JOURNALIST Raisa Wickrematunge RAISA WICKREMATUNGE is Deputy Editor at Himal Southasian , based in Colombo. She formerly worked at the Sunday Leader and the digital civic media initiative Groundviews . Her work has been published in The Guardian and First Post , among others. JOURNALIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

“Food organization at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment began as the effort of just seven students organizing the chaotic assortment on the tarp, but it quickly evolved into a network attracting several student groups, professors, community members, and even other encampments, including the NYU and City College encampments.” THE VERTICAL Food Organizing at Columbia's Gaza Encampment AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Food organization at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment began as the effort of just seven students organizing the chaotic assortment on the tarp, but it quickly evolved into a network attracting several student groups, professors, community members, and even other encampments, including the NYU and City College encampments.” SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Dispatch New York Palestine Food NYPD Gaza Columbia University Gaza Solidarity Encampments Apartheid Divest Divestment BDS Police Action Police Butler Lawn Repression in Universities Food Organizing University Administration NYU City College Arrests Anti-Israel Protests Jewish Voice for Peace Passover Jewish Culture Kosher We the People The People’s Initiative: NYC Stuudents for Justice in Palestine SJP Columbia Daily Spectator Anti-Zionism Coalition Building Accountability Apartheid Solidarity Internationalist Solidarity Complicity of the Academy Demonstration South Lawn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Dispatch New York 24th Sep 2024 Several hours after the New York Police Department (NYPD) had arrested their friends, Myra and six other people found themselves staring at a disorganized tarp laid on Columbia University’s Butler Lawn. The tarp held items donated by community members and student supporters, ranging from granola bars to water bottles to oranges. At the second Gaza Solidarity Encampment , formed in response to the arrests, it was rapidly becoming difficult to locate anything in the large, growing collection of food resources. “We all wanted some organization, and we wanted to feel like we were actively doing something, so we started organizing the tarp,” Myra said. “It felt really good because you could see the distinct difference [between] unorganized and organized.” Myra is an organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest , a coalition of over 100 Columbia student groups advocating for the university to divest from companies supporting Israel’s assault on Gaza, and to cut ties with Israel by suspending academic programs with Israeli universities, such as the dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University. Citing disciplinary measures taken by the University against pro-Palestinian student protesters as a safety concern, Myra has requested to remain anonymous. In April, the Columbia Daily Spectator reported on David Greenwald’s admission at a recent congressional hearing that ten students were suspended after an unauthorized “Resistance 101” event on campus. Greenwald is a co-chair of the Board of Trustees at Columbia. The tarp marked the start of Myra’s work as a food organizer for the Gaza Solidarity Encampment—a position that saw her working with several other people to organize food for over 200 students at the height of the encampment. This food organizing took place over a period of several days after the encampment’s first week. Despite the widespread international coverage on student encampments , the mechanics of sustaining them have seldom been discussed. Some of this invisibility stems from fear of administrative retaliation. Fatima, another food organizer with Columbia University Apartheid Divest, noted that even the fact that she and Myra were requesting anonymity to keep themselves safe felt disproportionate to the nature of their work. Fatima has requested to be identified solely by her first name due to concerns about how the Columbia administration would retaliate. “We are literally just feeding people but we have to take such precautions,” Fatima expressed. Though food organization at Columbia’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment began as the effort of just seven students organizing the chaotic assortment on the tarp, it quickly evolved into a network attracting several student groups, professors, community members, and even other encampments, including the New York University and City College encampments. This was partly due to the difficulties student organizers faced in getting food and other encampment resources—such as tents, hand warmers, etc.—to campus. Columbia restricted access to only university ID-card carriers the day that the encampment started, which meant only students, faculty and other essential workers could enter campus. On the first day of the encampment, public safety officers searched bags to see if students were bringing any materials—such as tents—for the encampment with them. Even groceries were not allowed through the gates on the first day of the encampment, despite the fact that some students were living in campus dormitories with kitchens. However, according to Fatima, the Gaza Solidarity Encampment had a “beautiful problem of abundance” even during its earlier days. Students would bring leftover food from the dining halls. Despite the gates, community members, students, professors, and designated “runners” would bring food from other areas of the city and pass to other students to sneak onto campus. One student called the encampment the “least food insecure” that they had ever been during their time at Columbia—a signifier of just how much food the encampment was gathering from community members. While the encampment received numerous food donations from restaurants, students, and faculty, organizers were at times compelled to prioritize locating vegan, vegetarian, halal, and kosher food due to student groups within the encampment that followed dietary restrictions. Given that the encampment was taking place during Passover, organizers also found themselves working to figure out how to get kosher and Passover food for Jewish students while simultaneously ensuring it was compliant with BDS principles. “The unfortunate fact of Jewish life is that connections with Israel are especially tied to the products you purchase, so it was definitely very difficult to find meals for people,” stated Remi, another student solely identifying by their first name due to safety concerns. Remi is an organizer with Jewish Voice for Peace, one of the two groups suspended by Columbia in November 2023 for holding an “unauthorized” demonstration calling for Columbia’s divestment from Israel. Remi relates that while making and finding food for Jewish students at the encampment was difficult, it was ultimately possible due to the help of several community members. “We ended up relying on a lot of just nice Jewish families around the city who wanted to cook and donate food for different dietary needs,” Remi said. They added that due to all the support from students and community members, the encampment was able to create a “kosher table” filled only with kosher food for Jewish participants. For many non-Jewish students, the encampment was the first time that they had ever been to a Jewish cultural event. “Inviting people in through food, through the things we eat…being able to share that with people and being able to disentangle violence from our culture and being able to offer that to people, I think that was really special and meaningful,” Remi said. Serving the integral purpose of sustaining people in the encampment, food also became an avenue for students to form a community with one another during a turbulent time—and, as Fatima, Myra, and Remi each noted, this community extended well beyond Columbia’s gates. Fatima explains that when food organizers started realizing that they had an overabundance of food, they immediately started contacting mutual aid organizations such as We the People and other student encampments in New York City. The goal, Fatima said, was to redistribute the food and supplies they didn’t need, especially warm meals and other perishables. Terrell Harper, who also goes by “Relly Rebel,” co-founded the mutual aid collective We the People in 2021. Harper first met student organizers in the Gaza Solidarity Encampment while protesting outside Columbia’s gates to support students and their cause. He said that after speaking with the organizers and discussing the collective, the organizers offered to supply food and meals for We the People’s bi-weekly community food distributions. Harper estimates that the Columbia encampment provided We the People with over 800 meals in a period of approximately two weeks. Harper added that it was hearty food too—containers full of hot meals, including chicken, rice, vegetables, sandwiches, and even desserts were brought in cars to Harper’s home or We the People’s various distribution sites to hand out. The NYPD dismantled the Gaza Solidarity Encampment on April 30th, 2024, but Fatima, Myra, and other organizers are still continuing their work to feed their community. Along with other encampment organizers, Fatima and Myra have helped to create The People’s Initiative: NYC , a collective of students, restaurants, and mutual aid groups, including We the People and The 116th Initiative. Their initiative aims to host free community meals throughout the summer and into the school year. Just as in the encampment, the people behind The People’s Initiative: NYC continue to center Palestine in their work. “Food plays a pivotal role in Palestinian culture—it connects diasporic people from across seas and ties them together with ribbons of smoke streaming out of a taboon oven,” their website’s homepage reads, “we follow in their footsteps, using food to connect communities across the city.” “Sitting by loving, committed, and revolutionary peers with a plate of joy is the way we will keep our people strong,” the site reads, “WE KEEP US SAFE. WE KEEP US FED.” ∎ Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

SOCIOLOGIST Heba Gowayed HEBA GOWAYED is an Associate Professor of Sociology at CUNY Hunter College & Graduate Center. Her research and writing centers the lives of people who migrate across borders and the unequal and often violent institutions they face. She is the author of Refuge: How the State Shapes Human Potential (Princeton University Press, April 2022). Her work has been published in Slate , Al Jazeera English, The New Humanitarian, and Teen Vogue, among others. SOCIOLOGIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ARTIST Sameen Agha SAMEEN AGHA lives and works in Lahore. Working across sculpture, painting and installation, her practice explores the emotional landscape of the home and its social and physical attributes as they intersect with gender and self-identity, and confronting the complexities of loss, belonging, and remembrance. She is the recipient of the 2024 Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Agha received a BFA from the National College of Arts, Lahore, in 2016. ARTIST WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

PLAYWRIGHT Aladdin Ullah ALADDIN ULLAH is a playwright, comedian, and performer based in New York City. He is a pioneer of the past decade as one of the very first South Asians to perform stand-up comedy on national television on networks such as: HBO, Comedy Central, MTV, BET, and PBS. He was the co-founder and host of the multi-ethnic stand-up show Colorblind, a member of Joseph Papp's Public Theater's Inaugural Emerging Writers group where he wrote and developed Indio during the Spotlight Series and workshops at Joe's Pub. He was also a part of the New York Theater Workshop Residency at Dartmouth, and Halal Brothers directed by Liesel Tommy (The Labyrinth's Barn Series at Public Theater). Aladdin has had staged readings/workshops of his plays at New York Theater Workshop, Cape Cod Theater Project, Classical Theater of Harlem, Lark Play Development Center, Shakespeare in Paradise Festival (Bahamas) Labyrinth, and 1 Solo Festival. His acting career includes American Desi , and the award-winning animated film Sita Sings The Blues . Aladdin is a Recipient of the Paul Robeson development grant to produce a documentary called In search of Bengali Harlem, which inspired the recent book Bengali Harlem by Vivek Bald. His most recent play is Dishwasher Dreams , a one-man show drawn from the story of his father’s migration from Noakhali, East Bengal, to New York City. PLAYWRIGHT WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

WRITER Surina Venkat SURINA VENKAT is a writer and student at Columbia University in New York City. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHER Abhishek Basu ABHISHEK BASU , originally from Tatanagar in Jharkhand, is a freelance art/documentary photographer, who works for various publishing houses on experimental story telling techniques, book design, curation and multimedia. His quarterly tabloid initiative, Provoke Papers , focuses on migration and labour relations. It takes root in a series titled How green was my mountain, which is his 4-year-long documentation of the coal mines of Jharkhand's Jharia district, 60 kms. from his hometown. Taking to Abbas’s advice, “buy a pair of shoes and fall in love with it”, Abhishek’s subjects span the wide variety of where life and his understanding of it have taken him. If there had to be a universal thread/subtext to his works it would be his exploration of the starkness of the human condition attempting to make you see it for what it is. His work has been published in magazines like Himal Southasian, The Wire, Burn Magazine, The Firstpost and Quint . DOCUMENTARY PHOTOGRAPHER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

"Our priority is to meet the needs of people on this planet. Not just workers. Not workers at all." A multimedia short using video archival footage, this faux-advertisement is equal parts a history of advertising & the legacy of fossil fuel companies’ manipulation and a disturbing, singular dystopia from one aesthete's point of view. BOOKS & ARTS It's Only Human Furqan Jawed "Our priority is to meet the needs of people on this planet. Not just workers. Not workers at all." A multimedia short using video archival footage, this faux-advertisement is equal parts a history of advertising & the legacy of fossil fuel companies’ manipulation and a disturbing, singular dystopia from one aesthete's point of view. Like having the imagination to envision oblivion. And make it reality. Special Thanks to: Varshini Prakash Narration by: Jessica Flemming EDITOR'S NOTE: This multimedia piece, by graphic designer and artist Furqan Jawed, is the result of a collaborative effort, initially conceptualized as a story about the history of advertising & fossil fuel companies’ manipulation of the public across the world. It took place over a number of months, supplemented by reminiscences and stream-of-consciousness ideas by Varshini Prakash, co-founder and Executive Director of the Sunrise Movement, as well as exchange with editors Vishakha Darbha & Kamil Ahsan. Furqan plumbed the archives of advertising across a number of decades in India and the United States. The product was, at the time, an unanticipated, serendipitous, and surprising product of an inquisitive but seemingly-directionless collaboration. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Video Still by Furqan Jawed SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Short Film Global Climate Change Multimedia Fossil Fuel Companies Oil Oil Production Advertising Electoral Politics Multimodal Simultaneity Sunrise Movement Neoliberalism Performance Art Mimesis Anthropocene Satire Absurdity Voiceover Archival Practice Video Archives Archiving Reminiscence Archives Public History Manipulation Affect Agriculture Mega Conglomerates Apocalyptic Environmentalism Art Activism Experimental Methods Video Form Graphic Design Capitalism Class Climate Anxiety Complicity Crisis Media Media Landscape False Advertising FURQAN JAWED is a freelance artist and graphic designer based in Brooklyn. A recent MFA graduate from the Yale School of Art, his practice focuses on the circulation of images and analysing the semiotics of representation within these images in the public and the private sphere. Short Film Global 26th Apr 2021 On That Note: Into the Disaster-Verse 12th MAR Chats Ep. 8 · On Migrations in Global History 4th MAY Photo Kathmandu & Public History in Nepal 25th NOV

Rasel Ahmed RASEL AHMED is an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University. WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Over nearly two decades, the opulence of the Jaipur Literature Festival has only grown and the prestige of attendance has attained unparalleled heights. Yet Torsa Ghosal, of Kaya Press’s imprint Kulhar Books, returned in 2025 with critical realizations about JLF’s core agenda. Reflecting not only on the nationalistic undertones celebrated but also on what was conspicuously absent, Ghosal points to the festival’s failure to meaningfully represent Muslim and Arab voices, and to a troubling insincerity in engaging with the moral crises of our time. BOOKS & ARTS Spiritually Chic AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Over nearly two decades, the opulence of the Jaipur Literature Festival has only grown and the prestige of attendance has attained unparalleled heights. Yet Torsa Ghosal, of Kaya Press’s imprint Kulhar Books, returned in 2025 with critical realizations about JLF’s core agenda. Reflecting not only on the nationalistic undertones celebrated but also on what was conspicuously absent, Ghosal points to the festival’s failure to meaningfully represent Muslim and Arab voices, and to a troubling insincerity in engaging with the moral crises of our time. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Review Jaipur Jaipur Literature Festival JLF Kumbh Mela Hindu Nationalism religious nationalism Religion Contemporary Literature Literature & Liberation Pop Spirituality Elitist elitism tokenism Representational Space representation suppression Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Review Jaipur 1st Aug 2025 Since launching in 2006, Jaipur Literature Festival (JLF) has been repeatedly called the “Kumbh Mela” of literature festivals. Kumbh Mela is a Hindu religious event held every six to twelve years at the confluence of the three rivers: Ganga, Yamuna, and the mythical Saraswati, where devotees convene in numbers unmatched by any other religious gathering in the world. The Kumbh analogy signals JLF’s massive scale and popularity. Indeed, the book festival is a mela, a social spectacle, that brings anywhere between three to five hundred speakers to Jaipur, shuttles them between the venue and the various four- and five-star hotels lodging them, and swishes them off to party in the city’s gorgeous palaces and forts. 400,000 visitors and around 4000 vendors thronged the festival grounds in 2024 according to estimates. Until recently, the staunch religious underpinnings of Kumbh had no direct equivalent in a festival that branded itself as an international “literary show,” and that has hosted a diverse assortment of luminaries such as Margaret Atwood, Orhan Pamuk, Kamila Shamsie, Oprah Winfrey, and the Dalai Lama. But over the last few decades, Hindu religious identity has increasingly defined national belonging and nationalist policies in India. This year’s Maha Kumbh Mela was attended by 4 times as many people as the previous iteration of the event, blazing proof of the upthrust in religious fervour among Indians and diasporic Hindus. JLF’s programming was not immune to the pulls of religious nationalism. The festival kept the crowds sated on pageantry and celebrations which often obscured the ways in which panels and talks questioned the nationalist agenda. Supported by a SALT travel grant , I was at JLF to scout authors in my role as an acquiring editor for Kaya Press’s brand new South Asian imprint, Kulhar Books . Working with Kaya’s managing editor Neelanjana Banerjee and the rest of the Kaya team, Kulhar editors—Rajiv Mohabir, Jhani Randhawa, and I—aspire to publish stylistically and politically imaginative literature; works that unsettle formulaic expectations caging and sanitizing South Asian literary expressions in America. Courtesy of the author. My first afternoon at JLF I heard the British author Sheena Patel speak about her desire for “the now to be captured” in her writing rather than telling a “timeless story,” and in a similar vein, my intention was to get a sense of “the now” of the literary-cultural scene in South Asia, intuiting that the festival would offer some—even if narrow—opening into the ideas and themes dominating the space. Flipping through the festival program, I tried to locate sessions on literary writings from and about South Asia with a focus on contemporary translated literature and newer voices, a task that proved to be somewhat at odds with JLF’s broad-ranging, political establishment- and celebrity-friendly slate of events, a host of which staged flaccid conversations on Hindu mythology, Hindu national and political identities, excitement about the potentials of AI and digital technology, corporate and startup success, even wellness practices. The festival has a “flashy, dazzling quality,” notes Mrinalina Chakravarty in her 2014 book, In Stereotype , which examines the hackneyed tropes found in literary representations of South Asia. At this year’s edition, social media influencers, Bollywood celebrities, and politicians predictably clinched the largest platform—the front lawn. Educator-philanthropist-billionaire Sudha Murthy’s talk in the lawn was attended by her son-in-law, U.K.’s former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. Sunak went viral for greeting the lawn’s audience with folded hands in a “namaste,” obeying the nudges of an elderly woman whom Indian media variously identified as his mother and aunt-in-law. A forty-five-minute session on the same stage was allocated to politician and author Shashi Tharoor unpacking the experience of living as Shashi Tharoor. Influencer Prajakta Koli blurted unprompted that her rom com novel contains “discrepancies” that she hoped readers would not pick up. JLF is often “a theatre of the absurd,” as Chakravarty observes, and the “incongruous juxtapositions of the bizarre and serious” raise questions about whether the festival coheres. JLF does not cohere— purposefully so. Vendors selling gorgeous brass jhumkas, wooden handicrafts, linen quilts and clothes form the backdrop of high-spirited debates and book launches. It is a carnival, almost in the Bakhtinian sense, a heteroglossia boasting of eclectic interests and priorities, but without the revolutionary zing Bakhtin associates with carnivalesque entertainment. JLF makes no pretence of renouncing hierarchies among speakers, vendors, volunteers, media persons, and spectators. There is a distinctly feudal quality to the “royal” warmth the green vest-wearing volunteers and interns shower on the invitees, riffing on the grand, luxurious image of Rajasthan in both the global and desi imagination. Rajasthan is after all the province where celebrities like Liz Hurley and Priyanka Chopra have hosted their weddings. Like crazy rich desi weddings, the happy hodge podge at JLF trades in stereotypes about South Asia’s mystique and splendour. JLF has a controversial history with respect to free speech, which Amitav Ghosh points out , shows how literature has become “embedded within a wider culture of public spectacles and performances…overtaking, and indeed overwhelming writing itself as the primary end of a life in letters.” As far as frenzied public spectacles in India go, none in recent times can compete with the individual and collective performances of the Hindu religious identity at the Mahakumbh, and the book festival arena is a porous zone. The five-day programming at JLF, what speakers thought permissible to say or not say, the audience questions, the popularity of sessions were all rooted within a broader cultural sphere that in 2025 was flooded with giant billboards starring the tight-lipped smiles of India’s Prime Minister alongside his brother in arms, the ascetic-politician Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh. Both their portraits were pasted onto scenes showing millions on the banks of a river, coloured a shade of blue so rich that I could tell it could only have been achieved after going through layers of digital filters, if the raw photograph was ever of the muddied brown Ganges I have known and swum in. The hoardings carried taglines like “Message from Kumbh, The Nation Must Unify” and “Sanatan Pride, Maha Kumbh Edition.” Courtesy of the author. Desi internet was trending Kumbh news and memes, minting new viral heartthrobs—hot Sadhus and Sadhvis—through WhatsApp forwards and Instagram reels, plus supplying shock and cringe content, that I and surely other festival attendees dutifully consumed. Young people are showing interest in scriptures, Malashri Lal remarked at a session launching mythologist Sunita Pant Bansal’s A Comprehensive Guide to Indian Scriptures . The slim book introduces Hindu sacred texts like the Puranas, Vedas, and the epics “as it is,” the author insisted, “without my opinion.” The aim is to demystify and correct beliefs about Hindu religious texts. Why, then, does the jacket say “Indian scriptures” rather than Hindu scriptures? A young audience member asked after admitting he was “nervous and worried” to raise the question. And if the book is on Hinduism, have texts from Nepal been included? The publisher Dipankar Mukherjee, who was also on stage, chivalrously swooped in to field the question, rationalizing that they were “trying to be somewhat politically correct to ensure the book reaches the right audience…Where they [the scriptures] started to become codified, recorded that’s part of current India.” He subsequently plugged the festival co-director William Dalrymple’s latest book, crediting Dalrymple for completing “half our work” tracing the influence of Indian traditions and philosophy on other cultures. Mukherjee’s blithe verbal acrobatics for swapping Hindu with India not only aligns with the religion-nation nexus the country’s government has openly adopted in the last decade but also follows the money as it were. Writing for New York Times, Anupreeta Das claims that book festivals are all the rage among India’s youth. On the surface, the hipness of literary festivals bodes well. Das notes young people “are increasingly reading literature in their native tongues alongside books written in English. For these readers, books open worlds that India’s higher education system, with its focus on time-consuming preparation for make-or-break examinations, often does not.” But what are the young people reading in these various languages? What kinds of worlds are books unlocking? The answers are not straightforward. Trapped in a long, slow-moving queue formed in front of a toilet in Amer Clarks, women were commiserating about the shortage of bathrooms at the venue. Interrupting this communal bonding, a woman in her early twenties started to hype up her novel that retells the Hindu epic Ramayana. Ramayana has become something of a foundational text in the Hindu nationalist imagination. The woman pitching her retelling to a captive, pee-holding audience explained that her book followed the love story of the Hindu demigod Lakhsman whom “feminism” has unfairly sidelined. Her pithy spiel echoed a pervasive cultural sentiment wherein Hindu culture and Hindu Gods need constant protection from the evil eyes of liberals and heretics. Another young woman asked for the book’s title to order on Amazon. Some days later, while looking up the book, I stumbled upon the author’s public Instagram grid that featured side-by-side photos of her in JLF and at Mahakumbh. Completing the spiritual chic circuit of JLF-Mahakumbh, she follows in the illustrious footsteps of others like Sudha Murty who took a holy dip at Kumbh days ahead of her JLF session. Browsing the aisles of bookstores and catalogues of Indian publishers gives an impression that pop spirituality is booming in India. OMTV, an “Indic storytelling” app, surveyed its users and found that around 80% of those consuming spiritual content are aged between 18 and 30. At the same time, The Crossword Bookstore on JLF festival grounds had eager customers crowding pretty much every corner, picking up new and old titles, not just the spirituality laced ones. And in an offline and online public sphere dominated by Maha Kumbh , JLF still managed to hold some conversations offering critical and nuanced perspectives on political Hinduism. Courtesy of the author. But among the nearly three-hundred delegates, the festival included just a handful of Indian Muslim speakers. Bollywood celebrities like the director Imtiaz Ali, Huma Qureshi, and Javed Akhtar were part of this roster. Mujibur Rehman, who used a comparative framework drawn from histories of Black resistance to talk about the political marginalization and de-Islamization of Indian Muslims in Shikwa-e-Hind (2024), was challenged by a middle-aged, ostensibly Hindu, ponytailed thought leader among the audience. “I have lots of confusion about the premise of your book…Should we continue to call Muslims minorities with twenty percent population?” the man asked. Rehman told the man his book answers the question and supplemented his response with analogies underscoring how minority identity and minority rights are not simply pegged on numbers or even the success and visibility of a select few. India’s constitution despite its secular promises is inherently majoritarian, he argued, which informs the cultural landscape where Indians clapping at America’s flag do not invite suspicion, but an Indian Muslim boy clapping at Pakistan’s flag is interpreted as sedition. Kashmiri Muslim, Pakistani, and Bangladeshi literary authors were largely absent from this edition. Some absences can be blamed on logistics—Pakistan passport holders have immense difficulty procuring Indian visas at present, unless of course they are Maha Kumbh enthusiast Hindus. Then they are handed Indian visas swiftly . State rules force compliance but even state policies cannot explain all erasures. Theatre actor and director MK Raina who comes from a Kashmiri Pandit family, spoke about owing his career to the state of Kashmir’s policy of allowing free education right from the 1940s, commented on inequities in contemporary India, and criticized the unrealistic portrayals of Kashmir in Bollywood. He left the stage when his co-panelist, the Rajasthani singer and thespian Ila Arun, started enacting a lengthy sequence from an Ibsen play she adapted and partly set in Kashmir, where a character “hurts the mother” and “hurts the motherland.” Raina’s abrupt departure was first extrapolated as resulting from his frustration about the supposed misrepresentation of Kashmir and later as following from his irritation with Ila Arun for hogging stage time. Multiple sessions addressed Israel’s war on Gaza, but the sessions recycled a small group of speakers that included the Indian American author Pankaj Mishra, Palestinian author Selma Dabbagh, Pulitzer-winning American journalist Nathan Thrall, and Israeli British historian Avi Shlaim. The number of Arab authors featured was in the low single digits. A JLF official reportedly interrupted an interview between the Press Trust of India and the Palestinian envoy to India Abed Elrazeg Abu Jazer on the grounds that the festival’s PR team hadn’t sanctioned it. JLF’s speaker lineup suffers from issues common in invite-only prestige events. The curators turn to the same authors and cultural delegates year after year, and even each year, the same names reappear across sessions. The festival seems to be battling two opposing drives: an impulse to represent a diversity of relevant ideas and a desire to wring the most out of a trusted clique of speakers, resulting in conversations that sometimes feel repetitive, sometimes tokenistic. Although the festival is held in the state of Rajasthan and makes decorative use of Rajasthan’s crafts and colours to create Instagrammable corners, Rajasthani authors and Rajasthani literature are not at the forefront. The festival is a shimmery tamasha that, like high-budget high-gloss Bollywood films, is fun to dip in, so long as one is willing to forgo critical questions. The scale of the festival remains something to marvel at. But other literature festivals that have cropped up in India after Jaipur, such as the Kerala Literature Festival and Mizoram Literature Festival , have made more emphatic attempts at grounding their events in their local cultures. JLF, on the other hand, is happy to remain the Chicken Tikka Masala of festivals, palatable to a wide-ranging, somewhat international audience, seemingly representative of South Asia, with a desi man and a Scottish one claiming credits for its origins. Courtesy of the author. Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Next Up:

· THE VERTICAL Dispatch · Katchatheevu The Uneasy Dreamscape of Katchatheevu A dispatch from a church festival on a largely uninhabited island that has long been the site of a contentious border dispute between India and Sri Lanka. A statue of St. Anthony, patron saint of the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka’s north and India’s south, is nestled in an arch just below the roof of the church. Courtesy of the author. You can almost taste the excitement on the boat as it nears Katchatheevu, people craning their necks out of windows, and perching on the steps to catch their first glimpse of it. For most passengers, it seems to be their first time visiting the island—abandoned, uninhabited, and closed to civilians for all but two days each year for its annual church festival. Standing on some bags to gain height, I catch flashes of the island—a statue of the Virgin Mary encased in glass peeping out from some foliage; with trees for miles, and waves lapping the shore. The four-hour boat journey from mainland Sri Lanka to Katchatheevu is surreal. I’d never heard of Katchatheevu until November last year. From a sparsely-populated Wikipedia page, I’d learned the island was only open for visitors during its March church festival, so I resolved to go. Katchatheevu lies in the Palk Strait between southern India and northern Sri Lanka, a contentious and liminal space that has historically been contested between the two countries. Under British rule, the island belonged to India, and after Independence it became a disputed territory. In 1976, it was ceded to Sri Lanka by then Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in a series of maritime boundary agreements. However, this decision has always been hotly contested by Tamil Nadu politicians ever since, who have long called for the reacquisition of Katchatheevu, ostensibly on the behest of Indian fisherfolk. In 1991, the Tamil Nadu Assembly adopted a resolution for its retrieval. In 2008, then Chief Minister of Tamil Nadu argued to the Supreme Court that the agreements on Katchatheevu were unconstitutional. As recently as last year, the 1974-76 maritime boundary agreements over Katchatheevu have remained hotly contested. Katchatheevu was closely surveilled during the Sri Lankan Civil War, which ended in 2009, suspected to be a base for the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), a militant group fighting for an independent state in the country’s north, from which they smuggled weapons. Since the end of the war, the island has been controlled by the Sri Lankan navy, with Indian fishermen allowed to dry their nets on its land. But conflicts between Sri Lankan and Indian fishermen continue to rage around the space, with Indians accused of crossing the maritime boundary to poach in Sri Lankan waters. Many poor Sri Lankan fisherfolk returned to these waters after the Civil War, by which time they found a landscape dominated by Indian trawlers they could not compete with. View of the island from the boat. Courtesy of the author These unresolved disputes of land and livelihoods make the seemingly peaceable annual church festival even more intriguing, since regulations on movement to and from the island are abandoned for the festival. Pilgrims from both sides of the strait collide in a rare meeting point of communities who speak the same Tamil language but have historically met mostly under difficult conditions; the line between southern India and northern Sri Lanka became porous during the civil war as people fled Sri Lanka in droves as refugees. In centuries prior, hundreds of thousands of Indian Tamils were brought over to Sri Lanka as indentured laborers by British colonizers. Indian Tamils were denied citizenship by Sri Lanka upon independence; many were deported back to India, with others in a state of limbo for decades. Communities in both countries have thus experienced statelessness and rejection on the other’s land, making Katchatheevu a contested space, all the more significant as a fleetingly-inhabited melting pot of experiences and cultures. It becomes a rare waypoint through which the porosity of borders and violent history of the region can be seen through its visiting Tamil communities. Yet it remains a little-known and incredibly underreported place, with the specifics of its historic legacy rarely discussed in a wider context. Traveling with two friends on the boat, I try to glean as much as I can about Katchatheevu’s history. My friend and I befriend a fellow passenger. She tells us a story about how St. Anthony’s Church, the only building on the island, was built. A fisherman who almost died at sea promised God he would build a church if he was saved. After the fisherman survived, he stayed true to his word, and built the church using materials from Delft island, about two hours closer to Sri Lanka’s mainland. As we disembark onto a temporary and very shaky gangway assembled by the Sri Lankan Navy, which administers the island year-round, we spot a crowd already assembled on the shore—Indian pilgrims. For the church festival, all disputes and regulations are suspended, and pilgrims from both countries land on the island in a rare meeting point of communities otherwise totally separated by the Palk Strait. We are shepherded into four different queues for navy checks—Sri Lankan women, Sri Lankan men, Indian women, and Indian men. The Indian and Sri Lankan sides look each other up and down with bemused curiosity. On the other side of the checkpoints, Katchatheevu is wild and bare, untamed vegetation crowding the sides of a wide and sandy path. The early afternoon sun beats down heavily on us, and juice vendors have wisely set up shop to serve cold drinks to thirsty pilgrims. Families separated by gender wait for their relatives to come through the queue, and I spot an interesting exchange between two pilgrims from India and Sri Lanka that highlights how monumental the festival is as a reminder of the liminal space Katchatheevu occupies. “Where are you from, son?” asks the aunty from Bangalore, clad in a light brown sari, speaking in a dialect quite far removed from Jaffna Tamil. “Jaffna,” replies the young man sitting next to her in a collared shirt and trousers. “Where’s that? Sri Lanka?” the aunty asks. “You don’t know where Jaffna is?” he replies, looking shocked and slightly offended. “Yes, it’s in Sri Lanka. It’s world famous!” After our friend arrives, we trek towards the church to set up camp. Along the way, we spot pilgrims industriously clearing patches of vegetation to find a spot to bed down, and others who have come organized with lunch carriers and huge containers of water, because there is no drinking water available on the island. We select a spot just in front of the church, next to a trio from Colombo, and lay out the bed sheet I’ve brought from home. A few minutes later, a voice over the loudspeaker announces that the prayers will soon begin. St. Anthony, patron saint of the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka's north and India's south. Photography courtesy of the author. The nuns begin to chant repeatedly: “ Punitha Mariye, Iraivanin Thaaye, paavikalaa irukkira engalukkaaka, ippozhuthum naangal irappin velaiyilum vendikollumaame. [Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death].” The church itself is a rich cream color, with a statue of St. Anthony, patron saint of the fisherfolk of Sri Lanka’s north and India’s south, nestled in an arch just below its roof. Another statue, larger and more imposing, is positioned on a podium in front of the church. Dressed in brown robes with fair white skin and brown hair, St. Anthony holds a small child and looks out into the sea of pilgrims as they kneel on the ground and pray, many of the women covering their hair with lace veils and turning rosaries in their fingers. Indian pilgrims work their way through the crowd, distributing sesame sweets. One of the temporary stalls set up by vendors from both countries. Photograph courtesy of the author. I decide to wander through the temporary stalls set up by vendors on an otherwise abandoned patch of vegetation. Enthusiastic sellers assume I’m from India and quote me prices in Indian rupees. One salesman asks me to take his photo, and predicts that I’ll soon be headed abroad. He inspects my palm, and informs me that my first child will be a boy. I spot the tent of Silva, a pilgrim from Bangalore.His tent has both Indian and Sri Lankan flags pinned on the front. He tells me he’s been coming to Katchatheevu for the last nine years. “They’re always in brotherhood, no?” says Silva. “Nobody can divide it. They’re always binding, very lovely people,” adding that Katchatheevu inspired him to visit mainland Sri Lanka. I chat with a fisherman from Rameswaram who’s visiting for the first time with a party of four other people. He tells me Katchatheevu is well-known in his hometown, but not many people make the journey over. Soon, religious songs blaring over the loudspeaker begin to drown out our conversation, and the Walk of the Cross begins. Young boys clad in red and white robes stand at the head of the procession. A wooden cross carried on the shoulders of Reverend Fathers behind them towers overhead. Photograph courtesy of the author. As they walk, songs accompany their steps, and a huge crowd walks around the church’s perimeter as the sun sets, taking us to the beach where groups of men are bathing in the clear blue water, standing and laughing amongst themselves. Every time the cross stops, people fall to the ground behind the cross and begin to pray, and a sermon is delivered from the church’s pulpit by Indian and Sri Lankan clergy, in variously inflected accents that inform us where they might be from. Some sermons are pointedly political. They talk of the Sri Lankan Tamils forcibly disappeared during the civil war. Of mothers still looking for their children. Some mention the ongoing economic crisis Sri Lankans continue to face. Others appeal directly to the pilgrims, telling them to be more loving and accepting of others and the pain they might be facing. It’s during the Walk of the Cross that I spot the original St. Anthony’s Church, the one built by the saved fisherman. It is a sharp contrast to the new church, with a decaying facade with plaster peeling off it, but stark in its simplicity. Pilgrims stream in and out to pray to old statues of St. Anthony placed on a ledge, overlooked by a chipped wall hanging of Jesus on the cross. Others camp in front of it, chatting and watching the Walk. “We’re devotees of St. Anthony,” one man from Thoothukudi, India tells me, perched on a blanket with his friends. “We have a very famous church for him there on the seaside, and we go and stay there every Tuesday… We’d heard about Katchatheevu before but we never had the opportunity to come, so this year when we got the chance we decided we had to come.” They’ve decided to buy soap at the stalls as souvenirs for their family, and joke about how much more expensive tea is in Sri Lanka due to the economic crisis. But the conversation takes a serious turn when they ask me about conflicts between Sri Lankan and Indian fishermen, and they say Indian fishermen are really struggling and have been shot down when trying to fish near Katchatheevu, despite it previously belonging to India. “If it were ours, there would be no shooting,” one of them says. They say that India has “extended a hand in brothership” towards Sri Lanka, but it has been met with “disgraceful behavior” by the latter. However, they’re adamant that India shouldn’t try to reclaim Katchatheevu, saying it’s been “given and that’s it.” Once the Walk of the Cross is over, the mass takes place at the front of the church. I perch next to my friends on the blanket as the Lord’s Prayer and Hail Mary are chanted repeatedly in Tamil. I realize it’s the first time I’ve been to a mass in Tamil, and listen intently to the words, which seem to acquire a deeper meaning in my mother tongue. I find myself deeply, uncontrollably moved, tears streaming down my cheeks as the words wash over me. “Isn’t this so nice?” I say, turning to my friend after the mass finishes. It feels like she’s radiating a deep, calm, glow. Her hands are clasped in prayer. “Yes,” she replies, hugging me. “Thank you for bringing me.” Afterwards, there’s a procession of St. Anthony, with a statue carried through the crowd and around the island, flashing with green and red lights. The church is decked out in beautiful lights that lend it a Christmas feel, and there’s a festive feeling in the air as people go to light candles at a small cave-like shrine next to the church, cupping them carefully to avoid the wind extinguishing them. Throughout the day, there are also intermittent announcements of pilgrims’ prayers to St. Anthony—people asking for foreign visas to be approved, for marriages to be arranged, and for illnesses to be cured. The specifics of people’s names and locations are all divulged, and my friends and I wonder at people’s deepest wishes being revealed so publicly. We then use our meal tokens to claim food provided by the navy—a meal of rice and fish curry. Being a vegan, I’m obliged to go back to the stalls to buy myself a meal of rice and vegetables, unable to eat the food provided. After dinner, I get to chatting with a fisherman from Rameshwaram, who also talks about the lack of fish on the Indian side of the ocean, forcing them to travel into Sri Lankan waters. We exchange numbers and decide to keep in touch. We’ve been chatting on and off all day to the trio from Colombo who have camped next to us, and we end up talking to them until late in the night, exchanging life anecdotes and cackling with laughter while pilgrims snore around us. They tease me about my new friend, saying that I’m about to embark on a cross-border romance. When we finally decide to call it a night, the buzz of life still hasn’t stopped, with people walking around and talking in hushed tones, and the church lights still glowing furiously. “Pilgrims, please wake up and get ready. The mass will begin at 6 am,” a voice over the loudspeaker announces at 4:30 am the next morning. But people are slow to take notice, the mass of sleeping bodies not rousing itself awake until shortly before sunrise. Just before 6 am, the mass begins, and it feels noticeably more formal than the festivities of the previous day, with Indian officials present. Hymn sheets are handed round, and the atmosphere is solemn as people periodically stand to sing from their campsites. The morning mass at 6 am. Photograph courtesy of the author. Just before 9 am, the mass comes to a sudden end, and we’re told to claim our breakfast parcels, this time rice with dhal and soya meat curry. I only eat a little, conscious of the boat journey later, and then the announcements begin, telling us which boats are ready to leave from the island and urging pilgrims to make their way to the shore. The fisherman from Rameshwaram comes to say goodbye to me, prompting more teasing from my friends. People crowd the old and new churches for one last prayer, and I join them before we trudge back the way we came the previous day. At the harbor, the Sri Lankan side pushes and shoves to depart, and we manage to get onto the third boat after almost an hour of waiting. The boat journey this time is relatively more eventful than the first. About ten minutes in, there’s a sudden jolt and a loud bang, with a force beneath our feet that feels like the boat has just hit something. Over the next few minutes, the bangs and jolts intensify, and people begin to scream and cry. The floorboards of the boat have come up on its left side, and the seats jump up and down. I find my hands reaching out for my friends around me, both old and new, and we sit huddled in a circle, praying quietly under our breath while an elderly lady cries and calls out to St. Anthony for help a few rows behind us. I lose count of how many times I throw up on the way back—at one point we run out of bags, so I have to stand on tiptoe to vomit out of the window, sea water hitting my face as my stomach convulses. People call the boatmen to show them what’s wrong with the boat and beg them to go slower, but nothing seems to change. My friends try to contact the navy and we even get to the stage of waving my red kurti out of the window as a danger sign, but to no avail. It seems to be by sheer miracle that we make it back to Kurikkaduwan. On the bus back to Jaffna town, I chat to the fellow Katchatheevu pilgrim next to me, Baskar, his grandson perched on his lap holding a toy gun. He went to Katchatheevu the previous two years as well, when the COVID-19 pandemic meant only 50 pilgrims were allowed to attend. He tells me he made a promise to St. Anthony to visit Katchatheevu with his whole family if his daughter was cured of a serious illness that twelve doctors said she wouldn’t survive. “That’s her,” he says, pointing to the girl sitting in front of us in a green salwar kameez, holding her phone to her ear and listening to Tamil film soundtracks. “I told St. Anthony I would bring her to Katchatheevu alive. I had that belief.” Baskar, who works as a fisherman, said the economic crisis has made it difficult for him to attend the festival because of the higher boat costs, but he somehow had to make it work because of his promise to Anthony. “We believe that whatever sea we go to, he’ll save us,” Baskar says. “Because of my belief in St. Anthony, I’ve been rescued two or three times. Once I even fell into the sea unconscious after hitting my head. But because of God’s grace, I was saved.” Two years ago, Baskar says he met an Indian pilgrim who was so upset that the COVID-19 restrictions meant nobody else could come. This year, he met the pilgrim again with his family, and was so happy that everybody could come. “I told him, don’t worry, next time you can come with all your siblings and children,” Baskar says. “And this time I was so happy… Lots of people came and they were so happy… We speak happily with them. Last night, there were around 40 or 50 Indians and they were all talking and laughing with me so happily—they wouldn’t let me sleep,” he says, laughing. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Dispatch Katchatheevu Sri Lanka Island Palk Bay Jaffna Tamil Tamil Diasporas Indian & Sri Lankan Tamil Communities Church Festival Rameswaram Border Dispute Fisherfolk Fishing Crisis Disputed Territory Pilgrimage Low-Income Workers Trawling Transnational Solidarities Internationalist Solidarity Sri Lankan Civil War Indentured Labor Labor Fishing Labor Subsistence Labor 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. 16th Jun 2023 AUTHOR · AUTHOR Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 6 On That Note:

“Cultures of Chittagong Hill Tracts and other indigenous peoples are still marginalized in Bangladesh, in mainstream cultural practices. They're made invisible. And there is a kind of appropriation too. A Chakma dance is danced by Bengali dancers.” COMMUNITY Bengali Nationalism & the Chittagong Hill Tracts “Cultures of Chittagong Hill Tracts and other indigenous peoples are still marginalized in Bangladesh, in mainstream cultural practices. They're made invisible. And there is a kind of appropriation too. A Chakma dance is danced by Bengali dancers.” VOL. 1 INTERVIEW AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Watch the interview on YouTube or IGTV. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Interview Chittagong Hill Tracts 9th Dec 2020 Interview Chittagong Hill Tracts Bangladesh CHT Indigeneity Chakma Chakma History Indigenous Art Practice Indigeneous Spaces Politics of Indigeneity Language Diversity Language Chittagong Hill Tracts Peace Accord Parbatya Chattagram Jana Sanghati Samiti United People's Party of the Chittagong Hill Tracts Kaptai Dam Bengali Nationalism Jumma Communities Jumma Chakma Communities Shaheen Akhtar Militarism Military Crackdown Shomari Chakma International Mother Tongue Day Intellectual History Postcolonialism 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. Researcher Kabita Chakma in conversation with Advisory Editor Mahmud Rahman talked about her own experience writing and translating in Bangla and Chakma, as well as the longue durée history of the Chakmas and the Chittagong Hill Tracts, particularly after the formation of CHT as a district in 1860. Colonial cartographies split the Chakma population between countries, districts, and states between Tripura, Assam, Mizoram in India, Burma, Bangladesh, and their global diasporas. How robust, Mahmud Rahman asks, is the readership of Chakma texts? RECOMMENDED: "Muscular nationalism, masculinist militarism: the creation of situational motivators and opportunities for violence against the Indigenous peoples of the Chittagong Hill Tracts, Bangladesh" (International Feminist Journal of Politics, 2022) by Glen Hill & Kabita Chakma More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5