· INTERACTIVE Live · Balochistan Chats Ep. 6 · Imagery of the Baloch Movement The profile of Mahrang Baloch discusses how Mahrang's personal experience with her family members being disappeared prompted her to get involved in the activism against the state's Baloch disappearances. Mashal Baloch documented that profile extensively. Here, Mashal discussed the ethics of photojournalism, working with international correspondents, and how she has navigated being a self-taught photojournalist. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. For SAAG Chats Ep. 6, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim discussed the nature of photojournalism with photojournalist Mashal Baloch, who also discussed her work for the profile of Mahrang Baloch , published by SAAG. As a self-trained photographer, Mashal's sense of precarity and a profound drive to learn with few resources available to her is palpably true both for photojournalists in Balochistan and in many embattled areas across South Asia. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Live Balochistan Karima Baloch Mahrang Baloch Self-Taught Reportage State Repression Pakistan Mapping Knowledge Humanitarian Crisis Photojournalism Baloch Missing Persons Baloch Student Long March Photographer Profile SAAG Chats Journalism Baloch Insurgency Geography Accountability Nation-State State Violence Human Rights Violations Extrajudicial Killings Enforced Disappearances 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. 28th Feb 2021 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

· INTERACTIVE Event · The Editors FLUX · A Preface For the editorial team, FLUX was an event about the immense shifts frequent whiplash of ideas, norms and political realities we were experiencing; wearily towing vessels we knew were obsolete day in and day out. Generative artwork by Neha Mathew. On Intent FLUX was held on 5th December 2020 during Volume 1 of SAAG. The event's discussions were largely in the context of US politics, with some exceptions, and thus focused more on American diasporic views than our content in general. For the editorial team, FLUX: An Evening in Dissent was about the immense shifts frequent whiplash of ideas, norms and political realities we were experiencing; wearily towing vessels we knew were obsolete day in and day out. Things that seemed, finally, ripe as they could ever be had suddenly turned utopian. A global pandemic that had stranded us all emotionally and psychically. A sense—despite the defeat of Donald Trump—of a heightened sociopolitical danger amongst the US Left in the wake of the historic progressive defeat of the Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren campaigns in the Democratic primaries. A dissipated progressive movement. Disillusionment with local and national politicians who reneged on promises to defund the police following a summer of protests after the killing of George Floyd. A media landscape monopolized by corporate elites. A lack of inaction on meaningful abolitionist goals, from prisons to detention centers, that had gotten mainstream attention in unprecedent fashion just weeks or months earlier. As the panels with Nikil Saval, Kshama Sawant, Bhavik Lathia, Jaya Rajamani discussed, this retrenchment of the centrist wing of the Democratic Party—the old guard, that had seemed tenuous for some time—was at the time asserting itself powerfully in the form of cabinet appointment announcements and a sense of unease that, truly, not much would change. What could we do whilst in eternal quarantine? Most crucially: where could we find optimism? We found it in media spaces, in the poetics of internationalism, in the attempts to think about capitalism & neoliberalism during a global pandemic in internationalist terms, whilst also being specific about what we wished to highlight about the American context. Whether it was housing rights protests in Philadelphia, protests to tax Amazon in Seattle, or harsh truths about the Left's failure to engage with key demographics based on statistics from the general election, even the demoralizing moment gave us a great deal to be honest about. Meanwhile, those in other countries offered great succor and support in community building. All of this was reflected in the design system by Divya Nayar & videography by Vishakha Darbha that allowed the event to move smoothly. The background generative artwork shown above was created by Designer Neha Mathew was literally evokes fluid topography: the sense of the grounds shifting beneath our feet heightening our sense of change and even danger. Scroll below to subscribe to our newsletter today & get exclusive news about our upcoming in-person and virtual events. Navigate through FLUX: An Evening in Dissent through the links below, or watch the full event on YouTube or IGTV ( Part 1 , Part 2 , Part 3 ) Natasha Noorani's Live Performance of "Choro" Jaishri Abichandani's Art Studio Tour Kshama Sawant & Nikil Saval: A panel on US left electoralism, COVID-19, recent victories, & lasting problems. Tarfia Faizullah: Poetry Reading Bhavik Lathia & Jaya Sundaresh: A panel on the US Left & its relationship with media in the wake of Bernie Sanders' loss. Rajiv Mohabir: Poetry Reading SAAG, So Far: A Panel with the Editors DJ Kiran: A Celebratory Set SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Event The Editors 2020 US Election US North American Diaspora Internationalism Crisis The Disillusionment of the Left Post-George Floyd Moment Defund the Police Racial Justice Pandemic COVID-19 FLUX Internationalist Solidarity Literary Solidarity Nikil Saval Kshama Sawant Natasha Noorani Darakshan Raja Jaya Rajamani Bhavik Lathia Tarfia Faizullah Rajiv Mohabir Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. 5th Dec 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:

· THE VERTICAL Profile · Lahore To Posterity Facing a crushing electoral loss and the suffocating grip of Pakistan’s military state, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party remains committed to Chungi—reclaiming revolutionary traditions, rebuilding popular power, and planting the seeds of a socialist alternative in the country’s most forsaken neighborhoods. Noormah Jamal I will never leave you (2022) Acrylic on linen In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang. The melody—a touch above a whisper—meandered softly, as if probing for an answer to an unasked question. Our faces were lit only by the faint fire we had made in the ceramic bowl, using styrofoam boxes as kindling. The heavy rains of the previous week had cleared the smog, and the Big Dipper now crept up over the water tank on the bare concrete rooftop. The phone signal was down. The internet was choked off. The military had imposed a total blackout. So we lit a fire—and we talked. We talked about Gilgit-Baltistan’s bustling border with Xinjiang. We talked about Fidel Castro , who had sent a medical brigade to Pakistan and, on a call before dawn, instructed his lead doctor on the strain of basmati to be fed to the cadres. We talked about the feudal lords’ grip on the people. We talked, and we reflected. In moments of quiet, comrade Sikander sang his soft, piercing song. News of the election trickled in with each teary-eyed arrival from the polling stations. Sixty-five votes at the City District High School. Seventy-four at the Government Boys High School. Twelve at the Qazi Grammar School. Seven at the Modern Public High School. By the end of the day, the Haqooq-e-Khalq Party (HKP) gathered only 2,174 votes. The two candidates were contesting for seats in the National Assembly and the Provincial Assembly from Chungi, one of the poorest neighborhoods in Lahore. Dejection swept through the Chiragh Ghar community center, transformed in recent weeks into a bustling campaign headquarters. The night before, hopes were high and predictions were jubilant. 10,000 votes. 15,000. 30,000. On the campaign trail, where passersby met Ammar Ali Jan , the lead candidate, with song and wreath after wreath of roses, a breakthrough seemed inexorable. Now, the dim hallways and winding staircases filled with whispers of disbelief and consolation. What did we do wrong? What if our critics were right? A few of us gathered on the roof. There, by the open flame, in thickening cigarette smoke, we talked late into the night about the military state and the dizzying structures of patronage that, time and again, condemn Pakistan’s people to the deathly embrace of the past. The Poverty of Chungi Few buildings in Lahore are taller than two or three stories, so the streets and neighborhoods stretch out in all directions across the flat landscape. In Lahore’s vast Defence Housing Authority (DHA) districts, the rows of homes—or, more accurately, walled compounds, often fronted by lush tropical gardens—feel endless. The DHA is the military-run real-estate developer that operates “defense” neighborhoods across the country. Pakistan’s aspiring professional class calls them home, as does the military and political top brass. Each DHA district is bookended by armed checkpoints. How many people who live in DHA cross the stark threshold into Chungi? In this peri-urban settlement that was once a village, paved streets make way for muddied and torn-up roads. The serene, airy alleys of DHA transition to a stifling cacophony of images, smells, and sounds. Cows, goats, and stray dogs mingle with the traffic, where cars and rickshaws buzz past each other from all sides at dizzying speeds. An open canal clogged with sewage and refuse from the food markets bubbles alongside one of the neighborhood’s main roads. The water is so filthy that some seventy percent of children in Chungi suffer from dysentery. These are the material imprints of a political system in which working people have had no meaningful shot at contending power for the better part of half a century. If the Pakistani left of the 1960s had put forward ambitious proposals for pulling the country towards greater equality, by the 1980s, “the socialist alternative which once seemed imminent had become a distant memory,” the politician and intellectual Aasim Sajjad Akhtar wrote . In its place, a series of increasingly entrenched regimes adopted, he wrote, “complex and sophisticated strategies of cooptation,” removing the workers and peasants from the equations of popular power and constructing a vast “patronage machine” to take their place. Then, the Soviet Union collapsed and the left entered a long era of retreat. The Pakistani state came to reflect a complex web of competing class interests—the capitalist, the feudal, the neo-colonial—that existed in permanent contradiction. Officeholders changed often. Little changed for the Pakistani people. At the top, a powerful military bureaucratic state apparatus—an inheritance of the colonial order—operated as kingmaker. This political structure seeped into every aspect of Pakistani society, threading its way through class and ethnic divides. At the scale of their lives, the people of Chungi, too, became beholden to the same contradictions that gripped the nation: above the sewage-filled canal that runs through the district, an opulent residence houses the local kingmaker. His loyalty buys the consent of the salesmen and the elders. The salesmen will secure the consent of their markets, and the elders of their neighbors. Allegedly, ten dollars buys a vote. Here, an electoral campaign resembles a suitcase of cash. What is the strategy for building popular power in Pakistan at this juncture? “None of the mainstream parties are interested in making the working class a subject of its politics,” Ammar Ali Jan told me after the election. “None of them are willing to speak of land reforms or ending subsidies for the elites. None of them are willing to confront the IMF. None of them are willing to give genuine and consistent solidarity to oppressed nationalities against state repression.” As a student, Ali Jan went to Chungi and found it to be a microcosm of the condition of millions of people around the country. Chungi revealed the futility of mere humanitarianism—a fixed road, new water filter, or food handouts—amid the tragedy that is produced and reproduced daily by the very architecture of the state. It revealed the inability of the existing order, so mired in its class interests, to bring dignity to the deprived. The situation of the people of Chungi pointed to a singular, piercing conclusion: the need to resurrect the revolutionary socialist alternative. Chungi Stirs At the start of 2023, Ammar Ali Jan and three activists of the Haqooq-e-Khalq Movement (HKM)—as it was then known—began their daily walk through the streets of Chungi . They talked with the butchers, stationery salesmen, and tailors at the bazaar. They talked with the textile weavers in the workshops and factories. They talked with the unionists whose struggles traced back decades—memories that they would soon seek to resurrect through public commemorations of forgotten martyrs. They talked with the mothers who cleaned the houses of Lahore’s middle and upper classes in a nearby DHA neighborhood. The HKM had organized in the community for some time before it embarked on the path of party-building. Pakistan’s complex structures of power were on their minds. How do you dislodge a system that dominates all the political offices, all centers of decision-making power, all structures within the judiciary? How do you politicize a dormant student body, and bring it into dialogue with the peasantry and the country’s disenfranchised women? How do you activate the workers in a neighborhood like Chungi? But they also thought about Pakistan’s old left, which had become fragmented and defeated, much of it confined to a series of old comrades’ clubs. How do you bring vitality back into a movement that has lost it? “The revolutions in Cuba and China—these were the most important things that we kept in our mind when we were writing our manifesto,” Dr. Alia Haider, an organizer with the HKP, told me. In Cuba, as in China, mass movements brought together coalitions of peasants, intellectuals, women, workers, and youth, establishing political bases that could overturn the feudal, colonial, and imperialist structures that gripped both nations. It was there, among the most oppressed, that revolutionary energies stirred. “We had read Marx, we had read Mao, we had read Fidel,” Dr. Haider said. “But when we arrived in Chungi, we saw that people who had never heard these names knew Marx. They lived Marx.” For the people of Chungi, the contradictions of class were blinding. They were visible in the sewage flowing through their streets; in the oil that the street food vendors could only afford to change monthly; in summary, uncompensated dismissals from the factories. But, like the broader left, they remained disorganized, disempowered, and dejected. “The Pakistani working class does not exist as an independent political subject,” Ammar told me. It exists in a “state of non-being, unable to assert its interests.” Its subordination has become entrenched. The politics of patronage that have seeped into every crevice and pore of Pakistan’s governing order have denied political agency to those most affected by it. It became clear that simply being voted into office by them would be insufficient. External representation on its own cannot awaken working class subjectivity—it cannot reassert its protagonism in the movement of history. What is needed, Ammar told me, is the reconstruction “of the subjective factor of the revolution—the party—with all the patience, consistency and courage that this requires.” The revolutionary party occupies a central space in the socialist tradition. Karl Marx showed that class analysis provides the fundamental starting point in understanding political parties, whose configuration reflects the stages of development and respective power of different classes. The ability of working people to represent themselves depends on the existence of a party created in their image, and carrying their subjectivity. Without such a vehicle, the working class is forced to align politically with the subjectivity of its oppressors. It becomes divided. Its political horizon becomes truncated. The revolutionary party is necessary to contain, develop, and advance the aspirations of the working masses. Years ago, the HKM first mobilized the community to sweep the streets and clean the canals, seeking to address the sanitation crisis. In 2022 , the movement organized weekly health camps around Chungi, an initiative led by Dr. Alia. With time, the imperative to institutionalize became clear. “As we began to organize the first of our free medical camps, we saw that the devastation facing the working classes was beyond our capacity to help them as a movement,” Dr. Alia told me. “So we had to not only develop the infrastructure to support these people, but also cultivate a politics of solidarity.” By August 2023, the HKP opened the Khalq Clinic , a permanent site providing free testing, consultations, and medicines to people in Chungi. The Cuban Ambassador attended the opening, recalling Cuba’s own missions of medical internationalism to Pakistan. By the end of the year, the Party had five vocational schools with courses on English, computer literacy, and financial management. Students from universities came to volunteer in droves. At first, Dr. Alia told me, they struggled to connect the problems of others with their own. But the people of Chungi transformed them and opened in them a much more expansive vision of political possibility. “Until we know what the water in the sea is like, we could not know how to navigate the waves,” Dr. Alia said. By the time the election arrived in February 2024, the HKP had mobilized seven hundred people to work on its campaign. Among them were two seventeen-year-old alumni of the vocational schools, who now managed a complex voter registration process at HKP’s campaign headquarters. They checked the voter lists against records from the polling stations. They identified and corrected missing data in the voter lists. For each entry on the lists, they prepared a folder with three sheets of paper, two pens, a ruler, and two pieces of candy to help voters navigate the labyrinthine process on the day of the election. They checked the folders against numbered spreadsheets for each of the polling stations. Within months after the election, further breakthroughs arrived. When, early in 2024 , workers from the Chawla factory learned of planned closures—and proposed dismissals with minimal compensation—they organized. Led by factory worker and HKP member Maulana Shahbaz, they won what Ammar described as the “largest golden handshake since the 1970s.” The workers’ severance package increased from roughly eighty US dollars to as much as three thousand. In October, HKP members traveled to the lush countryside of Jhang, a city on the east bank of the Chenab River, to bring together thousands of peasants for a Kissan Conference. The farmers sang, chanted, and vowed to take on the state that has long subjugated them. All along, the HKP worked to ground its local organizing in an internationalist vision, protesting regularly in solidarity with Palestine and Lebanon as they faced a merciless bombardment by Western-backed Zionist forces, and mobilizing in friendship with Cuba, itself suffocated by economic warfare. If building the revolution means preparing the masses for the task of governance, then the HKP’s small first steps hold immense significance. Carried toward their logical conclusion, their political strategy aims at activating a powerful dormant force that holds singular capacity to resolve the dilemmas of Pakistan’s oppressed—substituting the landlords, capitalists, and compradors for the masses in the equations of political power. In this context, the campaign in the February election had achieved its goals, even if it failed to secure electoral gains. Many described the vote as a referendum on Imran Khan and his Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf—a rejection of foreign meddling and the brazen denial of even the most basic democratic rights. As a local party, the HKP was not part of the national calculus. As is their wont, the other parties that had come to Chungi on the day of the election—never opening the tinted windows of their jeeps—soon left. They will return for the next election, whenever it may come: in two years, or three, or five. But the HKP has established a permanent presence in Chungi. Its organizational capacities were magnified by the electoral campaign. Now, it is aiming to move further afield: to open branches in other cities across the country, building clinics, building schools, cleaning the water, and everywhere reasserting the idea that working people are the subject of history and not the object of their oppressors. In the days after the February election, the HKP put out a statement. It began with a passage from the poem To Posterity by the German communist Bertold Brecht. The poem says everything there is to say about the permanent task that lies ahead: To the cities I came in a time of disorder That was ruled by hunger. I sheltered with the people in a time of uproar And then I joined in their rebellion. That's how I passed my time that was given to me on this Eart h. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Profile Lahore Haqooq-e-Khalq Party Elections Chungi Revolution Socialism Military Crackdown Community Discourse Discourses of War Storytelling News National Assembly Chiragh Ghar Campaign Ammar Ali Jan Pakistan Poverty Defence Housing Authority DHA districts Real Estate Militarism Armed Checkpoints Peri-urban settlements Village History Memory Dysentery Healthcare Inequality Aasim Sajjad Akhtar Working Class Capitalism Feudal Neo-Colonial Ethnic Division Popular Power Land Reform Subsidies Elitist Humanitarianism IMF International Monetary Fund Nationalism Repression Activism Cuba China Revolutionary Karl Marx Dehumanization Disempowerment Khalq Clinic Medical Internationalism Vocational Training Isolation Mobilization Chawla Factory Chenab River Kissan Conference Farming Farmers Agricultural Labor Solidarity Palestine Lebanon Zionism Economic Security Imran Khan Tehreek-e-Insaf Bertold Brecht PAWEŁ WARGAN is an activist and organiser based in Berlin. He co-founded and coordinates the Green New Deal for Europe campaign, sits on the Coordinating Collective of the Democracy in Europe Movement (DiEM25) and serves as the Coordinator of the Secretariat at the Progressive International. He publishes regularly in Jacobin , the New Statesman , Tribune, and Politico. 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. 30th Apr 2025 Paweł Wargan Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

The co-founder of the women-led publication Karti Dharti discusses India's farmers' movement, the intersecting realities of gender, and Dalit labour, the motivation to create Karti Dharti, the fifth edition of which you can read in Gurmukhi. INTERACTIVE Chats Ep. 7 · Karti Dharti, Gender & India's Farmers Movement The co-founder of the women-led publication Karti Dharti discusses India's farmers' movement, the intersecting realities of gender, and Dalit labour, the motivation to create Karti Dharti, the fifth edition of which you can read in Gurmukhi. Sangeet Toor Karti Dharti is a women-led publication that highlights diverse voices from the farmers’ movement. Understanding how gender, the COVID crisis, and the farmers' movement in India intersect is of critical importance. In April 2021, Drama Editor Esthappen S. chatted with Karti Dharti's Founder-Editor, Sangeet Toor, on Instagram Live, about Karti Dharti's history, the state of the farmers' movement in India at the time. They mapped out the nature of the movement itself, especially as it pertains to gender, discuss the challenges it faced. Toor described how the magazine focuses on the intersection of gender and movement politics. Read the fifth edition of Karti Dharti here . Karti Dharti is a women-led publication that highlights diverse voices from the farmers’ movement. Understanding how gender, the COVID crisis, and the farmers' movement in India intersect is of critical importance. In April 2021, Drama Editor Esthappen S. chatted with Karti Dharti's Founder-Editor, Sangeet Toor, on Instagram Live, about Karti Dharti's history, the state of the farmers' movement in India at the time. They mapped out the nature of the movement itself, especially as it pertains to gender, discuss the challenges it faced. Toor described how the magazine focuses on the intersection of gender and movement politics. Read the fifth edition of Karti Dharti here . SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Live Punjab Farm Ordinances Movement Organization Gender Mass Protests Media Blackout Media Delhi Chandigarh Women's Participation Displacement Sit-ins Disinformation COVID-19 Urban/Rural Urbanization Police Action Policing Citizenship Amendment Act Protests CAA Protests NRC Protests Accountability Pragmatic Realities of Protest Kisan Mazdoor Ekta Sanyukt Kisan Morcha Labor Agricultural Labor Solidarity Organic Solidarity Dalit Histories Dalit Labor Class Struggle Caste Political Economy Village Economies Domestic Labor Farmers' Movement India Indian Fascism India Today Activist Media Agrarian Economy Agriculture Alienation Gurmukhi Protests Movement Strategy Labor Movement Workers Movements Haryana Working-Class Stories Women and Gender Studies in India SAAG Chats Environment Climate Change SANGEET TOOR is Founder/Editor of Karti Dharti , a women-led publication showcasing diverse voices from the farmers' movement in India. She is a writer and reporter who has written for The Wire and Caravan , focusing on the history of land rights and peasant struggles in Punjab. 29 Apr 2021 Live Punjab 29th Apr 2021 The Changing Landscape of Heritage Saranya Subramanian 13th Feb Beatrice Wangui's Fight for Seed Sovereignty in Kenya Pierra Nyaruai 22nd Apr Whiplash and Contradiction in Sri Lanka’s aragalaya Harshana Rambukwella 27th Feb India's Vector Capitalism Model Anumeha Yadav 5th Jun The Assessment of Veracity: COVID-19 Mutual Aid Organizing Riddhi Dastidar 5th Jun On That Note:

· BOOKS & ARTS Essay · Political Theory Exhaustion & Emancipation Interpreting Rossana Rossanda & Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba to answer: what allows emancipatory politics to start, and what prevents it? Artwork by Mon M for SAAG. CONSIDER THE militant who wakes up exhausted. Every day and night in the streets, perhaps marching back and forth with painful restraint, perhaps building barricades in spontaneous moments of affinity with those whose rapid “learning processes” have demonstrated the rationality of slowing and obstructing the police. Sore muscles the next day arguing in meetings and studying the classics for guidance. Despair at the emptying of the streets, the guilty capitulation to apathy, and the devastating disintegration of the organization. Consider what intervenes between politics as event: the knocking of doors, the apocalyptically slow process of persuasion, the daily strain to survive one’s own declining fortunes, the sheer emotional intensity of attempting to maintain fidelity and hope in the empty and seemingly endless interval. We know such exhaustions. Alongside these exhaustions which punctuate the lives of those who have dedicated themselves to politics at an everyday, grassroots level, the residents of the United States as a whole seem to have entered a state of exhaustion. It is in no small part provoked by the series of drastic political shifts that are marked by the fluctuating fortunes of the parliamentary system and its parties, parallel to the ebb and flow of social movements outside state boundaries. This exhaustion seems to be a broad phenomenon—caused by an affective investment in the outcomes of elections and the trajectory of social movements. But in fact, we must think of exhaustion in a different, highly specific way if we are to understand its contemporary political centrality. Exhaustion, in fact, has something like the status of a historical condition, a status that is a consequence of the termination of emancipatory politics. In this sense, exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Contrary to the popular opinion which dictates that “everything is political,” politics is not always taking place—politics, by which I mean specifically emancipatory politics, is an exceptional phenomenon. It does not happen with frequency. Just as it has to appear, it also fades away. Exhaustion shifts from the moment which marks the termination of a political sequence to what appears to be the very impossibility of politics. Of course, to understand any of this, we have to specify what politics means in the first place. In embarking on this task for the present moment, I want to pay tribute to two comrades who left us last year: the Congolese philosopher Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba, and the Italian Communist Rossana Rossanda. Together they help think through the questions the militant faces in every moment of political action, even in what seem to be unremarkable and everyday practices: what is an emancipatory politics? What allows it to take place—and equally, what prevents it? The problem of emancipation animates the whole history of politics and political thought—but somehow, its place in our thinking and its relationship to social analysis often remains obscure. This slipperiness of emancipation presents a crisis for political thinking today. It is not difficult to see that a resurgence of authoritarian populism, the breakdown of the existing political system, and the approach of ecological apocalypse, all require concerted and creative theoretical efforts. But alongside the catastrophe of the present is the parallel emergence and disappearance of unexpected social movements—like those that recently peaked in the extraordinary mobilizations against racism and police violence. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. This vantage point is not one which we could step out of history to assume, but rather is one which appears in particular moments, and ultimately recedes. We also cannot simply take contingent aspects of any particular social movement to represent the intrinsic characteristics of emancipation. Horizontalist forms of organization, for example, though there is certainly no reason to dismiss them out of hand, nevertheless do not automatically guarantee a movement’s emancipatory character. It is possible for such organizational practices to foster broad and egalitarian popular participation, in a way that appears to “prefigure” an emancipated society. But it is just as possible that they will devolve into proceduralism, endless meetings, debilitating indecision, and the reassertion of the same old hierarchies and stratifications that characterize existing society. In this sense, perhaps counterintuitively, instead of embracing specific forms of movement democracy as good in themselves—which, more often than not, brings us back to abstract and ahistorical norms—we have to situate them within political sequences. It is within these sequences, and only within these sequences, that they take on a political meaning. Our capacity to theorize our reality will be limited by our ability to formulate a vantage point of emancipation. Such a vantage point of emancipation is different from any social analysis that serves as a guarantee for a particular political program. In my book, Mistaken Identity: Race and Class in the Age of Trump , I declined, much to the chagrin of certain critics, to explain the relation between the categories, now so frequently paired, of “race and class.” It seemed to me that to describe the relationship between two abstractions—which are only articulated in concrete and specific historical circumstances—would be a logical error. Instead, I concerned myself with the articulation of struggles against racial domination and class exploitation in emancipatory social movements. I briefly alluded to the vast literature on the social and historical construction of race, and at the same time, in archival work on the history of the 19th and 20th century workers’ movements for Viewpoint Magazine , I attempted to describe the social and historical construction of class, by reviving the method of “class composition.” At the time, it seemed to me that the erasure of class in “identity politics” had neutralized the revolutionary character of movements against racial domination. Since then I have been reminded that struggles founded on class can also be neutralized, as the history of the workers’ movement makes clear. It seems to me now that emancipation is foreclosed by any foundation, whether “identitarian” or “materialist,” and that the axes of political struggle cannot be aligned by an empiricist social analysis, but only from the vantage point of emancipation. I have further been led to understand that my description of the depoliticized moment of the present requires further explanation. I do not mean neutralization as the search for an already neutral domain, or the evasion of conflict, as in the canonical account of Carl Schmitt. His diagnosis of “the age of neutralizations and depoliticizations” is grounded in a general theory of “the political,” while I am concerned with the singular events of “politics.” My theory ends up diametrically opposite to the jurist. What I mean by neutralization is a force which renders opposition ineffective. It is distinct from the potentially moralistic idea of co-optation, which presumes some authentic belonging of the object. Opposition is neutralized not through appropriation, but through the formulation of an effective reactant and the transformation of each element into a new compound. Neutralization is restricted, while depoliticization is expansive. Neutralization comes from the top. It contains and redirects opposition into the harmonious diversity of the system. Exhaustion, then, is part of a constellation that includes neutralization and depoliticization. In order to distinguish this theory from preceding accounts of neutralization and depoliticization, it will be at the center of our inquiry. Emancipation Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba’s work is not widely known in the “West,” despite the important influence he had at University of Dar es Salaam in Tanzania and the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa in Senegal. His writings form part of an essential global dialogue on emancipatory politics. Wamba offers an indispensable statement on emancipation in his discussion of Lenin’s proposition that politics happens “under condition”: The political attitude is not accommodating; the state of affairs in the world does not have to remain so because it is so. People may live differently than they live. Politics is not expressed through the spontaneous consciousness. It is an active prescriptive relationship with reality and not a reflection or representation in consciousness of invariant structures (economic structure or level of development or the state). Politics is a creative invention. Let us do something about the situation! characterizes a political attitude. And so Wamba beautifully condenses a number of points on which to elaborate. Wamba emphasizes, drawing on Sylvain Lazarus, that “people think,” and that without this point of departure we inevitably end up in an elitist politics. Consequently there is a sense in which politics is thought—but thought is not, in some dualist framework, separate from reality. People’s thought is part of reality, and this is a materialist and egalitarian proposition. It rejects the idealist and elitist notions that “theory” is disconnected from people’s thought, and that only the party or the state can think. Emancipatory politics, then, based as it is on the “active prescriptive relationship with reality,” is not the expression of a social foundation. And because it starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics—not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” Because emancipatory politics starts from the premise of people’s equal capacity for thought, it is a mass politics. Not a populist politics in the sense of “the people,” but simply generic “people.” But even once we have affirmed that people think, we are forced to reckon with the fact that something is not always being done about the situation. In other words: is politics always happening? Wamba notes that the existence of a social movement does not automatically imply the existence of politics; the latter requires a “subjective break,” the development of an antagonism to the whole political order which “is revealed through militant forms of thought… and not through the movement of history.” Thus Wamba argues: Emancipative politics does not always exist; when it does, it exists under conditions. It is, thus, precarious, and sequential: it unfolds until its conditions of subjective break disappear. When people lose the consciousness of subjective break by ceasing to be involved in political processes, emancipative politics disappears. The completion of a sequence of progressive politics does not lead automatically to another. In the absence of emancipative politics, the state problematic or the imperialist influence prevails in the treatment of matters of politics. To reduce every political capacity to a state capacity is to abscond from politics. Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. When it does, it appears in sequences with a beginning and an end, and advances categories specific to its situation. But there are also modes of politics which are not emancipatory: the single-party, party-state model of state socialism, and the multi-party parliamentary mode. Let us put the term “democracy” in suspension for the moment, because the equation of democracy with multi-partyism and parliamentarianism naturally absorbs it into the state. “The multiparty system is a form of the state and not independent of or antagonistic to it,” Wamba writes. “Legal and constitutional dimensions, separation of powers, recognition of freedoms of association, expression, religion, etc., are structural traits of the state. They do not identify a mode of politics which has to be grasped through its subjective dimension.” Politics is not the political order of institutions. This much is already determined by the affirmation of people’s thought. But just as significantly, it does not always exist. In other words, politics in parliamentarism is reduced to voting. But it is only from the viewpoint of mass organization, Wamba proposes, that it is possible to speak of movements for democracy in Africa. The imposition of Western models of liberal democracy continues a fundamentally colonial relation which does not reflect the capacity of African people to constitute their own politics. “What are the conditions in Africa,” Wamba asks, “for emancipatory politics to exist?” He adds: Our starting point must be: in Africa too, people think and this is the sole material basis of politics. We must investigate the internal content of what they actually think. It is through an analysis of these forms of consciousness that we will grasp the forms of political consciousness characterizing the antagonism with the existing overall socio-political order. To fail in this task would be to “abscond from politics, reducing politics to a state capacity.” This, then, is our basic framework for understanding depoliticization. In line with Wamba’s reasoning, Michael Neocosmos provides important developments in his aptly named Thinking Freedom in Africa . Depoliticization is “the inability to maintain an affirmation of purely subjective politics” when “state politics reassert themselves because of the gradual linking of politics to social categories.” This problem, Neocosmos elaborates, is tangled up with the rare and sequential character of politics. How do we understand a political sequence? Along these lines, Neocosmos proposes, the end of the national liberation sequence in Africa 1960-75 need not be understood in terms of the “failure of nationalism” but as “the saturation of the politics of national liberation and their gradual exhaustion as pure politics.” Conventional wisdom on historical revolutionary sequences of the 20th century revolves around a fundamental, flawed dichotomy: either the beautiful soul which remains unsullied by their dark side, or the sensible pragmatist who understands that every attempt to change the world ends in disaster. But one can both reject the nihilistic conclusion that no politics ever took place in a completed political sequence, and understand the consequences of the end of the sequence in terms of the risk of depoliticization. This is a pervasive problem which we encounter with the exhaustion of the great political sequences of the 20th century, even of the great socialist revolutions. This is how exhaustion becomes a historical condition and results in what we described above as the seeming impossibility of politics. The sequence of revolution which stretched across Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the 20th century proposed not only the overturning of the existing societies but also the transitional processes of socialist construction which would yield an entirely new kind of world beyond capitalism. But now we are in no such historical phase—and the affective experience of exhaustion is tied to this condition. Nowadays, everywhere, there are attempts to disavow histories of the attempts to construct societies beyond capitalism—often with the easy narrative of “totalitarianism.” Such views simply repeat a traditional kind of fear of the masses which sees every collective body as a threat of mob conformism. This worldview seeks to defend representative, but essentially oligarchic institutions in which the educated elite protects a formal democracy which conceals the real dictatorship of capital. Anti-democratic views of this kind are in fact at the center of the dominant “democratic” ideologies which accuse every attempt to change the world of being fundamentally “totalitarian.” Theories of the political mired in this oligarchic sensibility, even if they appear on the left—such as it exists today—ultimately rely on teleological conceptions of history. Unable to comprehend the novel political declarations and actions which gave rise to the historical revolutionary sequences, they also cannot allow for the rare and exceptional emergence of politics in the present. Exhaustion, in this sense, is understood through what Lazarus has called the “method of saturation”: affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. In particular, we have to grapple with the saturation of the long sequence of the 20th century revolutions which revolved around the revolutionary working-class party seizing the state. Exhaustion, in this sense, is... affirming that politics “took place,” while also noting that its existing categories and sites, which constituted a “historical mode of politics” have come to an end. These are the conditions of depoliticization. But one need not lay blame on the historical figures who frequently reached a scale of human achievement unimaginable to us, to simply recognize that emancipatory politics is precarious and sequential. Exhaustion How does the condition of exhaustion operate on the concrete level of movements and the state? Here we can follow our second departed comrade, Rossana Rossanda of il manifesto , the dissident group pushed out of the Italian Communist Party in 1969. In 1983, reflecting on the long, turbulent sequence of political upheaval in Italy of at least the preceding two decades Rossanda identified two fundamental political problems: the dissipation of social movements outside the state, and the consequences of left-wing parties attempting to enter the state. Of course, the situation in Italy, characterized by perpetual strikes and a mass Communist Party approaching the seat of power, is not the same as the ones we know in the United States. Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of the rise and fall of the Bernie Sanders campaign and the mass protests against police violence demonstrates the ongoing salience of Rossanda’s reflections. The Sanders campaign, of course, attempted to pursue a social-democratic program within the parameters of the bourgeois state— subsequently followed by the eruption of social movements outside the state. This dynamic, even if in a drastically different form and context, sheds light on the problem of the relationship between party and movement—or to put it another way, between the political (parliamentary) forms of the existing state and the social (extraparliamentary) basis of autonomous mobilization. For Rossanda, in the aftermath of the crest of the European workers’ movement the very form of the party, manifested in the Communist Parties, was in crisis. Already in 1968, from Paris to Beijing “the party-form was put into question” in no small part by the independent initiatives of workers. This occurred without the guidance of parties and unions, and alongside an unprecedented level of protest by youth and students which had an uneven but frequently fecund relationship with factory struggles. This crisis of the party-form was a critique of its fundamental political model; it was, Rossanda wrote, “the refusal of any delegation of power, whether it be a party or state, henceforth treated as ‘other’ in relation to the new subjectivity of these social agents.” During this particular crisis, the working class was engaged in the “refusal of work” rather than following the lead of unions in pursuing a minimal program of delegating the negotiation of new contracts to the labor bureaucracy. The student movements, meanwhile, helped realize the potential of the workers’ movement to pursue an independent path by advocating for autonomy and cultural transformation. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the political demands of its working-class political base. But while the “new social movements” outside the party provided a vitality to the independent movements of the workers, they also relied on the mass organization of the working class that was inextricable from the political party, even if the latter operated as a force of containment. This contradictory relationship, also witnessed in the May 1968 revolt in France, was exacerbated when the parties confronted the implications, throughout the 1970s, of actually entering into the capitalist state. What could they achieve within the very bourgeois form not only of the political party itself, but parliamentary politics as a whole? Rossanda pointed to the simple fact that in Western societies representative democracy is a structure within which parties must attempt to get votes. The process of getting these votes within the limits of the existing political system determines the party’s framework and ideology, and this takes priority over the demands of its working-class political base. For this reason, whatever tactical potential there might have been in participating in elections, it was nevertheless the case that a very different kind of working-class political power would have to emerge in order to overturn class society. Within this structure, contemporary socialists have aspired to reproduce the history of the mass working-class political parties: garnering votes, aspiring to enter the state. In short, despite the fact that the very notion of a Communist Party entering the state seems unimaginable, when and if they succeed, contemporary socialists will eventually confront the problem of the form of political power that will be required for structural transformation. It wasn’t just the party that was in crisis. Extraparliamentary social movements had a prospect of overcoming bureaucratic ossification and reorienting the parties in a revolutionary direction. But movements were also in crisis. Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”; its “dramatic and destructive ebbs are as important as the sedimentations it creates.” Movements leave an “active sedimentation” in society and its institutions “at the molecular level,” as Rossanda put it. They are that part of society which “transforms itself, calls for change, assembles and gathers people together.” Yet the movement, Rossanda reminds us, “does not last”. There were, furthermore, important historical shifts at work as Rossanda was writing. Until the mid-twentieth century, Rossanda argued, movements “arose from sudden bursts from the margins of society” but were then “predisposed to become a party or merge with an existing party.” In this sense they provoked a transformation in the state which also generally represented their absorption into the existing institutions. Yet the new movements of the 1970s did not operate according to this logic. They “tended to express subjects and needs that the dominant social bloc, namely the parties and the state, could no longer absorb in a timely manner without abnegating itself.” The movements did not institutionalize themselves, either by building new institutions or by entering existing ones, either because they were not capable of achieving this or simply did not aspire to, and without articulating a project or alternative, they “withered,” and the existing power structures solidified in response. In Italy the parties were incorporated into the increasingly repressive state—the Italian Communist Party itself playing a leading role in repression of autonomous movements—and capital succeeded, by the late ‘70s, in breaking the power of labor. Even if the parties and unions had operated as a force of containment and absorption into bourgeois parliamentarianism, their mass membership also functioned as a political anchor, so their crisis was also the crisis of the movements. As they went on the retreat, movements fell prey to a general social anomie and atomization. Here I must beg your patience in referring to a dense and lengthy passage which provides the key formulation: A diffuse politicization remains, skeptical in regards to the left if not openly hostile, as does an intense depoliticization, a kind of active negation. The “movements” are no longer “movements” (which would suggest that they are only movements insofar as they retain the implicit hope for a way out or transfer to other “forms of politics,” or a certain trust in the permeability of the institutional network which has disappeared today). They are becoming fevers, “latencies,” partial cultures or subcultures, acting creatively but molecularly, contradictorily. Rossanda is pointing us here to the molecular level of depoliticization: not the macroscopic, historical scale that is the condition resulting from the end of a historical mode of politics, but the immediate, on-the-ground level of practical activity of the movement’s participants. What she calls the “diffuse politicization” of the movements is oppositional to the existing society. But in their fragmentation, the movements no longer move from the margins into the institutions. As Rossanda had argued of movements in the first half of the 20th century, this shift into the institutions had a dual character: the existing institutions neutralized these oppositional bursts from the margins, while at the same time also necessarily being transformed by them. While the autonomy of the emerging movements may have circumvented this neutralization, they also did not find a new way to compel the institutions to resolve the problems raised by their revolt, refusal, and demands. Now the movements came to exist as latencies alongside the sturdiness of the institutional order, and this order appeared to take on a despotic permanence. Rossanda’s insight into the complex relations between class and party, party and movement, remain crucial for socialists today who ask themselves: how should we organize? Endings & Beginnings In this essay, I have meant exhaustion in three senses. The first, at the level of the immediate practical activity of the militant, is the waning of the political capacity for commitment or the devolution into factionalism. The second, at the level of the political sequences within which militants act, is when an existing historical mode of politics comes to an end and a new one is not yet apparent. The third, at the level of history, is the condition which results from the seeming impossibility of political sequences of a scale and depth comparable to the 20th century revolutions. Does exhaustion constitute a period of history, an “age”? Periodization is tricky. All periodizations are schematic. It is extremely complicated to determine how the logical relationship between categories is aligned with a certain period of time, especially for events so tumultuous that they constantly defy interpretation. Though this may seem counterintuitive, periodization at its best does not exactly identify periods, within which every phenomenon expresses the totality in a particular stage of development. Rather, it provides specific and distinct descriptions of uneven and structurally interrelated processes, which have moments of rupture and discontinuity. There are thus interwoven threads throughout these periods, untimely divisions and amalgamations. Those of us living through a period between sequences which announce shared reference points for a global political subjectivity can choose between being faithful to the emancipatory project and the various forms of capitulation to exhaustion. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. With this we are all exhausted. What we are left with are simply various forms of pseudo-politics. In trying to revive politics, exhaustion overwhelms us: the closure of revolutionary history, the unavailability of the forms, resources, and means which might be utilized in its continuation, an unhealthy relationship to past failures. There are three such pseudo-political sensibilities: adjustment, which claims to advocate for adjusting the existing reality, but actually enjoins us to adjust ourselves to it, on the basis of convenient normative principles (democracy, even socialism); personalization, the reduction of politics to individual behavior and identity, determined by a range of categories to which a person might be said to belong; and pragmatism, which dictates that since it will not get better, you must unencumber yourself of principles. In the interval the choice is not easy. Perhaps more dangerous than resignation in the face of exhaustion is to perform the rituals of depoliticization. Consider how these sensibilities are practiced. First, adjustment appears in the condescending rejection of any organizational process which does not have the state as its object. It generally means that an aspiring bureaucracy closes ranks and insists that all other political practices should be dropped every few years when, as Marx put it long ago, the people are permitted to decide which member of the ruling class will misrepresent them in parliament. Experiments, necessary for any process of organizational invention, are ridiculed and dismissed in comparison to an ideal model which exists nowhere in reality, but which we are assured is the only practical solution. The stubborn repetition of norms, both political and social, guarantees the despotism of the model. Walter Benjamin recounted what he called a Hasidic saying (but which he actually heard from his friend Gershom Scholem), that when the messiah comes, the world will be just as it is now, “only a little bit different.” From the perspective of adjustment, it will not be even a little bit different. Second, personalization operates the reduction of politics to interpersonal relations, resulting in factionalism and conformism. Factionalism and conformism are not unusual in the history of politics, even emancipatory politics, but today they happen without the processes of total social upheaval that framed them historically. As a result, individuals and groups act like states without achieving any substantive change, enforcing unwritten laws with informal social punishments. In the place of the aspiration for structural transformation there is the centering of politics on the person, on the person of the adversary, whose offensive proclamations and style of speaking may provide the opportunity for a self-satisfied disgust, insofar as our experiences and self-designations are seen as spontaneously political rather than themselves the construction of political procedures. Third, pragmatism is the most widespread sensibility among intellectuals, from the media to the academy, who adopt political language but drain it of any idea, and laugh at those who have the courage to believe that a truly political idea is worth defending. As Alain Badiou puts it, the imperative of capitalism, “get rich!,” today translates into: “Live without an Idea!” Even in the pages of our most traditional newspapers, no less than in what Byung-Chul Han calls the “shitstorms” of social media, we can read condemnations of oppression and privilege, we can see debates over the abolition of our society’s most violent institutions, we can rejoice at the toppling of the latest petty tyrant with the misfortune of being randomly exposed. Yet if we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” These sensibilities correspond in certain respects to different political tendencies, but they also fuse and intermingle in various ways. In social movements, forms of organization, whether they are bureaucratic or horizontalist, frequently revolve around the persons who lead or represent the movement. Competitions between factions, the decisions about which persons will occupy the positions of leadership, displace debates over strategy and program; activists are required to perform lengthy confessions of their privilege instead of recruiting new members (who are almost universally repelled, entirely justly, by such religious procedures); and purges and expulsions are performed to cleanse and redeem the community, instead of fostering environments which encourage free and open discussion. If we were to don the fabled sunglasses of They Live! , we would read, in bold and colossal type: “Live without an Idea!” All depoliticization leads back to the state, and its rituals, no matter how molecular, only enforce its hegemony. In periods of the intensification of opinion, of the back and forth which is not genuinely political, the greatest temptation is withdrawal—to maintain the conviction that a genuinely emancipatory politics is necessary, to recognize that it has taken place in the past, but then to conclude that it will not take place again. It is difficult to dictate to others whether it is better to enter the fray of opinion or withdraw into the isolation of one’s bunker. And indeed, I have no political prescription to make. I am unable to conclude with a clarion call, to rally new energies to a resurgence of politics. But this is not because I view emancipation as illusory, inherently flawed, or doomed to failure. In reality, it has been exhausted, in a way that perhaps we are still unable to fully comprehend. In the absence of events which inaugurate a thorough break with the existing order, I can only try to remain faithful, to the extent that my energies allow, to the emancipatory statements that Wamba articulated: that people think, that they may live differently than they do, and that politics is the creative invention which says: let us do something about the situation! And the questions which immediately follow these statements are: what are the conditions for emancipatory politics to exist? What are the militant forms of thought which make it possible for masses of people to make a subjective break from the existing state of things? What are the sites of politics which allow us to take a distance from the state, and how do we prevent politics from being reduced to the state when a political sequence comes to an end? The energies for fidelity, however, do not remain stable in our turbulent reality. A kind of ordinary steadiness, perhaps, can be drawn from Rossanda’s analysis of the organizational processes underlying these conditions. If depoliticization overwhelms us, it is not a matter of historical necessity, but of everyday relations, of the way we organize our relations to each other in the process of organizing politically. From the working class to the new social movements, from unions to assemblies, there is the patient work of building collectivities that last and the sober analysis of the exigencies of organization. And once again, many questions: what will fill the empty space left in history by the party? How can movements avoid neutralization while still compelling the transformation of existing institutions? What can prevent movements from being consigned to the margins, where they watch power solidify and harden? I remain convinced by these insights, but it would be a mistake to pretend that we have answers to the questions that follow. False certainties do not result in correct actions, and we gain little from arranging our ideas in such a way as to give ourselves the gift of optimism. Exhaustion, perhaps, is not eternal; we have no evidence to conclude that it is. But as capitalism, in its automatic and impersonal nihilism, accelerates its exhaustion of the planet, and the rituals of depoliticization foreclose the declaration of any political idea, there appears almost to be a nobility in withdrawal. And yet, this appearance is illusory, because one of the few truly meaningful questions in an otherwise meaningless and mediocre existence is this: what can we do about the situation? Answering that question means reckoning seriously, and disturbingly, with exhaustion. Time will tell—but not too much time—if we are up to the task. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Essay Political Theory Emancipatory Politics Rossana Rossanda Ernest Wamba-dia-Wamba Congo Italian Communist Party Tanzania Senegal Carl Schmitt Lenin Sylvain Lazarus Marxist Theory Michael Neocosmos Il Manifesto Bernie Sanders 1968 Workers Movements Depoliticization Affect Historical materialism Walter Benjamin Movement Organization Movement Strategy Revolution Histories of Revolutionary Politics Temporality 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 Mar 2021 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

Anamitra Bora ANAMITRA BORA teaches feminist and queer theory as an Adjunct Faculty at the Centre for Women’s Studies, Cotton University, Assam. His research explores the sociology of gender and the intersections of queer sexuality, affect theory, and violence, with a focus on the politics of (absent) bodies and the emotional textures of queer life in South Asia. In 2024, he was awarded Best Presenter at the 7th International Conference on Gender and Sexuality in Thailand for his paper “From Sexual Shame to Sexual Pride: Extending Emotions to Homoerotic Connections.” WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

FACT CHECKER Sameen Aziz Sameen Aziz is a journalist and researcher based in Islamabad. She covers misinformation, social justice and gender issues. FACT CHECKER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

· INTERACTIVE Live · Punjab Chats Ep. 7 · Karti Dharti, Gender & India's Farmers Movement The co-founder of the women-led publication Karti Dharti discusses India's farmers' movement, the intersecting realities of gender, and Dalit labour, the motivation to create Karti Dharti, the fifth edition of which you can read in Gurmukhi. Subscribe to our newsletter for updates on SAAG Chats, an informal series of live events on Instagram. Karti Dharti is a women-led publication that highlights diverse voices from the farmers’ movement. Understanding how gender, the COVID crisis, and the farmers' movement in India intersect is of critical importance. In April 2021, Drama Editor Esthappen S. chatted with Karti Dharti's Founder-Editor, Sangeet Toor, on Instagram Live, about Karti Dharti's history, the state of the farmers' movement in India at the time. They mapped out the nature of the movement itself, especially as it pertains to gender, discuss the challenges it faced. Toor described how the magazine focuses on the intersection of gender and movement politics. Read the fifth edition of Karti Dharti here . SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Live Punjab Farm Ordinances Movement Organization Gender Mass Protests Media Blackout Media Delhi Chandigarh Women's Participation Displacement Sit-ins Disinformation COVID-19 Urban/Rural Urbanization Police Action Policing Citizenship Amendment Act Protests CAA Protests NRC Protests Accountability Pragmatic Realities of Protest Kisan Mazdoor Ekta Sanyukt Kisan Morcha Labor Agricultural Labor Solidarity Organic Solidarity Dalit Histories Dalit Labor Class Struggle Caste Political Economy Village Economies Domestic Labor Farmers' Movement India Indian Fascism India Today Activist Media Agrarian Economy Agriculture Alienation Gurmukhi Protests Movement Strategy Labor Movement Workers Movements Haryana Working-Class Stories Women and Gender Studies in India SAAG Chats Environment Climate Change 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. 29th Apr 2021 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

WRITER Zuhaib Ahmed Pirzada ZUHAIB AHMED PIRZADA is a freelance investigative journalist who focuses on climate justice, politics, indigenous knowledge systems, colonialism, and capitalism. His work has appeared in Vice and Fifty Two , among others. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

This essay traces the afterlife of queer activist Xulhaz Mannan’s words: once hidden in a drawer, now scrawled on Dhaka’s walls amid mass uprising. Through the collapse of Hasina’s regime, the co-option of gender rights, and the violent silencing of queer life, it asks: can a new Bangladesh truly emerge if it continues to deny the existence of those it has consistently tried to erase? · THE VERTICAL Opinion · Dhaka This essay traces the afterlife of queer activist Xulhaz Mannan’s words: once hidden in a drawer, now scrawled on Dhaka’s walls amid mass uprising. Through the collapse of Hasina’s regime, the co-option of gender rights, and the violent silencing of queer life, it asks: can a new Bangladesh truly emerge if it continues to deny the existence of those it has consistently tried to erase? "Phobia Ends Here" (2023), acrylic in canvas, courtesy of Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin. A Grammar of Disappearance Authors' Note: We wrote this article in the hopeful aftermath of the July 2024 uprising last year. But since then, we have witnessed a troubling resurgence of attacks on the trans and queer community in Bangladesh, some even led by organizers in the uprising. "W hy would the ones—those I cannot stop thinking about—forget me? Why cannot I live out my love freely? This is so unfair." In 1994, gay rights activist Xulhaz Mannan wrote the above in a letter, possibly addressed to his lover. Twenty years later, Mannan was murdered for publishing Roopbaan , Bangladesh's first LGBT+ magazine. Since then, his letters remain stashed away in a closet of his residence. Last year, two queer archivists, including the authors of this op-ed, retrieved and digitized them. Excerpts from Mannan’s letters now appear on one of Dhaka’s freshly graffitied walls. On 28 July 2024, Bangladesh’s then Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina imposed a curfew , issued a shoot-on-sight order, and cut off telecommunications in an attempt to suppress a student uprising. In response, coordinators of the student movement turned to guerrilla art. Armed with spray cans, they scrawled messages like "Hasina is a killer" on walls, streets, and riot vehicles before disappearing. People across the country joined in. The Hasina regime fell on 5 August 2024. Street art now covers the city. But Mannan’s graffiti stands apart—it is not a demand, nor a slogan, nor a call for justice. What does it mean to find a love letter rendered as political graffiti? In a country where homosexuality remains criminalized and queer lives are violently erased, this graffiti blends love and mass uprising. It now sits beside an image of disappeared adibashi activist Kalpana Chakma . Together, they reveal the interwoven violences inflicted on queer people and dissenters under Hasina’s ultra-nationalist rule. "Phobia Ends Here" (2023), acrylic in canvas, courtesy of Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin. Mannan was murdered in 2016, during Hasina’s tenure. The Home Minister at the time condemned the victims: “Our society does not allow any movement that promotes unnatural sex.” Hasina herself repeatedly denied the existence of queer people in Bangladesh. In a 2023 interview, when asked about the criminalization of homosexuality in the country’s constitution, she responded , “That is not a problem in our country.” The Hasina regime also attempted to co-opt the gender rights movement. A 2013 government gazette recognized hijra as a gender category, allowing inclusion in official documents and transgender women to run for reserved parliamentary seats . But instead of expanding public understanding, the policy collapsed hijra, intersex, and trans identities into a single vague category that enabled abuse. In 2015, hijras applying for government jobs were forcibly subjected to medical examinations . This flattening of gender identity eroded organizing efforts. In the years that followed, state-aligned gender activists and NGOs gained prominence. They argued that Hasina’s authoritarianism was necessary to protect gender rights from Islamist groups. But their fear-mongering proved hollow. Violence against gender and sexual minorities only intensified under Hasina, whose politics local organizers now describe as “hijra-washed.” "Phobia Ends Here" (2023), acrylic in canvas, courtesy of Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin. One telling example came when progressive organisers included a subsection on trans rights in a school textbook. Islamist groups led by Asif Mahtab Utsho mobilised violently, forcing sexual and reproductive health NGOs to shut down. The Hasina regime offered no protection. The trans content was officially removed in June 2024. Queer people were targeted not only in public but also in digital spaces. The regime’s Cyber Security Act 2023 severely restricted internet freedom , forcing queer Bangladeshis into online silence. From dating to organizing, their digital presence was strangled. As the Hasina regime collapses and new proposals for justice emerge, we must remember that the freedom of queer Bangladeshis is linked with the liberation of all marginalized groups. Mannan’s murder, the co-optation of gender rights, and the crackdown on queer life were all part of a broader regime—one marked by extrajudicial killings , the repression of journalists , activists, artists, and human rights defenders under the guise of digital security, and the systematic violation of women and girls, particularly in indigenous areas , in the name of development. Hasina's ouster does not mark the end of authoritarianism. When the dust settles, we may once again see the rule of Bengali Muslim cis-men. In such a moment, Mannan’s graffiti offers a sharp reminder that Bangladesh is made up of many communities. If queerness continues to be criminalized, denied, and erased, the country will simply reproduce the same systems of violence. Queer people in Bangladesh have always fought for collective liberation—including in this very uprising. The question now is not whether they exist. It is whether the new Bangladesh is willing to coexist with them. ∎ "Phobia Ends Here" (2023), acrylic in canvas, courtesy of Dipa Mahbuba Yasmin. SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Opinion Dhaka 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. 24th Oct 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:

Seeking a home beyond Europe and South Asia could provide, Amrita Sher-Gil wrestled with a duality of being that reflected in her oeuvre. A Spivakian reading of her 1935 work Group of Three Girls sees Sher-Gil as an accomplice in perpetuating the Orientalist gaze she faced while trying to prove her prowess to Western audiences unable to view her art as equal. BOOKS & ARTS Speaking Through the Subaltern Seeking a home beyond Europe and South Asia could provide, Amrita Sher-Gil wrestled with a duality of being that reflected in her oeuvre. A Spivakian reading of her 1935 work Group of Three Girls sees Sher-Gil as an accomplice in perpetuating the Orientalist gaze she faced while trying to prove her prowess to Western audiences unable to view her art as equal. Vamika Sinha Group of Three Girls is widely considered one of Amrita Sher-Gil’s masterpieces. The 1935 artwork has become increasingly popular over the years as a symbol of Indian feminism, while Sher-Gil herself has gained more international recognition and seen an increase in art market capitalization. In the South Asian subcontinent, she has become canonical and even adopted into the Indian state’s official historical national narrative. A major road in central Delhi is named Amrita Shergill Marg, while her works are labeled national “art treasures” that “cannot be taken out of the country.” Sher-Gil’s elevated status, especially through Group of Three Girls , was influenced by the academic boom of postcolonial and intersectional feminist methodologies around the 1990s, which have trickled into the mainstream. A central scholar driving that boom has certainly been Indian theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose seminal 1988 essay , “Can the Subaltern Speak?” critiques how Western intellectual discourse perpetuates and constructs the “Other,” or the “subaltern” subject. Spivak insists, however, on the subaltern’s heterogeneity—that it is not a monolith, but endlessly diverse, stratified, and therefore unstable. This idea was clearly a precursor to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s introduction to “intersectionality” in 1989. The term “subaltern” gets bandied about regularly. Spivak’s theory has been elevated to near-pop status in online and academic discourses, but is the subaltern still a useful term? Is Spivak still relevant when her own status as a global public intellectual has suffered the arrows of critiques like caste-blindness and complicity with capitalist pandering? Remember that strange Aesop ad? However, a debate on Spivak as a figurehead is not on today’s table. If the term “subaltern” has been propelled into ubiquity to the point of irony and satirical smirking, we can continue to test its value on different canvases. Today, that is Amrita Sher-Gil’s, specifically her painting, Group of Three Girls . In this work, Sher-Gil transmits a vulnerable period of India’s past, through her privileged Indo-European body, onto the rural Indian women depicted on her canvas. By ventriloquizing lower-class female Indian bodies to express and cope with her own feelings of cultural alienation and dislocation, she becomes a subaltern speaking through another subaltern. Is this problematic or a genuine act of solidarity—an attempt to connect with the pain of others? This Spivakian reading of Sher-Gil’s work attempts to expose a more nuanced interpretation of the painting as a complex ethical problem. More widely, it situates Group of Three Girls as a cultural object both embedded within and symbolic of the fragile, unstable historiography of the Indian nation—once a subaltern state tussling between colonialism and nationalism, on the cusp of partition and independence. Sher-Gil as Subaltern? Born in Budapest to a Hungarian opera singer and a Sikh aristocrat-scholar who was “one of the first photographers of South Asia,” Sher-Gil did most of her artistic training in Italy and France. According to Linda Nochlin’s iconic 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, Sher-Gil possessed all the crucial factors needed to achieve success as a female artist: formal European art training, a well-networked artistic family and peer circle, money, mobility and independence, and the mentorship of older, more powerful male artists. But she was also plagued by a crisis of belonging. In Group of Three Girls, three Indian women, dressed modestly in Punjabi salwar kameez outfits, sit in front of a jute-brown background. Their hair is mostly hidden by their dupattas. Their clothes are largely plain, though the material looks gauzy, even diaphanous, thanks to Sher-Gil’s long, languid brushstrokes. Influenced by post-Impressionism , she paints the women in solid, vivid colors. One wears vibrant pistachio green, the other a pulsating saffron, while the final dons a deep vermilion. None of the subjects meet the viewer’s eyes. Their gazes are faraway and downcast, evoking resigned melancholy, or perhaps the strangely beatific expression of the serenity in accepting defeat. The women do not touch or look at each other, as if each was pasted separately in a collage. While the colors and brushstrokes teem with warmth and dynamism, the figures themselves appear frozen, alienated, and emotionally distanced: “together…yet alone,” in the words of art historian Giles Tillotson . A light from outside the image casts shadows on the wall behind them. One’s immediate urge may be to code the subjects as lower-class, oppressed Indian women upon seeing their simple, traditional clothing and mute, passive, and despondent stances. This reading is reinforced by two aspects from Sher-Gil’s previous paintings: first, Sher-Gil’s earlier use of shadows, such as in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian (1934), signified a looming, intrusive male presence, according to art historian Saloni Mathur. In Group of Three Girls, the shadows could symbolize the rigidities of patriarchy, particularly of impending marriage. The painting can further be contrasted with one of Sher-Gil’s earlier European works, Young Girls (1932), in which two women occupy a figuratively warmer space, their bodies angled towards each other, displaying an intimacy and closeness missing from Group of Three Girls. The two “young girls” appear as connected yet distinct people, given how elaborately they are painted, lending their dress, clothes, hair, and surroundings multiple depths of light and texture. In contrast, the women in Group of Three Girls , whose formal depiction is comparatively flatter, become more symbols than individuals. Instead of appearing as a particular group of women bound by a close relationship, the “three girls” become every group of women, isolated but bound only by the circumstances of being Indian, female, and subaltern. Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Girls , 1932, oil on canvas, 164 cm × 133 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. But the subaltern itself is an “essentialist” or unfixed concept. Spivak highlights the slippages within the hierarchical, “taxonomic” categorizing of subaltern identities to demonstrate their relational nature—that they are always formed in relation to another individual or group's identity, ultimately rendering them unreliable. In other words, someone may be a subaltern in one context but an oppressor in another. For Sher-Gil, her half-whiteness, wealth, and European elite upbringing lent her enormous privilege in British India, making the rural subjects she painted subaltern in relation to her primarily via social class. Yet in the eyes of the West, up to decades after she died in 1941, Sher-Gil was herself subaltern via race, gender, and geography; she was a less relevant, less authentic woman of color who predominantly painted in and about a Third World colony. A Crisis of Belonging Group of Three Girls is the first painting Sher-Gil produced after leaving Europe in 1934 for a growingly anti-colonial India. Upon her arrival, she proclaimed her “artistic mission” was to “interpret the life of Indians, particularly the poor…silent images of infinite submission and patience…angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness.” Her painting was the first manifestation of this articulated desire to speak on behalf of the subaltern. Sher-Gil would go on to build on this painting’s style and subjects for the rest of her life, depicting Indian women and rural village scenes in flatter forms and hotter colors. Still, her “mission” reads as cliché and problematic today. Seeded firmly and formally in Group of Three Girls , it can be faulted in the same way as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s writings were by Spivak in 1988, who criticized them for making marginalized peoples into a monolith, essentializing, aestheticizing, and further Othering “them”. Meanwhile, the two scholars maintained the elevation and centrality of their Western gazes while assigning virtue to the subaltern solely through their tragedy and oppression. This critique exposes how Sher-Gil denies Group of Three Girls ’ subjects a sense of individuality or agency. The green-clad woman’s hand is cut off from the frame. The red-clad woman’s left palm faces upwards, as if begging or in surrender. Through Sher-Gil’s downward, Westernized outsider gaze, the subjects are only brought together in a homogenizing representation of subaltern Indian women as downtrodden, helpless, and paralyzed. This reading is supported by Sher-Gil’s significant preoccupation with Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings at the time, which she was riffing on in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian . Gauguin’s work itself has been heavily critiqued for his flat, Orientalist depictions of Tahitian women through a colonial, patriarchal gaze. The structure and output of such a dominant gaze play out similarly in Group of Three Girls, where Sher-Gil represents her subjects “in the singular, as archetypes of humanity,” as Mathur writes, “reproduc[ing]…Gauguin’s primitivist gesture.” Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian , 1934, oil on canvas, 90 cm × 56 cm, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. But Sher-Gil was not a complete outsider like Gauguin, as a half-Indian who had already spent much time in India before moving there at the end of 1934. It was both an exciting and painful homecoming. As Mathur notes , Sher-Gil “sought a point of entry into the cultural landscape…from the difficult position of standing partially outside it.” Sher-Gil felt India would offer her more belonging than a racist Europe—a Paris reviewer once diminished her as “an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu princess” who… “conjure[d] up the mysterious shores of the Ganges.” Yet she was simultaneously apprehensive about not fitting into the Indian cultural landscape. Indeed, as Mathur points out, “Sher-Gil’s early detractors in the subcontinent complained that her Indian portraiture ‘smel[t] of the west.’” For Mathur, it was precisely Sher-Gil’s “sense of fragmentation and cultural isolation” that drove her practice. The artist once reflected: ‘It may be that the sadness, the queer ugliness of the types I choose as my models…corresponds to...some inner trait in my nature…’” These models sometimes included Sher-Gil’s own servants. Grappling With Sher-Gil’s Legacy Art historians such as Geeta Kapur have criticized Sher-Gil’s “narcissistic” attempt to transmute her cultural crisis into catharsis by entwining and equating her pain with that of poorer Indians amid political and national turbulence. In Spivakian terms, Sher-Gil employed her dominant gaze to speak through the subaltern for her own benefit. But others have been more benevolent, foregrounding not the inequality between Sher-Gil and her subjects, but the points of solidarity instead. Writers like Mulk Raj Anand have emphasized how truly moved Sher-Gil was by the poverty and patriarchy blighting India at the time. Scholars such as Prachi Priyanka and Subir Rana have highlighted the influence of Gandhi and Nehru on her paintings. “Gandhi’s notion of Swaraj (self-rule), and Nehru’s concept of ‘Indianization’ ” seeped into works which, beginning with Group of Three Girls , Rana writes, were even considered for use by “Congress propaganda for village reconstruction.” The use of the saffron color in Group of Three Girls, which was eventually incorporated into the Indian national flag, is further evidence of Sher-Gil’s alignment with the Independence movement. She also used the red introduced in this painting more liberally and intentionally in later works, such as Woman on Charpai (1940), to represent women’s desires while conveying their repression. This use of what Rana calls “ semiotic color ” perhaps reflected a growing awareness and redressal of the flatter female representation she had begun in Group of Three Girls , possibly due to more intimacy with and time spent in India. Still, Sher-Gil’s work suffered from similar pitfalls as Gandhian philosophies: a sense of saviorism, romanticization, and Orientalization of a more authentic pre-colonial India, and a homogenizing class and caste-blindness. Spivak challenged “the ‘lie’ of global sisterhood between ‘First world’ and ‘Third world’ women… [while] highlight[ing] the failure of Indian nationalism to emancipate lower-class, subaltern women.” A Spivakian reading of Group of Three Girls neatly encapsulates this argument: Sher-Gil transplants her ‘First world’ gaze onto the Indian women subaltern to her while using the grammar of Indian anti-colonial nationalist ideologies. But it does nothing to speak for or help her subjects, beyond stimulating her own aspiration to transcend her displacement. In 2015, it was revealed that the women in the Group of Three Girls were actually Sher-Gil’s upper-class nieces, not subalterns, after all. But this knowledge did little to impact the painting’s narrativization. There was no rewriting, no uproar. Ultimately, the way the girls are painted remains the same. Yet the way we look at them—and the artist’s gaze upon them—can evolve. Retrospectively, Group of Three Girls is the catalyst for examining how Sher-Gil’s practice went on to “embod[y] the most painful paradoxes of a colonial modernity.” A common, knee-jerk contemporary reading of Group of Three Girls may find it admirable due to Sher-Gil’s mixed identity, or its romantic representation of “the Indian woman” as feminist and patriotic, or because the Indian state has adopted it as the pièce de resistance of the “mother of modern Indian art.” However, an engaged Spivakian reading reveals it to be a historical object emblematic of the tensions of pre-Independent India, revealing a methodology for analyzing the present. The beauty of this work lies not just in its artistry or the sense of relation it might evoke among Indian female viewers, but that it distills so much of the ethical, identity-based dilemmas interlocked at the heart of the Indian nation historically and today.∎ Group of Three Girls is widely considered one of Amrita Sher-Gil’s masterpieces. The 1935 artwork has become increasingly popular over the years as a symbol of Indian feminism, while Sher-Gil herself has gained more international recognition and seen an increase in art market capitalization. In the South Asian subcontinent, she has become canonical and even adopted into the Indian state’s official historical national narrative. A major road in central Delhi is named Amrita Shergill Marg, while her works are labeled national “art treasures” that “cannot be taken out of the country.” Sher-Gil’s elevated status, especially through Group of Three Girls , was influenced by the academic boom of postcolonial and intersectional feminist methodologies around the 1990s, which have trickled into the mainstream. A central scholar driving that boom has certainly been Indian theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, whose seminal 1988 essay , “Can the Subaltern Speak?” critiques how Western intellectual discourse perpetuates and constructs the “Other,” or the “subaltern” subject. Spivak insists, however, on the subaltern’s heterogeneity—that it is not a monolith, but endlessly diverse, stratified, and therefore unstable. This idea was clearly a precursor to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s introduction to “intersectionality” in 1989. The term “subaltern” gets bandied about regularly. Spivak’s theory has been elevated to near-pop status in online and academic discourses, but is the subaltern still a useful term? Is Spivak still relevant when her own status as a global public intellectual has suffered the arrows of critiques like caste-blindness and complicity with capitalist pandering? Remember that strange Aesop ad? However, a debate on Spivak as a figurehead is not on today’s table. If the term “subaltern” has been propelled into ubiquity to the point of irony and satirical smirking, we can continue to test its value on different canvases. Today, that is Amrita Sher-Gil’s, specifically her painting, Group of Three Girls . In this work, Sher-Gil transmits a vulnerable period of India’s past, through her privileged Indo-European body, onto the rural Indian women depicted on her canvas. By ventriloquizing lower-class female Indian bodies to express and cope with her own feelings of cultural alienation and dislocation, she becomes a subaltern speaking through another subaltern. Is this problematic or a genuine act of solidarity—an attempt to connect with the pain of others? This Spivakian reading of Sher-Gil’s work attempts to expose a more nuanced interpretation of the painting as a complex ethical problem. More widely, it situates Group of Three Girls as a cultural object both embedded within and symbolic of the fragile, unstable historiography of the Indian nation—once a subaltern state tussling between colonialism and nationalism, on the cusp of partition and independence. Sher-Gil as Subaltern? Born in Budapest to a Hungarian opera singer and a Sikh aristocrat-scholar who was “one of the first photographers of South Asia,” Sher-Gil did most of her artistic training in Italy and France. According to Linda Nochlin’s iconic 1971 essay “Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists?”, Sher-Gil possessed all the crucial factors needed to achieve success as a female artist: formal European art training, a well-networked artistic family and peer circle, money, mobility and independence, and the mentorship of older, more powerful male artists. But she was also plagued by a crisis of belonging. In Group of Three Girls, three Indian women, dressed modestly in Punjabi salwar kameez outfits, sit in front of a jute-brown background. Their hair is mostly hidden by their dupattas. Their clothes are largely plain, though the material looks gauzy, even diaphanous, thanks to Sher-Gil’s long, languid brushstrokes. Influenced by post-Impressionism , she paints the women in solid, vivid colors. One wears vibrant pistachio green, the other a pulsating saffron, while the final dons a deep vermilion. None of the subjects meet the viewer’s eyes. Their gazes are faraway and downcast, evoking resigned melancholy, or perhaps the strangely beatific expression of the serenity in accepting defeat. The women do not touch or look at each other, as if each was pasted separately in a collage. While the colors and brushstrokes teem with warmth and dynamism, the figures themselves appear frozen, alienated, and emotionally distanced: “together…yet alone,” in the words of art historian Giles Tillotson . A light from outside the image casts shadows on the wall behind them. One’s immediate urge may be to code the subjects as lower-class, oppressed Indian women upon seeing their simple, traditional clothing and mute, passive, and despondent stances. This reading is reinforced by two aspects from Sher-Gil’s previous paintings: first, Sher-Gil’s earlier use of shadows, such as in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian (1934), signified a looming, intrusive male presence, according to art historian Saloni Mathur. In Group of Three Girls, the shadows could symbolize the rigidities of patriarchy, particularly of impending marriage. The painting can further be contrasted with one of Sher-Gil’s earlier European works, Young Girls (1932), in which two women occupy a figuratively warmer space, their bodies angled towards each other, displaying an intimacy and closeness missing from Group of Three Girls. The two “young girls” appear as connected yet distinct people, given how elaborately they are painted, lending their dress, clothes, hair, and surroundings multiple depths of light and texture. In contrast, the women in Group of Three Girls , whose formal depiction is comparatively flatter, become more symbols than individuals. Instead of appearing as a particular group of women bound by a close relationship, the “three girls” become every group of women, isolated but bound only by the circumstances of being Indian, female, and subaltern. Amrita Sher-Gil, Young Girls , 1932, oil on canvas, 164 cm × 133 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. But the subaltern itself is an “essentialist” or unfixed concept. Spivak highlights the slippages within the hierarchical, “taxonomic” categorizing of subaltern identities to demonstrate their relational nature—that they are always formed in relation to another individual or group's identity, ultimately rendering them unreliable. In other words, someone may be a subaltern in one context but an oppressor in another. For Sher-Gil, her half-whiteness, wealth, and European elite upbringing lent her enormous privilege in British India, making the rural subjects she painted subaltern in relation to her primarily via social class. Yet in the eyes of the West, up to decades after she died in 1941, Sher-Gil was herself subaltern via race, gender, and geography; she was a less relevant, less authentic woman of color who predominantly painted in and about a Third World colony. A Crisis of Belonging Group of Three Girls is the first painting Sher-Gil produced after leaving Europe in 1934 for a growingly anti-colonial India. Upon her arrival, she proclaimed her “artistic mission” was to “interpret the life of Indians, particularly the poor…silent images of infinite submission and patience…angular brown bodies, strangely beautiful in their ugliness.” Her painting was the first manifestation of this articulated desire to speak on behalf of the subaltern. Sher-Gil would go on to build on this painting’s style and subjects for the rest of her life, depicting Indian women and rural village scenes in flatter forms and hotter colors. Still, her “mission” reads as cliché and problematic today. Seeded firmly and formally in Group of Three Girls , it can be faulted in the same way as Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s writings were by Spivak in 1988, who criticized them for making marginalized peoples into a monolith, essentializing, aestheticizing, and further Othering “them”. Meanwhile, the two scholars maintained the elevation and centrality of their Western gazes while assigning virtue to the subaltern solely through their tragedy and oppression. This critique exposes how Sher-Gil denies Group of Three Girls ’ subjects a sense of individuality or agency. The green-clad woman’s hand is cut off from the frame. The red-clad woman’s left palm faces upwards, as if begging or in surrender. Through Sher-Gil’s downward, Westernized outsider gaze, the subjects are only brought together in a homogenizing representation of subaltern Indian women as downtrodden, helpless, and paralyzed. This reading is supported by Sher-Gil’s significant preoccupation with Paul Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings at the time, which she was riffing on in Self-Portrait as a Tahitian . Gauguin’s work itself has been heavily critiqued for his flat, Orientalist depictions of Tahitian women through a colonial, patriarchal gaze. The structure and output of such a dominant gaze play out similarly in Group of Three Girls, where Sher-Gil represents her subjects “in the singular, as archetypes of humanity,” as Mathur writes, “reproduc[ing]…Gauguin’s primitivist gesture.” Amrita Sher-Gil, Self-Portrait as a Tahitian , 1934, oil on canvas, 90 cm × 56 cm, Kiran Nadar Museum of Art, New Delhi. But Sher-Gil was not a complete outsider like Gauguin, as a half-Indian who had already spent much time in India before moving there at the end of 1934. It was both an exciting and painful homecoming. As Mathur notes , Sher-Gil “sought a point of entry into the cultural landscape…from the difficult position of standing partially outside it.” Sher-Gil felt India would offer her more belonging than a racist Europe—a Paris reviewer once diminished her as “an exquisite and mysterious little Hindu princess” who… “conjure[d] up the mysterious shores of the Ganges.” Yet she was simultaneously apprehensive about not fitting into the Indian cultural landscape. Indeed, as Mathur points out, “Sher-Gil’s early detractors in the subcontinent complained that her Indian portraiture ‘smel[t] of the west.’” For Mathur, it was precisely Sher-Gil’s “sense of fragmentation and cultural isolation” that drove her practice. The artist once reflected: ‘It may be that the sadness, the queer ugliness of the types I choose as my models…corresponds to...some inner trait in my nature…’” These models sometimes included Sher-Gil’s own servants. Grappling With Sher-Gil’s Legacy Art historians such as Geeta Kapur have criticized Sher-Gil’s “narcissistic” attempt to transmute her cultural crisis into catharsis by entwining and equating her pain with that of poorer Indians amid political and national turbulence. In Spivakian terms, Sher-Gil employed her dominant gaze to speak through the subaltern for her own benefit. But others have been more benevolent, foregrounding not the inequality between Sher-Gil and her subjects, but the points of solidarity instead. Writers like Mulk Raj Anand have emphasized how truly moved Sher-Gil was by the poverty and patriarchy blighting India at the time. Scholars such as Prachi Priyanka and Subir Rana have highlighted the influence of Gandhi and Nehru on her paintings. “Gandhi’s notion of Swaraj (self-rule), and Nehru’s concept of ‘Indianization’ ” seeped into works which, beginning with Group of Three Girls , Rana writes, were even considered for use by “Congress propaganda for village reconstruction.” The use of the saffron color in Group of Three Girls, which was eventually incorporated into the Indian national flag, is further evidence of Sher-Gil’s alignment with the Independence movement. She also used the red introduced in this painting more liberally and intentionally in later works, such as Woman on Charpai (1940), to represent women’s desires while conveying their repression. This use of what Rana calls “ semiotic color ” perhaps reflected a growing awareness and redressal of the flatter female representation she had begun in Group of Three Girls , possibly due to more intimacy with and time spent in India. Still, Sher-Gil’s work suffered from similar pitfalls as Gandhian philosophies: a sense of saviorism, romanticization, and Orientalization of a more authentic pre-colonial India, and a homogenizing class and caste-blindness. Spivak challenged “the ‘lie’ of global sisterhood between ‘First world’ and ‘Third world’ women… [while] highlight[ing] the failure of Indian nationalism to emancipate lower-class, subaltern women.” A Spivakian reading of Group of Three Girls neatly encapsulates this argument: Sher-Gil transplants her ‘First world’ gaze onto the Indian women subaltern to her while using the grammar of Indian anti-colonial nationalist ideologies. But it does nothing to speak for or help her subjects, beyond stimulating her own aspiration to transcend her displacement. In 2015, it was revealed that the women in the Group of Three Girls were actually Sher-Gil’s upper-class nieces, not subalterns, after all. But this knowledge did little to impact the painting’s narrativization. There was no rewriting, no uproar. Ultimately, the way the girls are painted remains the same. Yet the way we look at them—and the artist’s gaze upon them—can evolve. Retrospectively, Group of Three Girls is the catalyst for examining how Sher-Gil’s practice went on to “embod[y] the most painful paradoxes of a colonial modernity.” A common, knee-jerk contemporary reading of Group of Three Girls may find it admirable due to Sher-Gil’s mixed identity, or its romantic representation of “the Indian woman” as feminist and patriotic, or because the Indian state has adopted it as the pièce de resistance of the “mother of modern Indian art.” However, an engaged Spivakian reading reveals it to be a historical object emblematic of the tensions of pre-Independent India, revealing a methodology for analyzing the present. The beauty of this work lies not just in its artistry or the sense of relation it might evoke among Indian female viewers, but that it distills so much of the ethical, identity-based dilemmas interlocked at the heart of the Indian nation historically and today.∎ SUB-HEAD ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: Kareen Adam · Nazish Chunara A Dhivehi Artists Showcase Shebani Rao A Freelancer's Guide to Decision-Making Amrita Sher-Gil, Group of Three Girls , 1935, oil on canvas, 99.5 x 73.5 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. SHARE Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Profile Lahore Punjab Amrita Sher-Gil Orientalism Western Gaze Europe South Asia post-Impressionism Subaltern Studies Gayatri Spivak Anti-Colonialism Postcolonial Feminist Theory subjectivity semiotic color modernity saviorism indianization Gauguin Foucault 1935 Group of Three Girls Self-Portrait as a Tahitian Young Girls Feminism Feminist Art Practice femininity feminine Modernism Bauhaus Avant-Garde Traditions Paul Gauguin Deleuze Primitivism VAMIKA SINHA is an arts and culture journalist based in London. She is Deputy Editor at Wasafiri. 8 Jul 2025 Profile Lahore 8th Jul 2025 To Posterity Paweł Wargan 30th Apr Theorizing the Romnie Iulia Hau 3rd Feb The Ahmadis of Petrópolis Sana Khan 21st Jan Chats Ep. 5 · Tamil translation & Perumal Murugan's “Poonachi” N Kalyan Raman 7th Dec The Pre-Partition Indian Avant-Garde Partha Mitter 25th Aug On That Note:

· COMMUNITY Interview · Chennai Experimentalism in the Face of Fascism “How do you laugh at untrammeled power? Either you are completely terrorized by it, or you completely delegitimize its authority by laughing in its face and doing the most absurd things.” Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. RECOMMENDED: The Orders Were to Rape You: Tigresses in the Tamil Eelam Struggle , the newest book by Meena Kandasamy (Navayana, 2021). SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Interview Chennai Sociolinguistics Avant-Garde Form Experimental Methods Dalit Literature Dalit Histories Indian Fascism Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam Tamil Tigers Auto-Fiction Bhima Koregaon Marxist Theory André Breton Absurdity Explanation Affect Translation Tamil Eelam Personal History Failure Narrative Structure 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. 7th Sep 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: