SENIOR EDITOR Abeer Hoque Abeer Hoque is a writer, photographer, and the author of The Lovers and the Leavers and Olive Witch , among others. She is based in Queens. SENIOR EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“Formal preoccupations are presumed to be a part of the European avant-garde, even though what form and form can be has been deeply influenced by writings from other parts of the world, and the West's straitjacketed understanding of the Renaissance being exposed to that.” COMMUNITY Origins of Modernism & the Avant-Garde in India “Formal preoccupations are presumed to be a part of the European avant-garde, even though what form and form can be has been deeply influenced by writings from other parts of the world, and the West's straitjacketed understanding of the Renaissance being exposed to that.” VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Avant-Garde Origins 4th Oct 2020 Interview Avant-Garde Origins Modernism Anthology Traditions Vaikom Muhammad Basheer Avant-Garde Form Auto-Fiction Wendy Doniger Multimodal Stream of Consciousness Rabindranath Tagore Tagore as First Impulse of Modernism Literary Activism Impoverished Histories Contradiction Criticism Intellectual History Internationalist Perspective Performance Art Satyajit Ray Avant-Garde Beginnings in India Varavara Rao 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. Author Amit Chaudhuri in conversation with Associate Editor Kamil Ahsan on his previous works, his preoccupations with the banal and the label of "autofiction" that haunts contemporary appraisals of his work. Further, they discuss modernism in India, in particular Tagore's children's books as possibly the first impulse of modernism writ large. In surveying the history of literature and art in colonial India, the consequences of Europe's mistaken claim to originating the avant-garde is a profound ahistorical act, one that patently must be rectified. RECOMMENDED: Sojourn by Amit Chaudhuri (New York Review Books, 2022). More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

COO of Fearless Collective, Tehani Ariyaratne, in conversation with Senior Editor Sabika Abbas Naqvi. COMMUNITY Public Art Projects as Feminist Reclamation COO of Fearless Collective, Tehani Ariyaratne, in conversation with Senior Editor Sabika Abbas Naqvi. Tehani Ariyaratne One of our murals in Rawalpindi, is an image of a [khwaja sira], Bubbli Malik, on a bicycle, and she says "I am a creation of Allah." The mural refers not to violence or trauma, but is a radical affirmation of the [khwaja sira] community. One of our murals in Rawalpindi, is an image of a [khwaja sira], Bubbli Malik, on a bicycle, and she says "I am a creation of Allah." The mural refers not to violence or trauma, but is a radical affirmation of the [khwaja sira] community. 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 Feminist Art Practice Feminist Organizing Mural Public Space Art Practice Public Arts Fearless Collective Fearless Arts Residency Art Activism Fundraising Future Dream Spaces Queerness Queer Spaces Trans Politics Trans Community Wheat Pasting Sri Lanka Pakistan India Internationalist Solidarity Khwaja Siras Bubbli Malik Queer Muslim Project 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. 29 Nov 2020 Interview Feminist Art Practice 29th Nov 2020 After the March Zoya Rehman 19th Apr Bibi Hajra’s Spaces of Belonging Iman Iftikhar 3rd Jul Protest Art & the Corporate Art World Hit Man Gurung · Isma Gul Hasan · Ikroop Sandhu 5th Jun A State of Perpetual War: Fiction & the Sri Lankan Civil War Shehan Karunatilaka 10th Jan Dissident Kid Lit Saira Mir · Shelly Anand · Vashti Harrison · Simran Jeet Singh 20th Dec On That Note:

"The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." COMMUNITY Indentured Labor & Guyanese Politics "The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized." VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Guyana 11th Oct 2020 Interview Guyana 2020 Guyanese Election People's Progressive Party Cold War Politics Black-Indian Tensions in Guyana Cheddi Jagan Black Solidarities Forbes Burnham Coolitude Fictional Essay Khal Torabully Avant-Garde Destabilizing History Irfaan Ali David Granger Ethnically Divided Politics Indentured Labor Labor Indo-Caribbean Georgetown 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. The People's Progressive Party in Guyana was a multiracial socialist party with very hopeful beginnings, cognizant of our history as colonized descendants of the enslaved and indentured. But it's a tragic casualty of Cold War politics. We now have two political parties that are essentially racialized. RECOMMENDED: Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture by Gaiutra Bahadur. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

WRITER-ACTIVIST Anjali Enjeti ANJALI ENJETI is a former attorney, organizer, journalist, and MFA instructor based near Atlanta. She is the author of Southbound: Essays on Identity, Inheritance, and Social Change , and The Parted Earth . Her other writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Globe, Harper’s Bazaar, Oxford American , and elsewhere.Since 2017, Anjali has been working to get out the vote in Georgia’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community. In 2019, she co-founded the Georgia chapter of They See Blue , an organization for South Asian Democrats. In the fall of 2020, she was a member of Georgia’s AAPI Leadership Council for the Biden-Harris campaign. She teaches creative writing in the MFA programs at Antioch University in Los Angeles and Reinhardt University in Waleska, Georgia. WRITER-ACTIVIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

DANCE COLLECTIVE DIONYSIAC DIONYSIAC was founded by the late Nael Nasheed and Neha Noogully as a performance art and dance collective. Many of its performances center on the public and private struggle of Maldivian women. DANCE COLLECTIVE WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

PHOTOGRAPHER Paul Mesnager PAUL MESNAGER is a photographer, graphic designer, and journalist with a background in geopolitics, whose work often explores themes of social and political domination, repression, and exile, with a focus on minority communities and the materiality of power, using various media including satellite imagery. He is based between Tunis and Marseille. PHOTOGRAPHER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

An architect and painter narrates an authentic story of place at Bibian Pak Daman. BOOKS & ARTS Bibi Hajra’s Spaces of Belonging AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR An architect and painter narrates an authentic story of place at Bibian Pak Daman. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Portfolio Lahore Art Practice Religious Shrine Fine Art Painting Bibian Pakdaman Mural Space Representational Space Henri Lefebvre Everyday Life Observance Consumerism Gynecology Ward Ramzaan Karbala River Ravi Makran Aurat March Public Space Feminist Organizing Feminist Art Practice 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 Portfolio Lahore 3rd Jul 2023 When Bibian Pak Daman (the mausoleum of Bibi Ruqqaiyah bint Ali) closed its doors to its herds of devotees, owing to a multimillion rupee expansion and renovation project, Bibi Hajra found herself alone at the otherwise well-populated shrine. Brought onto the project to paint larger-than-life murals on Pak Daman’s walls, architect and painter Hajra, who goes by the moniker “Bibi Hajra”, had a lot to reason with. While the shrine was now deserted, a crowd of emotions inhabited Hajra’s mind. She felt at once handpicked by Bibi Ruqqaiya herself, and yet unbefitting for the role of sole attendee–an inadvertently irreverent line of critique of Bibi Ruqqaiya’s choice, further confirming her misassignment. After a few days, her internal monologue dissipated in favor of the more obvious challenge she now faced: the shrine needed to be cleaned. With the usual janissary-turned-janitors absent, Hajra picked up the jharoo (broom) and began sweeping. The ritual process of regularly cleaning the shrine provided her the confirmation she needed. Through this repetitive act, she created for herself a lived space: one of everyday belonging and ceremony. Originally commissioned to create murals on the shrine as part of its corporate makeover, Bibi Hajra’s relationship with Bibian Pak Daman evolved through observance and praxis. Her work, too, engenders the collective and myriad ways in which the everyday politics of the interpersonal produces what Henri Lefebvre calls “representational space.” The space of the living, of inhabitants and users. Although an architect and urban studies scholar by training, Bibi Hajra rejects the Western disciplinary tradition of taking an isometric view of space in her work. Instead of opting for scientific voyeurism, she renders many routine lifescapes in Pakistan exceptional by taking the conversation to the street. What makes her work distinct is not just her recreation of spaces, as produced through their occupants’ web of relationships, but her personal commitment to revisiting the site multiple times. Each visit allows Hajra to discover the stories which happen around street corners, behind closed doors, in the patli gallis (narrow alleyways) between houses, on verandas and balconies. Her work puts these manifold narratives in dialogue with one another, bringing concurrent lived realities to a singular plane of coexistence. From caricature work depicting a Ramzaan transmission, a staple in Pakistani households, to an ordered yet anarchic portrayal of a gynecology ward, Hajra’s work takes the ordinary-extraordinary of regular life and reproduces it as bizarrely spectacular. Overlapping stories, rendered in her unique comical form, scream for undivided attention. Much like Bibi Hajra herself, the viewer must return to the work as reproduced space over and over again to view it in its entirety. Hajra’s work invites her audiences to create their own representational space. Ramzaan transmission, Watercolor and ink on paper, 29" × 42". Hyper-consumerism on morning shows during the month of Ramzaan Gynecology department on a low fee Thursday, Watercolor and ink on paper, 28" ×40" Her most recent series of paintings inspired by her visits to Bibian Pak Daman — a place she now calls home—go one step further, transcending the usual ‘(wo)man in her natural (read: material) state’ lens Hajra adopts. Crossing into the spiritual, the works portray tree shrines, malangs performing dhamaal , religious mourning and various other ritual practices typically performed at Bibi Ruqqaiya’s shrine, as well as, esoteric stories told to Hajra by devotees she met during her time at the darbar (tomb). Bibi (I) Arrival at Makran (2022) , an oil-based work etched in shades of blood red, includes the oft-repeated, mythical story of Bibi Ruqqaiyah’s lamentations lighting a fire in the forest she encamped in. Another woman told Hajra that Bibi Ruqqaiyah’s sorrow-filled sermons at Khurasan shook the earth and the tremors traveled against the currents of the rivers of Sindh all the way to the river Ravi in Punjab. The water in Bibi (II), Settling in the forest across River Ravi trembles as one peers at its otherwise guaranteed stillness. Hajra’s work is not one of mere observation, but is inspired by conversation. She is at once an artist and a storyteller, and her series on Bibian Pak Daman tells the multifarious, fabulous stories of one of Lahore’s most popular religious shrines. Recalling Karbala at the Makran Coast. Oil on paper. Settling in the forest across River Ravi. Acrylic on canvas. Alive but out of sight. Acrylic on canvas. Still alive just out of sight. Acrylic on canvas. Much like her previous creations, here too, gender and the feminine are at play both in the shrine’s own female character, but also in Hajra’s deliberate impressions of the stories of Bibi Ruqaiyya’s female devotees. A commitment to drawing public space as occupied and crafted by women is one the artist has always maintained, and continues to uphold. It is also a political choice inspired by conversations around women and public space pioneered by feminist groups such as Aurat Azadi March, for whom she produced posters in 2021 and 2022. Zenana. Aurat Azadi March 2022. Bibi Hajra’s method is centered on cultivating artistic space through lived experience, much like her paintings, which take on, as their subject, the spaces created through the ritual performance of Pakistani everyday life. Both her practice and finished works highlight her devotion to embodied praxis and to narrating an authentic story of place, in this case Bibian Pak Daman. ∎ 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:

Why have India’s ultranationalist aspirations made Lakshadweep the unlikely locus of its tourist aspirations and exacerbated tensions with the Maldives? FEATURES The Lakshadweep Gambit Why have India’s ultranationalist aspirations made Lakshadweep the unlikely locus of its tourist aspirations and exacerbated tensions with the Maldives? VOL. 2 REPORTAGE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Artwork courtesy of N.K.P Muthukoya. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Artwork courtesy of N.K.P Muthukoya. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Lakshadweep 29th Mar 2024 Reportage Lakshadweep Maldives India Nationalism China Foreign Policy Environment Climate Change Islands Lakshadweep archipelago Operation Cactus Mohamed Muizzu Modi Minicoy Tourism Belt and Road Initiative Luxury Tourism Mohamed Nasheed IMF Maldives Monetary Authority Sea Shell Beach Resorts Integrated Island Management Plan Laccadive Maliku Kavaratti Androth Chalo Lakshadweep Amindivi Eco-tourism Turkey Maumoon Abdul Gayoom Infrastructure Diplomatic Relations Malé Maldivian Economy Environmental Disaster 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. Kerala: On 4 January, pictures of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi snorkeling in Lakshadweep hit social media. The pictures were accompanied by his invitation “for those who wish to embrace the adventurer in them, Lakshadweep has to be on your list,” and incited a cascade of unanticipated events in the Indian archipelago of 36 islands lying to the west of India’s southwestern coast, in the Laccadive Sea between the Arabian Sea to and the Bay of Bengal. The photos triggered a surge in Google searches unseen in 20 years. Maldivian ministers in Malé, a mere 900 kilometres southwest of Lakshadweep, were alarmed. A few vented against Modi on social media. Hassan Zihan, Mariyam Shiuna, and Malsha Shareef, all deputy ministers, were suspended for the social media posts they made against Modi. Maldivian ministers have been sacked for lesser blunders, however, the president has chosen to keep them on government payroll following a temporary suspension. At a time when the Israeli-Palestinian conflict had escalated to levels previously unseen following the Hamas-led terror attacks in October 2023 and in the wider context of Israeli settler violence in the West Bank, Shiuna pointed out India’s ties with Israel. Other public officials joined in and said that Modi’s visit to Lakshadweep was aimed at undermining Maldives’ luxury tourism industry, which prides itself on its secluded pristine beaches. Indian travel and tourism agencies and celebrities added fuel to the controversy by using hashtags #MaldivesOut and #ExploreIndianIslands. In January, Maldivian President Mohamed Muizzu broke with tradition and prioritized visits to Turkey and China, flouting India's “ first-visit ” protocol. He flew to China, signed 20 deals , secured a massive 1000 crore aid package, and upon his return, urged India to withdraw its 80-member army contingent stationed in the Maldives by 15 March. The first well-known Indian presence in the Maldives was in response to the 1988 coup, under Operation Cactus , following a request from then-president Maumoon Abdul Gayoom, which protected the Maldives from Sri Lankan militants. There were 77 Indian officers stationed in Maldives since 2010 when the Indian government gifted two helicopters and a Dornier aircraft. Recent news suggests the first batch of Indian troops, some 25 soldiers, have already left the island country. In short, Modi’s Lakshadweep pictures created something of a diplomatic crisis that could significantly reshape Indian and Maldivian relations. Muizzu’s moves while in power have signalled a subtle but important shift in Maldivian foreign policy, with China gaining significant ground and India's traditional influence facing a challenge. But as diplomatic tensions between India and the Maldives have simmered, Muizzu’s deals with China, aimed at turbocharging tourism through large-scale construction projects and marketing to new countries, have raised crucial questions about the fragile archipelago’s environmental sustainability. Lakshadweep is similarly threatened—and if Modi’s agenda is realized, also poses a threat to the tourism sector pivotal to the Maldivian economy. Swallowed By the Ocean While Maldives-China 20-point MoU cooperation in disaster management and green and low-carbon sounds positive, deepening blue economy cooperation and accelerating the Belt and Road initiative raises serious concerns for the low-lying island country. In late 2021, highlighting the Maldives’ extreme environmental vulnerability, Aminath Shauna, the former environment and climate change minister noted, in an interview with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), that a staggering 80% of the country's islands sit less than a meter above sea level, over 90 percent of the islands report flooding annually, 97 percent are reporting shoreline erosion. “Fifty percent of all our housing structures are within just 100 meters of the coastline. So most really cannot withstand tidal floods, let alone tsunamis. Really, everything is at stake,” she had said. In 2008, concerned about the rising sea levels threatening the Maldives, then-President Mohamed Nasheed proposed relocation to neighbouring countries. However, in comparison, the current president’s plans differ greatly. He envisions reclaiming land, building elevated islands, and fortifying them. A report from the Economic Society of New Delhi-based Shri Ram College of Commerce reveals how extensive extraction for development disrupts beaches, harming marine life, compromising conservation for commerce, fuelling rapid biodiversity loss, around 21 percent of daily waste comes from tourists, polluting water and endangering health and untreated sewage and depletion threaten freshwater resources. But tourism continues to be integral to the Maldives economy, with growth in the sector in 2022 exceeding pre-pandemic levels with a remarkable 13.9% growth, outpacing even optimistic forecasts, fuelled by pent-up demand from both European and Asian tourists. Indeed, tourist arrivals and revenue in the Maldives have rebounded sharply, with total receipts soaring by 28% from $3.5 billion in 2021 to an estimated $4.5 billion in 2022. Fascinatingly, leading the charge was the recent upsurge in Indian travellers , some of them prominent Bollywood stars, with 209,198 visiting the island paradise in 2023. Close behind were 209,146 Russian visitors, followed by 187,118 Chinese tourists ranking third. According to the Maldives Monetary Authority, fuelled by a booming tourism sector, Maldives’ total government revenue surged 38 percent to USD 1.82 billion in 2022, outpacing both tax and non-tax revenue hikes. Financial figures show strong tourism recovery in the Maldives, raising concerns about its impact on the region's fragile ecosystem. However, the nation's latest partnerships, especially with China, may offer opportunities for balancing economic growth with environmental protection. Chalo Lakshadweep Can India reasonably pitch in Lakshadweep as a competitor for Maldives? While the idea of Lakshadweep as a competitor to the Maldives might be tempting, environmental concerns raise serious doubts about its feasibility. Lakshadweep’s environmental fragility, limited infrastructure, and local concerns cannot be ignored. A fresh study paints a grim picture for the Lakshadweep Islands, revealing that all of them are facing significant threats from rising sea levels, regardless of future emission scenarios. This marks the first time climate models have been used to assess potential inundation across the archipelago. The study predicts drastic land loss for smaller islands like Chetlat and Amini, with 60 to 70 percent and 70 to 80 percent of their shorelines vanishing under rising waters. Even larger islands like Minicoy and Kavaratti, including the capital, are not spared, facing potential land loss along 60 percent of their coastlines. The only relatively safe haven appears to be Androth Island, though it too will be impacted. Minicoy , the second largest and southernmost island in Lakshadweep, shares a unique historical connection with the Maldives. Known locally as “Maliku” in the Maldivian-Minicoy language, Minicoy was separated from the Maldives in 1752 by the Ali Rajas of Malabar (Kerala) and remained distinct ever since. The remaining northern islands of Lakshadweep, the Amindivi group, fell under British control much earlier in 1799, following their victory over Tipu Sultan of Mysore (who ruled them from 1787). The Laccadive Islands (southern group) and Minicoy were annexed to the British Empire later, with the suzerainty of Minicoy transferring to the British Indian Empire in 1875. However, the Arakkal House held a trade monopoly over these islands until 1905, when they were fully surrendered to the British. When India gained independence in 1947, the Union Jack continued to fly over the Minicoy lighthouse until 1956, when a representative of the Queen lowered it, marking Minicoy's official integration into the Indian Union. Lakshadweep’s current infrastructure caters to its 60,000 residents and a limited tourist influx. In 2021, the islands welcomed 13,500 tourists, a number that jumped to 22,800 in 2022. While this growth is encouraging, it also strains existing resources. There is only one airline operating flights to Lakshadweep and six ships ferrying people, and any Indian, who is not a native of Lakshadweep, shall have to obtain an entry permit . The reason for this, as per the Lakshadweep Tourism website, is to protect the Indigenous peoples residing there. Following a Supreme Court order in the 2012 case of M/s Sea Shell Beach Resorts v. Union Territory of Lakshadweep and Others, an expert committee led by Justice R.V. Raveendran evaluated the Integrated Island Management Plan (IIMP) for Lakshadweep. The IIMP is a crucial document that outlines the vision and strategies for sustainable development in Lakshadweep. The Supreme Court's order emphasized the need for balancing development with environmental protection in the islands. The Raveendran Committee's report made several recommendations, including, strict adherence to environmental laws and regulations, prioritization of sustainable tourism and eco-friendly practices, protection of the islands' fragile ecosystems and cultural heritage. Having said that, recently, the Lakshadweep administration planned to develop eco-tourism projects in 11 islands in public-private partnerships. NITI Aayog, the Indian government’s policy body, had sought proposals from consultants. The administration of the union territory identified the islands of Bangaram, Thinnakara, Pareli-II, Pareli- III, Chariyam, Kalpitti, Tilakkam, Kavaratti, Perumal par, Viringili island, and Minicoy. Additionally, branded hotels are coming up , while water villas are also on the horizon. However, the one and only parliamentarian from Lakshadweep has already raised his concern over tourism development projects. Talking to the media , he said the “Chalo Lakshadweep” call may not even get off the ground given multiple constraints, including the lack of direct flights and the minuscule number—150—of hotel rooms. “Even if it does, the tourist inflow has to be controlled in view of the fragile ecology of the island that has been propped up by a rulebook that lays down the number of tourists the islands can contain each day,” Mohammad Faizal, the parliamentarian from Lakshadweep, told media. Faizal cited Justice R.V. Raveendran’s suggestions to protect the island. The media quoted him, adding that the island is looking for high-end controlled tourism. Meanwhile, in a phone conversation with SAAG from Androth, the largest island in Lakshadweep, Mohammed Althaf Hussain, a former Panchayath president, discussed the potential benefits and drawbacks of increased tourism focus in the islands. Hussain noted that “pumping more money into tourism development can create job opportunities, help locals diversify their income, boost earnings, and popularize local culture.” However, he also acknowledged environmental concerns, stating, “Like any other place, our islands face environmental challenges due to climate change, including waste management woes.” He concluded by expressing optimism that “with scientific solutions, we can overcome these challenges.” Dr Naveen Namboothri, Trustee and Programme Head at Dakshin Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to environmental conservation and sustainable development, shared a note prepared by Lakshadweep Research Collective. This note responds to the draft development plan for the island proposed by the Indian government. The note shared by Naveen, who is part of Lakshadweep Research Collective, states that, the then development plan poses a dangerous threat to Lakshadweep's ecology, community, and culture. The note adds that the plan ignores Lakshadweep's unique ecology and climate vulnerabilities, proposing unsustainable development that endangers reefs and livelihoods. “It grants authorities power to take land and resources, jeopardizing traditional practices and local economies. Proposes a narrow, “fast-track” approach focused on infrastructure and exploitation, neglecting social well-being and ecological integrity,” the note adds. On 1 February, while presenting the interim budget, Indian Finance Minister Nirmala Sitaram, named Lakshadweep. “To address the emerging fervour for domestic tourism, projects for port connectivity, tourism infrastructure, and amenities will be taken up on our islands, including Lakshadweep,” she said . And there are reports that India has proposed a ₹3,600-crore infrastructure upgrade plan for the Lakshadweep islands, aiming to transform them into a tourist hub. Back in 2021, the Lakshadweep administrator was accused of introducing policies that could harm the environment and cultural heritage of the islands. The controversial proposals included a beef ban and restrictions on those contesting in local elections. At the time, India’s opposition leader Rahul Gandhi also raised his concerns. The tensions between India and the Maldives can be attributed to hypernationalism displayed by both state and non-state actors. While Maldivian deputy ministers criticized Prime Minister Modi, Indian social media users fueled the issue with their own brand of hypernationalism and unrealistic expectations regarding Lakshadweep. For India, boycotting the Maldives may well have negative political consequences. Meanwhile, losing the trust of a long-standing strategic partner whose culture is intertwined with its own would be a major detriment for the Maldives. Fueled by budget allocations and amplified by media buzz, India seems intent on making a "Maldives™" out of Lakshadweep, propelling ultra-nationalist sentiments in both countries. This move suggests that India is far from closing the chapter on instigating a previously non-existent tourism rivalry between Lakshadweep and the Maldives. ∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

ARTIST Jacobo Alonso JACOBO ALONSO holds bachelor's degrees in Computer Systems and Fine Arts. From 2014 to 2015, he studied at the University of Rennes 2 France. Alonso's work has been shown in 22 countries. He explores the opacity and versatility of the concept of the "Body" and the displacements it may have in different contexts and disciplines. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Interpreting Rossana Rossanda & Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba to answer: what allows emancipatory politics to start, and what prevents it? BOOKS & ARTS Exhaustion & Emancipation Interpreting Rossana Rossanda & Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba to answer: what allows emancipatory politics to start, and what prevents it? Asad Haider CONSIDER THE militant who wakes up exhausted. Every day and night in the streets, perhaps marching back and forth with painful restraint, perhaps building barricades in spontaneous moments of affinity with those whose rapid “learning processes” have demonstrated the rationality of slowing and obstructing the police. Sore muscles the next day arguing in meetings and studying the classics for guidance. Despair at the emptying of the streets, the guilty capitulation to apathy, and the devastating disintegration of the organization. Consider what intervenes between politics as event: the knocking of doors, the apocalyptically slow process of persuasion, the daily strain to survive one’s own declining fortunes, the sheer emotional intensity of attempting to maintain fidelity and hope in the empty and seemingly endless interval. We know such exhaustions. Alongside these exhaustions which punctuate the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to politics at an everyday, grassroots level, the residents of the United States as a whole seem to have entered a state of exhaustion. It is in no small part provoked by the series of drastic political shifts that are marked by the fluctuating fortunes of the parliamentary system and its parties, parallel to the ebb and flow of social movements outside state boundaries. This exhaustion seems to be a broad phenomenon—caused by an affective investment in the outcomes of elections and the trajectory of social movements. But in fact, we must think of exhaustion in a different, highly specific way if we are to understand its contemporary political centrality. Exhaustion, in fact, has something like the status of a historical condition, a status that is a consequence of the termination of emancipatory politics. In this sense, exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Contrary to the popular opinion which dictates that “everything is political,” politics is not always taking place—politics, by which I mean specifically emancipatory politics, is an exceptional phenomenon. It does not happen with frequency. Just as it has to appear, it also fades away. Exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Of course, to understand any of this, we have to specify what politics means in the first place. In embarking on this task for the present moment, I want to pay tribute to two comrades who left us last year: the Congolese philosopher Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, and the Italian Communist Rossana Rossanda. Together they help think through the questions the militant faces in every moment of political action, even in what seem to be unremarkable and everyday practices: what is an emancipatory politics? What allows it to take place—and equally, what prevents it? The problem of emancipation animates the whole history of politics and political thought—but somehow, its place in our thinking and its relationship to social analysis often remains obscure. This slipperiness of emancipation presents a crisis for political thinking today. It is not difficult to see that a resurgence of authoritarian populism, the breakdown of the existing political system, and the approach of ecological apocalypse, all require concerted and creative theoretical efforts. But alongside the catastrophe of the present is the parallel emergence and disappearance of unexpected social movements—like those that recently peaked in the extraordinary mobilizations against racism and police violence. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. This vantage point is not one which we could step out of history to assume, but rather is one which appears in particular moments, and ultimately recedes. We also cannot simply take contingent aspects of any particular social movement to represent the intrinsic characteristics of emancipation. Horizontalist forms of organization, for example, though there is certainly no reason to dismiss them out of hand, nevertheless do not automatically guarantee a movement’s emancipatory character. It is possible for such organizational practices to foster broad and egalitarian popular participation, in a way that appears to “prefigure” an emancipated society. But it is just as possible that they will devolve into proceduralism, endless meetings, debilitating indecision, and the reassertion of the same old hierarchies and stratifications that characterize existing society. In this sense, perhaps counterintuitively, instead of embracing specific forms of movement democracy as good in themselves—which, more often than not, brings us back to abstract and ahistorical norms—we have to situate them within political sequences. It is within these sequences, and only within these sequences, that they take on a political meaning. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. Such a vantage point of emancipation is different from any social analysis that serves as a guarantee for a particular political program. In my book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump , I declined, much to the chagrin of certain critics, to explain the relation between the categories, now so frequently paired, of “race and class.” It seemed to me that to describe the relationship between two abstractions—which are only articulated in concrete and specific historical circumstances—would be a logical error. Instead, I concerned myself with the articulation of struggles against racial domination and class exploitation in emancipatory social movements. I briefly alluded to the vast literature on the social and historical construction of race, and at the same time, in archival work on the history of the 19th and 20th century workers’ movements for Viewpoint Magazine , I attempted to describe the social and historical construction of class, by reviving the method of “class composition.” At the time, it seemed to me that the erasure of class in “identity politics” had neutralized the revolutionary character of movements against racial domination. Since then I have been reminded that struggles founded on class can also be neutralized, as the history of the workers’ movement makes clear. It seems to me now that emancipation is foreclosed by any foundation, whether “identitarian” or “materialist,” and that the axes of political struggle cannot be aligned by an empiricist social analysis, but only from the vantage point of emancipation. I have further been led to understand that my description of the depoliticized moment of the present requires further explanation. I do not mean neutralization as the search for an already neutral domain, or the evasion of conflict, as in the canonical account of Carl Schmitt. His diagnosis of “the age of neutralizations and depoliticizations” is grounded in a general theory of “the political,” while I am concerned with the singular events of “politics.” My theory ends up diametrically opposite to the jurist. What I mean by neutralization is a force which renders opposition ineffective. It is distinct from the potentially moralistic idea of co-optation, which presumes some authentic belonging of the object. Opposition is neutralized not through appropriation, but through the formulation of an effective reactant and the transformation of each element into a new compound. Neutralization is restricted, while depoliticization is expansive. Neutralization comes from the top. It contains and redirects opposition into the harmonious diversity of the system. Exhaustion, then, is part of a constellation that includes neutralization and depoliticization. In order to distinguish this theory from preceding accounts of neutralization and depoliticization, it will be at the center of our inquiry. Emancipation Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba’s work is not widely known in the “West,” despite the important influence he had at University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Senegal. His writings form part of an essential global dialogue on emancipatory politics. Wamba offers an indispensable statement on emancipation in his discussion of Lenin’s proposition that politics happens “under condition”: The political attitude is not accommodating; the state of affairs in the world does not have to remain so because it is so. People may live differently than they live. Politics is not expressed through the spontaneous consciousness. It is an active prescriptive relationship with reality and not a reflection or representation in consciousness of invariant structures (economic structure or level of development or the state). Politics is a creative invention. Let us do something about the situation! characterizes a political attitude. And so Wamba beautifully condenses a number of points on which to elaborate. Wamba emphasizes, drawing on Sylvain Lazarus, that “people think,” and that without this point of departure we inevitably end up in an elitist politics. Consequently there is a sense in which politics is thought—but thought is not, in some dualist framework, separate from reality. People’s thought is part of reality, and this is a materialist and egalitarian proposition. It rejects the idealist and elitist notions that “theory” is disconnected from people’s thought, and that only the party or the state can think. Emancipatory politics, then, based as it is on the “active prescriptive relationship with reality,” is not the expression of a social foundation. And because it starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics—not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” Because emancipatory politics starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics. Not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” But even once we have affirmed that people think, we are forced to reckon with the fact that something is not always being done about the situation. In other words: is politics always happening? Wamba notes that the existence of a social movement does not automatically imply the existence of politics; the latter requires a “subjective break,” the development of an antagonism to the whole political order which “is revealed through militant forms of thought… and not through the movement of history.” Thus Wamba argues: Emancipative politics does not always exist; when it does, it exists under conditions. It is, thus, precarious, and sequential: it unfolds until its conditions of subjective break disappear. When people lose the consciousness of subjective break by ceasing to be involved in political processes, emancipative politics disappears. The completion of a sequence of progressive politics does not lead automatically to another. In the absence of emancipative politics, the state problematic or the imperialist influence prevails in the treatment of matters of politics. To reduce every political capacity to a state capacity is to abscond from politics. Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. When it does, it appears in sequences with a beginning and an end, and advances categories specific to its situation. But there are also modes of politics which are not emancipatory: the single-party, party-state model of state socialism, and the multi-party parliamentary mode. Let us put the term “democracy” in suspension for the moment, because the equation of democracy with multi-partyism and parliamentarianism naturally absorbs it into the state. “The multiparty system is a form of the state and not independent of or antagonistic to it,” Wamba writes. “Legal and constitutional dimensions, separation of powers, recognition of freedoms of association, expression, religion, etc., are structural traits of the state. They do not identify a mode of politics which has to be grasped through its subjective dimension.” Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. In other words, politics in parliamentarism is reduced to voting. But it is only from the viewpoint of mass organization, Wamba proposes, that it is possible to speak of movements for democracy in Africa. The imposition of Western models of liberal democracy continues a fundamentally colonial relation which does not reflect the capacity of African people to constitute their own politics. “What are the conditions in Africa,” Wamba asks, “for emancipatory politics to exist?” He adds: Our starting point must be: in Africa too, people think and this is the sole material basis of politics. We must investigate the internal content of what they actually think. It is through an analysis of these forms of consciousness that we will grasp the forms of political consciousness characterizing the antagonism with the existing overall socio-political order. To fail in this task would be to “abscond from politics, reducing politics to a state capacity.” This, then, is our basic framework for understanding depoliticization. In line with Wamba’s reasoning, Michael Neocosmos provides important developments in his aptly named Thinking Freedom in Africa . Depoliticization is “the inability to maintain an affirmation of purely subjective politics” when “state politics reassert themselves because of the gradual linking of politics to social categories.” This problem, Neocosmos elaborates, is tangled up with the rare and sequential character of politics. How do we understand a political sequence? Along these lines, Neocosmos proposes, the end of the national liberation sequence in Africa 1960-75 need not be understood in terms of the “failure of nationalism” but as “the saturation of the politics of national liberation and their gradual exhaustion as pure politics.” Conventional wisdom on historical revolutionary sequences of the 20th century revolves around a fundamental, flawed dichotomy: either the beautiful soul which remains unsullied by their dark side, or the sensible pragmatist who understands that every attempt to change the world ends in disaster. But one can both reject the nihilistic conclusion that no politics ever took place in a completed political sequence, and understand the consequences of the end of the sequence in terms of the risk of depoliticization. This is a pervasive problem which we encounter with the exhaustion of the great political sequences of the 20th century, even of the great socialist revolutions. This is how exhaustion becomes a historical condition and results in what we described above as the seeming impossibility of politics. The sequence of revolution which stretched across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 20th century proposed not only the overturning of the existing societies but also the transitional processes of socialist construction which would yield an entirely new kind of world beyond capitalism. But now we are in no such historical phase—and the affective experience of exhaustion is tied to this condition. Nowadays, everywhere, there are attempts to disavow histories of the attempts to construct societies beyond capitalism—often with the easy narrative of “totalitarianism.” Such views simply repeat a traditional kind of fear of the masses which sees every collective body as a threat of mob conformism. This worldview seeks to defend representative, but essentially oligarchic institutions in which the educated elite protects a formal democracy which conceals the real dictatorship of capital. Anti-democratic views of this kind are in fact at the center of the dominant “democratic” ideologies which accuse every attempt to change the world of being fundamentally “totalitarian.” Theories of the political mired in this oligarchic sensibility, even if they appear on the left—such as it exists today—ultimately rely on teleological conceptions of history. Unable to comprehend the novel political declarations and actions which gave rise to the historical revolutionary sequences, they also cannot allow for the rare and exceptional emergence of politics in the present. Exhaustion, in this sense, is understood through what Lazarus has called the “method of saturation”: affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. In particular, we have to grapple with the saturation of the long sequence of the 20th century revolutions which revolved around the revolutionary working-class party seizing the state. Exhaustion, in this sense, is... affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. These are the conditions of depoliticization. But one need not lay blame on the historical figures who frequently reached a scale of human achievement unimaginable to us, to simply recognize that emancipatory politics is precarious and sequential. Exhaustion How does the condition of exhaustion operate on the concrete level of movements and the state? Here we can follow our second departed comrade, Rossana Rossanda of il manifesto , the dissident group pushed out of the Italian Communist Party in 1969. In 1983, reflecting on the long, turbulent sequence of political upheaval in Italy of at least the preceding two decades Rossanda identified two fundamental political problems: the dissipation of social movements outside the state, and the consequences of left-wing parties attempting to enter the state. Of course, the situation in Italy, characterized by perpetual strikes and a mass Communist Party approaching the seat of power, is not the same as the ones we know in the United States. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the rise and fall of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the mass protests against police violence demonstrates the ongoing salience of Rossanda’s reflections. The Sanders campaign, of course, attempted to pursue a social-democratic program within the parameters of the bourgeois state— subsequently followed by the eruption of social movements outside the state. This dynamic, even if in a drastically different form and context, sheds light on the problem of the relationship between party and movement—or to put it another way, between the political (parliamentary) forms of the existing state and the social (extraparliamentary) basis of autonomous mobilization. For Rossanda, in the aftermath of the crest of the European workers’ movement the very form of the party, manifested in the Communist Parties, was in crisis. Already in 1968, from Paris to Beijing “the party-form was put into question” in no small part by the independent initiatives of workers. This occurred without the guidance of parties and unions, and alongside an unprecedented level of protest by youth and students which had an uneven but frequently fecund relationship with factory struggles. This crisis of the party-form was a critique of its fundamental political model; it was, Rossanda wrote, “the refusal of any delegation of power, whether it be a party or state, henceforth treated as ‘other’ in relation to the new subjectivity of these social agents.” During this particular crisis, the working class was engaged in the “refusal of work” rather than following the lead of unions in pursuing a minimal program of delegating the negotiation of new contracts to the labor bureaucracy. The student movements, meanwhile, helped realize the potential of the workers’ movement to pursue an independent path by advocating for autonomy and cultural transformation. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the political demands of its working-class political base. But while the “new social movements” outside the party provided a vitality to the independent movements of the workers, they also relied on the mass organization of the working class that was inextricable from the political party, even if the latter operated as a force of containment. This contradictory relationship, also witnessed in the May 1968 revolt in France, was exacerbated when the parties confronted the implications, throughout the 1970s, of actually entering into the capitalist state. What could they achieve within the very bourgeois form not only of the political party itself, but parliamentary politics as a whole? Rossanda pointed to the simple fact that in Western societies representative democracy is a structure within which parties must attempt to get votes. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the demands of its working-class political base. For this reason, whatever tactical potential there might have been in participating in elections, it was nevertheless the case that a very different kind of working-class political power would have to emerge in order to overturn class society. Within this structure, contemporary socialists have aspired to reproduce the history of the mass working-class political parties: garnering votes, aspiring to enter the state. In short, despite the fact that the very notion of a Communist Party entering the state seems unimaginable, when and if they succeed, contemporary socialists will eventually confront the problem of the form of political power that will be required for structural transformation. It wasn’t just the party that was in crisis. Extraparliamentary social movements had a prospect of overcoming bureaucratic ossification and reorienting the parties in a revolutionary direction. But movements were also in crisis. Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”; its “dramatic and destructive ebbs are as important as the sedimentations it creates.” Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”. There were, furthermore, important historical shifts at work as Rossanda was writing. Until the mid-twentieth century, Rossanda argued, movements “arose from sudden bursts from the margins of society” but were then “predisposed to become a party or merge with an existing party.” In this sense they provoked a transformation in the state which also generally represented their absorption into the existing institutions. Yet the new movements of the 1970s did not operate according to this logic. They “tended to express subjects and needs that the dominant social bloc, namely the parties and the state, could no longer absorb in a timely manner without abnegating itself.” The movements did not institutionalize themselves, either by building new institutions or by entering existing ones, either because they were not capable of achieving this or simply did not aspire to, and without articulating a project or alternative, they “withered,” and the existing power structures solidified in response. In Italy the parties were incorporated into the increasingly repressive state—the Italian Communist Party itself playing a leading role in repression of autonomous movements—and capital succeeded, by the late ‘70s, in breaking the power of labor. Even if the parties and unions had operated as a force of containment and absorption into bourgeois parliamentarianism, their mass membership also functioned as a political anchor, so their crisis was also the crisis of the movements. As they went on the retreat, movements fell prey to a general social anomie and atomization. Here I must beg your patience in referring to a dense and lengthy passage which provides the key formulation: A diffuse politicization remains, skeptical in regards to the left if not openly hostile, as does an intense depoliticization, a kind of active negation. The “movements” are no longer “movements” (which would suggest that they are only movements insofar as they retain the implicit hope for a way out or transfer to other “forms of politics,” or a certain trust in the permeability of the institutional network which has disappeared today). They are becoming fevers, “latencies,” partial cultures or subcultures, acting creatively but molecularly, contradictorily. Rossanda is pointing us here to the molecular level of depoliticization: not the macroscopic, historical scale that is the condition resulting from the end of a historical mode of politics, but the immediate, on-the-ground level of practical activity of the movement’s participants. What she calls the “diffuse politicization” of the movements is oppositional to the existing society. But in their fragmentation, the movements no longer move from the margins into the institutions. As Rossanda had argued of movements in the first half of the 20th century, this shift into the institutions had a dual character: the existing institutions neutralized these oppositional bursts from the margins, while at the same time also necessarily being transformed by them. While the autonomy of the emerging movements may have circumvented this neutralization, they also did not find a new way to compel the institutions to resolve the problems raised by their revolt, refusal, and demands. Now the movements came to exist as latencies alongside the sturdiness of the institutional order, and this order appeared to take on a despotic permanence. Rossanda’s insight into the complex relations between class and party, party and movement, remain crucial for socialists today who ask themselves: how should we organize? Endings & Beginnings In this essay, I have meant exhaustion in three senses. The first, at the level of the immediate practical activity of the militant, is the waning of the political capacity for commitment or the devolution into factionalism. The second, at the level of the political sequences within which militants act, is when an existing historical mode of politics comes to an end and a new one is not yet apparent. The third, at the level of history, is the condition which results from the seeming impossibility of political sequences of a scale and depth comparable to the 20th century revolutions. Does exhaustion constitute a period of history, an “age”? Periodization is tricky. All periodizations are schematic. It is extremely complicated to determine how the logical relationship between categories is aligned with a certain period of time, especially for events so tumultuous that they constantly defy interpretation. Though this may seem counterintuitive, periodization at its best does not exactly identify periods, within which every phenomenon expresses the totality in a particular stage of development. Rather, it provides specific and distinct descriptions of uneven and structurally interrelated processes, which have moments of rupture and discontinuity. There are thus interwoven threads throughout these periods, untimely divisions and amalgamations. Those of us living through a period between sequences which announce shared reference points for a global political subjectivity can choose between being faithful to the emancipatory project and the various forms of capitulation to exhaustion. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. With this we are all exhausted. What we are left with are simply various forms of pseudo-politics. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. There are three such pseudo-political sensibilities: adjustment, which claims to advocate for adjusting the existing reality, but actually enjoins us to adjust ourselves to it, on the basis of convenient normative principles (democracy, even socialism); personalization, the reduction of politics to individual behavior and identity, determined by a range of categories to which a person might be said to belong; and pragmatism, which dictates that since it will not get better, you must unencumber yourself of principles. In the interval the choice is not easy. Perhaps more dangerous than resignation in the face of exhaustion is to perform the rituals of depoliticization. Consider how these sensibilities are practiced. First, adjustment appears in the condescending rejection of any organizational process which does not have the state as its object. It generally means that an aspiring bureaucracy closes ranks and insists that all other political practices should be dropped every few years when, as Marx put it long ago, the people are permitted to decide which member of the ruling class will misrepresent them in parliament. Experiments, necessary for any process of organizational invention, are ridiculed and dismissed in comparison to an ideal model which exists nowhere in reality, but which we are assured is the only practical solution. The stubborn repetition of norms, both political and social, guarantees the despotism of the model. Walter Benjamin recounted what he called a Hasidic saying (but which he actually heard from his friend Gershom Scholem), that when the messiah comes, the world will be just as it is now, “only a little bit different.” From the perspective of adjustment, it will not be even a little bit different. Second, personalization operates the reduction of politics to interpersonal relations, resulting in factionalism and conformism. Factionalism and conformism are not unusual in the history of politics, even emancipatory politics, but today they happen without the processes of total social upheaval that framed them historically. As a result, individuals and groups act like states without achieving any substantive change, enforcing unwritten laws with informal social punishments. In the place of the aspiration for structural transformation there is the centering of politics on the person, on the person of the adversary, whose offensive proclamations and style of speaking may provide the opportunity for a self-satisfied disgust, insofar as our experiences and self-designations are seen as spontaneously political rather than themselves the construction of political procedures. Third, pragmatism is the most widespread sensibility among intellectuals, from the media to the academy, who adopt political language but drain it of any idea, and laugh at those who have the courage to believe that a truly political idea is worth defending. As Alain Badiou puts it, the imperative of capitalism, “get rich!,” today translates into: “Live without an Idea!” Even in the pages of our most traditional newspapers, no less than in what Byung-Chul Han calls the “shitstorms” of social media, we can read condemnations of oppression and privilege, we can see debates over the abolition of our society’s most violent institutions, we can rejoice at the toppling of the latest petty tyrant with the misfortune of being randomly exposed. Yet if we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” These sensibilities correspond in certain respects to different political tendencies, but they also fuse and intermingle in various ways. In social movements, forms of organization, whether they are bureaucratic or horizontalist, frequently revolve around the persons who lead or represent the movement. Competitions between factions, the decisions about which persons will occupy the positions of leadership, displace debates over strategy and program; activists are required to perform lengthy confessions of their privilege instead of recruiting new members (who are almost universally repelled, entirely justly, by such religious procedures); and purges and expulsions are performed to cleanse and redeem the community, instead of fostering environments which encourage free and open discussion. If we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” All depoliticization leads back to the state, and its rituals, no matter how molecular, only enforce its hegemony. In periods of the intensification of opinion, of the back and forth which is not genuinely political, the greatest temptation is withdrawal—to maintain the conviction that a genuinely emancipatory politics is necessary, to recognize that it has taken place in the past, but then to conclude that it will not take place again. It is difficult to dictate to others whether it is better to enter the fray of opinion or withdraw into the isolation of one’s bunker. And indeed, I have no political prescription to make. I am unable to conclude with a clarion call, to rally new energies to a resurgence of politics. But this is not because I view emancipation as illusory, inherently flawed, or doomed to failure. In reality, it has been exhausted, in a way that perhaps we are still unable to fully comprehend. In the absence of events which inaugurate a thorough break with the existing order, I can only try to remain faithful, to the extent that my energies allow, to the emancipatory statements that Wamba articulated: that people think, that they may live differently than they do, and that politics is the creative invention which says: let us do something about the situation! And the questions which immediately follow these statements are: what are the conditions for emancipatory politics to exist? What are the militant forms of thought which make it possible for masses of people to make a subjective break from the existing state of things? What are the sites of politics which allow us to take a distance from the state, and how do we prevent politics from being reduced to the state when a political sequence comes to an end? The energies for fidelity, however, do not remain stable in our turbulent reality. A kind of ordinary steadiness, perhaps, can be drawn from Rossanda’s analysis of the organizational processes underlying these conditions. If depoliticization overwhelms us, it is not a matter of historical necessity, but of everyday relations, of the way we organize our relations to each other in the process of organizing politically. From the working class to the new social movements, from unions to assemblies, there is the patient work of building collectivities that last and the sober analysis of the exigencies of organization. And once again, many questions: what will fill the empty space left in history by the party? How can movements avoid neutralization while still compelling the transformation of existing institutions? What can prevent movements from being consigned to the margins, where they watch power solidify and harden? I remain convinced by these insights, but it would be a mistake to pretend that we have answers to the questions that follow. False certainties do not result in correct actions, and we gain little from arranging our ideas in such a way as to give ourselves the gift of optimism. Exhaustion, perhaps, is not eternal; we have no evidence to conclude that it is. But as capitalism, in its automatic and impersonal nihilism, accelerates its exhaustion of the planet, and the rituals of depoliticization foreclose the declaration of any political idea, there appears almost to be a nobility in withdrawal. And yet, this appearance is illusory, because one of the few truly meaningful questions in an otherwise meaningless and mediocre existence is this: what can we do about the situation? Answering that question means reckoning seriously, and disturbingly, with exhaustion. Time will tell—but not too much time—if we are up to the task. ∎ CONSIDER THE militant who wakes up exhausted. Every day and night in the streets, perhaps marching back and forth with painful restraint, perhaps building barricades in spontaneous moments of affinity with those whose rapid “learning processes” have demonstrated the rationality of slowing and obstructing the police. Sore muscles the next day arguing in meetings and studying the classics for guidance. Despair at the emptying of the streets, the guilty capitulation to apathy, and the devastating disintegration of the organization. Consider what intervenes between politics as event: the knocking of doors, the apocalyptically slow process of persuasion, the daily strain to survive one’s own declining fortunes, the sheer emotional intensity of attempting to maintain fidelity and hope in the empty and seemingly endless interval. We know such exhaustions. Alongside these exhaustions which punctuate the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to politics at an everyday, grassroots level, the residents of the United States as a whole seem to have entered a state of exhaustion. It is in no small part provoked by the series of drastic political shifts that are marked by the fluctuating fortunes of the parliamentary system and its parties, parallel to the ebb and flow of social movements outside state boundaries. This exhaustion seems to be a broad phenomenon—caused by an affective investment in the outcomes of elections and the trajectory of social movements. But in fact, we must think of exhaustion in a different, highly specific way if we are to understand its contemporary political centrality. Exhaustion, in fact, has something like the status of a historical condition, a status that is a consequence of the termination of emancipatory politics. In this sense, exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Contrary to the popular opinion which dictates that “everything is political,” politics is not always taking place—politics, by which I mean specifically emancipatory politics, is an exceptional phenomenon. It does not happen with frequency. Just as it has to appear, it also fades away. Exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Of course, to understand any of this, we have to specify what politics means in the first place. In embarking on this task for the present moment, I want to pay tribute to two comrades who left us last year: the Congolese philosopher Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, and the Italian Communist Rossana Rossanda. Together they help think through the questions the militant faces in every moment of political action, even in what seem to be unremarkable and everyday practices: what is an emancipatory politics? What allows it to take place—and equally, what prevents it? The problem of emancipation animates the whole history of politics and political thought—but somehow, its place in our thinking and its relationship to social analysis often remains obscure. This slipperiness of emancipation presents a crisis for political thinking today. It is not difficult to see that a resurgence of authoritarian populism, the breakdown of the existing political system, and the approach of ecological apocalypse, all require concerted and creative theoretical efforts. But alongside the catastrophe of the present is the parallel emergence and disappearance of unexpected social movements—like those that recently peaked in the extraordinary mobilizations against racism and police violence. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. This vantage point is not one which we could step out of history to assume, but rather is one which appears in particular moments, and ultimately recedes. We also cannot simply take contingent aspects of any particular social movement to represent the intrinsic characteristics of emancipation. Horizontalist forms of organization, for example, though there is certainly no reason to dismiss them out of hand, nevertheless do not automatically guarantee a movement’s emancipatory character. It is possible for such organizational practices to foster broad and egalitarian popular participation, in a way that appears to “prefigure” an emancipated society. But it is just as possible that they will devolve into proceduralism, endless meetings, debilitating indecision, and the reassertion of the same old hierarchies and stratifications that characterize existing society. In this sense, perhaps counterintuitively, instead of embracing specific forms of movement democracy as good in themselves—which, more often than not, brings us back to abstract and ahistorical norms—we have to situate them within political sequences. It is within these sequences, and only within these sequences, that they take on a political meaning. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. Such a vantage point of emancipation is different from any social analysis that serves as a guarantee for a particular political program. In my book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump , I declined, much to the chagrin of certain critics, to explain the relation between the categories, now so frequently paired, of “race and class.” It seemed to me that to describe the relationship between two abstractions—which are only articulated in concrete and specific historical circumstances—would be a logical error. Instead, I concerned myself with the articulation of struggles against racial domination and class exploitation in emancipatory social movements. I briefly alluded to the vast literature on the social and historical construction of race, and at the same time, in archival work on the history of the 19th and 20th century workers’ movements for Viewpoint Magazine , I attempted to describe the social and historical construction of class, by reviving the method of “class composition.” At the time, it seemed to me that the erasure of class in “identity politics” had neutralized the revolutionary character of movements against racial domination. Since then I have been reminded that struggles founded on class can also be neutralized, as the history of the workers’ movement makes clear. It seems to me now that emancipation is foreclosed by any foundation, whether “identitarian” or “materialist,” and that the axes of political struggle cannot be aligned by an empiricist social analysis, but only from the vantage point of emancipation. I have further been led to understand that my description of the depoliticized moment of the present requires further explanation. I do not mean neutralization as the search for an already neutral domain, or the evasion of conflict, as in the canonical account of Carl Schmitt. His diagnosis of “the age of neutralizations and depoliticizations” is grounded in a general theory of “the political,” while I am concerned with the singular events of “politics.” My theory ends up diametrically opposite to the jurist. What I mean by neutralization is a force which renders opposition ineffective. It is distinct from the potentially moralistic idea of co-optation, which presumes some authentic belonging of the object. Opposition is neutralized not through appropriation, but through the formulation of an effective reactant and the transformation of each element into a new compound. Neutralization is restricted, while depoliticization is expansive. Neutralization comes from the top. It contains and redirects opposition into the harmonious diversity of the system. Exhaustion, then, is part of a constellation that includes neutralization and depoliticization. In order to distinguish this theory from preceding accounts of neutralization and depoliticization, it will be at the center of our inquiry. Emancipation Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba’s work is not widely known in the “West,” despite the important influence he had at University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Senegal. His writings form part of an essential global dialogue on emancipatory politics. Wamba offers an indispensable statement on emancipation in his discussion of Lenin’s proposition that politics happens “under condition”: The political attitude is not accommodating; the state of affairs in the world does not have to remain so because it is so. People may live differently than they live. Politics is not expressed through the spontaneous consciousness. It is an active prescriptive relationship with reality and not a reflection or representation in consciousness of invariant structures (economic structure or level of development or the state). Politics is a creative invention. Let us do something about the situation! characterizes a political attitude. And so Wamba beautifully condenses a number of points on which to elaborate. Wamba emphasizes, drawing on Sylvain Lazarus, that “people think,” and that without this point of departure we inevitably end up in an elitist politics. Consequently there is a sense in which politics is thought—but thought is not, in some dualist framework, separate from reality. People’s thought is part of reality, and this is a materialist and egalitarian proposition. It rejects the idealist and elitist notions that “theory” is disconnected from people’s thought, and that only the party or the state can think. Emancipatory politics, then, based as it is on the “active prescriptive relationship with reality,” is not the expression of a social foundation. And because it starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics—not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” Because emancipatory politics starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics. Not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” But even once we have affirmed that people think, we are forced to reckon with the fact that something is not always being done about the situation. In other words: is politics always happening? Wamba notes that the existence of a social movement does not automatically imply the existence of politics; the latter requires a “subjective break,” the development of an antagonism to the whole political order which “is revealed through militant forms of thought… and not through the movement of history.” Thus Wamba argues: Emancipative politics does not always exist; when it does, it exists under conditions. It is, thus, precarious, and sequential: it unfolds until its conditions of subjective break disappear. When people lose the consciousness of subjective break by ceasing to be involved in political processes, emancipative politics disappears. The completion of a sequence of progressive politics does not lead automatically to another. In the absence of emancipative politics, the state problematic or the imperialist influence prevails in the treatment of matters of politics. To reduce every political capacity to a state capacity is to abscond from politics. Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. When it does, it appears in sequences with a beginning and an end, and advances categories specific to its situation. But there are also modes of politics which are not emancipatory: the single-party, party-state model of state socialism, and the multi-party parliamentary mode. Let us put the term “democracy” in suspension for the moment, because the equation of democracy with multi-partyism and parliamentarianism naturally absorbs it into the state. “The multiparty system is a form of the state and not independent of or antagonistic to it,” Wamba writes. “Legal and constitutional dimensions, separation of powers, recognition of freedoms of association, expression, religion, etc., are structural traits of the state. They do not identify a mode of politics which has to be grasped through its subjective dimension.” Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. In other words, politics in parliamentarism is reduced to voting. But it is only from the viewpoint of mass organization, Wamba proposes, that it is possible to speak of movements for democracy in Africa. The imposition of Western models of liberal democracy continues a fundamentally colonial relation which does not reflect the capacity of African people to constitute their own politics. “What are the conditions in Africa,” Wamba asks, “for emancipatory politics to exist?” He adds: Our starting point must be: in Africa too, people think and this is the sole material basis of politics. We must investigate the internal content of what they actually think. It is through an analysis of these forms of consciousness that we will grasp the forms of political consciousness characterizing the antagonism with the existing overall socio-political order. To fail in this task would be to “abscond from politics, reducing politics to a state capacity.” This, then, is our basic framework for understanding depoliticization. In line with Wamba’s reasoning, Michael Neocosmos provides important developments in his aptly named Thinking Freedom in Africa . Depoliticization is “the inability to maintain an affirmation of purely subjective politics” when “state politics reassert themselves because of the gradual linking of politics to social categories.” This problem, Neocosmos elaborates, is tangled up with the rare and sequential character of politics. How do we understand a political sequence? Along these lines, Neocosmos proposes, the end of the national liberation sequence in Africa 1960-75 need not be understood in terms of the “failure of nationalism” but as “the saturation of the politics of national liberation and their gradual exhaustion as pure politics.” Conventional wisdom on historical revolutionary sequences of the 20th century revolves around a fundamental, flawed dichotomy: either the beautiful soul which remains unsullied by their dark side, or the sensible pragmatist who understands that every attempt to change the world ends in disaster. But one can both reject the nihilistic conclusion that no politics ever took place in a completed political sequence, and understand the consequences of the end of the sequence in terms of the risk of depoliticization. This is a pervasive problem which we encounter with the exhaustion of the great political sequences of the 20th century, even of the great socialist revolutions. This is how exhaustion becomes a historical condition and results in what we described above as the seeming impossibility of politics. The sequence of revolution which stretched across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 20th century proposed not only the overturning of the existing societies but also the transitional processes of socialist construction which would yield an entirely new kind of world beyond capitalism. But now we are in no such historical phase—and the affective experience of exhaustion is tied to this condition. Nowadays, everywhere, there are attempts to disavow histories of the attempts to construct societies beyond capitalism—often with the easy narrative of “totalitarianism.” Such views simply repeat a traditional kind of fear of the masses which sees every collective body as a threat of mob conformism. This worldview seeks to defend representative, but essentially oligarchic institutions in which the educated elite protects a formal democracy which conceals the real dictatorship of capital. Anti-democratic views of this kind are in fact at the center of the dominant “democratic” ideologies which accuse every attempt to change the world of being fundamentally “totalitarian.” Theories of the political mired in this oligarchic sensibility, even if they appear on the left—such as it exists today—ultimately rely on teleological conceptions of history. Unable to comprehend the novel political declarations and actions which gave rise to the historical revolutionary sequences, they also cannot allow for the rare and exceptional emergence of politics in the present. Exhaustion, in this sense, is understood through what Lazarus has called the “method of saturation”: affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. In particular, we have to grapple with the saturation of the long sequence of the 20th century revolutions which revolved around the revolutionary working-class party seizing the state. Exhaustion, in this sense, is... affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. These are the conditions of depoliticization. But one need not lay blame on the historical figures who frequently reached a scale of human achievement unimaginable to us, to simply recognize that emancipatory politics is precarious and sequential. Exhaustion How does the condition of exhaustion operate on the concrete level of movements and the state? Here we can follow our second departed comrade, Rossana Rossanda of il manifesto , the dissident group pushed out of the Italian Communist Party in 1969. In 1983, reflecting on the long, turbulent sequence of political upheaval in Italy of at least the preceding two decades Rossanda identified two fundamental political problems: the dissipation of social movements outside the state, and the consequences of left-wing parties attempting to enter the state. Of course, the situation in Italy, characterized by perpetual strikes and a mass Communist Party approaching the seat of power, is not the same as the ones we know in the United States. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the rise and fall of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the mass protests against police violence demonstrates the ongoing salience of Rossanda’s reflections. The Sanders campaign, of course, attempted to pursue a social-democratic program within the parameters of the bourgeois state— subsequently followed by the eruption of social movements outside the state. This dynamic, even if in a drastically different form and context, sheds light on the problem of the relationship between party and movement—or to put it another way, between the political (parliamentary) forms of the existing state and the social (extraparliamentary) basis of autonomous mobilization. For Rossanda, in the aftermath of the crest of the European workers’ movement the very form of the party, manifested in the Communist Parties, was in crisis. Already in 1968, from Paris to Beijing “the party-form was put into question” in no small part by the independent initiatives of workers. This occurred without the guidance of parties and unions, and alongside an unprecedented level of protest by youth and students which had an uneven but frequently fecund relationship with factory struggles. This crisis of the party-form was a critique of its fundamental political model; it was, Rossanda wrote, “the refusal of any delegation of power, whether it be a party or state, henceforth treated as ‘other’ in relation to the new subjectivity of these social agents.” During this particular crisis, the working class was engaged in the “refusal of work” rather than following the lead of unions in pursuing a minimal program of delegating the negotiation of new contracts to the labor bureaucracy. The student movements, meanwhile, helped realize the potential of the workers’ movement to pursue an independent path by advocating for autonomy and cultural transformation. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the political demands of its working-class political base. But while the “new social movements” outside the party provided a vitality to the independent movements of the workers, they also relied on the mass organization of the working class that was inextricable from the political party, even if the latter operated as a force of containment. This contradictory relationship, also witnessed in the May 1968 revolt in France, was exacerbated when the parties confronted the implications, throughout the 1970s, of actually entering into the capitalist state. What could they achieve within the very bourgeois form not only of the political party itself, but parliamentary politics as a whole? Rossanda pointed to the simple fact that in Western societies representative democracy is a structure within which parties must attempt to get votes. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the demands of its working-class political base. For this reason, whatever tactical potential there might have been in participating in elections, it was nevertheless the case that a very different kind of working-class political power would have to emerge in order to overturn class society. Within this structure, contemporary socialists have aspired to reproduce the history of the mass working-class political parties: garnering votes, aspiring to enter the state. In short, despite the fact that the very notion of a Communist Party entering the state seems unimaginable, when and if they succeed, contemporary socialists will eventually confront the problem of the form of political power that will be required for structural transformation. It wasn’t just the party that was in crisis. Extraparliamentary social movements had a prospect of overcoming bureaucratic ossification and reorienting the parties in a revolutionary direction. But movements were also in crisis. Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”; its “dramatic and destructive ebbs are as important as the sedimentations it creates.” Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”. There were, furthermore, important historical shifts at work as Rossanda was writing. Until the mid-twentieth century, Rossanda argued, movements “arose from sudden bursts from the margins of society” but were then “predisposed to become a party or merge with an existing party.” In this sense they provoked a transformation in the state which also generally represented their absorption into the existing institutions. Yet the new movements of the 1970s did not operate according to this logic. They “tended to express subjects and needs that the dominant social bloc, namely the parties and the state, could no longer absorb in a timely manner without abnegating itself.” The movements did not institutionalize themselves, either by building new institutions or by entering existing ones, either because they were not capable of achieving this or simply did not aspire to, and without articulating a project or alternative, they “withered,” and the existing power structures solidified in response. In Italy the parties were incorporated into the increasingly repressive state—the Italian Communist Party itself playing a leading role in repression of autonomous movements—and capital succeeded, by the late ‘70s, in breaking the power of labor. Even if the parties and unions had operated as a force of containment and absorption into bourgeois parliamentarianism, their mass membership also functioned as a political anchor, so their crisis was also the crisis of the movements. As they went on the retreat, movements fell prey to a general social anomie and atomization. Here I must beg your patience in referring to a dense and lengthy passage which provides the key formulation: A diffuse politicization remains, skeptical in regards to the left if not openly hostile, as does an intense depoliticization, a kind of active negation. The “movements” are no longer “movements” (which would suggest that they are only movements insofar as they retain the implicit hope for a way out or transfer to other “forms of politics,” or a certain trust in the permeability of the institutional network which has disappeared today). They are becoming fevers, “latencies,” partial cultures or subcultures, acting creatively but molecularly, contradictorily. Rossanda is pointing us here to the molecular level of depoliticization: not the macroscopic, historical scale that is the condition resulting from the end of a historical mode of politics, but the immediate, on-the-ground level of practical activity of the movement’s participants. What she calls the “diffuse politicization” of the movements is oppositional to the existing society. But in their fragmentation, the movements no longer move from the margins into the institutions. As Rossanda had argued of movements in the first half of the 20th century, this shift into the institutions had a dual character: the existing institutions neutralized these oppositional bursts from the margins, while at the same time also necessarily being transformed by them. While the autonomy of the emerging movements may have circumvented this neutralization, they also did not find a new way to compel the institutions to resolve the problems raised by their revolt, refusal, and demands. Now the movements came to exist as latencies alongside the sturdiness of the institutional order, and this order appeared to take on a despotic permanence. Rossanda’s insight into the complex relations between class and party, party and movement, remain crucial for socialists today who ask themselves: how should we organize? Endings & Beginnings In this essay, I have meant exhaustion in three senses. The first, at the level of the immediate practical activity of the militant, is the waning of the political capacity for commitment or the devolution into factionalism. The second, at the level of the political sequences within which militants act, is when an existing historical mode of politics comes to an end and a new one is not yet apparent. The third, at the level of history, is the condition which results from the seeming impossibility of political sequences of a scale and depth comparable to the 20th century revolutions. Does exhaustion constitute a period of history, an “age”? Periodization is tricky. All periodizations are schematic. It is extremely complicated to determine how the logical relationship between categories is aligned with a certain period of time, especially for events so tumultuous that they constantly defy interpretation. Though this may seem counterintuitive, periodization at its best does not exactly identify periods, within which every phenomenon expresses the totality in a particular stage of development. Rather, it provides specific and distinct descriptions of uneven and structurally interrelated processes, which have moments of rupture and discontinuity. There are thus interwoven threads throughout these periods, untimely divisions and amalgamations. Those of us living through a period between sequences which announce shared reference points for a global political subjectivity can choose between being faithful to the emancipatory project and the various forms of capitulation to exhaustion. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. With this we are all exhausted. What we are left with are simply various forms of pseudo-politics. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. There are three such pseudo-political sensibilities: adjustment, which claims to advocate for adjusting the existing reality, but actually enjoins us to adjust ourselves to it, on the basis of convenient normative principles (democracy, even socialism); personalization, the reduction of politics to individual behavior and identity, determined by a range of categories to which a person might be said to belong; and pragmatism, which dictates that since it will not get better, you must unencumber yourself of principles. In the interval the choice is not easy. Perhaps more dangerous than resignation in the face of exhaustion is to perform the rituals of depoliticization. Consider how these sensibilities are practiced. First, adjustment appears in the condescending rejection of any organizational process which does not have the state as its object. It generally means that an aspiring bureaucracy closes ranks and insists that all other political practices should be dropped every few years when, as Marx put it long ago, the people are permitted to decide which member of the ruling class will misrepresent them in parliament. Experiments, necessary for any process of organizational invention, are ridiculed and dismissed in comparison to an ideal model which exists nowhere in reality, but which we are assured is the only practical solution. The stubborn repetition of norms, both political and social, guarantees the despotism of the model. Walter Benjamin recounted what he called a Hasidic saying (but which he actually heard from his friend Gershom Scholem), that when the messiah comes, the world will be just as it is now, “only a little bit different.” From the perspective of adjustment, it will not be even a little bit different. Second, personalization operates the reduction of politics to interpersonal relations, resulting in factionalism and conformism. Factionalism and conformism are not unusual in the history of politics, even emancipatory politics, but today they happen without the processes of total social upheaval that framed them historically. As a result, individuals and groups act like states without achieving any substantive change, enforcing unwritten laws with informal social punishments. In the place of the aspiration for structural transformation there is the centering of politics on the person, on the person of the adversary, whose offensive proclamations and style of speaking may provide the opportunity for a self-satisfied disgust, insofar as our experiences and self-designations are seen as spontaneously political rather than themselves the construction of political procedures. Third, pragmatism is the most widespread sensibility among intellectuals, from the media to the academy, who adopt political language but drain it of any idea, and laugh at those who have the courage to believe that a truly political idea is worth defending. As Alain Badiou puts it, the imperative of capitalism, “get rich!,” today translates into: “Live without an Idea!” Even in the pages of our most traditional newspapers, no less than in what Byung-Chul Han calls the “shitstorms” of social media, we can read condemnations of oppression and privilege, we can see debates over the abolition of our society’s most violent institutions, we can rejoice at the toppling of the latest petty tyrant with the misfortune of being randomly exposed. Yet if we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” These sensibilities correspond in certain respects to different political tendencies, but they also fuse and intermingle in various ways. In social movements, forms of organization, whether they are bureaucratic or horizontalist, frequently revolve around the persons who lead or represent the movement. Competitions between factions, the decisions about which persons will occupy the positions of leadership, displace debates over strategy and program; activists are required to perform lengthy confessions of their privilege instead of recruiting new members (who are almost universally repelled, entirely justly, by such religious procedures); and purges and expulsions are performed to cleanse and redeem the community, instead of fostering environments which encourage free and open discussion. If we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” All depoliticization leads back to the state, and its rituals, no matter how molecular, only enforce its hegemony. In periods of the intensification of opinion, of the back and forth which is not genuinely political, the greatest temptation is withdrawal—to maintain the conviction that a genuinely emancipatory politics is necessary, to recognize that it has taken place in the past, but then to conclude that it will not take place again. It is difficult to dictate to others whether it is better to enter the fray of opinion or withdraw into the isolation of one’s bunker. And indeed, I have no political prescription to make. I am unable to conclude with a clarion call, to rally new energies to a resurgence of politics. But this is not because I view emancipation as illusory, inherently flawed, or doomed to failure. In reality, it has been exhausted, in a way that perhaps we are still unable to fully comprehend. In the absence of events which inaugurate a thorough break with the existing order, I can only try to remain faithful, to the extent that my energies allow, to the emancipatory statements that Wamba articulated: that people think, that they may live differently than they do, and that politics is the creative invention which says: let us do something about the situation! And the questions which immediately follow these statements are: what are the conditions for emancipatory politics to exist? What are the militant forms of thought which make it possible for masses of people to make a subjective break from the existing state of things? What are the sites of politics which allow us to take a distance from the state, and how do we prevent politics from being reduced to the state when a political sequence comes to an end? The energies for fidelity, however, do not remain stable in our turbulent reality. A kind of ordinary steadiness, perhaps, can be drawn from Rossanda’s analysis of the organizational processes underlying these conditions. If depoliticization overwhelms us, it is not a matter of historical necessity, but of everyday relations, of the way we organize our relations to each other in the process of organizing politically. From the working class to the new social movements, from unions to assemblies, there is the patient work of building collectivities that last and the sober analysis of the exigencies of organization. And once again, many questions: what will fill the empty space left in history by the party? How can movements avoid neutralization while still compelling the transformation of existing institutions? What can prevent movements from being consigned to the margins, where they watch power solidify and harden? I remain convinced by these insights, but it would be a mistake to pretend that we have answers to the questions that follow. False certainties do not result in correct actions, and we gain little from arranging our ideas in such a way as to give ourselves the gift of optimism. Exhaustion, perhaps, is not eternal; we have no evidence to conclude that it is. But as capitalism, in its automatic and impersonal nihilism, accelerates its exhaustion of the planet, and the rituals of depoliticization foreclose the declaration of any political idea, there appears almost to be a nobility in withdrawal. And yet, this appearance is illusory, because one of the few truly meaningful questions in an otherwise meaningless and mediocre existence is this: what can we do about the situation? Answering that question means reckoning seriously, and disturbingly, with exhaustion. Time will tell—but not too much time—if we are up to the task. ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Artwork by Mon M for SAAG. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Political Theory Emancipatory Politics Rossana Rossanda Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba Congo Italian Communist Party Tanzania Senegal Carl Schmitt Lenin Sylvain Lazarus Marxist Theory Michael Neocosmos Il Manifesto Bernie Sanders 1968 Workers Movements Depoliticization Affect Historical materialism Walter Benjamin Movement Organization Movement Strategy Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics Temporality ASAD HAIDER is a founding Editor of Viewpoint Magazine , an investigative journal of contemporary politics. He is the author of Mistaken Identity and a co-editor for The Black Radical Tradition (forthcoming). His writing can be found in The Baffler , n+1 , The Point , Salon , and elsewhere. 10 Mar 2021 Essay Political Theory 10th Mar 2021 MON M is an organizer, writer, and illustrator from Bangalore, India currently organizing around surveillance, ending jail expansion, and prisoner support programs in Lenapehoking/New York City. Her work focuses on undoing the reformist creep of progressive criminal justice institutions and policies, as well as on abolitionist feminist strategies for ending the carceral state, and anti-caste solidarity within the South Asian diaspora, as a Savarna individual. She is a co-author of 8 to Abolition , as well as a founding co-organizer of the National No New Jails Network , and Free Them All for Public Health . 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:

“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 Sumana Roy “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?” “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. ∎ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Artwork by Haris Hidayat Ullah for SAAG. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ 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 SUMANA ROY is the author of How I became a Tree , Missing: A Novel , Out of Syllabus: Poems , My Mother’s Lover and Other Stories , among others. Her newest book is entitled Provincials: Postcards from the Peripheries. She is Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Ashoka University. Essay Bengal 4th Jul 2021 HARIS HIDAYAT ULLAH is an illustrator and a visual artist with works rooted in critical thinking, cultural phenomena and the absurd. He’s been involved with projects like Red Bull Radio, The Fearless Collective and has headed illustration workshops at the British Council Library, conducted art history workshops and exhibit at Rabtt. His collaborative initiative RTF Studio is shaping a diverse musical landscape. Additionally he has also been a speaker at TEDxGCU, where he gave his talk Navigating Through Self . Currently, he runs his artistic project called Lewanay delving into his surroundings, experiences and identity. Haris is also an Art Director in the fashion industry leading various editorial campaigns and visual storytelling. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct