· BOOKS & ARTS Profile · Quetta The Limits of Documentation While Pakistan doubles down on deporting Afghan Refugees, filmmaker Rani Wahidi covers the story of an Afghan musician, Javid Karezi, and his family, to bring to light the difficulties Afghan refugees face after migration. Untitled, digital embroidery on fabric. Mohammad Sabir (2024) It’s late 2022 and singer Javid Karezi is sitting on stage with his harmonium surrounded by his new band. They’re at a wedding ceremony in Quetta, Pakistan. Karezi is mid-song when a middle-aged man interrupts him. Up until now, Karezi’s singing has only caused guests to leave. The man—apparently the host—asks Karezi to sing a song in Pashto. Karezi is taken aback by this request—he is being asked to sing in a language he is not fluent in. He tries to put it off, but eventually decides to ask his fellow bandmate, Waseem, to sing the requested song instead, and sits off to the side. This is a scene from documentary filmmaker Rani Wahidi ’s film, The Failed Migration , where she follows the Karezi family’s journey of deportation from Pakistan to Afghanistan. As a celebrated singer, the son of renowned Afghan singer Faiz Ahmed Karezi, and a sixth generation musician, Karezi is used to being in the spotlight. But when the Taliban came to power in Afghanistan, life took more turns than he could have ever imagined. In August 2021, after their successful takeover of Kabul , the Taliban banned music —leaving Karezi and his fellow musicians devoid of their livelihoods. By April 2022, Karezi, his wife, and 5 children, packed up their lives and moved to Pakistan by way of the Chaman border crossing—and they weren’t the only ones. They joined the growing community of roughly 4 million Afghan refugees . A majority of them have lived in Pakistan since the late 1970s and about 1.7 million are undocumented. If not for films like Wahidi’s The Failed Migration , the struggles experienced by generations of Afghan families in Pakistan would be largely ignored, likely due to xenophobia, political disputes, and the government’s neglect of these very issues. “Musicians have a gift and the Taliban took that from them. Anyone can open a shop, but not everyone has such a skillset, so to take that from someone is very bad,” Wahidi says, adding that while foreign media often covers such issues, “ we live our stories, we can revisit them anytime. They are close to us, we can explain them better, keeping our own contexts and lived experiences in mind, and we have a lot of time to tell our story.” Karezi had little contact with other Afghan musicians during his time in Pakistan, as he tried to focus on making a living for himself. He's proud of what he does, and is teaching his son to play the tabla as well. Wahidi’s skillset is also her talent but it’s been unable to substantively help Karezi in the struggle of being an Afghan refugee in Pakistan. As a singer of Dari and Farsi—languages not commonly spoken or understood in Quetta—he was only ever hired for a few functions. He found informal work that provided little economic, health, and food security. Even when he did book wedding ceremonies or events, the money wasn’t enough, especially after being divided amongst the larger band that he performed with. Coming home from a gig one night, as Wahidi’s film shows, Karezi asks his daughter what the doctor said about his wife’s condition since she’s been sick for a while, only to find out that she needs to be put on an oxygen supply and requires more medicine—which he can already barely afford. Like most Afghan refugees, Karezi lives on the sidelines, taking part only in the informal employment sector—but not all experiences are the same. As a development worker, Elaine Alam has worked extensively with Afghan refugee communities and divides them roughly into two categories. “On one hand, [there] are the Afghan refugees you see at Peshawar University or Quaid-e-Azam University. They’re coming from a certain background in order to pursue education, which does not negate their challenges but does give them a certain privilege because they have an understanding of how to acquire things,” she told me. “Then you have people coming from a tribal background. These refugees come from a larger population, and have no leadership, no security, and no safety. Their only point of contact is the Commissionerate for Afghan refugees, which focuses on government plans and allowances through UNHCR.” The second category are the ones most at risk for deportation and detainment, and usually live in katchi abadi (slum areas). They have no access to healthcare or education, leaving them in a cycle of odd jobs with a fear of getting caught by authorities. Elaine puts Karezi somewhere in the middle of the two since he possesses a skillset he can use. However, his informal living situation along with a disruptive climate impedes his progress, placing him much closer to the second category. Karezi may be the spotlight of Wahidi’s film, but his story speaks to a much larger journey experienced by Afghan refugees in Pakistan. After a couple of months with his family cooped up inside a small and bare apartment, Karezi decides to take his children to a park in an effort to distract them from their struggles. With no schools willing to admit them, the five children grapple with settling in, and are distraught at having lost access to education. “His two older daughters were affected the most. One is in grade 10 and the other is in grade 7, and both were denied admission to school because they were considered over age,” Wahidi says, highlighting this as one of the top most struggles Karezi faced after migration. But experiences of young Afghans across the country—even second and third generation immigrants born in Pakistan—show that this is just an excuse hiding a much larger problem. Miles away in Karachi, 19 year-old Shabana Ghulam Sakhi worries about the future of her education after not being admitted into any university in the country. Because she doesn’t have any form of Pakistani identification, Ghulam, and other refugees like her, can only attend the Afghani school—–which has very few qualified teachers. This is where she completed her intermediate exams. “My English is very weak because we study English separately as one subject, and even for that we don’t have good teachers, so we really struggle after that,” she informed me in an interview. “I feel helpless. I did a 6 month digital marketing course that the UNHCR arranged for us at our school but still haven’t received the certificate, so I can’t do anything,” she says. Between limited access to education in Pakistan and the Taliban halting girls' education in Afghanistan , Karezi was stuck. He came to Pakistan hoping to prioritize his children’s education but ended up having to go back. His daughter Sabia, who Wahidi has also centered in the film, often talks about how she misses school. Left with no choice but to journey back to Afghanistan, Karezi returned in 2023. Fully aware of the restrictions on women’s education, Sabia worries about when she’ll get the opportunity to go to school again. Several circumstances forced Karezi to leave, but others have experienced something different—deportation—following newly established policies. The second phase of Pakistan’s new policy started after Eid , when police were instructed to identify locations where undocumented Afghan refugees were living. Officials have confirmed the intention to depor t Proof of Residence or POR card holders despite negotiations with various stakeholders still underway. Shabana Ghulam Sakhi has spent much of the last year trying to get her brother out of jail after he was detained by the police—despite having a valid POR card. “They hid his card, and claimed he was illegal and detained him. It was only when we found a copy at home that they suddenly reproduced it and let him go,” she says. Throughout the conversation, she voiced her worries about the future, unable to identify a way to support herself and her family. Those who remain in Pakistan live in constant fear; they find themselves terminated from jobs, detained by police, all while struggling to get their POR cards reissued. These cards form the basis of their identity, since Afghans are not issued Computerized National Identity Cards or CNICs . Not having a CNIC was also one of the reasons Karezi was unable to find formal employment and get his daughters admitted into a school in Pakistan. The policies around deportation treat Afghans as second class citizens and have shaped Pakistani citizens’ mindsets for a long time. Many Pakistanis continue to believe that the Afghan deportations are a good thing . This is partly why Wahidi found it so difficult to make her film. “For me, the biggest challenge was that in Pakistan, making a documentary on Afghans is difficult, because we don't want them accepted as a society,” she said in an interview. “There’s been no documentary on Afghans in mainstream Pakistani media since the Taliban came to power,” she added. Still, Wahidi made huge efforts to depict the reality of the Afghan refugee crisis, but there is a long way to go in resolving the issue. “It’s important that NGOs and civil society actors continue to do whatever they can in their own capacity and power, so that they can support young Afghan refugees and children. But, until the government doesn’t sort out what the rights of these refugees are, the rights of these people living on this soil for 4-5 decades, it's hard for the other 2 entities [NGOS and civil society] to agree on something concrete,’ says Alam. The film ends with more questions than answers about Karezi, which, perhaps, best reflects his reality. When I last spoke to Wahidi, she said she could no longer get in touch with Javid. The film ends with Karezi jobless in Afghanistan, hoping to find daily wage jobs as a laborer or similar. But he wants more for his children—as does every Afghan parent—regardless of whether they choose to stay. The problem is, for now, that both situations seem equally bleak. Still, Karezi finds comfort in knowing that he and his family are home, where their identity will not inhibit their plans. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Profile Quetta Afghan Refugees State Repression Afghan Deportations The Failed Migration Documentary Film Musician Taliban Undocumented Afghan Refugees Faiz Ahmed Karezi Rani Wahidi Dari Farsi Proof of Registration Card Incarceration Civil Society NGOs CNIC Afghanistan Employment Unemployment 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. 14th May 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:

"Our priority is to meet the needs of people on this planet. Not just workers. Not workers at all." A multimedia short using video archival footage, this faux-advertisement is equal parts a history of advertising & the legacy of fossil fuel companies’ manipulation and a disturbing, singular dystopia from one aesthete's point of view. BOOKS & ARTS It's Only Human "Our priority is to meet the needs of people on this planet. Not just workers. Not workers at all." A multimedia short using video archival footage, this faux-advertisement is equal parts a history of advertising & the legacy of fossil fuel companies’ manipulation and a disturbing, singular dystopia from one aesthete's point of view. Vol. 1 FIRST TAG AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Video Still by Furqan Jawed ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Video Still by Furqan Jawed SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Tags Tags 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. Like having the imagination to envision oblivion. And make it reality. Special Thanks to: Varshini Prakash Narration by: Jessica Flemming EDITOR'S NOTE: This multimedia piece, by graphic designer and artist Furqan Jawed, is the result of a collaborative effort, initially conceptualized as a story about the history of advertising & fossil fuel companies’ manipulation of the public across the world. It took place over a number of months, supplemented by reminiscences and stream-of-consciousness ideas by Varshini Prakash, co-founder and Executive Director of the Sunrise Movement, as well as exchange with editors Vishakha Darbha & Kamil Ahsan. Furqan plumbed the archives of advertising across a number of decades in India and the United States. The product was, at the time, an unanticipated, serendipitous, and surprising product of an inquisitive but seemingly-directionless collaboration. 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

Kashmiri homes and livelihoods are disintegrating, with major infrastructural developments and mining projects inducing landslides, disrupting water and electrical channels, and destroying agricultural trade in the region–all in the name of increasing Kashmir's connectivity. Impractical in scope, these infrastructural projects defy all recommendations geological researchers have urged developers to consider for decades: and the government is content leaving Kashmiris in unlivable conditions, so long as the homes are not yet one with the earth. · THE VERTICAL REPORTAGE · LOCATION Kashmiri homes and livelihoods are disintegrating, with major infrastructural developments and mining projects inducing landslides, disrupting water and electrical channels, and destroying agricultural trade in the region–all in the name of increasing Kashmir's connectivity. Impractical in scope, these infrastructural projects defy all recommendations geological researchers have urged developers to consider for decades: and the government is content leaving Kashmiris in unlivable conditions, so long as the homes are not yet one with the earth. Asif in front of the ruins of his home (2024). Photograph courtesy of the authors. Cracks in Pernote When Aasif Katoch returned home from work in the evening of April 25, he heard a loud voice from his cousin’s house, just over 100 metres away. “They were calling us urgently,” he recalled. “When we arrived, we saw cracks had developed in their house.” But before Katoch could begin to do anything about it, his children began frantically calling out to him from his house. He rushed back, only to see cracks starting to appear there too. “Within minutes,” he said, recounting the scenes of his house sinking, “we watched in horror as our homes which we built with hard work were damaged in front of our own eyes.” Katoch’s family isn‘t alone. Pernote village, seven kilometres from Ramban district in Jammu and Kashmir, became a disaster zone in April when 28 houses, including Katoch’s, were destroyed completely by land subsidence, affecting around 500 people . The road linking to Pernote village was severely damaged, cutting off connectivity. Cracks stretched several kilometres, disrupted electricity and water supply, adding more difficulties to the affected residents. Unmitigated Development is to Blame Since 2010, there has been an unprecedented rise in land sinking incidents near the national highway and railway tracks in Kashmir. Many attribute this increase to the rise in large-scale developmental projects , such as railway construction , widening of roads like the National highway , which links Ramban with Banihal, tunnel digging in the mountains , and hydro power projects, all constructed without proper precautions. For instance, around 12 hydropower projects are either constructed or are under construction in the Chenab region of Jammu. “One of the main causes of the increasing landslides in the region is unregulated developmental activity,” G.M Bhat, a Kashmir-based geologist, explained to us. “While landslides due to natural conditions existed before, human activities like mining have accelerated the frequency and severity of these incidents. The fragile nature of these mountains demands careful handling, yet we are doing the exact opposite.” For Bhat, the collapse of an 800-metre tunnel in Ramban on 19 May 2022, in which ten people died, should raise serious concerns. Recent land sinkings, like those in Pernote , he reasoned, are clearly the result of human activities, specifically poorly planned developmental projects. “We have been raising these issues for the last 30 years,” Bhat said, “with reports filed repeatedly. I can’t understand why the government continues to ignore our warnings.” The portion of a road in Pernote damaged after land subsidence. Courtesy of the authors. He blamed authorities for not involving experts and ignoring their warnings before starting work, saying the region has now become vulnerable to disasters due to excessive constructions. The residents also blame the construction agencies for land sinkage. “Since we live in a hilly area, rainwater used to flow naturally through canals and streams, eventually reaching the river at the bottom of the hill,” said Akther, a local resident of Ramban. Moreover, he added, during the extensive drilling for the national highway and tunnels, agency workers dumped tunnel waste near Chenab river banks, blocking these natural water channels. Despite raising concerns with the authorities, the residents were ignored. “As the waste blocked the streams,” Akther shared, “water began accumulating, saturating the land, making it unstable and unable to bear the weight of the mountain, which led to the sinking.” The situation worsened with the frequent blasts carried out during tunnel construction. The explosions were so loud that residents’ houses would shake, resembling powerful earthquakes. “We often rushed outside in fear that our homes might collapse,” Akther said. “The blasts were terrifying, and our children were left crying, traumatised by the repeated tremors.” In response to these concerns, the residents wrote to the District Magistrate (DM) in 2014, 2022, and 2023, highlighting that the Border Roads Organisation (BRO) was violating environmental norms by improperly dumping waste, blocking canals, and having a poor drainage system. Despite assurances of action from the DM, no visible steps have been taken. Now, the residents are taking the matter to court. “We feel neglected and unheard,” Akther expressed. “We want the authorities to fully compensate us for our losses and provide immediate rehabilitation, but they continue to ignore us.” Why is unprecedented development happening? Jammu and Kashmir has long been viewed as a region in need of better infrastructure. Poor road connectivity, especially in mountain areas like Pir Panjal and Chenab, has hindered trade and access to services for decades. Both these regions have undergone several development projects over the last decade, which includes tunnelling, road widening of NH 44 , construction of bridges, dams and railway lines to improve connectivity with the rest of India. For example, the new Katra-Banihal railway line and the widening of National highway 244 from two to four lanes is expected to be a game changer for the region's economy, as it will reduce travel time from Jammu to Srinagar and improve transportation for both locals and businesses. In 1999, Bhat explained that the local government invited a team of experts––including geologists, geographers, and landslide specialists from various countries––to Kashmir to study the Himalayas. “They warned that large-scale projects in the region would be extremely dangerous,” he said. A collapsed transmission tower damaged after land sinkage in Pernote. Courtesy of the authors. Since then, however, “massive developmental projects have been undertaken,” Bhat added, “with post-1999 projects being far larger in scale compared to those before that time.” According to Dr. D.P Kanungo, engineering geologist and landslide expert from Delhi, the “lithotectonic setup, rocks, and tectonics of the Pir Panjal range are extremely sensitive.” Any development in this region, therefore, must follow proper technical and scientific guidelines. “While I’m not opposed to development,” he clarified, “it’s clear that projects in the Pir Panjal region have not been carried out in a technically sound or scientific manner.” “Disrupting its fragile ecosystems can have fatal consequences,” Dr. Kanungo added, explaining why the excessive blasting for tunnelling is dangerous, particularly in these areas where the mountain range is young, still rising, and undergoing significant neo-tectonic activity. “When I visited the area, I saw that the work was being done in an unplanned way,” he noted. “Incidents like the land sinking in Pernote and cracks in nearby village homes could have been avoided.” The Detailed Project Report (DPR) outlines the scientific and technical methods to be followed, including when and how to support a cut slope. It also specifies where and how to cut particular rocks. However, our investigation revealed that the DPR is frequently violated and scientific techniques are often not followed on the ground, especially in the Himalayan regions. The Dangers of Improving Road Connectivity to Cut Travel Time The challenging terrains of the ecologically sensitive Chenab and Pir Panjal regions make travel difficult on the Jammu-Srinagar Highway, especially in the harsh winter months when snow and landslides frequently block the road. With the aim to decrease travel time on the Jammu-Srinagar Highway and increase connectivity to the Kashmir region, the government has spent almost 16000 crore INR to widen the two lane highway into four lanes. To date, 210 kilometres, including 10 tunnels, have been finished. The project, which will decrease travel time from 8 hours to 4-5 hours, is set for completion by 2025. Between 2010 and 2020, around 1750 people have died and more than 12,000 people have been injured in over 8,000 accidents on Jammu-Srinagar highway. “The construction of a four-lane highway on the Srinagar-Jammu route, in fragile areas, would be dangerous in coming years,” according to Bhat. “A two-lane road in sensitive zones, with four lanes only in the plains, would have been far more appropriate. Instead, we’ve made the mistake of widening roads and toe-cutting mountains, which has triggered land sinking.” As Raja Muzaffar Bhat, a social activist, noted, “construction in the Himalayas is incredibly challenging, hazardous, and complex.” For him, “building large four-lane highways and similar projects in such mountainous regions might be impractical and could have serious long-term consequences.” “The extensive tunnelling and mountain cutting required could lead to more frequent landslides and sinkholes, as well as negatively impact water systems,” Muzaffar Bhat warned. “These areas have unique geological and ecological characteristics, with intricate rock formations and small water channels that are easily disrupted.” Additionally, constructing very high pillars for bridges in earthquake-prone regions poses significant risks of natural disasters. In the last 10 years, the pace of construction of four lane highways, bridges, and tunnels has increased which has also increased landslides on the Jammu-Srinagar highway. According to the last data available, over 4,200 people lost their lives on Jammu-Srinagar national highway from 2018-2022 in the Kashmir valley. Locals are Losing Both Homes and Work Opportunities As construction continues, it is the locals living in these terrains who are paying the price for this development. Tunnelling through the mountainous areas of Pir Panjal and blasting for road expansions has led to the increase in landslides and land subsidence in these areas. The land subsidence of villages like Pernote is attributable to excavation of highways and other developmental projects. For residents of Pernote and several other adjoining villages, this development has come at a great personal cost. Families who lived in these areas for generations are now forced to abandon their homes and move to safer ground where they pay rent. “Where are we supposed to go?” asked Beer Singh, a Pernote resident. “We don't have any other lands and the government has not given us any answers.” Many families have been forced to live in nearby government buildings, rent out temporary shelters, or move in with relatives. “Our homes were everything we worked for,” Singh stated. “My whole earning was in that house.” As families grapple with the loss of their homes, the emotional toll is palpable. “I do not sleep properly at night,” Singh shared. “I keep thinking the wall will crack again and we won’t be able to escape.” Cracks visible in the house damaged after land subsidence in Pernote. Courtesy of the authors. Beer Singh is one of five brothers, whose parents are no longer alive. “We were doing well in life,” he said, recalling his land where he and his brothers cultivated pomegranates, tomatoes, and peanuts. “Farming was our livelihood throughout the year, and we sold our produce at good prices.” Living in a hilly area with a favourable climate, their crops were of high quality. "In our village, only a few people had government jobs,” he noted. “The rest relied on farming because it was profitable.” However, since the tragedy, only two or three families remain, and they live far from Singh and his family. “Now, no one comes to my shop because hardly anyone is left,” he said. “I sit here all day, unable to make sense of what happened.” The biggest issue, for Singh, is his loan repayments. He no longer receives any income and doesn’t have the money to repay his loan. After the land sinkage, many officials visited the area and promised compensation to residents of Pernote. Till date, however, these people have gotten nothing. "We were denied the initial compensation of 1,30,000 INR that others received, with the reasoning that our house had only developed cracks and hadn't collapsed entirely,” Singh shared. “However, the cracks are so severe that it's unsafe to live in, as no one can predict when it might fall.” The authorities initially issued a notice stating that the villagers would be given 10 marlas each and compensated for all damages caused by the disaster. However, the order was later changed, and they were told they’d receive only 5 lakhs INR and 1 kanal of land. As of September this year, it has been five additional months, and they still haven't received any compensation. Land sinking and landslides are not new The land sinking and landslide in these regions is not new; several incidents have been reported in the last decade. On February 1, 2023, for instance, a landslide hit Nai Basit hamlet in Doda district of Jammu and Kashmir, causing land subsidence that geologists attributed to the poor drainage system and continuous seepage from households and the movement of geological fault zones. The incident damaged 19 houses and caused a mosque with several structures to develop cracks. It forced many families to leave their homes and relocate to temporary shelters in a local government school. It also created panic in nearby villages of Ramban, where many houses had developed cracks. “It was all good until these projects started,” said Saqib, a local student. “We were living our life happily in these mountains. The government may increase the connectivity through these projects but it will make life miserable for thousands of villagers living in these mountains.” The unchecked development to increase connectivity within the Kashmir region has left residents like those in Pernote village devastated. With homes collapsing and lives uprooted, locals blame reckless infrastructure projects for these disasters. “I’m not opposed to developmental projects,” Bhat said, “but they must be carried out with proper environmental precautions and procedures.” For Muzaffar Bhat, too, it is necessary to follow sustainable development practices. “Unfortunately,” he noted, “recent political manifestos have largely ignored these environmental concerns.” Bhat suggested that if major development projects stop now, the Himalayas will likely stabilise in the next 50-60 years. “However, if these projects continue,” he warned, “the impending disaster will be unimaginable.” Specifically, the area falls in seismic zones 4 and 5, which are highly earthquake-prone. “If these projects continue and the mountains weaken further,” Bhat added, “even minor earthquakes could devastate the entire region, posing a severe threat to those living on the mountain slopes.” ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 23rd Oct 2010 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:

Guyanese poet Rajiv Mohabir takes a bricolage approach to historicity, with disciplined attention to the material. Even as they slip into Creole and Guyanese Hindi, his poems remain anchored in the texture of “Ghee Persad” or on the decks of a ship carrying his Indo-Caribbean ancestors in “In Ships [Honoring Mahadai Das' 'They Came in Ships.'” INTERACTIVE FLUX · Poetry Reading by Rajiv Mohabir with Marginalia Guyanese poet Rajiv Mohabir takes a bricolage approach to historicity, with disciplined attention to the material. Even as they slip into Creole and Guyanese Hindi, his poems remain anchored in the texture of “Ghee Persad” or on the decks of a ship carrying his Indo-Caribbean ancestors in “In Ships [Honoring Mahadai Das' 'They Came in Ships.'” Vol. 1 FIRST TAG AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the event in full on IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the event in full on IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Tags Tags 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. FLUX: An Evening in Dissent A selection of readings by Rajiv Mohabir—some published by SAAG earlier this year—to help pause, unwind, and slow time in the act of close reading and listening. Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID-19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors DJ Kiran: A Celebratory Set 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

Ahead of the presidential election in Sri Lanka, trade unions and political parties have promised a wage increase to tea plantation workers they hope to win over. Many workers are unconvinced, partly because wage increases are often tied to higher productivity targets that far exceed workers’ bodily capacity. THE VERTICAL The Ambivalent Voter AUTHOR Ahead of the presidential election in Sri Lanka, trade unions and political parties have promised a wage increase to tea plantation workers they hope to win over. Many workers are unconvinced, partly because wage increases are often tied to higher productivity targets that far exceed workers’ bodily capacity. “Let’s say a small child of around five years old is sick,” says Subramaniam Maheswarie, a 47-year-old tea plucker from Bogawantalawa in the Nuwara Eliya district of Sri Lanka’s Central Province. “We have to look after it and give it medicine.” The sick child Maheswarie is referring to is Sri Lanka: a nation on the slow road to recovery from a devastating economic crisis that led to shortages of food and fuel, and saw costs of living soar. The doctor who nursed the child is Ranil Wickremesinghe, the president who took the reins from Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted from office after months of protests. Wickremesinghe is attempting to hold onto power after two years in office as the country gears up for a presidential election tomorrow, 21st September, the first since the crisis. Such conditions are ripe for the playing out of patronage politics. The Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the largest plantation workers’ trade union, is advocating fiercely on Wickremesinghe’s behalf. Last year, the leader of the CWC was elevated to the position of a cabinet minister by Wickremesinghe’s government, and CWC formed a seat-sharing pact with the UNP (United National Party) aiming to garner votes in the central plantation districts. Maheswarie serves as a local chairwoman for the CWC, although she also continues to work on the plantation. Here in the hill-country region, political parties double as trade unions and vice versa—simultaneously trying to win workers’ votes as well as represent their voices in negotiations with plantations. In May this year, Wickremesinghe promised plantation workers a new wage of LKR 1,700 (US$5.64), a 70% hike from their current wage of LKR 1000 (US$3.32). Plantation companies appealed the wage, and Wickremesinghe’s presidential gazette was found to be unlawful by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court. The Wages Board has now issued a gazette mandating wages of LKR 1,350 (US$4.48) for plantation workers, with an additional productivity incentive of LKR 350 (US$1.16) that requires them to pluck extra kilos. Tea workers, most of whom are part of the Malaiyaha Tamil community—descendants of indentured labourers brought from South India to work on plantations by the British in colonial Ceylon—face a number of challenges including food insecurity, lack of access to educational opportunities, precarious housing, and poor living and working conditions. Maheswarie says the wage increase is positive, but admits that the last wage increase in 2021 led to problems for workers. She says productivity targets increased by 3 kilos at her plantation. Additionally, benefits such as medical care and food provisions were withdrawn or reduced, because the implementation of the new wage led to the collapse of the traditional collective agreement between plantation companies and trade unions. “[As part of the collective agreement], there were a lot of rules and regulations regarding what you should and shouldn’t do with workers,” Maheswarie says. “Now those rules don’t exist. Once we got rid of those rules, it was the companies who [arbitrarily] set the rules. Now that we don’t have the collective agreement, we can’t really go and argue [for more benefits].” Many workers are suspicious of the timing of the wage increase, perceiving it as a political ploy to win their votes in the election. However, Maheswarie is adamant that is not the case and accuses plantation companies of “dragging out” the process to frame the CWC as eking out a wage increase for political gain. Roshan Rajadurai, chairman of the Planters’ Association, which oversees hundreds of plantations in Sri Lanka, said targets would not increase. However, he also said productivity must be improved and that the wage increase was unsustainable. “In Sri Lanka, rationale and reason don’t, unfortunately, apply,” Rajadurai said. He questioned the announcement, saying the plantation sector was being “singled out.” He pointed out that wages for other sectors were not being increased. “We have to agree on something we can [actually] pay,” Rajadurai added. “If they [politicians] did everything they promised, Sri Lanka would be better than Singapore.” He refuted Maheswarie’s claim that benefits were being reduced for workers, saying welfare had actually been increased and that it was in the plantations’ best interests to look after their workers. According to Sri Lanka’s Tea Board, the industry contributed USD 1.26 billion to the Sri Lankan economy in 2022. However, plantation workers were severely hit by the crisis, with many struggling to afford basic necessities. “The election is coming, right? So they likely thought we’d only vote for them if they increased our salaries,” says Santhiappillai Mary, who works at the Loolecondera estate, a state-owned plantation in Kandy District, famously colonial Ceylon’s first tea estate. Mary is unmoved by Loolecondera's storied history. She shares that the plantation makes multiple deductions from workers’ salaries, including small amounts for the work cards they register their picked tea leaf kilograms on and, until recently, for their payslips. She has taken out multiple loans by now and is berated by the companies involved when she cannot pay. She often goes to work even when she is sick or it is raining heavily—simply because she cannot afford to miss a day of pay. “We have to take two meals to work, but sometimes, if I take two meals, my children don’t have enough food to eat at home,” Mary says. “So, I just take one meal and go. And sometimes I don’t take anything at all, because the children need food in the evening. I’ve done that, too.” Santhiappillai Mary, courtesy of Udara Pathum Such dire straits also affect access to free public services. In 2022, Mary’s oldest son had to drop out of school. After her family could not afford the bus fare to school, he was not permitted to advance to the next grade alongside his peers. In Agarapatana, local trade union leaders who were part of the National Union of Workers (NUW) are also not totally convinced by the wage increase. NUW has thrown its support behind presidential hopeful Sajith Premadasa, who has promised to turn estate workers into smallholders and increase their pay. “We can’t be sure we’re going to get the new wage,” said Dayalan Ravichandran, adding that he was surprised to see that he received the same salary in June even after Wickremesinghe promised a higher wage. “They say they’ve agreed to it, but it’s not definite yet. We don’t know if they’re just doing it because of the election.” One estate trade union leader said people’s votes were often won with alcohol, even within her own party. “The people in the party give alcohol to the chairmen and tell them to give it to the men,” she said, adding that the women were struggling without basic facilities. “The chairmen give alcohol to the men and tell them to vote for the party.” But perhaps the larger question is: Would a wage increase even shift the needle for tea workers? If even universal education—which Sri Lanka cites as a major source of pride in comparison to its South Asian neighbours—can seemingly be revoked for tea workers’ children for want of bus fare, can tea workers reasonably aspire to the end of generational poverty in the hill country? Tea leaves at a plantation in Kandy District, Central Province. Courtesy of Udara Pathum. Workers might be divided in their political preferences but are united on one issue. None of them believe the wage increase—of which proof will only emerge after the election when next month’s pay is given—will be definitive proof of improved conditions. Mary feels that any wage increase is unlikely to be the better prospect it’s touted to be. “If they increase the salary,” she says, “they’ll demand more kilos of tea leaves, so it’s difficult for the workers.” She adds that an increase in salary will also mean an increase in the cost of essentials. “So there’s no point in increasing the salary. However much we get, it’s not enough.” This linkage of wage increases to required increases in productivity demands is the root of tea workers’ misgivings about their financial future: indeed, a wage increase may well be thought of as an excuse for the extraction of surplus labour that exceeds the limits of bodily labour. Mahendran, 49, also a worker at Loolecondera, says his family often goes hungry for five or six days every month. He, too, believes estates will increase productivity targets in response to the wage increase, adding that workers “can’t work any more than this.” Rajadurai, the Planters’ Association chair, disagrees. “People are not willing to increase their productivity. Our productivity is the lowest in the world,” he says, comparing expectations for tea pluckers in Sri Lanka favourably to Assam, where he claims tea pluckers have to pluck far more. He argues that pluckers should be able to pluck 1 kilo in 12 minutes.“If they want to earn, they earn.” Pluckers, he says, “should not get into the mindset that 18 is an impossible target.” When informed that tea pluckers said they had a daily target of 13 kilograms before the 2021 wage increase, Rajadurai told SAAG: “What are they doing plucking 13 kilos for the whole day? It’s absurd.” If estates and plantation companies increase productivity targets with wage increases, the much-touted increase can arguably be equated not just to an effective wage stagnation but also a more significant risk to the lives and bodies of tea workers and their families. The firm productivity targets tied to the 2021 wage increase demonstrably taxed workers with less flexibility than before. Many workers say the work was harder after the wage increase. Maheswarie says that estates no longer weed the tea bushes properly. Instead, they expect workers to do so and then pluck 18 kilograms on top of that. Ramalingam Priyadharshini, 42, a tea plucker from Agarapatana, is still undecided about who to vote for. She’s been let down in the past by promises to fix the roads in her area and to build housing. Currently, her family has no toilet. Priyadharshini has to use the toilet at her mother’s house, a ten-minute walk away. At night, or in an emergency, she has to ask her neighbours if she can use theirs. “I’m wondering whether I should just not vote at all because our main problem is the road. But it’s only during election time that they come and say they’ll do everything for us,” says Ramalingam. Her mother, Palanimurthy Jeyam, is a retired tea plucker who plans to spoil her ballot after years of involvement with CWC as a local chairwoman. “The current government is only doing everything for the rich,” she says angrily. “But they’re letting the hungry people go hungry and die.” Mary also says she doesn’t feel hopeful that anything will change. Meanwhile, Priyadharshini argues that the state only really thinks of plantation workers when election campaigns are underway, a sentiment that brings to the fore the historical trend, since independence, of Sri Lankan political parties jockeying for power during election campaigns by promising welfare services like food subsidies and wage increases. Indeed, tomorrow’s election may well show the risk of taking plantation workers’ votes for granted—or their successful co-optation by trade unions.∎ Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 “Into tea forest I,” 2024. Pen and tea stain on brown board, 91.4cm x 121.9cm, part of a triptych. Courtesy of Arulraj Ulaganathan. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 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. On That Note: Heading 5 23rd OCT Heading 5 23rd Oct Heading 5 23rd Oct

Towards the end of FLUX, a key organizer with Muslims For Just Futures, Muslims for Abolitionist Futures, among others, performed a DJ set with Bhangra and urban music beats, featuring Major Lazer, Meesha Shafi & more, bringing a wide-ranging event about many intellectual and material shifts to an end. INTERACTIVE FLUX · A Celebratory Set by DJ Kiran Towards the end of FLUX, a key organizer with Muslims For Just Futures, Muslims for Abolitionist Futures, among others, performed a DJ set with Bhangra and urban music beats, featuring Major Lazer, Meesha Shafi & more, bringing a wide-ranging event about many intellectual and material shifts to an end. Vol. 1 FIRST TAG AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the event in full on IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the event in full on IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Tags Tags 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. FLUX: An Evening in Dissent An uplifting set by DJ Kiran to dance to at the end of a weighty virtual event. Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID-19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors 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

Despite the marketing of her debut novel "Gold Diggers," Sanjena Sathian did not set out to interrogate the model minority myth or the dynamics of class in the Indian-American diaspora. Instead, she began with the relationship of a mother and daughter. The world of an "uncritical and unthinking ambition" gradually began to assert itself in the narrative. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 10 · On Ambition, Immigration, Class in “Gold Diggers” Despite the marketing of her debut novel "Gold Diggers," Sanjena Sathian did not set out to interrogate the model minority myth or the dynamics of class in the Indian-American diaspora. Instead, she began with the relationship of a mother and daughter. The world of an "uncritical and unthinking ambition" gradually began to assert itself in the narrative. Vol. 1 FIRST TAG AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Tags Tags 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. Writer and journalist Sanjena Sathian in conversation with Vishakha Darbha about rule-breaking, questions from her publishing team, whether explaining world-building came easily to the writing of her debut novel, Gold Diggers (Random House, 2021), what makes a "good" immigrant novel, and writing about the Indian-American diaspora in its own mythologies, complications, and exceptionalism. 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

What is the utility of global history? In recent years, new approaches of global history have emerged. Whether as a challenge or companion to area studies, and specific and local histories within academia, global history has often aimed to become more inclusive of histories of migration, diasporas, labor, legal regimes within colonial and postcolonial chronologies from Guyana to China to South Africa. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History What is the utility of global history? In recent years, new approaches of global history have emerged. Whether as a challenge or companion to area studies, and specific and local histories within academia, global history has often aimed to become more inclusive of histories of migration, diasporas, labor, legal regimes within colonial and postcolonial chronologies from Guyana to China to South Africa. Vol. 1 FIRST TAG AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Tags Tags 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. Drama Editor Neilesh Bose, also the editor of the recent volume South Asian Migrations in Global History: Labour, Law, and Wayward Lives (Bloomsbury, 2020) discussed the genesis of the project & new ways of telling history with Kamil Ahsan on Instagram Live in May 2021. The edited volume began at a workshop at the University of Victoria. It explores how South Asian migrations in modern history have shaped key aspects of globalization since the 1830s, using global history to cast many contemporary dynamics and geographies into sharper relief. Including original research from colonial India, Fiji, Mexico, South Africa, North America and the Middle East, the essays explore indentured labour and its legacies, law as a site of regulation and historical biography. It includes recent scholarship on the legacy of issues such as consent, sovereignty and skilled/unskilled labour distinctions from the history of indentured labour migrations, and brings together a range of historical changes that can only be understood by studying South Asian migrants within a globalized world system. Here, Bose discussed the nature of global history, the approach taken at the workshop and beyond, and the many scholarly contributions to the volume. More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

WRITER Lutif Ali Halo LUTIF ALI HALO is a lecturer in English at Federal College Islamabad, an inquisitive blogger, an independent researcher-writer, and a translator. His work is interdisciplinary in nature and revolves around politics, art, philosophy, culture, language, history, the impacts of social media on society, and discourse studies. He is based in Islamabad. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

An anthropologist explores Bollywood creatives to trace BJP's carrot-and-stick strategy with Bollywood creatives: both controlling and regulating Bollywood in order to create a consistent and normative film culture that perpetuates Hindutva ideology. THE VERTICAL Saffronizing Bollywood An anthropologist explores Bollywood creatives to trace BJP's carrot-and-stick strategy with Bollywood creatives: both controlling and regulating Bollywood in order to create a consistent and normative film culture that perpetuates Hindutva ideology. Vol. 2 FIRST TAG AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watching You Watching Me. Oil on wood. 36″ Tondo. Shyama Golden (2023). ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watching You Watching Me. Oil on wood. 36″ Tondo. Shyama Golden (2023). SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Tags Tags Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. In 2022, India’s Hindi film industry was in the throes of a crisis. Bollywood, as the industry is colloquially known, was still bucking from a pandemic which had injured film industries worldwide. Multiple mainstream movies, helmed by some of the industry’s biggest stars, from Aamir Khan to Akshay Kumar to Ranveer Singh, were failing miserably at the box office. Since the tragic suicide of an actor named Sushant Singh Rajput in June 2020, a rabid social media movement in India had been calling for people to #BoycottBollywood for its alleged complicity in Rajput’s death and painted it as a hotbed of elitism, drugs, and moral bankruptcy. This was coordinated “collusive behavior”, one study suggested, to engineer a frenzy of conspiracy theories. Members affiliated with India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), another study found, especially pushed the narrative of Rajput’s death being a “murder”, driving the hashtag #JusticeForSSR to receive over 65 million active interactions in just six months. Amid this political powder keg and socioeconomic crisis, one film gained unprecedented success. A film with no stars, no popular songs, and none of the typical, crowd-pleasing conventions of mainstream commercial Hindi cinema. Released on 11 March 2022, The Kashmir Files claims to depict the 1990 Kashmiri Pandit (Hindu) exodus, but through crucial omissions—of the Indian army’s pervasive presence, unlawful detentions, and rapes of women across religions; well-documented cases of Kashmiri Muslims risking peril to protect Hindu friends ; and the thousands of Kashmiri Muslims who also died and fled Kashmir —creates a dangerously one-sided representation of Muslim violence against Hindus. In one scene, the menacing, kohl-eyed Muslim antagonist Bitta compels a Hindu widow to eat rice soaked in her dead husband’s blood. In yet another, he shreds open a bright saffron kurta off a Hindu woman and publicly brutalises her. The film uses shock value to incite Hindus towards collective anger, humiliation, and anti-Muslim hatred. The Kashmir Files opened to a modest figure of INR 3.55 crores. The following day, however, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi personally met with its makers and took a picture with them that was widely circulated on social media. “More such movies should be made,” Modi publicly said three days later, praising the film for showing “the truth which has been suppressed for years”. Other BJP leaders also endorsed the film – they organised special screenings and events, while the BJP’s information and technology cell and copious sympathetic media outlets provided incessant buzz and press coverage . The film was also given the coveted tax-free status in several exclusively BJP-ruled states. Though made with a modest budget of only INR 25 crores, with a little bit of “help”, The Kashmir Files eventually collected a whopping INR 247 crores domestically. It was a certified blockbuster. The BJP and Hindutva Founded in 1980, the BJP functions as the political wing of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), a Hindutva organisation active since 1925. Hindutva—the ideology of Hindu nationalism—conceives India as a Hindu nation, relegating Muslims and other minorities to second-class status. Historically, its ideologues drew inspiration from German Nazism and Italian fascism, while its closest ideological counterpart today is Israeli Zionism . The BJP has independently governed India since it won the national elections in 2014 by interlacing Hindutva with populist rhetoric under the leadership of Modi, a former RSS worker who oversaw an anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002 when he was the Chief Minister of the state of Gujarat. His purported victory, according to political scientist Christophe Jaffrelot, ushered in a new era for the nation, characterised by weakened state institutions, a distorted electoral process, and sanctioned violence against minorities, transforming India into an authoritarian Hindu state. The Bollywood industry is ultimately highly decentralised, commercially driven, and blockbuster-oriented. Politics seems peripheral to the eternal quest for the elusive box office hit. Then how has the BJP succeeded so profoundly? The Modi government has particularly weaponised the media to fuel Islamophobia. It has widely spread misinformation, enabling what media scholar Shakuntala Banaji has called the “mainstreaming” of intolerance. In his new book H-Pop (2023), independent journalist Kunal Purohit examines how the wider Hindu Right has harnessed popular culture forms such as music, poetry and books to disseminate and entrench Hindutva in popular and mass imagination. In this vein, Bollywood is a crucial fourth frontier. As India’s most prolific and powerful media industry, it is a key source of soft power and plays a crucial role in defining dominant conceptions of nationhood, belonging, and culture. As anthropologist Tejaswini Ganti writes in Bollywood: A Guidebook to Popular Hindi Cinema (2013) , Bollywood is also “perhaps the least religiously segregated place in India today where Hindus and Muslims work together as well as inter-marry”. Some of its most successful stars, directors, and other key members are Muslim. Many of its biggest hits over the years have celebrated Indian secularism and interreligious harmony, according to film scholar Rachel Dwyer, from Mughal-e-Azam (1960) and Amar Akbar Anthony (1977), to Veer-Zaara (2004), PK (2014), and Bajrangi Bhaijaan (2015) . Today, a slew of at least 10 brazenly Hindutva propaganda films are swamping Indian voters ahead of the upcoming national elections in May 2024. It is the outcome of many years of moulding and steadily saffronizing India’s Hindi film industry, most aggressively since the COVID-19 pandemic. This is the subject of my master’s dissertation, for which I conducted three months of fieldwork in Mumbai in the Summer of 2023, and conducted several interviews with prominent writers, directors, producers, actors, and journalists of Bollywood. All names have been anonymized in this essay. The BJP has used a carrot-and-stick strategy to control and regulate Bollywood ’s influence: a combination of bullying, along with promoting films that most brazenly perpetuate their Hindutva ideology. Yet for the most part, members of Bollywood have continued to eschew political binaries between left and right, instead seeing themselves as existing outside of the realms of politics and ideology. “The only God,” a veteran film critic and journalist told me, “is the box office.” The Bollywood industry is ultimately highly decentralised, commercially driven, and blockbuster-oriented. Politics seems peripheral to the eternal quest for the elusive box office hit. Then how has the BJP succeeded so profoundly? Fear and Censorship Alongside its elaborate army of online trolls, the BJP has not hesitated to use its hard power on Bollywood. They have incited mobs, engineered police cases, and orchestrated arbitrary arrests. When the Amazon series Tandav released in January 2021, for example, members of grassroots Hindu nationalist organisations filed police complaints against a Muslim actor Mohammed Zeeshaan Ayyub and the showrunners in four different Indian states, alleging offence to Hindu religious sentiments. The crime? A character named Shiva, played by Ayyub, uses profanity while portraying his namesake Hindu deity in a student play. When Amazon petitioned the Supreme Court to protect the showrunners from arrest while these cases were sub judice , this was denied. In another incident on 3 October 2021, inspectors of the Narcotics Control Bureau arrested Aryan Khan, the superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s then 23-year-old son, in a Mumbai port terminal. Despite lack of evidence, the agents imprisoned him for nearly a month before granting him bail, finally dropping all charges in early 2022. “Had a government agency really imprisoned Aryan Khan without proof, as pure intimidation?” questioned journalist Samanth Subramanian in The New Yorker . “The rest of Bollywood, meanwhile, absorbed the news as the most cautionary tale of all: if they could do this to the king, imagine what they could do to us.” In January 2023, the mammoth success of Shah Rukh Khan-starrer Pathaan , despite widespread calls for its boycott , not only revived Bollywood’s box office slump but was also touted as a victory over the Hindu Right . The social media boycotts, many in the industry concluded, were all bark and no bite. Subsequent consecutive successes of several Hindi films in 2023— Jawan, Animal, Gadar 2— compounded upon a palpable sense of triumph, with proclamations that “ Bollywood is back ”. But beyond boycotts and the habitually extreme ebbs and flows of the box office, the BJP has remained successful in its attempts at stoking fear and a pervading atmosphere of censorship, one that has now become naturalised in the industry. “You don't just deal with these issues when your film or your show is coming out,” one writer-director-producer said to me. “You're dealing with them while you are writing. There is a psychological aspect to it.” Many key Bollywood members I interviewed shared how their creative process now includes several additional considerations, like avoiding depicting green and saffron colours and any religious symbols and erasing any critiques of the police or politicians in the narrative. This was not the case before even 2020. A screenwriter named it the “chilling effect” – a perpetual state of cowering invoked in the face of the BJP’s “bullying tactics.” “You just have to stay in line,” he reflected, “ That builds a self-censorship inside you.” The New Blockbuster While the BJP suppresses, it also amplifies. In the case of The Kashmir Files , the party’s vigorous promotion of the film created a replicable template for a new kind of unabashedly bigoted blockbuster. In 2023, it was recreated by Sudipto Sen-directed The Kerala Story . Early promotions of the film claimed to tell a “spine-chilling, never told before true story” of 32,000 girls from Kerala who’ve been converted to Islam, manipulated into joining ISIS, and “buried in the deserts of Syria and Yemen”. This claim is demonstrably false , with the makers themselves later backtracking and saying they were showing the “true stories of three young girls from different parts of Kerala”. However, in the film, one character passionately declares to a policeman: “More than 30,000 girls are missing, sir. The unofficial number is 50,000. We all believe that, sir”. Simplistic and unsubtle, The Kerala Story cherry-picks and distorts disparate, extremely rare “true stories” and manipulates them to peddle the Hindu nationalist “Love Jihad” conspiracy theory and construct a heightened sense of fear and distrust of Muslims. In one scene, the protagonist Shalini’s (now Fatima) husband rapes her, using Islam as justification, and later slaps her for protesting as she cries. In another, a bearded Muslim man lays out the plan for love jihad: “Start giving them medicine, get close to them, make them estranged from their families, ... [and] if need be, get them pregnant”. By the end of the film, this plan results in the pregnancy, suicide, and gang rape of these Hindu girls. Like The Kashmir Files , then, The Kerala Story also uses shock value to arouse disgust and hatred towards Muslims in a Hindu audience. Similarly, the film was profusely praised by Modi and several other BJP ministers and declared tax-free in multiple states. Produced with a modest budget of INR 30 crores, it collected a whopping INR 242.2 crore in India, making it another bona fide blockbuster. Bollywood and literature scholar Priya Joshi argues in her book Bollywood’s India (2015) that since the 1950’s, blockbusters have “vitally captured dispersed anxieties and aspirations about the nation” and are a “testament to some of the public fantasies that accompanied the national project”. In essence, she writes, “Bollywood’s blockbusters have conducted a dialogue over the idea of “India””. As India’s new contemporary blockbusters, The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story reflect a nation engulfed in Islamophobia and Hindutva rhetoric. “The only trend that seems to work,” a prominent writer-director-producer admitted to me, “is an anti-Muslim trend.” According to culture studies scholars John Hartley and Ien Ang, audiences for films and any large-scale culture industries are “literally unknowable”, forming what Tejaswini Ganti calls “the ultimate site of unpredictability”. To cope with the inherent uncertainty of the business, members of Bollywood use what Ganti terms “production fictions”—“fluid and flexible discourses” made mostly in hindsight to explain commercial outcomes. Production fictions, for Ganti, primarily function to rationalise inherently random, unpredictable, and inexplicable box office events. Commercial outcome, she explains, functions as a “form of imperfect communication between audiences and filmmakers”—a dialectic of sorts. Riding the Saffron Wave The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story’s unprecedented success has created new production fictions that audiences actually want to watch more anti-Muslim, Hindutva stories, that consumer demand has simply swayed in that direction, and that such films are simply more likely to do better at the box office, not least due to possible, legitimizing promotion by the BJP. Many filmmakers, my interviewees claimed, “are riding on this whole saffron wave”, and many more, they expect, will “jump on the bandwagon” in order to achieve elusive box office triumph. It may be tempting to exceptionalize these films and view them as existing out of the scope of mainstream Hindi cinema, but this is misguided. These movies are only more extreme, brazen versions of an increasingly ubiquitous trend. From historical fiction films about Islamic invaders to cop and war films about fighting Islamic terrorism and Pakistan, Hindutva themes are dominating India’s cultural production and national consciousness. This type of cinema exists on a spectrum. There are those high on testosterone and muscular nationalism, like Uri (2019), Bhuj (2021), and recently, Gadar 2 (2023) and Fighter (2024), which involve masculinized army narratives, enforcing national borders, fighting “invaders”, espionage, violence, and the like. Then there are the rarer, more nuanced films on similar topics, like the female-centred Alia Bhatt-starrer Raazi (2018). Where there are explicitly propagandist, anti-Muslim examples of cinema like The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story , there are also more subtly Islamophobic films peddling a quieter poison, like Sooryavanshi (2021), Mission Majnu (2022), and Indian Police Force (2023). Cumulatively, the hard ubiquity of these protecting-the-nation-state-narratives and the pervasive uber–Hindu-patriotism at their core reflects what scholars Edward Anderson and Arkotong Longkumer refer to as the mainstreaming of Hindu nationalism. By making Indian-ness synonymous with Hindu-ness, they normalise Islamophobia in public discourse. The BJP has evidently harnessed the uncertainty endemic to the film industry to push it to perpetuate its Hindutva ideology. They are ultimately succeeding at saffronizing Bollywood, not by turning its largely apolitical members into Hindu nationalists, but by influencing market forces to make Hindutva stories more profitable and marginalising dissenting or “deviant” voices. This new political order is increasingly being internalised, naturalised, and taken for granted by industry members, who appear, from my research, all too willing to compromise on their ideals for commercial success. In January 2019, the year of the last Indian national election, a group of Bollywood A-listers, none of whom were Muslim, were invited to meet Modi. They then posted a selfie of all of them together, which instantly went viral on social media. Later that April, Modi sat down for a sanitised, scripted, and avowedly “apolitical” interview with Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar, known for being Hindutva’s poster boy . The same year saw the release of a slew of Hindutva propaganda films, many of which were officially promoted by the BJP , from hagiographic biopics of Hindutva figures like Thackeray and PM Narendra Modi to a film denigrating the opposition Congress party like The Accidental Prime Minister , to a pro-war, ultranationalist action film like Uri . With India heading towards another round of national elections this May, there is a lineup of propaganda films that peddle Hindutva conspiracies, celebrate Hindutva figures, and glorify the BJP while vilifying all its opponents: the Congress, academic institutions, activists, and of course, Muslims. These films share similar conventions: no A-list stars, lower budgets, saffron colour text in their trailers and posters, sensationalist hashtags hinting at conspiracies, and a neo-realist style colour grade. More importantly, they all seek to recreate the template created by The Kashmir Files and The Kerala Story , with the BJP and Modi’s promotion, tax-free status, and if they’re lucky, virality and box office glory. The first, Article 370 , exalts the Union Government for removing the eponymous article that conferred special status on Kashmir. Like clockwork, Modi praised the film even before its release. “I have heard that perhaps a film on Article 370 is going to be released this week,” he stated while addressing a rally in Jammu on 20 February 2024. "Good, it will be useful for people to get correct information." The film’s lead actor Yami Gautam shared a video of the speech immediately. “It is an absolute honour to watch PM @narendramodi Ji talk about #Article370Movie,” she wrote on X . Eventually released on 23 February, the film has made nearly INR 80 cr in India and is declared a super hit . More carnage is to follow. ∎ 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

I have weathered many rumblings— this house reverberating through the years with yells · FICTION & POETRY Poetry · United States I have weathered many rumblings— this house reverberating through the years with yells Imdad Barbhuyan, To Hold and To Let Go (2024). Digital photograph. Ghostmother I stare at you on the swing sweater over your sari, smile like my mother’s—teeth straight as a mare’s You summon the wind: forward, back forward, back Tendrils of hair frame your face, my mother's cursive brushes letters forward, back forward, back your ashen hand reaches through the photograph, grabs my wrist आओ— my flesh twists in your grip you insist, pull me forward, आओ— I open my eyes, find you pregnant Feel, you command in Nepali my selective ear translates on impact you guide my hand to your belly Is this her? I ask, anticipating a kick below my palm Yes, you smile at the gift of a future girl तिम्रो आमा (this we know) I follow you through the house not-yet-destroyed you never saw the earthquake relief cushions my voice Oh छोरी, your head tilts in pity I have weathered many rumblings— this house reverberating through the years with yells I hold back explaining how earthquake is different I wonder at the Nepali word for reverberate uncles fill narrow hallways, tall and lithe in school uniforms they do not see me I am your shadow swollen with your pregnant belly.∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Poetry United States Ghostmother Poet Disappearance Ceremony Maternal Motherhood Translation Body Home Voice Nepal Nepali Nepali American Intimacy Asexuality Femininity Touch Family Matrilineal Art Creative Writing Ghazal Love Pain Memory Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 10th Apr 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:

Information asymmetry, shadowy military operations, mining mafias, and the consent, or lack thereof, of the working class in how their information, labor, and presence are used are all tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, energy, and water in India. For climate journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar, this understanding, as well as the proximity of Operation Green Hunt to her hometown, led her to journalism. COMMUNITY On the Ethics of Climate Journalism Information asymmetry, shadowy military operations, mining mafias, and the consent, or lack thereof, of the working class in how their information, labor, and presence are used are all tied to the production, distribution, and consumption of food, energy, and water in India. For climate journalist Aruna Chandrasekhar, this understanding, as well as the proximity of Operation Green Hunt to her hometown, led her to journalism. Vol. 1 FIRST TAG AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Tags Tags 23rd Oct 2010 Tags Tags 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. There is an imbalance of power to be corrected—how do you level a playing field where, for centuries, you have oppressed, displaced communities, and always justified it for your own benefit? RECOMMENDED: " How One Billionaire Could Keep Three Countries Hooked on Coal for Decades " , NY Times . By Somini Sengupta, Jacqueline Williams, and Aruna Chandrasekhar. On how the Adani Group lobbied successfully to mine for coal in Australia and subsequently transporting it to India and contributing to energy and climate crises in both India and Bangladesh. 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