PHOTOJOURNALIST NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati lives in Kathmandu, Nepal and works at the intersections of visual storytelling, research, pedagogy, and collective action. In 2007, she co-founded photo.circle , an independent artist-led platform that facilitates learning, exhibition making, publishing, and a variety of other trans-disciplinary collaborative projects for Nepali visual practitioners. In 2011, she co-founded Nepal Picture Library , a digital archiving initiative that works towards diversifying Nepali socio-cultural and political history. She is also the co-founder and festival director of Photo Kathmandu , an international festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years. She has served as festival director for South Asia’s premier non-fiction film festival Film Southasia , been part of the selection committee for the first cycle of World Press Photo ’s 6x6 Global Talent Program in Asia, and been a mentor for the 2020 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. She was recently awarded the 2020 Jane Lombard Fellowship by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New York. She studied documentary photography at the SALT Institute of Documentary Studies, Maine, and International Relations and Studio Art at Mt. Holyoke College, Massachusetts. PHOTOJOURNALIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

JOURNALIST Arshad Ahmed ARSHAD AHMED is an independent journalist and photographer based in Assam, covering human rights, politics, marginalised communities, and the environment in India's northeast. His work has been published in Article-14, Maktoob Media, TwoCirles.net, EastMojo , and others. JOURNALIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

In this letter, Ustad Mohammad Ali Talpur responds to Hazaran Baloch, tracing the moral and political stakes of remembrance and resistance in the Baloch struggle. He foregrounds the legacy of the Baloch nation, where mourning and honoring martyrs binds generations, and encourages his pupil to trust in the unflinching nature and will of the Baloch people—traits that have triumphed in the face of 77 years of injustice. THE VERTICAL Letter to History (II) In this letter, Ustad Mohammad Ali Talpur responds to Hazaran Baloch, tracing the moral and political stakes of remembrance and resistance in the Baloch struggle. He foregrounds the legacy of the Baloch nation, where mourning and honoring martyrs binds generations, and encourages his pupil to trust in the unflinching nature and will of the Baloch people—traits that have triumphed in the face of 77 years of injustice. Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur My Dearest Daughter, Hazaran, Your anguished letter made me cry tears of rage, anger, and sadness. They cut deeper into the scars that remain on my soul after witnessing the suffering of our people for over half a century. Having lost so many of my friends and former students, I wonder if these wounds will ever heal. I remember Lawang Khan , seventy years old, who died defending his village in 1973. I remember Ali Mohammad Mengal , a veteran from 1960. I remember Safar Khan Zarakzai who, when surrounded and asked to surrender, replied: This is my land; I will defend it with my life. He died fighting. Etched on my soul are the enforced disappearances of my dearest friends, Duleep Dass “Dali” and Sher Ali Marri, in the spring of 1976. Dali nursed me back to health when I lay injured in the mountains. Etched, too, is the suffering of Baloch families I witnessed living as refugees in Afghanistan—only to be identified as terrorists upon their return. So many unsung heroes, so many disappeared without a trace, so many lives uprooted. They found no peace, neither in exile, nor upon return. My spiritual association with the Baloch struggle began on 15 July 1960, when Nawab Nauroz Khan’s son, Batay Khan, along with six companions––Sabzal Khan Zehri, Bahawal Khan Musiyani, Wali Muhammad Zarakzai, Ghulam Rasool Nichari, Masti Khan Musiyani, and Jamal Khan Zehri—were executed after the state broke its promise of amnesty. Four were hanged in Hyderabad Jail. Three, including Batay Khan, in Sukkur Jail. It was my uncle, Mir Rasool Bakhsh Talpur, who claimed their bodies, performed the funeral rites, and brought them to Kalat. On 21 October 1971, I left home and joined the armed struggle in the Marri hills. I was fuelled by rage. You ask what bullets sound like when they tear through our bodies. I thought of the twenty-seven fired into Sangat Sana , the three that pierced Jalil Reki ’s heart, the one that struck Ali Sher Kurd ’s forehead. Those martyrs may not have heard them, but those sounds echo in the soul of every Baloch who loves the motherland. You mention the screeching chains as they dragged my precious Mahrang away, shamelessly calling it arrest; her sarri/سری/chador trampled by those abducting her. You ask me about the thunder that must have shaken the heavens when my dearest Sammi’s سری was snatched from her head to dehumanize and humiliate her. All this and more is forever seared into me. Let me tell you what a sarri means to the Baloch. Fights cease when our women, with sarris in hand, come in-between. The Baloch say: the sarri is sacred. Our poet Atta Shad said that in return for a bowl of water, we give a hundred years of loyalty. I wish he had also said that the desecration of the sarri is never forgiven. Not in a thousand generations. It was difficult when I first joined the struggle. Despite the pain, however, there was also the belief that eventual victory would come. I, too, closed the door of hopelessness because I knew we were sowing seeds that would one day grow into trees—providing shade and fruit to all. When Banuk Karima was taken from us, it left the nation mourning. Her death created a void which seemed impossible to fill. Then came Mahrang, Sammi, Sabiha, Beebow, and hundreds more. Karima lit a fire in the hearts of Baloch women to participate in the national struggle––she embodied the wisdom and courage I see in all of you. When asked what Banuk Karima meant to Balochistan and its struggle, I replied: Karima is the conscience and the consciousness of the Baloch Nation . You ask me about little Kambar, Zahid’s son, who has lost another father this cursed March. I cannot send him words of consolation; they would be meaningless. But I want him to know that this isn’t his injustice to bear alone. The Baloch Nation will remember. You ask me about the state’s inhumanity toward Bebarg, who lives his life as a paraplegic. Why does the state fear a person who is unable to walk? It fears his voice. That is how the state maintains control: by repressing Baloch voices. My dearest child, it is of utmost importance to understand the essence of this state. It is by nature predatory and extractive––it cannot expand without exploiting us and our words, which refuse to submit to its evil design. We should not expect humanity or compassion from political parties integral to the establishment. They work for each other and protect their own interests. All pillars of the state are complicit. And in general, the silence of society is deafening too. The state will continue repressing us. What we do in response is our responsibility. Our only avenue is resistance. If we give it up, repression will be manifold, as docile people are an easier target. You rightly stated that Mahrang and Sammi taught the Baloch that they must stop being forever mourners, forever betrayed—and for that, they are considered the greatest threat and have been jailed. You are rightly worried about the fact that the new voices of our movement are now in jail cells, and that the state is trying to terrify young girls from treading the path that Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi chose. I feel it is important to understand how our Baloch Nation has responded to this unending crisis. Today, on the streets of Balochistan, girls—some as young as five years old—are carrying pictures of Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi. They are not merely holding their images; they picture themselves as these icons, and that is where our hope lies. For tomorrow, there will be Karimas, Mahrangs, Sammis, Sabihas, and Beebows in the millions. No power on earth will be able to stop them. I am not waiting for that tomorrow—it has already begun. The bastions of tyranny are crumbling, and that is why repression has multiplied and spread. That is why Mahrang and Sammi have been imprisoned. And while this violence will continue, it cannot subdue our spirits. “ Pakistan Zindabad ” was knifed onto the bodies of those Baloch who were extrajudicially killed. Their eyes gouged, their bodies drilled. Did the resistance vaporize and vanish? No. During the 2013 Long March by Mama Qadeer Baloch, Farzana Majeed, and others, faces were covered to avoid recognition. Today, thousands come out fearlessly to protest. The Baloch Nation has become fearless. The only history with a limited shelf life is that of the oppressor. Our history is ineradicable and can only flourish—for victory is our destiny. You ask if writing is futile. No, my dearest daughter, writing is our weapon. And it is a weapon that terrifies the oppressor because the word of freedom is sacred—it enlightens and motivates. Why do they seize books Baloch put up at book fairs? Writing challenges their phony and misleading discourse. Keep writing. You are empowering the Baloch narrative and preserving the history of Baloch resistance—a history long subjected to suppression. Writing strikes fear into the hearts and minds of oppressors in a way that no other weapon can. While other weapons bring only death and destruction, writing gives life—and that is why they fear words so deeply. Future generations will thank you and honor you for your words. You also ask, “Who will stand with us?’ and “Is it possible that the other oppressed nations of this land will stand with us in defiance of a shared oppressor?” My respected daughter, I believe that unity arises from two sources: either from the pain people share, or from a collective consciousness shaped by shared aspirations, history, and naturally, pain. Expecting support from those who believe in the narratives taught in Pakistan Studies is futile. And yes, do not expect the world to come to our aid—it has allowed Israel to do whatever it pleases to the Palestinians. The people may raise their voices, but governments will remain silent—because speaking up would endanger the very systems of brutality and exploitation they rely on. Merely being oppressed does not automatically give someone the consciousness to feel the pain of others or to support them. There are millions of oppressed people here, but support cannot be expected from them in the same way it can be from those who share our collective pain. To obstruct the path of collective consciousness, the state abducts students, blocks book fairs, and systematically neglects the education sector—ensuring that not many Baloch become educated. This denial of education is a key part of a calculated policy of erasure. Through their indiscriminate repression, however, they are unknowingly forging our collective consciousness. This will be the very reason for their downfall. You have talked about our mourning and grief over the years and how it continues. Yes, when there is death, there is grief and mourning—but it has not only been that. When my dearest friend Raza Jehangir was killed on 14 August 2013 by the state, we honored his death. His brave mother led the funeral and they sang a lullaby: Raza jan is little (child) and innocent, joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle. Joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle, sapient (learned men) are his forefathers. Then there is the incredible picture of the wife of Banzay Pirdadani Marri, who stands at the graves of her two sons, Mohammad Khan and Mohammad Nabi, draped in the flag that symbolizes a free Balochistan. They were killed on the same day and their bodies thrown on the roadside. I treated the two boys once, when they were very young and sick. When they grew up, I taught them at the school I managed for our refugee children in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan. How could my soul feel peace after their death? Yet I know that despite the depth of pain caused by the loss and disappearance of loved ones, the Baloch have mourned with grace and dignity. They cannot be accused of selling their grief. Those in power have offered compensation to the families of the disappeared, but these offers have always been firmly rejected. In the end, you ask, “Tell me, Baba Jan, are we destined to be forever caught in this storm, forever erased, forever replaced?” This storm—or the ones that came before—could not erase us, nor replace us, and neither will the ones that may come in the future. Why do I say this? Because the storm that came on 27 March 1948 could not erase us. Then came another in October 1958 , which led to the resistance of Nawab Nauroz Khan. He was promised amnesty on the oath of the Quran, yet on a single day—15 July 1960—six of his companions and one of his sons were hanged. Some believed it was the end of the resistance. But did it end? No. Babu Sher Mohammad Marri and Ali Mohammad Mengal stood their ground and kept the resistance alive. Peace was made in 1970, but provocations remained. So emerged the 1973–1977 insurgency to resist repression. In September 1974 , when some Marris in Chamaling surrendered under assault by gunships, the state claimed that the core of the resistance had been broken. But had it? No—because the fighting continued until 1977. That was not the end. The Marris who took refuge in Afghanistan did not return when the Zia regime offered them amnesty . Despite the hardships of life as refugees, they stayed. Khair Bakhsh Marri joined them in 1982. He remained there for nearly a decade. That act of defiance kept the spirit of the resistance alive back home. A period of apparent dormancy followed, from 1993 to 2000. But beneath the surface, resentment simmered and political awareness grew. Matters came to a head when Khair Bakhsh Marri was arrested on fabricated charges in 2000 and kept in jail for two years. That moment reignited the resistance. Then came a turning point: the killing of Akbar Bugti on 26 August 2006. Like the 1973–1977 insurgency, the fight spread across Balochistan—it has not ended. Since 2000, the Baloch have faced the severest repression. Every brutal tool at the state's disposal has been used. Our academics, such as Saba Dashtyari and Zahid Askani , have been killed; our political activists have been murdered or disappeared; our journalists have been silenced; our poets have been targeted; and our students have been abducted. And now, even our women have been incarcerated. Yet, the resistance lives on—it refuses to die. It survives because it is an expression of the people's most cherished dream. The Baloch are a resilient nation and do not give up what they hold dear—and what they hold dearest are dignity and freedom. It is no coincidence that the Baloch call their motherland Gul Zameen—Land of Flowers. As they say, Waye watan hushkain dar —I love my land even if it is like a withered twig. There is something vital that must be said. Something that has long been the bane of the Baloch Nation. Those soul-selling Baloch who have collaborated with the establishment, aiding in the suppression of Baloch rights and enabling crimes against their own people. There is an indigenous Native American fable: the birds complained of being killed by arrows, and the response was, “Were it not for the feathers of birds in the arrows, you would be safe.” Our suffering, too, would have been less had some Baloch not provided the feathers for those arrows. Let me tell you something: if brutal crackdowns and military operations could suppress a people's desire for national, political, social, and economic rights, then Algeria would still be a French colony. The French were ruthless and unforgiving. They picked people up, held them in custody, and tortured them for as long as they pleased. Yet in the end, they had to pack up and leave. The resistance, and the will of the people, could not be broken. It is said the French “won” the Battle of Algiers in 1957 by crushing the FLN in the city, but they lost the war in 1960 when the Algerian people rose up together, showing the futility of repression. Repression eventually breeds fearlessness. It compels people to abandon concern for their own safety. And here, they haven’t even won the Battle of Quetta—yet they have already lost Balochistan by irreversibly alienating the Baloch Nation. We can—and must—learn from the Palestinians, who, like us, have endured physical, economic, cultural, and geographic assaults—a systematic genocide since 1948. Yet they have never surrendered. Especially in Gaza, where since October 2023 , genocide has reached a brutal peak. Gaza has been flattened. Hospitals bombed, medical staff killed, famine imposed through a blockade of food and water. Over 60,000 people—seventy percent of them women and children—have been killed . And yet, the people of Gaza have not broken. Gaza may be a narrow strip of land, but despite the backing of powerful Western nations, Israel has failed to crush the spirit of the Gazans. Balochistan is vast. If Gaza has not been broken, then neither can we. In the end, my very precious child, I will say this: Tum maroge, hum niklenge —you will kill us, we will rise. This is not an empty phrase. It is how the Baloch have faced oppression for generations. If it were hollow, the resistance would not have persisted and grown stronger over the past seventy-seven years. It is true that a terrible price has been paid—in blood, in tears, in lost generations. But it is also the reason we have survived. We endure as a dignified nation, seeking a life of freedom and honor, and our will to resist not only endures—it flourishes. Today, I see you all protesting against state oppression, as bravely and wisely as Karima did, and I know this is why hopelessness is not an option for us. Hope is the fruit of the seeds Banuk Karima and other Baloch revolutionaries sowed in the soil of Balochistan. And so, with the accumulation of grief in adulthood, we also inherit seventy-seven years of the history of Baloch resistance, which, in spite of its traumatic chapters, is an inheritance of revolutionary hope for a free Balochistan. Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur Hyderabad 5 April 2025 ∎ My Dearest Daughter, Hazaran, Your anguished letter made me cry tears of rage, anger, and sadness. They cut deeper into the scars that remain on my soul after witnessing the suffering of our people for over half a century. Having lost so many of my friends and former students, I wonder if these wounds will ever heal. I remember Lawang Khan , seventy years old, who died defending his village in 1973. I remember Ali Mohammad Mengal , a veteran from 1960. I remember Safar Khan Zarakzai who, when surrounded and asked to surrender, replied: This is my land; I will defend it with my life. He died fighting. Etched on my soul are the enforced disappearances of my dearest friends, Duleep Dass “Dali” and Sher Ali Marri, in the spring of 1976. Dali nursed me back to health when I lay injured in the mountains. Etched, too, is the suffering of Baloch families I witnessed living as refugees in Afghanistan—only to be identified as terrorists upon their return. So many unsung heroes, so many disappeared without a trace, so many lives uprooted. They found no peace, neither in exile, nor upon return. My spiritual association with the Baloch struggle began on 15 July 1960, when Nawab Nauroz Khan’s son, Batay Khan, along with six companions––Sabzal Khan Zehri, Bahawal Khan Musiyani, Wali Muhammad Zarakzai, Ghulam Rasool Nichari, Masti Khan Musiyani, and Jamal Khan Zehri—were executed after the state broke its promise of amnesty. Four were hanged in Hyderabad Jail. Three, including Batay Khan, in Sukkur Jail. It was my uncle, Mir Rasool Bakhsh Talpur, who claimed their bodies, performed the funeral rites, and brought them to Kalat. On 21 October 1971, I left home and joined the armed struggle in the Marri hills. I was fuelled by rage. You ask what bullets sound like when they tear through our bodies. I thought of the twenty-seven fired into Sangat Sana , the three that pierced Jalil Reki ’s heart, the one that struck Ali Sher Kurd ’s forehead. Those martyrs may not have heard them, but those sounds echo in the soul of every Baloch who loves the motherland. You mention the screeching chains as they dragged my precious Mahrang away, shamelessly calling it arrest; her sarri/سری/chador trampled by those abducting her. You ask me about the thunder that must have shaken the heavens when my dearest Sammi’s سری was snatched from her head to dehumanize and humiliate her. All this and more is forever seared into me. Let me tell you what a sarri means to the Baloch. Fights cease when our women, with sarris in hand, come in-between. The Baloch say: the sarri is sacred. Our poet Atta Shad said that in return for a bowl of water, we give a hundred years of loyalty. I wish he had also said that the desecration of the sarri is never forgiven. Not in a thousand generations. It was difficult when I first joined the struggle. Despite the pain, however, there was also the belief that eventual victory would come. I, too, closed the door of hopelessness because I knew we were sowing seeds that would one day grow into trees—providing shade and fruit to all. When Banuk Karima was taken from us, it left the nation mourning. Her death created a void which seemed impossible to fill. Then came Mahrang, Sammi, Sabiha, Beebow, and hundreds more. Karima lit a fire in the hearts of Baloch women to participate in the national struggle––she embodied the wisdom and courage I see in all of you. When asked what Banuk Karima meant to Balochistan and its struggle, I replied: Karima is the conscience and the consciousness of the Baloch Nation . You ask me about little Kambar, Zahid’s son, who has lost another father this cursed March. I cannot send him words of consolation; they would be meaningless. But I want him to know that this isn’t his injustice to bear alone. The Baloch Nation will remember. You ask me about the state’s inhumanity toward Bebarg, who lives his life as a paraplegic. Why does the state fear a person who is unable to walk? It fears his voice. That is how the state maintains control: by repressing Baloch voices. My dearest child, it is of utmost importance to understand the essence of this state. It is by nature predatory and extractive––it cannot expand without exploiting us and our words, which refuse to submit to its evil design. We should not expect humanity or compassion from political parties integral to the establishment. They work for each other and protect their own interests. All pillars of the state are complicit. And in general, the silence of society is deafening too. The state will continue repressing us. What we do in response is our responsibility. Our only avenue is resistance. If we give it up, repression will be manifold, as docile people are an easier target. You rightly stated that Mahrang and Sammi taught the Baloch that they must stop being forever mourners, forever betrayed—and for that, they are considered the greatest threat and have been jailed. You are rightly worried about the fact that the new voices of our movement are now in jail cells, and that the state is trying to terrify young girls from treading the path that Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi chose. I feel it is important to understand how our Baloch Nation has responded to this unending crisis. Today, on the streets of Balochistan, girls—some as young as five years old—are carrying pictures of Karima, Mahrang, and Sammi. They are not merely holding their images; they picture themselves as these icons, and that is where our hope lies. For tomorrow, there will be Karimas, Mahrangs, Sammis, Sabihas, and Beebows in the millions. No power on earth will be able to stop them. I am not waiting for that tomorrow—it has already begun. The bastions of tyranny are crumbling, and that is why repression has multiplied and spread. That is why Mahrang and Sammi have been imprisoned. And while this violence will continue, it cannot subdue our spirits. “ Pakistan Zindabad ” was knifed onto the bodies of those Baloch who were extrajudicially killed. Their eyes gouged, their bodies drilled. Did the resistance vaporize and vanish? No. During the 2013 Long March by Mama Qadeer Baloch, Farzana Majeed, and others, faces were covered to avoid recognition. Today, thousands come out fearlessly to protest. The Baloch Nation has become fearless. The only history with a limited shelf life is that of the oppressor. Our history is ineradicable and can only flourish—for victory is our destiny. You ask if writing is futile. No, my dearest daughter, writing is our weapon. And it is a weapon that terrifies the oppressor because the word of freedom is sacred—it enlightens and motivates. Why do they seize books Baloch put up at book fairs? Writing challenges their phony and misleading discourse. Keep writing. You are empowering the Baloch narrative and preserving the history of Baloch resistance—a history long subjected to suppression. Writing strikes fear into the hearts and minds of oppressors in a way that no other weapon can. While other weapons bring only death and destruction, writing gives life—and that is why they fear words so deeply. Future generations will thank you and honor you for your words. You also ask, “Who will stand with us?’ and “Is it possible that the other oppressed nations of this land will stand with us in defiance of a shared oppressor?” My respected daughter, I believe that unity arises from two sources: either from the pain people share, or from a collective consciousness shaped by shared aspirations, history, and naturally, pain. Expecting support from those who believe in the narratives taught in Pakistan Studies is futile. And yes, do not expect the world to come to our aid—it has allowed Israel to do whatever it pleases to the Palestinians. The people may raise their voices, but governments will remain silent—because speaking up would endanger the very systems of brutality and exploitation they rely on. Merely being oppressed does not automatically give someone the consciousness to feel the pain of others or to support them. There are millions of oppressed people here, but support cannot be expected from them in the same way it can be from those who share our collective pain. To obstruct the path of collective consciousness, the state abducts students, blocks book fairs, and systematically neglects the education sector—ensuring that not many Baloch become educated. This denial of education is a key part of a calculated policy of erasure. Through their indiscriminate repression, however, they are unknowingly forging our collective consciousness. This will be the very reason for their downfall. You have talked about our mourning and grief over the years and how it continues. Yes, when there is death, there is grief and mourning—but it has not only been that. When my dearest friend Raza Jehangir was killed on 14 August 2013 by the state, we honored his death. His brave mother led the funeral and they sang a lullaby: Raza jan is little (child) and innocent, joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle. Joyfully asleep in the decorated cradle, sapient (learned men) are his forefathers. Then there is the incredible picture of the wife of Banzay Pirdadani Marri, who stands at the graves of her two sons, Mohammad Khan and Mohammad Nabi, draped in the flag that symbolizes a free Balochistan. They were killed on the same day and their bodies thrown on the roadside. I treated the two boys once, when they were very young and sick. When they grew up, I taught them at the school I managed for our refugee children in Lashkar Gah, Afghanistan. How could my soul feel peace after their death? Yet I know that despite the depth of pain caused by the loss and disappearance of loved ones, the Baloch have mourned with grace and dignity. They cannot be accused of selling their grief. Those in power have offered compensation to the families of the disappeared, but these offers have always been firmly rejected. In the end, you ask, “Tell me, Baba Jan, are we destined to be forever caught in this storm, forever erased, forever replaced?” This storm—or the ones that came before—could not erase us, nor replace us, and neither will the ones that may come in the future. Why do I say this? Because the storm that came on 27 March 1948 could not erase us. Then came another in October 1958 , which led to the resistance of Nawab Nauroz Khan. He was promised amnesty on the oath of the Quran, yet on a single day—15 July 1960—six of his companions and one of his sons were hanged. Some believed it was the end of the resistance. But did it end? No. Babu Sher Mohammad Marri and Ali Mohammad Mengal stood their ground and kept the resistance alive. Peace was made in 1970, but provocations remained. So emerged the 1973–1977 insurgency to resist repression. In September 1974 , when some Marris in Chamaling surrendered under assault by gunships, the state claimed that the core of the resistance had been broken. But had it? No—because the fighting continued until 1977. That was not the end. The Marris who took refuge in Afghanistan did not return when the Zia regime offered them amnesty . Despite the hardships of life as refugees, they stayed. Khair Bakhsh Marri joined them in 1982. He remained there for nearly a decade. That act of defiance kept the spirit of the resistance alive back home. A period of apparent dormancy followed, from 1993 to 2000. But beneath the surface, resentment simmered and political awareness grew. Matters came to a head when Khair Bakhsh Marri was arrested on fabricated charges in 2000 and kept in jail for two years. That moment reignited the resistance. Then came a turning point: the killing of Akbar Bugti on 26 August 2006. Like the 1973–1977 insurgency, the fight spread across Balochistan—it has not ended. Since 2000, the Baloch have faced the severest repression. Every brutal tool at the state's disposal has been used. Our academics, such as Saba Dashtyari and Zahid Askani , have been killed; our political activists have been murdered or disappeared; our journalists have been silenced; our poets have been targeted; and our students have been abducted. And now, even our women have been incarcerated. Yet, the resistance lives on—it refuses to die. It survives because it is an expression of the people's most cherished dream. The Baloch are a resilient nation and do not give up what they hold dear—and what they hold dearest are dignity and freedom. It is no coincidence that the Baloch call their motherland Gul Zameen—Land of Flowers. As they say, Waye watan hushkain dar —I love my land even if it is like a withered twig. There is something vital that must be said. Something that has long been the bane of the Baloch Nation. Those soul-selling Baloch who have collaborated with the establishment, aiding in the suppression of Baloch rights and enabling crimes against their own people. There is an indigenous Native American fable: the birds complained of being killed by arrows, and the response was, “Were it not for the feathers of birds in the arrows, you would be safe.” Our suffering, too, would have been less had some Baloch not provided the feathers for those arrows. Let me tell you something: if brutal crackdowns and military operations could suppress a people's desire for national, political, social, and economic rights, then Algeria would still be a French colony. The French were ruthless and unforgiving. They picked people up, held them in custody, and tortured them for as long as they pleased. Yet in the end, they had to pack up and leave. The resistance, and the will of the people, could not be broken. It is said the French “won” the Battle of Algiers in 1957 by crushing the FLN in the city, but they lost the war in 1960 when the Algerian people rose up together, showing the futility of repression. Repression eventually breeds fearlessness. It compels people to abandon concern for their own safety. And here, they haven’t even won the Battle of Quetta—yet they have already lost Balochistan by irreversibly alienating the Baloch Nation. We can—and must—learn from the Palestinians, who, like us, have endured physical, economic, cultural, and geographic assaults—a systematic genocide since 1948. Yet they have never surrendered. Especially in Gaza, where since October 2023 , genocide has reached a brutal peak. Gaza has been flattened. Hospitals bombed, medical staff killed, famine imposed through a blockade of food and water. Over 60,000 people—seventy percent of them women and children—have been killed . And yet, the people of Gaza have not broken. Gaza may be a narrow strip of land, but despite the backing of powerful Western nations, Israel has failed to crush the spirit of the Gazans. Balochistan is vast. If Gaza has not been broken, then neither can we. In the end, my very precious child, I will say this: Tum maroge, hum niklenge —you will kill us, we will rise. This is not an empty phrase. It is how the Baloch have faced oppression for generations. If it were hollow, the resistance would not have persisted and grown stronger over the past seventy-seven years. It is true that a terrible price has been paid—in blood, in tears, in lost generations. But it is also the reason we have survived. We endure as a dignified nation, seeking a life of freedom and honor, and our will to resist not only endures—it flourishes. Today, I see you all protesting against state oppression, as bravely and wisely as Karima did, and I know this is why hopelessness is not an option for us. Hope is the fruit of the seeds Banuk Karima and other Baloch revolutionaries sowed in the soil of Balochistan. And so, with the accumulation of grief in adulthood, we also inherit seventy-seven years of the history of Baloch resistance, which, in spite of its traumatic chapters, is an inheritance of revolutionary hope for a free Balochistan. Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur Hyderabad 5 April 2025 ∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Iman Iftikhar Talpur Sahab (2025) Digital Illustration SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Letter Balochistan Pakistan Activism Enforced Disappearances State Violence Protests Liberation Journalism Revolution Martyr Grief Sammi Deen Baloch Mahrang Baloch Resistance History Violence Writing After Loss Dissidence Disappearance Baloch Yakjehti Committee Dr Mahrang Baloch Arrests Tum Marogy Hum Niklengy Militarism Leadership Mass Graves Assassination Imprisonment Armed Struggle Repression State Repression Oppression Defiance Mir Mohammad Ali Talpur Sarri Sacred MIR MOHAMMAD ALI TALPUR is a political organiser with the Baloch struggle, a public intellectual, and writer on Balochistan. He joined the Baloch national struggle in 1971, was with the movement from 1973 to the 1977 insurgency, and escaped with them to Afghanistan as a refugee until 1991. He spent three years in the Marri Hills, three years underground in Sindh, and 13 years in Afghanistan, where he was responsible for camps delivering educational and health services to 8000 Baloch refugees in Zabul and Helmand (near Lashkargah). In 2014, he joined a 3000-kilometer-long march to demand the return of disappeared Baloch. He is the author of dozens of articles on the Baloch movement. 9 Apr 2025 Letter Balochistan 9th Apr 2025 IMAN IFTIKHAR is a political theorist, historian, and amateur oil painter and illustrator. She is an editor for Folio Books and a returning fellow at Kitab Ghar Lahore. She is based in Oxford and Lahore. 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· INTERACTIVE Live · Lahore Natasha Noorani's Retro Aesthetic “We looked at all these old EMI vinyl album covers. I remember listening to the song and thinking: 'This song is pink.'” Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. Natasha Noorani released “Choro,” the first single from her new album, on 24th May 2021. She first performed it unplugged for SAAG's previous online event, FLUX . As part of In Grief, In Solidarity , Noorani discussed what inspired the music video's aesthetic with SAAG advisory editor Senna Ahmad, with whom Noorani collaborated on “Choro.” For both, it was a risk, a labor of love, and a long-awaited collaboration—each of which speaks to how Noorani chooses to provoke and pay homage to Pakistani pop music in equal measure. Watch to hear more about their vision, how the pandemic affected the shoot of the music video, their numerous inspiration boards, their shared love for the music of the eighties and nineties, Urdu typography, and more. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Live Lahore Music Contemporary Music Retro Aesthetics Nostalgia Typography Contemporary Pop Pakistani Pop Music Video Homage Cover Art In Grief In Solidarity Fashion Haseena Moin Selfies Embroidery Color Art Practice Visual Art Collaboration Vinyl Urdu Music 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. 5th Jun 2021 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

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 Rejimon Kuttapan Why have India’s ultranationalist aspirations made Lakshadweep the unlikely locus of its tourist aspirations and exacerbated tensions with the Maldives? 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. ∎ 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 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 REJIMON KUTTAPPAN is a Kerala-based independent journalist, migrant rights researcher, and author of Undocumented: Stories of Indian Migrants in the Arab Gulf (Penguin India, 2021). Reportage Lakshadweep 29th Mar 2024 On That Note: Battles and Banishments: Gender & Heroin Addiction in Maldives 28th FEB Chats Ep. 11 · On Maldives' Transitional Justice Act 7th JUL A Dhivehi Artists Showcase 5th JUN

Palestinian-American actor and playwright Sadieh Rifai confronts the mental toll of occupation, war, and the American dream in her world premiere, The Cave. · BOOKS & ARTS Interview · Chicago Palestinian-American actor and playwright Sadieh Rifai confronts the mental toll of occupation, war, and the American dream in her world premiere, The Cave. Poster, and photos of the play, courtesy of A Red Orchid Theatre (AROT) . The Mind is a Theater of War Sadieh Rifai has performed on Chicago’s premier stages, working with the likes of Pulitzer Prize- and Tony Award-winning playwrights Tracy Letts and Stephen Karam. Following the preview performances of her playwriting debut at A Red Orchid Theatre (AROT), where she is an ensemble member, we spent precious dwindling hours discussing theater as a collaborative form, the Islamophobia of the 1990s, and what it means for her to stage a play that explores (among other things) the haunting afterlife of violence under occupation, in the shadow of Israel’s genocide in Palestine. Ahsan Butt Tell me what it was like being in the room with Tracy Letts workshopping August: Osage County , which, of course, went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. How did you get there? Sadieh Rifai When I first came to Chicago, I auditioned for the school at Steppenwolf, where the ensemble members taught viewpoints, and Sheldon Patinkin, who helped invent Second City, led the improv sessions. It was an incredible experience. After I finished there, I was asked to audition for a new play by Tracy Letts, August: Osage County . I had no idea how important it was going to be. I auditioned, but they wanted a Native American woman for the role. Still, they asked me to participate in the workshop. It lasted about a week and included Michael Shannon, who would later become my fellow ensemble member at AROT, Mike Nussbaum, the oldest living actor before he passed, and Amy Morton, one of my favourite actors. Sitting at that table, I learned so much. Tracy opened up about the play, explaining that it was based on his life—his grandfather had committed suicide, and this was the story of that. I remember him saying that when he showed the play to his mother, she told him, “Thank you for being so kind to my mother.” That always stuck with me because if you have seen the play, you would think that woman is a monster. But Tracy was so vulnerable in the room. The title of the play came from a poem written by his mentor. Before that, I had always assumed that playwrights did not want even a single word changed—that every line had to be said exactly as written. But in that room, I saw true collaboration. Amy Morton would ask, “Can I cut this word? It is getting caught in the sentence.” Tracy would say, “Cut it, cut it.” There were things he fought for, but in other moments, he was so open. That experience made me aware of what I wanted to create one day. I wanted to write my own story. But I did not yet have the confidence to do it. Still, it was my dream to build something like what they had in that room. AB Did you always want to be in theater? SR At my wedding, my younger brother told a story about our childhood. We grew up in our grandparents’ house in Galesburg, Illinois, which was an old schoolhouse. It had an auditorium, classrooms that became our bedrooms, and even lockers. The building was run-down but magical. There was also a stage. We used to put on puppet shows, slipping behind the curtains to perform. He asked, “Do you remember this?” When I said no, he just went, “Great, glad I brought it up.” My brother is incredibly smart. He could do no wrong as a student. I, on the other hand, am dyslexic. I was never a good student, never understood. But one day, my mother took me to see Jesus Christ Superstar . Ted Neeley was performing—he was the original Jesus—and Carl Anderson, the Judas from the movie, was there too. Afterwards, we got to talk to Ted Neeley. He was the nicest guy, telling us about filming in the Middle East. I think my mother knew early on that I was not going to be some kind of scholar. The things that interested me were always art, music, and theatre. And acting, though I was not good at anything yet, there was a part of me that just knew I could do it. We also lived in Vegas when I was young. My mom was a change-girl, and my dad worked in another hotel. She would take us to see this show called Splash— women dressed like mermaids, holding their breath underwater, and performing synchronized swimming routines. We also saw Sigfried & Roy , all the magic shows, David Copperfield . For us, until it became a dangerous place, when my cousin was murdered, it was like the schoolhouse: magical. Milla Liss, H. Adoni Esho, Aaliyah Montana, and Kirsten Fitzgerald in The Cave by Sadieh Rifai at A Red Orchid Theatre. Photo by Evan Hanover. AB Your play, The Cave , follows a mixed family like your own, a Palestinian father and Swedish-American mother with two kids, who also move from Las Vegas to a more suburban, white town after the murder of their nephew (the kids’ cousin). The father, Jamil—under the strain of the tragedy, their new life, the specter of a coming war, and past experiences he’s never talked about—begins to hear voices. Some may see it as a post-9/11 play because Islamophobia is such a prevalent theme, but the play is set in the ’90s, during the first Gulf War. For those of us, who are…a bit older, we remember what that time was like. What was your experience during the period in which the play is set? SR I still remember one of my teachers taking me in front of the classroom and saying, “This war is happening and Sadieh’s family believes Sadaam Hussein is in the right. And we are fighting that. So just know that is what her family believes.” There were other instances where she wouldn’t allow me to sit near other kids. I knew she didn’t like me and that’s a weird thing to know when you’re a kid. It’s difficult to explain to people who don’t want to believe it. But my parents believed me. They had a parent-teacher conference and whatever happened behind closed doors with that teacher led to me and my brother being home-schooled for a while. We knew we were being blacklisted within the community. At first, everyone was friendly. But then we stopped getting invited to birthday parties, and parents wouldn’t let their children play with us. I don’t know if we’ll ever know the reason. Maybe it was because they saw my dad dressed in a thobe and assumed he was radical. Maybe they were afraid of Islam. But a friend of mine, Sara, recently showed me a 1990 Atlantic cover—a brown man with a beard, the words “The Roots of Muslim Rage” plastered over his face, an American flag reflected in his eyes. Seeing that image was important to me because that was the climate back then. The propaganda was thick. Of course, after 9/11, it only got worse. AB What was your dad’s attitude toward assimilation? SR My father never wanted his children to erase their culture. He wanted us to fit in, but he also wanted to ensure we understood what it meant to be Palestinian. We had loads of Palestinian shirts. Even if we got sent home for wearing them, he would say, “Wear the shirt. If they send you home, we will change you.” He wanted us to learn Arabic, go to Friday prayers, know the Quran, understand the beauty of the religion. And we were interested in McDonald’s and the mall. Even when he tried to do things we enjoyed, like taking us to the mall, he would still have to pray. I remember him stepping into the JC Penney bathroom and coming out to do a short prayer. And I remember turning red, convinced everyone was looking at us. Now, I think that is beautiful, but at the time, I was embarrassed. Natalie West, John Judd and Aaliyah Montana in The Cave . Photo by Evan Hanover. AB What drew your parents together? SR Honestly, they both had a lot of growing up to do. They met young. There was an excitement in meeting someone so eager to learn about another culture. And my mother was unlike any woman he had ever met. She did not take shit from anyone. She rode motorcycles. She grew up in Knoxville, Illinois—this tiny place—with a lot of poverty. She had no wealth, no prestige. And then my father came into her life and saw her for who she was. There was nothing on paper that said they should match, but they just got each other. They loved razzing each other. They laughed a lot. When you spend your whole life with one idea of what the world is, and someone comes along and completely changes the narrative, that is thrilling. They learned from each other. AB There are many biographical similarities between your father, Shawki, and Jamil, the father in the play. Is Jamil your father? SR Jamil isn’t my father, but they share traits. They are also at different points in their lives. I do remember my dad at the time the play is set, but not in the way he is now. There was such a heavy burden on his shoulders then; he was a different person. My dad now is very light. He is more of a storyteller and prankster. He can tell a joke, and it will last ten minutes, with the punchline being Ross Perot—so old and outdated—and he will be crying with laughter. But that was part of who he was then too. My mom tells this story: when she met my dad’s brothers for the first time, she wanted to make a good impression, so she asked my dad how to say “It is so nice to meet you” in Arabic. My dad told her a phrase. She went up to each of my uncles and said it. My dad was laughing so hard. She turned to him and asked, “What did I just say to them?” He said, “You told them they have shit on their mustache.” AB That’s so interesting to me as a writer. There’s a memory aspect to it, because Jamil isn’t who your father is now, and it feels like there’s maybe a fog around that period…and then it’s also necessarily an act of creation, because you have to fit the character to the play. SR I had a conversation with a friend, a director in the ensemble, Shade Murray. I was having a hard time writing dialogue between Bonnie and Jamil. I said, “I cannot remember the things my parents would talk about.” He said, “You do not have to write your parents. You are married. You know what it is like to be in a marriage. You know what those conversations are.” I noticed that I was pausing the writing to try to find what they would have said—something I did not have access to because we were sent out of the room for difficult conversations. Aaliyah Montana and H. Adoni Esho in The Cave . Photo by Evan Hanover. AB Jamil has a romanticism about Palestine. Did your father as well? SR My dad was born in Hebron, seven years after the Nakba. He was one of ten kids. He only speaks in short stories, never with detail. But he told me once that he was holding his newborn sister when his mother said, “Run.” He said people had come into the house. There was screaming. They had guns. And he held his sister, running, not knowing where he was going. He would have been four. That was one of those moments that changed him, experiencing real fear. Having his mother tell him to leave—not knowing if that meant it was the last time he would see her. He tells another story from when he was older. A soldier came up to him and said, “I want to meet with you, Shawki,” They were trying to get information from him. They kept offering him tea, coffee, cigarettes. He said he felt that if he accepted anything, he would be cooperating with them, that he would be used as a spy or a pawn. So he put three cigarettes in his socks to make it clear he did not want anything from the soldier. When he first came to the United States, my uncle picked him up from the airport. They were driving when a police officer pulled them over. My dad immediately reached for all of his paperwork. My uncle said, “Shawki, I was speeding. They are not here to check your paperwork.” My dad realized then that there were no checkpoints everywhere. He had assumed every state had them. So he would just drive, drive, and drive. There was safety in that. But he never wanted to lose his citizenship. He had to go back every four years. By that time, he was already an American citizen, but he needed to fly back and stay long enough to renew his citizenship. Many people could not afford to go back and lost theirs, but he always made a point of it, no matter our financial situation. He loves Palestine and hates it. There is the desire to be there—and then, when he is there, the realization that he is under occupation. Photos of Sadieh's father, Shawki, courtesy of her. AB How did you write this play? SR I was at a low point in 2020. I was not working as an actor. At one stage, my husband and I moved to Indiana, and I took a job at Trader Joe’s. I struggled with depression, and it became overwhelming. I kept listening to podcasts where actors and directors would say, “Just write it; write the bad play.” But the idea had lived in my head for so long that I was afraid to put it on the page. I did not even know what software to use. I did not feel intelligent enough to structure it properly. Then I started, slowly. A paragraph, then another. Eventually, I had a scene. Then I thought there should be a scene before it, or after it. It was such a gradual process, and it took a long time. I was terrified to show it to anyone. Kirsten Fitzgerald, our artistic director at AROT, and my friend Jess McCloud kept encouraging me: “Just write it, even if it is bad—you will have written a play.” Kirsten even said, “If you need some money, we can find some through AROT to help you keep writing.” That allowed me to reduce my hours at Trader Joe’s. AROT kept asking when I would have some pages, and I kept saying it is not ready. That went on for a year. When I finally handed in a first draft, it was not even a play—just twenty chaotic pages. But they trusted me and told me to keep going. They gave me another check, and I wrote another draft, then another. I think I am on draft thirty now, and I still have rewrites to finish before tonight. Guy Van Swearingen and Aaliyah Montana in The Cave . Photo by Evan Hanover. AB Does your acting experience help? SR As an actor, I know when something is overwritten. If a line does not fit naturally in your mouth or keeps slipping from memory, it means something is off. During workshops, I can hear when dialogue should be condensed or when more context is needed. I am always thinking from the actor’s perspective because I have been that actor in the room. When actors make a “mistake” and swap out a word, it is usually because they have instinctively chosen a better one—something that flows more naturally. AB Your career, and the plays you have been involved in, tell a dark and compelling story about America. You were in the world premiere of The Humans by Stephen Karam, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and Tony Award winner for Best Play. I saw it in Los Angeles, and it unsettled me. There is an explicitly haunting moment, but more than that, the play feels like a failed exorcism of post-9/11 American anxiety. The Cave carries a similar ambient anxiety, but its source is inverted—it is the experience of the “other” in America. What is your relationship to this country? SR I consider myself very lucky that Stephen Karam is a friend. I love him dearly, and he is a genius. When we first received the script for The Humans , we knew it would have a major Broadway run, but we began with a Chicago production, where Stephen made significant revisions. I remember getting goosebumps reading that play. He had already written successful works, but this one was deeply personal, full of uncomfortable moments. We all knew from that first table read that it would resonate powerfully. It takes you on a journey you are not prepared for. But my relationship with America is complicated. You are referring to these quintessentially American plays, yet I have also played Dorothy three times. I loved playing her, even though I knew I did not look like her. I wanted to capture her hope, innocence, and dream-like qualities. Even in The Humans , they are all Irish. Stephen told me there are darker Irish people in Ireland! I love that I have been able to play these roles, albeit with a caveat. As for American culture, it is everything I know—SNL, Sesame Street. If I am overseas and Arachnophobia is playing in Arabic, I can sit through it and understand it completely. The language is irrelevant; I know the beats. I am American—for better or worse. AB Are you feeling pressure putting this play up? SR I do not sleep at night. Some of the things I think about—things AROT would rather I did not dwell on—my mind refuses to let go of. They are investing a lot of money into this play. It’s a large cast. It’s a world premiere, which means no one knows what this play is yet. Even the word “Palestinian” appearing in flyers and emails is enough to be seen as taking a side. We have two young actors—amazing young women—and I feel an instinct to protect them. When I see news reports about fake bombs being planted at venues where Middle Eastern singers are set to perform, about death threats and targeted violence, it is really scary. It was suggested that, since I love podcasts, we should pitch my family’s story to This American Life . My immediate fear was for my father and family in Texas. Not only am I worried about this new play going up, about whether it will be received well in the city, or about the theatre potentially losing money, but I am also worried about people being harmed. And I do not want to disappoint anyone. During rehearsal, someone asked me, “Are you afraid people will think Jamil is a bad man?” That is something I have thought about for over a decade. I do not want anyone in this play to fit into simple categories of good or bad. People are a combination of millions of things that make them human. The last thing I want is to paint someone in broad strokes—as a good person, or a good father. What matters to me is that we see Jamil trying. Milla Liss, H. Adoni Esho, Kirsten Fitzgerald, and Aaliyah Montana. Photo by Evan Hanover. AB Given the last year of day-after-day, live-streamed genocide, during which most American theaters have proven their irrelevance, what do you feel and what do you wish for the future of the form and its institutions? SR The silence speaks volumes. It’s the realization, within your own group of people, of who doesn’t stand by you. I have watched babies in incubators cry and starve until they are black and decaying. I feel as though I’ve seen the worst in humanity. As someone who seeks the good in people, it is the worst sort of darkness I can imagine. I had a friend say, “You can’t spend hours watching those videos,” and I thought, how dare you . All we can do is witness: witness somebody’s pain, understand that it's real, somebody screaming for their children. That’s all I can do right now, besides marching and boycotting. In fifteen years, I hope there will be no hesitation in putting these stories on stage. That when the genocide is in history books and taught in schools, theatres will feel compelled to tell Palestinian narratives as part of their regular programming, rather than treating them as a special selection. There are many theatres eager to stage plays by non-white playwrights. AB Will you feel a bitterness if that future comes to fruition and theaters begin tackling this genocide fifteen, twenty years from now? SR It is something I long for so much that I hope I would only feel relief. The history of being a woman has taught me that we fought for centuries to secure the rights we have now. I know others struggled before me, and I hope, when that time comes, we will acknowledge that there was a period when our voices were silenced, when we were afraid to tell these stories. I hope to sit in those theatres and see how far we have come. The Cave opened on January 30 at A Red Orchid Theatre in Chicago . The regular run begins on February 13 and continues till March 16. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Interview Chicago Palestine A Red Orchid Theatre Sadieh Rifai American Dream Theater of War The Cave Palestinian-American Actor Playwright Occupation Gulf War Conflict Nakba Theater Play Islamophobia History Mental Health Premiere Storytelling Memory Middle East United States Assimilation Migration Culture Biography Community Family Tracy Letts August: Osage County 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. 10th Feb 2025 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

A panel on dominant narratives about Kashmir: the longue durée of Kashmiri struggle, the continued movement-building between Kashmir & Palestine, the People's Alliance for Gupkar, and what the repeal of Article 370 really entailed. COMMUNITY Discourses on Kashmir AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR A panel on dominant narratives about Kashmir: the longue durée of Kashmiri struggle, the continued movement-building between Kashmir & Palestine, the People's Alliance for Gupkar, and what the repeal of Article 370 really entailed. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Panel Kashmir Intellectual History Settler-Colonialism Longue-Duree of Kashmiri Struggle Movement Organization Revolution Colonialism Burhan Wani People's Alliance for Gupkar Subaltern Studies Palestine Affect Internationalist Solidarity Media Blackout Radicalization Narratives Bollywood Occupation Genocide Pogroms Erasure Mass Protests War Crimes Movement Strategy Emancipatory Politics Humanitarian Crisis Activist Media International Law Hindutva Military Crackdown Military Operations Kashmiri Struggle Discourses of War Nationalism 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 Panel Kashmir 24th Oct 2020 Just over a year after the repeal of Article 370 from India's constitution, pro-India Kashmiri political parties called for an alliance. What did it all mean? In our second panel from October 2020, Kashmiri activist-scholars Ather Zia & Huma Dar, and journalist Hilal Mir, discuss the predominant discourses of Kashmir that pervade public and international narratives with Editor Kamil Ahsan. The wide-ranging discussion discusses Indian-occupied-Kashmir, India as a settler-colonial state, journalism & how the Azadi Movement and the repeal of Article 370 are depicted, and the many self-serving narratives that don’t take Kashmiri realities into account. 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:

Art historian Partha Mitter challenges the cultural purity predicated on nationalist myths: natural corollaries of the denial of both the existence of the avant-garde in colonial India. and the very real flow of politics and aesthetics that allowed for the emergence of global modernism. Indian avant-garde art was cosmopolitan, concentrated in Calcutta, Lahore, and Bombay, but it remains a challenge to art historiography nonetheless. COMMUNITY The Pre-Partition Indian Avant-Garde AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Art historian Partha Mitter challenges the cultural purity predicated on nationalist myths: natural corollaries of the denial of both the existence of the avant-garde in colonial India. and the very real flow of politics and aesthetics that allowed for the emergence of global modernism. Indian avant-garde art was cosmopolitan, concentrated in Calcutta, Lahore, and Bombay, but it remains a challenge to art historiography nonetheless. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Art History Avant-Garde Origins 1922 Bauhaus Exhibition Rabindranath Tagore Colonialism Modernism Ernst Gombrich Eric Hobsbawm Primitivism Edward Said Ramkinkar Baij Bombay Progressive Artists Satyajit Ray Intellectual History Global History Avant-Garde Beginnings in India Avant-Garde Traditions Amrita Sher-Gil Academia Art Activism Avant-Garde Form Art Practice Bauhaus Calc Gender Jamini Roy Bidirectional Exchange The Nature of Global History Anti-Colonialism Partition Formalism Geometry Kunst Nationalism Internationalism Vanguardism Gaganendranath Tagore Santiniketan School Abstract Orientalism Art Nouveau Kandinsky Historicism Cubism Malevich Surrealism The Valorization of the Rural Mukhopadhyaya Nandalal Bose Lahore Bombay K. G. Subramanyan Baroda School Hemendranath Mazumdar Plurality of Avant-Gardes Exchange Picasso Manqué Syndrome Cosmopolitanism Hegelian Dialectic Kalighat Samuel Eyzee-Rahamin 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 Interview Art History 25th Aug 2020 South Asian artists often deny the past of our own avant-garde. This is predicated on the nationalist myth of cultural purity fabricated in the 19th century. But if you deny history, you can't do anything. RECOMMENDED: The Triumph of Modernism: India's Avant-Garde 1922-1947 by Partha Mitter (University of Chicago Press, 2007) 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:

Seeking a home beyond Europe and South Asia could provide, Amrita Sher-Gil wrestled with a duality of being that reflected in her oeuvre. A Spivakian reading of her 1935 work Group of Three Girls sees Sher-Gil as an accomplice in perpetuating the Orientalist gaze she faced while trying to prove her prowess to Western audiences unable to view her art as equal. BOOKS & ARTS Speaking Through the Subaltern Seeking a home beyond Europe and South Asia could provide, Amrita Sher-Gil wrestled with a duality of being that reflected in her oeuvre. A Spivakian reading of her 1935 work Group of Three Girls sees Sher-Gil as an accomplice in perpetuating the Orientalist gaze she faced while trying to prove her prowess to Western audiences unable to view her art as equal. Vamika Sinha Group of Three Girls is widely considered one of Amrita Sher-Gil’s masterpieces. The 1935 artwork has become increasingly popular over the years as a symbol of Indian feminism, while Sher-Gil herself has gained more international recognition and seen an increase in art market capitalization. In the South Asian subcontinent, she has become canonical and even adopted into the Indian state’s official historical national narrative. A major road in central Delhi is named Amrita Shergill Marg, while her works are labeled national “art treasures” that “cannot be taken out of the country.” Sher-Gil’s elevated status, especially through Group of Three Girls , was influenced by the academic boom of postcolonial and intersectional feminist methodologies around the 1990s, which have trickled into the mainstream. A central scholar driving that boom has certainly been Indian theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose seminal 1988 essay , “Can the Subaltern Speak?” critiques how Western intellectual discourse perpetuates and constructs the “Other,” or the “subaltern” subject. Spivak insists, however, on the subaltern’s heterogeneity—that it is not a monolith, but endlessly diverse, stratified, and therefore unstable. This idea was clearly a precursor to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s introduction to “intersectionality” in 1989. The term “subaltern” gets bandied about regularly. Spivak’s theory has been elevated to near-pop status in online and academic discourses, but is the subaltern still a useful term? Is Spivak still relevant when her own status as a global public intellectual has suffered the arrows of critiques like caste-blindness and complicity with capitalist pandering? Remember that strange Aesop ad? However, a debate on Spivak as a figurehead is not on today’s table. If the term “subaltern” has been propelled into ubiquity to the point of irony and satirical smirking, we can continue to test its value on different canvases. Today, that is Amrita Sher-Gil’s, specifically her painting, Group of Three Girls . In this work, Sher-Gil transmits a vulnerable period of India’s past, through her privileged Indo-European body, onto the rural Indian women depicted on her canvas. By ventriloquizing lower-class female Indian bodies to express and cope with her own feelings of cultural alienation and dislocation, she becomes a subaltern speaking through another subaltern. Is this problematic or a genuine act of solidarity—an attempt to connect with the pain of others? This Spivakian reading of Sher-Gil’s work attempts to expose a more nuanced interpretation of the painting as a complex ethical problem. More widely, it situates Group of Three Girls as a cultural object both embedded within and symbolic of the fragile, unstable historiography of the Indian nation—once a subaltern state tussling between colonialism and nationalism, on the cusp of partition and independence. Sher-Gil as Subaltern? Born in Budapest to a Hungarian opera singer and a Sikh aristocrat-scholar who was “one of the first photographers of South Asia,” Sher-Gil did most of her artistic training in Italy and France. According to Linda Nochlin’s iconic 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, Sher-Gil possessed all the crucial factors needed to achieve success as a female artist: formal European art training, a well-networked artistic family and peer circle, money, mobility and independence, and the mentorship of older, more powerful male artists. But she was also plagued by a crisis of belonging. In Group of Three Girls, three Indian women, dressed modestly in Punjabi salwar kameez outfits, sit in front of a jute-brown background. Their hair is mostly hidden by their dupattas. Their clothes are largely plain, though the material looks gauzy, even diaphanous, thanks to Sher-Gil’s long, languid brushstrokes. Influenced by post-Impressionism , she paints the women in solid, vivid colors. One wears vibrant pistachio green, the other a pulsating saffron, while the final dons a deep vermilion. None of the subjects meet the viewer’s eyes. Their gazes are faraway and downcast, evoking resigned melancholy, or perhaps the strangely beatific expression of the serenity in accepting defeat. The women do not touch or look at each other, as if each was pasted separately in a collage. While the colors and brushstrokes teem with warmth and dynamism, the figures themselves appear frozen, alienated, and emotionally distanced: “together…yet alone,” in the words of art historian Giles Tillotson . A light from outside the image casts shadows on the wall behind them. One’s immediate urge may be to code the subjects as lower-class, oppressed Indian women upon seeing their simple, traditional clothing and mute, passive, and despondent stances. This reading is reinforced by two aspects from Sher-Gil’s previous paintings: first, Sher-Gil’s earlier use of shadows, such as in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian (1934), signified a looming, intrusive male presence, according to art historian Saloni Mathur. In Group of Three Girls, the shadows could symbolize the rigidities of patriarchy, particularly of impending marriage. The painting can further be contrasted with one of Sher-Gil’s earlier European works, Young Girls (1932), in which two women occupy a figuratively warmer space, their bodies angled towards each other, displaying an intimacy and closeness missing from Group of Three Girls. The two “young girls” appear as connected yet distinct people, given how elaborately they are painted, lending their dress, clothes, hair, and surroundings multiple depths of light and texture. In contrast, the women in Group of Three Girls , whose formal depiction is comparatively flatter, become more symbols than individuals. Instead of appearing as a particular group of women bound by a close relationship, the “three girls” become every group of women, isolated but bound only by the circumstances of being Indian, female, and subaltern. Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Girls , 1932, oil on canvas, 164 cm × 133 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. But the subaltern itself is an “essentialist” or unfixed concept. Spivak highlights the slippages within the hierarchical, “taxonomic” categorizing of subaltern identities to demonstrate their relational nature—that they are always formed in relation to another individual or group's identity, ultimately rendering them unreliable. In other words, someone may be a subaltern in one context but an oppressor in another. For Sher-Gil, her half-whiteness, wealth, and European elite upbringing lent her enormous privilege in British India, making the rural subjects she painted subaltern in relation to her primarily via social class. Yet in the eyes of the West, up to decades after she died in 1941, Sher-Gil was herself subaltern via race, gender, and geography; she was a less relevant, less authentic woman of color who predominantly painted in and about a Third World colony. A Crisis of Belonging Group of Three Girls is the first painting Sher-Gil produced after leaving Europe in 1934 for a growingly anti-colonial India. Upon her arrival, she proclaimed her “artistic mission” was to “interpret the life of Indians, particularly the poor…silent images of infinite submission and patience…angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness.” Her painting was the first manifestation of this articulated desire to speak on behalf of the subaltern. Sher-Gil would go on to build on this painting’s style and subjects for the rest of her life, depicting Indian women and rural village scenes in flatter forms and hotter colors. Still, her “mission” reads as cliché and problematic today. Seeded firmly and formally in Group of Three Girls , it can be faulted in the same way as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s writings were by Spivak in 1988, who criticized them for making marginalized peoples into a monolith, essentializing, aestheticizing, and further Othering “them”. Meanwhile, the two scholars maintained the elevation and centrality of their Western gazes while assigning virtue to the subaltern solely through their tragedy and oppression. This critique exposes how Sher-Gil denies Group of Three Girls ’ subjects a sense of individuality or agency. The green-clad woman’s hand is cut off from the frame. The red-clad woman’s left palm faces upwards, as if begging or in surrender. Through Sher-Gil’s downward, Westernized outsider gaze, the subjects are only brought together in a homogenizing representation of subaltern Indian women as downtrodden, helpless, and paralyzed. This reading is supported by Sher-Gil’s significant preoccupation with Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings at the time, which she was riffing on in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian . Gauguin’s work itself has been heavily critiqued for his flat, Orientalist depictions of Tahitian women through a colonial, patriarchal gaze. The structure and output of such a dominant gaze play out similarly in Group of Three Girls, where Sher-Gil represents her subjects “in the singular, as archetypes of humanity,” as Mathur writes, “reproduc[ing]…Gauguin’s primitivist gesture.” Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian , 1934, oil on canvas, 90 cm × 56 cm, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. But Sher-Gil was not a complete outsider like Gauguin, as a half-Indian who had already spent much time in India before moving there at the end of 1934. It was both an exciting and painful homecoming. As Mathur notes , Sher-Gil “sought a point of entry into the cultural landscape…from the difficult position of standing partially outside it.” Sher-Gil felt India would offer her more belonging than a racist Europe—a Paris reviewer once diminished her as “an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu princess” who… “conjure[d] up the mysterious shores of the Ganges.” Yet she was simultaneously apprehensive about not fitting into the Indian cultural landscape. Indeed, as Mathur points out, “Sher-Gil’s early detractors in the subcontinent complained that her Indian portraiture ‘smel[t] of the west.’” For Mathur, it was precisely Sher-Gil’s “sense of fragmentation and cultural isolation” that drove her practice. The artist once reflected: ‘It may be that the sadness, the queer ugliness of the types I choose as my models…corresponds to...some inner trait in my nature…’” These models sometimes included Sher-Gil’s own servants. Grappling With Sher-Gil’s Legacy Art historians such as Geeta Kapur have criticized Sher-Gil’s “narcissistic” attempt to transmute her cultural crisis into catharsis by entwining and equating her pain with that of poorer Indians amid political and national turbulence. In Spivakian terms, Sher-Gil employed her dominant gaze to speak through the subaltern for her own benefit. But others have been more benevolent, foregrounding not the inequality between Sher-Gil and her subjects, but the points of solidarity instead. Writers like Mulk Raj Anand have emphasized how truly moved Sher-Gil was by the poverty and patriarchy blighting India at the time. Scholars such as Prachi Priyanka and Subir Rana have highlighted the influence of Gandhi and Nehru on her paintings. “Gandhi’s notion of Swaraj (self-rule), and Nehru’s concept of ‘Indianization’ ” seeped into works which, beginning with Group of Three Girls , Rana writes, were even considered for use by “Congress propaganda for village reconstruction.” The use of the saffron color in Group of Three Girls, which was eventually incorporated into the Indian national flag, is further evidence of Sher-Gil’s alignment with the Independence movement. She also used the red introduced in this painting more liberally and intentionally in later works, such as Woman on Charpai (1940), to represent women’s desires while conveying their repression. This use of what Rana calls “ semiotic color ” perhaps reflected a growing awareness and redressal of the flatter female representation she had begun in Group of Three Girls , possibly due to more intimacy with and time spent in India. Still, Sher-Gil’s work suffered from similar pitfalls as Gandhian philosophies: a sense of saviorism, romanticization, and Orientalization of a more authentic pre-colonial India, and a homogenizing class and caste-blindness. Spivak challenged “the ‘lie’ of global sisterhood between ‘First world’ and ‘Third world’ women… [while] highlight[ing] the failure of Indian nationalism to emancipate lower-class, subaltern women.” A Spivakian reading of Group of Three Girls neatly encapsulates this argument: Sher-Gil transplants her ‘First world’ gaze onto the Indian women subaltern to her while using the grammar of Indian anti-colonial nationalist ideologies. But it does nothing to speak for or help her subjects, beyond stimulating her own aspiration to transcend her displacement. In 2015, it was revealed that the women in the Group of Three Girls were actually Sher-Gil’s upper-class nieces, not subalterns, after all. But this knowledge did little to impact the painting’s narrativization. There was no rewriting, no uproar. Ultimately, the way the girls are painted remains the same. Yet the way we look at them—and the artist’s gaze upon them—can evolve. Retrospectively, Group of Three Girls is the catalyst for examining how Sher-Gil’s practice went on to “embod[y] the most painful paradoxes of a colonial modernity.” A common, knee-jerk contemporary reading of Group of Three Girls may find it admirable due to Sher-Gil’s mixed identity, or its romantic representation of “the Indian woman” as feminist and patriotic, or because the Indian state has adopted it as the pièce de resistance of the “mother of modern Indian art.” However, an engaged Spivakian reading reveals it to be a historical object emblematic of the tensions of pre-Independent India, revealing a methodology for analyzing the present. The beauty of this work lies not just in its artistry or the sense of relation it might evoke among Indian female viewers, but that it distills so much of the ethical, identity-based dilemmas interlocked at the heart of the Indian nation historically and today.∎ Group of Three Girls is widely considered one of Amrita Sher-Gil’s masterpieces. The 1935 artwork has become increasingly popular over the years as a symbol of Indian feminism, while Sher-Gil herself has gained more international recognition and seen an increase in art market capitalization. In the South Asian subcontinent, she has become canonical and even adopted into the Indian state’s official historical national narrative. A major road in central Delhi is named Amrita Shergill Marg, while her works are labeled national “art treasures” that “cannot be taken out of the country.” Sher-Gil’s elevated status, especially through Group of Three Girls , was influenced by the academic boom of postcolonial and intersectional feminist methodologies around the 1990s, which have trickled into the mainstream. A central scholar driving that boom has certainly been Indian theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose seminal 1988 essay , “Can the Subaltern Speak?” critiques how Western intellectual discourse perpetuates and constructs the “Other,” or the “subaltern” subject. Spivak insists, however, on the subaltern’s heterogeneity—that it is not a monolith, but endlessly diverse, stratified, and therefore unstable. This idea was clearly a precursor to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s introduction to “intersectionality” in 1989. The term “subaltern” gets bandied about regularly. Spivak’s theory has been elevated to near-pop status in online and academic discourses, but is the subaltern still a useful term? Is Spivak still relevant when her own status as a global public intellectual has suffered the arrows of critiques like caste-blindness and complicity with capitalist pandering? Remember that strange Aesop ad? However, a debate on Spivak as a figurehead is not on today’s table. If the term “subaltern” has been propelled into ubiquity to the point of irony and satirical smirking, we can continue to test its value on different canvases. Today, that is Amrita Sher-Gil’s, specifically her painting, Group of Three Girls . In this work, Sher-Gil transmits a vulnerable period of India’s past, through her privileged Indo-European body, onto the rural Indian women depicted on her canvas. By ventriloquizing lower-class female Indian bodies to express and cope with her own feelings of cultural alienation and dislocation, she becomes a subaltern speaking through another subaltern. Is this problematic or a genuine act of solidarity—an attempt to connect with the pain of others? This Spivakian reading of Sher-Gil’s work attempts to expose a more nuanced interpretation of the painting as a complex ethical problem. More widely, it situates Group of Three Girls as a cultural object both embedded within and symbolic of the fragile, unstable historiography of the Indian nation—once a subaltern state tussling between colonialism and nationalism, on the cusp of partition and independence. Sher-Gil as Subaltern? Born in Budapest to a Hungarian opera singer and a Sikh aristocrat-scholar who was “one of the first photographers of South Asia,” Sher-Gil did most of her artistic training in Italy and France. According to Linda Nochlin’s iconic 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, Sher-Gil possessed all the crucial factors needed to achieve success as a female artist: formal European art training, a well-networked artistic family and peer circle, money, mobility and independence, and the mentorship of older, more powerful male artists. But she was also plagued by a crisis of belonging. In Group of Three Girls, three Indian women, dressed modestly in Punjabi salwar kameez outfits, sit in front of a jute-brown background. Their hair is mostly hidden by their dupattas. Their clothes are largely plain, though the material looks gauzy, even diaphanous, thanks to Sher-Gil’s long, languid brushstrokes. Influenced by post-Impressionism , she paints the women in solid, vivid colors. One wears vibrant pistachio green, the other a pulsating saffron, while the final dons a deep vermilion. None of the subjects meet the viewer’s eyes. Their gazes are faraway and downcast, evoking resigned melancholy, or perhaps the strangely beatific expression of the serenity in accepting defeat. The women do not touch or look at each other, as if each was pasted separately in a collage. While the colors and brushstrokes teem with warmth and dynamism, the figures themselves appear frozen, alienated, and emotionally distanced: “together…yet alone,” in the words of art historian Giles Tillotson . A light from outside the image casts shadows on the wall behind them. One’s immediate urge may be to code the subjects as lower-class, oppressed Indian women upon seeing their simple, traditional clothing and mute, passive, and despondent stances. This reading is reinforced by two aspects from Sher-Gil’s previous paintings: first, Sher-Gil’s earlier use of shadows, such as in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian (1934), signified a looming, intrusive male presence, according to art historian Saloni Mathur. In Group of Three Girls, the shadows could symbolize the rigidities of patriarchy, particularly of impending marriage. The painting can further be contrasted with one of Sher-Gil’s earlier European works, Young Girls (1932), in which two women occupy a figuratively warmer space, their bodies angled towards each other, displaying an intimacy and closeness missing from Group of Three Girls. The two “young girls” appear as connected yet distinct people, given how elaborately they are painted, lending their dress, clothes, hair, and surroundings multiple depths of light and texture. In contrast, the women in Group of Three Girls , whose formal depiction is comparatively flatter, become more symbols than individuals. Instead of appearing as a particular group of women bound by a close relationship, the “three girls” become every group of women, isolated but bound only by the circumstances of being Indian, female, and subaltern. Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Girls , 1932, oil on canvas, 164 cm × 133 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. But the subaltern itself is an “essentialist” or unfixed concept. Spivak highlights the slippages within the hierarchical, “taxonomic” categorizing of subaltern identities to demonstrate their relational nature—that they are always formed in relation to another individual or group's identity, ultimately rendering them unreliable. In other words, someone may be a subaltern in one context but an oppressor in another. For Sher-Gil, her half-whiteness, wealth, and European elite upbringing lent her enormous privilege in British India, making the rural subjects she painted subaltern in relation to her primarily via social class. Yet in the eyes of the West, up to decades after she died in 1941, Sher-Gil was herself subaltern via race, gender, and geography; she was a less relevant, less authentic woman of color who predominantly painted in and about a Third World colony. A Crisis of Belonging Group of Three Girls is the first painting Sher-Gil produced after leaving Europe in 1934 for a growingly anti-colonial India. Upon her arrival, she proclaimed her “artistic mission” was to “interpret the life of Indians, particularly the poor…silent images of infinite submission and patience…angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness.” Her painting was the first manifestation of this articulated desire to speak on behalf of the subaltern. Sher-Gil would go on to build on this painting’s style and subjects for the rest of her life, depicting Indian women and rural village scenes in flatter forms and hotter colors. Still, her “mission” reads as cliché and problematic today. Seeded firmly and formally in Group of Three Girls , it can be faulted in the same way as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s writings were by Spivak in 1988, who criticized them for making marginalized peoples into a monolith, essentializing, aestheticizing, and further Othering “them”. Meanwhile, the two scholars maintained the elevation and centrality of their Western gazes while assigning virtue to the subaltern solely through their tragedy and oppression. This critique exposes how Sher-Gil denies Group of Three Girls ’ subjects a sense of individuality or agency. The green-clad woman’s hand is cut off from the frame. The red-clad woman’s left palm faces upwards, as if begging or in surrender. Through Sher-Gil’s downward, Westernized outsider gaze, the subjects are only brought together in a homogenizing representation of subaltern Indian women as downtrodden, helpless, and paralyzed. This reading is supported by Sher-Gil’s significant preoccupation with Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings at the time, which she was riffing on in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian . Gauguin’s work itself has been heavily critiqued for his flat, Orientalist depictions of Tahitian women through a colonial, patriarchal gaze. The structure and output of such a dominant gaze play out similarly in Group of Three Girls, where Sher-Gil represents her subjects “in the singular, as archetypes of humanity,” as Mathur writes, “reproduc[ing]…Gauguin’s primitivist gesture.” Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian , 1934, oil on canvas, 90 cm × 56 cm, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. But Sher-Gil was not a complete outsider like Gauguin, as a half-Indian who had already spent much time in India before moving there at the end of 1934. It was both an exciting and painful homecoming. As Mathur notes , Sher-Gil “sought a point of entry into the cultural landscape…from the difficult position of standing partially outside it.” Sher-Gil felt India would offer her more belonging than a racist Europe—a Paris reviewer once diminished her as “an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu princess” who… “conjure[d] up the mysterious shores of the Ganges.” Yet she was simultaneously apprehensive about not fitting into the Indian cultural landscape. Indeed, as Mathur points out, “Sher-Gil’s early detractors in the subcontinent complained that her Indian portraiture ‘smel[t] of the west.’” For Mathur, it was precisely Sher-Gil’s “sense of fragmentation and cultural isolation” that drove her practice. The artist once reflected: ‘It may be that the sadness, the queer ugliness of the types I choose as my models…corresponds to...some inner trait in my nature…’” These models sometimes included Sher-Gil’s own servants. Grappling With Sher-Gil’s Legacy Art historians such as Geeta Kapur have criticized Sher-Gil’s “narcissistic” attempt to transmute her cultural crisis into catharsis by entwining and equating her pain with that of poorer Indians amid political and national turbulence. In Spivakian terms, Sher-Gil employed her dominant gaze to speak through the subaltern for her own benefit. But others have been more benevolent, foregrounding not the inequality between Sher-Gil and her subjects, but the points of solidarity instead. Writers like Mulk Raj Anand have emphasized how truly moved Sher-Gil was by the poverty and patriarchy blighting India at the time. Scholars such as Prachi Priyanka and Subir Rana have highlighted the influence of Gandhi and Nehru on her paintings. “Gandhi’s notion of Swaraj (self-rule), and Nehru’s concept of ‘Indianization’ ” seeped into works which, beginning with Group of Three Girls , Rana writes, were even considered for use by “Congress propaganda for village reconstruction.” The use of the saffron color in Group of Three Girls, which was eventually incorporated into the Indian national flag, is further evidence of Sher-Gil’s alignment with the Independence movement. She also used the red introduced in this painting more liberally and intentionally in later works, such as Woman on Charpai (1940), to represent women’s desires while conveying their repression. This use of what Rana calls “ semiotic color ” perhaps reflected a growing awareness and redressal of the flatter female representation she had begun in Group of Three Girls , possibly due to more intimacy with and time spent in India. Still, Sher-Gil’s work suffered from similar pitfalls as Gandhian philosophies: a sense of saviorism, romanticization, and Orientalization of a more authentic pre-colonial India, and a homogenizing class and caste-blindness. Spivak challenged “the ‘lie’ of global sisterhood between ‘First world’ and ‘Third world’ women… [while] highlight[ing] the failure of Indian nationalism to emancipate lower-class, subaltern women.” A Spivakian reading of Group of Three Girls neatly encapsulates this argument: Sher-Gil transplants her ‘First world’ gaze onto the Indian women subaltern to her while using the grammar of Indian anti-colonial nationalist ideologies. But it does nothing to speak for or help her subjects, beyond stimulating her own aspiration to transcend her displacement. In 2015, it was revealed that the women in the Group of Three Girls were actually Sher-Gil’s upper-class nieces, not subalterns, after all. But this knowledge did little to impact the painting’s narrativization. There was no rewriting, no uproar. Ultimately, the way the girls are painted remains the same. Yet the way we look at them—and the artist’s gaze upon them—can evolve. Retrospectively, Group of Three Girls is the catalyst for examining how Sher-Gil’s practice went on to “embod[y] the most painful paradoxes of a colonial modernity.” A common, knee-jerk contemporary reading of Group of Three Girls may find it admirable due to Sher-Gil’s mixed identity, or its romantic representation of “the Indian woman” as feminist and patriotic, or because the Indian state has adopted it as the pièce de resistance of the “mother of modern Indian art.” However, an engaged Spivakian reading reveals it to be a historical object emblematic of the tensions of pre-Independent India, revealing a methodology for analyzing the present. The beauty of this work lies not just in its artistry or the sense of relation it might evoke among Indian female viewers, but that it distills so much of the ethical, identity-based dilemmas interlocked at the heart of the Indian nation historically and today.∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Amrita Sher-Gil, Group of Three Girls , 1935, oil on canvas, 99.5 x 73.5 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Profile Lahore Punjab Amrita Sher-Gil Orientalism Western Gaze Europe South Asia Subaltern Studies Gayatri Spivak Anti-Colonialism Postcolonial Feminist Theory subjectivity saviorism indianization Gauguin Foucault 1935 Group of Three Girls Self-Portrait as a Tahitian Young Girls Feminism Feminist Art Practice femininity feminine Modernism Bauhaus Avant-Garde Traditions Paul Gauguin Deleuze Primitivism Modernity Postcolonialism Avant-Garde Form Semiotic Color Post-Impressionism Art History Art Criticism Criticism VAMIKA SINHA is an arts and culture journalist based in London. She is Deputy Editor at Wasafiri. 8 Jul 2025 Profile Lahore 8th Jul 2025 The Ahmadis of Petrópolis Sana Khan 21st Jan Chats Ep. 5 · Tamil translation & Perumal Murugan's “Poonachi” N Kalyan Raman 7th Dec Romantic Literature and Colonialism Mani Samriti Chander 13th Nov Origins of Modernism & the Avant-Garde in India Amit Chaudhuri 4th Oct The Pre-Partition Indian Avant-Garde Partha Mitter 25th Aug On That Note:

Violent clashes along the Assam-Mizoram border have a 150-year-old history. The recent border flare-ups may appear most visibly in the superficial disputes of state parliaments, but they have, in truth, roots in both militarism and political economy—particularly the illicut trade of the areca nut—that undergird the construction of ethnic identities. FEATURES Assam, Mizoram, and the Construction of the "Other" Violent clashes along the Assam-Mizoram border have a 150-year-old history. The recent border flare-ups may appear most visibly in the superficial disputes of state parliaments, but they have, in truth, roots in both militarism and political economy—particularly the illicut trade of the areca nut—that undergird the construction of ethnic identities. VOL. 2 ISSUE 1 REPORTAGE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR No Man's Land: The disputed region near Singhua saw violent clashes between the forces of Mizoram and Assam leading to the death of 6 Assam policeman on duty on the 26th of July 2021 in Singua, Assam, India. Courtesy of Abhishek Basu. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 No Man's Land: The disputed region near Singhua saw violent clashes between the forces of Mizoram and Assam leading to the death of 6 Assam policeman on duty on the 26th of July 2021 in Singua, Assam, India. Courtesy of Abhishek Basu. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Reportage Assam-Mizoram 25th Feb 2023 Reportage Assam-Mizoram Border Dispute Betel Nut Trade Northeast India Hachek Bial Kuhva Chingtu Pawl Areca Nut Northeast Democratic Alliance Amit Shah Sister States Nagaland Arunachal Pradesh Meghalaya Tripura Assam Rifles Mizoram Assam Cachar District Myanmar Burma Black Pepper Lailapur Nationalism BJP Inner Line Permit Silchar Veer Lachit Sena Ethnically Divided Politics Political Agendas Political Parties Mizo Zirlai Pawl VLS Mizo National Front Mizo English as Class Signifier Convent Education CPRF Central Reserve Police Force Forum for the Protection of Non-Mizos Seemanto-bashi Employment Guarantee Act Mizo student organizations Indian Citizenship Act Performative Nationalism Manipur Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. In July 2021, violent clashes along the “no-man’s land” border between Assam and Mizoram erupted, the latest in a conflict that dates back to over a century . This time, however, the clashes were accompanied by a battleground along party lines. In the lead up to India’s 75th Independence Day, Mizoram, the only remaining non-Saffronised, Congress-backed state in the northeastern region of India, seemingly became a target for India’s ruling party, the BJP, and its project to establish politically motivated “peace.” The seven sister states in the northeastern part of India are well acquainted with sporadic bouts of violence along their borders. The dispute along the border between Assam and Mizoram centers around contentious claims about where the exact border lies. Mizoram claims 509 square miles of the inner-line reserve forest under an 1875 border demarcation, a claim Assam rejects based on a demarcation in 1933. In turn, this contentious space has long become a locus for the political aspirations of both regional and central ruling parties and powerful groups. Following the violent clashes in July 2021, news reports quoted villagers in Mizoram as describing the situation as “a war between two countries.” The optics were indeed strange: two police forces of the same country—albeit different states—engaged in a violent shootout against each other. 48 hours before the first clashes, India’s Home Minister Amit Shah had met with the Northeast Democratic Alliance (NEDA) to discuss the possibility of a border settlement. Over the next few weeks, the series of police firings that began in Kareemganj, Hailakandi, spread to the Cachar district of Assam. The renewed conflict has deeper roots: on a macroscopic level, contemporary political, cultural, and economic structures continue to bolster the active construction of enemies, within and without, for both the Assamese and the Mizo populations. What appears to be behind the violent clashes along the 165km-long fluid border—alarming in breadth and scope—in the region is a complex game of both ethnic identity politics as well as the central government’s agenda of putting an end to the Burmese supari or areca nut (often called betel nut) trade, an economy in which locals from both states are involved. The import of Burmese areca nut is now illegal in Mizoram , but continues to feature in vested economic and political interests that make up the fragile peace along the Assam-Mizo border. Assam has unresolved border disputes with all four of the largely tribal states that have been carved out of it since Independence. This past November, at the border with Meghalaya, the Assam Police killed six people . In each case many diverse communities in the hilly and forested northeastern region are imbricated, with many array of exports; in each case, the conflict is oversimplified in mainstream media narratives which ignore how identity and political economy become intertwined, and few point out the common charge placed on Assam: that much of its incursions occur without consent and punishment, and regularly trammel either already-codified or customary rights that communities have over their lands. Recently, much was made of an agreement between Assam and Mizoram in the form of a joint statement. While the statement by both the state governments to amicably resolve the matters of unrest along this border have reached the third round of talks, a high-level delegation from Mizoram expressed that "there has been huge unrest among the areca nut growers in Mizoram on account of problems being faced in the transportation of their produce to Assam and other parts of the country." The joint statement also seemed to flatten the nature of the conflict, simply stating that "economic activities such as cultivation and farming along the border areas would be allowed to continue regardless of the administrative control presently exercised by either state at such locations... subject to forest regulations and after informing the deputy commissioners concerned." The problem of the in-between in this region, however, cannot be mitigated with such generalities which highlight a kind of identity performance about border disputes that tie into political parties' agendas. This past December, the opposition in the Parliament of Assam staged a walkout , aggrieved about the perceived lack of action against Mizoram after a school in Cachar district of Assam was allegedly occupied by Mizo students. Meanwhile, the plight of local areca nut farmers goes generally unnoticed in Parliament. December 2022, six vehicles carrying areca nut into Mizoram were set ablaze , allegedly by Central Customs and Assam Rifles, which regularly prevent the export of areca nut from Mizoram and Tripura by seizing them at the border. Regardless of the party responsible, an areca nut growers' society in Mizoram, Hachhek Bial Kuhva Chingtu Pawl (HBKCP) argues that farmers are suffering because the Assam Police are unable (or unwilling) to verify if areca nuts from Mizoram are local or foreign. The Mizoram government too has come under fire for its laxity with smuggling, or care for farmers. Despite the entangled politicking and trade relations between Assam and Mizoram, however, there is a deeper history of the Mizo peoples being seen as the “other.” This has only intensified in recent years, as has the illicit trade of the areca nut. Whether borne out of an acute sense of cultural or political difference, the stereotypes that circulate in Assam deploy the Mizos’ native language, their Western convent education, or their land use, to construct notions of fundamental differences in identity. Who “they” refers to, however, as is often the case, is vague and context-dependent. The Assamese in general seem to mean the Mizos, but locals often mean politicians, police mean locals, and locals may also mean their wives, many of whom hail from villages across the border. In 2021, we visited the village of Lailapur, in the Cachar district of Assam, where residents had pelted stones at policemen from Mizoram who had previously clashed in 2020 with residents of Vairengte, a town in Mizoram’s own Kolasib district, exemplifying how any border is insufficient to explain the blurred nature of the conflict. Imtiaz Akhmed a.k.a. Ronju, was born and grew up in Lailapur. He is one of several truckers who ferry goods such as areca nut and black pepper between Assam and Mizoram (goods that are smuggled into India from Myanmar, Thailand, Malaysia, or Indonesia). He also has a Mizo wife, and claims that their son has the cutest mixture of the facial features of the two sister states, while simultaneously asserting that there are fundamental differences between the Assamese and Mizo peoples. A few locals of Lailapur who helped set up an electric pole for this shed/post of the Assam police officers wait for permission to go and have lunch at their homes on the other side of the police barricades, in Lailapur. Courtesy of Abhishek Basu. From Ronju’s perspective, the areca nut trade is at the core of the conflict on a local level: “What can we do if the betel nut is cheaper on that side? They [the Mizos and the Burmese] have been in this business for long enough to establish a monopoly. A kilo of betel nut sells for INR 128 there, while it's INR 300 here.” But despite the monopoly, working in Mizoram has its advantages for Ronju. “I have big connections with ministers [in Mizoram] who make life easier for me by way of permissions. I get supari here for the Assam State Police at times too! Currently, my truck, loaded with tatka [tight] Burmese supari, is waiting at the border because of the blockade. The Mizos themselves will help unload it on this side though,” he cackled. Ronju emphasizes difference, but his family and work hint at complex aspects of lived reality in towns along the border. Of course, the complexities are often cynically flattened by local political parties who rely on enflaming the conflict. Soon after the initial clashes last year, Assamese politicians and ministers arrived in Lailapur. The press, both local and national, flocked to them in front of a police barricade. The Organizational Secretary of the Assamese political party Veer Lachit Sena (VLS), Srinkhal Chaliha told the media, “We will not tolerate any threat. The Assamese people will give an appropriate reply!” Locals and groups most impacted by the clashes observed the spectacle. They crowded on both sides of the narrow highway that leads to Lailapur and ends at the Assam Police barricade, located 5 kilometres away from the actual border. Several witnesses shook their heads in disappointment over what they perceived to be the Assam government's cowardice: to many, not giving statements at the border itself, or not strongly condemning repeated acts of aggression from the Mizo side of the border—where many local civilians are believed to have been seen by the Assam State Police officers—seen equipped with light machine guns (LMGs) provided to them by alleged extremist groups backing the ruling Mizo National Front (MNF) government. It is important to note that Mizoram is the only state among the seven sister states of Northeast India that has yet to turn saffron, or be in alliance in any way whatsoever, with the right-wing BJP (despite short-lived alliances with the BJP and MNF part of the BJP-led coalition at the Centre, in Mizoram the party has historically allied itself with Congress ). The strong response expected from the Assamese government to counter repeated jibes from the Mizos, however, never materialized. Ronju, a local businessman, explained: "One call from the Mizo Church and MZP (Mizo Zirlai Pawl, a powerful student organization with a long and antagonistic history with the Centre and a shared relationship with the ruling MNF), and you will find village after Mizo village come together in solidarity, bearing arms like LMGs (lightweight machine guns) that too! There's nothing like that here in Assam. We're too divided." He added that he was proud of having driven through the perilous Mizo terrain all the way to Aizawl, the capital of Mizoram, several times. Ronju, who is a seemanto-bashi or a border resident, holds similar views as many of the locals standing along the highway leading to the barricades. They expect the Assamese government to take a strong stance in the face of perceived Mizo homogeneity and solidarity, as well as support from the Church. The juxtaposition of Mizo identity and Assamese nationalism is reflected in geographical landmarks along the border: the last Indian symbol on the Assamese side is a temple and on the Mizo side, a Church. Many locals on the Assamese side of the border as well as the second in command of the CRPF (Central Reserve Police Force, India's largest Central Armed Police Force) battalion posted in Fainum, Assam, talk about Mizos as if they were a warrior tribe. They believe that Mizos kill on a whim; accentuate their cultural differences, food preferences and eating habits; and speak Mizo instead of Hindi or English. Such sentiments strengthen the perception that there are fundamental differences between the two communities, despite their obvious closeness either in proximity, occupation, or familial ties. "They believe they are Mizos first. For them, the [Indian] nation is secondary. Someone needs to sit down and reason with them," says S. Debnath, Barak Valley resident and former member of the Forum for the Protection of Non-Mizos. Debnath believes Mizos feel like this because of particular state practices: “There's the case of the Inner Line Permit mandatory for anyone wishing to enter Mizoram, which makes them [the Mizos] feel like they have a sovereign right to their land. They allow the Burmese in when it comes to the business of Burmese supari, but not people like us who are from other states of India." Mizoram also enjoys other affordances that allow Mizos to take autonomous decisions, like the Inner Line Permit (ILP), which evidently frustrates the residents of the Hindu-majority Barak Valley of Assam. Debnath, like several others, does not consider metrics such as Mizoram's literacy rate, population size, and economic growth that are used to explain their sovereign status—most of which comes from tribal autonomy guaranteed over the Lushai Hills, provided for in Schedule Six of the Indian Constitution. Mizoram has one of the country's highest literacy rates. Its Oriental High School is among the first convent schools established by the British in Silchar, an economic hub in the contested Barak Valley of Assam. The school also has residential quarters for their mostly Mizo staff and teachers who form a large part of the closely-knit Mizo community in Assam. Since the Mizo Church is reluctant to involve itself in the local politics of the region, the staff and teachers at Oriental High School have been asked not to share their political opinions and to stay entirely professional. Rati Bora, another seemanto-bashi , has two sons who work on farms on either side of the border. Her son who works on the Mizo side earns more than his brother, presumably because Mizoram’s economy is one of the fastest growing in the country. On July 26, 2021, Rati Bora heard the shots fired by policemen on both sides of the border and feared for her life. Her sons begged her to evacuate. She left home with her family members and elderly parents and headed for her sister’s house in the neighboring town of Silchar. The incident was terrifying for border residents like Rati at that time. Now, however, the local tea shops opened by a few families dwelling right beside the police check post in Dholakhal are flourishing, she says. Rati Bora overlooking her patch of green, now taken by the CRPF to establish camps and diffuse tensions between the two states of Assam and Mizoram. Singhu, Assam, India. Courtesy of Abhishek Basu. We watched as four local boys from the Cachar district of Assam struggled to set up an electric pole. The pole would serve as a post for the state police that would be stationed there at night for a few weeks. Later as the boys crossed the police barricade to eat their lunch of bhaat (rice) at their homes, we watched as onlookers stared at them with suspicion. Young men from bordering villages must always keep their aadhar ID cards on themselves, and even guests visiting their homes must carry their identification documents. The performativity of nationalism takes on a certain intensity for residents of this region. Locals like Ronju and Rati are intimately familiar with this performance, and with an eye to the cross-border trade, tend to hold a more nuanced view of the changing economy of Silchar. “[Despite the suspicion and discrimination], at least now seemanto-bashis from Lailapur and Sighua villages are getting some recognition,” says Rati. “Previously girls wouldn't ever want to get married to boys from here, like my two sons. Now at least there's a chance. It's not so remote anymore… there are so many SUVs and Boleros zipping by,” she says, referring to the many politicians she had seen in her area. Taking us away from the blame game at play in this region is the plight of the injured policemen of the Assam State Police, a few still waiting for doctors to remove pellets shot from the handmade guns of Mizo locals. Stuck in a rut because of delayed discharge papers and an inaccessible, unresponsive healthcare system, the policemen have issued multiple statements on maintaining peace and order in the region that are very similar to those of their politicians. Some policemen wrap the pellets removed from their bodies in delicate tissue paper and keep them in their pockets as a token of pride. Some of them eagerly share videos they recorded on their smartphones or shared by villagers on the Mizo side of the border. Until a time comes when the region’s employment issues are solved instead of vague assurances that the help mandated by the Employment Guarantee Act; until a time comes when roads are developed, middlemen are erased, the indigenous industry is promoted excluding the existing large tea and oil businesses; until a time comes when Assam helps itself and not its vote-banks, it will not be able to hide behind the central government’s exclusionary tactics of us and them. Like the rest of India, the northeast too may well fall into the trap of not asking the right questions to those in power, especially at a time the Indian economy is reeling from the shortages of resources in the wake of the COVID-19 crisis. It comes down to the possibility of the Assamese being able to reclaim everything considered “illegal” about the Burmese areca nut trade. This involves cracking down on people like Ronju, their very own, who act like oil in these cracks. It is not enough to just roll the areca nut by placing it below your tongue, it is to recognize that cultures when living in proximity, obviously are bound to inform and resemble each other. We saw many a xorai or a casket-like plate in almost every Assamese household we went to, and were offered the traditional areca nut and paan, or betel nut palm. Such an act is a symbol of “welcoming outsiders,” they told us. This contrasts starkly with an occasion in one of our interviews with Debnath where he lowered the volume on the television upon hearing a TV anchor complaining about protests organized by Mizo student organizations against the draconian Indian Citizenship Act: the same legislation designed to kick out “outsiders” from Indian soil. For the Mizos, it is Bangladeshis who are the outsiders and indeed they often consider even the moniker of “Bangladeshi” disparaging. Meanwhile, for Debnath, it is the Mizos who are more of an “other,” more so than those who agree to live illegally in India. The dynamics between the Mizos, the Bangladeshis, the mainland Assamese, and the active construction of the “other” is at the heart of this story and the continuing clashes. To fully understand what’s going on at Lailapur, it is important to understand that this polarized strand of history is deeply etched in the memory of the Mizos of this generation. At the same time, it is undoubtedly true that there are two competing narratives—one told by the natives and the other by government officials. The first tells a tale of the oral ethnocultural history of the tribe linked to the land and forests: the narrative of many Mizos and organizations like the MZP. The second is the “official” history of state formation: the Assamese state narrative, if not that of India writ large. ∎ 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

Photojournalist NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati in conversation with Shubhanga Pandey COMMUNITY Photo Kathmandu & Public History in Nepal NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati Photojournalist NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati in conversation with Shubhanga Pandey The archive of Nepal Picture Library is there to diversity our narratives of the past and begin to look at historically marginalized histories of specific communities, whether that be along the lines of caste or ethnicity or gender. 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 Nepal Archiving Photojournalism Photo Circle Photo Kathmandu International Festival Nepal Picture Library Library Archival Practice Exhibitions Pedagogy People's Movement II Skin of Chitwan Indigeneity Indigenous Art Practice Indigeneous Spaces Dalit Histories Anthropocene Journalism Jana Andolan II Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist) Insurgency Public History Public Space NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati lives in Kathmandu, Nepal and works at the intersections of visual storytelling, research, pedagogy, and collective action. In 2007, she co-founded photo.circle , an independent artist-led platform that facilitates learning, exhibition making, publishing, and a variety of other trans-disciplinary collaborative projects for Nepali visual practitioners. In 2011, she co-founded Nepal Picture Library , a digital archiving initiative that works towards diversifying Nepali socio-cultural and political history. She is also the co-founder and festival director of Photo Kathmandu , an international festival that takes place in Kathmandu every two years. She has served as festival director for South Asia’s premier non-fiction film festival Film Southasia , been part of the selection committee for the first cycle of World Press Photo ’s 6x6 Global Talent Program in Asia, and been a mentor for the 2020 World Press Photo Joop Swart Masterclass. She was recently awarded the 2020 Jane Lombard Fellowship by the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School, New York. She studied documentary photography at the SALT Institute of Documentary Studies, Maine, and International Relations and Studio Art at Mt. Holyoke College, Massachusetts. Interview Nepal 25th Nov 2020 On That Note: Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History 4th MAY Bengali Nationalism & the Chittagong Hill Tracts 9th DEC Rethinking the Library with Sister Library 21st OCT

SENIOR EDITOR Shubhanga Pandey Shubhanga Pandey is a historian at University of California, Los Angeles and formerly the Chief Editor of Himal Southasian . His work has appeared in The Caravan , London Review of Books , and Jacobin , among others. He is based in Los Angeles and Kathmandu. SENIOR EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE