JOURNALIST Ryan Biller RYAN BILLER is a journalist who covers politics, conflict and climate. JOURNALIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Botany, diaspora, and the entangled legacies of migration, plant knowledge, and colonial collecting proclivities BOOKS & ARTS (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Botany, diaspora, and the entangled legacies of migration, plant knowledge, and colonial collecting proclivities Clare Patrick There are certain phrases that stick with me—even better if they’re in a song—that reference planting seeds in new places. What it might be to plant something and watch it grow, not knowing the lands or the contexts it has been embedded into? Curiously, this sentiment can metaphorically link heroes, victims, and villains of much of migratory history. Colonial exploits continue to transplant and overtake natural vegetation displaced by invasive species. Inversely, guerrilla planting tactics of indentured Mauritian labourers initiated a sense of placemaking, making accessible familiar ingredients while asserting their own agricultural intervention on the land. Go to any British National Trust garden gift shop, and you’ll likely find bundles of seed-related gifts, even “seed-bombs” – seemingly so-named without an ounce of irony or awareness. In Stockholm, there were “seed passports,” and in Cape Town, they’re packaged as “bundles.” Now, perhaps more than ever before, the convergence of environmental awareness, ecological degradation, and global conflict has enabled a heightened recognition of the importance of planting, access to land, and the preservation of soil and heirloom seeds. Continuing lineages of migration with a practice that thinks through seeds, roots, and shoots, and what to do with them as forms, Cynthia Fan is a South African Chinese artist, now based in the UK. With a PhD in molecular plant biology, her work weaves together scientific inquiry and visual expression. While navigating transitions, the anchoring of flowers and their cyclical presence has, for her, become a motif of placemaking. Moving away from home comforts and across oceans, working with plants offers solace and reassurance. “Buying bunches of flowers there became a small ritual that mirrored something I had observed throughout my life”, she explains in her forthcoming collection of essays, Among Willows : “my mother’s weekly routine of bringing home fresh flowers for our house, along with the groceries. Though my surroundings were unfamiliar, the presence of fresh flowers in my room facilitated my adjustment to a very different place to the one I had grown up in.” Portrait, Cynthia Fan by Jesse Navarre Vos Dialogues of duality and precipices of balance recur in Fan’s practice. Perhaps mirroring her own lived history, she moves lightly between disciplines and materials, as if to propose a method of querying rather than asserting one. In gravity-defying floral installations, the structural potential of plants and flowers becomes focal and calls forward a further tilting of perspectives. Straddling scientific inquiry, creative writing, and ephemeral intervention, Fan creates works that centre plants, humans, and their environments in an investigation. She writes about reciprocity. Across the book’s pages, she traces the push and pull of her history through plant analysis, folding it into inquiries around morphological development. RBGE 1 , From Silent Archive, 2024. Leaf scans, installations using found garden materials from the garden, and photography. Balancing culture, migration, history and exploration, her investigation of botany is documented in photographs and installations. These evidence the process of physicalising ideas which gesture and meditate yet remain fleeting. As temporal objects, Fan’s sculptures exist momentarily. In her photographs, sculptural forms are presented within tableaus, set against inserted backdrops that echo a practice of recording and cataloguing, yet are disrupted through the showing of her structures of armatures and clips. The works illuminate an approach to collecting that sits against hegemonic discipline, even resisting preservation through the necessary ephemerality of each work. Clasped into something that can be kept only through documentation, Fan’s practice necessarily evades ownership. The works contend with their plant material qualities, as if poised for musical activation, as if about to dance off as an elfin creature or poised to be turned into one of Rachel Youn’s robotic floral articulations. Using unexpected but familiar materials, Fan raises questions of excursions and voyaging, cultivation and gathering with a kind of intimate observational approach. Highlighting her own proximity to the environment, the works present organic materials within collections to query contemporary relationships to transgenerational concerns of ownership and study. I'm interested in how changing environments impel movement, in turn creating relational narratives and impacting social and artistic discourse. I situate this interest within conversations around diaspora, transnational collaboration, and ecological investigation. In Fan’s work, these themes swirl and echo across her personal experience and the scientific trajectory of her subjects. Where Kapwani Kiwanga’s Flowers for Africa (2020) delineates timelines through decay, gesturing to the futility of politicking among bureaucracies, Fan homes in on impulses of construction and collecting, highlighting colonial histories of ownership through access, cataloguing, and storing. With sculptural investigations of organic form, she uses networks of interaction as a research focus. This approach enables her practice to manifest manifold, across science and art – in exhibitions, installations, and writing. RBGE 3 , From Silent Archive, 2024. Leaf scans, installations using found garden materials from the garden, and photography. Last year, I visited two exhibitions that showcased the delicate precision of Indian miniatures: one at the Met in New York and the other at the CSMVS Museum in Bombay. In thinking between exhibitions, I’m struck by the criticality of contextual reading and how different these exhibitions felt physically. One sweaty and loud in the middle of a heaving city, pumped full of recycled air and extracted wealth. The other, quiet and sticky, with muffled street sounds carried through thick stone and sparse spending. The collecting of objects, seeds, artefacts, artworks, and talismans has long been the work of museums, while the work of care is only now coming into focus, largely thanks to curators and activists who engage contemporary transnational decolonial practices. Thinking about writing this piece, I came across a review by Guardian critic Jonathan Jones of In Bloom , a recently opened exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. “Here is where the story of botany takes flight from science to sensuality, from interest to addiction”, he writes. By noting differing cultural interactions with flowers, Jones points out botanical strategies in the colonial project: “As well as cultivating new species of poppy, the Dutch at the height of their commercial power in the 1600s became obsessed with tulips, which came from the Islamic world and were particularly cultivated at the Ottoman court.” Interactions with these flowers today are weighted by this cultivation and proliferation. Thinking about flowers and their presence, I keep returning to Fan’s practice and the way she prompts questions about engaging with and interpreting the natural world, both globally and hyperlocally. Phormium nets and a single Delphinium , 2024 In Fan’s Silent Archive at the RBGE (2024), she peels back a veil of botanical investigation and preservation in search of origins and context. Where her PhD research pivoted around the Begonia leaf, Fan became preoccupied with the notion of a living Begonia collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh (RBGE) – a plant not indigenous to the region. In creating this series, she opens up a questioning of routes and place, confronting the colonial past and present of the institution in Edinburgh, which continues to house and encase species extracted from their original contexts in the name of scientific method. Of the work, she reflects: “By creating morphologically distorted configurations using bamboo and Begonia leaves, I invite the viewer to question which of these physical states are considered ‘ordinary’ and assess the impact of human involvement within these interactions.” I’m sitting at my window, which overlooks an intersection. At the corner is a bakery, and opposite that is a vacant former tech repairs store. There’s a constant flow of people, families strolling with prams and scooters and various backpacks and balloons; there’s an older woman bundled up and carrying a bushel branch. Waiting for the light to turn is another woman in a navy coat over what looks like a green dress or skirt that flows to just above her boots. I notice these colours because they perfectly complement the buttercup sunshine yellow of the ranunculi and freesias in her arms. An ordinary, fleeting, yet magnificent moment. The flowers might have been daffodils, except Spring appeared so early this year, and all the flowers are being shocked into blooming before shrinking back again as the temperatures swing. It is a bouquet of yellow, with springs of bright green and silver greenery perfectly contrasting the deeper forest colours of her clothing. Her blonde hair wisps around her face, and I watch the sun catch the bunch of joy she’s carrying. A momentary glimpse of a passing passage, yet the colours hit across the block. There are at least four florists within ten minutes’ walk from my apartment, two of them on my street just a few steps from each other. The seasons are traced in the display of wares here, like nowhere else I’ve lived. From blood oranges to Helleborus blooms, the temporality of fleeting lives feels ever-present, while being endlessly celebrated. This living presence of plant lives seems pertinent when considering Fan’s work, both scientific and creative, as her practice dialogues across disciplines. Able to encounter and swerve expected preservations, collections, and records, her practice revels in observations of tiny blooms as they momentarily appear within a landscape. In this approach, she activates knowledge with an observational present, manifesting in a perpetually delicate balance of disciplines. While Iranian tulip motifs contrast the hyperrealism of Dutch Nature Morte vanitas, and the Indian miniatures are made to dance differently in New York while they hold court in Bombay, Fan’s floral sculptures assert a poised suspension. Like an intake of breath, the pieces balance in the precarious querying of place, placement, and ownership. ∎ There are certain phrases that stick with me—even better if they’re in a song—that reference planting seeds in new places. What it might be to plant something and watch it grow, not knowing the lands or the contexts it has been embedded into? Curiously, this sentiment can metaphorically link heroes, victims, and villains of much of migratory history. Colonial exploits continue to transplant and overtake natural vegetation displaced by invasive species. Inversely, guerrilla planting tactics of indentured Mauritian labourers initiated a sense of placemaking, making accessible familiar ingredients while asserting their own agricultural intervention on the land. Go to any British National Trust garden gift shop, and you’ll likely find bundles of seed-related gifts, even “seed-bombs” – seemingly so-named without an ounce of irony or awareness. In Stockholm, there were “seed passports,” and in Cape Town, they’re packaged as “bundles.” Now, perhaps more than ever before, the convergence of environmental awareness, ecological degradation, and global conflict has enabled a heightened recognition of the importance of planting, access to land, and the preservation of soil and heirloom seeds. Continuing lineages of migration with a practice that thinks through seeds, roots, and shoots, and what to do with them as forms, Cynthia Fan is a South African Chinese artist, now based in the UK. With a PhD in molecular plant biology, her work weaves together scientific inquiry and visual expression. While navigating transitions, the anchoring of flowers and their cyclical presence has, for her, become a motif of placemaking. Moving away from home comforts and across oceans, working with plants offers solace and reassurance. “Buying bunches of flowers there became a small ritual that mirrored something I had observed throughout my life”, she explains in her forthcoming collection of essays, Among Willows : “my mother’s weekly routine of bringing home fresh flowers for our house, along with the groceries. Though my surroundings were unfamiliar, the presence of fresh flowers in my room facilitated my adjustment to a very different place to the one I had grown up in.” Portrait, Cynthia Fan by Jesse Navarre Vos Dialogues of duality and precipices of balance recur in Fan’s practice. Perhaps mirroring her own lived history, she moves lightly between disciplines and materials, as if to propose a method of querying rather than asserting one. In gravity-defying floral installations, the structural potential of plants and flowers becomes focal and calls forward a further tilting of perspectives. Straddling scientific inquiry, creative writing, and ephemeral intervention, Fan creates works that centre plants, humans, and their environments in an investigation. She writes about reciprocity. Across the book’s pages, she traces the push and pull of her history through plant analysis, folding it into inquiries around morphological development. RBGE 1 , From Silent Archive, 2024. Leaf scans, installations using found garden materials from the garden, and photography. Balancing culture, migration, history and exploration, her investigation of botany is documented in photographs and installations. These evidence the process of physicalising ideas which gesture and meditate yet remain fleeting. As temporal objects, Fan’s sculptures exist momentarily. In her photographs, sculptural forms are presented within tableaus, set against inserted backdrops that echo a practice of recording and cataloguing, yet are disrupted through the showing of her structures of armatures and clips. The works illuminate an approach to collecting that sits against hegemonic discipline, even resisting preservation through the necessary ephemerality of each work. Clasped into something that can be kept only through documentation, Fan’s practice necessarily evades ownership. The works contend with their plant material qualities, as if poised for musical activation, as if about to dance off as an elfin creature or poised to be turned into one of Rachel Youn’s robotic floral articulations. Using unexpected but familiar materials, Fan raises questions of excursions and voyaging, cultivation and gathering with a kind of intimate observational approach. Highlighting her own proximity to the environment, the works present organic materials within collections to query contemporary relationships to transgenerational concerns of ownership and study. I'm interested in how changing environments impel movement, in turn creating relational narratives and impacting social and artistic discourse. I situate this interest within conversations around diaspora, transnational collaboration, and ecological investigation. In Fan’s work, these themes swirl and echo across her personal experience and the scientific trajectory of her subjects. Where Kapwani Kiwanga’s Flowers for Africa (2020) delineates timelines through decay, gesturing to the futility of politicking among bureaucracies, Fan homes in on impulses of construction and collecting, highlighting colonial histories of ownership through access, cataloguing, and storing. With sculptural investigations of organic form, she uses networks of interaction as a research focus. This approach enables her practice to manifest manifold, across science and art – in exhibitions, installations, and writing. RBGE 3 , From Silent Archive, 2024. Leaf scans, installations using found garden materials from the garden, and photography. Last year, I visited two exhibitions that showcased the delicate precision of Indian miniatures: one at the Met in New York and the other at the CSMVS Museum in Bombay. In thinking between exhibitions, I’m struck by the criticality of contextual reading and how different these exhibitions felt physically. One sweaty and loud in the middle of a heaving city, pumped full of recycled air and extracted wealth. The other, quiet and sticky, with muffled street sounds carried through thick stone and sparse spending. The collecting of objects, seeds, artefacts, artworks, and talismans has long been the work of museums, while the work of care is only now coming into focus, largely thanks to curators and activists who engage contemporary transnational decolonial practices. Thinking about writing this piece, I came across a review by Guardian critic Jonathan Jones of In Bloom , a recently opened exhibition at Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum. “Here is where the story of botany takes flight from science to sensuality, from interest to addiction”, he writes. By noting differing cultural interactions with flowers, Jones points out botanical strategies in the colonial project: “As well as cultivating new species of poppy, the Dutch at the height of their commercial power in the 1600s became obsessed with tulips, which came from the Islamic world and were particularly cultivated at the Ottoman court.” Interactions with these flowers today are weighted by this cultivation and proliferation. Thinking about flowers and their presence, I keep returning to Fan’s practice and the way she prompts questions about engaging with and interpreting the natural world, both globally and hyperlocally. Phormium nets and a single Delphinium , 2024 In Fan’s Silent Archive at the RBGE (2024), she peels back a veil of botanical investigation and preservation in search of origins and context. Where her PhD research pivoted around the Begonia leaf, Fan became preoccupied with the notion of a living Begonia collection at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh (RBGE) – a plant not indigenous to the region. In creating this series, she opens up a questioning of routes and place, confronting the colonial past and present of the institution in Edinburgh, which continues to house and encase species extracted from their original contexts in the name of scientific method. Of the work, she reflects: “By creating morphologically distorted configurations using bamboo and Begonia leaves, I invite the viewer to question which of these physical states are considered ‘ordinary’ and assess the impact of human involvement within these interactions.” I’m sitting at my window, which overlooks an intersection. At the corner is a bakery, and opposite that is a vacant former tech repairs store. There’s a constant flow of people, families strolling with prams and scooters and various backpacks and balloons; there’s an older woman bundled up and carrying a bushel branch. Waiting for the light to turn is another woman in a navy coat over what looks like a green dress or skirt that flows to just above her boots. I notice these colours because they perfectly complement the buttercup sunshine yellow of the ranunculi and freesias in her arms. An ordinary, fleeting, yet magnificent moment. The flowers might have been daffodils, except Spring appeared so early this year, and all the flowers are being shocked into blooming before shrinking back again as the temperatures swing. It is a bouquet of yellow, with springs of bright green and silver greenery perfectly contrasting the deeper forest colours of her clothing. Her blonde hair wisps around her face, and I watch the sun catch the bunch of joy she’s carrying. A momentary glimpse of a passing passage, yet the colours hit across the block. There are at least four florists within ten minutes’ walk from my apartment, two of them on my street just a few steps from each other. The seasons are traced in the display of wares here, like nowhere else I’ve lived. From blood oranges to Helleborus blooms, the temporality of fleeting lives feels ever-present, while being endlessly celebrated. This living presence of plant lives seems pertinent when considering Fan’s work, both scientific and creative, as her practice dialogues across disciplines. Able to encounter and swerve expected preservations, collections, and records, her practice revels in observations of tiny blooms as they momentarily appear within a landscape. In this approach, she activates knowledge with an observational present, manifesting in a perpetually delicate balance of disciplines. While Iranian tulip motifs contrast the hyperrealism of Dutch Nature Morte vanitas, and the Indian miniatures are made to dance differently in New York while they hold court in Bombay, Fan’s floral sculptures assert a poised suspension. Like an intake of breath, the pieces balance in the precarious querying of place, placement, and ownership. ∎ SUB-HEAD Reflections on South African Chinese artist Cynthia Fan's approach to placemaking through botany and the legacies of migration, plant knowledge, and colonial bioprospecting—moving outward from contemporary museum culture to florists, flowers, and the sense of the fleeting that Fan's work attempts to capture. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Installation view, Enso House (London), September 2024 SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Essay Paris Cynthia Fan Museums Museum Culture New York Bombay Environment Botany Material Culture Exhibitions Planting Seeds The Local and Global British National Trust Stockholm Cape Town South Africa Migration Colonialism Guerilla Planting Flowers Visual Art Science Reflection Cyclical Patterns Among Willows Duality Multimodal Floral Installations Ephemeral Art Morphology Sculpture Rachel Youn Kapwani Kiwanga Colonial Histories Discourse Jonathan Jones Ashmolean Museum Metropolitan Museum of Art The Met Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Vastu Sangrahalaya CSMVS Museum History of Botany Colonial Prospecting Bioprospecting Dutch Empire Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh Miniatures Multivocal Practice Art Practice Color Florists Placemaking Care Work Curation CLARE PATRICK is an independent curator and writer who hails from Cape Town. Formerly at NXTHVN , the Norval Foundation , and the Paris College of Art , she currently works at Atelier 11 Paris and No! Wahala Magazine . Her work has been featured in Art Throb , Contemporary And , Vogue , and The New York Times . 1 Jun 2026 Essay Paris 1st Jun 2026 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:

REPORTER Anmol Irfan ANMOL IRFAN is a Pakistani freelance journalist and editor. She works on gender, climate, and media, with a focus on South Asia. She also runs a book club in Karachi. REPORTER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. · THE VERTICAL Reportage · Hong Kong In Hong Kong’s shifting political landscape, diasporic South Asian communities have emerged as key voices within a growing movement to build transnational solidarity, especially in regards to Palestine. Through reshaping activist networks and confronting racial exclusion, South Asians are building new alliances, resisting colonialism, and deepening their commitment to Palestinian liberation. "Khai Hoa" (Bloom) by Hoai Phuong. Shifting Solidarities Building inclusive organizing networks is a fraught endeavor in Hong Kong. For the last five years , residents involved in demonstrations and community events have had to work around the government’s crackdown on civil liberties. For South Asians, the situation is more complex. In addition to dealing with the impacts of COVID-19 policies and the recent National Security Law ( NSL )—specifically implemented to intimidate dissenters—they also have to contend with the implicit racial biases of fellow organizers. It wasn’t until 2023, when people started protesting Israel’s genocide in Palestine, that organizing practices began shifting, with efforts to learn from South Asians’ years of work in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle. While there is still plenty of room for progress, 2023 marked a promising moment of intersectional coalition building in Hong Kong’s political history. In 2019, the government proposed the Fugitive Offenders and Mutual Legal Assistance in Criminal Matters Legislation (Amendment), a bill regarding extradition that allowed criminal suspects to be sent for trial to a number of countries, including the People’s Republic of China, Taiwan, and Macau. In the months that followed, more than a million people took to the streets to protest , citing concerns that the bill would expose people in Hong Kong to China’s judicial system. Protestors clashed with the police, and in the aftermath , faced immense repression; hundreds of activists were exiled, unions were dismantled, and residents left the territory in mass numbers. Amidst the turmoil, citizens found solace in one another, with the term “Hong Konger” becoming a unifying marker of identity for many dissenters. Despite this burgeoning camaraderie, ethno-nationalist tendencies persisted. The newfound sense of community excluded the city’s historic South Asian citizens —a group that came to the region as early as the 1800s, when the British colonized the city. Initially arriving as soldiers in the British army, South Asians eventually became central to setting up key administrative and educational institutions within the territory. However, today, Hong Kongers of South Asian descent still face institutionalized discrimination rooted in a colonial racial hierarchy, colorism, and language segregation. Adnan Muhammad is a Pakistani-Hong Konger who founded a Palestine solidarity group called United For Palestine (UFP) in 2017. Reflecting on his experience organising around Palestine in Hong Kong, he said, “We always felt like we were operating within silos [because] most of the people who came to our events were either Pakistani or Indian, or Muslim [from diverse backgrounds].” Adnan added that during the 2019 anti-extradition bill protests , South Asians and other minority communities could not partake because of the language barrier; most protest materials were in Cantonese. If they did participate, they became “easy targets” for the police due to their ethnicity, the institution's deeply rooted racist attitudes , and, notably, discriminatory “stop and search” practices. This is an observation that Alison Tan, a food designer and organizer, made , too. The Hong Kong-based designer stated, “People have a bit of a mind-your-own-business mentality in Hong Kong, especially in public, but during the demonstrations, you could see people actively looking out for each other,” adding, “Yet, when there were instances of police aggression towards South Asians, no one seemed to step up.” The organizing networks established in 2019 largely dissipated the following year when the pandemic hit. The government imposed 6pm curfews, movement tracking mobile apps, mask mandates, and restrictions on gatherings. In public, an air of self-censorship took root. Citizens felt that they couldn’t have open conversations about the ways these laws were negatively impacting them. The NSL, passed in 2020, made dissent along with community organizing even more difficult. It allowed the Hong Kong government to prosecute individuals with crimes of secession (trying to break away from China), subversion (threatening the government’s power), terrorism (acts of violence), and collusion with foreign organizations. Each of these crimes was vaguely defined—no one really seemed to know what would count as a transgression. By instituting this law, the government was effectively cracking down on civil liberties, including the freedom of speech. Despite the intensity of censorship, Hong Kong citizens did not lose their fervor for dissent. When Israel launched a genocidal attack on Palestine following the events of October 7th, organizing networks slowly began springing back into action. Citizens still didn’t have freedom of assembly, so events started out as small-scale, community-based, and non-confrontational gatherings. Nevertheless, organizers were resolute and made an effort to be intersectional. Following the cancellation of a Palestinian film screening at a community arts studio, solidarity efforts intensified. The events that were previously semi-public went completely underground. During this time, Alison remembers seeing South Asian and Middle Eastern communities taking the lead in filling a crucial gap in people’s knowledge about Palestine. “Most Chinese Hong Kongers do not care, and do not know [about Palestine]. We just don’t have an insight into the way faith, for example, plays a role in the struggle.” For Alison and Adnan, this knowledge gap exists because there has been little exchange and solidarity between movements for Hong Kong’s liberation and those located outside the region. In the past year, however, efforts by groups like United for Palestine have converged their goals with those of other organizing collectives. Under UFP leadership, people joined messaging groups made by South Asian Muslim youth that disseminated information about teach-ins and prayers being held in mosques that helped spread awareness about the history of the Palestinian cause. There were communal events, tucked away from the public eye, where people gathered to talk about grief, frustration, and their commitment to justice. Reflecting on these shifts, Adnan felt that even though their collective began operating in Hong Kong in 2017, “It was only after October 2023 that our efforts began reaching people beyond South Asian and Muslim communities, and people from other communities began to take an interest.” Vera, a Chinese Hong-Konger whose artist studio is located in a diverse neighborhood consisting of Indian, Pakistani, Nepalese, and Chinese residents, shared that his studio’s support for Palestine has brought him and his colleagues closer to their South Asian neighbors. “X, a Pakistani kaifong , who often plays chess with me, visited our space and saw Palestinian flags. Since then, he’s been cooking for us, saying Palestinians are like his brothers and sisters.” This again represents a rare instance of solidarity between communities who live alongside each other but don’t always have common ground to meaningfully interact with one another—a divide that's frequently reinforced by systemic factors, including language differences. At a community mutual aid event in March 2024 that raised 48,000 HKD in donations for Palestine, South Asian students put up a stall selling keffiyehs, mehndi, and other solidarity materials alongside other Hong Kongers who sold miso soup, zines, and second-hand clothing. The event also featured a halal vegan-friendly spread of foods and learning sessions about Islam’s role in the resistance and the Palestinian struggle against colonization. The fundraiser, centered around honoring and learning about Palestinian culture, ended with a moving performance of a song, “My mouth was made for speaking,” by a Hong Kong singer, drawing powerful links between the struggle for Palestine’s liberation and Hong Kong’s own struggle against imperialism. This is not to say that there has not been pushback. Events that have taken place more publicly have been shut down and censored under the pretext of ambiguous complaints. While official reasoning remains unknown, pro-Palestine organizers speculate that the government seeks to avoid friction with pro-Zionist lobbies and maintain a politically neutral—or rather, a conflict-free—environment within the city. Of course, choosing to remain indifferent to a genocide is akin to implicitly siding with the oppressor. In August 2024, after almost a year of community-based events for Palestine, some organizers were able to host a public exhibit showcasing Palestine solidarity posters at Hong Kong’s premier Art Book Fair, “BOOKED,” at Tai Kwun Contemporary. However, two days before the fair was due to begin, the exhibition was canceled without any clear explanation from the management. Pivotally, organizers remain resilient and tactful. Within two days of the exhibition at BOOKED being canceled, they secured an alternative venue and utilized solidarity networks to gather a large number of attendees. Jason, a photographer who has been running a leftist reading club in Hong Kong for the past year, believes this was only possible because efforts related to Palestine revitalized networks of organizing that had been previously quashed. “There was a lot of energy in the city that dissipated [after 2019], and now people have a reason to come together again.” Alison, who was also at the event, said, “Palestine has really brought people from all walks of life together in a really powerful way.” It is hard to say whether these efforts make a dent in the powerful apparatus of settler-colonial regimes that seek to occupy Palestine. But within their own context, these newly formed relationships are allowing communities in Hong Kong to chip away at divisions along racial and ethnic lines.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Reportage Hong Kong Civilian Solidarity Civilian Activism Activism Activist Advocacy Pakistan Free Speech Freedom Palestine Protest Mass Protests Civilian Unrest Liberation ideology Muslim Islam Organizing Ethno-nationalism Liberation Struggle Diaspora South Asia Muslim Organizing Public Space Geography Politics of Ethnic Identity Social Change Tai Kwun Contemporary National Security Law Hong Konger United For Palestine Protest Materials Cantonese Language Language Segregation China Police Action Freedom of Speech BOOKED Multi-ethnic Solidarity Networks 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. 22nd May 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:

NON-FICTION EDITOR Shahzaib Raja SHAHZAIB RAJA is a grassroots political organizer, and researcher-writer based in Islamabad. He is also the founder and chef at Zaiby’s Tacos, a pop-up restaurant and delivery service. NON-FICTION EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Journalist Fiza Pirani in conversation with Editor Kamil Ahsan. COMMUNITY How Immigration & Mental Health Intersect AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Journalist Fiza Pirani in conversation with Editor Kamil Ahsan. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Investigative Journalism Mental Health Climate Change Erasure The Intersections of Mental Health Suicide Contagion Immigration Foreign Bodies Teenagers Personal History Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Interview Investigative Journalism 16th Sep 2020 I’ve been very frustrated by the way that the media portrays suicide. Suicide contagion has been on the rise for teenagers in wealthy, suburban American neighborhoods. Financial prosperity does not protect them from mental illness. But suicide deaths still aren’t really reported on. RECOMMENDED: Foreign Bodies , a Carter Center-sponsored newsletter by Fiza Pirani, centering immigrants with a mission to de-stigmatize mental illness and encourage storytelling. One year after teen's suicide, Georgia father continues the fight , The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Oct 27th, 2018), by Fiza Pirani Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

"For most dissenters in Pakistan, whether it's a movement like the PTM, or journalists critical of the state, the first reaction of the state's representatives is to characterize them as traitors, or funded by foreign governments." COMMUNITY Progressivism in Pakistani Higher Education "For most dissenters in Pakistan, whether it's a movement like the PTM, or journalists critical of the state, the first reaction of the state's representatives is to characterize them as traitors, or funded by foreign governments." Nida Kirmani RECOMMENDED: Questioning the ‘Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality by Nida Kirmani (Routledge, 2013) RECOMMENDED: Questioning the ‘Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality by Nida Kirmani (Routledge, 2013) SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Clare Patrick (Our) Worlds and (Plant) Wisdoms Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Interview Karachi Pashtun Tahafuz Movement Postcolonial Feminist Theory Feminist Organizing Progressivism Deniz Kandiyoti Lyari Sociology Mama Qadeer Refusal of Anthropology Anthropology Baloch Missing Persons Slums Dissent State Repression Statelessness Gulalai Ismail Matiullah Jan Lahore LUMS Urbanization Islamophobia NIDA KIRMANI is the Madeleine Haas Russell Visiting Associate Professor of South Asian Studies at Brandeis University. She is an Associate Professor of Sociology in the Mushtaq Ahmad Gurmani School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the Lahore University of Management Sciences (LUMS), and coordinator of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Minor. She is a leading feminist public intellectual who has published widely on issues related to gender, Islam, women’s movements, development, and urban studies in India and Pakistan. She completed her Ph.D. in 2007 from the University of Manchester in Sociology. Her book, Questioning ‘the Muslim Woman’: Identity and Insecurity in an Urban Indian Locality , was published in 2013 by Routledge. She is currently working on on urban violence, gender, and insecurity in Lyari in Karachi, Pakistan. 27 Aug 2020 Interview Karachi 27th Aug 2020 To be Woman and Hip in Dunya Zara Suhail Mannan 24th Oct Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy Chaitali Sen 17th Dec The Pakistani Left, Separatism & Student Movements Ammar Ali Jan 14th Dec Public Art Projects as Feminist Reclamation Tehani Ariyaratne 29th Nov Syncretism & the Contemporary Ghazal Ali Sethi 14th Oct On That Note:

The aragalaya is an exceptional expression of democratic activism—but it contained contradictions that force us to reckon with its true limits and potential. THE VERTICAL Whiplash and Contradiction in Sri Lanka’s aragalaya The aragalaya is an exceptional expression of democratic activism—but it contained contradictions that force us to reckon with its true limits and potential. VOL. 2 ISSUE 1 OP-ED AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Mural painted as a Rapid Response by the Fearless Collective during the GotaGoGama protest in Galleface, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Courtesy of the Fearless Collective (June 2022). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Mural painted as a Rapid Response by the Fearless Collective during the GotaGoGama protest in Galleface, Colombo, Sri Lanka. Courtesy of the Fearless Collective (June 2022). SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Op-Ed Sri Lanka 27th Feb 2023 Op-Ed Sri Lanka Aragalaya Gotagogama Energy Crisis Economic Crisis Poverty Gotabhaya Rajapaksa Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day Ranil Wickremasinghe Contradiction Teachers Movement Movement Organization Movement Strategy Precarity Postcolonialism Doughnomore Commission Universal Franchise Ethnocracy Sri Lankan Civil War Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Islamophobia Easter Sunday Bombings of 2019 Lee Kwan Yu Mahathir Mohamed Technocracy Agricultural Labor Agriculture Agrarian Economy Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna Sinhala Nationalism Majoritarianism Accountability 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 we begin to make sense of the events of the past several months in Sri Lanka? A country that was ranked as a “middle-income” nation and had one of the highest standards of living in South Asia, now faces economic oblivion. What is truly stunning is the rapidity with which this national tragedy unfolded. Of course, this all says a great deal about the social and economic precarity that neoliberal policies force upon entire populations, who become unwilling victims of an insidious nexus between the instrumental interests of political and corporate elite. And all this has indeed been said frequently. But amidst its dizzying journey to national catastrophe, Sri Lanka also bore witness to a spectacular people’s movement—the aragalaya (“protest” in Sinhala)—which unseated a cabinet of ministers, a prime minister, and ultimately the all-powerful executive president of the country. However, almost equally swiftly the ‘democratic’ gains of the aragalaya have been rapidly undermined and the discredited political culture which the people’s uprising has begun to reconsolidate. The aragayala was a historic first for many reasons. It succeeded in breaking the vicious cycle of patron-client politics which often distorts electoral democracy in the country—with impoverished populations being mobilized on the promise of political largesse. It transcended—if temporarily—ethnic and religious divisions that have fueled conflict in Sri Lanka. It provided a space for youth activism rarely visible in the political mainstream. And it also provided a rare space for alternative cultural expression, including a visibly active LGBTQ community. One could cautiously argue that the aragalaya represented the emergence of a sense of democratic citizenship that has been rarely visible in Sri Lanka’s postcolonial history, despite Sri Lanka’s long tradition of electorally sanctioned democratic transitions of power at regular intervals. But since July 9th when the aragalaya peaked, forcing the executive president Gotabhaya Rajapaksa to flee the country and subsequently resign, the historic gains of the struggle have been rapidly reversed. A parliament, dominated by the ousted president’s party, the Sri Lanka Podu Jana Peramuna (SLPP), supported the election of Ranil Wickremasinghe—a deeply unpopular six-time prime minister—as executive president, resulting in a situation where the very political forces that were rejected by the aragalaya and had seemingly lost their legitimacy rapidly reasserted themselves. Wickremasinghe, a canny and expedient politician, swiftly undermined the aragalaya through two strategies. One was to unleash a wave of state repression with arbitrary arrests and abductions, severely undermining the “liberal democratic” image Wickremasinghe has been careful to cultivate throughout his career. The other strategy has sought to undermine the legitimacy of the people’s movement by characterizing it as a form of anarchy: a deeply conservative and reactionary discourse which has unfortunately found some resonance in society, particularly among segments that have an instrumental motive for backing Wickremasinghe, who they believe will bring economic stability. Democracy, or something like that All of which begs the question: how can the rapid reversal of the aragalaya gains be explained? Given the seeming rapidity with which the aragalaya arose and its apparently equally swift decline, the nature of the aragalya and what it represents in terms of Sri Lanka’s democratic history requires closer scrutiny. The characterization of the aragalaya as a form of anarchy can be traced to a conservative political culture where mass politics, despite regular elections, has had an ambiguous status. Sri Lanka received universal franchise in 1931, ahead of all of its colonial peers. But from the very outset Sri Lanka’s political elite argued against universal franchise, worried about its implications for their authority. They instead argued for a restricted franchise and expressed deep reservations about the ability of the “people” to act with political responsibility. But when the Doughnomore Commission recommended universal franchise in 1931, despite elite objections, the political elite scrambled to work around it by building ethnically and religiously partisan voter bases rather than work towards a more democratically enlightened citizenry. This effectively resulted in the beginnings of a system of patronage politics, and at the same time laid the foundations for an ethnically polarized political culture that has bedeviled the country since independence. Unlike in neighboring India where the political elite were able to mobilize people through an anti-colonial agenda and develop a sense of pan-Indian identity (despite its Hindu-centric nature), Sri Lanka’s elite politics in the period leading up to independence in 1948 failed to articulate such a Sri Lankan identity. In post-independence Sri Lanka, therefore democratic politics easily translated into majority rule, which some commentators have dubbed a form of “ethnocracy”. Although transitions of political power in Sri Lanka have taken place through regular electoral cycles, the minimalist operation of democracy masked a deeply illiberal political culture. One dimension of this illiberality is in how the entrenched culture of Sinhala majoritarianism in the country has marginalized minorities—initially the ethnic Tamil community, and more recently the Muslim community. Sri Lanka’s thirty-year militant conflict where a faction of the Tamil minority fought for an independent state was a direct outcome of this illiberal democracy where the electoral domination of the Sinhala numerical majority led to a distorted rationalization and normalization of majority rule. At the same time, the post-independence Sri Lankan state was unable to establish a system of social and economic justice, an inability which perhaps explains the two armed insurrections among the Sinhala youth in the 1970s and 1980s. Both uprisings were brutally suppressed, and the state’s violent response to the Sinhala youth mirrored how it dealt with Tamil militancy, even if the ethnically biased nature of the state resulted in a more insidious form of state violence against Tamil militancy. In post-independence Sri Lanka, democratic politics easily translated into majority rule, which some commentators have dubbed a form of “ethnocracy”. In Sri Lankan political history the two Sinhala youth uprisings and the Tamil secessionist movement stand as the three most significant people’s uprisings against the state. All three were violent in nature, advocated the use of militant force to overthrow and challenge the state, and were also ethnically marked and geographically confined to a particular territory of the country. While all three uprisings emerged from what might be called a “democratic deficit” in the country’s political mainstream, their ambition could not be termed as truly democratic because of the militant and authoritarian nature of the politics they represented. It is against this history of armed insurrection as well as a warped and majoritarian, albeit seemingly smooth system of electoral politics, system of democracy, that one has to read the aragalaya —both its potentials and limitations. Gotabhaya’s Many Sudden Turns of Fortune The broader context to the emergence of the aragalaya lies in the historic mandate Gotabhaya Rajapaksa received in 2019, winning six point nine million votes—the largest presidential electoral margin in Sri Lankan history. Islamophobia in the aftermath of the Easter Sunday bombings of 2019 and nakedly racist political campaigning shored up a narrative of existential fear in the Sinhala majority and drove them in their millions to vote for Rajapaksa. But these developments were also accompanied by a non-ethnically marked discourse about a need for substantive political change. While Gotabhaya is a member of the Rajapaksa dynasty, headed by his charismatic two-time president and elder brother Mahinda, he was marketed as the “non-political” Rajapaksa option: the technocrat who successfully guided the war effort in 2009 as Defense Secretary and therefore, an efficient apolitical candidate. Gotabhaya was seen perhaps as the Sri Lankan incarnation of a fusion between Malaysia’s Mahathir Mohamed and Singapore’s Lee Kwan Yu—an efficient, nationally committed, benign authoritarian figure who would herald tough and efficient governance. It's easy to forget that in 2019, Gotabhaya’s overwhelming victory was hailed as a historic harbinger of change. Sinhala youth embraced his win enthusiastically. Days after his election a spontaneous nation-wide graffiti campaign (with the exception of the North) transformed wayside walls into colorful, if cheesy, murals themed variously on Sri Lanka’s past grandeur as well as visions for a future of prosperity. And yet, just two years from this moment of hope, it was arguably the same youth who gathered in their hundreds of thousands to oust Gotabhaya—disillusioned by consistently failing governance and holding him accountable for robbing them of their future, a disillusionment that resonated in the slogan “Gota Go Gama” (Gota Go Home). In this context, both Gotabhaya’s election within the recognized democratic system, and his ousting outside the electoral process, need to be seen as democratic. From a liberal perspective, the election of Gotabhaya—an heir to the dark and poisonous racist legacy of the Rajapaksa dynasty— was an illiberal outcome. But it was nonetheless an expression of the people’s will. Similarly, the ousting of Gotabhaya through a popular uprising, when no constitutionally sanctioned alternative was forthcoming is also democratic in its broadest sense. Undoubtedly, extreme economic precarity fueled the aragalaya . However, amidst the solidarity forged by precarity, less instrumental political desires also found a space of expression. This was facilitated by the formlessness of the aragalaya which had no distinct political leadership, no distinct political ideology, and no singular authorship, thus making it possible for diverse forces to coalesce under its banner. Set against the history of Sri Lanka’s armed insurrections sketched above, it is also easy to see why the aragalaya is an exceptional moment of democratic activism. But the very diversity of the aragalaya also meant that many contradictory forces operated within it, and these contradictions, in turn, speak to the limits of what the aragalaya represented. This formless nature of the aragalaya can be attributed to its beginnings. The most immediate precursors of the aragalaya were two protest movements that emerged during the early phase of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s presidency. One was a nationwide teachers’ struggle for better wages, which morphed into a national movement questioning the legitimacy of the government and its inability to be receptive to just demands by important segments of society. This was closely followed by a disastrous overnight attempt to switch to one hundred percent organic farming, resulting in farmers across the country protesting as yields plummeted and the entire agricultural sector was plunged into crisis. These two protest movements shook the seemingly solid foundation of the Gotabhaya Rajapaksa government. The rising public dissatisfaction swiftly accelerated as the economic crisis worsened and daily essentials such as fuel, cooking gas and increasingly medicines became scarce. Soon enough, the burden of economic mismanagement was laid squarely on the doorstep of the Rajapaksa presidency. In this context, both Gotabhaya’s election within the recognized democratic system, and his ousting outside the electoral process, need to be seen as democratic. On March 31st, a series of small-scale protests and candlelight vigils—a largely urban middle class phenomenon—that had emerged throughout Colombo and its suburbs turned into a more confrontational mode. Thousands congregated in the vicinity of Gotabhaya Rajapaksa’s private home in the suburbs of Colombo. In the ensuing confrontation with the police scuffles broke out, a bus was torched, and teargas was used. The government attempted a swift crackdown with mass arrests, but the legal community ensured that the protestors were provided protection. Mobilization for this protest happened mainly through social media—which became the default medium for protest mobilization and dissemination of aragalaya news. While the earlier teachers' and farmers' protests had provided the political backdrop, it was this urban activism that created the immediate conditions for the emergence of the aragalaya in a more visible and concrete form. Soon after the events of March 31st, the “Gota Go Gama” village became established as a group of youth began occupying the area in front of the Presidential Secretariat at Galle Face in the heart of the downtown business district in Colombo. As protests continued throughout the country, Gota Go Gama (or GGG) became their focal point. From its outset some organized groups with connections to political parties like the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna (JVP), the leftist party which launched the two insurrections against the state in the 1970s and 80s, and the Frontline Socialist Party (FSP), a breakaway group from the JVP were present at GGG. In addition, the Inter University Students Federation (IUSF), which is connected to the FSP and has a large following among undergraduates at state universities, along with other trade unions and activist groups, were also present. However, none of these groups could claim ownership over the aragalaya . Instead, a group of youth with no distinct political affiliations essentially managed the GGG site. This politically non-partisan nature of the GGG site allowed it to flourish with a library, an IT facility, a kitchen, and even a cinema hall. At the height of its existence, GGG resembled a mini-township. Aragalaya Culture The cultural dynamics of GGG are immensely significant. GGG allowed a rare mainstream space for alternative cultural expression. The musician Ajith Kumarasiri, a man with a strong presence in the avant-garde musical scene in Sri Lanka but long shunned by the musical establishment, played a prominent role with regular musical performances. Alongside the music, installation and performance art that were both thematically and formally daring found expression at GGG. This cultural dynamic of the aragalya challenged the hegemonic Sinhala national cultural form—a form that is deeply conservative and has little space for marginal identities like the LGBTQ community. The “alternative” cultural identity of GGG also facilitated two significant events. One was the Mullivaikkal Remembrance Day which falls on May 18th and marks the deaths of hundreds of Tamil civilians in the closing stages of the war in 2009. This commemoration, effectively banned by the Sri Lankan state due to its human rights implications, and an uncomfortable truth that the Sinhala community had long ignored, was marked at GGG. What made the event all the more significant was the participation of Buddhist priests—often seen as guardians of Sinhala nationalist ideology—in addition to clergy from other faiths such as the iconic Catholic priest Father Jeevantha Peiris who was closely identified with the aragalaya. The other significant event was a Pride March at GGG on 25th June—a mass celebration of sexual identities that was an unprecedentedly public challenge to the traditional political and cultural mainstream of the country. Still, even while the “alternative” cultural vibe of GGG and the aragalaya forcefully flagged a progressive movement, this aspect of aragalaya culture also jostled for power alongside more established undercurrents. For instance, GGG had a hut for disabled soldiers that promoted the narrative of the ranaviruwa (or war hero), a trope that was weaponized by the Rajapaksas to delegitimize minority political demands and shore up their patriotic Sinhala credentials. Supporters of the controversial war-winning miliary officer-turned-politician Sarath Fonseka were also present in the space of GGG, as was the Buddhist priest Omalpe Sobitha who has a history as a hardline Sinhala nationalist. Their presence could be read in multiple ways. It could mean they strategically maintained a presence within the aragalaya to ensure that its political power remained within the ambit of Sinhala nationalist interests. At the same time, it could also be read as a softening of Sinhala nationalist ideology, potentially creating more space for alternative political and cultural imaginaries. These competing interests and ideologies that were united under the common aragalaya banner of “Gota go Home” became more starkly visible in the aftermath of the July 9th “victory” when protestors stormed several key state buildings, including the Presidential Secretariat, resulting in Gotabhaya Rajapaksa fleeing the country and eventually resigning from the presidency. With the common enemy gone, the competing interests of the various groups represented within the aragalaya began to emerge more explicitly. The FSP began promoting a narrative that the aragalaya had delegitimized the entire parliamentary system in Sri Lank a and that a radical restructuring of the state was necessary. This was also accompanied by a strategic insertion of the notion of a “people’s council,” a seemingly progressive proposal that empowers more direct citizen engagement with governance but was also an obviously strategically motivated bid for the FSP to become relevant in mainstream politics. One narrative that has since emerged is that the aragalaya was hijacked by organized political interests: an accusation that was directed towards the FSP and the JVP by middle class and professional groups that backed the aragalaya but are deeply suspicious of revolutionary politics and subscribe to the more conservative “liberal democratic” discourse discussed above. This narrative of hijacking was not entirely new: indeed, it dovetailed into the incidents of May 9th—early days of the movement—when politically backed thugs, emerging from a meeting at the Prime Minister’s official residence, Temple Trees, unleashed brutal violence on GGG while the police and armed forces did little to intervene. In the aftermath of this unprovoked attack, there was a national backlash, with over 70 houses and properties belonging to politicians thought to be involved in the attack on GGG being torched. One parliament MP was also killed when a mob attacked his vehicle. This is an interregnum in which fluid new political forms are emerging. The spectacular democratic mobilization that emerged during the height of the aragalaya and the spirit of active citizenship it unleashed remains—as does the economic precarity that fueled it. The drivers of the violence of May 9th are unclear. While there was a spontaneous backlash immediately following the attack on GGG, what followed later in the night with systematic burning of politician’s houses had a much more organized dynamic, but it is unclear to this day who drove this wave of attacks. The vigilante violence was of course repudiated by the youth of the aragalaya. But in a deeply conservative political culture where revolutionary political action is viewed with extreme suspicion, May 9th marked a loss of innocence for the aragalaya. Today, there is a sustained campaign to discredit the aragalaya by associating it with violence, a pernicious characterization of it as a “breakdown of the rule of law.” It is frustrating to insist on the fact that given Sri Lanka’s violent history, the aragalaya was indeed a peaceful expression of the people’s will, and not a violent, anarchic movement. It was a creatively conceptualized and executed protest movement that maintained non-violence as a cardinal principle. And it is precisely this peaceful nature of the protest that frustrated a national security apparatus used to the mobilization of force and violent confrontation to suppress dissent. What now? The aragalaya in the form it took since March 31st and lasted more than 100 days appears to be over now. The last of the physical structures that marked the GGG occupy site have been dismantled. As of now, the repression of the Ranil Wickremasinghe government along with its insidious narrative to discredit the aragalaya as a form of anarchy appears to be at least temporarily succeeding. But if we’ve learned anything over the past few months it is that this moment in Sri Lanka is a moment of significant and unpredictable transition. This is an interregnum in which fluid new political forms are emerging. The spectacular democratic mobilization that emerged during the height of the aragalaya and the spirit of active citizenship it unleashed remains—as does the economic precarity that fueled it. The aragalaya marked a distinct turning point in Sri Lanka’s political history as a population used to exercising their franchise within a system of political patronage, at least briefly, transcended instrumental political motivations to demand democratic accountability. The aragalaya also rattled a complacent political class that imagined it was secure within an entrenched patron-client political system. Politics in Sri Lanka are unlikely to follow a familiar script in the aftermath of the aragalaya. The traditional political party system of the country has confronted a significant existential challenge due to the aragalaya . A vast majority of the political parties and their representatives in the current parliament have had their legitimacy undermined—they are held accountable for the current state of the country and they are associated with a corrupt political culture. However, what the swift reversal of fortunes in the aftermath of the aragalaya suggests is that Sri Lanka’s long-entrenched culture of political impunity with deeply institutionalized structures of corruption, nepotism, repression, and violence are unlikely to change easily. If the brief hope kindled by the aragalaya is to survive and be fashioned into viable and sustained political change, it will take committed and long-term engagement by a variety of actors, including civil society and progressive political parties, as highly contingent socioeconomic conditions continue to shape the politics of the moment. Whether anything of this nature will emerge is anybody’s guess. ∎ 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

On 20th July Shahidul Alam wrote another dispatch from Dhaka, detailing the list of student demands posed at the Bangladeshi government, whose signatories and organizers have since gone missing. The scale of the massacre is presently unknown but seemingly far larger than media outlets report. | · THE VERTICAL Opinion · Dhaka Update from Dhaka II On 20th July Shahidul Alam wrote another dispatch from Dhaka, detailing the list of student demands posed at the Bangladeshi government, whose signatories and organizers have since gone missing. The scale of the massacre is presently unknown but seemingly far larger than media outlets report. bichar hobe (ink drawing and digital collage, 2024), Prithi Khalique EDITOR'S NOTE: On 21st July, SAAG received another dispatch from Shahidul Alam, following th e one published o n 20th July. Publication was postponed due to security concerns for those involved. We chose to publish this piece without thorough fact-checking due to the urgency of the situation, the internet blackout, and news reports that do not correspond with eyewitness accounts. —Iman Iftikhar The government has paraded several student leaders on TV, and multiple versions of the demands made by student coordinators of this leaderless movement, are in circulation. The original list of demands was circulated in an underground press release yesterday. The signatory, Abdul Kader, has since been picked up. Another coordinator, Nahid Islam, was disappeared by over 50 plainclothes people claiming to belong to the Detective Branch. A third coordinator, Asif Mahmud, is reportedly missing. The Prime Minister must accept responsibility for the mass killings of students and publicly apologise. The Home Minister and the Road Transport and Bridges Minister [the latter is also the secretary general of the Awami League] must resign from their [cabinet] positions and the party. Police officers present at the sites where students were killed must be sacked. Vice Chancellors of Dhaka, Jahangirnagar, and Rajshahi Universities must resign. The police and goons who attacked the students and those who instigated the attacks must be arrested. Families of the killed and injured must be compensated. Bangladesh Chhatra League [BCL, the pro-government student wing, effectively, the government’s vigilante force] must be banned from student politics and a students’ union established. All educational institutions and halls of residences must be reopened. Guarantees must be provided that no academic or administrative harassment of protesters will take place. That the Prime Minister publicly apologises for her disparaging comments about the protesters may seem a minor issue, but it will surely be the sticking point. This PM is not the apologising kind, regardless of how it might seem. Regardless of the three elections she has rigged. Regardless of the fact that corruption has been at an all-time high during her tenure. Regardless of the fact that hundreds of students and other protesters have been murdered by her goons and the security forces. Regardless of the fact that she has deemed all those who oppose her views to be “Razaakars” (collaborators of the Pakistani occupation army in 1971). Regardless of all that, there simply isn’t anyone in the negotiating camp who would have the temerity to even suggest such a course for the prime minister. There is a Bangla saying, “You only have one head on your neck.” The ministers do the heavy lifting. They control the muscle in the streets and manage things when resistance brews. The previous police chief and the head of the National Board of Revenue did the dirty work earlier. They were easily discarded. But the ministers are seniors of the party, and apart from finding suitable replacements, discarding them would send out the wrong message within the party. Making vice-chancellors and proctors resign is also easy. These are discardable minions. The perks are attractive, and there are many to fill the ranks. The police being dumped is less easy, but “friendly fire” does take place. Compensation is not an issue. State coffers are there to be pillaged, and public funds being dispensed at party behest is a common enough practice. BCL and associated student organisations in DU, RU, and JU to be banned is a sticking point, as they are the ones who keep the student body in check and are the party cadre called upon when there is any sign of rebellion. A vigilante group that can kill, kidnap, or disappear at party command. For a government that lacks legitimacy, these are the foot soldiers who terrorise and are essential parts of the coercive machinery. Educational institutions being reopened is an issue. Students have traditionally been the initiators of protests. With such simmering discontent, this would be dangerous, particularly if the local muscle power was clipped. The return of independent thinking is something all tyrants fear. The cessation of harassment is easy to implement on paper. It is difficult to prove and can be done at many levels. Removing the official charges will leave all unofficial modes intact. Of all these demands, it is the least innocuous, that of the apology, that is perhaps the most significant. It will dent the aura of invincibility the tyrant exudes. She has never apologised for anything. Not the setting up of the Rakkhi Bahini by her father, Sheikh Mujibur Rahman , nor the paramilitary force that rained terror on the country and, in all likelihood, contributed to the assassination of seventeen members of the family in 1975. Not Rahman’s setting up of Bakshal, the one-party system where all other parties, as well as all but four approved newspapers, were banned. And certainly not the numerous extra-judicial killings or disappearances and the liturgy of corruption by people in her patronage during her own tenure. An apology to protesting students, while simple, would be a chink in her armour she would be loath to reveal. The body count is impossible to verify. I try to piece things together from as many first-hand reports as I can. Many of the bodies have a single, precisely-targeted bullet hole. Pellets are aimed at the eyes. As of last night, those monitoring feel the number of dead is well over 1,500. International news, out of touch as the Internet has been shut down and mobile connectivity severely throttled, say deaths are in the hundreds. The government reports far fewer. Staff at city hospitals are less tight-lipped and can give reasonably accurate figures, but not all bodies go to hospital morgues. An older hospital in Dhaka did report over 200 bodies being brought in as of last night. The injured who die on the way to the hospital are not generally admitted. Families prefer to take the body home rather than hand them over to the police. Bodies are also being disappeared. Police and post-mortem reports, when available, fail to mention bullet wounds. My former student Priyo’s body was amongst the missing ones, but we were eventually able to locate him. A friend took him back to his home in Rangpur to be buried. Constant monitoring and checking by activists resulted in the bullet wound being mentioned in his case, though a deliberate mistake in his name in the hospital’s release order that was overseen by a police officer attempted to complicate things. Fortunately, it was rectified in the nick of time. Getting the news out has become extremely difficult, and coordinating the resistance is challenging. This piece goes out through a complicated route. I’ve deleted all digital traces to protect the intermediaries. The entire Internet network being down because of a single location low-level attack, as claimed by the technology minister, appears strange for a police state that boasts of being tech savvy, but there are other strange things happening. Helicopters flying low, beaming searchlights downwards, and shooting at people in narrow alleyways—this is spy film stuff. But it is not stunt men down below. Even teargas and stun grenade shells become lethal when dropped from a height. The bullets raining down have a more direct purpose. A student talks of the body lying on the empty flyover being dragged off by the police. A friend talks of an unmarked car spraying bullets at the crowd as it speeds past. She was lucky. The shooter was firing from a window on the other side. A mother grieves over her three-year-old senselessly killed. Gory reports of human brain congealed on tarmac is a first for me. The curfew has resulted in rubbish being piled up on the streets. The brain will be there for people to see, perhaps deliberately. The raid at 2:20 am earlier this morning in the flat across the street was also in commando fashion. The video footage is blurry, but one can only see segments of the huge contingent of Rapid Action Battalion (RAB), heavily armed police, and others in plainclothes. They eventually walked out with one person. Perhaps an opposition leader. My memories of the genocide in 1971 seemingly pale in comparison to what is happening in the streets of Bangladesh today. Ironically, it was the Awami League that had led the resistance then. The revolutionaries have now become our new occupiers. They insist it’s still a “democracy.” APCs prowl the streets. Orders to shoot on sight have not quelled the anger, and people are still coming onto the streets despite the curfew. There is the other side of the story. Reports of policemen being lynched and offices being set on fire are some of the violent responses to the government-led brutality. Some of the damage to government buildings could possibly be the act of paid agent provocateurs hired to tarnish the image of the quota protestors. There are other instances, less extreme, but just as serious. The impact on the average person, as most working-class Bangladeshis live day to day. Their daily earnings feed their families. As a prime minister desperately clinging on to a position she does not have a legitimate right for and a public who has been tormented enough to battle it out. They are the ones who starve. Private TV channels vie with the state-owned BTV and churn out government propaganda, and I watch members of the public complain but am unable to forget all the average people I spoke to. The rikshawalas and fruit sellers with perishable goods express solidarity with the students. Their own immediate suffering, though painful, is something they are willing to accept. She has to go, they say. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Opinion Dhaka Quota Movement Fascism Student Protests Bangladesh Awami League Sheikh Hasina Police Action Police Brutality Economic Crisis 1971 Liberation of Bangladesh BTV Zonayed Saki Internet Crackdowns Internet Blackouts BSF Abu Sayeed Begum Rokeya University Abrar Fahad BUET Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology Mass Protests Mass Killings Torture Enforced Disappearances Extrajudicial Killings Chhatra League Bangladesh Courts Judiciary Clientelism Bengali Nationalism Dissent Student Movements National Curfew State Repression Surveillance Regimes Repression in Universities Bangladesh Chhatra League Demands Sheikh Mujibur Rahman Corruption Rakkhi Bahini Democracy The Guise of Democracy Rapid Action Battalion July Revolution Student-People's Uprising 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. 21st Jul 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:

India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. · FEATURES Features · Mumbai India’s archive of the COVID-19 pandemic is incomprehensive, and a rhetoric of ghostliness has been employed by the political class to deem insignificant the lives of migrant laborers most affected by the pandemic. Analyzing the statistics, politics, and poetics of disappearance in the case of India’s migrant crisis extracts truth from darkness; this work seeks to translate forced absentia into a historical record in its own right, relaying a clear manifestation of alienated labor amid global calamity. Thomash Changmai An indescribable journey of survival (2022) CGI (blender 3d) X Marks The Ghost The first case of the COVID-19 pandemic in Mumbai, India was reported on 11th March , 2020. Thirteen days later, a nationwide lockdown was announced – bringing India to a grinding halt. Except that is not what actually happened. Those who could afford it shielded themselves within their homes, rations packed to the rafters and N-95 masks stockpiled. For the over 600 million internal migrants in India –those whose homes are in villages but who work in informal labor markets in the city–the lockdown announcement triggered a mass exodus. Droves of people fled the cities they worked in to return to their rural communities, largely on foot. With their wages coming to an abrupt standstill, they left deeply fearful of what lay ahead. Much has been written about the lack of statistics regarding this exodus. Many lives were lost to hunger, fatigue, heatstroke and, of course, disease. Yet “ there are no numbers ,” Santosh Kumar Gangwar, then Indian Minister for Labour and Employment, stated the same year when asked to enumerate the tragedy’s scale at a national level. Migrant workers have already long been considered “fringe figures” within the Indian urban social network. With the rupture caused by the pandemic, their existences have only been further invisibilized. The initial guidance provided by India’s central government was to ensure that migrants did not leave the cities. However, given the sheer volume of panicked people desperate to rush back home, this guidance was impossible to actually implement. When the stay-where-you-are orders failed, the center tried creating quarantine camps at state borders .This, too, did not prove successful. Attempts to build a database of the departing migrants were also abandoned halfway. The pandemic was already seen as an arithmetic problem : a problem of numbers where a solution could purportedly be reached by just pinning down the right formula. This notion was only compounded upon by the use of terms such as “rate of infection” and “doubling time” in the media, which made the actual lack of data and data collection efforts regarding migrant workers result in a particular kind of disenfranchisement. Despite the magnitude of the exodus, India’s national mood was to dismiss the migrants’ long march as simply an aberration. Since the event was caused by the deep distrust that migrants displayed in the state’s ability to provide them with safety nets, any acknowledgment of the tragedy’s nuances would misalign with the government’s narrative of complete control over the crisis. A Vocabulary of Ghostliness In retrospect, the lack of numbers eventually became an object of interrogation. A particular trope came into play within the media discourse surrounding the migrant exodus: a vocabulary of ghostliness. Words used to describe the state of the migrants essentialized their identities to solely their forced absence from the labor market. News reports in publications like the BBC and God Save the Points , spoke of “ghost workers” and “ ghost towns .” In a Telegraph India essay written shortly after the first lockdown, academic Manas Ray describes the migrant workers trekking to their native villages as “ghost mutineers stalking the country in search of a home.” “These lives are, of course, not entitled to the city's culture and taste, to its intellect and leisure; these are gross lives,” Ray writes further. The word “gross,” a mathematical term for excess, is specifically used here to capture the unnumbered migrants’ lives. “What seems like a relatively stable social order is constantly being modified, added, subtracted, maintained, and cleaned by the invisible labor force mostly made of migrants,” Ray continues. While terming the migrants as ghosts evokes a certain poignancy, it also dehumanizes and homogenizes a diverse, marginalized group of people. Although the tragic scale of the exodus could not accurately be enumerated at the time, it is now possible to retrospectively analyze Indian media archives and give an approximate number to the verbiage that was in play. As an intervention into this archive of absence, I formulated a dataset containing newspaper (e-paper) stories that appeared when I ran a Google Search with the following phrases as keywords: Migrant Haunting Mumbai Migrant Ghost Mumbai Covid Haunting Mumbai Covid Ghost Mumbai I delimited the database both spatially and temporally. The city of Mumbai became a stand-in for the urban, chosen for being the country’s financial capital. Temporally, I limited the selected articles to those published between 15th March, 2020 and 10th August, 2021. I downloaded the text from these news articles from relevant pages of search results as raw TXT data and eliminated the duplicate results, making sure that each webpage was represented only once in the TXT data file. This data was subsequently input into a Word document where, using the “Find” feature, I located the words “haunt” and “ghost,” highlighting the sections they appeared in. I further transferred these sections to columns to see the frequency of the words and the contexts they were phrased within. Finally, I color-coded repeated phrases, numbering each occurrence. My goal through this exercise was to locate patterns within this particular media discourse which evoked a metaphoric vocabulary of ghostliness. The data I analyzed for these patterns encompassed roughly 106,000 words in total, including headlines, by-lines, articles, conjunctions, and prepositions over the four keyword searches. It is important for me to say that by no means did I conduct a perfect academic study which incorporated all the work that has been produced relating to the migrant exodus. The formulation of the data set was restricted by resources, paywalls, and availability of time so it is meant to be indicative rather than declarative. Therefore, this is not a quantitative analysis, but a qualitative exploration of the use of a specific vocabulary and its implications for understanding a certain media archive. Why is it necessary to think about the vocabulary used to describe this, or any, tragedy? First, without numbers, we have no other way to understand the scale of the lives lost and destroyed. Secondly, understanding language allows us to understand who is permitted to be forgotten or remembered, and who media discourse renders invisible. The absence of numbers of lives can then be understood by investigating who is made a ghost–who is seen to haunt rather than live as a full human being–and how. When we cannot account, we must articulate. There is a long tradition in the social sciences of using the vocabulary of ghostliness and hauntings to explain societal relations. In a 1919 essay titled The Uncanny , Sigmund Freud describes how any change in the way society functions bring with it a sense of deep unsettlement. Karl Marx takes this even further at the beginning of the Communist Manifesto , where he terms communism itself as a specter haunting Europe, invoking ghosts to signify societal churn. More recent scholarship in anthropology has built on tradition, hypothesizing how societies often tell ghost stories as a way of integrating uncomfortable memories into the cultural fabric. In scenarios with no actual historical record or archive, hauntings and ghosts become a means to combat “ institutional forgetfulness. ” With the COVID-19 pandemic and migrant crisis in India, we can see deliberate institutional forgetfulness in action. Here, the vocabulary of ghostliness becomes a tool to grasp public sentiment. Even three years removed from the worst of the pandemic, which disproportionately ravaged the Global South , understanding its impact on human lives is to grapple with ambiguity–intellectual, pragmatic, and experiential. It is to be faced with something that is not quite historical, not quite normal, and not quite visible. It is to engage with a ghost. Gloomy Sunday, 2023, courtesy of Thomash Changmai. In the depths of the night, a lonely soul weeps, Tangled in shadows, where despair seeps. A heart, heavy with the weight of solitude's sting, A melody of sorrow, a dirge I sing. (Inspired by the song Gloomy Sunday composed by Hungarian pianist and composer Rezső Seress and published in 1933.) Accounting, Articulating Within my data set, the word “haunt” in various conjugations (haunted, haunting, et cetera) occurred 29 times. The term was used most often to describe images of the migrant exodus and how the city folk were haunted by the visuals of it. To ascribe a numeric value: out of the 29 references, 11 referred either to “haunting images” or “haunting visuals.” As anthropologists Benjamin Smith and Richard Vokes write in their 2008 article “ Haunting Images ,” the photograph and the ghost “are never far apart.” The two can be interchangeable in their function, “standing in for relationships that cannot or can no longer be performed directly,” and share the similarity of embodying present absences . They further activate an “emotive force through their representation of absent objects, kin and places.” Images from the pandemic are rife with this emotive force as they represent moments of death and tangible devastation, evoking significant grief, and by extension of the vocabulary of haunting, horror. Through images, citizens of the city are forced to reckon with the structural collapse of urban labor networks. In my study, a second pattern emerged: the use of the word “haunting” to describe memory and recollection. There were four references to being “haunted by memories.” Comparing it to the previous pattern, where photographs produced ghosts, memory here is where the lost “normal life, or the remembrance of normality,” resides. During the pandemic, the phrase “new normal” was commonplace. In such an unprecedented time, recent memories felt historical, and indeed haunting given the sense of loss they invoked. The word “ghost” itself appeared in my study 28 times. 21 of these occurrences concerned a place, with 11 referring to “ghost towns,” nine to “ghost villages,” and one to the ghostly nature of abandoned roads. In media discourse during COVID19, the term ghost town was clearly used to describe the emptied urban centers, while ghost villages referred to the rural settings where the population had previously been sparse due to internal migration. During the pandemic, these became the sites of return for the working class who were seeking safety and familiarity. In five instances across the data set, “ghost” was an epithet transferred to the laborers themselves leaving the cityscape. Coupled with migrants already being othered and alienated, this deployment of the language of haunting only served to further exacerbate their marginalization and cement their erasure. A 2022 report from the World Health Organisation suggested that India’s real COVID toll may never be known. According to the report, more than 4.7 million people – a nearly ten times higher statistic than estimates by Indian officials – might have died from COVID-19 infection between 1st January, 2020 and 31st December, 2021. It is not a stretch to postulate that the missing numbers from India’s state statistics might be deaths that occurred in villages or at the homes of those who could not afford medical treatment. Data paucity within India is not a new phenomenon, and it is well-documented that the ones left out are often from marginalized communities . A poem written by Indian filmmaker Kireet Khurana during the lockdown turns attention to the migrant crisis with the following stanza: “Hum to pravasi hain, kya is desh ke vaasi hain? Agar nahi hain insaan to maar do abhi, de do farmaan” (We are migrants, are we (not) residents of this country? If we are not human, kill us now, Give the command) The stanza juxtaposes “ pravasi” (migrant/traveler) with “ desh ke vasi ” (residents of the country). The value of this wordplay comes from the etymology of the terms and their meanings. The root word for both pravasi and vasi is the same–“vas” meaning abode. Therefore, a vasi is one who is of the abode, so its negative suffix pra(vasi) implies one who is separate or othered from their place of abode. However, the term desh ke vasi (residents of the country) often signifies being a citizen. Citizenship and residency are therefore interchangeable in this context. The poem questions the disenfranchisement of migrants by declaring “if we are not human, kill us now,” criticizing the political leadership's unwillingness to provide migrant laborers with humane means of returning to their native communities. In his celebrated essay collection Politics of the Governed , historian Partha Chatterjee categorizes individuals afflicted by infrastructural disenfranchisement as occupying a fringe space. In this fringe or margin, they reside within the city but cannot rely on it for social safeguards. Thus, they are rendered beyond the comfort of being a vasi . This only became more explicit in India through the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite numerous assurances by the government that migrant workers would be safe within the cities , a precedent of haplessness and lost livelihoods led to large masses attempting to leave cities. For most migrant workers, the uncertainty of a treacherous journey back home was preferable to relying on the state for sustenance. The distrust created by constant erasure simply could not be erased by politicians’ promises and press broadcasts. Specters and those who witness David Torri , an anthropologist of shamanism, describes the ghost as first and foremost a story: it “needs listeners more than it needs witnesses.” As researchers charged institutionally with the creation of knowledge, the onus is upon us to bear witness to the lacunae within archives and acknowledge our failures in listening to those who fall through the chasms of documentation. India’s COVID-19 migrant exodus was a humanitarian crisis born out of rightful mistrust held by laborer populations towards urban administration. The ghosts resulting from this exodus, and further exacerbated through media discourse, are not new, but have always existed – the pandemic simply made visible the cracks within India’s neoliberal urban apparatus. Indian cities have continued to grapple with their failure to integrate migrant laborers into their social and cultural fabric in the three years since the pandemic. Despite the significant cost to human life, there has been no socio-political change aimed at remedying the gap between those seen as citizens of the city, and those essentialized as mere bodies for labor. “I felt betrayed twice: by society, because no one around me lent a hand – my landlord kicked me out – and by the state,” a construction worker from Kanpur, Ram Yadav, said in a 2022 documentary made by The Guardian . At the time of the lockdown, he vowed never to return to the city he’d left. A few months later, however, he had no choice but to head back to Delhi. By November 2020, large sections of migrant workers , much like Yadav, had returned to the cities they had left. There was no newfound love for the urban–just desperation in the face of limited job opportunities within rural communities. The disenfranchisement they continue to face is deeply institutionalized. Within most archives their experiences are secondary. The fact that there are no numbers is potent; the state does not account for the working class body, neither in life nor death. In life, they have no stability or voice in the functioning of the very urban centers that rely on their migrant labor; in death, they are merely erased. This erasure reaffirms migrant workers as Chatterjee’s term of fringe figures, or outsiders to the city’s social and cultural fabric. Devoid of agency, the migrant becomes the object of urban anxieties, rather than a subject experiencing them. The city is thus simultaneously run by migrants yet haunted by their absence, with the urban populace haunted in particular, albeit at a comfortable distance, by migrants’ trauma. In other words, the laborer is subject to the whims of the megacity and those who administer it. They become the “other,” pitied by middle-class citizenry, yet still not seen by them as human or equal. As Jacques Derrida puts it in his book Specters of Marx (1994), disjunctures in society, like pandemics, make apparent the anxieties of a place, and the “ghosts” that emerge here are testimonies to alienated labor. By reconciling these specters through scholarship, at the least, we can move forward towards marking the absences within existing records. It is an attempt to integrate significant institutional failure into cultural memory. The production of knowledge is never perfect, but the use of alternative vocabularies as interventions allows us to pinpoint deliberate erasures. Fully understanding the effect of a crisis, of course, does not encompass just metrics, even if imprecise, for its impact. Yet, it is an honest start. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Features Mumbai State Government Narrative Internal Migrants Migrant Laborers Ghost Workers State Erasure Vocabulary of Ghostliness Data Paucity Shamanism Complicity Cosmopolitanism Displacement Alienation Institutional Forgetfulness Precarity Refugees State Modernization Narratives Archive Pandemic Kireet Khurana Migrant Traveler Health Epidemic Town and Gown Rural Urban Media Discourse India COVID-19 Archive of Absence 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 Nov 2024 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. 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Artist and activist-scholar Aqui Thami, in conversation with Comics Editor Shreyas R Krishnan. | Interview · COMMUNITY Interview · Indigeneous Spaces Rethinking the Library with Sister Library Artist and activist-scholar Aqui Thami, in conversation with Comics Editor Shreyas R Krishnan. Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. I really wanted to rethink what a library could mean, and show that most libraries are funded by monies that come from the exploitation and relocation of indigenous peoples. [Sister Library] is what comes out of that. RECOMMENDED: Support Sister Library , the first ever community-owned feminist library in India, here . SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Interview Indigeneous Spaces Feminist Spaces Decolonization Community Building Community-Owned Public Space Sister Library Sister Radio Kochi-Muziris Biennale Dharavi Bombay Underground Indigenous Art Practice Indigeneity Zines Pedagogy Public Arts Public History Archival 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. 21st Oct 2020 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:

In Mizoram, new geopolitical and security measures are dismantling long-standing community bonds and obstructing essential trade in a region accustomed to fluid boundaries. These controls lay bare the disruptions to daily life wrought by political decisions on both sides of the Indo-Myanmar border. In Mizoram, new geopolitical and security measures are dismantling long-standing community bonds and obstructing essential trade in a region accustomed to fluid boundaries. These controls lay bare the disruptions to daily life wrought by political decisions on both sides of the Indo-Myanmar border. Manglien Gangte, Untitled (2021). Digital collage. Artist Indo-Myanmar Border AUTHOR · AUTHOR · AUTHOR 14 Oct 2024 th · FEATURES REPORTAGE · LOCATION Crossing Lines of Connection In April, C. Lalpekmuana, a 58-year-old resident of Zokhawthar on the Indo-Myanmar border in Mizoram, was grieving the death of his grandmother, Lianthluaii. The 91-year-old, who suffered from asthma, had succumbed to asphyxiation the day before. She had been a resident of Thingchang village in Myanmar’s Chin State. Lalpekmuana believes her death could have been avoided if the Assam Rifles, responsible for overseeing India’s border with Myanmar, had allowed her to cross and access medical treatment in India. However, she was denied entry following the Indian government’s decision, under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, to scrap the Free Movement Regime (FMR) in February. According to India’s Home Minister, Amit Shah, this was done to “ensure the internal security of the country” and “maintain the demographic structure of India’s North Eastern States bordering Myanmar.” The FMR had previously allowed cross-border movement without a visa for up to 16 kilometres for communities living on either side. It also permitted those near the border to stay in the neighbouring country for up to two weeks with a year-long border permit. In 2018, the Modi government renewed this arrangement in a cross-border movement agreement with Myanmar, recognising the historical ties among these communities—only to revoke it earlier this year. Besides Mizoram, the 1,643 kilometre Indo-Myanmar border extends through three other northeastern Indian states: Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, and Nagaland. For centuries, communities on both sides have maintained deep ethnic and familial ties. The Chins in Myanmar are ethnically related to the Mizos in Mizoram and the Kuki-Zo in Manipur, a state currently embroiled in ethnic conflict between the Kuki-Zo and Meitei tribes. Across the border, many residents of Zokhawthar have immediate and extended family in the villages of Khawmawi and Thingchang, located 1.7 and 22 kilometres away, respectively. The people in these villages share the same myths, legends, and folklore that fill the air in Zokhawthar. “A mother in Khawmawi and Thingchang most likely sings the same lullaby to her child as a mother does in Zokhawthar,” says Lalrawngbawla, a member of a Mizo volunteer group. “We are so close that most people on the other side know those from Zokhawthar by name and face.” The lore and camaraderie extend along the Tiau River, which snakes through both India and Myanmar. Lalrawngbawla, whose house overlooks the shallow Tiau flanked by the green foothills of the Chin and Lushai hills, affirms that while the river has served as a de facto border between the two nations, it has always united the Chins and Mizos. “Children on either side would make paper boats with enclosed messages and let the river carry them to their friends,” he mentions, smiling. “This has been a favourite pastime since childhood.” The recent development, however, has alarmed locals, with tribal communities voicing that the termination of the FMR is hurting them. It was this arrangement that allowed Lalpekmuana and other Mizos to visit Rih Lake, a pilgrimage site about five kilometres into Myanmar from Zokhawthar. “With the FMR scrapped, we are now barred from visiting our holy lake which binds the Kuki-Chins and Mizos together,” Lalpekmuana laments. Locals are also troubled by New Delhi’s plan to construct a USD 3.7 billion fence along the Indo-Myanmar border. Many we spoke to fear that this proposed fence could further cripple the local economy, which relies on cross-border trade. In Zokhawthar, over 400 of the town’s 501 families are directly involved in cross-border commerce and labour for their livelihoods, according to a trade union leader. Any disruption to trade across the Tiau bridge and river would plunge them into a financial crisis. “After the Lok Sabha election this year, the Assam Rifles sealed the border for a while . No goods were allowed in or out,” states 24-year-old Lalhnehzova, a Mizo labourer in Zokhawthar who spends the better part of his day unloading trucks arriving from Myanmar. “Fencing means starvation to us.” Courtesy of the authors. A Lasting Colonial Legacy After the defeat of the Burmese army in their first war with the British in 1826, the regime was forced to sign the Treaty of Yandabo with the British East India Company. This pact ended the Burmese occupation of much of the northeastern region, including Assam, which then included present-day Nagaland, Arunachal Pradesh, and Mizoram, leading to their annexation by British India. Almost a decade later, in 1834, British officer Captain R. Boileu Pemberton drew a line to separate colonial India from Myanmar, now known as the Pemberton Line. However, the Chin-Kuki-Zo and Mizo tribes, who predominantly live in the hills of northeastern India and present-day Bangladesh, were not consulted during the demarcation. This line has since caused distress for these tribes that share connections and links that traverse the "imaginary border" and reject the idea of “colonial boundaries,” according to stakeholders from the tribal communities. During an interview, Lalmuanpuia, president of Zokhawthar’s village council, explains to us how the Mizo and the Chins have suffered since the colonial boundaries were drawn. “Our people were not given the option to choose between the countries, nor were we consulted before the demarcation,” he comments with emotion. “The issue has remained at a stalemate ever since.” His views are echoed by the chief of the Longwa village in Nagaland, which is also split between India and Myanmar. The first breakthrough in resolving the colonial border issue came after both India and Myanmar gained independence from British colonial rule. In 1948, Myanmar’s first Prime Minister, U Nu, introduced the Burma Passport Rules , allowing passport and permit-free entry for indigenous nationals of neighbouring countries up to 40 kilometres from the border. Two years later, Jawaharlal Nehru’s government responded by amending India’s passport rules , allowing similar cross-border movement for tribes along the Indo-Myanmar border. Since then, cross-border movement between the ethnic tribes of the two nations—which later formed the basis for the FMR—has continued, albeit with occasional suspensions due to the rise of militancy and multiple revisions, the latest being in 2016 . However, these measures have not dispelled the sense of coloniality associated with the border among locals. “A border demarcation that split communities on both sides was a part of colonial cruelty by the British,” explains Jangkhongam Doungel, who teaches political science at Mizoram University. “The scrapping of the FMR and the fencing are extensions of that colonialism for these communities.” Courtesy of the authors A Counterproductive Measure Soon after Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government announced the abolition of the FMR, the governments of Mizoram and Nagaland quickly passed resolutions against the suspension in their assemblies. However, the Indian government upheld its decision, citing reasons such as safeguarding internal security and managing the influx of Myanmarese refugees into India to justify freezing the FMR. Moreover, while India’s northeast may be prone to security concerns from insurgent groups in Myanmar, experts argue that fencing the entire border will be costly and “counterproductive,” given the security forces' dependence on the locals living along the border. Angshuman Choudhary, an associate fellow specialising in Myanmar and northeast India at the Centre for Policy Research (CPR) in New Delhi, tells us that the army relies on ethnic communities living along the border for various military arrangements, including cooperation to manage the border and intelligence gathering against insurgents. “Such a move may alienate these communities from the army,” he observes, noting that the fencing could cause “significant social and political turbulence along the border, leading to new forms of discontent that might escalate into anti-state violence.” Another challenge to erecting a fence along the border is the region’s hilly terrain. “Unlike India’s frontiers with Pakistan and Bangladesh, the Indo-Myanmar border region is mountainous and forested,” Choudhary adds. The decision to erect the border fence has met with stiff opposition from hill-dwelling indigenous communities and insurgent groups . Zo Reunification (ZoRO), a Mizoram-based civil society group advocating for a unified Chin-Kuki-Mizo region, has even taken their protest to the United Nations. An Empty Response to Meitei Demands Kuki-Zo civil society groups, as well as experts we spoke to, contend that the actual motivation for ending the FMR was to satisfy the demands of the Meitei political class in Manipur. According to the narrative popular among Meitei nationalists, the “illegal immigration” of the minority Kuki-Zo community from Myanmar has been the flashpoint driving the ethnic crisis in Manipur. Since violence erupted between the Kuki-Zo and Meiteis on May 3, 2023, the state has reported over 225 deaths, most of them Kuki-Zos, and approximately 60,000 people have been internally displaced. The BJP-led N. Biren Singh government in Manipur has long advocated for freezing the FMR as part of its efforts to curb immigration . Since the Tatmadaw seized power in Myanmar in 2021, more than three million Myanmarese have fled to neighbouring countries, according to the United Nations. India has also seen an influx of Myanmarese refugees, including Rohingyas . At least 70,000 refugees from the Junta are now living in India, with over 36,500 granted asylum in Mizoram. However, Singh’s government has taken a hostile stance towards these refugees. India’s former ambassador to Myanmar, Gautam Mukhopadhaya, challenges the justification of eliminating the FMR over the refugee crisis, stating that it “creates the very conditions it purports to counter.” “In fact, the state government has exploited the presence of a small group of refugees to brand the entire Kuki-Zo population in Manipur as ‘illegal migrants,’ and the centre has tacitly followed suit.” Mukhopadhaya’s concern resonates with many refugees we met at a camp in Zokhawthar. For 42-year-old Zarzokimi, the suspension of the FMR is undoubtedly a result of Meitei supremacism. She recounts how Singh’s government “cruelly deported” her family members who sought asylum in a Manipur border town after the coup. “If Mizoram can take us in, why can’t Manipur?” she asks. “The FMR removal is just another way to divide the Kuk-Chins from the Mizos.” Meanwhile, as India’s Home Ministry pushes forward with fencing in Manipur and Arunachal, communities along the border are confronted with the brutal imposition of a frontier designed to fracture the ties they have held close for generations. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 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. Reportage Indo-Myanmar Border Mizoram Free Movement Regime (FMR) Settler Colonialism Colonialism India Myanmar Northeast India Manipur Assam Rifles Thingchang Meitei Kuki Modi Mizos Tribes Indigeneity Terrain Centre for Policy Research CPR Zo Reunification State & Media Majoritarianism Tribal Conflict Kuki-Zo Scheduled Tribes Politics of Ethnic Identity Refugees Insurgency Civil Society State Government Narrative AFSPA Indigenous Spaces Ethnically Divided Politics Sister States Local vs. National Politics Precarity Zokhawthar Tiau River De Facto Border Rih Lake Commerce Arunachal Pradesh Nagaland Colonial Boundaries Displacement Internally Displaced Persons Mizoram University Chin-Kuki-Mizo region Rohingya Asylum 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: