ADVISORY EDITOR Hasanthika Sirisena Hasanthika Sirisena is a Professor of English at Susquehanna University, visiting faculty at the Vermont College of Fine Arts, editor at West Branch and 7.13 Books , and author of The Other One & Dark Tourist . She is based in Selingsgrove, Pennsylvania. ADVISORY EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Over nearly two decades, the opulence of the Jaipur Literature Festival has only grown and the prestige of attendance has attained unparalleled heights. Yet Torsa Ghosal, of Kaya Press’s imprint Kulhar Books, returned in 2025 with critical realizations about JLF’s core agenda. Reflecting not only on the nationalistic undertones celebrated but also on what was conspicuously absent, Ghosal points to the festival’s failure to meaningfully represent Muslim and Arab voices, and to a troubling insincerity in engaging with the moral crises of our time. BOOKS & ARTS Spiritually Chic Over nearly two decades, the opulence of the Jaipur Literature Festival has only grown and the prestige of attendance has attained unparalleled heights. Yet Torsa Ghosal, of Kaya Press’s imprint Kulhar Books, returned in 2025 with critical realizations about JLF’s core agenda. Reflecting not only on the nationalistic undertones celebrated but also on what was conspicuously absent, Ghosal points to the festival’s failure to meaningfully represent Muslim and Arab voices, and to a troubling insincerity in engaging with the moral crises of our time. Torsa Ghosal Since launching in 2006, Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been repeatedly called the “Kumbh Mela” of literature festivals. Kumbh Mela is a Hindu religious event held every six to twelve years at the confluence of the three rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati, where devotees convene in numbers unmatched by any other religious gathering in the world. The Kumbh analogy signals JLF’s massive scale and popularity. Indeed, the book festival is a mela, a social spectacle, that brings anywhere between three to five hundred speakers to Jaipur, shuttles them between the venue and the various four- and five-star hotels lodging them, and swishes them off to party in the city’s gorgeous palaces and forts. 400,000 visitors and around 4000 vendors thronged the festival grounds in 2024 according to estimates. Until recently, the staunch religious underpinnings of Kumbh had no direct equivalent in a festival that branded itself as an international “literary show,” and that has hosted a diverse assortment of luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Orhan Pamuk, Kamila Shamsie, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama. But over the last few decades, Hindu religious identity has increasingly defined national belonging and nationalist policies in India. This year’s Maha Kumbh Mela was attended by 4 times as many people as the previous iteration of the event, blazing proof of the upthrust in religious fervour among Indians and diasporic Hindus. JLF’s programming was not immune to the pulls of religious nationalism. The festival kept the crowds sated on pageantry and celebrations which often obscured the ways in which panels and talks questioned the nationalist agenda. Supported by a SALT travel grant , I was at JLF to scout authors in my role as an acquiring editor for Kaya Press’s brand new South Asian imprint, Kulhar Books . Working with Kaya’s managing editor Neelanjana Banerjee and the rest of the Kaya team, Kulhar editors—Rajiv Mohabir, Jhani Randhawa, and I—aspire to publish stylistically and politically imaginative literature; works that unsettle formulaic expectations caging and sanitizing South Asian literary expressions in America. Courtesy of the author. My first afternoon at JLF I heard the British author Sheena Patel speak about her desire for “the now to be captured” in her writing rather than telling a “timeless story,” and in a similar vein, my intention was to get a sense of “the now” of the literary-cultural scene in South Asia, intuiting that the festival would offer some—even if narrow—opening into the ideas and themes dominating the space. Flipping through the festival program, I tried to locate sessions on literary writings from and about South Asia with a focus on contemporary translated literature and newer voices, a task that proved to be somewhat at odds with JLF’s broad-ranging, political establishment- and celebrity-friendly slate of events, a host of which staged flaccid conversations on Hindu mythology, Hindu national and political identities, excitement about the potentials of AI and digital technology, corporate and startup success, even wellness practices. The festival has a “flashy, dazzling quality,” notes Mrinalina Chakravarty in her 2014 book, In Stereotype , which examines the hackneyed tropes found in literary representations of South Asia. At this year’s edition, social media influencers, Bollywood celebrities, and politicians predictably clinched the largest platform—the front lawn. Educator-philanthropist-billionaire Sudha Murthy’s talk in the lawn was attended by her son-in-law, U.K.’s former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Sunak went viral for greeting the lawn’s audience with folded hands in a “namaste,” obeying the nudges of an elderly woman whom Indian media variously identified as his mother and aunt-in-law. A forty-five-minute session on the same stage was allocated to politician and author Shashi Tharoor unpacking the experience of living as Shashi Tharoor. Influencer Prajakta Koli blurted unprompted that her rom com novel contains “discrepancies” that she hoped readers would not pick up. JLF is often “a theatre of the absurd,” as Chakravarty observes, and the “incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious” raise questions about whether the festival coheres. JLF does not cohere— purposefully so. Vendors selling gorgeous brass jhumkas, wooden handicrafts, linen quilts and clothes form the backdrop of high-spirited debates and book launches. It is a carnival, almost in the Bakhtinian sense, a heteroglossia boasting of eclectic interests and priorities, but without the revolutionary zing Bakhtin associates with carnivalesque entertainment. JLF makes no pretence of renouncing hierarchies among speakers, vendors, volunteers, media persons, and spectators. There is a distinctly feudal quality to the “royal” warmth the green vest-wearing volunteers and interns shower on the invitees, riffing on the grand, luxurious image of Rajasthan in both the global and desi imagination. Rajasthan is after all the province where celebrities like Liz Hurley and Priyanka Chopra have hosted their weddings. Like crazy rich desi weddings, the happy hodge podge at JLF trades in stereotypes about South Asia’s mystique and splendour. JLF has a controversial history with respect to free speech, which Amitav Ghosh points out , shows how literature has become “embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances…overtaking, and indeed overwhelming writing itself as the primary end of a life in letters.” As far as frenzied public spectacles in India go, none in recent times can compete with the individual and collective performances of the Hindu religious identity at the Mahakumbh, and the book festival arena is a porous zone. The five-day programming at JLF, what speakers thought permissible to say or not say, the audience questions, the popularity of sessions were all rooted within a broader cultural sphere that in 2025 was flooded with giant billboards starring the tight-lipped smiles of India’s Prime Minister alongside his brother in arms, the ascetic-politician Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Both their portraits were pasted onto scenes showing millions on the banks of a river, coloured a shade of blue so rich that I could tell it could only have been achieved after going through layers of digital filters, if the raw photograph was ever of the muddied brown Ganges I have known and swum in. The hoardings carried taglines like “Message from Kumbh, The Nation Must Unify” and “Sanatan Pride, Maha Kumbh Edition.” Courtesy of the author. Desi internet was trending Kumbh news and memes, minting new viral heartthrobs—hot Sadhus and Sadhvis—through WhatsApp forwards and Instagram reels, plus supplying shock and cringe content, that I and surely other festival attendees dutifully consumed. Young people are showing interest in scriptures, Malashri Lal remarked at a session launching mythologist Sunita Pant Bansal’s A Comprehensive Guide to Indian Scriptures . The slim book introduces Hindu sacred texts like the Puranas, Vedas, and the epics “as it is,” the author insisted, “without my opinion.” The aim is to demystify and correct beliefs about Hindu religious texts. Why, then, does the jacket say “Indian scriptures” rather than Hindu scriptures? A young audience member asked after admitting he was “nervous and worried” to raise the question. And if the book is on Hinduism, have texts from Nepal been included? The publisher Dipankar Mukherjee, who was also on stage, chivalrously swooped in to field the question, rationalizing that they were “trying to be somewhat politically correct to ensure the book reaches the right audience…Where they [the scriptures] started to become codified, recorded that’s part of current India.” He subsequently plugged the festival co-director William Dalrymple’s latest book, crediting Dalrymple for completing “half our work” tracing the influence of Indian traditions and philosophy on other cultures. Mukherjee’s blithe verbal acrobatics for swapping Hindu with India not only aligns with the religion-nation nexus the country’s government has openly adopted in the last decade but also follows the money as it were. Writing for New York Times, Anupreeta Das claims that book festivals are all the rage among India’s youth. On the surface, the hipness of literary festivals bodes well. Das notes young people “are increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English. For these readers, books open worlds that India’s higher education system, with its focus on time-consuming preparation for make-or-break examinations, often does not.” But what are the young people reading in these various languages? What kinds of worlds are books unlocking? The answers are not straightforward. Trapped in a long, slow-moving queue formed in front of a toilet in Amer Clarks, women were commiserating about the shortage of bathrooms at the venue. Interrupting this communal bonding, a woman in her early twenties started to hype up her novel that retells the Hindu epic Ramayana. Ramayana has become something of a foundational text in the Hindu nationalist imagination. The woman pitching her retelling to a captive, pee-holding audience explained that her book followed the love story of the Hindu demigod Lakhsman whom “feminism” has unfairly sidelined. Her pithy spiel echoed a pervasive cultural sentiment wherein Hindu culture and Hindu Gods need constant protection from the evil eyes of liberals and heretics. Another young woman asked for the book’s title to order on Amazon. Some days later, while looking up the book, I stumbled upon the author’s public Instagram grid that featured side-by-side photos of her in JLF and at Mahakumbh. Completing the spiritual chic circuit of JLF-Mahakumbh, she follows in the illustrious footsteps of others like Sudha Murty who took a holy dip at Kumbh days ahead of her JLF session. Browsing the aisles of bookstores and catalogues of Indian publishers gives an impression that pop spirituality is booming in India. OMTV, an “Indic storytelling” app, surveyed its users and found that around 80% of those consuming spiritual content are aged between 18 and 30. At the same time, The Crossword Bookstore on JLF festival grounds had eager customers crowding pretty much every corner, picking up new and old titles, not just the spirituality laced ones. And in an offline and online public sphere dominated by Maha Kumbh , JLF still managed to hold some conversations offering critical and nuanced perspectives on political Hinduism. Courtesy of the author. But among the nearly three-hundred delegates, the festival included just a handful of Indian Muslim speakers. Bollywood celebrities like the director Imtiaz Ali, Huma Qureshi, and Javed Akhtar were part of this roster. Mujibur Rehman, who used a comparative framework drawn from histories of Black resistance to talk about the political marginalization and de-Islamization of Indian Muslims in Shikwa-e-Hind (2024), was challenged by a middle-aged, ostensibly Hindu, ponytailed thought leader among the audience. “I have lots of confusion about the premise of your book…Should we continue to call Muslims minorities with twenty percent population?” the man asked. Rehman told the man his book answers the question and supplemented his response with analogies underscoring how minority identity and minority rights are not simply pegged on numbers or even the success and visibility of a select few. India’s constitution despite its secular promises is inherently majoritarian, he argued, which informs the cultural landscape where Indians clapping at America’s flag do not invite suspicion, but an Indian Muslim boy clapping at Pakistan’s flag is interpreted as sedition. Kashmiri Muslim, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi literary authors were largely absent from this edition. Some absences can be blamed on logistics—Pakistan passport holders have immense difficulty procuring Indian visas at present, unless of course they are Maha Kumbh enthusiast Hindus. Then they are handed Indian visas swiftly . State rules force compliance but even state policies cannot explain all erasures. Theatre actor and director MK Raina who comes from a Kashmiri Pandit family, spoke about owing his career to the state of Kashmir’s policy of allowing free education right from the 1940s, commented on inequities in contemporary India, and criticized the unrealistic portrayals of Kashmir in Bollywood. He left the stage when his co-panelist, the Rajasthani singer and thespian Ila Arun, started enacting a lengthy sequence from an Ibsen play she adapted and partly set in Kashmir, where a character “hurts the mother” and “hurts the motherland.” Raina’s abrupt departure was first extrapolated as resulting from his frustration about the supposed misrepresentation of Kashmir and later as following from his irritation with Ila Arun for hogging stage time. Multiple sessions addressed Israel’s war on Gaza, but the sessions recycled a small group of speakers that included the Indian American author Pankaj Mishra, Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh, Pulitzer-winning American journalist Nathan Thrall, and Israeli British historian Avi Shlaim. The number of Arab authors featured was in the low single digits. A JLF official reportedly interrupted an interview between the Press Trust of India and the Palestinian envoy to India Abed Elrazeg Abu Jazer on the grounds that the festival’s PR team hadn’t sanctioned it. JLF’s speaker lineup suffers from issues common in invite-only prestige events. The curators turn to the same authors and cultural delegates year after year, and even each year, the same names reappear across sessions. The festival seems to be battling two opposing drives: an impulse to represent a diversity of relevant ideas and a desire to wring the most out of a trusted clique of speakers, resulting in conversations that sometimes feel repetitive, sometimes tokenistic. Although the festival is held in the state of Rajasthan and makes decorative use of Rajasthan’s crafts and colours to create Instagrammable corners, Rajasthani authors and Rajasthani literature are not at the forefront. The festival is a shimmery tamasha that, like high-budget high-gloss Bollywood films, is fun to dip in, so long as one is willing to forgo critical questions. The scale of the festival remains something to marvel at. But other literature festivals that have cropped up in India after Jaipur, such as the Kerala Literature Festival and Mizoram Literature Festival , have made more emphatic attempts at grounding their events in their local cultures. JLF, on the other hand, is happy to remain the Chicken Tikka Masala of festivals, palatable to a wide-ranging, somewhat international audience, seemingly representative of South Asia, with a desi man and a Scottish one claiming credits for its origins. Courtesy of the author. Since launching in 2006, Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been repeatedly called the “Kumbh Mela” of literature festivals. Kumbh Mela is a Hindu religious event held every six to twelve years at the confluence of the three rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati, where devotees convene in numbers unmatched by any other religious gathering in the world. The Kumbh analogy signals JLF’s massive scale and popularity. Indeed, the book festival is a mela, a social spectacle, that brings anywhere between three to five hundred speakers to Jaipur, shuttles them between the venue and the various four- and five-star hotels lodging them, and swishes them off to party in the city’s gorgeous palaces and forts. 400,000 visitors and around 4000 vendors thronged the festival grounds in 2024 according to estimates. Until recently, the staunch religious underpinnings of Kumbh had no direct equivalent in a festival that branded itself as an international “literary show,” and that has hosted a diverse assortment of luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Orhan Pamuk, Kamila Shamsie, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama. But over the last few decades, Hindu religious identity has increasingly defined national belonging and nationalist policies in India. This year’s Maha Kumbh Mela was attended by 4 times as many people as the previous iteration of the event, blazing proof of the upthrust in religious fervour among Indians and diasporic Hindus. JLF’s programming was not immune to the pulls of religious nationalism. The festival kept the crowds sated on pageantry and celebrations which often obscured the ways in which panels and talks questioned the nationalist agenda. Supported by a SALT travel grant , I was at JLF to scout authors in my role as an acquiring editor for Kaya Press’s brand new South Asian imprint, Kulhar Books . Working with Kaya’s managing editor Neelanjana Banerjee and the rest of the Kaya team, Kulhar editors—Rajiv Mohabir, Jhani Randhawa, and I—aspire to publish stylistically and politically imaginative literature; works that unsettle formulaic expectations caging and sanitizing South Asian literary expressions in America. Courtesy of the author. My first afternoon at JLF I heard the British author Sheena Patel speak about her desire for “the now to be captured” in her writing rather than telling a “timeless story,” and in a similar vein, my intention was to get a sense of “the now” of the literary-cultural scene in South Asia, intuiting that the festival would offer some—even if narrow—opening into the ideas and themes dominating the space. Flipping through the festival program, I tried to locate sessions on literary writings from and about South Asia with a focus on contemporary translated literature and newer voices, a task that proved to be somewhat at odds with JLF’s broad-ranging, political establishment- and celebrity-friendly slate of events, a host of which staged flaccid conversations on Hindu mythology, Hindu national and political identities, excitement about the potentials of AI and digital technology, corporate and startup success, even wellness practices. The festival has a “flashy, dazzling quality,” notes Mrinalina Chakravarty in her 2014 book, In Stereotype , which examines the hackneyed tropes found in literary representations of South Asia. At this year’s edition, social media influencers, Bollywood celebrities, and politicians predictably clinched the largest platform—the front lawn. Educator-philanthropist-billionaire Sudha Murthy’s talk in the lawn was attended by her son-in-law, U.K.’s former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Sunak went viral for greeting the lawn’s audience with folded hands in a “namaste,” obeying the nudges of an elderly woman whom Indian media variously identified as his mother and aunt-in-law. A forty-five-minute session on the same stage was allocated to politician and author Shashi Tharoor unpacking the experience of living as Shashi Tharoor. Influencer Prajakta Koli blurted unprompted that her rom com novel contains “discrepancies” that she hoped readers would not pick up. JLF is often “a theatre of the absurd,” as Chakravarty observes, and the “incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious” raise questions about whether the festival coheres. JLF does not cohere— purposefully so. Vendors selling gorgeous brass jhumkas, wooden handicrafts, linen quilts and clothes form the backdrop of high-spirited debates and book launches. It is a carnival, almost in the Bakhtinian sense, a heteroglossia boasting of eclectic interests and priorities, but without the revolutionary zing Bakhtin associates with carnivalesque entertainment. JLF makes no pretence of renouncing hierarchies among speakers, vendors, volunteers, media persons, and spectators. There is a distinctly feudal quality to the “royal” warmth the green vest-wearing volunteers and interns shower on the invitees, riffing on the grand, luxurious image of Rajasthan in both the global and desi imagination. Rajasthan is after all the province where celebrities like Liz Hurley and Priyanka Chopra have hosted their weddings. Like crazy rich desi weddings, the happy hodge podge at JLF trades in stereotypes about South Asia’s mystique and splendour. JLF has a controversial history with respect to free speech, which Amitav Ghosh points out , shows how literature has become “embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances…overtaking, and indeed overwhelming writing itself as the primary end of a life in letters.” As far as frenzied public spectacles in India go, none in recent times can compete with the individual and collective performances of the Hindu religious identity at the Mahakumbh, and the book festival arena is a porous zone. The five-day programming at JLF, what speakers thought permissible to say or not say, the audience questions, the popularity of sessions were all rooted within a broader cultural sphere that in 2025 was flooded with giant billboards starring the tight-lipped smiles of India’s Prime Minister alongside his brother in arms, the ascetic-politician Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Both their portraits were pasted onto scenes showing millions on the banks of a river, coloured a shade of blue so rich that I could tell it could only have been achieved after going through layers of digital filters, if the raw photograph was ever of the muddied brown Ganges I have known and swum in. The hoardings carried taglines like “Message from Kumbh, The Nation Must Unify” and “Sanatan Pride, Maha Kumbh Edition.” Courtesy of the author. Desi internet was trending Kumbh news and memes, minting new viral heartthrobs—hot Sadhus and Sadhvis—through WhatsApp forwards and Instagram reels, plus supplying shock and cringe content, that I and surely other festival attendees dutifully consumed. Young people are showing interest in scriptures, Malashri Lal remarked at a session launching mythologist Sunita Pant Bansal’s A Comprehensive Guide to Indian Scriptures . The slim book introduces Hindu sacred texts like the Puranas, Vedas, and the epics “as it is,” the author insisted, “without my opinion.” The aim is to demystify and correct beliefs about Hindu religious texts. Why, then, does the jacket say “Indian scriptures” rather than Hindu scriptures? A young audience member asked after admitting he was “nervous and worried” to raise the question. And if the book is on Hinduism, have texts from Nepal been included? The publisher Dipankar Mukherjee, who was also on stage, chivalrously swooped in to field the question, rationalizing that they were “trying to be somewhat politically correct to ensure the book reaches the right audience…Where they [the scriptures] started to become codified, recorded that’s part of current India.” He subsequently plugged the festival co-director William Dalrymple’s latest book, crediting Dalrymple for completing “half our work” tracing the influence of Indian traditions and philosophy on other cultures. Mukherjee’s blithe verbal acrobatics for swapping Hindu with India not only aligns with the religion-nation nexus the country’s government has openly adopted in the last decade but also follows the money as it were. Writing for New York Times, Anupreeta Das claims that book festivals are all the rage among India’s youth. On the surface, the hipness of literary festivals bodes well. Das notes young people “are increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English. For these readers, books open worlds that India’s higher education system, with its focus on time-consuming preparation for make-or-break examinations, often does not.” But what are the young people reading in these various languages? What kinds of worlds are books unlocking? The answers are not straightforward. Trapped in a long, slow-moving queue formed in front of a toilet in Amer Clarks, women were commiserating about the shortage of bathrooms at the venue. Interrupting this communal bonding, a woman in her early twenties started to hype up her novel that retells the Hindu epic Ramayana. Ramayana has become something of a foundational text in the Hindu nationalist imagination. The woman pitching her retelling to a captive, pee-holding audience explained that her book followed the love story of the Hindu demigod Lakhsman whom “feminism” has unfairly sidelined. Her pithy spiel echoed a pervasive cultural sentiment wherein Hindu culture and Hindu Gods need constant protection from the evil eyes of liberals and heretics. Another young woman asked for the book’s title to order on Amazon. Some days later, while looking up the book, I stumbled upon the author’s public Instagram grid that featured side-by-side photos of her in JLF and at Mahakumbh. Completing the spiritual chic circuit of JLF-Mahakumbh, she follows in the illustrious footsteps of others like Sudha Murty who took a holy dip at Kumbh days ahead of her JLF session. Browsing the aisles of bookstores and catalogues of Indian publishers gives an impression that pop spirituality is booming in India. OMTV, an “Indic storytelling” app, surveyed its users and found that around 80% of those consuming spiritual content are aged between 18 and 30. At the same time, The Crossword Bookstore on JLF festival grounds had eager customers crowding pretty much every corner, picking up new and old titles, not just the spirituality laced ones. And in an offline and online public sphere dominated by Maha Kumbh , JLF still managed to hold some conversations offering critical and nuanced perspectives on political Hinduism. Courtesy of the author. But among the nearly three-hundred delegates, the festival included just a handful of Indian Muslim speakers. Bollywood celebrities like the director Imtiaz Ali, Huma Qureshi, and Javed Akhtar were part of this roster. Mujibur Rehman, who used a comparative framework drawn from histories of Black resistance to talk about the political marginalization and de-Islamization of Indian Muslims in Shikwa-e-Hind (2024), was challenged by a middle-aged, ostensibly Hindu, ponytailed thought leader among the audience. “I have lots of confusion about the premise of your book…Should we continue to call Muslims minorities with twenty percent population?” the man asked. Rehman told the man his book answers the question and supplemented his response with analogies underscoring how minority identity and minority rights are not simply pegged on numbers or even the success and visibility of a select few. India’s constitution despite its secular promises is inherently majoritarian, he argued, which informs the cultural landscape where Indians clapping at America’s flag do not invite suspicion, but an Indian Muslim boy clapping at Pakistan’s flag is interpreted as sedition. Kashmiri Muslim, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi literary authors were largely absent from this edition. Some absences can be blamed on logistics—Pakistan passport holders have immense difficulty procuring Indian visas at present, unless of course they are Maha Kumbh enthusiast Hindus. Then they are handed Indian visas swiftly . State rules force compliance but even state policies cannot explain all erasures. Theatre actor and director MK Raina who comes from a Kashmiri Pandit family, spoke about owing his career to the state of Kashmir’s policy of allowing free education right from the 1940s, commented on inequities in contemporary India, and criticized the unrealistic portrayals of Kashmir in Bollywood. He left the stage when his co-panelist, the Rajasthani singer and thespian Ila Arun, started enacting a lengthy sequence from an Ibsen play she adapted and partly set in Kashmir, where a character “hurts the mother” and “hurts the motherland.” Raina’s abrupt departure was first extrapolated as resulting from his frustration about the supposed misrepresentation of Kashmir and later as following from his irritation with Ila Arun for hogging stage time. Multiple sessions addressed Israel’s war on Gaza, but the sessions recycled a small group of speakers that included the Indian American author Pankaj Mishra, Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh, Pulitzer-winning American journalist Nathan Thrall, and Israeli British historian Avi Shlaim. The number of Arab authors featured was in the low single digits. A JLF official reportedly interrupted an interview between the Press Trust of India and the Palestinian envoy to India Abed Elrazeg Abu Jazer on the grounds that the festival’s PR team hadn’t sanctioned it. JLF’s speaker lineup suffers from issues common in invite-only prestige events. The curators turn to the same authors and cultural delegates year after year, and even each year, the same names reappear across sessions. The festival seems to be battling two opposing drives: an impulse to represent a diversity of relevant ideas and a desire to wring the most out of a trusted clique of speakers, resulting in conversations that sometimes feel repetitive, sometimes tokenistic. Although the festival is held in the state of Rajasthan and makes decorative use of Rajasthan’s crafts and colours to create Instagrammable corners, Rajasthani authors and Rajasthani literature are not at the forefront. The festival is a shimmery tamasha that, like high-budget high-gloss Bollywood films, is fun to dip in, so long as one is willing to forgo critical questions. The scale of the festival remains something to marvel at. But other literature festivals that have cropped up in India after Jaipur, such as the Kerala Literature Festival and Mizoram Literature Festival , have made more emphatic attempts at grounding their events in their local cultures. JLF, on the other hand, is happy to remain the Chicken Tikka Masala of festivals, palatable to a wide-ranging, somewhat international audience, seemingly representative of South Asia, with a desi man and a Scottish one claiming credits for its origins. Courtesy of the author. SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making "Year of the Snake" (2020), digital drawing by Chaaya Prabhat. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Review Jaipur Jaipur Literature Festival JLF Kumbh Mela Hindu Nationalism religious nationalism Religion Contemporary Literature Literature & Liberation Pop Spirituality Elitist elitism tokenism Representational Space representation suppression TORSA GHOSAL is the author of a book of literary criticism, Out of Mind (Ohio State University Press), and an experimental novella, Open Couplets (Yoda Press, India). Her fiction, essays, and interviews have appeared in Berkeley Fiction Review, Catapult, Los Angeles Review of Books, Literary Hub, Bustle , and elsewhere. She is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Sacramento, and a host of the Narrative for Social Justice podcast. 1 Aug 2025 Review Jaipur 1st Aug 2025 CHAAYA PRABHAT is an illustrator from India currently working out of Goa. She’s previously worked with several clients such as Penguin, Hachette, Meta and Google on digital illustration projects, stickers and book projects. She enjoys the using pattern and colour in her illustrations, and has previously won awards for her work from Behance and Cosmopolitan magazine. Ritwik's Trees Sumana Roy 12th Mar Provocations on Empathy Clare Patrick 13th Aug A Man's World Nidhil Vohra 2nd Mar Lights Out in Kinshasa Vrinda Jagota 17th Feb Dissident Kid Lit Saira Mir · Shelly Anand · Vashti Harrison · Simran Jeet Singh 20th Dec On That Note:

The Zeenat Haroon Rashid Prize Committee referred to Raniya Hosain as “an original voice with a striking command of her craft.” The essay for which she won the ZHR prize emerges from Hosain's reckoning with a dichotomy: the contradictory impulses of a rejection of the generality of women's experience of pain on one hand and a sense that there is some generality on the other, felt necessary for Hosain to think through. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 3 · On the 2020 ZHR Prize-Winning Essay The Zeenat Haroon Rashid Prize Committee referred to Raniya Hosain as “an original voice with a striking command of her craft.” The essay for which she won the ZHR prize emerges from Hosain's reckoning with a dichotomy: the contradictory impulses of a rejection of the generality of women's experience of pain on one hand and a sense that there is some generality on the other, felt necessary for Hosain to think through. VOL. 1 LIVE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Pakistan 23rd Nov 2020 Live Pakistan Zeenat Haroon Rashid Writing Prize for Women Feminist Spaces Feminist Organizing Trauma Body Politics SAAG Chats Gender Gender Violence Despair Grief Depictions of Grief Essay Essayistic Practice Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. A reading & discussion with Raniya Hosain, the winner of the Zeenat Haroon Rashid Prize for her essay “Portrait of a Woman in Pain.” In her discussion, Hosain discusses how, in women's organizing spaces, she felt a keen sense that despite wanting to do away with one's “womanhood,” it was womanhood itself that allowed her to feel solidarity. What universality, Hosain asks, can be found in the experience of gender. If recognizing that no one experience can create the whole seems necessary, why does the specific pain she outlines in her essay seem to be felt by all the women she knows or hears from? 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

· THE VERTICAL Photo-Essay · Mizoram LIFE ON LINE Following the collapse of Myanmar’s healthcare infrastructure after the 2021 coup and India’s sudden suspension of free movement protocols in 2024, even the most basic access to medical care has become a perilous and expensive endeavor for many Burmese living in Mizoram-Myanmar border regions. As Indian authorities invoke criminal allegations against those seeking care for border security, tens of thousands have been denied essential services, and the burden on Myanmar’s remaining hospitals is further intensifying. An injured rebel joined an armed group after the military junta’s 2021 coup. Last March, he was injured nine miles from the Myanmar-India border. He was treated in Chin State, but the doctor advised him to get a CT scan, which required travelling to India. Courtesy of the author. Since the violent coup d’état in 2021, Myanmar’s healthcare system has nearly collapsed under the weight of political repression, worker exodus, and escalating conflict. The result is that what was once a robust public service has been transformed into fragmented emergency care provided largely by NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF). Field reports from MSF starkly document what international bodies like the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, UN Special Rapporteur, and Associated Press have confirmed: hospitals shuttered, key disease programs disrupted, and millions left without reliable care. On the other hand, in forcibly returning vulnerable individuals to Myanmar without healthcare safeguards and under the shadow of rape accusations, Indian authorities violate international non-refoulement obligations while also inflicting profound harm on those already under physical and psychological duress. Amnesty warns that this practice “threatens to intensify the health crisis” for Burmese refugees, who find themselves trapped between persecution at home and denial of asylum with healthcare in India. Burmese refugee attempts to cross Tuai river for emergency medical treatment near Zokhawthar village in Mizoram, India. Courtesy of the author. A quiet yet complex world unfolds in the lush hills and deep valleys where Mizoram, in India, meets Chin State, Myanmar. While the official border stretches for 510KM, the boundary feels more like a line on a map than a real division in practice: villages often straddle both sides, and families share bloodlines across nations. The military-led coup of February 2021 brought with it the migration of thousands of people from Chin State, who sought refuge from violence and persecution in Mizoram. The people on both sides are predominantly from the Zo ethnic group , which includes Mizos in India and Chin in Myanmar. They speak related languages, share customs, and follow similar Christian beliefs. This has created a strong cultural bond, even in the face of political borders. Marriages, festivals, and trade are conducted informally across the border. Despite the Indian federal government’s cautious stance, the Mizoram state government and its people have welcomed the refugees on humanitarian grounds, housing them in makeshift camps and local homes. This has created a quiet tension between the Indian central government and the Mizoram state leadership. The Tuai River, a former key crossing point between Myanmar and India, is pictured near Zokhawthar village. Its significance waned after India suspended the Free Movement Regime (FMR) in 2024, which had allowed border residents to travel visa-free up to 16 kilometers into the neighboring country for 72 hours. Courtesy of the author. In Rikhawdar, a border town in western Myanmar, 52-year-old Thangi experiences first-hand the repercussions of disrupted healthcare and movement. Each month, she embarks on a grueling journey from her home in Rikhawdar to Zokhtwar, a distance of nearly 80 miles, just to get a medical checkup. The trip costs her nearly 70,000 kyats — about $22, a considerable sum in a region ravaged by conflict. Still, for Thangi, the opportunity to get a medical checkup and to hear her husband’s and son’s voices on the other end of a Facebook Messenger call is priceless. This is her small comfort in an otherwise onerous situation. She looks out of a tiny window in a home stay, facing the heavily guarded border with India. Once a key trading post and a vital escape route for those seeking refuge from the war, the border is now completely sealed off. 52-year-old Thangali experiences first-hand repercussions of disrupted healthcare and movement. Courtesy of the author. The closure of the border has also made it impossible for Thangali, a 28-year-old rebel fighter from the People’s Defense Forces, to get a crucial MRI scan at a hospital in Aizawl, India. Thangali, who was injured during a night ambush whilst fighting against the Junta forces, used to travel to India, almost 200 kilometres because there is nowhere within reach in Myanmar that has a functioning hospital offering the advanced services he needs. “We used to cross the border to get the care we needed,” Thangali said the next day, his voice weary but steady. “But now it’s too dangerous. With the border closed, we’re trapped—cut off from help. The treatment that once gave us hope is now out of reach, and we’re left to suffer in silence.” The sudden termination of the Free Movement Regime (FMR), which allowed for cross-border access to essential services between Mizoram in India and the border areas of Myanmar, has plunged his home township of Kale into a healthcare crisis. Kale Township connects central Myanmar to the Indian border through the Chin Hills, making it a key corridor for both humanitarian aid and displacement movements. It was in the lead-up to February’s national elections that the Indian government decided to end FMR, allegedly to address security concerns . Unfortunately, it has instead largely just stranded thousands of people and left them in urgent need of medical attention . "The closure of the border has dealt a heavy blow to our community," said Dr. Lalaramzaua, the only doctor at the RHI Hospital. "We're struggling to handle numerous cases with very limited resources. We rely on our neighbours in Mizoram for supplies and medication. With the border now closed, our ability to provide the care we need is severely compromised. "In several documented cases , including over 38 individuals deported in June 2024 from Moreh, local authorities reportedly used allegations of rape and other charges—without due process—to justify forced returns.” Amnesty International warns that this conflation of unverified crime allegations with border enforcement effectively bars these refugees from seeking vital healthcare in India, particularly for reproductive and mental health. Malsawm Puia lives in Kale township, on the border between India and Myanmar. He suffers from blood cancer. Malsawm was being treated at a hospital in the Indian state of Mizoram, but the Indian government’s decision to terminate a free movement agreement could mean a potential death sentence for the 28-year-old and dozens like him. Courtesy of the author. Among those severely impacted is Malsawm Puia, a 28-year-old from Kale township in Myanmar, battling blood cancer. Before the border closure, Malsawm Puia received treatment in Mizoram. With the end of the free movement agreement, he now faces an uncertain future as he is unable to access the necessary medical care. "The decision by the Indian government could be a death sentence for many of us," said Malsawm Puia's mother, who accompanied him to the hospital. Corpal Chanchu 23, stays in Kale township of Myanmar. Corpral got injured while fighting with the Myanmar forces last month. Courtesy of the author. Lalremtluanga, a 28-year-old rebel fighter, was injured in January during a mission. Initially treated in Aizawl's Greenwood Hospital, he had to leave due to worsening conditions and was then treated at the RHI Hospital. His condition, worsened by a broken leg and concerns about infection, makes it even more urgent to receive cross-border medical support. "The situation is dire," said Lalremtluanga. "We lack proper healthcare and medication here. The border closure has put us in a difficult position." The sudden end of the FMR and the ongoing construction of border fences have left nearly 100,000 residents of Kale township struggling with a failing healthcare system. The only hospital, already stretched thin by the ongoing conflict and injuries from the unrest, now faces an unprecedented challenge in providing care due to a severe shortage of medical supplies and facilities. "We have pregnant women and cancer patients here," Dr. Lalaramzaua said. "The lack of facilities means I can only treat basic conditions. The situation is heartbreaking, and we are doing everything we can with the limited resources available." Enok, a farmer in Kale township, gave birth to her fourth child at home with the help of a midwife. She considers herself lucky for managing a safe delivery amid the raging conflict in the region. Unable to travel to the hospital for a medical check-up, Enok still can’t obtain postnatal supplements and has to subsist on plain rice. Courtesy of the author. In terms of maternal health, women face perilous childbirths in Myanmar. Enok, a 38-year-old farmer in Kale township, gave birth to her fourth child at home with the help of a midwife. She considers herself lucky for managing a safe delivery amid the raging conflict in the region. Unable to travel to the hospital for a medical check-up, Enok still can’t obtain postnatal supplements and has to subsist on plain rice. “I can’t get enough sleep,” Enok, who used a pseudonym for security reasons, related, “People are so tired because they can’t sleep.” ∎ Civilians and fighters seek treatment inside the RHI Hospital. According to Insecurity Insight, a nonprofit collecting data on conflicts worldwide, nearly 1,200 attacks on healthcare workers and facilities have occurred in Myanmar since the junta seized power in February 2021. Courtesy of the author. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Photo-Essay Mizoram India 2024 Indian General Election Myanmar Health Crisis Health Maternal Health Border & Rule Borders Politics of Ethnic Identity Ethnic Division Zo Mizo Chin state Free Movement Regime Médecins Sans Frontières Freedom of Movement Christianity Rikhawdar Burma Chin Hills Healthcare State Repression 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. 27th Jul 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:

The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. FEATURES Whose Footfall is Loudest? The story of the Spring Revolution in Myanmar can be told through the footwear—the strewn, tossed, bloodied, abandoned—that is tied up with both the iconography and reality of brutal state violence. Piles of flip-flops amidst the debris, military boots stomping the ground: both are “central characters” of the Revolution. VOL. 2 ISSUE 1 ESSAY AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Artwork by Mahnoor Azeem. Ink collage on cardstock. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Artwork by Mahnoor Azeem. Ink collage on cardstock. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Essay Myanmar 24th Feb 2023 Essay Myanmar Military Coup Spring Revolution Saffron Revolution Hla Than Aung San Suu Kyi National League for Democracy Amay Sound Low-Income Workers Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring Student Movements Student Protests Incarceration Military Crackdown Military Dictatorship Military Operations Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics 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. Never in my life did I think that flip-flops could be fascinating. Only after a memorable incident entailing a particular pair of flip-flops did I begin to pay attention to them. An incident, yes! The one that will stay with me my whole life. It made me realise that certain footwear could carry more meaning than just “footwear”. It happened after Amay passed away. Before she drew her last breath, Amay had been struggling with lung cancer for nearly three months. At the time, we were living in a small town. Hoping that we could still save her, we sent her to a hospital in the city. We buried her there when she died. Without Amay, our journey back to our small town was desolate. My heart felt empty, as if there was nothing left for me to hold on to. Everything around me went pitch dark, as if I had been pulled into a black hole. When it was decided that all of Amay’s belongings would be given away to needy families, I acquiesced. I didn’t want to cling to her stuff—after all, I had lost Amay as a person already. Even then, something that belonged to Amay was discovered unexpectedly. A pair of flip-flops. Under Amay’s bed, lying still and quiet in the darkest corner as if they were hiding, were a pair of her flip-flops. They must have been separated from Amay when she was taken to hospital. When I looked at them carefully, I saw that the soles were worn out and the heels were ragged. Amay was a frugal woman who always budgeted carefully and spent wisely. Apart from a new pair of flip-flops for some occasions, she wore these worn rubber flip-flops on a daily basis—when she did household chores and went grocery shopping—for many years. If the straps were broken, she would replace them with new ones herself. If only one strap of her flip-flop was broken, she would keep one new strap for later use. After several years of daily use, Amay’s toeprints were imprinted on the flip-flops. Tears started rolling down as I looked at them. These flip-flops showed me beyond a doubt how Amay went through hard times in her life, and how she endured pain and suffering. That pair of flip-flops I inherited from Amay would stay with me for many, many more years. Since then, I’ve been drawn to stories, memories and lives that could be revealed by well-worn flip-flops. We might change clothes every day, but a member of a low-income household, who could barely afford an extra pair of flip-flops, had to rely on the only pair they had. Flip-flops were a poor person’s comrades-in-arms on a thorny road. Flip-flops gave them strength. They were as close to them as their own skin. “My flip-flops are my fortress!” poet Hla Than declared. After the military coup in February 2021, I collected more intriguing stories of flip-flops and their owners. A small, underdeveloped country suffering from economic asthma under COVID-19 was hit by a rogue political wave. This spring, the future of the nation became as blurry as the spring mist itself. If someone looked far into the future, they would only see a parched land. The military claimed that the 2020 election fraud made the coup inevitable. Prior to the election, “The Sound of Heels,” an election campaign song by the National League for Democracy (NLD), was very popular. It became the NLD’s triumphant anthem following the party’s landslide victory in the election, but it vanished into thin air after the military seized power. The song was dedicated to the State Counsellor, Daw Aung San Suu Kyi, leader of the NLD, to whom her supporters referred as “Amay”. The song was about how her efforts gave Myanmar, an ostracised society under long years of military rule, a chance to step onto the world stage. On 1 February, the clack-clack of heels were silenced by the bang-bang of military boots. Before long, the whole country was completely under the boots. The voices of mourning mothers, the tongue-clicking of dismayed youth, the moaning of farmers out of their stubbled fields and workers out of their factories got louder and louder each day. “Join the CDM now!” As soon as the rallying cry put people on alert, all those different voices merged together—ineffectual whines turned into battle cries reverberating across the sky. If someone had ever questioned whether footwear could be frightening, the answer would have been “yes” if they were military boots. In the first week of the Spring Revolution, civil servants joined the CDM en masse. The main action of the CDM was that no employee should go to work. In some political cartoons, military generals in jackboots trampled doctors, school teachers and workers. “Stop going to office, struggle out of the dictatorship!” was the slogan of the strikers. They warned each other that if people continued to work for the military state, many precious lives, beautiful things and human values would be smashed under the boots. That’s how footwear became a central character in the Myanmar Spring Revolution. There was more to come. Within a week of the coup, thousands of young people took to the streets. In response, the military hired a group of jingoists and staged counter-protests. Some anti-coup protesters started shouting that they were out on the street on their own volition, and that they had not been paid by anyone. To drive home the point that they were from well-to-do families and that they could not possibly be bought, they came to the protests in expensive outfits and shoes. This, however, only highlighted the dire situation of most of their fellow protestors, who couldn’t afford fancy outfits. There were messages on social media condemning some affluent protesters for talking down to people from underprivileged backgrounds, including those hired by the military. In opposing tyranny, people simultaneously learned to smash any form of discrimination based on wealth or class. Day by day, the revolution gathered strength. It soon turned into a nationwide protest of people from all walks of life—rural and urban. Their footfall echoed in the streets. Now street surfaces seemed totally covered by an array of flip-flops and shoes that it would be difficult for anyone to gain a foothold there. Spring was in full bloom. On roads where fallen ones would be laid to rest, columns after columns of rallies continued to march over and over again. One of the non-violent protests was known as “Lace your shoes up!” In the early days of the Spring, security personnel seemed uncertain about whether they should use force against protesters. They tried to push the crowds off the roads, saying the people were obstructing traffic. The youth reacted by making their protests mobile. They moved around in small groups and continued to protest. They crossed the road when the light was green. They stopped when the light turned red. They shouted rally cries. As soon as they had the chance, they sat on the road, lacing up their shoes at a leisurely pace. Policemen watching them were speechless. In the following days, there were “harvesting onion” and “collecting rice grains” movements. Loose onions and grains of rice were deliberately poured out in the middle of a road so everyone could help pick them up and put them back in the bags to annoy the police. Spring flowers of a variety of colours were seen everywhere. New and creative forms of revolutionary activities shone here and there. Some people found fault with these kinds of protests. Young people were not serious, they said. Others pointed out the generation gap. Older people did not understand the state-of-the-art techniques of young people. In reality in the early days of the spring, people of all ages managed to build mutual trust and solidarity. They were full of energy, enjoying the calm before a storm. The fresh, green spring would soon turn into a fully-blown parched summer. The intense heat made wall tiles rise up and crack. A heatwave also pervaded throughout the democratic movement. The forces, standing up hand-in-hand against the junta, were hit with a bloody gust. A volley of gunfire across the sky set a flock of roosting birds on a chaotic flight. A group of soldiers and police chased down the protesters who were retreating into a neighbourhood, and beat them to death like blood-starved beasts. Even the black asphalt road began to weep, blood streaming down all over her face. After blood was spilled, the style of people’s revolutionary art also changed. Each time a group of people were chased by guns and batons, dozens of ownerless flip-flops would be left abandoned on the street. Some flip-flops were upside down, others in the gutter, and many of them unpaired. And yet most of them looked well-worn. When the security forces were gone, people picked them up and organised them in pairs for their owners to come and collect them. The abandoned flip-flops didn’t look great but they could be invaluable to their owners. In this way, I learned, rather accidentally, that flip-flops had always been important witnesses to our revolutions. In the 1988 uprising, flip-flops were scattered everywhere on the road. In the 2007 Saffron Revolution, there were many flipflops drenched in blood. Following the 2015 student protests, hundreds of flip-flops were on the road again. There was even a shoe charity campaign in 2021. It emerged after some people began to question on social media what kind of shoes would be most suitable for protests if they were to escape from violent attacks. A number of shoe donors came forward. In some places, many pairs of “used, feel free to take” shoes in various sizes were on offer. Some people who owned extra pairs of shoes shared them with their comrades. They exchanged metta in sharing shoes. They looked after each other. They became more united, realising that people were cut from the same cloth. On top of physical violence, people also suffered from psychological warfare by the regime. The longer a revolution dragged on, the more volatile revolutionary morale could become. And yet, crackdowns notwithstanding, most protesters decided to continue with their struggle. Some bid farewells to their parents and friends. “In the event that I am killed I donate my organs to anyone in need,” some people wrote in their wills. “Don’t push this person any further, / at land’s end / my flipflops are my fortress,” read the last lines of a poem by Hla Than. People prepared for a last-ditch fight. Oaths—that they would not back down no matter what—were sworn. They glued pictures of the coup leader on the roads and marched on them. The senior general’s face was smeared with hundreds of footprints. The murder of protesters became more commonplace. The number of martyrs multiplied every day. People shed new tears before old tears dried on their cheeks. They were placed under curfew. Internet access was restricted. Arrests and detentions under various charges became more frequent. People felt less and less secure. There were no more grounds for them to take a stand, so it seemed. They became afraid of nightfall. What they feared more probably was the nightfall over their future. One day I saw a photo of a pair of slippers on social media. “These belonged to a mother. They were left during a protest.” They were white and size 37. The straps were white, but not pure white. The left and right slippers must have been thrown into disarray when the wearer was attacked. There was a line of blood on the pavement that stained one of them. I learned that the owner was a 50-year-old schoolteacher. She was shot to death at that spot by the military terrorists. A bullet that hit her hand took her life as she had a heart condition. “She wasn’t feeling very well when she went to the protest,” said her daughter in an interview. The alleged “2020 election fraud” brought dishonour to members of the education department who had overseen the polling stations. That’s why she believed that it was her duty to protest the coup on the front line. Before she left home, she had comforted her daughter that the security forces would go easy and not use violence against school teachers. Sadly, the gun barrel does not discriminate—it was loyal only to the finger that pulled the trigger. One bullet after another shattered our dreams. Karl Marx’s slogan “Proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains,” echoed loudly among the masses. The daughter wept violently over the slippers left by her fallen mother. This reminded me of how I cried whenever I saw my amay’s flip-flops. What of her? Would she become interested in footwear too? In revolutions, footwear is often prematurely parted from its wearers. The group in military boots stood firm, determined to put an end to the civilian resistance. The people had no weapons, nor sturdy shields. Their flip-flops wore thin. Even then, the hot, bloody roads couldn’t be worse than hell. No one seemed to mind the intense heat under their soles. With or without footwear, their way out of hell would be an arduous journey. ∎ Endnotes : Hla Than’s poem was translated by Ko Ko Thett. This essay appeared in Picking Off New Shoots Will Not Stop the Spring: Witness Poems and Essays from Burma/Myanmar 1988-2021 , edited by Ko Ko Thett and Brian Haman, and published by Gaudy Boy in North America, Balestier Press in the UK, and Ethos Books in Singapore. 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

· THE VERTICAL Research · Bombay Saffronizing Bollywood An anthropologist explores Bollywood creatives to trace BJP's carrot-and-stick strategy with Bollywood creatives: both controlling and regulating Bollywood in order to create a consistent and normative film culture that perpetuates Hindutva ideology. Watching You Watching Me. Oil on wood. 36″ Tondo. Shyama Golden (2023). In 2022, India’s Hindi film industry was in the throes of a crisis. Bollywood, as the industry is colloquially known, was still bucking from a pandemic which had injured film industries worldwide. Multiple mainstream movies, helmed by some of the industry’s biggest stars, from Aamir Khan to Akshay Kumar to Ranveer Singh, were failing miserably at the box office. Since the tragic suicide of an actor named Sushant Singh Rajput in June 2020, a rabid social media movement in India had been calling for people to #BoycottBollywood for its alleged complicity in Rajput’s death and painted it as a hotbed of elitism, drugs, and moral bankruptcy. This was coordinated “collusive behavior”, one study suggested, to engineer a frenzy of conspiracy theories. Members affiliated with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), another study found, especially pushed the narrative of Rajput’s death being a “murder”, driving the hashtag #JusticeForSSR to receive over 65 million active interactions in just six months. Amid this political powder keg and socioeconomic crisis, one film gained unprecedented success. A film with no stars, no popular songs, and none of the typical, crowd-pleasing conventions of mainstream commercial Hindi cinema. Released on 11 March 2022, The Kashmir Files claims to depict the 1990 Kashmiri Pandit (Hindu) exodus, but through crucial omissions—of the Indian army’s pervasive presence, unlawful detentions, and rapes of women across religions; well-documented cases of Kashmiri Muslims risking peril to protect Hindu friends ; and the thousands of Kashmiri Muslims who also died and fled Kashmir —creates a dangerously one-sided representation of Muslim violence against Hindus. In one scene, the menacing, kohl-eyed Muslim antagonist Bitta compels a Hindu widow to eat rice soaked in her dead husband’s blood. In yet another, he shreds open a bright saffron kurta off a Hindu woman and publicly brutalises her. The film uses shock value to incite Hindus towards collective anger, humiliation, and anti-Muslim hatred. The Kashmir Files opened to a modest figure of INR 3.55 crores. The following day, however, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally met with its makers and took a picture with them that was widely circulated on social media. “More such movies should be made,” Modi publicly said three days later, praising the film for showing “the truth which has been suppressed for years”. Other BJP leaders also endorsed the film – they organised special screenings and events, while the BJP’s information and technology cell and copious sympathetic media outlets provided incessant buzz and press coverage . The film was also given the coveted tax-free status in several exclusively BJP-ruled states. Though made with a modest budget of only INR 25 crores, with a little bit of “help”, The Kashmir Files eventually collected a whopping INR 247 crores domestically. It was a certified blockbuster. The BJP and Hindutva Founded in 1980, the BJP functions as the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindutva organisation active since 1925. Hindutva—the ideology of Hindu nationalism—conceives India as a Hindu nation, relegating Muslims and other minorities to second-class status. Historically, its ideologues drew inspiration from German Nazism and Italian fascism, while its closest ideological counterpart today is Israeli Zionism . The BJP has independently governed India since it won the national elections in 2014 by interlacing Hindutva with populist rhetoric under the leadership of Modi, a former RSS worker who oversaw an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 when he was the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. His purported victory, according to political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, ushered in a new era for the nation, characterised by weakened state institutions, a distorted electoral process, and sanctioned violence against minorities, transforming India into an authoritarian Hindu state. The Bollywood industry is ultimately highly decentralised, commercially driven, and blockbuster-oriented. Politics seems peripheral to the eternal quest for the elusive box office hit. Then how has the BJP succeeded so profoundly? The Modi government has particularly weaponised the media to fuel Islamophobia. It has widely spread misinformation, enabling what media scholar Shakuntala Banaji has called the “mainstreaming” of intolerance. In his new book H-Pop (2023), independent journalist Kunal Purohit examines how the wider Hindu Right has harnessed popular culture forms such as music, poetry and books to disseminate and entrench Hindutva in popular and mass imagination. In this vein, Bollywood is a crucial fourth frontier. As India’s most prolific and powerful media industry, it is a key source of soft power and plays a crucial role in defining dominant conceptions of nationhood, belonging, and culture. As anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti writes in Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (2013) , Bollywood is also “perhaps the least religiously segregated place in India today where Hindus and Muslims work together as well as inter-marry”. Some of its most successful stars, directors, and other key members are Muslim. Many of its biggest hits over the years have celebrated Indian secularism and interreligious harmony, according to film scholar Rachel Dwyer, from Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), to Veer-Zaara (2004), PK (2014), and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) . Today, a slew of at least 10 brazenly Hindutva propaganda films are swamping Indian voters ahead of the upcoming national elections in May 2024. It is the outcome of many years of moulding and steadily saffronizing India’s Hindi film industry, most aggressively since the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the subject of my master’s dissertation, for which I conducted three months of fieldwork in Mumbai in the Summer of 2023, and conducted several interviews with prominent writers, directors, producers, actors, and journalists of Bollywood. All names have been anonymized in this essay. The BJP has used a carrot-and-stick strategy to control and regulate Bollywood ’s influence: a combination of bullying, along with promoting films that most brazenly perpetuate their Hindutva ideology. Yet for the most part, members of Bollywood have continued to eschew political binaries between left and right, instead seeing themselves as existing outside of the realms of politics and ideology. “The only God,” a veteran film critic and journalist told me, “is the box office.” The Bollywood industry is ultimately highly decentralised, commercially driven, and blockbuster-oriented. Politics seems peripheral to the eternal quest for the elusive box office hit. Then how has the BJP succeeded so profoundly? Fear and Censorship Alongside its elaborate army of online trolls, the BJP has not hesitated to use its hard power on Bollywood. They have incited mobs, engineered police cases, and orchestrated arbitrary arrests. When the Amazon series Tandav released in January 2021, for example, members of grassroots Hindu nationalist organisations filed police complaints against a Muslim actor Mohammed Zeeshaan Ayyub and the showrunners in four different Indian states, alleging offence to Hindu religious sentiments. The crime? A character named Shiva, played by Ayyub, uses profanity while portraying his namesake Hindu deity in a student play. When Amazon petitioned the Supreme Court to protect the showrunners from arrest while these cases were sub judice , this was denied. In another incident on 3 October 2021, inspectors of the Narcotics Control Bureau arrested Aryan Khan, the superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s then 23-year-old son, in a Mumbai port terminal. Despite lack of evidence, the agents imprisoned him for nearly a month before granting him bail, finally dropping all charges in early 2022. “Had a government agency really imprisoned Aryan Khan without proof, as pure intimidation?” questioned journalist Samanth Subramanian in The New Yorker . “The rest of Bollywood, meanwhile, absorbed the news as the most cautionary tale of all: if they could do this to the king, imagine what they could do to us.” In January 2023, the mammoth success of Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan , despite widespread calls for its boycott , not only revived Bollywood’s box office slump but was also touted as a victory over the Hindu Right . The social media boycotts, many in the industry concluded, were all bark and no bite. Subsequent consecutive successes of several Hindi films in 2023— Jawan, Animal, Gadar 2— compounded upon a palpable sense of triumph, with proclamations that “ Bollywood is back ”. But beyond boycotts and the habitually extreme ebbs and flows of the box office, the BJP has remained successful in its attempts at stoking fear and a pervading atmosphere of censorship, one that has now become naturalised in the industry. “You don't just deal with these issues when your film or your show is coming out,” one writer-director-producer said to me. “You're dealing with them while you are writing. There is a psychological aspect to it.” Many key Bollywood members I interviewed shared how their creative process now includes several additional considerations, like avoiding depicting green and saffron colours and any religious symbols and erasing any critiques of the police or politicians in the narrative. This was not the case before even 2020. A screenwriter named it the “chilling effect” – a perpetual state of cowering invoked in the face of the BJP’s “bullying tactics.” “You just have to stay in line,” he reflected, “ That builds a self-censorship inside you.” The New Blockbuster While the BJP suppresses, it also amplifies. In the case of The Kashmir Files , the party’s vigorous promotion of the film created a replicable template for a new kind of unabashedly bigoted blockbuster. In 2023, it was recreated by Sudipto Sen-directed The Kerala Story . Early promotions of the film claimed to tell a “spine-chilling, never told before true story” of 32,000 girls from Kerala who’ve been converted to Islam, manipulated into joining ISIS, and “buried in the deserts of Syria and Yemen”. This claim is demonstrably false , with the makers themselves later backtracking and saying they were showing the “true stories of three young girls from different parts of Kerala”. However, in the film, one character passionately declares to a policeman: “More than 30,000 girls are missing, sir. The unofficial number is 50,000. We all believe that, sir”. Simplistic and unsubtle, The Kerala Story cherry-picks and distorts disparate, extremely rare “true stories” and manipulates them to peddle the Hindu nationalist “Love Jihad” conspiracy theory and construct a heightened sense of fear and distrust of Muslims. In one scene, the protagonist Shalini’s (now Fatima) husband rapes her, using Islam as justification, and later slaps her for protesting as she cries. In another, a bearded Muslim man lays out the plan for love jihad: “Start giving them medicine, get close to them, make them estranged from their families, ... [and] if need be, get them pregnant”. By the end of the film, this plan results in the pregnancy, suicide, and gang rape of these Hindu girls. Like The Kashmir Files , then, The Kerala Story also uses shock value to arouse disgust and hatred towards Muslims in a Hindu audience. Similarly, the film was profusely praised by Modi and several other BJP ministers and declared tax-free in multiple states. Produced with a modest budget of INR 30 crores, it collected a whopping INR 242.2 crore in India, making it another bona fide blockbuster. Bollywood and literature scholar Priya Joshi argues in her book Bollywood’s India (2015) that since the 1950’s, blockbusters have “vitally captured dispersed anxieties and aspirations about the nation” and are a “testament to some of the public fantasies that accompanied the national project”. In essence, she writes, “Bollywood’s blockbusters have conducted a dialogue over the idea of “India””. As India’s new contemporary blockbusters, The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story reflect a nation engulfed in Islamophobia and Hindutva rhetoric. “The only trend that seems to work,” a prominent writer-director-producer admitted to me, “is an anti-Muslim trend.” According to culture studies scholars John Hartley and Ien Ang, audiences for films and any large-scale culture industries are “literally unknowable”, forming what Tejaswini Ganti calls “the ultimate site of unpredictability”. To cope with the inherent uncertainty of the business, members of Bollywood use what Ganti terms “production fictions”—“fluid and flexible discourses” made mostly in hindsight to explain commercial outcomes. Production fictions, for Ganti, primarily function to rationalise inherently random, unpredictable, and inexplicable box office events. Commercial outcome, she explains, functions as a “form of imperfect communication between audiences and filmmakers”—a dialectic of sorts. Riding the Saffron Wave The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story’s unprecedented success has created new production fictions that audiences actually want to watch more anti-Muslim, Hindutva stories, that consumer demand has simply swayed in that direction, and that such films are simply more likely to do better at the box office, not least due to possible, legitimizing promotion by the BJP. Many filmmakers, my interviewees claimed, “are riding on this whole saffron wave”, and many more, they expect, will “jump on the bandwagon” in order to achieve elusive box office triumph. It may be tempting to exceptionalize these films and view them as existing out of the scope of mainstream Hindi cinema, but this is misguided. These movies are only more extreme, brazen versions of an increasingly ubiquitous trend. From historical fiction films about Islamic invaders to cop and war films about fighting Islamic terrorism and Pakistan, Hindutva themes are dominating India’s cultural production and national consciousness. This type of cinema exists on a spectrum. There are those high on testosterone and muscular nationalism, like Uri (2019), Bhuj (2021), and recently, Gadar 2 (2023) and Fighter (2024), which involve masculinized army narratives, enforcing national borders, fighting “invaders”, espionage, violence, and the like. Then there are the rarer, more nuanced films on similar topics, like the female-centred Alia Bhatt-starrer Raazi (2018). Where there are explicitly propagandist, anti-Muslim examples of cinema like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story , there are also more subtly Islamophobic films peddling a quieter poison, like Sooryavanshi (2021), Mission Majnu (2022), and Indian Police Force (2023). Cumulatively, the hard ubiquity of these protecting-the-nation-state-narratives and the pervasive uber–Hindu-patriotism at their core reflects what scholars Edward Anderson and Arkotong Longkumer refer to as the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism. By making Indian-ness synonymous with Hindu-ness, they normalise Islamophobia in public discourse. The BJP has evidently harnessed the uncertainty endemic to the film industry to push it to perpetuate its Hindutva ideology. They are ultimately succeeding at saffronizing Bollywood, not by turning its largely apolitical members into Hindu nationalists, but by influencing market forces to make Hindutva stories more profitable and marginalising dissenting or “deviant” voices. This new political order is increasingly being internalised, naturalised, and taken for granted by industry members, who appear, from my research, all too willing to compromise on their ideals for commercial success. In January 2019, the year of the last Indian national election, a group of Bollywood A-listers, none of whom were Muslim, were invited to meet Modi. They then posted a selfie of all of them together, which instantly went viral on social media. Later that April, Modi sat down for a sanitised, scripted, and avowedly “apolitical” interview with Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar, known for being Hindutva’s poster boy . The same year saw the release of a slew of Hindutva propaganda films, many of which were officially promoted by the BJP , from hagiographic biopics of Hindutva figures like Thackeray and PM Narendra Modi to a film denigrating the opposition Congress party like The Accidental Prime Minister , to a pro-war, ultranationalist action film like Uri . With India heading towards another round of national elections this May, there is a lineup of propaganda films that peddle Hindutva conspiracies, celebrate Hindutva figures, and glorify the BJP while vilifying all its opponents: the Congress, academic institutions, activists, and of course, Muslims. These films share similar conventions: no A-list stars, lower budgets, saffron colour text in their trailers and posters, sensationalist hashtags hinting at conspiracies, and a neo-realist style colour grade. More importantly, they all seek to recreate the template created by The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story , with the BJP and Modi’s promotion, tax-free status, and if they’re lucky, virality and box office glory. The first, Article 370 , exalts the Union Government for removing the eponymous article that conferred special status on Kashmir. Like clockwork, Modi praised the film even before its release. “I have heard that perhaps a film on Article 370 is going to be released this week,” he stated while addressing a rally in Jammu on 20 February 2024. "Good, it will be useful for people to get correct information." The film’s lead actor Yami Gautam shared a video of the speech immediately. “It is an absolute honour to watch PM @narendramodi Ji talk about #Article370Movie,” she wrote on X . Eventually released on 23 February, the film has made nearly INR 80 cr in India and is declared a super hit . More carnage is to follow. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Research Bombay BJP Bollywood Sushant Singh Rajput The Kashmir Files Films Cinema Hindutva Kashmir Shakuntala Banaji Kunal Purohit Censorship Shah Rukh Khan Rachel Dwyer Aryan Khan Samanth Subramaniam Love Jihad Box Office Commercialization Tejaswini Ganti Fascism Ethnography India Advertising Bhuj The Kerala Story Priya Joshi Article 370 Yami Gautam Ien Ang John Hartley 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. 15th Apr 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

· FEATURES Photo-Essay · Sri Lanka Scenes From Gotagogama Early in 2022, the signs of an unprecedented and historic movement in Sri Lanka were already visible. A dire economic crisis and a corrupt and languid government from a political dynasty that had ruled for many years in Sri Lanka bred discontent of unprecedented proportions, leading to the Aragalaya. This photo essay documents some of the earliest days of the protests. A group of protestors wave the Sri Lankan flag on the 10th day of protests at Galle Face Green, unofficially named Gotagogama among locals. EDITOR'S NOTE: In March 2022, I was in Colombo, hosting the Fearless Ambassadors' Residency with our team. Artists had gathered from across South Asia to paint two murals in the streets of Colombo. When we arrived, little did we know that the country would break into one of the biggest protests that it has seen. There were big rallies of people burning party flags and shouting, "Gota Go Back!" A people divided had come together. Years of corruption and divisive politics led the country to one of its worst socio-political and economic crises since independence, resulting in people protesting against the incumbent President and the government. The protests, led purely by the people of Sri Lanka, especially the younger generation, supported by the workers' and students' unions, started in early March 2022 and spread islandwide. Rage in their eyes, they walked hand in hand, ready to take down the government that had left them to face acute shortages of food, fuel, and other basic supplies because of its ridiculous policies followed by the pandemic leaving the country bankrupt. It is no longer only about reform or political change but a matter of survival for the people of Sri Lanka. They were tired. Their life-long savings had been reduced to nothing. There was no petrol or cooking oil. There were long queues everywhere, anger and despair at every nook. They demanded justice for journalists and activists killed in the past and decried corruption and deception from the uppermost echelons of power. The protest in front of the Presidential Secretariat soon turned into a model village called "Gotagogama" (Go Gota Village). While the protests were peaceful, police fired tear gas at the protestors and assaulted them in an attempt to stifle the protests. There were artworks lined up, medical camps, IT support stations, and community libraries, all in one place, as if the people were reimagining every system that existed. Every morning we could see our friends and colleagues plan and participate in rallies and protests. We made posters and stood with them with affirmations such as "Take back our power" and "We are our own leaders" being passed across the streets. There was hopelessness but also a will to dismantle the system. These photographs were taken as part of the first wave of protests that broke out. Much happened after that. A few months later, in June, the people marched into the President's house and took over, watered his plants, picnic-ed in his lawns, slept in his bed, and made memes as a protest. The government changed, the village was taken down, more protestors and activists were arrested, and mysteriously disappeared. Gota Go Gama didn't exist anymore. When work took me to Colombo again later that year, I saw no big protests. Instead, I saw shoulders carrying hopelessness, eyes filled with broken dreams, and a lot of perseverance. People are struggling to get back to "normal." The new guard is no better. It has tried every tactic to crack down on anti-government movements. The real causes of the crisis are yet to be solved. Sri Lanka still awaits an IMF bailout and assurances from China and India, while the people's struggle will continue. Their struggle requires thinking about what has transpired: Harshana Rambukwella's analysis is a strong partner to the photo essay that follows. But one thing is clear: the movement of people in Sri Lanka may have subsided, but something new to Sri Lanka began in 2022. —Sabika Abbas Naqvi, Senior Editor From the earliest days, the youth were a significant driving factor in the protests against the Rajapakse government. A creative representation of the expectations of protestors using the colour red, a signifying motif of the Rajapakse regime. The Rajapaksas have been known to weaponise the colour red and inculcate hate among racial groups through their choice of clothing and colours. Protestors are using this motif against them in an ironic way. The sign translates to: "The oppressed in the queue while the oppressor is in the mansion." With such signs, protestors pointed clearly to dwindling supplies of essential resources among ordinary citizens, while those in power remain unaffected. Many children attended the protests, inciting larger conversations on politics and accountability within families—a first for many Sri Lankans. First rain at the protest site: Determined citizens continued to protest in thunderstorms and heavy rainfall. The breeding ground of Gotagogama, where the largest record of citizens gathered outside the Presidential Secretariat’s office. On March 31st 2022, a protest in Mirihana, Nugegoda (a suburb of Colombo) sparked a chain of organic and interminable protests across the country. The crowd present at this protest blocked a police bus from entering the protest site. 37 people were injured, 53 were arrested. Several journalists were brutally assaulted, with at least 6 arrested by Sri Lanka's Special Task Force. Protestors of all ages hold up signs reflecting the magnitude of the economic crisis in Sri Lanka created by the current government. Pleas to the government to right their wrongs, taken at the largest youth-led protest at Independence Square, Colombo. A figure of Mahinda Rajapakse, then-Prime Minister and Gotabhaya Rajapakse's brother, depicted holding a self-imposed request to be struck by lightning: a popular curse in Sinhalese folklore. A group of nuns join the protest to show their solidarity and dissent against the current government. People continued their fight well into the night, with many Muslims breaking their fast during the holy month of Ramadan coinciding with the beginning of summer. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Photo-Essay Sri Lanka Gotagogama Aragalaya Movement Organization Capitalism Economic Crisis Energy Crisis Galle Face Green Mass Protests Mahinda Rajapaksa Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Low-Income Workers Ramadan 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. 23rd Feb 2023 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

“Take Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun.' Well, it's a working-class family, and it's about upward mobility, but systematic racism is preventing them from having upward mobility. I remember seeing the film first and not even realizing that it was a play. Of course, it's a story about economic apartheid, but I only later saw the resonance in the tradition when I read August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, and later, Lynn Nottage.” COMMUNITY Theatre & Bengali Harlem “Take Lorraine Hansberry's 'A Raisin in the Sun.' Well, it's a working-class family, and it's about upward mobility, but systematic racism is preventing them from having upward mobility. I remember seeing the film first and not even realizing that it was a play. Of course, it's a story about economic apartheid, but I only later saw the resonance in the tradition when I read August Wilson, Amiri Baraka, and later, Lynn Nottage.” VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Bangladeshi Diapora 11th Sep 2020 Interview Bangladeshi Diapora Bangladesh South Asian Theater Working-Class Stories Bertolt Brecht August Wilson Amiri Baraka Lorraine Hansberry Avijit Roy Mel Watkins Black Solidarities 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. How do you give dignity and humanity and a platform for people that are not being represented in the arts, in film, TV, and theatre? 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

· COMMUNITY Panel · Language On the Relationship between Form & Resistance “When I say that language has failed us, I mean that there is no amount of information you can give a society that necessarily means it will be compelled to act.” Panel 2 of the event "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse" held on 30th March 2024. The second panel from our event on 30th March 2024, "Solidarity: Beyond the Disaster-Verse," at ShapeShifter Lab in Brooklyn, New York, which marked the close of Volume 2 Issue 1 of SAAG. Here, Iman Iftikhar, Sharmin Hossain, Maira Khwaja, Kalpana Raina, and Suneil Sanzigir discuss how the varied forms of storytelling they use inform and are informed by their politics, resistance, and solidarity and how they feel it is most useful. This panel picks up from where Panel 1, "What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity?" ends. What follows is a discussion of form & storytelling with: Iman Iftikhar, a researcher, educator, co-founder and manager of Kitab Ghar, an Associate Editor at SAAG, and an editor at Folio Books. Maira Khwaja, a journalist, multimedia producer, and researcher at the Invisible Institute . She is also an Associate Producer of We Grown Now dir. Minhal Baig, April 2024, Stage 6 Films & Sony Pictures Classics. Kalpana Raina, a co-translator of For Now, It is Night: Stories by Hari Krishna Kaul (Archipelago Books, February 2024) Sharmin Hossain, an abolitionist organizer, artist, and the Organizing Director at 18 Million Rising that organizes Asian Americans. Suneil Sanzgiri, a filmmaker, researcher, artist, whose first solo exhibition, Here the Earth Grows Gold , opened at the Brooklyn Museum in October 2023. Photographs courtesy of Josh Steinbauer. SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Panel 1: What do we mean when we talk about Solidarity? SOLIDARITY: BEYOND THE DISASTER-VERSE Quintet Performance SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Panel Language Solidarity Films Film-Making Capital Investigative Journalism Criminal Justice Abolitionism Solidarity: Across the Disaster-Verse Prisons Police Personal History The Petty Self Kashmiri Struggle Translation India Anti-Colonialism Two Refusals Goa Hybrid Multimedia Sham-e-Ali Nayeem Portuguese Nationalism Afro-Asianism Bandung Conference Angola Mozambique Sita Valles Portuguese Communist Party Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola Angolan Liberation Youth/Police Project Act of Listening Stop and Frisk 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. 17th Apr 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

“If you truly believe someone is suppressing you, you can end up in jail for 15 years. So is there really a space for citizen journalism? I truly don't have an answer.” COMMUNITY Storytelling in Post-Aragalaya Sri Lanka “If you truly believe someone is suppressing you, you can end up in jail for 15 years. So is there really a space for citizen journalism? I truly don't have an answer.” VOL. 2 PANEL AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. Artwork courtesy of Hafsa Ashfaq. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. Artwork courtesy of Hafsa Ashfaq. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Panel Colombo 27th Aug 2024 Panel Colombo Aragalaya Storytelling Citizen Journalism Social Media Fiction Media Landscape State & Media Corporate Corporate Media Sri Lanka Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day War Memorials Post-Aragalaya Moment Narratives Complicating the Unity of the Aragalaya Optimism on the Local Level Youth Media Youth Tech Remembrance Mourning State Repression Social Media Crackdown Sentencing Laws Ranil Wickremasinghe Gotagogama Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. The SAAG launch event for Vol. 2, Issue 2 in Colombo, on 7th May 2024, began with a panel introduced by Chief Editor Sabika Abbas. The panel, moderated by Andrew Fidel Fernando, discussed whether storytelling is possible in post-aragalaya Sri Lanka. How do artists and writers of all persuasions deal with the disappeared? How do we face a state that refuses to even let remembrance occur, particularly regarding the events of 18th May 2009, or Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day? How did the events of 2022, the aragalaya in all its optimism, and the sharp break that followed affect the nature of reporting, fiction, social media, and the work of youth tech organizations? The panel included: Kanya D'Almeida, an award-winning writer and podcaster Benislos Thushan, a digital storytelling enthusiast and lawyer Darshatha Gamage, a youth empowerment and development specialist Raisa Wickrematunge, Deputy Editor at Himal Southasian We can't even remember our loved ones. Even regarding May 18th, we simply don't have any war memorials for people to go and mourn, and no national initiatives. Before, people at least went to social media. now it specifically says if you use social media, if you talk against the military, guess what? You'll be put into prison for five years—or more. If you truly believe someone is suppressing you, you can end up in jail for 15 years. So is there really a space for citizen journalism? I truly don't have an answer. 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

"So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money." FICTION & POETRY The Cuckoo Keeps Calling "So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money." VOL. 1 SHORT STORY AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR "The Cuckoo Keeps Calling" by Hafsa Ashfaq. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 "The Cuckoo Keeps Calling" by Hafsa Ashfaq. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Short Story Translation 23rd Sep 2020 Short Story Translation Bengali Bangladesh 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. Translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya MODHU wakes up at dawn and says to his wife, “Say goodbye.” Modina clasps her husband’s hand and says, “Not today. Go tomorrow.” The cuckoo trills from the branches of the koroi tree. Modhu doesn’t know what it means when the cuckoo calls during a spring dawn. He lies back again. Now comfortable, he goes back to sleep. The next day at dawn, Modhu again asks his wife to bid him farewell. Again, his wife says, “Not today, tomorrow.” Modhu again lies down like a good boy. Sleeps comfortably. The cuckoo calls from the tree. Modhu doesn’t hear. He is sound asleep. The cuckoo grows increasingly desperate. Coo. Coo-oo. Coo-oo-oo. Modhu sleeps, he doesn’t hear. His wife Modina lies awake; she doesn’t hear either. But Mafiz hears the cuckoo trilling in this spring dawn. He is not unromantic. He breaks into song: Oh, why do you call to me so early in the morning, oh, little cuckoo of my life? Modina doesn’t hear Mafiz’s song. Mafiz exits his home and gazes at the three-way intersection, the road that people take to reach town. Mafiz doesn’t see anybody taking that road. He walks. He places his foot on the threshold of Modina’s yard and, in a muted voice, calls out, “Brother, Modhu, have you gone to Dhaka?” Modina shoos cows. “Hyat! Hyat, hyat!” “Hey, girl, why are you shooing me?” Modina picks up a wooden stool and throws it at Mafiz. Mafiz sniggers like a jackal and leaves. As he goes, he says to himself, “No matter how many times you cut me, or hit me…” Modhu wakes up hungry. Modina serves him rice and eats as well. Not freshly cooked, steaming rice. Old rice, with water added. As he eats, Modhu asks, “Isn’t there anymore panta-rice left?” Modina bites her tongue in shame. Which means that there is no more panta-rice left. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. “Now I need to go to Dhaka.” Modhu needs to go to Dhaka for pertinent reasons. Modina asks, “Isn’t it hard to drive a rickshaw?” Modhu knows that this is Modina being tender. Modina knows that driving a rickshaw in Dhaka city is grueling. But working the fields was hellish torment, and the wages were poor—merely sixty takas a day. One day in the month of Joishthya, Modhu had almost died while weeding the jute fields belonging to the Mondals. There was no water in the fields, there were no clouds in the sky, Modhu’s back was burning to ashes from the sun, his throat was parched wood, he was desperately thirsty, he was running for water, the solitary plains had become the deserts of Karbala, in the distance, Bacchu Mondal’s new tin shed glinted in the sunlight, there was a new tube-well near the outer yard of the house, Modhu was running towards it, stumbling on the clods of earth in the hoed field, shouting “A drop of water for me, please!” But before he had reached the tube-well, Modhu had tumbled onto the ground, his eyes had rolled back into his head, he foamed at the mouth. Modhu almost died that day. No more, meaning that in Modina’s judgment, because she herself has eaten too much, the panta has been finished before her man’s hunger has abated. Hence, Modina’s shame, hence, her biting of the tongue. So Modhu traveled beyond Kalai, Mokamtala, Bogra, Sirajganj, across the Jamuna Bridge, to the city of Dhaka, two hundred miles away. There he pulls a rickshaw, earns a hundred takas a day, counts that money each night, again and again, can’t settle on one place where he can hide this money. This is how, day after day, for fifteen straight days, Modhu drives a rickshaw. In Kawran Bazar, twelve of these drivers live in a windowless room; with them live twelve thousand mosquitoes; the mosquitoes sing, suck the blood of all the Modhus, and the Modhus all sleep like the dead. At the crack of dawn, when the tired mosquitoes are each an immobile drop of blood, the Modhus wake up; nature calls them. They not only feel the thunderclouds rumbling in their bellies, they hear them as well. They go out in a group, pull the tabans covering their asses over their heads, and they show their naked dark asses in a row as they hunker down at the edge of the Kazi Nazrul Islam Avenue, or some of them in front of the Hotel Sonargaon gate. They wipe their asses with newspapers because there is no water; not only is there a lack of water to clean themselves, the Modhus don’t have water to bathe. For fifteen days straight, Modhu doesn’t wash himself; sometimes the odor of his own body makes him want to vomit, especially when the sun is strong and Dhaka’s skies and air cease to be. This is how it is, day after day, night after night. But what happiness, what success! When Modhu returns to Modina after fifteen straight days, there is at least fifteen hundred takas in his waist pouch. Which means that for at least a month, he neither thinks of Dhaka nor speaks of it. Modhu goes to Dhaka city. The watered rice is finished, there is no more rice left in the house, Modina sits emptyhanded by the derelict stove. A cuckoo trills in a tree; Modina doesn’t hear it, but Mafiz does. It has never happened that a cuckoo sings and Mafiz hasn’t heard it. When Modhu crosses the three-way intersection of the highway and goes towards the upazila town, Mafiz peeks from behind the house. He spots Modina sitting by the stove doing nothing and he begins to joke around. “Brother, Modhu, are you off to Dhaka?” Modina turns her head. Joyous, Mafiz says, “What’s up, Modina?” “What’s your deal?” Modina scolds Mafiz in a solemn manner. “You’re hankering for a beating?” “If you beat me with your own hands,” Mafiz says as he grins with all his teeth and comes forward fearlessly, “my life would be a treasure.” “Go home.” Modina is even more serious. “Do you want a job, Modina?” Mafiz coaxes her. Modina isn’t willing to listen to anything. She threatens Mafiz, “I’m telling you, go.” Mafiz tries to get angry and says, “I’m here to do you a favor without being asked, and you want to shoo me off like a cow?” Modina asks in a serious manner, “What favor?” Mafiz responds with mystery. “You’ll get money, wheat. Want a job?” “What job?” “Shooing goats,” Mafiz says and chuckles. Although he hadn’t intended to laugh. Modina is furious. “Go away, you bastard. You can’t find someone else to joke with?” Mafiz moves fast to try to control the damage and speaks in a very businesslike manner. “Not a joke, Modina, for real! No actual work involved, just shooing cows and goats.” “Explain clearly, what sort of job is this then?” Mafiz explains it clearly. “Haven’t you seen those trees planted on either side of the highway? Those trees need to be guarded so that cows and goats don’t chew them up. That’s the job. They’ll pay cash, they’ll also pay with wheat. You sell the wheat to buy rice. And with the money, you buy beef, tilapia…!” “Stop, stop.” Modina stops Mafiz and suspicion rolls across her eyes and face. She narrows her eyes, creases her forehead, and interrogates him. “Why would anyone give me this job when there are so many people around?” “Why, I’ll arrange it for you. I’ll grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and I’ll beg…” Mafiz pauses for no reason. He can’t find anything else to say. But his plan and his words are quite clear. Still, Modina wants to hear more about this job guarding trees and the means to getting it even more clearly. “Go on, why did you stop?” Mafiz laughs and says, “I will grab the Chairman’s hands and feet and beg: Uncle, give this job to Modina, you won’t find a girl as nice as Modina even if you look and look…” Modina howls with laughter. A cool breeze wafts across the ditch and disappears. From the branches of the koroi tree, a cuckoo calls. Mafiz glances towards the tree and looks at the cuckoo. Then he gazes at Modina’s face and says in a melancholy manner, “Do you know what the cuckoo is saying? Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” “What?” There is a smile on Modina’s face; she knows what Mafiz is about to say. Mafiz says, “The cuckoo is crying. It’s crying and asking, Where did my own little cuckoo bird go?” Modina laughs again. Her laughter enrages the cuckoo in the koroi tree. Mafiz speaks the cuckoo’s mind, “Why do you laugh like that Modina?” “What is it to you if I laugh?” Modina asks cocking her eyebrow like a flirt. “My ribs shatter to bits and my soul wants to fly away,” Mafiz says. Modina laughs, shimmying her whole body. Mafiz looks at the tree but the cuckoo is gone. It has been raining all day in Dhaka; as he pedals his rickshaw Modhu is pretty much taking a shower. After getting drenched all day, all the warmth had left his body. Modhu cannot fathom where his body is finding so much heat in the evening. He feels cold, his head hurts, and soon he begins to shiver. He rolls around on the floor in the dark room, and like a child, he moans, calling out to his mother. It isn’t raining in the village of Modhupur; the moon is visible in the sky and a cuckoo is singing in the branches of the koroi tree. Mafiz stands by Modina’s window, grasping the grill and whispering, “Modina! Oh, Modina!” Scared, Modina scrambles into a sitting position, and spits on her own chest to dissipate her fear, and Mafiz whistles in the air saying, “It’s me, Mafiz!” The power has gone out in Dhaka city. In the box-like room where Modhu rolls on the ground by himself, shivering and moaning, the darkness of hell has descended: Modhu thinks he is dying. In the village of Modhupur, through the gaps in the branches of the koroi tree, slivers of moonlight land on Modina’s window; outside stands Mafiz, like a ghost, and inside is Modina. Modina’s teeth can be seen white in the shadow of moonlight, her eyes are shining, and she is pretending to be angry with Mafiz, telling him she was going to complain to Modhu when he came back, and Modhu would grind Mafiz’s bones into powder and apply it to his body. Modina purses her lips in laughter as she talks, and Mafiz says that Modhu wasn’t coming back to Modhupur anymore, he was going to die in Dhaka. Mafiz tells Modina, “Our fortunes were written together. You have no choice but me, Modina.” Modina slides her arm through the window grill and shoves Mafiz in the chest. “Go home, you stray cow.” Mafiz grabs Modina’s hand in the blink of an eye and says, “You don’t know this, but I know it for sure, Modina. I have you written in my fate and you have me.” Modina feels that Mafiz has lost his head. As Mafiz goes back to his own house, he dreams that Modhu has died in Dhaka. “He’s dead, that bastard Modhu is dead,” says Mafiz, willing Modina’s husband to die as he walks home. Right then, in Kawran Bazar, Dhaka, Modhu is freezing and shivering, and he is calling out to Allah, saying, “Don’t take my life, Khoda. Let me live this time around. I’ll never come back to Dhaka in this lifetime.” The next morning Modhu recovers from his fever; he sees that there is no more rain, the sky is a shining blue, and the buildings are all smiling. Modhu forgets his promise to Allah, and that very afternoon he goes out again with his rickshaw. He recalls the bone-shaking fever from the night before and laughs to himself. That morning, Mafiz places his foot on the threshold of Modhu’s yard and calls out in a low voice, “Brother, Modhu, are you back from Dhaka?” But Mafiz knows very well that if Modhu is supposed to be back fifteen days later, there are still three more days to go. Two days before the day that Modhu is supposed to return to Modhupur, he drops off a passenger in the inner side of Gulshan-2 and goes to grab a cup of tea at a roadside stall. He takes two sips of his tea and turns around to find his rickshaw gone. At first, Modhu doesn’t believe it. He thinks maybe someone has hidden his rickshaw nearby as a prank. But no, it isn’t that simple. The rickshaw has disappeared, meaning seriously disappeared. Modhu goes to the rickshaw owner and describes the situation. The owner points towards Modhu and orders his people, “Tie up that fool.” Before the ones under order had begun the work, the owner himself landed a kick in Modhu’s belly. “You fucking nobody, where’s my rickshaw?” A grunt emerges from Modhu’s mouth, he doubles over and grabs his mouth with one hand. One of the owner’s followers runs over and, almost astride Modhu’s shoulders, he grabs Modhu’s hair, shaking his head and demands, “Say it, you son of a bitch, to which of your fathers did you sell off the boss’s rickshaw?” The boss screams, “First, do him over real good.” Modhu is made over almost into a corpse, and thirteen hundred and twenty five takas, meaning all his earnings, are taken away from him before he is handed over to the police. The police take Modhu to the station and hit him some more in the hope of getting some money, but they quickly realize that not only will no one show up with any money for his release, the owner and his men had already beat him so much that he might very well die in the police station. In which case, the newspapers will start writing about death in police custody, and all those poor-loving human rights organization folks will drum up a furor. The police think about all this hassle and push Modhu out of the station. Modhu can’t walk; he falls onto the street in front of the police station and moans. The police feel inconvenienced and annoyed at this; they load Modhu into the back of a pickup truck, and drive around the city, along this street and that, and they focus their flashlights here and there looking for a convenient spot in which to dump him. As they search, one of them has an idea. “Well, then,” he says to his colleagues, “whose fault is it that we’re going through all this trouble?” They drive the pickup truck with Modhu in the back to the Begunbari house-cum-garage of the rickshaw owner and roar at him, “You, pal, have murdered the suspect before handing him over to the police!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t seem perturbed by the roaring police; he goes inside and quickly returns with ten thousand takas. He tucks it into the hand of one of the policemen and says, “There’s no more cash in the house, saar. Just manage the thing, please.” One of the policemen grows angry. “Is this a joke!” The rickshaw owner doesn’t quite understand what his anger means; still, out of habit, he goes back inside and returns with another ten thousand takas. Then he gets a louder scolding, and a policeman even utters the words, “under arrest.” Therefore, the rickshaw owner goes back inside again, and when he is late in coming back out, the policemen look at each other with suspicion. But before they lose their patience, the rickshaw owner reemerges with a page from his check book. He says, “Saars, an accident just happened. It is my fault, but I don’t want the guy to die. Here, I’ve written out one hundred thousand.” The policeman stops him midway and says, “Pal, you want to survive, then show up at the station tomorrow morning with five hundred thousand in cash. We don’t do checks-fecks.” The rickshaw owner says, “What arrangements for the body?” A policeman answers, “That’s the big trouble right now. What to do with this dead body, we’ve been going around all night…pal, that five hundred thousand won’t cut it. We’ll have to take care of the journalists; we’ll have to take care of the human rights people. Make it six lakhs and be at the station by nine a.m.” But Modhu isn’t a dead body yet. On the floor in the back of the pickup truck, he lies flat on his back with his neck at an angle, peering at them like a weak, sick kitten. There is still a spark of life in his dying eyes. It was the end of night when Modhu was carefully laid down behind a bush in a corner of the Suhrawardy Gardens, from the police pickup truck. Silence descended once the mechanical noise of the pickup truck disappeared in the distance. The silence reigned for a few moments; then suddenly, someone blew on the mosque microphone, and in a voice deep like thunder, began the chant of Allahu Akbar. When the quivering notes of the azaan floated to Modhu’s nearly numb ears, his eyes opened slightly. In the distance, he saw a light tremble. He tried to move one of his hands but couldn’t. He tried to move his legs but couldn’t. Modhu tried to make a noise with his mouth; he forced himself to say, Allah! But Modhu’s voice didn’t echo in the wind. Modhu would die and Mafiz would have Modina forever—this is what is written in Modina and Mafiz’s destinies. Modina doesn’t believe it but Mafiz’s faith doesn’t have an ounce of doubt. But why Mafiz counts the days till Modhu’s return is something only he knows. Two days before Modhu is supposed to come back, which was fifteen days after his departure, Mafiz, once again, stands by Modina’s window and says that Modhu will not return. He is going to die in Dhaka; and because when poor people die that far away, their bodies never make it back, Modina will never see Modhu again. When Mafiz is telling Modina all this, Modhu is rolling back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness on the floor of the pickup truck in the streets of Dhaka. Modina protests the ill-omened, cruel words from Mafiz by scratching his chest and neck until he bleeds. But when Mafiz groans in pain, she covers his mouth with her hand and says, “Oh, does it burn?” When Mafiz sulks and wants to leave, Modina grabs his shoulder again and says, “Come tomorrow! The day after, he’ll be back home!” The next night, before the cuckoo sings in the koroi tree, three ghosts come to Modina’s house. They had whispered to each other as they came down the road that Modhu was gone. “Let’s go and eat Modhu’s wife.” These ghosts only eat people of the female gender; from age eight to fifty-eight, wherever they find a woman at an opportune moment, they eat her. These famous ghosts live in the upazila town; they came to the village of Modhupur after verifying and ascertaining the information that Modhu is absent, and truly they find Modina by herself in Modhu’s house, and when they find her, they begin to eat her. They take turns in eating Modina. After the first ghost, the second ghost, then the third ghost, then the first ghost again. While they eat Modina in turns, at some point, Mafiz shows up. Modina sees Mafiz and whimpers in the hope of getting some help, but one of the ghosts grabs hold of her nose and mouth so hard that not only any noise, even her breath cannot emerge from her. In addition, another ghost grasps her throat with five and five, ten fingers; Modina thrashes around, groans, her tongue lolls out, her eyes want to bug out. Seeing which, Mafiz, a single person, attacks the three ghosts; two of whom pick him up and slam him down on the ground; a grunt emerges from Mafiz’s throat, his eyes go dark; one ghost picks up a half-brick and smashes it down on Mafiz’s head; his skull opens up with a crack, and this encourages the ghost, so he begins smashing the brick down into Mafiz’s skull again and again. Right then, the cuckoo trills in the koroi tree. Ghosts don’t know what it means when a cuckoo sings in a spring evening. ∎ 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 Photojournalist NayanTara Gurung Kakshapati in conversation with Shubhanga Pandey VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Nepal 25th Nov 2020 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 Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. The 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. 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