged the Malaysian Home Ministry to stop the forum alleging it went against Kepercayaan Kepada Tuhan (Belief in God), the first clause of the Rukun Negara (Malaysian National Principles). The clause states that citizens must submit to the power of God. While the Malaysian state claims that the Rukun Negara, constructed in 1970, was a way to reconcile with the aftermath of the 1969 race riots, prominent Malay-Chinese intellectual and former political prisoner Kua Kia Soong counters this narrative. He argues that the “race riots” were exploited by the emerging Malay capitalist class to gain political authority over the then-ruling aristocracy. According to Kua, the principles were designed to control the masses and prevent challenges to Ketuanan Melayu (Malay Supremacy), embedded in the national constitution. This is also evident in the second and third clauses, which reify citizens’ unquestioning allegiance to Malay royalty, the country, and the constitution. On December 21, 2023 , Karunchattai held a press conference refuting the allegations from the NGOs. He stated that the principles are not against the nation’s political foundations of race, religion, and royalty (the "3Rs") and Hindu extremists are targeting them for their Periyarist identity. Despite obstacles, the forum's programming was effectively executed. Photo courtesy of the author. Following the press meet—while organisers were picking up the international speakers from the airport—they were informed that the permission to host their forum at the Wisma Tun Sambanthan hall was revoked after the venue received complaints. Fortunately, that very same night, members of Karunchattai met with the management of the KL & Selangor Chinese Assembly Hall who granted them permission and declared solidarity. The next day, Nagenteran Sandrasigran, the founder of Karunchattai Ilaignar Padai, was called into the Dang Wangi police station following additional complaints. The police interrogated Nagenteran about the nature of his organisation, the forum, and Periyarism, but he was released the same day without further action. The Malaysian Immigration Department (MID) also intervened, informing the organisers that their international guest speakers had travelled under the wrong visa and needed a special one to participate in the forum. MID restricted the live streaming of the event and also implemented orders to stop and interrogate the participants as they travelled to the region. "There have been many Dravidian forums in Malaysia before, where overseas speakers were invited, but nothing this severe has ever happened before,” Nagenteran observed. Harassment and deliberate sabotage were inflicted on both organisers and speakers. On the day of the event, while the speakers were in their hotels, they received suspicious calls from people pretending to be the organisers, asking them to come down to the lobby. “I told them to stay in their rooms until I called them and not to pick up calls from unknown numbers,” Nagenteran said. The entire forum took place under the vigilant presence of the Malaysian police and immigration department. Seven police officers, including the Dang Wangi Special Branch, Bukit Aman Special Branch, and the Kuala Lumpur Contingent Headquarters, along with nine immigration officers, surveyed the forum. There were several other events organised after the main event with constant police presence throughout the day. In addition, about ten representatives from various Hindu NGOs attended the event. One representative, Rishikumar Vadivelu, vice president of the NGO Hindhudharma Maamandram , refused to stand up for the Malaysian Tamil Thai Vaazhtu (Tamil Anthem), penned by Malaysian Tamil writer Seeni Naina Mohamed . Secretary Ponvaasagam of Malaysia Dravida Kazhagam (MDK) and several other MDK members noted his behaviour and approached Rishi to firmly advise him to stand up, but he refused. Later, when a photo of Rishi’s antics went viral on social media, he declared that he didn't want to, nor should he have to, stand for a Tamil anthem written by a Muslim. He insinuated that the Tamil literary icon Seeni Naina Mohamed was a “Muslim missionary” trying to proselytise Tamil-Hindus for Islam. Hindhudharma Maamandram's President, Radhakrishnan Alagamalai, sent a letter to Deputy National Unity Minister SaraswathyKandasami reiterating that the forum was in direct opposition to the Malaysian national ideology. Saraswathy, an opportunistic caste-Hindu politician with strong ties to caste-Hindu associations, sent a letter to the home ministry emphasising the much speculated threat of atheism. She also mentioned that one of the speakers had a speech titled “Periyar from a Marxist Perspective,” fueling the anti-communist sentiment already present in the state. The ministry advised Deputy Minister of Youth and Sports Adam Adli , who previously contributed to the cause and accepted the invitation to inaugurate the forum, against following through on his plans. Just a day before the event, Adli’s assistant, Mr. Amar, informed Nagenteran that the Deputy Minister would not be attending. Nagenteran expressed his disappointment, stating that moral support from the governing party could have been significant in legitimising their cause. The influence of Periyar in West Malaysia dates back to the 1930s, driven by the Tamil diaspora. During this time, Periyarists established their own Dravidian organisations in erstwhile-Malaya that engaged with the political realities of Peninsula Malaysia, alongside the self-respect movement in Tamil Nadu. Malaya’s Tamil Reform Association (TRA), founded in 1932, published Tamil Murasu , a newspaper dedicated to cultivating Dravidian ideology. The paper covered various topics, including: Tamil social reforms, Indian nationalism, Dravidian nationalism, and the conditions of indentured workers from Burma to Ceylon. Courtesy of Singaporean governmental archives. Above is a special edition of the newspaper Tamil Murasu in celebration of ponggal, which the Dravidian movement celebrated as Tamilar Thirunaal (Day of the Tamils), celebrating the secular roots of tamil society. Many successful reforms were also introduced by the MTRA revolving around marriage, specifically widow remarriages, self-respect weddings, and the endorsement of the Sharada Child Marriage Restraint Act. However, this momentum drastically diminished in postcolonial Malaysia. Nagenteran detailed how, until the late 1980s, the Malaysian Dravida Kazhagam (MDK) had been a strong community ally of MIC. During the internal power struggle for party leadership between Samy Vellu and Dr. Subramaniam Sinniah , however, MDK’s then-president KR Ramasamy threatened to contest the elections if MIC didn’t change its opportunistic ways. Samy Vellu, aiming to extinguish political rivalry and appease the opposition, lured MDK members into joining MIC, rewarding those who did exceptional work for the party. “Then, the splinter between Pandithan and Samy Vellu happened,” said Nagenteran, citing how caste politics within the party caused MG Pandithan, who belonged to the Paraiyar caste, to split from Samy Vellu, a Thevar. The former formed a new political party called the All Malaysia Indian Progressive Front ( IPF ). Paraiyars and other caste-oppressed individuals from MIC and MDK left their respective organisations to join the IPF. Due to these deviations, the influence that MDK and Dravidian ideology once had on the Tamil population greatly disintegrated. “In the 90s, we could speak about Periyar to our families, but now it has become a taboo subject,” lamented Nagenteran, describing how the political situation shifted drastically within a single generation. Wider Malaysian politics also faced the decline of progressive elements with the rise of Malay Muslim ethno-religious supremacy, who demanded that the Malaysian people come together to form a united front. “We have to embrace multicultural politics,” asserted Gausalyah Arumugam, the secretary of Karunchattai, while also criticising the existing caste pride within the Malaysian Tamil-Hindu community. “When caste prevents them from viewing members of their own ethnic group as equals, how can they form genuine political solidarity with other ethnicities?” Tamils in Malaysia In the early 19th century, European imperialism forcefully displaced many dalit and lower shudra Tamil peasantry as indentured labourers to colonial West Malaysian plantations. While the migration of the Tamil workers was controlled by debt-bondage, free Tamil merchants were able to move with ease. The hellscape system of the plantation was shaped both by European imperialism and brahminical hierarchy. By the 1940s, Tamil workers led labour unions and contributed to the anti-imperialist armed struggle of the Malayan Communist Party (MCP). Britain's counterinsurgency across Southeast Asia, however, made progressive movements a weak entity in Malaysia, paving the way for the Malaysian Indian Congress (MIC) to be endorsed as a communal party that could de-radicalize Tamil workers. Nevertheless, Nagenteran notes that since 2008 MIC’s hold on the Tamil workers has drastically deteriorated. The weakening of MIC is attributed in part to the 2000s Hindu Rights Action Force (HINDRAF) movement, inspired by the Hindu Swayamsevak Sangh (HSS), an international branch of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh ( RSS). MIC's continued incompetence in fighting for Indian/Tamil minority rights led to a loss of support among Tamils and relegated it to the sidelines under then Prime Minister Najib Razak. Nagenteran explained that although Najib was a corrupt criminal, he successfully established strong bonds with working-class Tamils through opportunistic concessions. Instead of using MIC as a communication channel, Najib reached out directly to meet with Indian and Tamil communities, Hindu NGOs, and caste associations to protect his vote bank. He visited the Batu Caves Murugan Temple for Thaipusam , provided a grant of RM1 million for the development of the Sri Murugan Tuition Centre, and offered Indians and Tamils the opportunity to invest in the Amanah Saham unit trust funds. In post-Najib Malaysia—with the chaos of COVID-19 still fresh—leadership changes further degraded the hopes of working-class Tamils. The current government is no different in exhibiting a lack of interest in the Tamil population. “Anwar has missed two Thaipusam festivals. There are no Tamils in the cabinet. They even complained that no diaspora ministers were invited to the inauguration of the King!” exclaimed Nagenteran, who detailed the disregard faced by working-class Tamils from political parties, further contributing to their political demoralisation. Hindu Extremism and Casteist Violence in Malaysia Some Hindu temples, like the Batu Caves Murugan temple, are advertised as emblems of religious harmony in Peninsular Malaysia, while others are sites of contention. The Seafield Mariamman Temple is one such example. It was the site of a major dispute between its property owner and the public, revealing the sinister truth undergirding the dysfunctionality embedded within Malaysian society—resulting in a riot in 2018 that made national news. The recurring demolitions of Hindu temples find their roots in the destruction of the rubber plantations and subsequent displacement of Tamil workers, directly influenced by Razak’s New Economic Policy of the 70s, and then cemented by Mahathir's industrialisation throughout the 80s and 90s. In the 2000s, this complex crisis evolved into fertile ground for the emergence of a reactionary Hindu rights advocacy, which uprooted the crisis of the temple from the historical caste-labour politics of the plantation, indentureship, and caste-feudalism. Folk deity temples are among those most often demolished. They are part of Tamil Hindu heritage and are maintained by workers who are descendants of Dalit and Shudra villagers. The villagers used to worship folk deities rather than more Brahminized deities, however, Gausalyah states that, through the influence of Hindu extremism, Malaysian Tamil Hindus are abandoning their folk practices in favour of Vedic traditions. This shift in religious practices is endorsed by temple management in the nation, which is typically governed by members of a specific caste. “Casteists and Hindu extremists work in parallel to each other,” noted Gausalyah, discussing how these spaces are weaponized to assert brahminical hegemony. This, in turn, cultivates extremism under the guise of cultural preservation. Malaysia Dravidar Kalagam Ticket, Courtesy of Singaporean governmental archives. Just like the temples, Tamil government schools are disempowered, receiving very little financial or moral support, making them susceptible to political extremism. Despite schools being secular educational spaces for multi-religious Tamil children, extremism is gradually transforming them into Hindu education camps, with some schools receiving religious textbooks published by the Hindhudharma Maamandram. “It's so easy for Hindu NGOs to work with schools, but they won't let us (Periyarists) in,” stated Nagenteran. Hindu and caste dominance is propagated to children by school management, teachers, and staff of particular castes. Gausalyah notes that the hiring is predominantly caste-based to maintain control over the education system. This influence of Hindutva-led caste segregation is reaching far beyond grade school and into university clubs as well. Gausalyah speculates that extremism has been growing for the past six years, tracing the birth of the movement to a trip Rangaraj Pandey took to Malaysia. “Hindu extremism did not grow this strongly in Malaysia without receiving financial support,” she stated. Although they do not have concrete evidence of where this funding may have originated, Karunchattai is certain that a financial network has been established between groups in Malaysia and stronger Hindu extremist bodies like the RSS. Considering the rate at which Hindu extremism has developed—mirroring the RSS's fascistic language, educational and cultural programs, and political influence in Malaysian governance—the movement cannot sustain itself without substantial financial support. Karunchattai hosts reading groups and classes to support grassroots political work against Hindutva-backed caste extremism. They hope to introduce Periyar into Tamil schools and envision connecting with anti-caste organisations worldwide, fostering a strong internationalist anti-caste vanguard that can support one another in defeating the rise of Hindu fascism. As the politics of Malaysia differ greatly from those of Tamil Nadu, propagating Periyar to the Malaysian masses is a significant task set before Karunchattai, to which Nagenteran responds with determination: “Win or lose, we want to see how far we can go.”∎ 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 MIRIYAM ILAVENIL is a journalist and a descendant of displaced Tamil Dalit indentured labourers who is interested in understanding the politics and histories of South and Southeast Asia. OCTO is a self-taught Malaysian artist from Mentakab, Pahang, whose multidisciplinary work focuses on the violent politics of the Malaysian state, creatively engaging his practice in themes of police brutality, statelessness, and urban poverty. His art has been featured in Amnesty International's We Make Our World exhibition and Patani Art Space's Kenduri Seni Patani exhibition. Features West Malaysia Malaysia Malaya Fascism Hindu Fascism Hindutva Black Shirt Youth Movement Periyar Periyarism Tamil Tamil-Nadu Tamil Diaspora Dravidian Tamil Dravidian Activism Alienation Self-Respect Movement Tamil Reform Association TRA Tamil Labor Unions Malayan Communist Party MCP Malaysian Indian Congress MIC radicalization de-radicalization Hindu Rights Action Force HINDRAF Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh RSS HSS Corruption Anti-Caste COVID-19 Hindu Extremism temple demolition attacks on folk deities Tamil Murasu Singapore Colonialism Hindutva-based Caste extremism Caste extremism Civil Society Organizing Liberation ideology 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 the Karoonjhar mountains—a region of ancient hills and rock formations amidst salt marshes and other ecosystems—local activists are fighting to protect the region from mining companies. For years, private corporations in Sindh have mined the mountains for granite, marble, and minerals. Despite court bans, illicit—and, as of a week ago, licit—mining continues. FEATURES Save Karoonjhar AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR In the Karoonjhar mountains—a region of ancient hills and rock formations amidst salt marshes and other ecosystems—local activists are fighting to protect the region from mining companies. For years, private corporations in Sindh have mined the mountains for granite, marble, and minerals. Despite court bans, illicit—and, as of a week ago, licit—mining continues. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Photo-Essay Sindh Climate Karoonjhar Mountains Nangarparkar Reportage Pakistan Environment Environmental Disaster Mining Granite Sindh Provincial Government PPP PML-N Pakistan Party Politics Rann of Kutch Salt Marshes Hills Mountains Mountain Range Tharparkar Allah Rakhio Akash Hamirani Hindu Communities Jain Communities Multi-Faith Sites Indigeneity Indigenous Activism Groundwater Delicate Ecosystems Sindh High Court Supreme Court Heritage Site Protected Site Extractionism Extraction Ancient Chachro Sardharo India-Pakistan Border Borders Translation Sindhi 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 Photo-Essay Sindh 19th Jul 2024 The lore of the Karoonjhar mountains contains many tales. During Partition, for instance, a farmer, Kasu Bha Sodho, chose to stay in Nangarparkar while his family moved to India. Then, his family dispatched the infamous dacoit Balvand to bring Kasu Bha to them. Confronting Balvand, Kasu Bha declared, “If you want to take me to India, then take Karoonjhar along.” The Karoonjhar mountains rest on the northern edge of the Rann of Kutch, in Sindh's eastern Tharparkar district, and southwest of Nangarparkar. The rock formations in the area are at least 3.5 billion years old. The hills were present when prokaryotes appeared, the atmosphere oxygenated, and multicellular life evolved. They were there when the Cambrian explosion occurred, dinosaurs roamed, and Homo sapiens emerged. But for decades, this range—which spans 19 kilometers, with granite rocks that extend approximately 305 meters below the surface—has been a battleground between the forces of extractionism and the region's indigenous communities. It also continues to be the source of political dust-ups involving provincial governments, national ruling parties, dissenting MNAs and MPAs, rural petitioners , and the residents of Nangarparkar—even after the Sindh High Court ruled to ban extraction. At the national level, it is something of a cudgel between the PPP and PML-N. In February, Bilawal Bhutto, in a public meeting in Chachro, accused the PML-N of scheming to establish a puppet government in Karachi to exploit the mountains. “They think if their government is formed, they will exploit granite and mineral resources of Karoonjhar,” he told the crowd. But at the local level, all this seems irrelevant. Indigenous activists have long fought for the designation of the mountains as world heritage sites, and for compliance with court rulings against extraction. Precious little has prevented the Sindh Cabinet from allowing or even encouraging extraction in the past—aside from local activists and the public. A week ago, the Sindh Cabinet approved mining in part of the region. Today, a local activist appealed to fight back. When I gazed upon these peaks in early February, my mind was far from the conflicts of cabinet halls. In truth, I couldn't help but reflect on the irony of the mountains' extraction by those whose existence is a mere blip in time. The relationship people have with the mountains is evident in the words of the political activist Akash Hamirani, who said: “Oh beloved mountains! You are the land of our dreams, you are a deity, you are strength, no one can cut you.” Encircled by the salt marshes and dunes of the Rann of Kutch, the Karoonjhar Mountains are a natural refuge and sanctuary for thousands of humans, millions of birds, insects, plants, trees, animals, herbs, and mushrooms–all nourished by the waters flowing from the mountains’ sacred heights. Karoonjhar is a psychedelic world full of colors, music—and silence. Many religious and cultural sites are nestled in the mountains' folds. The mountains are also many peoples’ sole economic source, encompassing approximately 108 ancient temples dedicated to Hindu and Jain beliefs . Sardharo, a religious site of Lord Shiva. Since the 1980s, Karoonjhar has been exploited for its decorative stones. “The eyes of a capitalist see expensive and unique marble and minerals in stones, but the eyes of an indigenous person see their god in them…,” says Allah Rakhio Khoso, an indigenous elder and the leader of Karoonjhar Sujag Forum who has been fighting against their extraction for three decades. Allah Rakhio Khoso Laying on a Sindhi Cot in Nagarparkar. Beginning in 1980, powerful companies like Millrock, Pak Rock, Kohinoor Marbles Industries, Haji Abdul Qudoos Rajer, and the Frontier Works Organization (FWO) were granted contracts and leases by the Sindh Government for mining the granite rock of the mountains with dynamite. For decades, Allah Rakhio has organized protests and made many speeches whilst facing numerous challenges and death threats. “Karoonjhar is our life,” Rakhio says. “How can we let them snatch it?” In 2011, the Supreme Court halted the mining of granite using dynamite blasting by Kohinoor Marbles on the heels of public protests. Mining continued, nonetheless, accelerating in 2018, led by the FWO. This prompted an advocate from Mithi, Tharparkar, to file a petition in the Sindh High Court , Hyderabad, in the public interest for the protection of the range and designation as a heritage site. The court ruled against the mining and extraction of the mountain range. Still, mining has persisted illegally. Karoonjhar’s natural springs and stones are also a natural defense against the salinity of the salt marshes of Rann of Kutch. “If Karoonjhar is plundered, this entire region will wither into the salt desert of Rann of Kutch,” warns Akash Hamirani, a climate activist involved in the protests against mining. Groundwater wells supply potable water for the people in the villages and towns near the range. Extraction threatens to dry up these wells. One day, Imam Ali Jhanjhi penned a poem that swiftly spread across social media. Jhanjhi is a former government official, but his poems about the Karoonjhar mountains are the prime source of his popularity. In his poem, بُک وطن کي ڀيلي ويندي, (Hunger Will Claim Our Lives), Jhanjhi reveals how the extraction of Karoonjhar will affect us: They shattered Karoonjhar's bones, They silenced all my moans. When the great disaster arrives, Hunger will claim our lives. After Karoonjhar's demise, Desolation will arise. No more rivers from Naryasar will flow, Villages will vanish, row by row. Fetching water from a dry pitcher, Eyes will thirst, a painful ache, No drops left in the dams to take, Wells will turn to salty lakes. Looking up from the foothills On May 29th, I found myself once more amidst the Karoonjhar mountains, visiting the Rama Pir Mander in Kasbu, Nangharparkar. It was there that I heard Khalil Kumbhar's poem, resonant with the voice of a faqeer. With the words of the poem, he sang: Only the trader will sell, be it sister or mother, Don't cut and sell the mountain, for it is my brother. Can someone tell these sellers, the motherland is not for sale, I've tied a Rakhi to the mountain, for it is my brother. Khalil wrote this poem while imagining the Kolhi women: shepherdesses who peel onions. To them, Karoonjhar is father, brother, honour, and a beloved. “We crossed so many deserts to convey one message,” Khalil Kumbhar said, “but this one song made things easier for us. Not only did our message reach every home, but this song also connected every individual to us, and the people embraced their mountains.” He continued, “Karoonjhar is a Watan (Homeland) for the trees, birds, insects, humans, animals, and all living beings. For a businessman, Karoonjhar is wealth. For us, it is Watan.” Even from the outside, such a perspective makes sense. After all, Karoonjhar contains many delicate ecosystems, supplies water for crops, drinking, and even fills the Rampur Dam (below). Extractionist logic would extend the aridity of the nearby deserts. In 2021, Allah Rakhio, along with two advocates, Teerath Jhanjhi and Faqeer Munwar Sagar, filed another petition in the Hyderabad High Court, appealing for compliance with the Sindh High Court's prior decision and the designation of a heritage site. By 2023, no decision had been made. The extraction of granite and other precious elements from the mountains continued. On July 20, 2023, newspaper advertisements invited bids for the auction of approximately 5,928 acres spread over 17 slots near Nagarparkar in the Karoonjhar Mountains. Public protests erupted. Soon, #SaveKaroonjhar was trending on social media sites across Pakistan. Advocate Shankar Meghwar, who drafted the previous petitions, filed a third petition against the auction, declaring Karoonjhar a heritage site. The decision to auction was successfully reversed due to public pressure. On August 22, Shankar Meghwar succeeded in getting all mining leases on Karoonjhar canceled and merged his petition with that of Allah Rakhio and others. With the leases canceled, the court issued orders to clear all mining sites , asking the district administration to report back within 24 hours. The sites were cleared. “On the evening of August 30, I was targeted by these mafias you know well. They threatened me to withdraw the petition; they started with calls from unknown numbers, followed by personal meetings with life-threatening messages, and forcing me to change locations,” Shankar Meghwar told me. In the months of February and March, the mountains were set on fire more than five times. Locals believed that it was not by chance but preplanned. Fire in Karoonjhar Mountains, photographed by Dileep Parmar, a photographer in Nagarparkar who has been documenting and resisting extraction. Imam Janjhi—in the same poem—addresses those who sell Karoonjhar: Those who sold the soil for gain, Exchanged their mother for wealth and fame, Sold the pots of worshippers' pray, On peacocks' cry, they gave away, With no religion or faith to claim, What shame can touch their name? To auction off generations old and young, A business crowd has come along. The entire land on scales will lie, Hunger will claim our lives. Due to their depth, granite deposits spread far beyond the visible mountain range. Do definitions of forests justify political decisions to allow mining when they simultaneously validate the range of Karoonjhar? From the depths of the waters to the heights of the hills, people chant, “Karoonjhar is not for sale.” These hills are their past, their present, and their future. If this masterpiece of nature, forever carved in their hearts and souls, is looted, they will continue to fight, resist, and protect. But the rest is a long night of terror and displacement. On October 19, a 15-page judgment written by Justice Mohammad Shafi Siddiqui declared that the Karoonjhar Mountains cannot be excavated for any purpose other than the discovery of historical monuments, and even then, only in accordance with international guidelines. “The Mines and Minerals Department has no jurisdiction over it since it is a protected heritage site and not available for mining or excavation,” the court stated. But just a week ago, the Sindh Cabinet approved the Karsar area—25 kilometers from Nangarparkar—for granite mining, pending approval from the Forest & Wildlife Department. The Cabinet committee argues that Karsar does not overlap with forest territory. Simultaneously, the Cabinet designated the Karoonjhar mountains as cultural and heritage sites, forests, and a wildlife sanctuary/Ramsar Site. The contradictory logic seems designed to enable future extraction while attempting to appease the public. Shankar Meghwar argues, “Karoonjhar mountains have their own range, and wherever such stones are found within that jurisdiction, including areas like Karsar, they should be considered part of it and should not be separated based on distance.” Just today, he challenged the government’s decision in the court of Mirpurkhas, calling for the Cabinet's decision to be ruled to be in contempt of court based on previous decisions. On the other hand, the case of the Sindh provincial government's appeal to the Supreme Court to overturn a prior decision protecting the mountain range remains. Meghwar, Allah Rakhio, and others continue to face death threats.∎ Poetry translated from Sindhi by Lutif Ali Halo. 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:

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 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. Torsa Ghosal 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. 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 ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase "Year of the Snake" (2020), digital drawing by Chaaya Prabhat. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn 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 TORSA GHOSAL is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Bustle , and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, and a host of the Narrative for Social Justice podcast. 1 Aug 2025 Review Jaipur 1st Aug 2025 CHAAYA PRABHAT is an illustrator from India currently working out of Goa. She’s previously worked with several clients such as Penguin, Hachette, Meta and Google on digital illustration projects, stickers and book projects. She enjoys the using pattern and colour in her illustrations, and has previously won awards for her work from Behance and Cosmopolitan magazine. Ritwik's Trees Sumana Roy 12th Mar Provocations on Empathy Clare Patrick 13th Aug A Man's World Nidhil Vohra 2nd Mar Lights Out in Kinshasa Vrinda Jagota 17th Feb Dissident Kid Lit Saira Mir · Shelly Anand · Vashti Harrison · Simran Jeet Singh 20th Dec On That Note:

“As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow—perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion?” FEATURES Dukkha AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow—perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion?” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Essay Bengal Personal History Holding Water Epistemology Trauma Temporality Water Sadness Depictions of Grief Grief Essay Form Experimental Methods Banality William Blake Teesta Disaster & Language Intimacy & Disaster River Guilt Privacy Siliguri Loneliness Stream of Consciousness Watercolor Rath Yatra Memory P. C. Sorcar Darjeeling Himalayas 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 Essay Bengal 4th Jul 2021 “For a tear is an intellectual thing.” William Blake THEY are beating water. They are beating water with a hammer. I wake up with this sound in my ears. I yawn to be sure that I’m awake. I don’t know whether people yawn in their sleep. I don’t know many other things—whether the body wakes up before the mind, or whether it is possible to beat water with a hammer. But they’re beating water with a hammer. The ears must be the most alert part of our bodies? I’ve heard water speaking in different dialects before. From the sound of it being poured, I can make out how far water in a glass is from the brim; I hear buckets in neighbouring flats overflow; I hear leaking taps, disobedient drops falling to the floor from the mouth of a tap, unhurt; I hear sweat collect into drops; I hear saliva move inside mouths; I hear water breathe and sleep. But this is a different water. They are beating water . I walk out of my rented room. Outside, there’s the light, reluctant to announce itself as if it were a guest. The wind is just the opposite, seeking attention. Both invisible, invincible. What is visible is water—the river Teesta, swollen like an overworked muscle, twitching, like a nerve. But where’s the hammer? I look, but with my ears. There is the regular rhythm of water falling on water to the earth, where everything must collect. When I get out of bed—and from the dream where I was caged all night—the world is in motion. In towns and cities, that motion is triggered by time. Here, where I’ve come to escape time’s fundamentalism, it is not time that is causing motion, for water is the last of the revolutionaries, having managed to live indifferent to time. As life moves to time elsewhere, in the cities of the world I’ve set out to leave behind me, things move to water, its flow. I do not fail to notice that both time and water flow —perhaps it is this that abets and causes motion? There are no mirrors in this house, and so I do not see any humans. I do not know the antonym of ‘human’, but whatever it is, it is for this that I have come here. For me, the opposite of humans is water. It is perhaps because I feel related to water, related as in being a relative. Every time I’ve tried to say this to someone, they’ve dismissed or interpreted this as a ‘poetic’ reflection. I’ve seen doctors who’ve dismissed it as a phase—like teenagers who fancy themselves as their favourite crushes on their T-shirts— and others who’ve told me that there was nothing to worry about feeling like that, for humans are indeed composed mainly of water, more than three-fifths of us. But no one really understands. The drizzle has stopped though I can see its ruins—on leaves, floors, tarpaulin. That water can fall anywhere without breaking its bones is a slap to the superiority of vertebrates. I wonder whether water, if it were animal, would be mammal or aves. Are these raindrops eggs then, or corpses? I am water not because I long to flow. I am water because no metal, no air, no music, nothing can hold my sadness like water. Water fills a teardrop like air fills a yawn. The elements rush in when they sense emptiness. My fingers are on my face again. If water could leave fossils, I imagine that this is how they’d look—these marks coursing down my face. They disappear, but not the sadness. Perhaps it is my fossil. It might have all begun with dehydration. My days in the hospital were marked by the aloneness of being inside the womb of a dark room, but without the water of the womb that enables life. Bottles of saline water hung like benevolent angels beside me, keeping watch over my life. I could see them even in the darkness—the fluorescence of water inside a plastic bottle. I heard them coax life into me, drop by drop, as if I was being created anew. I lay on my back, my spine dividing the bed like a book, thinking of strangers—writers whose words still hadn’t left me, co-passengers whose words had stuck as spit does on walls. That is the thing about sadness—its extremism, its intrusiveness, that leaves space for nothing. Sadness changes us unrecognisably even as we appear the same to the world. Humans, after all, are not like the sky—one cannot tell the climate of feelings from its body and colour. Dark clouds do not appear like boils on human bodies to indicate sadness. It was hard to believe that it was crying that had left me dehydrated. Any piece of wood becomes sweet-smelling when left in the proximity of sandalwood: this is a saying in Bangla. Left beside water for days, hearing it trickle drop by drop into my body, I became an embodiment of that. The thought of organ transplants never left me, as if this water would replace my sadness, my body’s largest organ. I could not think of it as anything but water—it came out of me as tears, snot, and sweat, the last in moments of panic and anxiety, when I felt this fear would corrode everything. I felt it inside me as one does water, in its various states, moving inside me like water, me trying to push it out as if it were gaseous, but it was like ice, solid and heavy, territorial, refusing to move, immobilising me, every thought and action. I longed for a hammer that’d allow me to break it into pieces just like the ice-candy man scraped ice. I hoped for this new water from the drip to take its place, as rain cleans the air, to fill me with life as I imagined life should be: without pain. I thought of the agents of my sadness—those I’d loved, whose understanding had now disappeared. As if I’d suddenly turned into a foreign language. I imagined their sadness as well, even as I knew that it was different from mine. I saw theirs from the outside, and recognised it from their words and gestures. From the self-centredness that suffering brings, I understood only the obvious: if sadness were a species, I belonged to its phylum. Life with watercolour, I see now, was also a life with water. What I loved most about watercolour was what I loved most about water—its unexpectedness of flow and behaviour. Even after all these years, I couldn’t be completely sure how a dab of the brush would behave on the canvas. It could spread beyond my imagined prediction, or it could remain still, like the skin of a drying pond. That was how sadness settled inside me even though I still can’t tell whether the sadness was inside or outside. Watercolour changed my perception of language. Surface tension—the physical property of water that explained its behaviour on the canvas—I now saw only as ‘tension’. Paint I came to read and hear as ‘pain’. Like people, sounds and things and expressions had begun disappearing from my life. Cohabitation meant living with, living beside. My long history of living beside water, as it helped me understand the world on canvas, and then the interminable days of lying beside the relentless drip, reminded me of possible older lives—memories stored inside the gene, like a safe deposit that would remain unused until needed. My immediate ancestors had made a life in the alluvial plains of Bengal—my mother’s paternal family on the Gangetic delta, my father’s by the Padma. In this, they were related to the first humans who built settlements by the river. I hoped that that ancient sense of water, its blood and its carefree individualism, had trickled into me in some way. They had known water simply as water; as neighbour, not as something imagined , like ice or gas. This intimacy with water had marked their relationships—not just fluidity and flow, but a natural transparency and constancy. But the river was only a memory inside me—a human memory, of calls of fear by my great grand-people, of delight in its offerings, of the sound of splashing, of rolling abundance, and also of drowning. Why has the river stopped flowing after entering me? How have I become its station? There is nothing we own as deeply as pain. That is perhaps why we’re reluctant to let it go. I’m often unable to distinguish myself from my sadness. It is not like looking in a mirror, where I know I am related to the person looking back at me, who moves when I do, who walks away when I do. That sadness can have a body and breasts and fingers and a stomach that moves in all four directions is still new to me, even after all these years. For it is hard to imagine sadness. An infant might be able to imagine many things, perhaps even its hair blowing in the wind, but it can’t imagine sadness. Why am I sad? Trying to answer this question is like looking for a black stone from amidst a large pile of black stones—the answer is there, but not identifiable to me. If I knew which stone it was, I’d throw it far away, beyond the reach of the strength of my arms and the power of my eyes. I think of possible reasons for my sadness—I pile them together like those black stones. When they topple over inside my head, I arrange them differently, like books on shelves, but nothing helps. I only feel it inside me. Sometimes, I rub my chest as if sadness were a lump that would dissolve and melt inside me. But I can’t touch it. I feel that I’ve let sadness turn to god, the way god is invisible but everywhere. Like Hindu gods, sadness is also form-changing. The pestle pounding between my breasts transforms into a leech in my throat, and soon into water in my eyes. I touch the water and stare at it sometimes. For even though it might look like the same water, the sadness is always different. Like water, like god, like a caterpillar, it is always changing form. I struggle to remember why I was sad yesterday or why I cried all night last week. When I am exhausted by its ingratitude at my having given it a home to stay, I want to throw it out. Instead, I hide it from the world as if it were a secret love. I try to remember when I first made its acquaintance but I fail. It seems I’ve known it for as long as I have known my mother. Or life. Because I don’t tell anyone about it, I cannot seek their assistance. Once or twice, a friend who sensed the wildlife of my tears over the phone, says, ‘Maybe you should see a doctor? I have a friend who benefitted from…’ I struggle the most at that moment—her words are like a laxative inside my gut, they push my sadness out violently. My face is in my hands then—I have to hide my tears from the world. I have no idea why hiding my face seemed necessary at that moment. I am embarrassed. I feel guilty. I always feel guilty for being sad. Happiness missionaries are everywhere—on my bookshelves, in my phone, in notes I have copied and written to myself. Life seems to be only about joy, about participating in ananda, in pleasure, in happiness—everything we do ought to be directed towards that sole aim. Sadness is life’s outcast, and those like me are therefore life’s outcasts too. Why tears are more private than laughter, I don’t know. I will not be able to recognise my tears, in spite of having known them for so many years, ever since I was born. They are not like blood and its groups. If they were, we might have been able to know about the group that constituted the saddest people. When a friend asks what sadness feels like, whether it’s permanent, (‘Like paralysis?’), I try to think of an appropriate metaphor and fail—‘It’s like a niggling cough inside you. You feel it there, inside your chest, waiting to come out all the time’. Nothing helps. Nothing helps. For everything might have a language—some kind of language—but sadness doesn’t. It is pre-linguistic, and hasn’t evolved since then. That is another thing that I think about often. That sadness might be my only connect with my oldest ancestors. My body, with deposits of pollutants, might not be related to theirs, their reasons for joy must have been different from mine, but I think it is our sadness that makes us true relatives. I refuse to see a doctor. A friend says: ‘You must change a shoe that pinches’. It is not the fact of my sadness being compared to a shoe that irritates me. It is their assumption that sadness can be replaced. Everyone seems to have a vague idea about what that replacement might be, but they can’t be quite sure—a spare tyre replaces a similar tyre; will another kind of sadness replace this sadness? Sadness paralyses. It is because the water freezes. How does it move then? I pose this as an anonymous question to a suicide prevention website and someone writes back immediately. I imagine the responder to be a woman, and soon after, a machine. ‘Try origami—take paper and try to fold it into a shape that resembles your sadness. Write to us after you’ve done that. Being able to do that is half your work done.’ I recoil from the aggressive tone, this ridding of sadness now so integral to me, as close as a biological child. The annoyance passes, but the thought loiters in my consciousness. I bring old newspaper and turn to my fingers—they’ve fed and cleaned me all my life, won’t they bring me some calm if they can? Stars and birds, flowers and balloons—everything can be created from folding paper, so at that point it appears that this is how god created the world, merely by folding. I’ve only ever made boats before—folding squares into triangles and pulling them inside out gently until the likeness of a boat emerged. It was a surprise every single time—the genius of folds, of lines and planes, sticking without water’s glue. And yet, no matter how much my boat-making improved with practice, the tiny boat never managed to sail without capsizing. The thinness of paper, even with its softness, fails to find appropriate support in a partner like water, it being without a spine itself. Is sadness the paper I’ll have to fold into a boat, or the water on which the boat must sail? My heart feels like a boatman trying to boat on a dried river. I cry in the shower. Water washing water, as if water were excreta—the way I heard my grandmother say bishey bishkhoy, poison kills poison. Water runs over me, touching me in places where even light struggles to enter. I close the tap from time to time but cannot leave. Water is a magnet—I know I should leave for dryness, for warmth, but I stand there waiting for more water. I am aware of my aloneness, I feel like a seed. It was possible that all seeds are as lonely as the mango stone. Loneliness had turned them hard and unwelcoming of every kind of touch, whether of blade or tongue or teeth. The opposite of this was the papaya—seeds that were soft and silky and naughty, this joy coming to them from living in a commune inside: a hundred blackish seeds. That is why hair too is never lonely—it struggles for space, but is never in want of company. The heart, on the other hand, is completely alone. One heart, one penis, one vagina. But two breasts. Was there a moral in this? Was water as lonely as me? I wouldn’t ever know, so dependent was I on this body and its inability to migrate to anything besides itself. I hated my thoughts and wanted to be rid of them. In fact, I wanted to be rid of myself. I questioned all my thoughts and actions as if they were someone else’s, even an enemy’s. I did not realise that I was lonely—I did not understand that my loneliness had pitted me against myself. It was a surprise, what I had become—like a wet and fierce wind that carves rocks, so that what we see is actually the remainder after the tussle between stone and wind, I was now a leftover of my sadness. Sadness slows down everything—it survives on echoes, for everything returns over and over again. It stammers inside, trying hard to get out. It becomes like a port of the heart, and mind that they always return to. Compared to other emotions, its pace is slow—but slow only horizontally, for it moves southwards like water does through soil. Other emotions, like the roots of trees, feed on sadness urgently. They change immediately, for sadness is a powerful catalyst: it changes its surroundings without itself changing. I try to understand sadness through physics—taking away a piece of brick will result in exactly the same volume of air taking its place. The disappearance of a person leaves sadness that is far greater than the physical volume of the person. How does that happen? Science fails, I fail. To carry the size and weight of sadness that is bigger and heavier than one’s body; it was sadness that Sisyphus was trying to push up the mountain. I have this image: I’m standing at the top of a hill, about to jump off, but I can’t. I think it is sadness that glues me to the spot for sadness is an addiction. I’ve become a parasite to this sadness. I must remain alive to keep my sadness alive. I don’t know why they call it stream-of-consciousness. Lately, every time water from my paintbrush has leaked onto the canvas, that phrase has come up. Information doesn’t interest me—they are like nails that break for being too long, the fact of this phrase coming from William James’s revolutionary book. Did he actually mean stream of sadness when he said consciousness? Was he sad when he coined the phrase? But at times it doesn’t feel like a stream but a waterfall—water hurting water, sadness hitting sadness. I’m teaching my nephew to draw water. Next to him is a box of watercolours. We are rubbing water—with a brush, of course—on a blue tablet to produce blue water: adding water to produce water, a version of sexual reproduction as it were, humans producing humans, plants producing plants, like producing like. (That is the nature of reproduction: to produce versions of oneself. Only the sun is different. We, in all our varied forms, are its offspring, but we don’t resemble it.) The little boy takes the brush and pulls it from one end of the page to the other until its bluish stains mark the page. He promptly calls them water’s pimples. He’s angry when I laugh at his diagnosis. Scolded, I ask for a cure—water, he says, and pours the entire bowl on the page, and, of course, the drawing book. The flooded page is put under a patch of sunlight. There it dries unequally, crinkling, losing its flatness. We imagine land as we do water—flatness pleases us, it makes us feel powerful. Sharp undulations, prickliness, bristliness—they trouble us. This comes to us from our body which wants smooth surfaces; even a tiny grain of sand can keep us awake. The eye, like our back, seeks plain surfaces. There is aaram in looking at a straight line instead of jagged lines. But water is neither straight nor jagged. It is a moving line. The closest approximation of water’s movement on land is that of ants moving in a line, untouched by the push and rush of time. For many things move water—feet and machines, pumps and pipes, but time has no power over water’s movement. Time cannot move water, like it cannot move sadness. Another day we try again. This time land is sandwiched between two blocks of blue—water and sky. One of these he can see—and so it is not hard for him to be faithful: he looks outside the window, the blue sky is squatting there as always. He needs no tutoring, no demands are made on the imagination. Blue must be coloured blue. But water, silent in the bowl next to him, is colourless. Why must he colour it blue? It is a lie, he thinks. I try to paraphrase the Raman effect for him, but it’s like chanting a mantra to prove the existence of god. Water can be any colour, he says, and then demonstrates—dipping the brush into the colours one by one, letting it leak and dissolve into the bowl. Water collects all the colours. There’s nothing more accommodative than water. It is more elastic than even the human heart. ‘Making a bucket is a lot of work. Anything that holds water demands a lot of work.’ It is Rath Yatra, and I’m at a small fair that accompanies it every year. The fairs of my childhood are gone—clay, iron and tin toys have now been replaced by plastic. Almost everything squeaks, or runs on battery. I’ve come here to buy clay utensils—miniatures, toys for children. Utensils, fruits and vegetables, even houses with sloping roofs—most of these things don’t exist anymore, not even in villages. They are a part of folk memory, on their way to turning into nostalgia, a space as inert as a museum. This man sits in a corner. He is a remainder, and reminder, from an older time, when men trusted their hands, and when they blamed their poverty on destiny and not the government. In front of him are three kinds of things: kulo, boti, balti, the first for winnowing, separating grain from husk, the second a kind of flat bladed knife, used by sitting on the floor; the third is a toy tin bucket. For the bucket he asks for twenty rupees. Scared that I might bargain, he adds: "Anything that holds water demands a lot of work." It is folk knowledge that it always rains on the day of Rath Yatra. But there is not a cloud in the sky. That humidity which makes rain possible has landed on earth,. Around me is a blind crowd, blind because, like me, they do not know where we’re all going. We’re being pushed, and are pushing each other without will. We are sweating, we have become clouds. People are eager to touch the rope that pulls Jagannath and his siblings. It is endearing, this sacredness of a rope, how belief transforms the common into a thing of wonder. It is what love does too. I notice that the priest who’s sitting in the "ground storey" of the Rath is carrying a black umbrella. But the rains don’t come. It is as if we’ve become skies—water is flowing out of us relentlessly. The man’s words don’t leave me—how difficult it is to create anything that holds water. I kept thinking of god as the old man spoke, and how hard it must have been for him to design our eyes that hold tears. "Because you can’t carry water in everything after all." I’ve watched time lapses of water solidifying into ice. It is still a thing of wonder for me, for I was born into a household that did not have a fridge until I was seven. It was a magic machine. The magician P.C. Sorcar visited Siliguri almost every winter. We watched him cut human bodies into pieces and put them back together, the people, who were dead only a while ago now walked back to their seats in the auditorium. I thought of the fridge as akin to the magician—it could change unwieldy, liquid water into solid square cubes. But, like Sorcar, the fridge kept its technique hidden from me—it would freeze water only with its door closed. These time-lapse videos affect my body. I find that I swallow my saliva more often. I see water freezing into ice and I imagine this is how pain coagulates into sadness inside me. I remember looking at the icy peaks of the Himalayas from the balcony of my rented apartment overlooking Darjeeling’s Happy Valley Tea Estate. When I couldn’t see them clearly, I realised it wasn’t just my clinical myopia but the water in my eyes, which surprised me with its inexhaustibility. At first I dip just my head in the old iron bucket. It is cold—the water feels like metal, cold, solid, and resistant to any entry. When I force my head in, it tries to expel my head out of the bucket. I try again—I push my head in and then pull it out when the resistance seems too strong to bear. My head doesn’t learn to swim. One thing I take from this with some relief, even joy, is how water drowns out and distorts almost all surrounding sound. For a moment, perhaps because of the unexpectedness of the impact, it drowns out the sounds inside my head as well. I immediately begin thinking of this as a cure—this dunking my head in water every time sadness paralyses me. I remember my mother pouring water on my head and forehead to bring down my fever. I will trust in water too. Later, as the day wears warmer clothes, I walk to the river and sit on a rock. My feet enter the water. The river doesn’t push back like the water in the bucket. Head and feet—these are our extreme points, where tiredness accumulates the fastest. But how different the aches, and how different their cures. The water, even though it is colder than my body, as it mostly is when we meet in natural conditions, doesn’t seem as foreign to my feet as it did to my head. I do not know why. All my life I have allowed the water poured over my head to run to my feet. I read that the Indus Valley civilisation came to an end because of water shortage. Civilisations can end because of water. Can sadness end for the same reason? I am sleepy. Sleep feels like a pencil whose nib breaks every day. The history of hurt remains unrecorded. ∎ 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:

ARTIST Naomi Wanjiku Gakunga NAOMI WANJIKU GAKUNGA , a contemporary sculptor and visual artist has roots in Gacharage Village, Kenya. Her artistic journey began under the guidance of her grandmother, who imparted the traditional skill of weaving to her. Wanjiku mastered the art of creating yarn through the process of twisting and braiding straw, sourced from indigenous shrubs, showcasing her ability to innovate with locally available materials. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE