Author Chaitali Sen in conversation with Fiction Editor Hananah Zaheer. COMMUNITY Nation-State Constraints on Identity & Intimacy AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Author Chaitali Sen in conversation with Fiction Editor Hananah Zaheer. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Interview Literary Solidarity Bengali Internationalist Solidarity Black Solidarities Satyajit Ray Statelessness Colonialism Language South Asian Women's Creative Collective South Asians Against Police Brutality Abner Louima Anthony Baez Literature & Liberation Diaspora Identity Community Building Post-George Floyd Moment Immigration Race & Genre Short Stories Fiction Avant-Garde Form Avant-Garde Traditions Emancipatory Politics Experimental Methods Rabindranath Tagore Mrinal Sen Separatism Tamil Separatists Punjabi Separatists Rajiv Gandhi Separatist Movements in India Indian Diaspora Syria Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Interview Literary Solidarity 17th Dec 2020 I fight for a world without borders, but they're borders wrenched in reaction to colonialism, and fortified against the spread of English. It's interesting how capitalism homogenizes while making people want to put up walls. RECOMMENDED: A New Race of Men from Heaven: Stories (Sarabande, 2023) by Chaitali Sen 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:

In the absence of a legal foundation for abortion care, solidarity amongst communities of color requires meticulous attention to history and strategy. THE VERTICAL Universalism & Solidarity in a Post-Roe Landscape AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR In the absence of a legal foundation for abortion care, solidarity amongst communities of color requires meticulous attention to history and strategy. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Op-Ed United States Roe v Wade Reproductive Rights Legacies of Slavery Human Rights Abortion Access Low-Income Workers The Right to Contraception Liberate Abortion Latin American Green Wave National Network of Abortion Funds Gender Violence South Asian SOAR Internationalist Perspective Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. DISPATCH Op-Ed United States 23rd Feb 2023 ON JUNE 24, 2022, the Supreme Court of the United States overturned the constitutional right to abortions protected under the 1973 landmark ruling, Roe v. Wade . The decision, issued in a case concerning Mississippi’s 15-week ban on abortion, has opened the doors for dozens of states to take steps to ban it outright. As I’m writing this solidarity note, at least 15 states have abortion bans in effect: Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, and Utah. The prohibitions range from a complete ban on abortions to banning abortions at 18 weeks of pregnancy. These states are among the poorest in the country, with large populations of Indigenous, Black, and immigrant communities. In the absence of safe, timely, and affordable abortion care; people are forced to travel hundreds and thousands of miles to access medical care or carry pregnancies to term against their will. This is a gross violation of human rights. Abortion bans can be traced to the brutal legacies of slavery, where Black women were treated as sexual chattel. Hence, they are rooted in white supremacist, heteropatriarchal, anti-Black violence. Such racist laws deny systematically marginalized communities the right to control their bodies and futures. About 60% of people who need abortion care each year are Black, Indigenous, and people of color. Against the backdrop of this country’s legacy of racism and discrimination, Black, Latino, and Indigenous communities, LGBTQ+ communities, people with low incomes, and those living in rural areas tend to face greater barriers to quality health care, childcare, and job opportunities. Oriaku Njoku, Executive Director of the National Network of Abortion Funds, shares: "This [abortion] is not something where it's either: make a choice to choose to be a parent or not to choose to be a parent. There are so many things like access to food, access to a living wage, access to insurance, your race, your gender, your ability to make money for your family." According to the World Health Organization, almost half of the 121 million pregnancies across the globe each year are unintended. Each year, over 44,000 people die from unsafe abortions, and millions more suffer serious, often permanent, injuries. Restricting access to abortion drives pregnant people to use unsafe methods. For example, Pakistan has one of the highest abortion rates in the world, but the lack of access to abortion care makes it one of the deadliest places to get an abortion. This much is clear: abortion access saves lives. This is why reproductive justice advocates have been fighting for the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, or not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities. The reproductive justice framework calls for every possible effort—whether through policies, social services, and community relationships—to address intersecting oppressions, create alliances across identities, analyze power systems, and center the most marginalized among us. Reproductive justice allows us to understand access to abortion as a critical piece of economic, healthcare, and gender justice battles: the way we treat birthing people and families impacts how we build stronger and healthier communities. For example, the right to contraceptives only ensures that people can get a prescription for them. But for a low-wage worker who is uninsured, how can they afford to take a day off and pay for the contraceptives? By thinking outside of the rights framework—where we are only fighting for the right to abortion—reproductive justice acknowledges the socio-political and economic inequalities that are disproportionately faced by BIPOC communities. South Asian American communities in general and survivors in particular, live at the intersection of multiple oppressions which make the overall consequences of lack of abortion access, particularly grave. Without access to healthcare resources in the many languages spoken across South Asian diasporas, and culturally imposed shame and stigma around accessing reproductive healthcare, South Asian communities experience marginalization at multiple levels. Even apart from the lack of policies that support access to hospitals and clinics trusted by South Asian communities, there is simply no insurance for healthcare needs specific to these communities. Lack of such policies work as barriers to healthcare and reify the long-established history of racism and its many inequities. For South Asian survivors the consequences are even more grave. People in abusive relationships are far more vulnerable to sexual assault, birth control sabotage, reproductive coercion or control, and misinformation about their reproductive rights. In most cases, murder by an intimate partner is the leading cause of maternal death during pregnancy and the postpartum period, as mentioned in the SOAR Collective Statement . The Liberate Abortion—a coalition of over 150 member organizations—is currently one of the largest BIPOC-led reproductive justice and rights coalitions in the United States. Liberate Abortion was founded out of the realization that the struggle against the threat to abortion access cannot be fought by a single organization, healthcare provider, organizer, or donor. This is why the coalition focusses on community mobilization, electoral organizing, changing cultural narratives, federal outreach, and policy reform. The staff, leaders, and members coordinate with stakeholders such as movement partners in legal defense and practical service delivery spaces, cross-movement partners, funders, members of Congress, and the Biden administration on information sharing and strategy. Although the coalition solely focuses on abortion funds and clinics in the United States, frontline activists from the Latin American Green Wave movement have joined the coalition to share lessons from their campaigns to expand abortion access across the continent. In the last two years alone, Mexico, Argentina and Colombia have decriminalized or fully legalized abortions. The Supreme Court’s attack on the right to abortion access leaves several fundamental human rights open to contestation. These include the right to vote, racial justice, LGBTQ+ rights, and a host of other rights intertwined with the right to liberty protected through Roe v. Wade . As access to abortion gets further criminalized by politicians and companies that sell our data to anti-abortion lawmakers and legislators, privacy activists and lawmakers need to also shift their approach. According to the National Advocates for Pregnant Women, the past 15 years have seen a shocking spike in arrests and prosecutions for crimes related to stillbirths, miscarriages, and alleged drug and alcohol use during pregnancy. The legal advocacy and policy support group If/When/How: Lawyering for Reproductive Justice, documented over 61 cases that occurred between 2000 and 2020 in which people were criminally investigated or arrested for allegedly self-managing abortions or helping someone else get one. Only this year in August, Facebook gave Nebraska police access to a teen’s private messages which they used to prosecute her for getting an abortion. The fight for reproductive justice includes battles against surveillance and policing. These are the tools of the right wing to expand their control over bodily autonomy. For South Asian Americans this is a critical time to shift away from calls for increased policing to visionary organizing that is rooted in the desire to build safer communities. Some of the ways we can express solidarity are to get involved in volunteer services and mutual aid networks. Abortion fundraisers like the ARC-Southeast are coordinating funding and logistical support for people who need abortion access in Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi, South Carolina and Tennessee. For the South Asian & Indo-Caribbean diaspora, HEART to Grow is sustaining a reproductive justice fund for Muslims across America, while domestic violence organizations like API Chaya ally with abolitionist efforts that close youth jails across Seattle. The fight for reproductive justice must be both localized and nationalized—to aid and abet folks seeking abortion access, while electing prosecutors, judges, and elected representatives committed to the long-term strategy of ending criminalization, punishment, and harassment by the state, institutions, and individuals. Perhaps Roe was never enough to safeguard abortion rights or protect abortion access for all people. We are building a future in which abortion is liberated for all of us, no matter where we live or how much money we have, no matter our race, age, gender, or sexual orientation. We need to organize, build power, and create a country where our values are reflected in democracy. We will continue to provide life-saving care for those who need it the most, and we will continue fighting until every one of us has access to the care we need, when we need it, without stigma or fear. We need to develop networks of solidarity. ∎ RESOURCES : If you are a person who needs abortion care, reach out to a provider immediately . If you’re looking for an abortion provider, go to INeedAnA.com . Campaigns like Abortion On Our Own Terms are supporting folks with knowledge on self-managed abortions, while organizations like PlanCPills are distributing and providing information on how to access abortion pills online. We must all be vocal and support people who have abortions and providers who provide care every day. This means funding local abortion clinics to keep the clinics open, volunteering and donating to local abortion funds to ensure that people have support, funding, and access to care, telling your own abortion story, and listening deeply to the stories of people you love. 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:

MUSICIAN-COMPOSER Moto Fukushima MOTO FUKUSHIMA is a Japanese artist currently based in NYC. He is a six-string bass player, composer, and shamisen player. Along with Max ZT, Fukushima forms the duo House of Waters. The band has released two albums, with its debut album, Rising (GroundUP Music, 2019), reaching #2 on the iTunes World Music chart, and the second album hitting #4 on the iTunes Jazz chart. House of Waters' sophomore album, On Becoming (GroundUP Music, 2023), was recently nominated at the 66th GRAMMY Awards for Best Contemporary Instrumental Album. MUSICIAN-COMPOSER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

ART EDITOR Priyanka Kumar PRIYANKA KUMAR is an illustrator, visual artist, and creative head at Anchovy Press . She makes comics, prints and murals, and teaches illustration at the Maryland Institute College of Art, Baltimore. ART EDITOR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

"How would Rafi Ajmeri have fared in the Progressive era that was dawning just then?  Would his liberal attitudes have hardened into dogma, or would he have swung to conservatism in the Pakistan to which his brothers migrated as he too probably would have?" | · FICTION & POETRY Short Stories · Karachi Four Lives "How would Rafi Ajmeri have fared in the Progressive era that was dawning just then? Would his liberal attitudes have hardened into dogma, or would he have swung to conservatism in the Pakistan to which his brothers migrated as he too probably would have?" Artwork by Prithi Khalique for SAAG. 3D motion and interaction design. Editor's Note: Earlier versions of these stories have appeared in Aamer Hussein's collections, albeit not as an interconnected set in conversation with one another as they are intended to be published here. Shefta 1. AS a young man, Mustafa Khan Bangash was given to revelry, wine and the love of dancers. His pen-name was Shefta. He composed verses for his lover Ramju, who many years later wrote her own book of poems. They say he had another lover too. He took lessons in prosody; his verses were improved by illustrious contemporaries: Momin Khan Momin, then later Mirza Ghalib. At the age of thirty-two, he set off on a pilgrimage to the Holy of Holies. On the way he and his fellow-passengers were shipwrecked on an island from where, for many days, they found no rescue, no route to freedom. They lived on a diet of sifted salt-water and herbs. When he returned to Delhi after an absence of two years and six days, Shefta had lost his taste for wine and the love of dancing women. In this city of poets, musicians and courtesans there were also many scholars and saints. Where once he had written of rapture, he now wrote lyrics of renunciation. He still sat beside his master Ghalib and watched the older poet drink, but Shefta no longer raised a glass with anyone. 2. - In 1857, during the Uprising in Delhi, the conquering British accused him of sedition and of fraternising with rebels. He was imprisoned without proof for seven years. His family’s land and properties were confiscated. He was released to see his wrecked and haunted city rebuilt and transformed, the traces of his life erased. Delhi—his birthplace, his prison, his grave. Though he does not know this yet, the task of vindication will fall to his descendants who will fight for freedom. Some will make their home in the new nation of Pakistan. But that’s in another century, in another story that has yet to be written. Uncle Rafi I can’t remember when, exactly, I first heard my mother and aunts talk about Shaikh Rafiuddin Siddiqi, known as Rafi Ajmeri, their maternal uncle whose delightful volume of short stories, Kehkashan , was published only after his early death at the age of 33. I do recall that when I began to take an active interest in modern Urdu fiction, my aunt and then my mother told me of Mamu Mian, as they called him. He had, in his youth, been considered more than promising; already well-known in his 20s, he published fiction and essays in journals such as Sarosh and Saqi . He was handsome and highly literate; although he grew up in Ajmer, where his maternal grandfather Nawab Haji Mohammed Khan had settled, his mother’s family were from Kabul, so Persian was spoken around him. His Kashmiri father was highly educated and encouraged his children in literary pursuits; both Rafi and his sister, my grandmother, published at an early age. They were an articulate, gregarious family; the brothers and sisters quoted Saadi, Rumi and Khusrau from memory; they had heard Iqbal recite his poems in their own home. They also sang and narrated the story-songs of Rajasthan where they were born and raised. I heard these stories and songs in my Karachi childhood from my mother, and with even more enthusiasm from my grandmother during long summer holidays in her home in Indore, and that’s certainly where, at least in part, I inherited my love for old stories. Grandmother married in 1914 and soon devoted herself to family pursuits, while Mamu Mian wrote story after story, spent most of his time in Delhi, and travelled from town to town in search of material. He often visited my grandparents in Indore. My mother, a schoolgirl then, remembers him on his last trip there, in 1937. He was afflicted by a mysterious ailment they referred to as melancholia, and strolled in the garden leaning heavily on his older sister’s arm. Today his condition would be called severe depression. He’d fallen in love with a distant cousin who probably returned his feelings but, in those changing times, he just hadn’t had the courage to propose: she’d married someone her parents chose for her. When the young woman’s mother heard about Mamu Mian’s feelings, she said: He only had to tell me. But it was too late. A few months later, while visiting his niece in Bombay, Mamu Mian was found dead. A literary acquaintance who will remain unnamed, was left in charge of his stories. My uncle complains that Kehkashan was randomly edited; some of Rafi Ajmeri’s stories were lost forever, and others plagiarised and published in other people’s names. However, Kehkashan survived. But though Rafi’s life’s brief story was as fascinating as any tale he might have written, no one in my family had managed to preserve a single copy of his book. It wasn’t until ’97 or ’98 that my friend, Asif, a descendant of one of Uncle Rafi’s earliest editors, unearthed a copy of it in Karachi, which he xeroxed and sent me. (Thank God for Pakistani libraries.) For days I inhabited Rafi’s world. His fiction was set in the increasingly modern milieu of his own time; it barely touched on the princely India my grandparents, and their now-married older daughters, inhabited. He wrote about students, young women and men, seeking their fortune in a competitive late colonial world. The prevailing tone of his stories is light and witty, wordly but never cynical, tinged with romance. (In one, a young woman manages to reach her lost love by an astute or accidental use of subtitles in a silent film.) Later stories show an awareness of the nuances of class and the economics of marriage. In ‘Muhabbat ka bulava’ (my own favourite), a young man falls in love with his friend’s sister, and when his loved one’s very rich father forbids the marriage, not only do the lovers elope, but the hero’s friend escapes with them to set up a life away from the rigid social norms of his family. How would Rafi Ajmeri have fared in the Progressive era that was dawning just then? Would his liberal attitudes have hardened into dogma, or would he have swung to conservatism in the Pakistan to which his brothers migrated as he too probably would have? Or would his fictions have echoed the calm voice of conscience? No way of telling, though one short, bitter text of his suggests another direction he might have taken. Here retells, from an old song, the legend of the bandit Daya Gujjar, who robbed the king’s wife of her jewels to please his demanding wife. Amma ko mera Ram-ram kehna Behna ko mera salam Gujri ko bas itna kehna Reh jaye joban ko re tham Daya ab aana nahin Daya julmi ke phande Daya phaansi ke phande (Give my greetings to my mother and sister, but to the Gujri just say to make good use of her youth: Daya isn’t coming back, he’s in the clutches of the oppressor, the noose is around his neck). As I read it, I could hear my grandmother’s singing voice. My hair stood on end as it did when I first heard it at the age of nine or ten. Lady of the Lotus 1. Her daughter gave her the red diary with a sketch or a poem printed on each page, as a gift for her fifteenth wedding anniversary in February. She had a meeting that morning, and a formal dinner to attend in the evening. Her husband had a difficult day. He didn’t want to go. The next day she was at the airport at noon, to receive the ‘Mother of the Nation’ who was coming home from a trip abroad. Later, a meeting at her sister-in-law’s house, to discuss the situation and progress of Muslim women. Her husband told her he’d had disturbing news. In the diary, she wrote: Just when I feel on the edge of a discovery—an illumination. Between then and June, after her opening entries, she used it only to write down the words of the songs she was learning. Her handwriting intertwined with the printed words and pictures on the pages. 2. June was a musical month. Her teacher, whom she called Khan Sahib, invited connoisseurs of classical music, including Shahid Ahmad, the editor of the literary journal Saqi, to hear her sing. She performed three raags— Khambavati, Anandi and Des — without making a single mistake. Her teacher was quite satisfied, her husband was pleased, the audience impressed. She was thinking of her deadline: a text to be handed over to She the next morning. A musician from Bengal, Begum Jabbar, played the sitar very well. She sang Khambavati and Darbari. Her teacher was satisfied, she wasn’t. She missed a farewell party for her friend Jane who was going back to America. At the next session four days later, Begum Jabbar played well again, Khan Sahib sang well, and her songs were well-appreciated. Her husband was very pleased with her singing, her teacher exultant. Two days later, she was singing again at a concert; she didn’t feel she sang too well; her teacher was most dissatisfied. There was a series of dinners to attend before the music conference at the new Arts Council began. Amanat Ali and Fateh Ali were performing on the opening night, she enjoyed their recital; on the second, Nazakat Ali and Salamat Ali were good in parts, but she was bored by the vocal gymnastics of Roshanara, Queen of Song. She started to learn the new Darbari tarana . It was a composition by Tan Ras Khan. She tried to sing a Thumri in Bhairavi, with her own improvisations and embellishments, but she didn’t make it. She practiced Darbari in the evenings for twenty minutes. She cancelled a party at her friend Suad’s, to practice a new Malhar, but he made her sing Anandi. She waited for him at 5.30 and he appeared at 8.30. She wanted to sing the Malhar she’d learnt but instead he made her sing Aiman and Kedara. June was ending, and she had another deadline, for the Morning News this time. She wanted to sing Malhar. He made her sing Darbari. She wanted something new and he made her repeat old lessons. Then he started her on a new raag, Mian ki Todi . She practiced Des and Bhopali, shifted to Bahaar, wanted to sing the rest of them, but he moved her to Malhar. She’d hoped he’d teach her the new string, but he made her revise the oldest. She didn’t like them much. A full Darbari with a new Tarana, and a new Khambavati at last. Satisfied ( she writes). 3. She notes her deadlines in the diary, but she doesn’t write about driving her children to school in the mornings four miles from P.E.C.H.S to Clifton, or picking them up for lunch. She mentions the parties she attended, but not the night she came back laughing because the Portuguese Ambassador had called her the Maria Callas of Karachi. She doesn’t record the passing of the seasons, the walks to the lake in the mild evening breeze, the flowers and fruit she grows, or the frangipani fallen on wet grass or picked off the branch in the morning for her hair. 4. July. Khan Sahib arrived unexpectedly. She revised Anandi, learnt a new Khambavati. Some beautiful new improvisations: Satisfied (she writes). A few days later, another unexpected visit. From Jahan Khan this time, her teacher’s maternal uncle. He started her on Khambavati. Ai ri mi jagi piya bin sagri rain Jab se gaye mori sudh hu na leni kaise kahun man ki batiyan… Ustad Jahan Khan comes by regularly now (she writes). Her pages were filling up with the lyrics of the songs she learned. She was practising ornamentation, Alankaar, in Khambavati. 5. In August, Ustad Jahan Khan brought her voice down to a lower pitch by half a note. She sang all her songs without the accompanying harmonium . The discovery amazed her and surprised everyone. She was not very satisfied with her voice at that pitch. The next day her teacher tried out the old raags at the new pitch, with only the tanpura . Every note was in tune. He will teach me morning raags in the morning ( she writes) and come in the evening to teach me evening raags . 6. After trying out several raags in Khayal, Ustad Jahan Khan struck upon Dhrupad, which her husband liked very much. She started to learn Raag Durga in the Dhrupad mode, with the Khamach rhythm; unusual and rarely recognised. She sang with the pakhwavaj , a single, two-faced drum, instead of the usual paired tablas . Eri mai nand kunwar eri mai nand kunwar eri mai nand kunwar maaa-aai nand kunwar maa-aai nanda Her voice throbbed and soared. 7. When a blister appears on the first forefinger (she writes) it is a sign that you have achieved the perfect pitch. One hour a day should be set aside, sacredly, for the practice of taans and sur sadhan: the art of song. 8. Her children will remember the concerts in the garden on nights lit up by flares or by the moon, they remember the songs and remind her of them, when she sang what, and even the words and melodies. They sat around her as she sang, or listened from the open window. They learnt her songs like the grey African parrots in their aunt’s big cage, half-understanding the words; they delighted her by singing raags in the bath, but when she persuaded them to take formal lessons all but her middle daughter would run away. They will remember her favourite book: The Lady of the Lotus , illustrated with classical miniatures: a story from her native Malwa, of Baz Bahadur and the poet-singer Roopmati, whose melancholy verses their mother set to music and sang. Years later, her son will find her a copy of the book she lost in transit, and find some of those verses. But it’s a new edition. Had I but known what pain with love would come, had I but known Jo main aisa jaanti preet ki ye dukh hoe I would have banished him by beat of drum, had I but known Nagar dhandora peetti preet na kariyo koe Did the rain fall that year of 1963? None of them remembers now: they think it never came. They remember, though, all the years she longed for rain and missed her native Malwa, and how she exulted when it finally fell. 9. After trying her voice out in several pitches, Ustad Jahan Khan brought it back to the original note. He said he’d been worrying over it for days. 10. So, what did it mean to you, the singing? Her son will ask her as he transcribes, and reads back to her the words of her diary. She remembers it all, the rooms, the faces, the applause, the ecstasy and the fall. Expression, she will reply, and release. The poetry in the music is thought, and through singing I expressed those thoughts. Sometimes late at night, the lady of the lotus will sing to herself, those songs, of rainfall, separation and exultation. Later, her son, who never wanted to, will also sing to find release. But one night, he will stop mid-song, terrified of the audience around him and the failure of his voice, and swear he’ll never sing on stage again. He will exchange the ecstasy of music for the dry solace of thoughts; he’ll write, but he inherits from her the pursuit: of austere phrase, soaring note, throbbing pulse, blistered forefinger. 11. She abandoned the diary with a final, terse entry. 23rd Nov 1963. Dinner at Khan Sahib’s house. Music after dinner. Sang Darbari. No exhilaration after singing. After this, there are only poems, wedding songs and musical notations. Dove 1. OFTEN on those long afternoons in the old house in Badayun when sunlight spread golden carpets on the stones and the older women had taken in the washing and the children were tired of playing hopscotch in the open courtyard or leaping from balcony to balcony, the girl would go to the terrace and shelter in a stone pavilion with a novel or write couplets in a notebook and then, as if she’d invited it over, the dove would begin to call her from a tree, and its call would lie like a shadow on her skin, but she never saw the bird that gave her invisible company. 2. For years after she left and crossed borders and moved houses in Karachi then Lahore and then Pindi and back to Karachi, and was known as the country’s queen of melancholy verse, she thought her invisible friend had abandoned her. Yes, but once in a top floor bedroom in a tall empty house in an Islamabad paralysed by strikes and demonstrations against a corrupt regime, as she stood looking out of a window at a flowering jacaranda, she heard the dove’s call from the tree’s upper branches, and she wondered how its plaintive song could ever have seemed to her to be the harbinger of joys to come. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Short Stories Karachi Raaga Generational Stories Stories in Dialogue English Urdu Language 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. 25th Nov 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:

WRITER Amna Chaudhry AMNA CHAUDHRY is a writer and activist based in Lahore. She also teaches creative writing and writes the newsletterThis Is The Mod Squad, which covers feminism and ethics in the fashion industry. WRITER WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

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. GENERAL PROFILE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Amrita Sher-Gil, Group of Three Girls , 1935, oil on canvas, 99.5 x 73.5 cm, National Gallery of Modern Art, New Delhi. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 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 8th Jul 2025 Profile Lahore Punjab Amrita Sher-Gil Orientalism Western Gaze Europe South Asia Subaltern Studies Gayatri Spivak Anti-Colonialism Postcolonial Feminist Theory subjectivity 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 Modernity Postcolonialism Avant-Garde Form Semiotic Color Post-Impressionism Art History Art Criticism Criticism 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. 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.∎ More Fiction & Poetry: Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5 Date Authors Heading 5

Kashmiri poet Huzaifa Pandit in conversation with Nazish Chunara. COMMUNITY The Craft of Writing in Occupied Kashmir Kashmiri poet Huzaifa Pandit in conversation with Nazish Chunara. 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 Kashmiri Poetics 24th Jan 2021 Interview Kashmiri Poetics Historicity Poetic Form Poetry Kashmiri Struggle Kashmir Faiz Ahmed Faiz Agha Shahid Ali Mahmoud Darwish PTSD Trauma Mass Protests Memory Language Diversity Urdu Resistance Poetry Metaphor Metaphoricity Raj Rao Varavara Rao Journaling Occupation Pune University Language Language Politics Hindutva Despair Defiance 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. By abolishing Urdu, they are removing its historical significance... By pushing for the extinction of a language, you're pushing the extinction of a history and the sentiments associated with that history. Because in life the present is a function of the past. And so, by altering that past, they're hoping to alter the present altogether beyond the cognition. RECOMMENDED: Green is the Colour of Memory (Hawakal Publishers, 2018) by Huzaifa Pandit. 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

Facing the jarring revival of chauvinist storylines in mainstream motion pictures, a new era of feminist film is cleaving its way into festival and global acclaim. Two such films—Don’t Cry, Butterfly (2024) and Santosh (2024)—debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival to a welcome reception. Celebrated for showcasing revelatory Asian women’s narratives from distinct perspectives, the features ebb and flow artfully between absurdity and reality, demarcating their respective protagonists’ experiences reclaiming autonomy, dignity, and justice in spaces and psyches consumed by patriarchy. Facing the jarring revival of chauvinist storylines in mainstream motion pictures, a new era of feminist film is cleaving its way into festival and global acclaim. Two such films—Don’t Cry, Butterfly (2024) and Santosh (2024)—debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival to a welcome reception. Celebrated for showcasing revelatory Asian women’s narratives from distinct perspectives, the features ebb and flow artfully between absurdity and reality, demarcating their respective protagonists’ experiences reclaiming autonomy, dignity, and justice in spaces and psyches consumed by patriarchy. Iman Ifthikhar, Untitled (2025). Digital painting. Artist Toronto Nidhil Vohra 2 Mar 2025 nd · BOOKS & ARTS REPORTAGE · LOCATION A Man's World “What can one do, Geetanjali? Sadly, it’s a man’s world,” roared Ranbir Kapoor’s quasi-alpha, male avenger in Sandeep Reddy Vanga’s blockbuster picture Animal (2023) . The film’s problematic psyche enveloped by an uber-massy exterior invigorated the pen of many critics. Several of them deciphered—in accordance with Vanga’s implied admissions—the film’s intrinsic toxicity as an attempt by the director to double down on his ethically-questionable brand of filmmaking, in response to those who questioned the philosophies of his previous films. His contempt towards his critics, the Hindi film industry, and its audiences is effectively ventriloquized through Animal’s glossy protagonist’s several loud, misplaced outbursts directed at society’s collective failure in recognizing the importance of the “ alpha male” —a stand-in metaphor for Vanga’s bratty brand of manchild protagonists. Following the shattering acclaim that Animal has enjoyed, the rhetorical question that Kapoor’s character screams at his wife, also becomes one that the film mocks the industry with. What can the audience, the critics, or the filmmakers do? Unfortunately, it is a man’s world. The answer presents itself in two films which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival this year. One Vietnamese and one Indian, both helmed by two distinct debutante women directors , where the protagonists are two distinct women holding their own against the patriarchy, while cleverly counteracting genre expectations (in essence, the opposite of Animal ). Dương Diệu Linh’s Don’t Cry, Butterfly (2024) and Sandhya Suri’s Santosh (2024) had triumphantly traveled the festival circuit before arriving at TIFF. Both films are equally poignant in their portrayal of patriarchy as an infestation: Linh’s quite literal and Suri’s more metaphorical, allowing for novel insights into the extent to which ours is, in fact, unfortunately, a man’s world. Still from Don't Cry Butterfly (2024). Image Courtesy of TIFF. Dương Diệu Linh’s Don’t Cry, Butterfly Linh’s fascination with the domestic and emotional perils of middle-aged Vietnamese women neatly threads through her filmography . Her debut feature follows a similar syntax as it documents the desperation of a wedding planner, Tam (Lê Tú Oanh), after she catches her husband philandering with a much younger woman during the broadcast of a nationally televised soccer game. This peculiar predicament sends Tam down an introspective spiral, forcing her to consult the services of a feng-shui master who advises her to make several lifestyle and appearance changes to save her decaying marriage, much to her daughter Ha’s (Nguyen Nam Linh) chagrin. An unwelcome companion to this crisis is a leak in Tam’s bedroom ceiling which persists endlessly, eventually metamorphosing into a tar-like sentient substance only visible to the women in the building, growing in size as Tam’s marriage gradually becomes comatose. The film’s quirky comedic overtone is thus assisted in willful contrast by a reliance on the supernatural, which cleverly conveys the thesis to the audience without conscribing to pre-existing genre tropes. Linh’s hyper-fixation on the specificity of Tam’s situation underscores the culturally informed mechanism through which Don’t Cry, Butterfly addresses the broader issue of patriarchy. The infestation, standing in as a symbol for patriarchal ambivalence, mimics the toxic phallocentric culture which allows Tam’s husband, Thanh ( Le Vu Long ), to slog around the house sans accountability or apology. There is a distilled direction in Linh’s style of storytelling which allows her to effectively sashay between the dry humor dominating the film’s dialogue and gripping moments of supernatural terror. While she employs the fantastical elements quite sparingly, she ensures their effect is well-informed, creating a horror-comedy that delivers across both departments. Linh also infuses the film with welcome observations about Vietnamese customs and society, creating a work that is global despite (or perhaps, because of) its nuances. “If we chop the dicks off of all cheating men, the whole country will be filled with eunuchs,” remarks Tam’s friend, in a statement where the ethos transcends borders. Don’t Cry, Butterfly is a stellar showcase of independent cinema, intelligently employing form and fiction to serve something beyond its broad thesis. You are reminded to trust the tale as told by the teller, absorbing all that the story has to offer you. Sandhya Suri’s Santosh Suri ’s Santosh, albeit not as creatively fluid, still effectively upturns expectations in pursuit of a grander purpose. Her previous narrative short, The Field (2018) , also produced by the British Film Institute (BFI) , functioned similarly, exploiting the beats of a conventional thriller to highlight the innocence of an extramarital affair in rural India. Her debut feature, Santosh , is centered around the eponymous character (Shahana Goswami) who, through a government scheme aimed at helping widows, replaces her deceased husband in the local police force. The “khaki” uniform adds heft to Santosh’s identity, which was previously reduced to doomed daughter-in-law and hapless widow. There is a purpose to her step in this new job where she operates in service of a greater truth. Her occupational idyll, however, is shattered when the murder of a Dalit girl exposes her to the malignance of those in power. Inaction by her superiors in addressing the victim’s family's concerns causes major uproar in the media, and a female inspector ( Sunita Rajwar ) is brought in to placate the situation. Suri, much like Linh, posits the primary crisis not as a means of tackling the problem, but as a portrayal of its entrenchedness, while branching out with equal enthusiasm towards subsidiary issues. The extent to which caste-based discrimination penetrates the fabric of Indian society rests at the forefront of the film’s ideas. But nestled within are communalism, patriarchy, police negligence, and an overall decay in India’s legislative, executive, and judicial institutions. The labored pacing, especially in the chase sequences and the static positioning of the camera, works in service of such multi-layered messaging, as the film delicately explores its ideas in lieu of arguing for them. This attributes a documentary quality to the film, where it presents the events in a rather quotidian manner, allowing for a measured confrontation with reality, rather than an exploitation of the events for contrived emotion. Still from Santosh (2024). Image courtesy of India Currents. The premise, which is reminiscent of Anubhav Sinha’s social thriller Article 15 (2019), avoids conscribing to the showmanship of cop films as idealized by those like Sinha’s but more prominently by those of Rohit Shetty in Hindi cinema. There is no euphoric release where Santosh batters the villains to a pulp. There is no “gotcha!” moment where Santosh wields the law to best the killer, locking them up for life. There is no monologue about the oppressive caste system or the abysmal statistics regarding women’s safety in India. Santosh trusts the viewer with its messaging, reinforcing the grim subject matter with an equally grim portrayal. The closest the film comes to giving us a heroic smash-the-patriarchy moment is a measured but revolting scene in which Santosh spits out her barely chewed meal to discomfort the gaze of a man staring at her. Despite its aspirations and twists in emotion and notion, the story eventually becomes predictable towards the end. The casting of an otherwise lovable Sunita Rajwar as a domineering inspector also falters in places owing to the relatively harmless characters she has taken up recently. Regardless of its shortcomings, however, Santosh stands out as a testament to a fearless brand of filmmaking that exhibits a flawed India, where the only thing separating the cop and the crook is a “khaki” uniform and a government-issued firearm. A refreshing deviation from the mainstream The meticulousness of both Don’t Cry, Butterfly and Santosh stands in stark contrast to the populist, pulpy, and policed cinema that is mass-produced in their respective countries, and in the absence of a commercially successful precedent, it becomes a monumental task to fund films like these. It thus becomes extremely crucial that films like Don’t Cry, Butterfly and Santosh , and filmmakers like Linh and Suri, who have been nurtured by Western institutions like Berlinale and the BFI, get this recognition in front of international audiences as it paves the way for such an “arthouse” brand of cinema to exist alongside the mainstream. The inter-continental efforts required to produce these films also stands as testament to the idea of global filmmaking, which is helping amplify regional voices, and preventing them from being strangled by the rigidity of their national cinemas and governments. Now, it remains to be seen whether either of Linh’s or Suri’s films are received with as much domestic fanfare as they were internationally. With both having been picked up by mid-size primary distributors, there is still hope that non-festival audiences get to enjoy these truly novel films. Nevertheless, there is a lot to be done: after all, it is, sadly, a man’s world. ∎ SUB-HEAD Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. You can update and reuse text themes. Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Add paragraph text. Click “Edit Text” to customize this theme across your site. 1 NIDHIL VOHRA is a writer, filmmaker, and a Cinema Studies and Peace & Conflict Studies student at the University of Toronto. His work has been published in NDTV , The Tribune , and The Varsity . IMAN IFTIKHAR is a political theorist, historian, and amateur oil painter and illustrator. She is an editor for Folio Books and a returning fellow at Kitab Ghar Lahore. She is based in Oxford and Lahore. Review Toronto Chauvinism Motion Picture Film Cinema Feminism Film Festival Dont Cry Butterfly Santosh Toronto International Film Festival Art Criticism Absurdity Autonomy Rhetoric Duong Dieu Linh Sandhya Suri TIFF Indian Currents Filmography Vietnamese Indian Independent Cinema British Film Institute Caste-based Discrimination Arthouse Berlinale A Mans World Ritwik's Trees Sumana Roy 12th Mar Provocations on Empathy Clare Patrick 13th Aug Spiritually Chic Torsa Ghosal 1st Aug Speaking Through the Subaltern Vamika Sinha 8th Jul Fictions of Unknowability Torsa Ghosal 28th Feb On That Note:

ACTIVIST-SCHOLAR Aqui Thami AQUI THAMI is an artist, activist, scholar doctoral candidate, and founder of Sister Library , South Asia's first community owned feminist library space. ACTIVIST-SCHOLAR WEBSITE INSTAGRAM TWITTER Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 Heading 5 Heading 6 Heading 6 LOAD MORE

Ahead of the presidential election in Sri Lanka, trade unions and political parties have promised a wage increase to tea plantation workers they hope to win over. Many workers are unconvinced, partly because wage increases are often tied to higher productivity targets that far exceed workers’ bodily capacity. THE VERTICAL The Ambivalent Voter Ahead of the presidential election in Sri Lanka, trade unions and political parties have promised a wage increase to tea plantation workers they hope to win over. Many workers are unconvinced, partly because wage increases are often tied to higher productivity targets that far exceed workers’ bodily capacity. VOL. 2 DISPATCH AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR “Into tea forest I,” 2024. Pen and tea stain on brown board, 91.4cm x 121.9cm, part of a triptych. Courtesy of Arulraj Ulaganathan. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 “Into tea forest I,” 2024. Pen and tea stain on brown board, 91.4cm x 121.9cm, part of a triptych. Courtesy of Arulraj Ulaganathan. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Dispatch Sri Lanka 20th Sep 2024 Dispatch Sri Lanka Plantation Workers Tea Estates Ceylon Workers Congress Ranil Wickremasinghe UNP Central Province Malaiyaha Tamil Community Indentured Labor Agricultural Labor Agriculture Plantations Labor Wage Labor Wages Political Agendas Patronage Politics Clientelism Surplus Value Productivity Demands Production Planters’ Association Political Economy Loolecondera Kandy District Nuwara Eliya District Political Parties False Promises Effective Wage Stagnation 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. “Let’s say a small child of around five years old is sick,” says Subramaniam Maheswarie, a 47-year-old tea plucker from Bogawantalawa in the Nuwara Eliya district of Sri Lanka’s Central Province. “We have to look after it and give it medicine.” The sick child Maheswarie is referring to is Sri Lanka: a nation on the slow road to recovery from a devastating economic crisis that led to shortages of food and fuel, and saw costs of living soar. The doctor who nursed the child is Ranil Wickremesinghe, the president who took the reins from Gotabaya Rajapaksa, who was ousted from office after months of protests. Wickremesinghe is attempting to hold onto power after two years in office as the country gears up for a presidential election tomorrow, 21st September, the first since the crisis. Such conditions are ripe for the playing out of patronage politics. The Ceylon Workers Congress (CWC), the largest plantation workers’ trade union, is advocating fiercely on Wickremesinghe’s behalf. Last year, the leader of the CWC was elevated to the position of a cabinet minister by Wickremesinghe’s government, and CWC formed a seat-sharing pact with the UNP (United National Party) aiming to garner votes in the central plantation districts. Maheswarie serves as a local chairwoman for the CWC, although she also continues to work on the plantation. Here in the hill-country region, political parties double as trade unions and vice versa—simultaneously trying to win workers’ votes as well as represent their voices in negotiations with plantations. In May this year, Wickremesinghe promised plantation workers a new wage of LKR 1,700 (US$5.64), a 70% hike from their current wage of LKR 1000 (US$3.32). Plantation companies appealed the wage, and Wickremesinghe’s presidential gazette was found to be unlawful by the Sri Lankan Supreme Court. The Wages Board has now issued a gazette mandating wages of LKR 1,350 (US$4.48) for plantation workers, with an additional productivity incentive of LKR 350 (US$1.16) that requires them to pluck extra kilos. Tea workers, most of whom are part of the Malaiyaha Tamil community—descendants of indentured labourers brought from South India to work on plantations by the British in colonial Ceylon—face a number of challenges including food insecurity, lack of access to educational opportunities, precarious housing, and poor living and working conditions. Maheswarie says the wage increase is positive, but admits that the last wage increase in 2021 led to problems for workers. She says productivity targets increased by 3 kilos at her plantation. Additionally, benefits such as medical care and food provisions were withdrawn or reduced, because the implementation of the new wage led to the collapse of the traditional collective agreement between plantation companies and trade unions. “[As part of the collective agreement], there were a lot of rules and regulations regarding what you should and shouldn’t do with workers,” Maheswarie says. “Now those rules don’t exist. Once we got rid of those rules, it was the companies who [arbitrarily] set the rules. Now that we don’t have the collective agreement, we can’t really go and argue [for more benefits].” Many workers are suspicious of the timing of the wage increase, perceiving it as a political ploy to win their votes in the election. However, Maheswarie is adamant that is not the case and accuses plantation companies of “dragging out” the process to frame the CWC as eking out a wage increase for political gain. Roshan Rajadurai, chairman of the Planters’ Association, which oversees hundreds of plantations in Sri Lanka, said targets would not increase. However, he also said productivity must be improved and that the wage increase was unsustainable. “In Sri Lanka, rationale and reason don’t, unfortunately, apply,” Rajadurai said. He questioned the announcement, saying the plantation sector was being “singled out.” He pointed out that wages for other sectors were not being increased. “We have to agree on something we can [actually] pay,” Rajadurai added. “If they [politicians] did everything they promised, Sri Lanka would be better than Singapore.” He refuted Maheswarie’s claim that benefits were being reduced for workers, saying welfare had actually been increased and that it was in the plantations’ best interests to look after their workers. According to Sri Lanka’s Tea Board, the industry contributed USD 1.26 billion to the Sri Lankan economy in 2022. However, plantation workers were severely hit by the crisis, with many struggling to afford basic necessities. “The election is coming, right? So they likely thought we’d only vote for them if they increased our salaries,” says Santhiappillai Mary, who works at the Loolecondera estate, a state-owned plantation in Kandy District, famously colonial Ceylon’s first tea estate. Mary is unmoved by Loolecondera's storied history. She shares that the plantation makes multiple deductions from workers’ salaries, including small amounts for the work cards they register their picked tea leaf kilograms on and, until recently, for their payslips. She has taken out multiple loans by now and is berated by the companies involved when she cannot pay. She often goes to work even when she is sick or it is raining heavily—simply because she cannot afford to miss a day of pay. “We have to take two meals to work, but sometimes, if I take two meals, my children don’t have enough food to eat at home,” Mary says. “So, I just take one meal and go. And sometimes I don’t take anything at all, because the children need food in the evening. I’ve done that, too.” Santhiappillai Mary, courtesy of Udara Pathum Such dire straits also affect access to free public services. In 2022, Mary’s oldest son had to drop out of school. After her family could not afford the bus fare to school, he was not permitted to advance to the next grade alongside his peers. In Agarapatana, local trade union leaders who were part of the National Union of Workers (NUW) are also not totally convinced by the wage increase. NUW has thrown its support behind presidential hopeful Sajith Premadasa, who has promised to turn estate workers into smallholders and increase their pay. “We can’t be sure we’re going to get the new wage,” said Dayalan Ravichandran, adding that he was surprised to see that he received the same salary in June even after Wickremesinghe promised a higher wage. “They say they’ve agreed to it, but it’s not definite yet. We don’t know if they’re just doing it because of the election.” One estate trade union leader said people’s votes were often won with alcohol, even within her own party. “The people in the party give alcohol to the chairmen and tell them to give it to the men,” she said, adding that the women were struggling without basic facilities. “The chairmen give alcohol to the men and tell them to vote for the party.” But perhaps the larger question is: Would a wage increase even shift the needle for tea workers? If even universal education—which Sri Lanka cites as a major source of pride in comparison to its South Asian neighbours—can seemingly be revoked for tea workers’ children for want of bus fare, can tea workers reasonably aspire to the end of generational poverty in the hill country? Tea leaves at a plantation in Kandy District, Central Province. Courtesy of Udara Pathum. Workers might be divided in their political preferences but are united on one issue. None of them believe the wage increase—of which proof will only emerge after the election when next month’s pay is given—will be definitive proof of improved conditions. Mary feels that any wage increase is unlikely to be the better prospect it’s touted to be. “If they increase the salary,” she says, “they’ll demand more kilos of tea leaves, so it’s difficult for the workers.” She adds that an increase in salary will also mean an increase in the cost of essentials. “So there’s no point in increasing the salary. However much we get, it’s not enough.” This linkage of wage increases to required increases in productivity demands is the root of tea workers’ misgivings about their financial future: indeed, a wage increase may well be thought of as an excuse for the extraction of surplus labour that exceeds the limits of bodily labour. Mahendran, 49, also a worker at Loolecondera, says his family often goes hungry for five or six days every month. He, too, believes estates will increase productivity targets in response to the wage increase, adding that workers “can’t work any more than this.” Rajadurai, the Planters’ Association chair, disagrees. “People are not willing to increase their productivity. Our productivity is the lowest in the world,” he says, comparing expectations for tea pluckers in Sri Lanka favourably to Assam, where he claims tea pluckers have to pluck far more. He argues that pluckers should be able to pluck 1 kilo in 12 minutes.“If they want to earn, they earn.” Pluckers, he says, “should not get into the mindset that 18 is an impossible target.” When informed that tea pluckers said they had a daily target of 13 kilograms before the 2021 wage increase, Rajadurai told SAAG: “What are they doing plucking 13 kilos for the whole day? It’s absurd.” If estates and plantation companies increase productivity targets with wage increases, the much-touted increase can arguably be equated not just to an effective wage stagnation but also a more significant risk to the lives and bodies of tea workers and their families. The firm productivity targets tied to the 2021 wage increase demonstrably taxed workers with less flexibility than before. Many workers say the work was harder after the wage increase. Maheswarie says that estates no longer weed the tea bushes properly. Instead, they expect workers to do so and then pluck 18 kilograms on top of that. Ramalingam Priyadharshini, 42, a tea plucker from Agarapatana, is still undecided about who to vote for. She’s been let down in the past by promises to fix the roads in her area and to build housing. Currently, her family has no toilet. Priyadharshini has to use the toilet at her mother’s house, a ten-minute walk away. At night, or in an emergency, she has to ask her neighbours if she can use theirs. “I’m wondering whether I should just not vote at all because our main problem is the road. But it’s only during election time that they come and say they’ll do everything for us,” says Ramalingam. Her mother, Palanimurthy Jeyam, is a retired tea plucker who plans to spoil her ballot after years of involvement with CWC as a local chairwoman. “The current government is only doing everything for the rich,” she says angrily. “But they’re letting the hungry people go hungry and die.” Mary also says she doesn’t feel hopeful that anything will change. Meanwhile, Priyadharshini argues that the state only really thinks of plantation workers when election campaigns are underway, a sentiment that brings to the fore the historical trend, since independence, of Sri Lankan political parties jockeying for power during election campaigns by promising welfare services like food subsidies and wage increases. Indeed, tomorrow’s election may well show the risk of taking plantation workers’ votes for granted—or their successful co-optation by trade unions.∎ Some names and identifying details have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. 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

“Those first days in April was when I think I started to grasp the enormity of the crisis. People were live-tweeting themselves in death. I just stopped working. I was doing medical resources at the time, which meant I was calling to make sure if oxygen tanks and hospital beds were available.” INTERACTIVE The Assessment of Veracity: COVID-19 Mutual Aid Organizing “Those first days in April was when I think I started to grasp the enormity of the crisis. People were live-tweeting themselves in death. I just stopped working. I was doing medical resources at the time, which meant I was calling to make sure if oxygen tanks and hospital beds were available.” VOL. 1 LIVE AUTHOR AUTHOR AUTHOR Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. ALSO IN THIS ISSUE: AUTHOR Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 Heading 5 AUTHOR Heading 5 Follow our YouTube channel for updates from past or future events. SHARE Facebook ↗ Twitter ↗ LinkedIn ↗ Live Delhi 5th Jun 2021 Live Delhi COVID-19 Event In Grief In Solidarity Veracity Essential Workers Mutual Aid Organizing Art Practice Accountability Affect Exhaustion Pretense Fundraising Social Media Mutual Aid India Diasporic Donors Grassroots Organizing Cyclone Hyat NGOs Direct Bank Transfer Disaster Capitalism 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. Journalist and organizer Riddhi Dastidar worked tirelessly throughout 2020 and 2021 for pandemic relief in Delhi. In our event In Grief, In Solidarity , Dastidar recounts their experience of being in Delhi as a reporter in April 2020, when the enormity of the situation truly hit home. Amidst the many dead, dying, and a severe shortage of hospital beds, Dastidar was making urgent calls for oxygen tanks and hospital beds. Here, with Art Director Priyanka Kumar, Dastidar explained how the grief and devastation motivated Mutual Aid India —an act of confusion and desperation as much as urgency. "If I compile a list of campaigns that are working on grassroots relief, would you be willing to volunteer?" they remember asking, imagining it would be a relatively small thing to begin. The pandemic, of course, exacerbated the divisions and marginalization within Indian society. As Dastidar explains, how grassroots organizations seemed to assess the "veracity" of need seemed ignorant of what lived reality was like. Dastidar later discusses, citing Kaveh Akbar, that this was the sort of time when art and poetry were simply not activism. Only organizing was. Their refusal of a conflation is, in itself, an act of demonstrating veracity. Kumar, in turn, asked: How does somebody involved in both investigative journalism and mutual aid organizing also make sure to attend to one's own grief? 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